You Can Take the Barolo Out of the Piedmont

But you can't take the limestone out of the nebbiolo. Nor can you, even as a human with a great, hulking, ponderous mass of a cerebrum, it seems, rid yourself entirely of what you once were in order to make way for what you would become. All our stories, all our remembrances, our bad mommies and doting daddies and every dance you were never asked to and each imperfect dismount and second place in debate because you only slightly screwed up the Jefferson line are there, somewhere, even when you imagine you are thinking of nothing at all except the mesmerizing horror that is the infield at the Kentucky Derby. They lie around lurking like recessive genes, just waiting for their one brief instant of relevance, to turn some unsuspecting fetus' right eye blue and leave the left one brown, or cause you to say No instinctively when reflection and analysis might have allowed for more than a few shades of gray.

So it is that I predictably turn to poetry to try to get at the nuances of what I might be feeling, for example, or that someone else consistently knocks himself out in squash when he fears he would otherwise be knocked out by something less manly. Where we start to bump up against the things we'll later be banging our heads on if we're not careful is where I try to intuit what you mean by 'squash' and you wonder what it is that Farrokhzad has that you don't.

The answer in either case is usually Nothing and Stop Being a Fatuous Boob, but we can't know that if we stay mired in our own heads. Someone observing me or listening to me is always going to filter what I do or say through his own experience. What might to me feel like the knife-edge of recklessness might to him seem dull and commonplace. Other things might be boring to me while appearing to him frighteningly exotic. And I seem to you perhaps apathetic and restive when I'm really just shy, as I meanwhile tire of what I see as your brittle callousness when you're actually struggling madly to know what to do...

People have gotten tripped up with me when they, in thinking I have so many words at my disposal, believe each one always must be the fruit of exacting, deliberate selection. This puts an undue amount of exegetical weight on 'nuts!' when I drop my keys in a puddle. It also makes it hard to talk crap, which is frequently necessary and often welcome. There is also the problem of the 'literal reading,' which can be done with some books but no persons, since you cannot know what precisely one individual construes as the difference between 'languid' and 'languourous' in the privacy of his own head.

You need, in other words, Context, which only comes over time. I know when an exhusband is being snarky about something in a friendly way, and I also know when he means he really does hate something in the depths of his heart. I know which friends are not disingenuous in embracing ostensibly contradictory opinions and which ones have an unambiguousness of speech that William Penn would covet. Not knowing them, one might think their apparent frankness were there to mask actual doubt -- but it's not; they know what they think, and they say it.

Which brings us to Dating, and why one sometimes just has to cry in bed. I am strongly of the opinion that neither party can give an adequate representation of what he or she is actually likely to bring to the hypothetical relation they are in theory potentially considering as a possibility. Everything relevant comes later. Well, almost: as I have lengthily and tediously admitted earlier, I do understand some people's need for leggy honeyblondes, divinity-school dropouts, effete flutists and partners who iron their socks.

But bracketing all that, or else assuming those factual and obvious criteria are met, the stuff that would constitute the soaring and glorious bits of the relationship once it was not hypothetical cannot be glimpsed over coffee, or even between heady sips of an unfolding Piemontese red. One can't know the depths of a lover's solicitude until it has been evoked. You simply cannot have a discussion about Potential Solicitude - in the main because there is no such thing. A former lover finally got me to the point of intimacy with a cogent and convincing argument that this was something we should no doubt know about, something that would prove quite relevant, and we weren't going to know anything about it, whether it worked for us or not, until we actually undertook it. It wasn't especially romantic, I admit, but there is little about romance that is -- until you get to that point where it all is, where you are routinely overtaken by love because your husband is brushing his teeth, or switching to fourth gear. And of course, if you get to that point, you come to the stunning realization that you no can longer care that he doesn't iron his socks.

Schlieβlich, bin ich ja auch ein Mensch.

Nobody, I imagine, intends to spend the evening in bed crying.

Well, that's not true, not even for me: I remember that in the past on occasion I tried to schedule nervous breakdowns. I'd force down some wine (beer doesn't help for this, and I'm 'scared of' liquour), stare at a wall or read A Lover's Discourse or The Captain's Verses or something equally drippingly love-riddled while listening to Dwight Yoakum or Leonard Cohen assuring me that it could be far, far worse, and hoping that the expulsion of excess saline from my system would dismantle and implode the oppressive palimpsest of whatever melancholia and frustration had been of late clogging my chi and messing with my chakras.

I'd stare, and think terriblyhorribly plaintive thoughts in so deep a way as to verge on the Continental, but it very seldom worked. These days you can orchestrate Armageddon but not a good old-fashioned emotional meltdown. Lucky, then, that they sometimes come unbidden, or I'd have no chi left and all of my chakras would be stuffed down somewhere in my perfectly-manicured feet.

If you actually know me, then you know I have struggled with this for some time. Dating, that is, not missing appendages or wondering what to do for hosiery. I don't miss any appendages, for what it's worth, just some extra organs and clearly extraneous bones in my face. Plus, I have the addition of bone filler in there, so I'm actually ahead of the game!

No, it's Dating. Nothing ever killed me so much. No deadline long or short, no employer going bankrupt and issuing bad checks, no marauder on the street, no toilets exploding as soon as the gay husband pulls away to go to a music conference. No bad tailoring, no smashed face, no ventilator or morphine or housemice stealing a great-grandmother's platinum square-set diamond ring I was only so recently considered 'mature' enough to be given. All of that I can take, and more, too, and still feel well enough to enjoy what remains of the remains.

It doesn't work for me. I don't know how else to say it. I think there is perhaps one person who knows precisely what I have at stake, but he is far away and has enough unpleasantness of his own going on but if he were here he would let me cry on his shoulder and it wouldn't help me in the slightest but at least I wouldn't be reading Neruda.

So I quit the Match.com. They made one check a box for reason leaving (no one wrote me; I found someone; I'm too busy; not the right time...) and write a 'suggestion' as to how they could better assist people finding people. I couldn't see very well at the time, so brevity was in order, but I did try to think for a moment, for my own purposes not theirs, get some clearer if not clear idea of what the deal was, and what I managed was something hideous and dripping with bathos on the order of 'if you are an exception it is perhaps better to be alone.' That was my unconscious sense of things previously, and it appears I have circled full round to embracing it as an explicit Mission Statement or something akin. In between I thought --

well, it doesn't matter what I thought. I thought I'd take a chance, that's all.

But why should it be so hard? Why do I think I'm so bloody different that I have anything to whine about at all? In a way I don't: I think we're all walking stereotypes of one sort or another. If I am in any way misanthropic, I am universally so, and, after all, bin ich ja auch ein Mensch. As anthropoid as you. So I'm lumped in with the lumpens, and with you, so have no fear.

However, leaving aside the fact that we all have our share of frailties, fears, and outright stupidities, we are nonetheless individuals, whether you imagine us to be barred subjects, children of God, overembellished limbic systems, or neurotic egos tucked inside moribund skin bags. This being the case, I have my singular perspective on life, my unique experiences, my own tendencies, my particular desires, and my peculiar, annoying idiolect, to boot. All of this makes me ill-suited to most; it may well make me unsuited to all. The latter, at any rate, is my current stance, despite the enormous social pressure on us all to sort ourselves in twos at any cost.

However, my faraway friend insists that part of what makes me different also makes me want to be in love, be in a large, expansive loving relationship with one person. And I think he is right sometimes, but I don't want to hear that sort of thing. To hear that I was made to sing, but have to figure out some way to do it without a throat.

In the Christian tradition, Lucifer was the king of the angels, a big guy on the heavenly roll call, and when God told him man was now above him, it was his ego, his excess of pride, that made him wince and protest and ultimately get demoted and exiled, the job transfer to Hell. In the Sufic tradition, it was his Love. Iblis was as true, as natural, a Lover as could be imagined. Roses sprang up where he knelt in praise. He was a creature of fire, yes, a djinn, and man was made of dirt, which pales by comparison. But it wasn't a sense of superiority that caused him to disobey God. Rather, how could he prostate himself before anyone, anything, other than the object of his worship?

God sent him an impossible task, according to this reading. An immoral order. Mercurial and vain and wishing to have His new creation - and His Will - acknowledged and obeyed, He issued an edict: the Angels will bow down. But Iblis loved; he loved God beyond anything; he spent his days in adoration and veneration. So, he obeyed the First Commandment, and his heart, and his love - for he could bow down before no one but his only Love, God - while flouting the letter of the new, para-doxical dictum that God had now promulgated. For this mind-numbingly difficult choice, his sentence was revocation of the one thing his heart desired: to live in the sight of God and continue to be the Lover he was meant to. He was forever thus denied the one thing that defined him, enriched him, gave him meaning and life. In this telling, God sends him to Hell, where Shaitan nonetheless continues to sing his praises and to whisper Hallelujah, with every damned breath.

Well, I'm not a djinn, interior design preferences notwithstanding. But I don't like things that look like other things while not possessing the core, the essence, that is constitutive of the real thing they are so cruelly resembling. And so I want little truck with facsimiles of Love, approximations of ardor, or close cousins of intimacy. To me, casual sex sounds like the sort of thing someone might resort to because the bowling alley is done fulled-up.

If you have any sense in you, you walk between two worlds, all the time everyday. There is how you endeavor to be, which is the fruit of years of study and prayer and introspection and pain and glory and hard-won knowledge. And then there is the reality of living in a postmodern, postindustrial, capitalist culture, in which one still must be functional, and be able successfully to fill the gas tank or snake the toilet or insert a hyperlink or navigate the wilds of a wine list when necessary. In which constant self-less-ness does not work. A culture, as well, predicated not merely on the ceaseless satisfaction of desire, but on its constant cultivation. Obviously those two appear at odds.

Yet in Love these two, and so many other ostensible antinomies, can be reconciled. In true Love giving is a form of receiving. In true Love the Lover seeks less his own selfish satisfaction and rejoices in pleasing his partner. He takes joy, as well, in actions that further their Love, their bond. He finds that their desires mingle, and her pleasures become his own. In pleasing her he pleases himself. No one commands Iblis to sing as he does, in other words; he simply cannot help it.

They also create a world and a refuge. They see parts of each other no one else does. The sad, the holy, the weak, the child. The pained, the vexed, the parent, the patient, and all the flecks of the eternal spirit dimmed to others' view by the pressures of everyday life. And it becomes, rather than frightening, a relief, a release -- because of the different, extraordinary sort of trust that exists between and over and around them.

And to some extent all of this sounds absurd and fantasaical. And I know I am fourteen in some quite obvious and substantive ways. But I retain the right to my position that Love can be this sort of thing by pointing out the frequency with which people take the Song of Solomon and anything by Rumi to be secular love songs. Ergo, I am not alone in this notion that Love can be something quite distinct from Like.

Alexander Pope Was Wrong

Somewhere between Emily Dickinson and Jean Rhys lie most of the rest of us. Between knowing too little about love to know what to hope for and knowing far too much about it to find hopefulness anything but otiose. Between adolescent longings for the miracle that will save you from having to go to sixth period and the eminently adult realization that nothing is going to save you from anything ever again except God as you construe Him/Her/It/They/Us and what scant measure of caution you are still half-able to muster while getting ever more looped in the loops of her hair.

People always talk about jadedness, and much of our discourse makes it sound like an utterly inevitable concomitant of aging: reach a certain year, and not only are you compelled to vote conservative, buy a sportscar, take up yoga or Italian, set at least one of the presets to 'soft jazz' and attempt in largely unsuccessful and risible ways to reclaim your lost youth, but you also arrive at the hitherto unthinkable position that the vast majority of people are irredeemable asses. I don't believe it's age, though; I would venture it's experience, which is not at all the same thing, at least for some people. If you could live in a pleasant box up to that age (which assumes, of course, the complete lack of both 'soft jazz' and middle-aged adolescents in that nice box with you), then you wouldn't be jaded at all. If you never fall in love, never get tromped on or kicked in the teeth, I fail to see how you could manage to be cynical when contemplating your odds for either of the last two happening simply because you were considering doing the first. There would be no correlation for you, let alone the suggestion of causality.

So it's experience, then, and if you have rather little, you may not be cynical -- but the cost is that you are not especially wise, either. And I suppose this is where I find myself. Not quite Emily Dickinson, since I at least get out of my room sometimes, but certainly not Marlene Dietrich or Coco Chanel, either. When it comes to men, or love, I have no idea what I am doing, and so most of the time I do nothing at all.

I've been single most of the time: take my thirties, for example. Or my teens. It's not the same as reclusive, but it's certainly non-average. There were a couple ill-starred, brief marriages in there, and the rare relationship, and a bunch of me going about my business not worrying about coupling, or love, or whether I was starting to become Greta Garbo. No especial yearnings for something I could have felt I was missing, as I was traveling, or going to school, or running a little business, or whatever.

But I'm starting to feel that both the cynical people and the Dickinsons and Garbos of this world are perhaps on to something. That really, frankly, if you can't know what anyone means by anything they say, it doesn't sound like a very sensible idea to listen to any of it. At least in business meetings people offer up flowcharts and spread sheets to back up their point. At academic conferences you cite page numbers, and offer caveats in advance of your (purposively, of course) too-literal translation, or you have slides with the artworks on them glowing behind you while you argue whatever it is you mean to say about the changes in mudras in 18th-century Thai Buddhas. You back it up with something, in other words, because you have to, because that's how it's done.

Not so in the personal realm. I wouldn't hire a mailroom boy just because he insists he is nice, but that is how it works in dating. I'm not going to call your references, even if you were to proffer them. What I get is 'face value,' and no matter how much I like your face that's not very much. And since I don't know you, I have only a general history of interacting with all the humans I've ever encountered to draw upon in figuring out whether I think you're lying about your wife's affair or your girlfriend's craziness or your catharsis in Mumbai or epiphany in the Bronx. And since even a stopped clock is spot on twice a day, there are times when any of us can get it right, or at least not hideously, egregiously, flamboyantly wrong, using our intuition and experience to come up with the right sensation.

But Dietrich would be better at it. And perhaps some modicum of cynicism is actually called for. I could call it scrupulousness, caution, objectivity, reason, or wisdom and make it sound better. But I never do that, take that approach: that's what I do when I'm thinking about a new car, or whether I should use thyme or dill, or if I need to stop at the rest stop or can make it another ninety miles. I don't want to analyze everything a date says! What if we do enjoy each other, and begin to date, and fall in love -- will I then have to continue checking everything he says against observable facts? God save me I should prefer to die now.

Even with trivia it runs counter to my nature: if it is genuinely something I could never care about, and you really want me to believe it, fine. I could never care, so that means I don't now, too. If it has more weight it will always come out, and generally sooner rather than later. If I am to get the sort of relationship I would hope for, it has to be predicated on radical, utter, full, and deep trust. Starting out by checking the alumni register or Googling anything about a date other than best driving routes isn't me. I can't help feeling that if it is my business to know who you are, I will.

And perhaps the same is true with the reticence I offer you in return for all your putative facts and the biography I fail to investigate and countercheck: I could tell you all about me, all I could give you, all the ways that I am, and the things that I've done, and the beauties and terrors that I've seen, and what it is that makes me cry and what it is that I want more than anything -- but however attractive or repellent any of them may be, they don't matter if you can't take them in context, can't take all of me and let each of them emerge in a graceful, organic, meaningful pattern...

The lover's discourse stifles the other

who finds no place for his own language beneath this massive utterance. -Barthes, A Lover's Discourse

An acquaintance, having read the profile I managed to endure having up on Match for two weeks, made interesting comment. Well, interesting to me, at any rate, as pretty much anything regarding me is a source of endless (self-) entertainment. Which is good, inasmuch as that at least makes one of us.

What he said was that, while on the surface my profile appears to be very intimidating in terms of what I would be seeking in a partner, it is in fact, or so he reckoned (correctly, as it turned out, but then he is smart and that is invaluable when it comes to reckoning, dead or otherwise) not at all. This is because, unlike in the overwhelming majority of cases, I offer no list of what he has to be. Or like, or be like. And there isn't one, isn't any such list, anywhere in my head.

Consequently, many of the things that came closest to being stipulations were mediated by friendly and sort-of relativist terms: he doesn't have to believe in God, for example, but would ideally 'believe in Good'; he should 'more or less accept some sort of ontological basis' with regard to my referencing the mundane, the sordid, and the divine as categories. So not hardcore at all; in fact, pretty nimbly leaving the door open for discussion on whatever, even the huge things -- provided he knows what the bloody heck I'm even talking about.

That, of course, remains a bit of a sticking point, and one which I've argued with myself over for years. Intellectually, of course, I would think it fatuous to hope someone, friend or lover or sister-in-law, has the same reading resume, for example, that I do. Certainly my reading has been as much a part of my life, or my development, as my varied experiences -- but I wouldn't expect or consciously hope that someone would have had the same Life History that I have, so why do so with books, or thinky pursuits?

But I do imagine there is a bottom level either of fluency or of competence with the ideas and values I might be expressing, or the way in which I intend a certain word, or come to a position, or approach an idea or situation. And I'm not sure, though, whether that relates to actual intellectual experience or innate intelligence (the 'fluency' versus the 'competence'). Moreover, there is certainly the part of me that wishes on the one hand never, ever to fall in love with someone I'm going to have to have arguments with over Homi Bhabha or Agamben! Really really really. That part of me that distrusts and at some level despises all language and particularly despises any language that talks about language. The part of me that can love, rather than 'love.'

So, wow, it would be fantastic to find someone who did believe that some things transcended language, defied articulation -- and who was passionate enough to be able to seek those sort of experiences openly, genuinely. Unpostmodernly!

But, anyway, yes I do not say, must like Telemark skiing and growing Siberian ginseng; must be at least this high and weigh no more this; must eat, or not eat, meat; must like Western Swing and Shostakovich. So mine, for all its bloated words and grandiloquent turbidity, makes, in a sense, far fewer demands on the potential suitor than all those who ask that you agree on income, occupation, children, pets, occupation, hobbies, politics, and 'turn-on' and 'turn-offs' before you make a move one way or the other. Of course, not that I worked this out or laboured over the diction, but I'm sure somewhere in my pointy head there was the notion and the desire that the content and the writing and the vocabulary would nauseate and repel the least suitable.

Still, it is not as though I don't have desires or limits. We all do. In my case though, I have this possibly wrong-headed but nonetheless inextinguishable belief, or at least sense, that what matters is ultimately evinced. This, I have discovered (and so have others, and I'm sorry, genuinely) is one more thing that makes me a ghastly date. I don't ask questions. I'm also pretty sure I give weird answers when people ask me normal ones. The latter relates to so much being contingent or context-driven for me. As a very trivial example, I really do hate pickles, at some level. Nonetheless, I have a jar of Zesty Dills, I believe they are, in the front of my refrigerator, and I have on occasion cut up two of them and eaten them for dinner. But if someone were, for his own idiosyncratic reasons, to wish to know on a first date where I stood on the matter of pickles, I would not know how to answer. I would probably say I hate them, because that is an answer, and because it came to my head, but it's not true in the way I can say I like taking long drives alone listening to weird reportings about Central Asia. Certainly if he asked something of greater substance I could well be far more nonplussed and nearly preverbal in my stumbling attempts to come up with something resembling an expectable answer...

Partly it is because, when it comes to the big things, especially anything having to do with a big-R Relationship, nothing is really true at that point, and you as my interlocutor have no context for understanding anything I might say about me, if it were the case that I could come up with something. As there is no relationship, it serves little for me to do what amounts to conjecture about what I might or might not be like in a relationship. Admittedly, too, as I look at it, I think some of that reticence derives from an inground and inescapable sense of the seemly, even when I can remember 'what I am like' or 'what I like.'

But it's also truly that what I like depends on who you are. If I don't need a 6'2"-6'4" linedancing Presbyterian wildlife-biologist father of no more than two, then what I will enjoy with you depends on who you come to this as, and what sort of connection we develop together. If you really want me to come crew with you at the stockcar races, and I love you, then manifestly I am going to come to love the stockcar races, and your car, and your hot new exhaust system, and your pit crew. I may well come to love the pickles the Snak-Shak passes out with their hot dogs!

Frankly, it's also just fair. I am no longer twenty, and have tastes and opinions and my own little life, and I would hope that no one would demand that I stop engaging in all the silly little things that give me pleasure. If I hold out the hope that you will accept that I have a weakness for bad Arab dance music at times, and that every other month my house has a completely different color scheme, then who am I to ask you to renounce fly fishing or your veneration of a comic I consider insipid and exhausting?

And so instead of asking I wait. So, too, I think that what it occurs to you to tell me is arguably more revelatory than those things you share merely because you were prodded, those things that were not in your head, even if they really are a part of your life. I am given more things - more information, more insight - in the former case than the latter, by a lot. There is an interesting why there that doesn't exist in the second case, in which the only 'why' is because I asked you to tell me. Which is very boring compared to reflecting on what it might mean that you described your employees but not your firm, or your favorite poets but not novelists, or how you felt in Denali but not in Dalian.

In other words, I can make you tell me about mean, mean Sr. Catherine making you stand in the hall yet again for passing notes in class, or whether you preferred to be the bank robber or the policeman -- but what do you want to say? I'm not going to get a full picture anyway, I am not going to get to your core at this point, so what is the self you wish to give me, here where we are now? Yes, it could all be lies, but it could also be untrue that you went to Catholic school!

Upon reflection, I have decided that this approach, the receptive rather than active or inquisitive one, makes normal people think I am cold, uninterested, and in all likelihood a supercilious she-devil. Commingled with my insurmountable inability to give the vaguest idea of how I am when I'm in love (which is, in all frankness, the opposite of how I am when I am with someone I don't know -- but who would know that??), it makes for a very unappealing proposition for my unsuspecting date. And in sense, a very, very strong sense, if you like (not that I think it's possible, but let's hypothesize, shall you?) how I am on the date (the distance, the ostensible apathy, the cool, the lack of anything resembling the guts of me in evidence anywhere), then you will not like the me that would emerge in a Relationship. If you, by contrast, find the Date me ineffably off-putting, then my bad luck indeed, as you might be just the sort the Relationship me would get on with brilliantly.





Too bad you and she will never meet.

Because Underneath ,You Feel Pure Permanence

I don't think most people know how to be in relationships. I don't believe most people are, in their hearts, really looking for something huge and overpowering, something not merely substantive, which is unusual enough itself, but transformative. Love can do that, can change us immeasurably for the better, but one has to be opened to it, one has to accept the vulnerability that is both a prerequisite and a consequent of real love.

And of course that is terrifying. It is totally unlike our normal interactions, which are based on suites of deliberately congruent, affected manners, dictions, postures, appearances, that correspond to and flesh out whatever role we are enacting in that context. This isn't base or even dishonest: on the one hand, we really do need the second cellist behaving like a cellist during the symphony and not a botanist or ironworker; and on the other, he really is a cellist, as evidenced by the presence of his chair in the pit and his bowing of the strings. That isn't disingenuous; it's getting the job done!

But maybe it is the difference between a Bach fugue and bebop. Precision, order, the beauty of the work found in its elegant mathematics, in its stolid girders, right angles and re-bar, in perfection of Form above all else, as against the piercing, unutterable glory that can come only from leap of faith compounded geometrically by subsequent leap after leap after leap -- all these being, not 'explored' in a self-indulgent descent into solipsism, and certainly not 'reconciled' or 'rescued' once the head reemerges --no, not at all, but bared, freed, radically embraced, and then transcended and born anew, via that selfsame melody that could always so easily enslave a pedant or fundamentalist.

So I think it's a big deal, Love. I have difficulty understanding shopping for it, I admit, and I get prickly thinking of the people who don't bother to reflect on it and its significance, especially when they do already, or could if they expended effort, live inside it. I think it takes work, yes, but so do wine and music and childbirth, and yet people keep doing those without saying Wait, I need some Time to Listen to 'Self' in the middle of a bloody solo or parturition.

When you are in love, when you cherish someone, you honor them. Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved. It leaves all the other secondary effects to take care of themselves. Love, therefore, is its own reward. According to Thomas Merton, at any rate, and I agree that Love is indeed that elegantly simple, and that boundlessly rewarding. Still, it requires effort, requires temperance; and that miraculous, supple, and overpowering solicitude born jointly of eros and agape can only exist where there is sufficient maturity, wisdom, and openheartedness to allow its first seeds to grow.

I think where that sort of genuine and mature love is present, there are lines not merely inconceivable, but impossible, to cross. It's quite easy to see why kvetching about 'never getting any' to your hot boss or flirty assistant is risky, but while it may not be a Gateway to Sin! in everyone's view to lament someone's weight gain, odd facial hair choice, lack of understanding, bad habits, or emotional issues to friends, it nevertheless creates a rift. It lets someone in where they shouldn't be, between the man and the woman. It also keeps those complaints or critiques closer to the front of your mind, even when it's just you two. Joe from the pool hall is right there, in bed with you, with his I-Hear-You-Man comments from yesterday about his wife's growing middle as you run your hands up your wife's now-size-40 hips.

We are conditioned that, to a certain extent, articulation makes it so. Nearly all of our experience is filtered, necessarily, through language. This is why people do affirmations. 'I am good. I am strong. I do not eat Snickers.' Imagine if instead of desperate, last-ditch efforts at 'I love my husband. I love my husband. I love my husband' we had the wife daily complaining to her girlfriends about his stutter, his pot belly, his skin condition, and his lack of sexual skill. And, as we all know, our friends can be relied upon to take our side in such things. It is rare indeed for one of these sort of confidants to interrogate the speaker, ask him why it is he would want to say such disrespectful things, what it is he is really feeling, whether he understands that speaking out of class like that is going to leak a poison in and keep all those things in his mind.

I cringe when I hear such things spoken by people in a relationship -- and we hear them all the time. If it is one on one, I at least have the liberty and the opportunity to ask the other sorts of questions, the sort that can go somewhere, the sort that can open the person's heart rather than seal it shut for good -- but so often people just spout this crap, and don't care who hears. And then someone else commiserates, and tells private details about his partner. And then I perhaps know more about the state of his relationship than his spouse does!

Meanwhile, I am course am thinking You bloody idiots: you have someone who loves you! I am not speaking here of abusive things, or of gambling addictions, or infidelity. Instead, it's stupid, quotidian annoyances, or habitual ways of doing things regarding which the individuals' tendencies and preferences are at odds. Or, of course, pot bellies, skin conditions, Comfortable Shoes, fatigue at sex-time, and, simply, two people who were once together, engaged now in building up separate lives, deliberately or indeliberately. After a certain point, the fissure is irreparable, and if not 'Man,' then surely man's ego, has rent the two solidly asunder.

I have a stance, as well, partly ethical, partly aesthetic, part pragmatic, and part just Healthy Living, that distills down to wait and see, I suppose. A few bucks lost here and there at the race track is not the same as the mortgage payment going to the bookie. An otherwise shockingly thoughtful anniversary gift ordered too late for timely arrival is not the same as spending that anniversary with another girl in a hotel room. And, again (this is the pragmatic angle, I suppose, mixed in with the ethical), if you spend all the time collecting notes on what is not perfect, that, my dear, is what is in your head. Not the moments of beauty, not the act of deep tenderness, but the why-didn't-he-X-when-I-felt-sure-he-would? And if you take all those to your friends, because they're all clustering around your brain making you sick because you chose to focus on them and now can't think of the other things, after your iteration of all his/her failings, what do you think they will say? What average friend ever counsels, Yes, but she's so.... Or, But those are trivial, and look what he does when.... Or, Work on it, work on it, work on it, and keep your love for that person always in your mind?

But perhaps that is what distinguishes Love and friendship. Friendship so often concerns itself with reinforcing the status quo, with affirming assumptions rather than challenging them, by 'supporting' the friend in the least difficult, most prosaic ways. Love, by contrast, keeps always one hand outstretched to the Divine and the other gently opened to the beauty to be found here. It is the turning of the Mevlevi, the name of God ceaselessly on the lips, each step and every breath a rupture and mediation between the ineffable and the temporal.
Love seeks alternately to veil and to transcend the less savoury aspects of what we see in this pathetic, finite moment, pointing always to the grander vision that lies beyond. It reaches, challenges, wounds, elates, soars. Love never disappoints, although it sometimes kills.

I know you touch so fervently because the caress preserves,/because the place you cover up, O tender ones,/doesn't disappear; because underneath, you feel/ pure permanence. Thus your embraces almost promise you eternity. -Rilke, Duino Elegies, 'Second Elegy'

Woes which Hope thinks infinite

Dating is hell. Strike that: dating is an unappealing and tedious proposition from which few emerge fully intact, and Internet dating is hell.

I'm well past being concerned about whether it is some weakness in me which I should be compelled to abhor and exorcise that makes me imagine I might like to be in love. I have come to accept that I am a human, and thus a primate and a mammal, and that makes it perfectly excusable that I should at times want to be near others of my species, or even to form especial bonds with some. I've stepped down off the ego-stretching machine I had initially bought for a weak-willed and insecure boyfriend and admitted that in a previously unimaginable number of respects I'm just like everybody else.

So I shouldn't feel bad about wanting to couple, partner, bond, reproduce, marry, or whatever. Just because something is prosaic doesn't mean you shouldn't ever do it: I can eat lasagne from time to time and still remain exceptional -- can't I? Just because I own pointy boots doesn't mean I read women's magazines -- right? A few average habitudes does not an average person make. Well, necessarily, at any rate, I tell myself: there is cause there for caution.

And beyond that, one has to be reasonable, as well. If I can manage to accept that my desire for an exceptional, fulfilling, challenging, sublime and transcendent connection to/relationship with someone else does not inherently condemn me to a life of mediocrity in every possible arena, then I have to be reasonable and accept as well that there are steps I should take to find this. I am as likely to be stricken by a romantic coup de foudre while redecorating my apartment again or making a nice paella for Kirkland arrivistes as I am to be pulled over for driving while confident.

Which leaves me few options other than dating. I thoroughly despise being 'hit on' while out. If I want to have a glass of wine by myself and bring along a portable Proust, it is not a plaintive and desperate invitation to discussions of literary theory or why Americans cannot enjoy Loire reds. Given my predilection for answering such come-ons with monosyllables when possible (as with 'Good book?' as a shudderingly convenient example) and with the unbecomingly catty 'I'm not here to make new friends' when not, I cannot depend on Chance to render unto me the Übermensch I so richly deserve.

This leaves friends of friends, friends of relatives, friends of clients, friends of students, and friends of fellow volunteers. Scratch all of them, because whether anything does or does not work, it's far too tangly and I like my things silky. I do rely on referrals, connections, goodwill and guanxi in other areas, and tremendously value the imprimatur of a trusted friend on almost anything. But not as regards his good friend Joe.

Wrack and Pillion

Right, so if we accept the fact that I have no market, that I am, in the voice of my scratchy-tee-shirt-creating friend's blown-up Times New Roman scream 'INCOMPATIBLE' in an elegantly intransitive way, what am I supposed to do? If there is, as I am increasingly persuaded is the case, exactly no demographic for the Product that is me, then how many cats should I ultimately have, and at what age is it most seemly to start acquiring them?

I mean, here's the deal. Dating is, for good or ill - and I do have my opinions on this, but they do not matter in the slightest - the process of advertising what it is one thinks to be his or her greatest selling points to those individuals s/he has deemed to be within his or her market demographic, while simultaneously assessing the claims of desirability proferred by that same population. Maybe you need to marry a fellow Jew, maybe your spouse must have attained at least a Master's degree, maybe you just really like blondes. The gravity of these necessary or desirable characteristics varies. It has, moreover, become clear to me during my brief sojourn into Internet dating that how wide the pool of potential partners individuals believe themselves to be drawing from varies significantly, as well. In other words, some people will not waste their time with anyone who is not a Libran Lutheran real-estate developer with grey hair and green eyes on a raw-foods diet who prefers Scrabble over poker and Bakhtin over Baudrillard. Others, by contrast, hope to find a non-leprotic member of the opposite sex who does not immediately try to kill them.

There are a million variables that go into deciphering - not the Ideal, because that's easy (6'2" and above, shaved and pleasingly-shaped head, cow eyes, PhD in Continental Phil or a Doctor of Divinity who nonetheless passionately appreciates the performing arts, well-toned arms the better to drape my delicate ones over, collects and rides vintage Indians, emotionally adroit and verbally fearsome, wears work clothes non-self-reflexively, tans easily and seldom burns, is possessed of a North African nose and fullish lips, owns neither 'polo shirts' nor 'flipflops,' and whether or not he has one speaks never, ever, ever, of an 'avid yoga practice') - but rather the Desirable and, failing that, the Minimum Acceptable. Moreover, when it comes to dealing with actual people, whatever variables and emphases one has placed in either of these two categories tend to be more fluid in practice than they had seemed initially in the Excel chart. You may find it possible for Jane's industriousness at lovemaking to compensate for her apathy as regards housemaking, or you might eventually stop noticing John's weak chin after listening to him drunkenly recite ten Shakespeare sonnets consecutively. It ends up not being very scientific for most people in the end.

I guess that's 'chemistry,' and I couldn't be bothered. I can't get to the Chemistry Phase because I can't stand anyone long enough to endure the phases leading up to it. The Irrelevant and Hyperbolic Flattery Phase, the Self-Aggrandizement via Recountings of Accomplishments I Could Not Even in an Alternate Universe Care About Phase, the Surely It's Time by Now Groping Phase and, my least favorite, the I Really Thought We Had Something Special There What's Wrong with You Girl Phase.

And I think we all, and I for my part certainly do, make accommodations. In deft acts of self-deluding algebra we optimistically cube portents of 'affability' or 'gentleness' or 'emotional intellect' while dividing by their square roots all behavioral auguries of 'unreflective,' 'melancholic,' or 'rash.' When we find something we like, we naturally focus on that and allow the low-level nasty things to recede in our consciousness. This is how you end up a year later being shocked when your boyfriend 'does the mature thing' and 'opens up' to 'share his emotions' -- and the only 'emotion' he sees fit to share is the one where it's not about you, you're really wonderful really, and pretty and untiringly kind, as well, but it's just that there's a feeling of loss he can't seem to shake, and he really thinks he should address this, should tuck in and knuckle down and take care of it, this bereftness he and his inner child now feel that before getting entangled with you he failed to 'play the field' sufficiently to preclude his daily longing for that idyllic field now...

But leaving aside both the past and bald Gauloises-smoking retired Jesuits turned art critic social workers with a sideline in oldschool philology and research on the Generation of '27 not to mention lofty ethics and ancient but shiny motorbikes, we end up, yet again, here. Which, presumably, since I don't have the twenty-seven cats yet, is not nearly as horrific as what's to come. Which is irrelevant, of course, since I don't even want the twenty-seven cats; the twenty-seven cats are a sop, or a consolation prize, or a hideous metonym for What I Can't Have, What Ever Eludes Me, All That I'll Never Ever Ever Get But Keep Wanting Until I Fill the Hole With Felids. And perhaps as well with a set of long-discontinued China that I spend decades laboriously accumulating piece by piece. If all goes as I fully expect it to, at some point in my dotage I'll revert indeliberately to 'Miss' and the circle will be completed, no more cards will need to be read, and the cats, bless them, will in their hunger pick my (brittle, since I couldn't afford the meds) bones clean once I'm no longer opening the Friskies for us to share, having long ago spent what few shekels remained of my oisive jeunesse à tout asservie, back when I still believed I should or could or would date, or fall in love, or engage in even a vague simulacrum of what I then considered to be 'meaningful conversation' before I descended the mountain (or in this case the creaky stairs of my tenement) one last time and admitted that Yes, par délicatesse I had indeed perdu ma vie.