How do we fall in love? There are countless times during the course of the day when someone catches your eye. I remember recently being in [a coffee bar] across from my editor’s apartment (…) and there was a fine-boned woman behind the cash register with a neck like an antelope, and we looked at one another in that appraising and mutually approving way that, had I been a single man rather than a very happily married one (more on love, lies and marriage to come in a later column), would have resulted in a conversation. That is, we provoke and are provoked by one another frequently, perhaps many times a day. If our sexual antennae are up—in New York, when I visit, as opposed to Kansas City, where I live, the array and intertwining of sexual antennae seems like a tangle of erotic interest, a dangerous sensual spider web—we could begin the process of feeling one another out (which would lead, one hopes, to feeling one another up) in an almost daily way. (…)

According to Aristophanes, human beings were once joined together in pairs, so that we had four arms and four legs. But this unusual metrical composition and arrangement of limbs made us so speedy—have you ever noticed how everything accelerates when you’re in love, except the time apart from your lover?—that we dared to roll our way up Mount Olympus, challenging the Gods, which prompted Zeus, quite sensibly, to split us apart with thunderbolts (the stitching up of skin he had to do afterwards was pulled together at one point, which is why you have a belly button). But this splitting in two—whether woman from woman, man from man, or man from woman (there were all three sorts)–is why, now, you feel this desperate need to be reunited with your other half, it is why you no longer feel whole, except when you are in love. True love, then—and this is where all this trouble starts, which is later exploited by so many poets and brokenhearted cowboy singers—is when you are reunited with that single person who was once your other half.

{ Clancy Martin/The Faster Times | Continue reading }

ideas, relationships | November 7th, 2009