Lovers and ivory towers

Lovers and ivory towers: some spontaneous thoughts, and some lines, on an image

Two instances of the same image in verse:

‘Hyr throte, as I have now memorye,
Semed a round tour of yvorye,
Of good gretnesse, and noght to gret.’

~Geoffrey Chaucer,
The Book of the Duchess

Your neck is like a tower of David,
Built to perfection,
A thousand shields hang upon it,
All the armour of heroes.
…
Your neck is like a tower of ivory.

~Song of Songs
Chapters 4 and 7


I suppose that the metaphor works best with a woman or a boy, as opposed to with a man. With a man, I would feel inclined to write to the effect of

Your neck, an ivory tower, cracked
Along its foundations by the commas
And dashes that creep up from your
Chest. Little outward and upward lines,
Like exclamation points, – breathing space –
And the balcony from which you survey
Untold orchards… &c

And as a metaphor, it is one that makes me consider its contradictions – the contradictions abounding a kissable fortress, the tower with fault lines at its base and too many arrow slits at its peak. When the Man in Black remembers the above item of White’s physical description in The Book of the Duchess, it comes to him in the moment of speech – ‘as I have now memorye’ – as if he were remembering a detail from a dream. Yet what the river Lethe has surrendered is not a photographic likeness of a neck, but a symbolic one of a person, which happens to describe a neck – it is a likeness smoothed over by the river’s currents. More pearl than ivory. An ivory tower, as it happens, is the best descriptor in such a case – the one that tells us most about White herself beyond just her neck.

And White’s tower is not just a symbol picked because of where it stands on the Petrarchan plain of martial romantic conceits – this is before Chaucer discovered Petrarch, in Italy – it has been specifically chosen because it offers the poet particularly descriptive spatial and aesthetic properties. As towers go, hers is

Of good gretnesse, and noght to gret

It is a modest tower. Its modesty, amid descriptions of its ‘round… yvorye’ structure, paints a slender, swan-like structure. It is dainty, and feint, and characteristically feminine. That it is a tower connotes only its stature, its nobility, its impenetrability. The Man in Black cannot hope to recover fair White from death’s kingdom, and nor can John of Gaunt his fair Blanch, though the former occasionally manages to conjure the odd memory every now and then.

Yet in the instance given from the Song of Songs, there emphatically is a martial character to the addressee’s neck: it is hung with a “thousand shields”, and it memorialises “heroes”. It is itself decorated, and implicitly also armoured, with heroes’ armour. It is an epic poem among monuments. Whatever the gender of the addressee, it is characterised in explicitly masculine terms. (Even if it were not the neck of a man, it still remains that it is being described as if it was one.) The very fact that it is ‘Built to perfection’ implies a laboured act of ‘construction’, and the fact that it has been built or constructed gives a strong sense of its tangibility, a solid presence and a solid core. One is aware of a sense of “man-made” as much as one is of a faint sense of it being “manly”. And the Song of Songs, too, is ‘constructed’ as much as it is composed – both have been built along a poetic ideal, ‘to perfection’. And so too, a male pronoun is used in Chapter 4:

Let my lover come into his garden
And taste its luscious fruits.

As with White’s neck, we have an instance where the tower encloses the beloved, the ‘fruit’ (cf. the Pauline maxim as delivered in Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale) and resists the lover’s acquisition of it. The beloved is a captive however, and not a tormentor as in Petrarch’s Canzoniere or the first half of Spenser’s Amoretti. The very fact that it is a tower which both encloses a fruit garden and specifically the taste of a fruit – an ‘Adam’s apple’ – makes its ‘gendered’ identification even more confusing. In my spontaneous lines on the subject, I wrote

…the balcony from which you survey
Untold orchards

Casting apples out into the world – a garden of men – but also locating the beloved, once again, as enclosed within the tower. If not as a captive, then as himself a reticent lover.

This dual image in the Song and elsewhere, or tower as a garden – by virtue of it being a tower which encloses fruit – makes a lot of sense to my mind. This is because, conflictingly, what lies within the tower is, in Langland’s terms,

… þe londe of longynge and love

(In Piers Plowman Passus XI, the knowledge in Will’s “metels” or dream, into which he was “fette” (fetched) by Fortune, is compared with the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden from which the Adam’s apple takes its name.) It is, much the same, the locus amoenus, a setting of beloveds and languishing lovers, as in Guillaume de Lorris’ Le Roman de la Rose. It is a garden where love and languishing both grow, but yet one which a lover like a Dreamer can at times struggle to rightly perceive. And yet it is a Dreamer, and a dozy lover, in Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess, which do the best job of it.

A dream, strangely, is so very much like a tower in Chaucer’s dream visions. The Chaucerian homophobe is tour; it is both a provocative symbol, like a tower, which we struggle to imagine in waking life, but which we ‘tour’ or a journey into when we sleep, or when we read the poems in our own Ivory Towers. In the Somnum Scipionis, Cicero writes of Scipio’s dream as a ‘Somnum complexus’. What’s more, it is ‘artior’ (from ‘artus’). It is a sleep characterised by encircling, enwrapping, clasping and grasping. It is a sleep experience of a narrow and confined space at the same time as liberation from one’s bodily enclosure; it is a towering off of oneself into “so inly swete a sweven” (Chaucer’s House of Fame).

Is having memory of necks-as-towers better seen as a reflection, then, of the memory of a sort-of ‘dreamer’ who has not made invocation to Morpheus, as Geffrey later does in House of Fame? In the Song of Songs, there is no sense among its serial metaphors – breasts are fauns, lips are honey, and necks are towers – of forming a cohesive picture. That, as in Langland’s descriptions of the “fair feeld ful of folk”, is an English tendency; rather, the Song’s images swim in solution. They ‘deck’ its garden. This relates to my main problem, and my main aversion to, this metaphor. It ‘beheads’ its object; it decapitates the beloved. And it is those instances of encoded masculinity – pronouns and elsewhere – which compound this disturbing effect. A man’s neck in many cases is checked by the characteristics of his face and his chest. The image of hair ‘creeps’ in, and a severed neck with stubble and a chest hairs necessitates a severed head resting someplace else.

Chapter 7 of the Song of Songs scans up the body of the beloved: feet, thighs, navel, belly, breasts, neck, eyes. Reaching the top presumably, it moves down again, to the nose, and then surveys the whole head. Our speaker has stepped back, and their eye traces the beloved’s hair and reflects first on love and then the beloved’s whole form. It then turns to breasts, breasts again, breath and mouth and lips: it simulates lovemaking. And is a human body that is made love to, not the collection of scattered metaphors. It is this very human beloved, the composite of body parts – a stature like a palm tree, a mouth tasting like wine – which after all, ventures out into the garden.

Come, my beloved,
Let us go out into the field,
And lie all night among the flowering henna

Let us go early to the vineyards
To see if the vine has budded
If the blossoms have opened
And the pomegranates are in bloom

Yet the ‘construction’ or ‘blueprint’ for the well-built chapter 7 has been a ‘vine’ itself – roped together images which form a metanarrative of a lover’s gaze and erotic feelings. It is the same technique which Hopkins uses to stow away phalluses in “Harry Ploughman”. So the beloved must venture ‘out’ to the garden if indeed the lover is to venture ‘in’ to theirs. A process of becoming mutually enclosed, complexus, characterises the experience of requited spiritual love. It is similar sort of love to that which is patronised by Aphrodite Urania in Plato’s Symposium – the heavenly Venus whose love inspires art. And yet the Song of Songs marries this concept to that of Aphrodite Pandemos, the common Venus.

In my lines, I have imagined the “fault lines” which a man’s form puts into the metaphor of an ivory tower as dashes and commas – disjunctive and interruptive moments. They are instances of non-utterance: a silence which threatens to derail a poem. Yet in the Song of Silence, the only “speech” of this breathing mouth at the end of the tower-like neck is the escaping “fragrance” of the orchard within, the locus amoenus. In chapter 4, even,

Your lips, my bride, drip honey,
Honey and milk are under your tongue.

And it is this outpour of fructifying, ‘sweet’ words which water the fields and form

…an orchard of
pomegranate trees
…
With every tree of frankincense
myrrh and aloes.

That is, the lover’s lips spring those gifts given at Christ’s nativity. Where in Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, numerous sonnets beginning and ending in combinations of “Sweete lip” and “Sweete kisse” positioned the kiss in Sidney’s Second Song as the begetter of yet more lines of verse, the Biblical Song of Songs imagines the poetic expression of a physical love in pursuit of a spiritual ideal as a realisation of a nativity scene. Making physical love to a him with womanlike breasts – Spenserian milky paps – reconciles the spiritual and the physical loves, as long as the male-male lovemaking is configured as making love to a womanly Jesus.

Which is why the tone of my spontaneous lines had to be different, and tried to be more matter-of-fact and modern (reflective of a more contemporary and egalitarian kind of male-male romantic relationship). Here, “breathing space” of course puns on couples’ needing “space to breathe” as much as the age-old conflation of poetry and breath, seen exemplarily in Sidney and Shakespeare. In Richard II, the line is delivered

Words, life and all, old Lancaster hath spent

And much the same, one ‘spends’ (exhausts) oneself and one’s energies trying to break the fortress of a lover or former lover’s tower-like resolve to be silent. These same spaces are always cracks – they indicate a conspicuously effortful resolve to resist entry, and at the same time offer a glimpse inside as to the reason why. And that’s why this image is ultimately so powerful, and powerful insofar as it is difficult to reconcile. We get knocked back to its outermost layer every so often – we see objects again as things and not as profound significations. And then we realise that whatever a hair rising from an ex’s shirt collar excites in us, it is a problem which no amount of love poems or playful eisegesis (!) can resolve. That problem, too, is towered off from us.

Today I went to a faith healer

Last night, Tim suggests to me, I go to a faith healer. Implicit in this, maybe I'm broken, I don't know. I don't feel right, but I'm not sick and I'm quite sane (which at times I'm afraid is precisely the problem).

After a restless night, a wonderful pasta which took ages to cook, and a brief shopping session with Rhiannon I make good on my promise and head from Balliol to Cornmarket Street where this faith healing thing is beind held.

I get there and I can't go through with my shallow plan, my utilitarian views of religion are blasted away by a sudden guilt and selflessness which directs me to ask them to pray for my mum instead. And it's all fairly harmless, they're good people and it's a good strategy to convert people to religion. You can't knock them. One man suddenly however puts his hand on my shoulder and places his Christian magic spell whammy on me: 'I pray that the Holy Spirit can enter Liam's heart and fill it with love.'

Boy, I wish he didn't send that. So, in my hand is a flyer about faith healing and a pack about healing at home and about finding Jesus. Great. So I wander into Boots, and my nose is thick with the scents of vanities and I find myself really finding it sinful. Nevertheless, I buy some hairspray. The irony pangs a little. I consider momentarily if maybe the selflessness of my wish will have some sort of spiritual payback: will God reward me? Maybe I'll get some good karma - wait, wrong faith. I'm really not good at this this. I'm supposed to be a fervent athesist. No, wait. I am one. I AM.

Convicing rhetoric in this pamphlet, I decide, flicking through it in the JCR. Like Stephen Dedalus, I have nothing to lose in religion but some sane rationality and pride lead me to abstain. I step outside and see Orlando, great name, and I can't help but spit out all about my spiritual crisis. I don't know what I feel but I know it sucks. I wonder if the pain is boy trouble manifesting as spititual emptiness. That's how churches operate, of course: you've vulnerable, they comfort you. Or perhaps, you ARE empty and Jesus DOES make you feel better. Kinda fairytaily, too much baggage. The book commands I give up all my wrongdoings and the things I know to be wrong in a Biblical context and DO cause me immense day-to-day pain I KNOW to be things I can't change. So I feel this pressure, and wander past tourists as if guided by an invsible path to the chapel.

I had no idea where the chapel was, but I found it almost instantly. I walked straight down to the giant phoenix, with Britney Spears playing "Gimme More" out of my headphones and here I interpret this as "give me that thing I need, to fill that void." That excess of life's pleasures, that emptiness of spirit, keep it coming baby. The headphones fall out of my ears and I suddenly hear this amazing churchy music, but I guess the magical quality of it is ruined by my knowledge that it's playing automatically from some sort of CD player on a loop. A bit like the Soul Scrolls in The Handmaid's Tale, it feels like it's pointing out some ludicrous hypocrisy. I put back in Britney, I take her out, I try and balance the headphones in my ears so I can hear both and decide between the two all the while I well up with tears and feel like dropping to my knees, speaking in tongues and crying to the phoenix.

On my walk back to my room, I hear these words come into my head. They're beautiful and speak about so many different things, different crises in me, simultaneously. I try to go remember them when I get to my laptop a bit later, but they don't quite fall the same way. I don't give the poem a title, but I dedicate it to loads of names and to 'the old me' and I suppose that could be its title, but then the words 'darker angels' repeat enough times so that that essentially becomes its title. It's saved as darkerangels.otf, so I guess that IS its name. I'm going to save it as a PDF and send it to Scrawl, even though it sucks compared to the original idea I had.

The poem won't be complete until my phonecall a bit later, so I'll decide what to append or change or if even to send it later.