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.

Ani's Worlds (2)

Ani had to reach over to her phone. The girl in the bed had been there a week. Returning from work, there she'd be, in some new lingerie, in eager await. She was less appealing sleeping face down like this, however, with a spot of drool on the pillow the size of a sweat patch. Her hair, the dark, reddish and wiry sort, curled about itself in the air like arthritic hands. She mumbled to the vibrations on the wood surface by her head, but the girl could sleep through anything.

'Who is it?'

'Ani,' said the voice on the other end. There was an affectation of casual about the voice. 'It's just me, Marti. Had a day off. Here at home with Jeremy Kyle and thought I'd give you a ring. I can't remember if I was supposed to call you or if you were supposed to call me. Sorry.'

Gulp. 'Hey, I've been meaning to call you.' In truth, she really had been meaning to. Her voice went up an octave, a signal to drop pretences. We can let ourselves be excited, can't we? "I'm so sorry, I've just been' - her eyes fixed on the back of the girl's head, the wiry hair reaching onto infinity - 'a bit preoccupied.'

She slipped out of the bed, wedging the phone between her shoulder and her right ear, sweeping her legs out from under the white sheets and letting the bed slowly adjust. The weight shifted ever so slowly; she watched the girl's face twitch, her nose fidgeting about, near lips which look so much more beautiful in moonlight. A strip of sun broke through the blinds, straight across the mouth, down the middle as if teasing. Crapola. In a cosmic sense.

While they talked about the date, the quays, how the new jeans fit, she flitted her legs gently down the stairs in fluffy slippers. Every step was a performed move, to herself, revelling in the femininity she could assert when no one was looking. The private woman just the same as the outer one; whether this was true worried Ani somewhat from time to time, the careful dance of girliness was a never-ending waltz, afraid to stop and change the nature of her mannerisms forever by forgetting the moves. Being is seeing, or seeing is believing, or believing is seeing what you're being. It isn't important.

'Ani,'

'Marti,'

'Is it weird to say I've missed you?'

Of course not. Of course not. Of course it's weird. Of course it isn't. 'No, I've missed you too.' That she had. She tried to perceive the pretty, ginger-haired lady on the other side, straining her eyes through the cables and across the charcoal barrier and conjure up a woman in mens' pyjamas, with an empty bowl of cereal balanced on her lap. Without lipstick, they looked just the same, just as red; this was imagination, she was sure. The same little waltz, in a sort.

'Thank god,' (exasperated with relief, it seemed), 'You don't have work either today, do you?'

The bedroom was just above her now, looking into the TV, into Jeremy Kyle's soulless face. Craggy like the moon. In the movies, lovers looked into the moon at the same time, as if their longing could reach up to the satellite and back. Stellar love networks mapped through the heavens in ribbons and bows and knots of invisible cables reaching out from earth and back. Such a time may have never existed; now, whether in emulation of tradition or fiction, we simulate this with televisions and text messages. The bedroom, directly above her. There was the girl. The other beautiful girl. The betrothed, lying, unawares. One must be good about these things.

'I'm busy today, actually,' she said, at once hating and congratulating herself. Swallowing down a fingernail.

'Oh!' The insufferable 'oh', the one word, the one sound, a letter O, a single letter which reaches up to Heaven 'O Lord' and into Ani to stab at her with guilt, with pangs of longing, the desire to reward herself. To bite the apple.

'But I'm free Saturday.' The fireworks wanted to go off, but they just scorched the ground and burnt out slowly.

'It's a date.'

Ani's Worlds (1)

Ani kissed goodbye to Marti just once on the lips. The fireworks she imagined over the bay were made up of potential energy. The sea and the sky were both mirrors to this magical happening, catching the light and sharing it with the birds and the fish. Their lips parted slowly, regretfully. This was, at once, a beginning and an end. It was a door, ajar. The lights glimmered on the water for a second after they'd dissipated in the air. Trains tore them apart. The concrete floors in the station still pattered with feet, as they had before, but now Ani could only hear the roaring of the train as it cut through the air and tore a line across the South coast. The journey was to her, leaving a charcoal line in its wake, a separating of A from B.

The phone jumped, and lit up, as she had hoped. The small table on the train buzzed against its back.

'I really like you', is all it said.

Ani arrived back to the Hove apartment, dropped her keys into a shoe by the front door and slid off her heels and put them under the desk in the foyer. As she hung up her bag on the newel post at the bottom of the stairs, she noticed the light. The kitchen was lit up, as was the living room; the whole house was bright enough to see, apart from the creeping darkness at the top of the stairs. She walked through the house unafraid - it couldn't be burgulars - and found Lorrie on the couch, watching a DVD on her DVD player.

'Still have my key', she said, in monotone but with a smile reaching out. Her body was rigid, facing the TV, only the neck poised to Ani. They both sat on the couch, watching the twentysomethings playing teenagers in love, and slowly their bodies gave way and relaxed and conversation became more fluent. Laughs and wine later, it had been like nothing was ever the matter between them. The red-head princess and the guy from the wrong side of the tracks got it on, and that barrier broke all theirs too. Kissing seemed natural. Like they had kissed yesterday, or the day before.

The charcoal line widened.

Diagram of Love

It's best to try imagining things in shapes;
Lets you see the whole world on a page
(Inside your head) and look carefully
At the rougher edges, the obtuse bends...
Where the heart has warped. Emotion sends
Its tiresome delays across wilfully
Mis-managed roofs and a cracking stage
Man, within the shape, is reduced to ape.

But shapes are more complex than at first we imagine
So we delve in deeper, forced to re-examine.
And its lines are far longer than first we thought
And its contours less level, but mismatched:
Declines and dips, and sharper relief was attached
And the battle to connect called "love" was fought
With one of us uphill. And your war brought famine,
To an already pestilent heart, now starved compassion.

So outside the shape the ape makes an Apollo,
But also wise, he would like to think of himself.
And he's never truly out of it, always linked by thread:
If only to perceive from greater distance, detachment.
If only to escape the heart's foul entrapment.
Which would dissolve the dying love, make dying dead...
And poor the adornments once revered for their wealth...
Just an empty shape then, a box. Merely hollow.

Symmetry is preferred when the love is anew,
But calculating love is wont to stew,
And boil over into the unpredictable,
As exciting then as it was delectable,
But again we're in some familiar pattern.
Guided by old verses; love's familiar lantern.
This couple will not do for couplets, alas
Their coupling was illusion, now since passed.

Regain symmetry. Regain control,
I beg of the air, the ground, the sea...
I am asking: make fresh and make whole
What is faint and illusory.
I don't fancy going A-B-A-B,
When I know our love I'm told,
Is beyond the letter C,
Forget what you're told, ma chérie,
Let's just repeat. Let's stay with B.

Break free, break free, disregard this echo
Of acoustics from times past, where memory was allowed
To run free and recall some past day, some nearby stanza...
When love isn't confined so easily, when it is best told in blank.
Except when it's perfect. But love is so much greater than the sonnet
That captures one of its facets: an obsession, a bemusement,
A bewilderment at nature, some new sensation...
All these belong to the power of the rhyme but disregard this a moment
If you want to seek the truth. Seek the truth.
Let's escape this construction. Let's shatter the diagram. Break free.

Set me free. Let me go of this! Fine, fine: let's rhyme.
If that's what you require, cruel muse, whose SMS
Shakes with a rumble and a light, when I haven't the time
To fuck with your metre, to put away bad words, to bless
You all over again with some kind new description.
I'm only a man and this is my prescription:
Take one set of perfect diction and throw it to the wind.
Take every thing you've heard about poetry, and love,
And give it to the air, let it all rescind...
And if we have faith in rhyme and poetry, then above
May come at last its return, its repetition, its relevance
To the world that cannot deny its power or its elegance.
So just write something dear, it's called "catharsis",
Get it out of your system, make a point of two,
Drop a reference to the Bible, name-drop Saul of Tarsus,
That's how a poem's made, isn't that true?

So let's clear our heads a second. Let's cool it down.
Regain the rhyme. Regain the structure. Regain the symmetry.
Step outside the Diagram of Love, and your frown
Might recede if it can perceive the divinity...
Of something not in me or in you (but sometimes in our contrivance)
Some other goddamn web rocking with our connivance...
To pretend there ever was a romance at all.
And from the reliefs to the dips, what a fall might befall
The falling lover... trapped again in ABAB...
Trapped again in those sounds, the conformity.
Text me later, get back to me.

Silent Love Song

The beach beneath your feet, the sand betwixt your toes,
Soft-caressing air against your arm, its chill against your nose,
A hand beneath your chin, sunlight beam bent from sky
Across the dunes and to your face, to set your smile alight.
The tide longs to be near you, and trickles through the rocks.
Winter may change the trees, but ours knows not the clock.
The hand of time so cruel, and callous we not know
As with every moment near you, I feel sun and sand and grass and snow.

But for this moment do I wonder,
What became then of the past,
And so she asks if someone blundered
and I know not beyond the last.
That last time I did see your smile,
and a moment I claimed mine...
I disregard all these rules,
and send out unseen this untamed rhyme.

Currently listening to:

Alone: The Home Recordings of Rivers Cuomo by Rivers Cuomo