Love Objects - Beroul, mainly

Shipwreck porcelain fused with coral

by KARL STEEL

For various reasons, I'm thinking right now of the last book of Aelred of Rievaulx's On Spiritual Friendship, which I (mis?)remember as featuring Aelred and a few select monks scurrying from the attention of their colleagues, hoping to keep their friendship and conversation free of the clutter of untrustworthy, unsympathetic, unpalatable others. Aelred knows that friendship, and by extension, love have their limits.

Both are limited by whether we want to be friends with our fellows, of course, but also by the limits of our existence itself. Because nothing can be everywhere, because everything that is has only so much space, attention, and time, only so many ways of grasping or engaging or connecting, we, whatever we are, can't love everything. Unless you assume a fundamental oneness connecting us all inextricably--and I just don't--our being at all limits our love. Whatever direction we take excludes the others we might have lit up with our love. Whatever direction we take leaves the others to themselves.

The same, maybe not incidentally, goes for eating.

Also, various reasons drive me to think of a scene in Beroul's Tristan:

After sunset that night, when it had grown quite dark, Tristan set off with his squire. He knew the lie of the land well. They rode to Lantyan. He dismounted and went into the town. The watchmen were giving loud blasts on their horns. Tristan slipped into a ditch and went along it until he reached the hall of the castle. He was in great danger. He came to the window the king's chamber and called him, taking care not to speak too loud. The king awoke and said:

'Who are you, coming at this time? What do you want? Tell me your name.'

'Sire I am Tristan. I am bringing a letter for you which I will leave on this window ledge. I dare not talk to you for long. I am leaving the letter behind, I dare not stay.'

Tristan turned to leave. The king sprang out of bed and called out three times: 'For God's sake, fair nephew, wait for your uncle!'

The king picked up the letter. Tristan had gone. He dared not remain and slipped away quickly back to his waiting squire and jumped on his horse.

(translation from Alan S. Fedrick; for a probably unreliable edition of the French, see here, beginning at "Anuit, après solel couchier")

"Por Deu, beaus niès, ton oncle atent!" Mark wants the family back together. He wants Tristan to accept his love. And Tristan, feeling the obligation, flees, fleeing this love and this duty to hew to others.

Yet Tristan doesn't flee Mark's love entirely. Just imagine Tristan's disappointment, or ours, had Mark read the letter, seen his nephew fleeing, and only shrugged. Beroul wants his hero. He needs to show us a desirable Tristan, but there's more going on here than that. All at once, we see Tristan's abandonment of his uncle and his family; we see how he abandons it all for love; and we see the other side, what Tristan's choice inflicts on a terribly wronged uncle, who for whatever reason foolishly longs to reunite the family. We see how Mark's been left miserably to himself.

Or, as elsewhere in Beroul, we see this story from the perspective of Tristan's enormous, heroic self-regard, who here wants to believe that his uncle would call after him, even if he professes to want nothing to do with him. We see Tristan wanting the love he doesn't want.

Art, medieval and otherwise, tends to take the perspective of the frustrated lover, eventually rewarded. It tends to want to make us sympathetic to love. I don't know of any medieval narratives of being stalked (except maybe?), nor any of someone or something trying to exempt itself from God's charitable regime. Beroul gives us something rare, then, when he presents a King who wants what he shouldn't want and won't get, and a nephew embarrassed by love he doesn't want, desperate to be let alone so he and Isolde can love on their own terms, but desperate too to keep his hold on Mark.

One more thought, just as incomplete as the others: We tend to like love and we love to talk about it. No surprise. But with all due apologies for a dialectical reversal, I'm citing Žižek: in The Parallax View, he writes “finding oneself in the position of the beloved is . . . violent, even traumatic: being loved makes me tangibly aware of the gap between what I am as a determinate being and the unfathomable X in me which stimulates love.” The feeling of being loved, particularly when it's unwanted, is "why me?" "please, not me," "you've got the wrong one," or even "who, me?"

Being loved can be annoying, dangerous, or estranging. To try to put this in the language of object-oriented philosophy, the feeling being loved is of discovering some mode of apprehension you didn't know you had, of discovering something unknown reaching out from yourself to attract another, of discovering that some other wants to take you into its orbit. You feel yourself an object for another and, disturbed by your own attractiveness to that object, you feel yourself estranged from yourself, as if looking down into your own depths to find stored modes of apprehension and attraction that you perhaps hope had never been activated.

(picture from the Seattle Art Museum, by Alison Kinney)