To Sara Mosher

An author can not be in want of a topic for very long, for the world is chock-full of topics. If he cannot proceed at once, what he needs is an impetus or a motive, perchance a provocative communication from another being. The provocation might come from within, from his muse, if you will, or from without, from a friend, if you please.

A friend of mine who lives thousands of miles away and whom I have never seen nor heard nor touched, sent me a message this morning on the perennial topic of love. She is a strong woman, an active woman who perseveres with a purpose in mind. At the moment she is keenly interested in loving and in being loved and she has taken confident steps to that end, exploring both her past and her possibilities. What struck me most of all within the body of her message was her remark that she wants to be hugged.

I know what she means. Human beings amongst other living creatures have a basic need to be held and hugged, touched and such. Da Vinci's comment that the eye is nobler than the ear might or might not be right; however that might be, touch is the basis of nobility - a baby not held and touched in the beginning is ruined for life. I have felt the need to be touched myself from time to time, sometimes very desperately so. I think the early, subconscious memories of being held and lovingly caressed causes some of us to suffer more than others from the present lack of manipulation.  Yet given my experiences I do not like to be touched anymore. I thrive more on general abstractions. Despite my father's advice, "He who loves everybody loves nobody," I prefer now to love people in their generality, in the abstract, rather than be caught up in the passionate, concrete details of hugging and kissing, which now seem quite foolish.

Meeting "someone" is about the last thing on my mind nowadays. Some wise old ladies say that leaves me especially vulnerable to Cupid's arrows. Nonetheless, pending that assault, my erotic period seems to be over. The only embrace I look forward to as of late is the embrace of Mother Kali. For me, the one great negation has become the most positive assertion, of All, and the prospect of my own annihilation has made the universal so entertaining that I simply cannot give it up for anything in particular.

On that dark note I am mysteriously moved not to change the subject but to let myself go and recall how the dramatist and philosopher Maurice Maeterlinck was a dark and brooding poet of terror, composing "death dramas" until he met the opera singer and actress Georgette Leblanc. She fell in love with him when she read his transcendental introduction to Emerson's essays - Emerson had brought out the optimistic shade in Maeterlinck;  as for the rest of the Americans he encountered during his visit to the United States, he found them friendly and likable but complained of their ignorance and lack of cultural traditions.

"I was sure that in all the universe he was the one man I could love," wrote Leblanc, and said she rearranged her life just to be in position at the right place and time to meet him - and meet him she did. Despite his protestations and his warning that he preferred to love several women at once, they become companions from 1895 to 1918 - marriage was out of the question for her, as she would rather, or so she said, walk across Belgium in flat shoes and a short skirt than get married.

After Leblanc deliberately forged an alliance, Maeterlinck the mystic Symbolist gradually evolved from Schopenhaurian pessimism, which is not an entirely unhappy affair, to a Marcus Aurelean or Stoic optimism. Furthermore, he began to write strong women into his plays. When Claude Debussy was staging Maeterlinck's masterpiece, 'Pelleas and Melisande', Leblanc strongly believed that she was perfectly suited for the role of Melisande; alas, Debussy chose someone else. Maeterlinck challenged Debussy to a duel. Maeterlinck later apologised and said that he was solely to blame - a true gentleman always takes blame away from his beloved.

Maeterlinck had lost his faith before reaching twenty years of age and had been converted to "Symbolism". The Symbolists of his day were fascinated by the hidden meaning of visible things. Enthused by the occult, their figures symbolized the spiritual realm. That is not to say that earthly romance was left out of the equation, especially not where the younger Symbolists were concerned; many Romantics of the day were Symbolists. After all, is not occultism a response to intensely erotic desires? Maeterlinck himself became more realistic, perhaps due to the advent of the mysterious appearance of a strong woman in his life. Yet he remained fascinated by the greatest mysteries of life. We have this from his 'Evolution of Mystery':

"It is not unreasonable to believe that the paramount interest of life, all that is truly lofty and remarkable in the destiny of man, reposes almost entirely in the mystery that surrounds us; in the two mysteries, it may be, that are mightiest, most dreadful of all - fatality and death.... Our consciousness of the unknown wherein we have being gives life a meaning and grandeur which must of necessity be absent if we persist in considering only the things that are known to us; if we too readily incline to believe that these must greatly transcend in importance the things we know not yet." (1)

Maeterlinck's early influences were Plato, Plotinus, Boeme, Coleridge, Novalis, Ruysbroeck, Villiers, Carlyle, Emerson, Poe, Hawthorne, and other illustrious authors who rendered fresh expressions of timeless platitudes. He appreciated his Jesuit instructors, but he complained of their obsessions with carnal sin and their deficient hygiene. No doubt they were in part responsible for his early morbidity and his abiding absorption with the imponderables of human existence.

Notwithstanding his research into the occult and even into the secret intelligence of flowers, bees, ants, and termites, Maeterlinck did not see his destiny coming, at least not in the form of Georgette Leblanc. Nor did he foresee his fate when actress Renee Dahon appeared and asked him for his autograph one day. Nor was he any the wiser when Renee became protege to him and Leblanc, living with them for awhile. Yet his fate finally it dawned on him; he broke off his long relationship with Leblanc and married Dahon in 1919.

One never knows: That was precisely Maurice Maeterlinck's conclusion towards the end of his long life (1862-1949). He observed that, despite all his studies of the great mysteries, he still did not know their nature. Neither did Georgette Leblanc.

"If anything troubles me" Leblanc reminisced, "it is the epoch in which that love was born - the symbolist epoch, more false than all the others, since everything in it was a simulation. The most simple things were garlanded, surrounded by an artificial mystery, complicated with absurd interpretations in which their true meaning was lost from sight. Under Symbolism even a carpet sweeper would have been endowed with profound pretensions. "Furthermore", she went on, "I cannot imagine that any other form of literature would have been so seductive for my love.... My flowing hair and interminable costumes bore witness to the amplitude of my ideas. It was in a forest of capital letters that Maeterlinck and I met. Both were wandering with the golden lamp of Goodness, the frantic love of Beauty and the happy anguish of advancing along the luminous paths of pure... 'Consciousness'.... Alas, I know now that in the span of a whole life our greatest efforts barely allow us to conceive what it might be, because we have as a means of approaching it only our experience, learning and our five senses - all falsified." (2)

The lovers arrived at the same conclusion after all. In any case, I hope that my friend, who lives thousands of miles away and whom I have never seen nor heard nor touched, will succeed in her active search to be hugged. And perhaps even I, as remote as I am from the details, which I prefer not to be touched by although I do dearly love them in general, will be struck by Love's arrow before Mother Kali embraces me.

I don't know.


E


Sources:

(1)Maeterlinck, Maurice, THE BURIED TEMPLE, Trans. Alfred Sutro, New York: Dodd Mead, 1913

(2)Leblanc, Georgette, MAETERLINCK AND I, Trans. Janet Flanner, London: Methuen, 1932