we’ve done it:
survived that awkward first date–
coffee in a crowded cafe, to be sure
that you weren’t a crazed psycho.
things went well enough in that this-could-be-lovely kind of way
no room for a guarantee,
just an abundance of what-if and maybe, perhaps
and so we met again for something
slightly more real–
creatures and cocktails and science,
a chance to exercise conversation and wit,
to search for spark and possibility.
we’ve weathered strained smiles
stuttered stumbling
stilted silence
and shared those first secrets
hardly blackmail material
but truths that move just beyond
polite small talk
ones that scratch beneath the epidermis and
graze flesh, sensitive and living and warm.
and now we stand on the brink
of something tenuous and cautious, fragile
as a dewdrop on spun silk,
ripe with disaster and glory alike,
a portal to a new beginning
or, perhaps, yet another ending.
— —a breath— ——a touch—
if you take my hand
will i ever want to let you go?
or will i be impossibly tethered,
wings clipped, bound and chained
to a future interminable?
could we be a pair?
or will this flame sputter out
and die
too weak to withstand the breeze?
one false move
one tiny mistake
could cost us everything:
a sacrifice of mornings not yet lived
the death of kisses never exchanged
the loss of a million dreams and wishes
uttered into the empty night
present yet not, hovering
just beyond reach.
if love is a leap
then i have never
been inspired to jump
until this moment, with this ache
in my heart
growing ever deeper.
to leave you now would be
betrayal and cowardice both
so i stand with you
listen to the echo of your heart beat
with mine
and wait for the knowledge that this is
love
strong enough to endure.
Long as the day in the summer time
Deep as the wine dark sea
I’ll keep your heart with mine.
Till you come to me
– Loreena McKennitt, “Penelope’s Song”
I’ve had romance and myth on the brain for the past few days, the former because I’ve been busy devouring regency romance novels, and the latter because I’ve been watching documentaries about Joseph Campbell and the hero’s journey.
Greek Romance Sketches, by Kate Beaton
Somewhere in the bubbling cauldron that is my brain, romance and myth merged together, and I started thinking about my favorite love stories from Greek and Roman mythology. The ancients are a passionate bunch; hatred and death tango side-by-side with love and romance.
As a child, I found that classical mythology challenged my notion of happily-ever-after, honed and sharpened from too many Disney films (I was actually slightly horrified after I watched Disney’s Hercules and then read the *real* myth. So much death!). After a while, however, I came to appreciate this world where gods meddled and interfered (see: every myth ever written), and mortals were driven by their base instincts and egos.
All of this leads me to Homer’s Odyssey, one of my favorite epic poems. Unlike poor Echo and Narcissus above, Odysseus and his wife Penelope do experience a happy ending.
The storyline is simple: Odysseus has spent 20 years trying to return to his home in Ithaka after the end of the Trojan War. Along the way he manages to offend both gods and mortals (including Poseidon, who is enraged at the way Odysseus taunts and provokes the Cyclops), but through his wily intelligence, and the guidance of “grey-eyed Athena,” he manages to finally return home.
There he discovers that his home has been overrun by 108 (!) men attempting to win Penelope’s hand in marriage, as they believe him to be dead. Odysseus and his son, Telemachus, slay the suitors, and finally, the wandering warrior can be reunited with his wife.
It’s the reunion that makes my poor little heart stutter and my eyes mist up. Penelope is shrewd, and she challenges Odysseus to prove his identity. In response he describes how he built their marriage bed with his own hands, fashioning it around an ancient olive tree:
An old trunk of olive
grew like a pillar on the building plot,
and I laid out our bedroom round that tree,
lined up the stone walls, built the walls and roof,
gave it a doorway and smooth-fitting doors.
Then I lopped off the silvery leaves and branches,
hewed and shaped that stump from the roots up
into a bedpost, drilled it, let it serve
as a model for the rest. I planed them all,
inlaid them all with silver, gold and ivory,
and stretched a bed between — a pliant web
of oxhide thongs dyed crimson.
There’s our sign!
I know no more. Could someone else’s hand
Have sawn that trunk and dragged the frame away?
Homer tells us that Penelope kisses Odysseus at last when he offers this sign, and in response, he weeps:
Now from his breast into his eyes the ache
of longing mounted, and he wept at last,
his dear wife, clear and faithful, in his arms,
longed for
as the sunwarmed earth is longed for by a swimmer
spent in rough water where his ship went down
under Poseidon’s blows, gale winds and tons of sea…
she too rejoiced, her gaze upon her husband,
her white arms round him pressed as though forever.
Swoon. It’s just so romantic.
I admit, I have a crush on Odysseus. It doesn’t help that I read The Odyssey after watching Troy, where Odysseus was portrayed by Sean Bean (imagining Sean Bean building a marriage bed for his beloved with his own hands = hot). But I digress.
Sean Bean as Odysseus in "Troy" (Source: The Guardian UK)
The more I think about it, the more I come to appreciate Penelope’s fortitude, intelligence, and strength. Loreena McKennitt, one of my favorite singers, articulates these very qualities in “Penelope’s Song,” described as “a paean to steadfast love.”
Although Penelope didn’t have to brave the retribution of gods and men for twenty years, she had to wait for twenty years, rearing a son, evading the suitors, and holding onto the belief that Odysseus lived. I’m reminded of a passage from Jane Austen’s Persuasion, where Anne Elliot argues that women “love longest, when existence or when hope is gone.” She continues,
We certainly do not forget you so soon as you forget us. It is, perhaps, our fate rather than our merit. We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey on us. You are forced on exertion. You have always a profession, pursuits, business of some sort or other, to take you back into the world immediately, and continual occupation and change soon weaken impressions.
"Penelope Unraveling Her Web," by Joseph Wright of Derby
While Penelope might have been confined, she isn’t completely helpless. She uses her own techniques to thwart the suitors and to undermine their advances. For example, she promises to choose a husband from among them only after she weaves a burial shroud for her father-in-law; however, she secretly undoes part of the shroud every few nights in an attempt to delay her decision and to buy herself more time.
Penelope a remarkable character and the perfect mate for a hero like Odysseus. They are lovers and partners; Homer (at least from my reading) makes it clear that they relate with one another as equals, and by the end, they are left in marital bliss — or so I like to imagine!
What are your favorite romantic couples from myth and legend? Do you prefer star-crossed and tragic lovers, or ones who manage to weather the odds and achieve a happy ending?
Valentine’s Day is just around the corner, and because I am a die-hard hopeless romantic, I thought I’d dedicate today’s post to love, that most noble sentiment.
I dabble with romance in my writing, and a good romance book or film can always boost my spirits. But as much as I enjoy the love stories that Hollywood and my favorite novelists can create, it’s the love stories from real life that affect me the most.
Cupid and Psyche | Image via Wikipedia
I didn’t always feel this way, but after my first (and, to date, last) relationship ended, I found myself looking at love in a completely different light. If there’s anything that I’ve learned, it’s that maintaining a relationship is really damn hard… but that it’s worth the effort, if the person you’re with is also willing to put in the work.
My parents on their wedding day, July 1986
The older I get, the more I come to admire and understand the nuance of my parents’ relationship. As a child, I idolized their love story, the tale of a man and a woman from two different parts of the world meeting by chance in San Francisco, falling in love, getting married, and having a couple of kids.
I spent a lot of time looking at my atlas back in the day, tracing myself an imaginary line from the Philippines, where my dad was born and raised, to San Francisco, where he and his family moved when he was 15; from Ohio, where my mom was born, to Los Angeles, where she grew up, and up the coast to SF, where she moved in her early 20s. Add in the fact that my mom claims to have day-dreamed of marrying “a boy from an island” when she was 5, and you have the recipe for little Lena thinking that her parents’ relationship was written in the stars.
My parents worked in the same office in San Francisco, where dad was the chauffeur for the company president. As my mom tells the story, all of the ladies in the office had crushes on him, including all the fancy-pants executive secretaries… but somehow, he fell for her, the lowly receptionist. It almost reads like a romance novel: the plain Jane who wins the cute guy over all the other ladies. It was a story that I loved.
And yet, I knew very well the darker side of their relationship. Both of my parents came to their relationship saddled with their fair share of baggage, emotional and otherwise. To top it off, my dad had a nasty addiction to drugs and alcohol, which contributed to the fights and arguments, the cycle of making up, breaking up, and making up again.
The early years of their relationship were turbulent, and those problems only continued after they married and I was born. In my early memories, it was just my mom and me — dad was off elsewhere, carousing with the guys, too busy getting drunk and high to come home. And I even remember the day when everything changed, the terrible fight when my mom called the cops and had my dad arrested because his temper got so out of hand.
This is a story that, for so many reasons, shouldn’t have a happy ending. It’s a story that should have ended with a divorce… but it didn’t. Mom decided that she wasn’t going to take it anymore, kicked dad out the house, and told him he couldn’t come back till he was clean. And my dad hit rock bottom, decided that his life, his job, and his family were more important than anything else, and came back to us. My little sister was born shortly afterwards, when I was 5, and slowly but surely, we became a family.
The whole family together, Christmas 2010
Watching my parents grow together over the years has taught me that love is never easy, that it requires constant maintenance and cultivation, like a garden that must be tended each season in order for fruit to ripen and flowers to bloom. They have their ups and downs, the occasional argument and misunderstanding, but they are on solid ground with one another.
Now that my sister and I are both grown and more or less living on our own, it’s exciting for me to seem them enter a new phase in their relationship: two empty nesters who go out on impromptu dates, who have been together long enough to overcome some of the hardest challenges in their relationship and who now know each other so very well.
I think my proudest moment came last summer, when I watched them renew their vows for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Their story is still in the process of being written, but it is one that reminds me that real life love is rarely as simple or straightforward as in the movies.
My parents on their 25th wedding anniversary, July 2011
I remember them today, especially because they have another anniversary coming up — the 28th anniversary of their first date, which, in a strange twist of coincidence, falls on February 18th, my 25th birthday. Congrats, Mom and Dad!
-oOo-
Because I am a music fiend, I had to give you all a couple of my favorite love songs to go along with today’s theme of “real life love stories.” These two, in my mind, capture the poignancy and uncertainty of love.
The first song, “Kissing You” by Des’ree, will be familiar to any of you who have seen the 1997 adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, directed by Baz Luhrman and starring Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio. It’s bittersweet and beautiful, and Des’ree’s voice never fails to send chills down my spine.
The second comes from John Legend’s first album, Get Lifted. No matter how many times I hear this song, I’ll never get sick of it. John Legend tells the story of the love that “ordinary people” face, one that is far more complex and nuanced than any Hollywood fairy tale can portray.
What are your favorite “real life” love stories? Any romantic songs that you can’t stop listening to?
Lena Corazon writes steampunk and fantasy novels, drinks far too much tea, and has an unhealthy obsession with Byronic heroes. She blogs about books, sparkly things, her masochistic relationship with academia, and anything else that tickles her fancy.
