Advice to the Lovelorn Column
Cyber Love
WARNING:
If you suffer from a weak heart or dizziness,
If you are subject to spells of falling or fits,
If you are pregnant or under the age of twenty-one,
DO NOT PROCEED BEYOND THIS POINT.
But then, who but the weak-hearted, dizzy, ensorceled and those seized by fits of strong emotion would ever place love’s bubble of hope in one of the few baskets found even more insubstantial--Cyber Love?
Build it and they will come.
Reviewing the sorry course of love, we note that it often begins with what is cynically called, mere physical attraction, and then proceeds to deeper, more ego-syntonic involvement of that shadow organ, the heart. It’s hanky-panky to happiness-ever-after by degrees as subtle as the movement of hands on a clock.
We have a number of these invisible organs, conveniently named after those which physicians have lucked upon in their explorations. Of these, the heart is probably the most active, being shared between love and bravery. But a shadow-failure of liver can sap the foundations of courage, while an access of shadow-spleen can inflame the emotions beyond the poor brain’s modest capacity to cool. Love often gets a kick in the pants from compassion, which has its seat in the shadowy bowels; this last we have on Scriptural authority.
But, to return to our muttons (perhaps dressed as lambs), only in present-day America are we free and inclined to seek love’s first, physical touch as a whisper of electrons tickling the inner eye of a cathode tube. How the under-developed nations must envy us!
And yet, it is a keyhole through which the animal spirits must be enticed. Of course, we all live in proper dread of computer-mounted, digital, video transmitters. Like nudism, the Beatles and power devolving back to an armed and independent citizenry, it may sound better than it looks. Those few, who have been eager enough to submit to flat scanners, give further warning of the oft-heralded, imminent decline of the written word. But there will inevitably be some delay. Copper cables will not handle visible passion; it will take fiber-optics at the least, and polarized spectacles. Progress, though, is like love: there is no holding it back and no one under the age of twenty-one even wants to try.
And yet, it is a tussle to stuff the pillows of love through the keyhole of the keyboard. Some say, sooner will a camel pass through the eye of a needle, but hope is an enduring sparrow. While nature has equipped none of us with the exact skills to communicate the most worldly of common interests through words, nature has certainly ignored this issue more thoroughly in some cases than in others.
"Yo, babe, ‘sup!" It just does not convey.
Confronted with the poor medium of words in the blind, pulsing presence of another, we could look at how this problem, or one like it, was solved by others--Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Shakespeare, Petrarch, Jacqueline Susann, et al.
Anyway, it couldn’t hurt..., not forever.
For this is the difficulty all writers have found themselves in since the moon turned its face away.
Out of the list above, let us select Basho ( a.k.a.: Al of et al.), to see how he conveyed his passion--by means of indirection.
Crow settling on a bare branch---winter evening
One can veritably feel the hot feet of the crow reaching for that naked limb and the imagination is set upon a course of riot to detail a cozy evening by fireside or hot tub. Clearly Basho is showing us (rather than telling us) how hot-foot lust becomes the cold feet of true love. It is blatantly apparent that this indirect manner of illustrating the point is much more moving than a flat statement; I need not state that here.
And Basho told his disciples,
"If you would know the pine, go to the pine;
if you would know the bamboo, go to the bamboo."
In the heat of discussion, let us not forget that the Latin for pine is the homonymous "pinus." Verb. sap., eh! Pretty clever of the old Japanese gentleman. That is his way of indicating the desirability of using concrete description to convey logical content and emotion.
"Tossed all night by the storm, limbs of Matsushima pine still hold the moon"
Perhaps something more contemporary might serve the cybering swain:
"Tossing all night, bedposts of Matsushima pine hold the pale moon."
And it’s a unisex fit.
Who has not wondered at the old saw, "Show, don’t tell?" Though he seems to have had a tendency to mumble in print, W.C. Williams may have meant something much like this by his aphorism, "Not in ideas, but things."
"So much depends on the red wheel-barrow, glazed by rain."
"So much depends on your thin fingers (or whatever) glazed with red polish." You could try to rope a cowgirl with it.
Or, "So much depends on your red hands, glazed with grease," a riposte for he women on this fencing team.
Yeats once thought that a poet ought to sound as if he kept a sword upstairs. At the risk of inflaming the current debate that has the National Rifle Association at its center, I might suggest that any cyber-chatter of either gender would do much worse than to take this advice to heart. I myself, have been told that I sound as if I had a blunderbuss in my attic--a John Wayne sort of compliment, don’t you agree, Pilgrim?
I will leave practical application of this truth as an exercise for the student.
In any case, title for Most Intense Verbal Context is constantly flipping back and forth in wonder, like an escaped canary at a badminton match, between poetry and cyber-chat. What, indeed, is the difference, allowing for technological advances?
"How do I love you? Let me count the ways."
Had EBB framed that question in binary code, her answer would have been as moving. After all, "A rose by any other name...." And so it would be well for the two merging fields to take from one another, for the candy straws of cyber-love to sip from the tart citrus of poetry.
Build it and they will come.
Reviewing the sorry course of love, we note that it often begins with what is cynically called, mere physical attraction, and then proceeds to deeper, more ego-syntonic involvement of that shadow organ, the heart. It’s hanky-panky to happiness-ever-after by degrees as subtle as the movement of hands on a clock.
We have a number of these invisible organs, conveniently named after those which physicians have lucked upon in their explorations. Of these, the heart is probably the most active, being shared between love and bravery. But a shadow-failure of liver can sap the foundations of courage, while an access of shadow-spleen can inflame the emotions beyond the poor brain’s modest capacity to cool. Love often gets a kick in the pants from compassion, which has its seat in the shadowy bowels; this last we have on Scriptural authority.
But, to return to our muttons (perhaps dressed as lambs), only in present-day America are we free and inclined to seek love’s first, physical touch as a whisper of electrons tickling the inner eye of a cathode tube. How the under-developed nations must envy us!
And yet, it is a keyhole through which the animal spirits must be enticed. Of course, we all live in proper dread of computer-mounted, digital, video transmitters. Like nudism, the Beatles and power devolving back to an armed and independent citizenry, it may sound better than it looks. Those few, who have been eager enough to submit to flat scanners, give further warning of the oft-heralded, imminent decline of the written word. But there will inevitably be some delay. Copper cables will not handle visible passion; it will take fiber-optics at the least, and polarized spectacles. Progress, though, is like love: there is no holding it back and no one under the age of twenty-one even wants to try.
And yet, it is a tussle to stuff the pillows of love through the keyhole of the keyboard. Some say, sooner will a camel pass through the eye of a needle, but hope is an enduring sparrow. While nature has equipped none of us with the exact skills to communicate the most worldly of common interests through words, nature has certainly ignored this issue more thoroughly in some cases than in others.
"Yo, babe, ‘sup!" It just does not convey.
Confronted with the poor medium of words in the blind, pulsing presence of another, we could look at how this problem, or one like it, was solved by others--Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Shakespeare, Petrarch, Jacqueline Susann, et al.
Anyway, it couldn’t hurt..., not forever.
For this is the difficulty all writers have found themselves in since the moon turned its face away.
Out of the list above, let us select Basho ( a.k.a.: Al of et al.), to see how he conveyed his passion--by means of indirection.
Crow settling on a bare branch---winter evening
One can veritably feel the hot feet of the crow reaching for that naked limb and the imagination is set upon a course of riot to detail a cozy evening by fireside or hot tub. Clearly Basho is showing us (rather than telling us) how hot-foot lust becomes the cold feet of true love. It is blatantly apparent that this indirect manner of illustrating the point is much more moving than a flat statement; I need not state that here.
And Basho told his disciples,
"If you would know the pine, go to the pine;
if you would know the bamboo, go to the bamboo."
In the heat of discussion, let us not forget that the Latin for pine is the homonymous "pinus." Verb. sap., eh! Pretty clever of the old Japanese gentleman. That is his way of indicating the desirability of using concrete description to convey logical content and emotion.
"Tossed all night by the storm, limbs of Matsushima pine still hold the moon"
Perhaps something more contemporary might serve the cybering swain:
"Tossing all night, bedposts of Matsushima pine hold the pale moon."
And it’s a unisex fit.
Who has not wondered at the old saw, "Show, don’t tell?" Though he seems to have had a tendency to mumble in print, W.C. Williams may have meant something much like this by his aphorism, "Not in ideas, but things."
"So much depends on the red wheel-barrow, glazed by rain."
"So much depends on your thin fingers (or whatever) glazed with red polish." You could try to rope a cowgirl with it.
Or, "So much depends on your red hands, glazed with grease," a riposte for he women on this fencing team.
Yeats once thought that a poet ought to sound as if he kept a sword upstairs. At the risk of inflaming the current debate that has the National Rifle Association at its center, I might suggest that any cyber-chatter of either gender would do much worse than to take this advice to heart. I myself, have been told that I sound as if I had a blunderbuss in my attic--a John Wayne sort of compliment, don’t you agree, Pilgrim?
I will leave practical application of this truth as an exercise for the student.
In any case, title for Most Intense Verbal Context is constantly flipping back and forth in wonder, like an escaped canary at a badminton match, between poetry and cyber-chat. What, indeed, is the difference, allowing for technological advances?
"How do I love you? Let me count the ways."
Had EBB framed that question in binary code, her answer would have been as moving. After all, "A rose by any other name...." And so it would be well for the two merging fields to take from one another, for the candy straws of cyber-love to sip from the tart citrus of poetry.