unchained melody

There is something about Don Mclean songs that makes me nostalgic about an imaginary romance in a Tuscany countryside where I might have been desperately in love and had my heart broken in a very old fashioned way. And let’s even dress myself in a frilly plaid tunic frock with the hemmed petticoat lining peeking out, wearing a matching bonnet and bright red palm shoes. I guess this imagery directly plants me in an impressionistic painting from the nineteenth century, transporting me to “back in the days when romance was in fashion, before the days of whips and rollerblades…back in the days when we were idealistic and younger than our years…”¹

 

I have been thinking about love. 

Among the many disagreeable things that Freud has taken the liberty of making famous and manipulating future psychology students with for the rest of their lives, inciting dissentious outbreaks in classrooms, university offices or coffee houses, one particular analysis that “we are never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our love” rings true with a million resonance. And even though for the most part we don’t exactly have a ready conception of love, yet most of us would agree with a marginal degree of skepticism, applying Mendel’s law, Murphy’s Law, allowing anomalies, that love is in fact a noble thing. And yet, it inadvertently becomes perverse if one should love a third emotionally or romantically (which does not necessarily mean sexually) if one is already committed in that capacity to someone exclusively. The fear of losing one or the guilt for loving another seems imminent. But what should one do in times like these? One could lie or deny both to the existing lover/partner and to this other object of attraction/love, (a person no doubt). But is there a purpose? Yes, perhaps much argument is averted, but what more? Can you honestly evacuate or terminate the stirrings you inexorably are sinking into for this other person? For some I guess the excitement or the very attraction stems from the fact that the other person is untenable, unattainable. Some takes pleasure in the palpable, adrenalin pumping, hormones flying, blood boiling sexual undercurrent, and the challenge to overcome the moment of intense willingness or seduction… when two riving, writhing bodies comes close… very close. It is perhaps only in the overcoming and not in the succumbing of the temptation that the attraction between the forbidden two will remain… 

And for few others who keep their feelings a secret, sipping fondly but clandestinely from the resplendent font of love in all its splendor… those who spend their days in quiet commitment and soft pining for a lingering wishful desire, must seek inspiration in the words of Shakespeare again, 

She never told her love,
But let concealment, like a worm in the bud,
Feed on her damask cheek: she pined in thought,
And, with a green and yellow melancholy,
She sat like Patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief.

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