So today, I read McCullers's short story "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe." I, again, don't know how to write about this work. Only to say this: human love seems impossible. To love someone means he or she will never love us in return. Loving seems to only drive away the beloved. Yet, McCullers (or the balladeer) says it is better to be the lover than the beloved, for the beloved can only feel suffocated, crushed by the experience of being loved. But how it must hurt to love in McCullers's world; it hurts to love in my world. If being loved only destroys, crushes, how is it better to be the lover? How is it better to destroy the one you love.
I cry when I think about it. Is a requited human love possible? McCullers suggests that it is not. I am inclined to agree.
I suppose that I am not loved in return, because it is simply human nature for the beloved to feel rather than to love.
Tonight I will cry myself to sleep, again.
a president, a King
13 years ago
1 comment:
when i try to write about mccullers, or carson as i like to call her in my informal drafts... i often hit up against this. i feel like there is everything to say, and then, nothing. this is the best i've come up with so far--born out of an earlier blog entry and so far the opening to my chapter:
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I want to talk about about how writing was survival for Carson McCullers, how she was a frail shell of a woman, seemingly composed of ideas and words alone. How her anthem was: ‘I seem strange to you, but anyway I am alive.’ How in a late interview, after she had suffered the strokes that left her nearly paralyzed, the journalist for Harper’s recalls: "how painfully she spoke, gathering fractions of words in her throat, raising them through creakings to her soprano song, straining to woo and polish the sounds with her mouth" (McCullers and Dews xv). And how she was obsessed, from her very first story, with the utter solitude that is life, that grows deeper, darker with love . How when she published her first novel at twenty three people were astonished, and horrified that she knew such isolation, such freakery and how with each subsequent novel how she intensified the grotesque. How the word “wunderkind” was whispered more than once, and how she mirrored her own adolescent misfits. How she has been hailed as a writer’s writer as and surrounded herself by artistic genius. How she lived a writer's life and how it destroyed her. and kept her alive. how to know her was not to love her, but to be utterly consumed by her. how she remarried her husband, only to escape him in Paris before he committed suicide, longing to bury them both together in the snow.
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now, a couple of things here: our friend carson will not assuage your loneliness, but she will give shape, depth to it. and what you are doing, writing defiantly and bravely to an invisible audience is exactly, i think, what carson would have done. she was always looking for ways to connect, to enmesh herself with others. and our lives do go on, but not unaffected. what you write here, what you think changes now what i write, what i think. in fact, i wrote about you today, in an email, and i was told it should be blogged. so i think i will do that.
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