The Ladder of Love

What is this thing called love?

This funny thing called love?

Just who can solve its mystery?

Why should it make a fool of me?

I saw you there one wonderful day

You took my heart and threw it away

That’s why I ask the lord in heaven above

What is this thing called love?

Cole Porter, 1929

Spring has finally sprung on Cape Cod.

Birds are frantic in their nest-weaving.

Chipmunks run madcap across the decks.

It’s the time of year when I can tell which of the goldfish in our ponds are the ladies – they’re the ones being bothered by the others.

In the Spring a fuller crimson comes upon the robin's breast;

In the Spring the wanton lapwing gets himself another crest;

In the Spring a livelier iris changes on the burnish'd dove;

In the Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.

Lord Tennyson

As much as our notions of love seem very much a matter of flesh and bone, we lift our eyes to the divine in trying to understand the mystery of our feelings for another.

Even brilliant Socrates had to visit the priestess Diotima to ask what love is.

And 2,500 years later, brainiacs like Dion and the Belmonts were still looking to the heavens in search of the answer:

Each night I ask

The stars up above

Why must I be
A teenager in love?

This ancient image of an androgyne depicts one of the three types of human that comic playwright Aristophanes said existed at the beginning of time – man, woman, and part man and woman combined.

Each had four hands, four legs, two faces, two sets of privates. They were strong and brash -- even daring to attack the gods -- so Zeus split them in half to weaken them.

The outcome? Us. Lonely creatures ceaselessly searching for our other halves.

This desire and pursuit of the whole is what Aristophanes called love. And it went beyond sex.

A certain person is right for us not because that person has qualities we find appealing, but because that person's character is similar to ours and resembles our "other half."

“The intense yearning that each of them has towards the other does not appear to be the desire of lover's intercourse, but of something else that the soul of either evidently desires.”

Aristophanes' Speech from Plato's Symposium

Aristotle agreed, citing the pursuit of our "other half" as one of humankind’s noblest aspects -- making us whole again and easing our feelings of incompleteness.

As for Socrates, he came away from his priestly oracle with the idea that love is more -- a yearning to possess the beautiful and the good, forever.

But “foreverness” is not available to mortals, he said, so the best we can do is produce creations that live on after us.

Love is the energy that drives us to ever-higher forms of creation. Socrates called it The Ladder of Love, on which we ascend from the carnal to the spiritual: from biological offspring … to heroic deeds … and finally to works of art, science, legislation, education and philosophy.

Plato introduced friendship as a constituent of love that transcends the carnal … and transforms it into the spiritual. What Saint Exupery was talking about when he said:

“Friends look not at each other but together gaze into the distance.”  

Perhaps the question for us today is, what value does love hold for us?

The misfortune of our times is that we have taken to thinking of sex as the singular manifestation of love.

British philosopher Roger Scruton says the word love has been so indiscriminately applied that it’s lost meaning, resulting in “the promiscuous use of a holy word.”

But if The L Word has been cheapened, The F Word remains protected by regulation and practice from use in newspapers, public airwaves and network television. It’s as unutterable as God’s name in the Hebrew Bible.

And today we remain as divided as Aristophanes’ first humans were – rooted in our animal urgings for sex while at the same time seeking to sacramentalize them.

Which kind of brings us back to where we started. 

In my next blog, “Time and Again”

Birds of Paradise

I titled my first novel, Down the Edges, after these words from Elizabeth Bishop:

“All my life I have lived and behaved very much like a sandpiper, just running down the edges of different countries and continents, looking for something."

Maybe this is why I feel an affinity for the birds of Cape Cod, and the way their birdsong occurs as if by magic on an early spring day when you least expect it.

The birds start their day before dawn -- 4 A. M. out here on the far-eastern boundary of Eastern Daylight Saving Time, where the native Wampanoag called themselves “children of the first light.”

I don’t know why the birds are so excited so early; all they have to look forward to is a breakfast of worms.

But after the quiet of winter here in Truro – 50-plus miles out in the Atlantic Ocean – the birdsong of spring is very welcome.

During the cold months, the only birds we hear are crows and chickadees. Their barking hardly qualifies as song. Cooing mourning doves also winter on Cape Cod, as do robins -- but they are seldom seen and more seldom heard. Robins, in fact, have succeeded in convincing most people that they are harbingers of spring.

Cape Cod is a flyway for more than 350 species of birds that journey between the Arctic and Antarctic.

The Outer Cape – where my Truro home is – offers a geographic position (at mid-latitudes and jutting into the Atlantic) and an array of bird-welcoming habitats that make us a prime resting and feeding area for succeeding waves of migratory species.

Lots of them remain for the entire summer: woodpeckers and whippoorwills, orioles and cardinals, bobwhites and blue jays.

Jo Knowles, author of Jumping Off Swings, takes a jaundiced view of all this:

“I'm lying in my room listening to the birds outside. I used to think they sang because they were happy. But then I learned on a nature show they're really showing off. Trying to lure in some other bird so they can mate with it. Or let the other birds know not to get too close to their turf. I wish I never watched that show, because now all I think about is what those pretty sounds mean. And how they're not pretty at all.”

For my part, I don’t care whether it’s wooing or warring that the birds are up to. The chorus of their calls makes me happy.

I join with Douglas Malloch in proclaiming:

“You have to believe in happiness, or happiness never comes. That's the reason a bird can sing. On his darkest day he believes in spring.

Even after they leave in autumn, the echoes of their songs linger. Here’s Thomas Bailey Aldrich:

“What is more cheerful, now, in the fall of the year, than an open-wood-fire? Do you hear those little chirps and twitters coming out of that piece of apple-wood? Those are the ghosts of the robins and blue-birds that sang upon the bough when it was in blossom last Spring. So I have singing birds all the year round.”

If you don’t have access to real birds -- or apple-wood fires -- here’s a link to some vicarious birdsong to brighten your day: http://www.almanac.com/topics/birding-fishing/bird-sounds

In my next blog, “The Ladder of Love”

Islands

“Best of an island is, once you get there – you can’t go any farther … 

you’ve come to the end of things….”

Agatha Christie,

And Then There Were None

By some happenstance of venture and misadventure, I once was the owner of three homes that shared a common trait -- all of them were on islands.

Vieques, an island off the island of Puerto Rico, where we operate a bed-and-breakfast.

The island of Manhattan, where we had a business office and apartment.

Cape Cod, home to our Truro B & B, became an island 540 feet off the mainland when the canal was dug in 1914.

So it was understandable that I was interviewed by the Financial Times about my experience in living on three different islands. I pitched my talking points around what I knew interested their readers. Here’s some of what the reporter wrote:

“Everything is likely to be more expensive on an island,” says media entrepreneur Peter Yaremko – who splits his time between the islands of Manhattan, Vieques and Cape Cod. “But with only a fixed amount of land available for development, real estate values have a much better chance of increasing.”

Our human ancestors have since pre-historic times sought to dwell near bodies of water.

And living on an island is even better than pitching your tent on the coastline of an ocean or on the shoreline of a river or lake.

Here’s why:

When you live on an island, you enjoy – at the same time – both a sense of separateness from the pack and also the ability to connect when you choose to, by bridge or boat.

This is probably most true of Manhattan, and may explain the assertive attitude of people who live there.

Some might say that the attitude of islanders, which I called assertive, might more rightly be termed uppity. Snobby, even.

For example, the ancient Wampanoag of Cape Cod were isolated from any neighboring tribes, and it was said that they avoided the mainland “because they have become one with the eastern ocean, and it is their delight.”

I wouldn’t call that snobby, would you?

Then again … how else to explain these lyrics of Laurie Anderson’s song?

And there was a beautiful view

But nobody could see

Cause everybody on the island

Was saying “Look at me! Look at me!”

As my wisdom increases with increasing age, I find myself settling back and agreeing with Herman Wouk.

He bought and operated a hotel in the West Indies for several years, something like what I’ve been doing.

He turned his adventures in island living into an entertaining and spot-on novel titled, Don’t Stop the Carnival.

And he nails it:

“This comes from a piece of wisdom that his climate of eternal summer teaches him. It is that, under all the parade of human effort and noise, today is like yesterday, and tomorrow will be like today; that existence is a wheel of recurring patterns from which no one escapes; that all anybody does in this life is live for a while and then die for good, without finding out much; and that therefore the idea is to take things easy and enjoy the passing time under the sun.”

In my next blog, “Birds of Paradise”