The Girl at 36:34

    I’m in love again. This time safely at a distance with no possibility of being rejected. She doesn’t know me or that I’m infatuated with her. I don’t know her or her name. She’s probably Italian since I “met” her while watching a YouTube video of a 2008 Andre Rieu concert [Romantic Paradise - Part 1] in Cortona, Tuscany, Italy.

    The video was moving in and of itself but this young, ethereal, mesmerizing beauty appears for a second or two at 36 minutes and 27 seconds — enough of a glimpse to invoke a bated breath hoping for another glimpse which, fortunately, does happen. The second and clinching appearance is at 36 minutes, 34 seconds.  Her appearances occur after the orchestra’s moving rendition of Verdi’s Grand March from Aida with actual heraldic trumpets and during the rousing Italian National Anthem, “Il Canto Degli Italiani (The Song of the Italians)”. Music aside, her beauty stands on its own; no music necessary to strum my heartstrings.

Bella Signorina
[This link no longer works because of possible copyright infringement I was not aware of.
It may still be accessible through the YouTube video of the Andre Rieu concert mentioned above.]

    My ancestors are from Bavaria but who’s to say they didn’t venture over the Alps for a visit to Italy only a couple hundred kilometers away. Perhaps there’s some Italian in my Heinz 57 ancestral make-up.

    I studied the Italian language in Naples in 1964 and later that year spent a weekend in Florence less than 100 kilometers from Cortona. Had I known of the beauty that would later be in this village, I‘d have made a side trip. Of course, it would have been this lady’s mother (or grandmother probably) I would have happily met. I knew enough Italian by then to have intelligibly greeted her with a cheery, “Buon Giorno, signorina”  [She would not yet have been signora]. That would have gotten her attention; an American sailor speaking to her in her own language.

    I don’t know why certain assortments of physical features are so heart-stoppingly, captivatingly exquisite while others barely arouse a second glance. Many words exist to modify and enhance the word ‘Beauty’ yet there are times when no adjectives added to the word can ever effectively cover the entire spectrum of descriptives. It’s as though some beauties most be seen to be experienced; that any attempt to describe with mere words is doomed to failure. With this young lady, all it took was one look.

    In the meantime, I continue working on my Master’s thesis on “How to Accept Rejection Gracefully and With a Smile”.  Until that’s completed, though, love at a distance is the best I can hope for. It’s much less rewarding but it is not nearly as painful.

    It’s less frustrating to want the impossible and never get it
than it is to want the possible and be denied it.

#  #  #

 


   

Inconsiderateness; An Equal Opportunity Insult

    To my Facebook acquaintance: You made some recent comments about a young man’s actions, or absence of, which perturbed you. You found him seemingly interested in a closer connection yet his failure to follow through belied his apparent interest.

    Your sharing of your discomfort struck a chord in me as I had experienced a similar frustration recently. It’s evident that this type of inconsiderateness can be perpetrated by persons of either gender. In my case, I ultimately concluded it was because of immaturity and insecurity and that, had I been able to get closer to the young woman sooner, I would have probably found there was no reason for my intense attraction to her, that it was an idiopathic attraction (or an idiotic one as a wishful thinking old fool.)

    Funny thing about Love — funny peculiar not funny ha-ha. When it is of the variety of lightning bolt, clap of thunder, fireworks and butterflies all at once kind of love, it’s often referred to as “love at first sight”. But it really isn’t. In the words of the poet, John Donne

        “Love is a growing, or full constant light, And its first minute, after noon, is night.”

    Love can’t grow if it is simply the unexplained desire of one person to be close to another. To grow, it must be mutual. That mutuality has to be evidenced and nurtured at the very least by consideration of the other whether the feelings are the same in both or not.

    It is the most humane thing to reveal as soon as known that mutuality is not there and likely never will be. To walk away without word borders on cruel and unusual punishment.

    I’ve said that I can deal with joy, I can deal with sorrow but I cannot deal with silence. The silence delayed my “moving on” and getting past the painful emptiness. That emptiness now is not for the end of a love — we never even embraced — it’s for the loss of a possibility which seemed so sweet.

    The good from this for me is that I discovered emotions I once thought long dead are still there and waiting for their entrance cue.

“It takes a minute to have a crush on someone, an hour to like someone and a day to love someone - but it takes a lifetime to forget someone.”

 — Johnny Depp

Je ne vais pas oublier

#  #  #

Love and Death

    Although most poetry is about beauty and emotions, “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in moments of tranquility” (Wordsworth,) many poems are about love or death. It’s hard to conjure any other pair of categories of such powerful impact on humans. The key word here is power.

    Poetry uses the same words as prose yet it uses those words in such a way as to imbue them with an effect simple prose cannot accomplish. How does poetry accomplish this? It’s oversimplification to say it’s done with rhyme and meter unless the concept of containment is also added. It’s like dynamite. The containment gives dynamite its release-all-at-once explosiveness. The key here is containment.

    It’s like watching a powerful railroad locomotive pulling a train up a steep grade or speeding past on any stretch of track. If a passerby asked “What’s the attraction?” a railfan might say “If you have to ask, you wouldn’t understand.” It’s the power being contained between the two steel rails — the simultaneous interplay of power and containment.

    So it is with poetry — the simultaneous interplay of power and containment. And so it is with the casual passerby who says they don’t like poetry. No explanation will peel the blinding scales from their eyes.

    Some poets must be read more than once to unlock their accessibility. Others are immediately available to us. Take e.e. cummings, for instance, in his

somewhere i have never traveled

* * *

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

     Or the passionate declaration by an anonymous poet:

O Western Wind
***
O western wind, when wilt thou blow
That the small rain down can rain?
Christ, if my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again.

 

     Nor should Ogden Nash be forgotten. Humor is welcome.

Reflections on Ice-Breaking
***
Candy is dandy
but liquor is quicker

     Enter the Grim Reaper with Edna St. Vincent Millay’s

Dirge without Music
***
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains, --- but the best is lost.
The answers quick & keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,
They are gone. They have gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

Perhaps it is the passion of love that gives respite from thoughts of Hamlet’s “… undiscovered country, from whose bourn No traveler returns…”

#  #  #

Less Than One

    Leonard Nimoy (Star Trek’s Mr. Spock) wrote in his recounting of a love which ended that when they were together there were three: “you, me and us; now that you’re gone, there’s less than one.” I am now less than one.

    My love was not so much a love as an infatuation. We never kissed or embraced. I ached for that to happen. I had allowed myself to become an artist of the beautiful and I painted a picture of such warmth, caring and sharing that I became as a teenager experiencing First Love. I misread positive responses as more welcoming than they were and my overtures went unnoticed.  But there were definitely overtures.

    Our modern, popular social medium, Facebook, gives us an opportunity to very quickly exchange ideas and share photos. Unfortunately it also prevents depth in communication — it is tangential and superficial. Unless a thought or idea is explicitly presented, it can bounce off the surface with little noticeable impact.

    However, it can provide insight. I saw the movement of my adorée’s attentions in a direction other than toward me. Since unrequited affection can be painful to the adorer, the only sensible course is to admit lack of success and move on. True love may not have developed but the loss of possibility creates an emptiness just as painful.

    I said “lack of success,” I didn’t say “failure.” As a result of this mini-Love Story I confirmed that an emotional center in me I once thought long dead is still alive and waiting for an entrance cue. It may never be cued but it is there. Yet the evanescence is frightening. (“But now the days grow short, I'm in the autumn of the year“)

    Being in the right place at the right time to meet the right woman is like juggling soap bubbles without breaking any.  Bursting bubbles can hurt. I hurt. Send in the clowns.

#  #  #

Love?

    I have loved. I have been loved. I have also suffered infatuation. I say suffer because infatuation whether puppy love or a teenage crush (regardless of actual age) is nothing more than  unrequited love. It feels like love but since it is not reciprocated its one-sided character is depleting and painful — thoughts, feelings, desires going out; nothing coming back.

    If wisdom accompanies aging, the older you get the easier it should be to distinguish between love and wishful thinking. Unfortunately that doesn’t always happen. The loud “zing” from heart strings being strummed can be deafening and it can overwhelm good judgment.

    “Ah, take the cash and let the credit go,” according to Omar Khayyam. Savor the heart flutters for their joy of the moment but wake up and smell the coffee and move on. No Waiting for Godot. The train doesn’t stop here anymore. Dreaming for something that will never happen is foolhardy.

E.E. Cummings speaks well of heart strings being strummed whether it’s a beginning or an end:

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands