Longing for The Face Withheld: V Day Musings

February is a month when romance is both ritualistic and compulsory. Everything, from cookies to diamonds, sells in the name of St. Valentine, the icon of stubborn conviction in the face of the repressive and regulatory forces of the violent military state that tries to control the faith of its subjects with an absurd arrogance. St. Valentine's connection with sexual love is a later day, mainly medieval, effort to Christianize Europe's pagan past.

At a time when division and intolerance increasingly define man's relation with the social-world outside the community/ religion/ race/ state he is accidentally born into, the formal reiteration of such subversive love that seeks to shake up the status quo is highly relevant, even necessary one would say, since every instance of the personal is ultimately political.

But just as Christmas is especially difficult for the socially unaccommodated, so too is Valetine's Day for the lonely, the 'unloved', which is all of us at some point or the other, it being a rite of passage for every adult. There is no escaping the shame and embarrassment of the solitary individual standing outside the magic circle of mutually reciprocated romantic affection among friends and family. May be, he too feels love in his skin and bones; love that keeps him awake in the nightly privacy of his bedroom  -- but being what it is, lonely, secret and sometimes even outlawed, this kind of love is denied the festive hype of  V Day which is oriented exclusively at heterosexual consummation.

Picture courtesy: http://hd-wall-papers.com/single/1580071-background-lovers.html

And yet who could deny the unlimited richness, the sheer creative potential of this brand of love? Literature and art open up a space of cultural catharsis where we typically encounter its raw and rabid energies, for such love to be absorbed by socially accommodated structures, such as marriage, procreation and family, this love has to shed much of its disruptive capacity, hence its intensity. Anyone who remembers Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights from his high-school reading, will immediately understand the failure of the effort to integrate such feral amorous energies into domesticated bourgeois respectability.

The tortured verses of the young Rimbaud, turning the stale and stagnant conventions of French poetry on its head to introduce infernal beauty in its place, would never have come into existence without the deeply conflicted, and finally impossible affair with a middle aged Verlaine, hopelessly entrenched in his marriage ( the film Total Eclipse is a devastatingly beautiful exploration of that torrid, sordid intimacy) .

There would be no Moonlight Sonata, no Fur Elise, I'm certain, if Beethoven's entire life had not been spent in affairs with women who were ultimately impossible objects due to their class, or marital status or both. His unsent correspondence to his so-called Immortal Beloved is so achingly exquisite in its frustrated, self-consuming obsession that they serve as an excellent extra-textual commentary to his sublime music.We still do not know the identity of the 'I.M'--Julia Guicciardi, Josephine Brunsvik, Antonie Brentano-- the candidates are several. And finally such scholarly  enterprise is bound to be futile as it does nothing to deconstruct the aura of that attraction. Its pure magic resides in its intractability.

 Closer home, the better part of Rabindranath Tagore's creative corpus can be interpreted as his obsessive quest to reach out to the love of his life (several lesser affairs notwithstanding) Kadamvari, the immensely gifted woman married to his older brother Jyotirindranath, and who acted as a muse to an adolescent Rabindrath's fledgling creativity. Kadamvari committed suicide at 26, in the aftermath of her infamous intimacy with 'Rabi'. He lost her at 24, but even when he was dabbling in visual arts quite late in the day, in his seventies, the sombre, incandescent portraits staring back from a shadowy backdrop, have the same gaunt face and hauntingly intense eyes of his first undead muse. In the preface to Manasi, the big bang of Tagore's creative expression, written shortly after the tragic affair, Tagore describes his writing as a way out of his personal depression and a larger futility and randomness at the heart of creation itself.

Desire, according to Lacan, is an effort to staunch the wound inflicted on the subconscious by an always-already absent object. Art, in this context, becomes a space of fantastic intercourse, where desire that is denied gratification in reality is consummated on an aesthetic, rather than erotic, plane. The beloved who is perennially out of reach is finally appropriated and possessed in and through the artist's creative imagination. She never deserts the creator thereafter, defeating in that way, the vagaries of fate and the mutability of the universe. The artist has laid claim to her existence through his authorship and that right, for him, is inalienable.

The intensely lacerated lyricism of Rilke (to whom I owe my title and whose lifelong obsession for Lou Salome is responsible for much of his troubled poetry), the dazzlingly dark beauty of Leonard Cohen's music, the pained serenity in Goya's portraits, the young Shakespeare writing Twelfth Night to heal the cracks of his lost love, commemorating his cross-dressed beloved through his heroine in drag (in the end of Shakespeare in Love, so beautifully written by Tom Stoppard) are all instances of this disruptive, subversive and ultimately self-renewing love that will never find its way to the pretty V-Day cards and merchandise. And yet, this is the most triumphant and enduring love that shakes civilization out of its stupor and complacence and sets human endeavour rolling in the direction of revolutionary transformation.