Skip to main content

The End of Love. 2

A sweet little love song. 
And this really is a love song, unlike most of the others which are actually infatuation songs. 
One of my favourite books, John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman is set in Victorian England and is about a successful and established young man, Charles Smithson. Charles is engaged to Ernestina but becomes curious about a woman named Sarah Woodruff, reputedly the abandoned lover of a French naval officer. Charles has some contact with Sarah and soon realises he is in love with her. On a trip to settle some private business, Charles decides to visit Sarah. At this point the author intervenes in the story and offers the reader the first of three possible endings. 
1. Charles decides not to visit Sarah after all, returns to his home in Lyme Regis, marries his fiancee and lives a dull and unsettled life. 
 The reader is invited to read on and an alternative story develops. Charles visits Sarah and they have an impetuous sexual encounter. Charles returns home to end his engagement and join Sarah but promptly loses contact with her. He spends years seeking her. And then the author intervenes again and offers two more possible endings:
2. Charles finally tracks Sarah down and they have a poignant, quietly joyous reunion in which he meets the child of their former encounter. A difficult  but satisfying life lies ahead of them.
3. Charles meets Sarah and their meeting is sour. After a brief conversation in which he realises that his feelings are unreciprocated, and groundless,  Charles departs to face a bleak and uncertain future.  
 With the different endings the same events are given a different meaning. So, in ending 1 Charles feelings are revealed as a passing, inconsequential infatuation arising from his nervousness about his impending marriage. In ending 2 those same feelings are revealed as a true and noble love; a soul relationship which triumphs over all the hardships Charles has endured in their pursuit. In ending 3 his feelings are shown to be a kind of insanity: an obsession which has destroyed him. 

John Fowles is making a profound and powerful statement. All relationships end and the ending gives meaning to everything that went before it. All the events of any story - of any relationship - are prolegomena to the revelation of the true state of things which the ending reveals. The ending is what all that other stuff was leading to. It's not that the ending of a relationship changes anything but rather that the ending reveals what was there all along. 

We are all ambiguous creatures and our relationships are uneasy composites  of good and bad, healthy and unhealthy, selfish and selfless components. We simultaneously show love to the other and use them to satisfy our conscious or unconscious needs. Over time however the deepest strongest forces in the relationship reveal themselves and these are seen most starkly at the relationship's end. 

Where has this relationship left us? What has it done to us? Has this relationship proven, in its final revelation and analysis,  to be one in which we were nurtured and encouraged and grown? Or is it one in which we have been restricted and lessened and damaged? Have we left it bigger and more whole? Or have we left it broken and restricted? Has it opened doors for us or closed them? An ending may be fraught. In the ending most strong unions, by whatever means, there will be an overloading of grief , which is the process by which we learn to accommodate ourselves to the loss of the beloved other and learn to live without them. But even in the sometimes overwhelming force of grief we still recognise the strengthening and empowering contribution with which the beloved  has gifted us. Or perhaps the gall of grief is made all the more bitter by the ending of our illusions about what it was that we were actually being used for.

 
Labels:

Comments

Alden Smith said…
The Romantic/Eros and the Agape Love divide is an interesting one (Although in a sense they are both inextricably interwove). The relationship between the two is dealt masterfully in the 'Tristan and Iseult' Myth. An equally masterful and accessible analysis is provided in a book by Robert A Johnson called 'WE - Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love'. It provides insight and direction for those who have been formed in the crucible.
26 February 2016 at 21:46
Kelvin Wright said…
The myth is about Tristan attachment to two women neither of whom in the end is satisfactory and both of whom are compelling but for different reasons. That is the story is about Tristan drive to satisfy his own needs. It is NOT about his recognition of the two women he is compelled to pursue and even less about his extending himself for their wholeness. That is, while it is a powerful portrayal of the process of being in love it is not about love at all.
27 February 2016 at 00:27
Alden Smith said…
The myth is about Tristans Romantic Love which is a projection of his own desires and needs onto another - which in the end collapses under the weight of the impossibility of another being able to carry that weight (and the impossibility of of Tristan maintaining the projection). The 'solution' (or the reality of TRUE Love) is to love in the Agape sense which is a love where one extends ones self for the other. To love the other unconditionally carries with it the ground upon which the wholeness of the other can develop.

That is the way I read the myth - is there something here that I have missed?
27 February 2016 at 07:34
Alden Smith said…
.... also, with respect, I disagree with your assessment that the myth is about Tristans "attachment to two women neither of of whom in the end is satisfactory...etc ".

Myths, deal in symbols and metaphors and contain an important universal message. My interpretation is that the myth is about two ways of loving. The woman Tristan loves (Isuelt) can be loved in two ways, either as a psychological projection of his needs and desires (and/or as a projection of aspects of his higher self) OR she can be loved in the way of 'True Love' defined by Scott Pecks as "extending oneself for the good of the other.. seeking the wholeness of the other." The myth (in my opinion) points to the fact that the way of Agape in the end is the most sustainable way of loving and the way of growth for both the individuals involved - it is a giving and a gifting out of a sacred center which ultimately facilitates the growth and 'Individuation' of both people. Reciprocated Agape love in terms of personal relationships requires that both people withdraw their respective projections. A personal relationship begun with Romantic Love only survives long term if the demands and reality of Agape love is understood and lived. In the myth Tristan is the 'Universal man OR woman' and the object of his love i.e. Isuelt is a symbol of two differing ways of loving.
27 February 2016 at 17:01
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede
Post a Comment
Read more

The Matter With Things. 2

  Last night I finished reading Iain McGilchrist's The Matter With Things, Our Brains, our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World , the biggest book I have ever read, in all senses of the word "biggest". Back in 2017 I wrote about books which had been important to me , and, however I would recompile that list now, The Matter With Things would go straight to the top. Really. It's that good. I've read every word: no skipping or coming to and realising that my eyes have been glazed over for the past ten minutes. It's taken me a couple of months to engage  with its 1300 or so pages of text, and, as well, there are another couple of hundred pages of  appendices and bibliography (well, OK, I haven't read the bibliography). At the end of the book proper there is an epilogue which is a "so what" chapter in which McGilchrist speculates about the implications of his hemispheric theory for the world in the immediate future. This epilogue is preceded by a
5 comments
Read more

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and the
3 comments
Read more

Turn Sideways Into The Light

David Whyte speaks in his audio series What To Remember When Waking of the myth of the Tuatha De Danann. They were a mythical race from Ireland's past who were tall, magical, mystical people devoted to beauty and artistry. When another more brutal people, the Milesians invaded Ireland the Tuatha De Danann fought them off in two battles, but were faced with a third, decisive battle against overwhelming odds. So, lined up in battle formation and facing almost certain defeat, the Tuatha De Danann turned sideways into the light and disappeared. Whyte's retelling is, to put it mildly, a gloss, but I am quite taken with the phrase and with the phenomenon it describes. Turning sideways into the light is the realisation that there are some encounters that are damaging to all involved in them: no one wins a war. Faced with such an exchange, to turn sideways into the light is to seek another, more whole form of relationship. It is to reject the ground rules of the conversation as they
2 comments
Read more

Prayer as Relationship

  This is a reconstruction of the talk I gave, last night, at the 3 in 1 group at St Michael's Church, Anderson's Bay, Dunedin.  We have all had unhelpful experiences of prayer . I remember the clergy colleague who would sometimes correct the theology of my sermons 5 minutes later, when he led the intercessions; or the prayer groups when you dreaded THAT person speaking, because you knew they would speak for a quarter of an hour and list everything they knew to be wrong with the world. I've heard prayer used to share gossip, or to preach sermons, or to make announcements. I've seen prayer used to shame, or to control or to boast. In all these instances I have to ask "who, exactly is being addressed here?" and find myself asking again what, exactly, is prayer anyway?  I know what it's not. Prayer is not telling God what God should do with the universe. Neither is it barking into a silence in which nothing is ever heard. Prayer is not exercising some positio
1 comment
Read more