Appraising myriad hues, faces of love

Cape Town-151010-Prof Adam Small, pictured at his home. The portrait is of his wife Rosalie. Picture Jeffrey Abrahams

Cape Town-151010-Prof Adam Small, pictured at his home. The portrait is of his wife Rosalie. Picture Jeffrey Abrahams

Published Oct 15, 2015

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Adam Small

I dedicate this twenty-first Counterpoint piece to Rosalie, who has been my support all this time, sharing with me her intellect – her critique of my ideas in the shaping of my work.

Hence my theme for today is the exciting but difficult concept of love, being most descriptive of this working relationship: With rays of light flooding through the window your oval face brings me joy.

Your presence around me sings, and you need no primping to impress me! A popular definition of love is that it is a matter of “fondness or tender feeling” between two persons.

But, as a superlatively imaginative Edgar Allan Poe once wrote, there is also “love with a love that is more than love”! He implies that love is not merely a matter of romance, but one also of deep mutual respect for each other’s personality.

The one does not dread the other’s intellect, you share a love of wisdom (philosophia). It is apt, here, to refer to Virginia Woolf’s writing about “the intellectual status of women”. In her short text, Killing the angel in the house, Samuel Butler is quoted to have said when asked “what he thought about women”: “I think what every sensible man thinks”; and when he was coaxed further, he replied: “Sensible men never tell.”

This, we are told, “was ominous and also characterstic; the crusty bachelor was a strong strain in him”. The fact is that Butler was simply foolish, throwing out a smart-aleck response that lacked both insight and generosity: true intellectuality has nothing to do with this kind of soulless dapperness.

Visual artists have tried to image love. Rembrandt’s painting of Saskia comes to mind; and Van Gogh’s picturing of Kee Vos, who fled from him when he declared “his passion for her”.

When he turned to a prostitute, he realised, abhorred, that sex was not synonymous with love. Gauguin, whom Van Gogh befriended, was grossly cavalier about love. His story is a reproach to love’s integrity.

The greatness of St Augustine of Hippo, on the contrary, was that, after a youth of profligacy, he came to the “City of God” remorsefully. Love is considered fulsomely in the words of Corinthians, that “now abide faith, hope and charity, and the greatest of these is charity”. The heart of love is indeed charity – a caring for others, considering and promoting their interests. Forms of love are manifold.

To begin with, there is the love of humanity or community – the expression of feeling for people in distress. Humour is not out of bounds here! Many years ago, a priest, Father Da Costa, once walked me through District Six. He knew the District intimately.

In our wandering, we came upon a couple on a dimly-lit staircase, who were arguing violently, and Father da Costa urged them to stop the quarrel. The woman responded: “Father, just go away, this is our quarrel, not yours!” Time and time again, I realise how special a notion love is.

All other concepts seem directly or indirectly to relate to it – which is to be expected if “God is Love”, and “all things were made by Him”. Helen Waddell, in her beautiful novel, Peter Abelard, portrays the frustrated love of the ambiguous Abelard and the brave novice nun Héloïse (who, in truth, wasted her love on the monk). The involvement of love with other concepts – like satellites of it! – is captivating.

Shakespeare’s unsurpassable melodramas open up all of this for us. Cordelia’s honest love for her father, King Lear, is tragically denied by the deluded King: he madly prefers his deceptive, slick-tongued older daughters, Goneril and Regan, who profess to love him “with all their heart”.

Lear, in his dotage, is disappointed with Cordelia’s unembroidered response – only to find out afterward how Goneril and Regan had deceived him. The end of this drama of love, and the false profession of it, is a labile King Lear screaming revenge into the wind: “I will do such things, what they are yet I know not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth. You think I’ll weep. No, I’ll not weep. I have full cause of weeping, but this heart shall break into a hundred thousand flaws, or ere I’ll weep”. There is the ambitious Lady Macbeth.

She fires up the patriotic, well-meaning Macbeth to murder King Duncan. Macbeth then ascends the throne, Lady Macbeth becoming queen – all this only to the avail that Macbeth himself is killed by Duncan’s son. Ophelia (“sweetness to the sweet”), the beautiful daughter of the pompous Polonius, is driven to madness by the stressed-out prince Hamlet (in the process of his avenging his father’s death due to his mother Gertrude'’s infidelity).

Ophelia’s love enfolds her naturally: it comes to her and from her, flowing freely. She lives from inside beauty. A definition of true love might well be that it is an Ophelian reality: it speaks of tenderness, softness, smiling (rather than laughter), of a withholding shyness, a bringing of joy into the world.

In Ophelia’s case, there is never a turning in upon the self, not even in dire frustration – such as with Hamlet who, self-centred, allows this for himself.

This effaces the worth of his love for her, and, in the end, he does not deserve her. There is Shylock’s love of money. His avarice is thwarted, in turn, by the lawyer Portia’s love of legality.

And there is the complicatedly romantic love of Romeo and Juliet, the end of which is a tragic denouement into a far-fetched shambles in which they are both destroyed, but – paradoxically – their families, in enmity before, are reconciled. Turning to a contemporary episode, I note the love of language, which can be a happy circumstance. It can also be a jingoistic sickness, though.

At a recent so-called “black” writers’ symposium at the University of the Western Cape, a “white” Afrikaans woman poet and participant in the symposium, condescendingly came out “challenging” blacks (including “coloureds”), to pursue “inclusivity” rather than viewing themselves as “victims” in our society.

I cannot recall even a mousey squeak from the lady in horror of apartheid during the time of that regime – what prattle therefore! I can tell our poet that inclusivity is precisely what a thinker like myself, or true poets like S.V. Petersen and P.J. Philander, or indeed our broad public, have striven for all our lives, and it is not the privilege or prerogative of the likes of her to pontificate to us on this matter! Returning to Shakespeare (a more pleasant exercise, even in the ensuing case): at the farthest end of concepts associated with love, we encounter the thoroughgoing evil of Iago.

He is jealous of Cassio who ranks higher in the army than he, and jealous also of his general, Othello, for preferring Cassio to him. He schemes against Othello (the prime adviser to the state of Venice in matters of warfare).

His ugly mind plots to have Othello believe that the beautiful Desdemona, Othello’s wife, is carrying on an affair with Cassio (which she isn’t). He contrives to let a handkerchief Othello had given her as a present be discovered on Cassio’s person.

This incenses Othello, who insanely smothers Desdemona, only to realise his folly, and then kill himself.

Love is indeed a most intriguing concept to think through, but also recalcitrant. Shakespeare’s imaginative proffering of it does not lighten our task! It remains a joy, however, to consort with these many thoughts.

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