A Natural History of Love (19 page)

DENIS DE ROUGEMONT: LOVE AND MAGIC

On this cold November morning, the snow is blowing sideways in a hard white artillery, and ice-jacketed trees have begun rocking back and forth like keening women. The winds drop. Slow-motion flakes fall silently and knit together on the lawn. Suddenly the winds blast up a frenzy, and a great commotion of snow funnels fast into the sky.

All that power, euphoria, frailty, and destruction fits with the music surging through my study: Wagner’s
Tristan und Isolde
. A pure, white-hot tempest of sensuality that is prolonged, savored, and explored, the music recreates the physical passion of a love so fierce that it exalts its lovers only to destroy them. The cellos moan with longing; the oboes yowl with desire. Now restless, now ecstatic, voluptuous and tense, the prelude begins in gloom, reaches a feverish crescendo and climax, and then unravels itself utterly, ending with a whisper. From that emotional summary, the opera unfolds an ancient tale of love and death:

Long ago, in the days that troubadours sing of, the Beautiful Maiden Blanchefleur fell in love with a Brave Handsome Knight who, in time and after many obstacles, she married. He was summoned to battle and killed while she was pregnant. The shock was so great that Blanchefleur fell desperately ill. She lived long enough to name her newborn son Tristan, or “Sadness,” and after her death the orphan was adopted by Blanchefleur’s brother, King Mark of Cornwall, who took him to live at Tintagel castle. The boy grew up heroically, and at puberty, the age of knighthood, he performed the required acts of bravery. He killed the Morholt, for example, a monstrous Irish giant. But in the process the Morholt wounded Tristan with a poison barb and, thinking he would surely die, Tristan asked to be set afloat with his sword and harp. In a small boat with neither sail nor oar, he drifted for some while and at last drew near the coast of Ireland. This was doubly good fortune because the queen of Ireland, as well as her daughter Iseult the Fair, possessed powers of healing, and they had a remedy to save him. He went to them straightaway and told his tale, carefully concealing how he got his wound (because the Morholt was the queen’s brother), and Iseult nursed him back to health.

Some years later, King Mark was standing at a castle window when a bird landed on the stone sill. It was carrying in its beak one beautiful golden hair that shone in the sunlight. King Mark was so enthralled that he decided then and there to marry the woman whose hair it was. Tristan was sent to find her. En route, a storm shipwrecked him once again in Ireland, where he vanquished a dragon that had been plaguing the locals, and again his wounds were nursed by Iseult. But this time she learned the truth about his past, and when she realized that he had slain her Uncle Morholt, she grabbed a sword and went to kill him in his bath. Tristan leapt to his feet, Iseult saw him in all his naked glory and was impressed, Tristan explained the mission that King Mark had sent him on, Iseult said that she was the very woman he sought and that she would indeed like to be queen, and with one thing and another she put down her sword and spared him.

The pair set off at once for Cornwall, but at sea the doldrums hit, the air felt loose and hot, and they asked Iseult’s maid for a drink. Rummaging around in a nearby cabin, the maid grabbed a small flask of wine from one of her mistress’s bags and poured an equal measure for both. What she didn’t realize was that the flask contained a powerful love potion made from grasses and herbs, which the queen had brewed as a surefire wedding-night gift for Iseult and Mark. Thirsty and unaware, Tristan and Iseult drank the potion, and then reacted very strangely: they sat bolt upright and stared rivers of fire into each other’s eyes. From that moment on, their destiny was fixed and inescapable, for they had “drunk their destruction and death.” According to the original version of the myth, the love potion had an expiration date of three years, but for the time being they were absolutely joined by love, inseparable at heart, soul, and flesh.

Despite this obvious and catastrophic betrayal, Tristan was still a knight, with knightly codes of conduct to follow, and thus duty bound to complete his mission and bring Iseult to King Mark, which is what he did. On the wedding night, Iseult’s maid, under cover of darkness, crept into the royal bedroom and secretly consummated the marriage in Iseult’s place. Apparently, King Mark didn’t detect any significant difference in body type, or look too closely at her face, or talk much during lovemaking. The following day, the king’s barons reported that Tristan and Iseult had been lovers. Although the king banished Tristan, the lovers continued to meet on the sly, and through a series of colorful escapades and tests King Mark became only too aware of their continuing adultery. At that point, he sentenced Tristan to die at the stake and handed Iseult over to a mob of lepers. En route to his execution, Tristan managed to escape, then he rescued Iseult, and they ran away to hide in the forests. This might have been bliss, a green thought in a green shade, but the myth specifically characterizes their life together as “harsh and hard.” One day, King Mark found them sleeping, with Tristan’s drawn sword lying between them. The king was so moved by their apparent chastity that he forgave them, left his own sword in place of Tristan’s as a sign, and crept away.

After three years, the love potion wore off, and suddenly the lovers began to feel guilty and to have second thoughts. Tristan said he missed the excitement of court life; Iseult missed being queen. First visiting an ogre, then enduring magic rituals and ordeals, and at last lying preposterously to both the king and God (Iseult swore that she had never been held in anyone else’s arms except those of the king and the peasant lad who just carried her ashore—however, the peasant was Tristan in disguise), the couple ingratiated themselves back into the good books of gullible King Mark.

Reinstated as a knight, Tristan set out again on adventures, some of which carried him a great distance from Tintagel. Alone for some while, he missed the company of women, and missed in particular Iseult the Fair, whom he concluded was happy at home and didn’t love him anymore. In a moment of nostalgia, he married a beautiful woman with Iseult’s name—“Iseult of the White Hands”—but, out of loyalty to the original Iseult, could not bring himself to consummate the marriage. The rigors of battle finally took their toll, and one day, wounded by a spear and about to die, he sent word for Queen Iseult to hurry to him with her medicines and save his life. She set out at once, sending a messenger to Tristan saying the ship carrying her would bear a white sail. But Tristan’s wife, Iseult of the White Hands, saw the ship arriving with her rival and, consumed by jealousy, told Tristan the sail was black as doom. Tristan died as Iseult the Fair landed. Rushing to the castle and finding him dead, Iseult was so tormented by grief that she fell down next to her lover and died beside him.

Fatal love is the oldest theme in song and legend. As Denis de Rougemont points out in his classic study of the Tristan myth,
Love in the Western World
, poets seldom sing about happy, tune-whistling, untroubled love. History doesn’t bother recording eternally happy lovers. “Romance only comes into existence where love is fatal, frowned upon, and doomed … not the fruitful contentment of the settled couple; not the satisfaction of love, but its
passion
. And passion means suffering.” Passion is something we dream about, want for our children, cheer in others, admire as a blinding bright jewel of emotion, secretly long for. Every person needs passion, a song by Rod Stewart tells us, listing some of the people who do, from farmers to diplomats, saints to thieves. “Even the president needs passion.” But, as de Rougemont rightly points out, passion by definition includes suffering. It is in essence a calamity. Then why do we prize it? Because caring and suffering make us feel more alive, they give us a frisson, a jolt. Passion whips us into a frenzy of feeling so intense we crave it, even though it pains us. Passionate love elevates, but it also afflicts us, and for that carnal thrill—feeling all of our senses on red alert, the sun always at noon, each hour a small forever—we would gladly suffer.

The Tristan myth swelled up like water from the ground of public morality. Many hands shaped it, many voices uttered it. Myths tend to be cautionary tales about the rules of conduct one is expected to follow in society, but they also express taboo thoughts and a people’s secret fears. This myth reflected the concerns of twelfth-century Europe, when people were trying to grapple with moral contradictions and hard truths. On the one hand, the codes of chivalry said that strength rules, and also that a knight must first and foremost serve his lady as her vassal. Accordingly, no one would have faulted Tristan, who was much braver and stronger than King Mark, from running away, with Iseult as his prize. On the other hand, the codes of feudal society ordained that he obey his lord as a vassal. So Tristan returned Iseult to his king. There are many kinds of allegiance and devotion. Whom should one be true to, the myth asks, when faced with different and conflicting forms of duty?

Once Tristan and Iseult drank the love potion, they lost their free will and were prey to nature, which gave them the right to be smitten and run off together. But the ideals of courtly love are based on flirtation, romance, and longing. The knight is not supposed to actually possess his lady. In fact when the lovers go to see a powerful ogre in the forest, they claim they’re in love because of the potion, but that in truth they don’t even like each other! Love happened to them against their will, when they weren’t looking, without being their fault. It was a double abduction. Something magical happened that hurled them outside the realm of guilt or sin, good or evil, above morality, into a kingdom of two, with its own edicts and physical laws.

There, in exquisite anguish, they both rule and serve, not because they are in love, but because they are in love with love. As de Rougemont astutely observes, “Their need of one another is in order to be aflame, and they do not need one another as they are. What they need is not one another’s presence, but one another’s absence.” That’s why there are so many obstructions in the story. When finally together, living as a married couple in the forest, with one day like the next, they become bored with life and bored with each other. De Rougemont argues that the need for obstruction is what this myth is all about; it is what is
required
to feel intense passion. The lovers “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.” That is why, when they’re living together in the forest, he puts a drawn sword between them as they sleep, to add a little cozy peril of his own.

De Rougemont notes that three years is about as long as ardent but unthwarted love can last, which is why the love potion’s expiration date was well chosen. After that, couples develop a different, quieter form of companionable love. For the love to stay tantalizingly hot, it has to be fueled with new perils.

In addition, de Rougemont says, the Tristan myth conceals a dreadful, secret, shameful yearning in all of us, something so awful we cannot utter it except as a sort of emotional hieroglyph. So we talk symbolically about ancient lovers in a distant time. The truth we cannot speak is that we long for death.

Magic comes in because the passion which has to be depicted has a fascinating violence not to be accepted without qualms…. The Church proscribes it as sinful, and common sense looks upon it as a morbid excess. It is thus not open to admiration till it has been freed from every kind of visible connexion with human responsibility. That is why it was indispensable to bring in the love-potion, which acts willy-nilly, and—better still—is drunk by mistake.

The love-potion is an
alibi
for passion. It enables each of the two unhappy lovers to say: “You see, I am not in the least to blame; you see, it’s more than I can help.” Yet thanks to this deceptive necessity, everything they do is directed towards the
fatal fulfillment
[italics added] they are in love with, and they can approach this fulfillment with a kind of crafty determination and a cunning the more unerring for not being open to moral judgement…. Who would dare admir that he seeks Death … that what he longs for with all his being is the annihilation of his being.

Only in death do we stop posing, struggling, and resisting, only then do we cast off the impediment of reason, the mind games of politics and religion, all the human frets and bothers, and become part of life at its essence, its most organic. In that ultimate state, where even the power of love evaporates, the senses reach heights of glory as they die. Paradoxically, it is in that moment of annihilation that we become most open to life. Dylan Thomas has a beautiful sonnet on this theme:

When all my five and country senses see,
The fingers will forget green thumbs and mark
How, through the halfmoon’s vegetable eye,
Husk of young stars and handfull zodiac,
Love in the frost is pared and wintered by,
The whispering ears will watch love drummed away
Down breeze and shell to a discordant beach,
And, lashed to syllables, the lynx tongue cry
That her fond wounds are mended bitterly.
My nostrils see her breath burn like a bush.