6 posts tagged “heartbreak”

Alright, I confess that having a movie entitled Ladies in Lavender on my Netflicks queue is a bit unerving. But I assure you the movie is innocent enough. Its main character, Ursula, dabbles in the unconventional briefly but she comes around in the end. Her crime in this movie was to fall in love and to be too old to do so. Or at least too old to do so with the person she falls in love with. As her affections are not reciprocated, what we get to see is a movie about heartbreak. Its beauty I suppose is in reminding us that the elderly have hearts to break.

Ursula, I gather from the lack of mention of a deceased husband in her life, has the unfortunate challenge of dealing with two heartbreaks at once and I suspect that this is why her feelings for the young Polish musician who washes up on their beach are so much more intense than those of her dear sister, Janet. Both sisters are fond of the young man. Both are missing something (or someone) in their lives. But Ursula deals with the absence of memories of such a person as well. She grieves for not only what she lacks but also for what she has always lacked. And therein, I suspect, lies the power of her attachment. The young Andrea is a solution to both a present and a past hole in her life. Although he is not a realistic solution. (Does anyone ever really care if a solution to a heart's need is realistic though?)

I thought that both Judi Dench and Maggie Smith played their parts quite brilliantly. I could believe them both. Their eyes. Their expressions. Their inflections. Their gestures. They speak of something that we all tend to forget. They remind us that human hearts may grow old but they do not thereby grow into something different. Whether you are 15 or 80, when this story is told, this story of “where did you go? I was attached to you?” it will be, or should be, told with exactly these emotions.

Question for Comment: Do you think you will be surrounded by all the love you need when you are old? Or do you suspect that you will be like Harry Chapin in Cats in the Cradle?)

“Passion is sanity” says Mr. Emerson in E.M. Forster’s A Room With a View. I was reminded of that scene in Star Wars where the spirit of Obi Wan Kenobe tells Luke Skywalker to shut off his X Wing fighter’s instrumentation panel and “trust his feelings” to find the precise moment to launch the missile that will destroy the Death Star and Save the Resistance from annihilation. “I forbid you to consult the Baedeker. You should consult your feelings here” Lucy Honeychurch is advised in A Room With a View, and the advice Lucy is given throughout the novel is consistent with that simple injunction, though with the understanding that “Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.”

Forster keeps returning to the use of the word “muddled” as he brings his main character, Lucy, through the stormy sea of late adolescence and early adulthood. She is sent to Italy with a chaperone and the clear instruction to find a perfect Victorian husband with whom to live a perfect Victorian life and yet she discovers that Italy and the people that she meets there muddle everything. Her feelings don’t follow the channels that her society has dug for her to run into. Everyone, it seems, has a different idea about how she gets muddled, but they all know that she is getting so. Here are just a few examples.

“It isn't possible to love and to part. You will ... wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal” (19.42).

“[…] let yourself go. You are inclined to get muddled, ... if I may judge from last night. Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them” (2.43).

“And she spoke so seriously that the risk became a certainty, and he, lifting his eyes, said: “You are leaving him? You are leaving the man you love?”
I—I had to.
“why, Miss Honeychurch, why?”
Terror came over her, and she lied again. She made the long, convincing speech that she had made to Mr. Beebe, and intended to make to the world when she announced that her engagement was no more. He heard her in silence, and then said: “My dear, I am worried about you. It seems to me” — dreamily; she was not alarmed — “that you are in a muddle.
She shook her head.
“Take an old man's word; there’s nothing worse than a muddle in all the world. lt is easy to face Death and Fate, and the things that sound so dreadful. It is on my muddles that I look back with horror — on the things that I might have avoided. We can help one another but little. I used to think I could teach young people the whole of life, but I know better now, and all my teaching of George has come down to this: beware of muddle.”

What clearly needs to happen before Lucy Honeychurch starts making decisions and promises that affect other people is this. She needs to figure out, in the abstract, what weights she will place on the various influences that affect her decisions. Will her feelings weigh 50%, her familiy’s opinions weigh 30% and her reason weigh 20%? Or will she construct some other recipe more like 30-30-30? “This solitude oppressed her;” the character, Lucy observes. “She was accustomed to have her ... thoughts confirmed by others or, at all events, contradicted; it was too dreadful not to know whether she was thinking right or wrong.”

And there is the rub, Lucy. There is no weighting of influences that will provide you with a right answer every time. So in matters of the heart, where no retreat from the decision is possible, aim to have your head, your heart, and your family all at a 100% agreement. And have a good reason why not if that can’t be the case.

In the end, E.M. Forster speaks through Mr. Emerson (a slightly veiled allusion to Ralph Waldo Emerson who wrote the Bible of the transcendental self making decisions in his essay Self Reliance), the essential thing is to know that you love and are loved:

“When I think what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love; Marry him; it is one of the moments for which the world was made.”

Or as the book of Song of Solomon puts it “I am my beloved’s and he is mine” … It seems like that is the sort of love that even God cannot help but celebrate. And I guess He should weigh more than anyone.

Think, feel, pray, listen … do all these things. Just don’t pretend.

“It did not do to think, nor, for the matter ... of that to feel. She gave up trying to understand herself, and the vast armies of the benighted, who follow neither the heart nor the brain, and march to their destiny by catch-words. The armies are full of pleasant and pious folk. But they have yielded to the only enemy that matters—the enemy within. They have sinned against passion and truth, and vain will be their strife after virtue […] Lucy entered this army when she pretended to George that she did not love him, and pretended to Cecil that she loved no one. The night received her, as it had received Miss Bartlett thirty years before (17.54-5).

One must assume that on the way to truth there will be muddlement. We must bear with it long enough to be allowed to see. To be allowed to grow up. Which is really simply the act of coming to see. Like learning to wait before walking after getting dizzy.

“Lucy cried aloud: “It isn't true. It can't all be true. I want not to be muddled. I want to grow older quickly.”

In response to the advice “beware of muddle” I think I would say “was there ever a different way to finding the truth?” As Oscar Wilde says “Only the shallow know themselves.” Muddled? Welcome to class.

Question for comment: We all get muddled sometimes. Do you tend to remain so longer than most? Why?

One of the assertions that Don Quixote makes about women, or about noble women anyway, is that they are as impressed with men who fall apart for disappointed love of them as they are with men who can protect them and provide services to them. Indeed, in chapter 25 and 26 of the novel, Don Quixote determines to immerse himself into a spell of love-induced declaratory madness for his Lady fair, Dulcinea. In the spirit of true chivalry, he refuses to simply fake a madness or to even abbreviate it. He insists that his Lady Dulcinea deserves no less than a full fledged psychotic episode complete with ravings in the rock strewn desert, abandonment of clothes, poetry writing that borders on the fringes of suicide, and angst without bottom.

I confess to being of two minds on this question as it does seem to me that there are many women who “go for” musicians that seem to embody the form if not the substance of the psychotic break (Angst Rock they call it). In some way, a rock star’s ability to seem as though they are going insane or have gone at some point already is, dare I say, attractive, to some music fans of the opposing gender. On the other, hand, I cannot really see any evolutionary advantage to encouraging the sort of dismantling of normal life that psychosis usually brings in its wake. I suppose the message that must be conveyed along with the psychotic break is that it was caused by the absence or denial of the beloved’s affections. This, in theory, communicates that the beloved is important and always would be. It says “you can assume that I would never treat you as having less importance than a Monday night football game” though it takes drastic measures to say that.

Here is Don Quixote trying his level best to make this message clear to Dulcinea of Toboso, his unsuspecting true love.

"This is the place, oh, ye heavens, that I select and choose for bewailing the misfortune in which ye yourselves have plunged me: this is the spot where the overflowings of mine eyes shall swell the waters of yon little brook, and my deep and endless sighs shall stir unceasingly the leaves of these mountain trees, in testimony and token of the pain my persecuted heart is suffering. Oh, ye rural deities, whoever ye be that haunt this lone spot, give ear to the complaint of a wretched lover whom long absence and brooding jealousy have driven to bewail his fate among these wilds and complain of the hard heart of that fair and ungrateful one, the end and limit of all human beauty! Oh, ye wood nymphs and dryads, that dwell in the thickets of the forest, so may the nimble wanton satyrs by whom ye are vainly wooed never disturb your sweet repose, help me to lament my hard fate or at least weary not at listening to it! Oh, Dulcinea del Toboso, day of my night, glory of my pain, guide of my path, star of my fortune, so may Heaven grant thee in full all thou seekest of it, bethink thee of the place and condition to which absence from thee has brought me, and make that return in kindness that is due to my fidelity!” p. 198

The question I suppose is, “does a woman like Dulcinea Del Toboso want more than anything to be regarded as important by the man she choses to bestow her love and affection on? Or does she really want someone who is not going to fall apart into a psychotic mess in the midst of a life-hardship?

Don Quixote is basically relying on his mentor and idol, Amadis De Gaul, a fictional character from one of his chivalric romances to provide him with a model to follow in answering this question.

“I would have thee know, Sancho, that the famous Amadis of Gaul was one of the most perfect knights-errant--I am wrong to say he was one; he stood alone, the first, the only one, the lord of all that were in the world in his time. A fig for Don Belianis, and for all who say he equalled him in any respect, for, my oath upon it, they are deceiving themselves! I say, too, that when a painter desires to become famous in his art he endeavours to copy the originals of the rarest painters that he knows; and the same rule holds good for all the most important crafts and callings that serve to adorn a state; thus must he who would be esteemed prudent and patient imitate Ulysses, in whose person and labours Homer presents to us a lively picture of prudence and patience; as Virgil, too, shows us in the person of AEneas the virtue of a pious son and the sagacity of a brave and skilful captain; not representing or describing them as they were, but as they ought to be, so as to leave the example of their virtues to posterity. In the same way Amadis was the polestar, day-star, sun of valiant and devoted knights, whom all we who fight under the banner of love and chivalry are bound to imitate. This, then, being so, I consider, friend Sancho, that the knight-errant who shall imitate him most closely will come nearest to reaching the perfection of chivalry.” P. 195

It is interesting that Cervantes includes a story of a beautiful woman by the name of Marsela. She insists that a woman need feel no remorse or attraction whatsoever to the advances of a man who practices this sort of angst ridden judo.

“Heaven has made me, so you say, beautiful, and so much so that in spite of yourselves my beauty leads you to love me; and for the love you show me you say, and even urge, that I am bound to love you. By that natural understanding which God has given me I know that everything beautiful attracts love, but I cannot see how, by reason of being loved, that which is loved for its beauty is bound to love that which loves it; besides, it may happen that the lover of that which is beautiful may be ugly, and ugliness being detestable, it is very absurd to say, "I love thee because thou art beautiful, thou must love me though I be ugly." But supposing the beauty equal on both sides, it does not follow that the inclinations must be therefore alike, for it is not every beauty that excites love, some but pleasing the eye without winning the affection; and if every sort of beauty excited love and won the heart, the will would wander vaguely to and fro unable to make choice of any; for as there is an infinity of beautiful objects there must be an infinity of inclinations, and true love, I have heard it said, is indivisible, and must be voluntary and not compelled. If this be so, as I believe it to be, why do you desire me to bend my will by force, for no other reason but that you say you love me? Nay--tell me--had Heaven made me ugly, as it has made me beautiful, could I with justice complain of you for not loving me?”

Despite her arguments, the gentlemen to whom she speaks ignore her and go right on abusing her character for her refusal to respond to one of their kind who so effectively demonstrated his willingness and ability to go completely to pieces for her. Perhaps it is essential for all those who can never be the “alphamale” in a community that there be some women who will affirm them for being the omega male (least likely to impress)?

Question for Comment: Have you ever found yourself attracted to someone who has exceptional qualities even though those qualities are not regarded as worthy of value in society?   

Today's movie was Feast of Love, a movie based on a book I read a few years ago. I'll be honest. Despite the fact that it didn't receive terribly encouraging reviews at Rotten Tomatoes, it made me cry. It does a good job of portraying just exactly how shallow and irresponsible and dishonest some lovers can be. It does a good job of portraying heartbreak. But the heartbreaks in the movie are too easily healed to be the sort that I have met in my life. One gets the idea that these accidents of love that we get ourselves into can bend and twist the frames of our core selves but ... no one in this movie gets totaled and those characters who are deep enough to get totaled are conveniently left out of the field of vision when they are.

There is a line from the book that did not make its way into the movie that should have:

"When you break the heart of a philosopher,you must apply great force and cunning strategy but when the deed is completed the heart lies in great stony ruin at your feet. If you succeed in breaking it, the job is done once and for all.  It will not be repaired."

Anyway, there were a few other lines from the book that might be worth recording for posterity for those who only see the movie:

"What is agitating about solitude is the inner voice telling you that you should be mated to someone, that solitude is a mistake.  The inner voice doesn't care about who you find.  It just keeps pestering you, tormenting you -- if you happen to be me -- with homecoming queens first, then girls next door, and finally anybody who might be pleased to see you now and then at the dinner table and in bed on occasion.  You look up from reading the newspaper and realized that no one loves you, and no one burns for you.  The workings of nature are mysterious, but they do account for a certain amount of despair among single persons, the irrelevance you sometimes feel." p. 87

About the author of the above quote,, Dianna, the woman that marries him in a spasm of "I think I will play grown up for a while" says:

"As the weeks went on and I grew to know him better, I thought of all these default mode negatives; He was not ignoble, not ill spoken, not a bully, not inconsiderate, not obnoxious, not a boor, not violent ,not distressing, not disdainful, not a bad dresser, not unmindful not dirty, or smelly, and not particularly ironic. He was not unhandsome.  He was not unattractive. In other words, he was husband material simple as that.

 I didn't need a husband, I've said that.  But I hadn't had one, not yet,though there had been halfhearted offers, and I was ready to have the experience, retro as it may have been, of being married, to say nothing of the fact that it seemed about time for one of them, one of these unattached default mode fellows to wander into my life and choose me. . . . f I loved anything about him, it was his plainness, his lack of mask, this failure of costume. . . . e was uninteresting and genuine sweet tempered and dependable, the sort of man who will stabilize your pulse rather than make it race. He proposed.  And I accepted."

Makes me want to take her and drag her behind my chariot around the walls of Troy. What right do people have to play "dress up" with other people's lives, hearts, families?

Question for Comment: One of the main characters in the movie sees a young couple in love and says ".I was envious . . . . and then I felt sorry for them. There's so much they don't know; heartbreak they can't even imagine." He wonders that God ever created such pain as that which can come in the trail of love. "God is either dead, or he despises us." he says, to which Bradley responds,

"God doesn't hate us, Harry. If he did, he wouldn't have made our hearts so brave."

Do you feel like your heart has been made strong enough to heal from the ways it has been broken? Or are there ways in which it will never be repaired?

"Nullius in Verba" (Latin: "On the words of no one" ) i.e. "don't believe anyone

I have been listening to the Aeneid in my travels today and it has me in a fowl mood. Aeneid has me so angry at him I could burn down Troy myself if the Greeks hadn't done it already. Aeneid whines about the treachery of the Greeks and their underhanded ploy to insert a horse full of warriors into the heart of hiscity. He rages about the way the Greeks talked Troy into accepting the "gift" that eventually barfed its destruction out into the heart of his loved ones. "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts" he laments. I say "beware of Aeneas bearing gifts." The wretch. What do the Greeks do to Troy that Aeneas doesn't do to to Dido? Makes me wish I could go back in time and help Carthage's Hannibal salt the plains of the Tiber. Rome deserved to Fall, if for nothing less than for Aeneas' two faced weasel-assed capriciousness.

Oh but wasn't it a blessing to those ancient Trojans and Greeks to be able to blame their fickleness in love on the Gods!

"He longed to flee away and leave the sweet land, amazed at such a stern warning and command from the gods. Alas, what was he to do? With what words now might he dare to win over the furious queen? What should he take as his place to begin? He cast his mind rapidly now this way now that; he snatched at one idea after another, and turned everything over. As he hesitated , this decision seemed the better: he summoned Mnestheus and Sergestus and brave Serestus. They were to make the fleet ready silently . .. "

All of the elements of a classic breakup follow.

Dido accuses him of treachery and starts to call him names ("you savage). Then she cries and asks for pity ("I beg you, by these tears, and by your right hand - since I have left myself with nothing else"). Then she begins to list the sacrifices she has made  ("It is because of you that the nations of Africa and the Numidian rulers hate me, and my own people are hostile; It is because of you again that my honour and my former reputation - my only route to heaven - have been destroyed.") Then she bargains for more time ("At least if I could have conceived a child for you before your desertion, if I had a baby Aeneas to play in the palace, whose expression could remind me of you, I should not seem so utterly lost and abandoned.”)

So then Aeneas responds, hoping to inject the novicane of flattery into her pain long enough to get out of Dodge: ("I shall never, my queen, deny that you did with kindness all the many things you were able to list, nor shall I be ashamed to remember Dido, as long as my memory lasts, while there is breath in my body." Then he does a little denial move ("I shall speak briefly and to the point. I did not intend to hide my escape with secrecy - don't imagine I did") Of course, that is EXACTLY what he was up to! Then he claims that there never really was an official commitment (". . . and I never held out the wedding-torch or entered into this contract. ") Then he starts asserting his own powerlessness ("If the fates allowed me to lead my life according to my own choice and to settle my worries to my own liking ..."). Then he starts blaming her for being selfish and demanding that he go without something that she isn't willing to go without ("If it is the citadels of Carthage and the sight of an African city that captivate you, a Phoenician, what is your objection, tell me, to Trojans settling in an Italian land?") Then he makes the leap to the conclusion that dumping her is a moral NECESSITY and an honorable and virtuous thing indeed ("It is right for us to to seek kingdoms abroad.") Then he insinuates that Dido's wish for him to stay amounts to elder abuse and husband abuse and child abuse ("Whenever night hides the earth with its damp shadows, whenever the fiery stars come out, the troubled ghost of my father Anchises rebukes me in my dreams and terrifies me; so to does my boy Ascanius, and the wrong I do to one so dear, whom I am robbing of the kingship of Italy and the lands ordained by destiny.") Then he goes all spiritual ("Now indeed the messenger of the gods sent by Jupiter himself - I swear on both our lives - has brought orders through the racing winds . . . ") Then it is back to pleading powerlessness. How can he be held accountable for some decision that he is not making ("Stop inflaming us both with your complaints; I do not seek Italy of my free will.")

And Virgil, that bastard TAKES HIS SIDE in the matter!

"In just the same way the hero was pounded with continual appeals from this side and that, and felt the full force of her troubles in his mighty heart; His mind held fast, the tears poured down in vain."

Hero? Hero? The slime! I wish Hannibal had nuked the miserable wretch's Italian ancestors' whole capital city. Aeneas himself had lost his wife in the sack of Troy. He had gone searching for her in the dark streets, weeping at his loss and had seen her wraith (ghost) and had felt the agony of separation himself.

"So saying, she left me. I was in tears, and still had much I wanted to say. But she faded from my sight, and vanished into the air. Three times I tried to put my arms round her: three times as I unsuccessfully tried to hold her did her substance slip through my fingers, just like a soft breeze or an evanescent dream."

Human attachment bonds were such a mistake. There is nothing but pain to be had from them. Nothing but pain. The stoics were right to say that the only way to live is to teach yourself not to care. As Epictetus puts it,

"If you love an earthen vessel, say it is an earthen vessel which you love; for when it has been broken, you will not be disturbed. If you are kissing your child or wife, say that it is a human being whom you are kissing, for when the wife or child dies, you will not be disturbed. . . . Never say about anything, I have lost it, but say I have restored it. Is your child dead? It has been restored. Is your wife dead? She has been restored. Has your estate been taken from you? Has not then this also been restored?"

In short, care for no one for they all, like Aeneas, are self centered and will just leave and compensate you for your pain with some excuse that satisfies their own guilt quite nicely.

Question for Comment: Am I right? Or am I right?  

Puccini for Beginners is another movie in the same vein as Kissing Jessica Stein. A young woman not only cannot figure out who she loves, she can't even figure out which gender to be looking in, if either ... or if in both. So she winds up dating and making out with both partners in a couple in the process of breaking up.

Dan Stein: You know, I've been hearing about "the one" for I don't know, like 20 years. I guess I thought it would be a guy.

Jessica: I know, I know, but look, I don't even believe that any more. I don't believe there's just one person. I think there are, like, seven.

Needless to say, the plot in Puccini for Beginners leads to the scene the movie starts with: The moment when her duplicity is revealed in the middle of a party with a crowd looking on. Your worst nightmare. But its OK. Everyone heals within five minutes of the denouement. People heal like that in movies. They heal faster than Spiderman in Episode III. He can have his head slammed against a brick wall, a train, a steel beam, whatever and he won't need a band-aid the next morning. Thats the way hearts heal in movies don't you know.

 Question for Discussion: How long does it take you to heal from a broken heart? From someone intimate who pretended to be something other than what they were?