Darconville's Cat (34 page)

  “We create what we love as we love what we want to
become, our dreams, queerly, acting our temptations, for the higher
men can raise their ideals the greater is the reflected glory which
they feel at their devotions. Indeed, love, it might be said, is
not directed toward beauty but toward the procreation of beauty,
creating a
new
woman for man instead of a real woman and
for woman a new, not a real, man. It does not solve, it
contemplates; it does not examine itself, it awakens. We are
reborn, as it were, in the mind of another, a perishable
transubstantiated—hi substance, not accidents—into an imperishable.
This fully unattainable goal of all longing, love, cannot be
totally realized in experience, in fact, and much of it must
forever remain an idea, immaculate, which is why it is almost
always associated with the awakening of the desire for purification
and a disposition to inexpressible kindness. The idea forever
beckons, tempts, ecstasizes, and the star-gazer’s toe is often
stubbed. Whom the gods wish to render harmless they first afflict
with love. A lover is utterly and totally defenseless.

  “The strongest pulsation of the will towards the
supreme good, directing the true being of man to a state between
body and spirit, between the bald senses and the moral nature,
between God and the beasts, is the direct result of loving. One can
never directly experience the emotion without changing, and thus it
comes about that only when they love do many men and women realize
the existence of their own personality and of the personality of
another, that ‘I’ and ‘thou’ become for them more than merely
grammatical expressions. The greater a man is, the more he yearns
for full identity, extending himself toward the reaches of the
immortal where the experience of love, like the sounds of a city
heard on the height of a skyscraper, is compressed into a single
note. A man truly has just as much arrogance as he lacks
self-realization, and true love always ends all arrogance
altogether, for the sacrifices it implicitly requires—it requires
nothing else —allow one to ‘selve’ for another and yet in doing so
serve oneself. Love is centrifugal, hate centripetal. Demons must
hilarify as they watch while we are drawn to someone unable, or
unwilling, to love us. It is easy to be cruel. One need only not
love.

  “
Caritas, agape, eros, amicitia
: love
inspires us in the many ways it’s defined. And yet the whole
apparat of formal understanding is foreign to it—in fact, a human
being perhaps cannot love another whom he fully understands or
effectively comprehends because the very nature of the ideal
discommends the empirical or rationalistic approach to wisdom
through analysis, always a felony in matters of love. (To
comprehend something fully is to be beyond or above it, no?) On the
other hand, one can project and pursue the idea of beauty
relentlessly, intuiting the possibility of it, this constantly
renewed endeavor to embody the highest form of value, as a prisoner
in the darkness of solitary confinement might determine the season
outside by seining through the vegetables in his daily soup. And
yet while union depends on duality, the lover who does not seek his
own soul in his loved one will never find his own soul in himself,
for the lover is a person whose quaesitum desperately exists in,
and indeed is—
is
—another. A transition beckons.

  “Love is not contagious, only the idea of it is. And
yet, again, is it not fabled that for everyone there is someone,
that, as in the epistolary novel—its traditional subject, of
course, always being love—we need but post a letter to receive one,
whereupon, then, is issued a sweet and confident outlay of intimacy
that documents the ratio of priority and subsequence and so leads
to the perfect ending we bank on? Who can’t want to believe it?
Everybody aspires to fall in love. We look to see the candidates
and find multitudes, multitudes. But the chosen? A minority. So
overpowering is the emotion, however, so mighty the reputation,
that it sends back, echoing down its hypostyle, sufficient echoes
of its living renown only for the shouting—and yet to what good if
no one is there to make it real?

  “The mere postulate of love creates in its
mythopoetic wake a throng of pursuivants whose desire for it, if
going no further, only parodies what lies tragically beyond its
grasp. And yet how the world, perversely to encourage our hopes
that way, seeks to oblige us with its suddenly and
slubbering-over-with-whitewash conceits—the magic of mood and
music—that we all might upon an instant wake to find not illusion
but rather our heart’s desire in the form of Venus Mandragoritis
holding out a love-apple. Look! There assembles a host of would-be
lovers and laplings who, seeing Cupid in a jar-owl and sweetness in
a colicinth, would have it gospel that one man’s yawn makes another
yawn, one man’s pissing makes another piss! They fashion fancies
and pull impressible faces and, smugging themselves up in pomade
and passion-flowers, step out into the moonlight poets write of to
project their disposition to desire upon another, as rich in the
confusion of intent as that person who judges a party a success
because he himself has been charming. There may be music with
imposing lyrics, wine, the tuition of promises. But then where is
love? Make it. But is it love? Fake it. But is not this a lip and
that a lip? And can she not shape her elbow to my arm?
O euros
Chymicorum! O cuantum in pulvere inane
! Faults are thick where
love is thin. The sting of the reproach is the truth of it.

  “The passion of love is like a parable, by which
men, often, still mean something else. It is a step away from
reality, conceived, among other things, to improbabilize low aims
and soar into a participation with whatever divinity presents
itself. The lover, however, is a person never unaware of the
frightful dualism of nature and spirit; desire, characteristically,
partakes of the former, love of the latter—and with that
recognition the morality play of Mutability and Constancy performs
a dress rehearsal in your head. Consider love and desire: are they
often not perfectly antagonistic? Man projects his soul onto woman
and she onto him with this hope, always, that the beauty of bodily
image embodies morality, only one of the variations of expectation
having to do with love.

  “But the kinesis of beauty (as opposed to the stasis
of the idea of beauty)—
res aptus studendo
—is, indeed,
often nothing but a blocking agent to the continuity of love,
annulling it by either change or alteration. It is this that so
often surprises and saddens a lover when it is revealed that beauty
does not necessarily imply morality in the object of love; one, in
fact, often feels that the nature of the offense is actually
increased by the conjunction of beauty and depravity, unaware,
perhaps, that up to that time the woman in question only seemed
beautiful to him because he still loved her. All aesthetics are
created by ethics; and beauty, more often than not, is a bodily
image in which morality is archetypally felt to be represented. The
less transcendental the beauty is, the less permanent we are
usually convinced it will be, in direct proportion, for our faith
resides here, that we love what we esteem, a usufruct of heaven
beckoning us to the bettermost, and so to preserve in spirit what
we’ve captured in nature it often falls out that love and desire
are sometimes two unalike, mutually exclusive conditions. If love,
for instance, is only true, as has been written, in proportion as
it is pure, what then is the ideal?

  “Thumb your histories. Xenocrates, passing nights
with Lais of Corinth, never touched her. Socrates, who doted on
Alcibiades, sent him away precisely at a moment when the
opportunity to lie with him presented itself. And Petrarch,
sempiternally burning for his Laura, did not take her to himself
when she was offered to him and, even losing her, somehow possessed
her more. If it be the case that there is no adoration utterly free
from desire there is no reason why the two should be identified.
What, in fact, are realities worth compared to the mirages we would
know? Shall the true lover be satisfied to comprehend his
intoxication only by sensation? The very rapture of one’s love,
surely, no longer limits him only to earth. ‘Reality,’ it’s been
written, ‘is the only word in the language that has no meaning
without quotation marks.’

  “Have you then understood me to say to love only in
the mind? I summon a thousand angels to disprove such a thing,
charging you to love with your hands, your heart, your paper and
poems, whistles and whispers, the light of your soul, its
pathetical prayers, and the candle that sits in your head pointing
its flames toward the goblin perched over your head called night.
O, illustrious Trismegist, you who love, you
yourself
are
the very miracle you seek to keep! You have been given the gift of
love!

  “Go and love! The exhortation must be shouted in
twos, else for you shall the world be dark as Lycophron. Lovers,
you move toward the completion thankfully never complete. You are
the denial of denials. You would do all and dare outdo what, done,
deems yet more to do. You would practice months of refusals and
scoff in the teeth of exhaustion but to comfort her! You would,
like Alexander, burn to the ground the entire city of Persepolis if
it stood in the way of your love! You would pull down an entire sky
only to present her with a supply of calliblepharies for her eyes!
You would tremble in the night at the sound of far-off bells,
fearing the merest implication of new events and change, for you
have been given the gift of love. You would heal the pottage of
Gilgal, suck up the Nile at a single haust yet still cry out for
thirst, and watch through tempests of provocation to see it snow
eryngoes and shower down the sun! You would willingly die tomorrow
only that she might kill you with her own hands! You would be
drugged with Spanish licorice and let your bones be used for
hell-dice only to look into her eyes and see yourself reflected
there! For you have been given the gift of love!

  “Proud would you be her phaeton, her gig, her
shoe-latchet snapped shut to walk her safely in the fittest steps
toward paradise, to the snows of Monte Rosa, to the heights of
Horeb where each dream dreamt is only yet another dream dreamt
among dreams. You have been given the gift of love. You believe it
only when you realize it, and yet at that very stroke you cannot
but have removed its momentous secret far beyond the hollow
formulae, abstract terms, and words such as these that since the
beginning of time have stammered after it, pitifully, in the
desolation of vain human syllables.”

  XXXIX

  The Cardinal’s Crotchet

  The lioness had torn some flesh away,

  Which all this while had bled.

        —WILLIAM
SHAKESPEARE,
As You Like It

  DARCONVILLE that afternoon took the essay to Dr.
DodypoPs house and turned by Fitts on his way back: Isabel,
apparently, had gone to Charlottesville for the weekend. And so he
returned to his rooms and, with nothing else to do, began sorting
through his trunk. He found something at the bottom he’d long
forgotten he’d put there: an old book.

  It was a rectangular folio—soiled, plates missing,
bisected at the spine—whose tight biscuity signatures and stiff
pages, each a
pointillisme
of brown spotting, could hardly
be turned, and the lower corner of each recto was polished to
yellow horn from its many long-ago encounters with curious and
inquisitive thumbs. A page was turned to a symphony of
crepitations. It was a relic of the sixteenth century, something of
a gradus then, but handed down through the centuries it bore,
increasingly, the characteristic of a strange little joke within
the family. What value, then, if any, might be assigned it? The
question, somehow, always posed itself to Darconville on those few
occasions when he’d ever bothered to look at it. What value?
Historical, at least, he thought.

  He puffed dust from the cover and smoothed his hand
down the buckled vellum. He marveled at it. The book had been
indited in the Year of Our Lord 1574 by that common ancestor of the
illustrious “writing d’Arconvilles,”[2] the learned grammaticus and
saintly but uncompromisingly tough old mumblecrust—whose blessed
memory we recall, annually, in the glorious martyrology of the
Church—named Pierre Christophe Cardinal Théroux-d’Arconville
(1532-1601 ).

  [[2]Dame Marie Geneviève Charlotte d’Arlus
Théroux-d’Arconville (1720-1805), author of
Vie de Marie de
Médias, princesse de Toscane, reine de France et de Navarre
(1774);
Des Passions
(1764);
Discours sur l’amour
propre
(1770) and many notable others. The first French
translator of Chaucer, Prior, and Pope, she also acted in a
theatrical production of
Mérope
, directed by Voltaire
himself. Jean Thiroux (1691-1740?) in his
Gallia Christiana in
Provincias Ecclesiasticus Distributa
(1715) documented current
monastic studies at that time. Louis Théroux de Crosne d’Arconville
(1736-1789), lieutenant general of the Paris constabulary, wrote
the classic monograph, still in use, called “Les Interprétations
criminelles des oreilles” before losing his life to the Jacobins
and their despicable peasant revolt. (“
Après la prise de la
Bastille, il se démit de sa charge entre les mains de Bailly le 16
juil. 1789,” La Grande Encyclopédie, trente et unième
, Paris.)
Charles Victor Théroux-d’Arconville (1803-1862), captain of
artillery and theoretical militarist at the Ecole Militaire de
Saint-Cyr, attacked in his polemic
La Flotte marchande
(1853), for abuses, all the parasitical birds-in-hand of the
merchant marine who, educated at government expense, greedily
sought to acquire private fortunes in civilian life in lieu of
military service. It will be here pointed out, in discommendation
of any such charge, that none of the above writers falls into the
strict category of the professional, a vulgar correption to which
true nobility need not, and must never, submit, especially those
through whose veins pounds the blood of the heroic Valois.]