IF YOU GIVE YOUR BODY AWAY . . .

If you give your body away, where do you live?  Lovers, the tortured, athletes, combatants, the grievously afflicted, and perhaps dancers or musicians surrender the control of their physical selves to something larger.  But, doing this, they can feel enormous intimacy, even spiritual.  Perhaps the parts of the identity that dwelt in the larger body come to concentrate in the mental life, brain-based.  There is often some kind of attachment that develops, very intimately and not necessarily caressing.  Then attachment can become obsession and finally addiction, which is a minutely physical neuronal change in the body, most intensely in the brain.  Usually it works against survival.   So now I’m including on this short list all kinds of PTSD and much drug use.  There may or may not be self-awareness of what has happened, no perceived ability to change back to a former self or a future addiction-free state, except through great suffering, like opiod withdrawal.  

I’m speaking from observation and testimony, not my own experience, in the way the first aboriginal people assigned an interpreter, who were often women living at crossroads.  The tribal lives were not lesser, but different; not better or worse, but different.  Those whose brain nodes-of-assumptions (I mean literal neuron sorting centers) have been deeply changed will try to avoid explaining and probably couldn’t if they tried.  The inside/outside boundary cannot be breached except by those very few who can go back and forth.  It is a shaman’s journey and humbling.

My copy of “Love in the Western World” by de Rougement is second-hand (Princeton, ’83).  Ch. 8, “The Love of Love,” has been previously underlined almost throughout.  None of the other chapters are marked except for one sentence in the next chapter: “The Love of Death.”  “. . .the lovers’ secret -- that they are seeking peril for its own sake.  But so long as the peril comes from without, Tristan’s prowess in overcoming it is an affirmation of life.”

The original tale is far more elaborate than we are used to knowing, with many partings and reunions, many struggles to give each other up, many ordeals.  De Rougement is worth quoting.  P. 39 in my paperback.  :  “They are thus in a thrillingly contradictory position.  They love, but not one another.  They have sinned, but cannot repent; for they are not to blame.  They make confession, but wish neither to reform nor even to beg forgiveness.  Actually, then, like all other great lovers, they imagine that they have been ravished ‘beyond good and evil’ into a kind of transcendental state outside ordinary human experience, into an ineffable absolute irreconcilable with the world, but that they feel to be more real than the world.” 

This is a condition of the instrument, not that which is measured.  The sensory interface with the world becomes engraved on the lens of the observer, so that nothing else matters or can be accurately perceived.  But in addition there is always an over-chord of transcendence, a feeling that there must be something mystical going on.  As I write, the radio is suddenly playing Wagner.

Still, we are bodies, embraceable and sometimes singing.  We age.  Unexpectedly I found this quote from a David Brooks conversation with Gail Collins entitled “How to be Old.” “Michelangelo, Titian, Rembrandt, Turner and Cézanne, peaked in their elderly years. These artists shared what he called:  A sense of isolation, a feeling of holy rage, developing into what I have called transcendental pessimism; a mistrust of reason, a belief in instinct.”  And yet a wish to help others. 

In fact, fascination/obsession/addiction to these issues comes through a felt intimacy (as ill-fated as that of Tristan and Iseult and not at all physical) that holds attention, which is the craved state, but equally strong is fear of entrapment and that’s true on the other end as well, a tie between two people.  It’s not dependent on writing except that print can be the body of the connection. 

De Rougemont gives much attention to the END of this relationship between Tristan and Iseult.  Contemporary derivations emphasize eternal love, endlessness. “love beyond death.”  This seems to come from Christianity and its roots, not as universally transcendent as those sources would claim.  Compared to Buddhism, it seems to me shallow.  Compared to awareness of simple embeddedness in the natural world, it seems to me unnecessary.

Chapter 11, “Unhappy Mutual Love” addresses suffering.  (The previous owner of the book has now begun dog-earing pages.  One could easily write a short story playing that reader against this reader against the text.)  De Rougement proposes (p. 51) these alternatives:  “According to the sturdiness of our spirit, this unhappiness may be the ‘delightful sadness’ and spleen of nineteenth-century decadence, a transfiguring torment, or a challenge which the mind flings down to the world.”  They are not mutually exclusive.  

In spite of the emphasis on transcendence evoked or even forced by the inescapable dilemma, religion is not the solution -- it is an example.  Particularly the ones that premise an anthro-theos can only harden the dilemma of unrequited love locking one into addiction to one’s own brain template.

De Rougement claims in the Freudian way that this is all rooted in a yearning for death.  I think this is pretty much a distraction since we all die anyway.  If you want death, all you have to do is to wait.  Maybe be a little careless.  Live in the wrong place.  Have passionate encounters with the wrong people -- or, worse, passionless transactions with the wrong people.  But since the whole assurance of Christian and Islamic traditions is that obedience will earn eternal life, maybe yearning for death is simply a Celtic assertion of belonging to oneself and one's own body -- not some system imported from the Middle East.

Once one realizes the inevitability of death, then the issue moves to how to be most alive in the time allotted.  One of the figures not often considered in the Tristan and Iseult tale is the “Morholt” which is a kind of Minotaur figure that demands the sacrifice of youths.  Youth is much admired by older persons (in spite of their willingness to sacrifice them) but despised by those still in that state.  The young are still death-deniers, still susceptible to the love-potions, still on the surface of their mind formation.  Therefore they are vulnerable to ill-use, addiction without wisdom, and resistance to the culture that could have supported them.  Tristan slays the Morholt -- then discovers that the creature is Iseult’s brother.  (Remember the giant albino in “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” trilogy?)

The whole point of King Mark’s marriage to Iseult the Fair is to produce heirs for his kingdom.  Genetic succession keeps order and might even assure quality.  Tristan and Iseult prevent the creation of children, a new generation.  This could destroy the whole nation.  Even Tristan’s legal marriage to Iseult of the Fair Hands is never consummated and therefore produces no rival children, which preserves the community.  The lovers have taken themselves out of the standing order without creating something new except for ideas, story.

THE CHEVALIER AND THE FEUDAL KING

Underneath the seemingly unaccountable changes in the way the world unfolds over the centuries are forces that either cause or are caused by war, famine, weather, new inventions and so on.  The issue of human survival always hinges between two kinds of survival:  individual and group.  Sometimes the chances of surviving are much better for the individual and sometimes for the group, but they are highly interdependent.  Since individuals are often protected as well as identified by their group affiliation and since groups survive by the willing allegiance of many individuals, stories about how to reconcile and honor both the triumphs and the sacrifices are always in the air, partly to control what will happen and partly to justify what has already happened.

Denis de Rougemont in his classic book, “Love in the Western World,” reckons that “Tristan and Iseult” is an example of the code of individual behavior that grew out of the Crusades, to keep the discipline and allegiance of “chevaliers” (horseback riders) attached to the folks back home, but sometimes in conflict with the preceding idea of “feudalism,” which meant that power came through the acceptance that a particular patch of land “belonged” to kings (backed up by God, of course) who could control and dispose of everyone who lived there and the assets they created through their work.  The kings in the time period of Tristan used their wealth to underwrite the knights or chevaliers who were assumed to act with great loyalty and dedication in the king’s interests.  So King Mark more or less “owned” Tristan, in the same way that God “owned” the believers:  through an intense idea of faith and obligation.  The King “was” the nation and to betray the king was to betray the country. 

The Romantic idea of an individual falling in love amounted to a heresy.  Adultery was treason.  And once those chevaliers had ridden their horses off to the Holy Land, seeing all sorts of things along the way and relying on their individual wits -- or at least a buddy group -- to survive in unknown territory -- well, once they’ve seen Paree (or Jeroo), how do you keep them back on the farm?  And how do you keep them from figuring out, -- like a horse who realizes that a bit only controls his mouth and that he’s much bigger and more powerful than his rider -- that there are larger forces than a king?  At that point one still believes in God -- or not.  The same with the women left behind or used as a trading token.

A knight, unlike a horse, knows he can be seriously injured or killed.  Healing is a high value in combat, and so the code of fealty can be overcome if the injury is grievous enough.  Tristan is as good as dead when he is set adrift in a boat, unconscious.  It is not his choice to be washed up on the shore of Ireland where a princess, Iseult, has the skills to save him and does, compassion overcoming caution.  He’s not deliberately betraying his king by being healed, but it puts him in tension between his individual survival and the survival of King Mark, which will be much enhanced by marriage to Iseult through Tristan’s efforts.

De Rougement says (p. 19 in my paperback)”  “I propose to consider Tristan, not as a piece of literature, but as typical of the relations between man and woman in a particular historical group -- the dominant social caste, the courtly society, saturated with chivalry, of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.  The group in question was indeed long ago dissolved.  Yet its laws remain our laws in an unsuspected and diluted form.  Profaned and repudiated by our official legal codes, these laws have become the more compelling in that they wield no power over us except in our dreams.”

I would broaden that out even more.  In a denomination grouped only by the affinities of the congregation members (weakening as the generations thin out), the representative of the whole is the denominational headquarters -- the Pope in the instance of the Roman Catholics.  Then the priests become the chevaliers, risen to knighthood on the horse of ordination.  If their code is strong, they can be crusaders as well as protectors.  If it is weak, the whole institution turns rotten.

The Roman Catholic church still runs by feudal rules, but no longer has the land that would make it a nation except in scattered patches all over the planet.  It is a “virtual” nation with much wealth which comes from the allegiance of its people.  It is a corporation which is less like a person (as is the legal convention, as though institutions could be their own king) and more of a landless nation.  If it cannot protect the members from disease (whether physical or moral) then it is going to rot from within.  And so will the United States which also collects taxes in the feudal way -- though adding representatives of the people whose duty is to keep the faith, and to limit authority by mapped boundaries.  Feudalism died because of abuse by those in power and so can religious institutions or governing institutions.

The consequences to any “nation”  that does not preserve the health of the constituents is a rise in the felt need of individuals to take matters into their own hands, whether it is a formal and land-based country, provoking demonstrations, or a family in which the adults do not act to protect their children, obliging them to rebel or run away.  When it appears that the whole planet is grievously wounded and infected, then God is discredited and we look for a mystical Irish healing woman, an Iseult.  But there are false Iseults, like the one Tristan marries to please King Mark, and she moves under a black sail.

This is a wildly simplified and possibly distorted understanding of what de Rougemont is saying and I haven’t even finished reading the book yet, but I think it is a useful formula for interpreting some very confusing dynamics.  The question is “what should an individual do to preserve his or her community?”  (Assuming one has found a community.)  Then, in reciprocity, what is the community doing to protect its members?  The US claims it can find a unity in plurality through the protection of rights and the prevention of oppression.  But if we get scared enough, that falls apart.  They call in the Chevaliers, the Samurai, and the Predator drones to force authority.

We are waiting to see what all these horsemen of the keyboard can manage.  Will leaking information and revealing corporation disguises return faith to the people?  Or will it destroy order ?  Shouldn’t we be looking for something we can all believe in the way we used to believe in God?  Or is the individual hacker saving us all?

Science, which can amount to a religion, recommends the planet as something we can believe in, the ultimate human group.  (Forget about the rocket riders who go on Crusades to the stars.)  But we are demanding that science heal us.  In the end everyone will die -- the question is what will you live for in the meantime?  Your own right to do what you like, or the honor of your country, or the good of life on this planet, or some virtual world that may or may not really exist?  (Are all those virgins a reward or a problem?)  De Rougement says it doesn’t really matter whether the emphasis is on individual or group -- the thing that counts is making the story go on and on -- now this way and now that way.  It is Scheherazade who knows.  It is the story that survives when all else is gone.