Love + Danger = Romance · 4:12am Jan 22nd, 2017
Bad Horse put up a blog post saying "Romeo and Juliet isn't really romantic. Show me something that is."
So I posted this:
It got 11 upvotes and a shout-out from Bad Horse.
Which made me wonder: why does everyone think this is romantic? Gomez and Morticia are trying to kill each other. Just like they always do. Just like Romeo and Juliet succeeded in doing.
But yeah, it's romantic. For the same reason Romeo and Juliet is romantic. For the same reason "Romance" used to mean "knights in shining armor riding off into the woods to slay monsters, or die trying."
The term romance once meant and sometimes still means "a long, often fantastical fictional adventure." And in many cases it was simply that: the 19th-century novel Flatland* is subtitled "A Romance of Many Dimensions" though there is no love-interest in it at all**. The grandaddy of the genre, though, was the Renaissance Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto, who rebooted the ancient franchise of the chansons de geste, or tales of great deeds, which had fallen into campy self-parody (think Adam West as Batman) from which we get the term jest. His poem Orlando Furioso tells the story of Orlando, one of Charlemagne's knights, who goes mad (furioso) for the love of the lady Angelica and immediately sets off into the Vale of Arden, looking for opponents to fight to prove his love.
You can see here how love and danger were intertwined with the concept of "romance" from a very early age. But wait, did this juxtaposition really begin with Ariosto? Let's look at the work that kicked off the franchise Ariosto rebooted: a little something from around 1100 AD called the Chanson de Roland.
Now the Chanson isn't "romantic" as today's culture understands the term: there are absolutely no female characters, nor any mention of women at all, not even the Virgin Mary. There are no fantastic creatures, no magicians, no enchanted swords or female knights, as in Ariosto's work. It's pretty stark stuff. The Franks are betrayed to the Saracens by a traitor in Charlemagne's court. They're ambushed in a steep and narrow valley, fight valiantly to the last, and are slaughtered to a man.***
This seems closer to the battle of Thermopylae than a Barbara Cartland novel, right? Yet look here: there is love--love of King, love of Christendom (though little of Christianity), love of comrades. And that love is proved in danger, in deeds of violence, violence upon the roads, violence of horses, with edges of sharp steel.
And it is tragic, and it bloody, and it is in its own weird way, beautiful:
Said Olivier, "Idle is speech, I trow;
Thou didst disdain on thy horn to blow--
Succor of Karl is far apart;
Our strait he knows not, the noble heart.
Not to him nor his host the blame--
Therefore, barons, in God's good name
Press ye onward, and strike your best,
Make your stand on this field to rest,
Think but of blows, both to give and to take,
Never the watchword of Karl forsake!"
Then from the Franks resounded high--
Montjoi! Whoever had heard that cry
Would hold remembrance of chivalry.
Then ride they--how proudly, O God, they ride--
With rowels dashed to their coursers' side;
Fearless, too, are their pagan foes:
Frank and Saracen, thus they close.
Love and danger. Love and danger. That is the heart of romance.
That's why Romeo and Juliet is romantic: because their love takes place in an environment of danger, the rivalry between the Capulets and the Montagues. And even though it ends tragically and bloodily, like the Chanson de Roland, it is no less romantic for all that. It is, in fact, all the more.
Stupid teenagers acting more like something from pornography? Well, nice-stomached sorts could say the same of Roland and the pornography of violence. But I think to call something "pornography" is, very often, to squeamishly dismiss the real and cutting edges in human nature which that thing shows us.
Love and danger. Love and danger. But the two are linked in more than literature.
Why do women love bad boys? Love and danger. Why do men love toxic women (or toxic men, Mr. Wilde)? Love and danger.
Why do young girls leave comfortable European welfare states to join ISIS and marry suicide bombers?
And this explains why the romance goes out of most marriages, and that's not a bug, it's a feature: because if you love someone in a mature, grown-up way, enough to want to enter into a long-term relationship with them, then you want to take the danger out of their lives. Health care, life insurance, seat belts and gym memberships--there are a million ways to do it, but you'll want to do it. And if there's a kid involved, hey, this one goes up to eleven.
Love and danger. Love and danger. But don't they always go hand-in-hand?
Because there is a danger in love itself, and that danger is that love will end--with the death of one, or disaffection between the two. And then you will end up lonelier than you were before. That's the danger Hooves and Cheerliee confront, in "Aubade:" that if this love ends there will be no going back to how they were before, and no time to start again.
I suppose that's how it is with Rarity Chick and I, as well. Which is odd because I wrote "Aubade" before she and I got back together.
But perhaps that points a way out of the quotidian trap: to realize that love is danger, however secure and warded-about it may seem. Live every day as if it may end tragically, even bloodily, and all you will leave behind are your deeds and, perhaps, your words. Because it may.
That's pretty stark stuff. Perhaps it would be better taken with a dose of comedy, of parody.
Like, say, Gomez and Morticia.
And so to bed...
* From which the counterculture learned to call a boring middle-class person "A Square."
** It was written by an English clergyman, which explains everything
*** Which battle almost totally didn't happen. In 778 a detachment of Charlemagne's army, on its way back from fighting the Moslems in Spain, was dry-gulched in the Pyranees by the local hillbillies. Should've picked up the pace when they heard banjo music.
I agree with most of what you've said here, in terms of what most people think of as romance.
I do think there's room for exploring less dangerous romances, and that it can be very romantic, but in a different way.
There are two sides to a romance: passion and family. Passion is what we think of as romance, what you're talking about here. And danger is totally a part of it. But in theory, the end stage of a romance is family, whether it's a family of two people, or they get themselves some kids, or some other set up. And families can be romanticized in their own ways, as something stable and unified and dependable in a mixed up, unpredictable world. They might not always live up to that, but societal pressures are all aimed towards that ideal, and it's something people take comfort in.
Morticia and Gomez are a rare couple who have it both ways: The danger of passion and the stability of family. It's really hard to beat.
I think that a big part of why Morticia and Gomez come off as more romantic to a lot of us than Romeo and Juliet, is because the former know one another and what they're doing. Whereas Romeo and Juliet are, well, teenagers in love, with all the passion and foolishness and lack of thought it implies.
4391804
Yes, you have more experience of these things than I do, and of a very different sort. I defer to that.
But other people have walked on the moon, and though I never will I can't help wondering what it's like (even if I do get some things wrong).
Juliet was twelve. Just sayin'.
4391804
Yes! Those are foils that Morticia and Gomez are holding; sport weapons. It's a safe sort of danger. It may seem weird to people who have never experienced it, but combat is awesome when it's between two people who love each other very much and treat each other as equals.
Exploration and adventure shared is also a romantic activity. If my wife and I can't whack each other in the dojo, a roadtrip to somewhere we've never been before is darn near as good.
I have been thinking of danger lately.
See, I often wonder about mental health and the past. People, today, live in what most of humanity from ages long past would consider heaven.
I live in a home that machines keep at comfortable temperature all year round. I have access to as close to 'all the information in the world' as it is possible to get with a machine that has me so spoiled that a wait longer than about an hour is intolerable and longer than a day, preposterous. Inter-library lending sounds like a bad nightmare. I have enough food to be able to be picky about it and all of it is fresher and tastier and for all the artificial this-or-that in it better for me than anything available in the past. I can summon fresh water in unlimited quantities, a luxury that most of us absolutely take for granted and can use it to make myself and my surroundings as clean as I feel like making them. I can be confident that a stray disease won't kill me (this year's bronchitis made a valiant effort, though), and so confident of my personal safety that I don't own or want a weapon of any sort.
All this and I'm a poor person in a pretty poor country, too.
And yet... I struggle and my happiness is not by any means assured. How the hell would I have coped with a colder, vastly more dangerous world? Would I simply dissolve on contact? How did people live?
I think I may have an answer. Due to... circumstances, I know what a war looks like from the inside, and d'you know, people who struggle with peactime don't do much worse with deprivation and a constant threat of dying. They don't do better, certainly, but they don't do as much worse as you'd expect. This is odd, and I think it comes down to people having a natural adversity level they are 'designed' for, and that this modern age has placed us under way, way less than the, hah, optimal amount.
And romance may be a part of it. Yes, he/she/other's bad for you, but isn't it exciting? Doesn't it make everything seem more vibrant, feel strangely right? People put themselves through considerable distress and discomfort in various forms of recreation some of which have staggeringly high death rates.
I think that human minds have a suitable level of violence, adversity, danger, and so on that they need to function properly, and technology coupled with a pervasive need to childproof the world have starved those in more well-off places of these causing fascinating pathologies from malign hypersensitivity to adversity (I'm sure a moment's thought will furnish examples), to people going off to join ISIS because they were bored[1].
The trick is finding a safe replacement for it all. Somehow. BDSM and extreme sports for everyone?
[1] Yes, yes, Islam and all that, but there's interpretation of Islam that'll let you continue living your boring and safe EU life with perfect contentment. You don't always pick your religion, but you always pick what it means for you. After all, St. Francis of Assisi and Torquemada allegedly followed the same exact religion and did what they did because of it, too.
4392553
I appreciate this comment more than you currently know.
You see there was that time a few days after having been evacuated from 11,000 feet on La Malinche due to severe altitude sickness, I got to 16,000 feet on the north glacier of Popocatepetl, solo...
1.bp.blogspot.com/_orkFMOWExYg/STyKk-_DTtI/AAAAAAAAAH4/IS4FD1SgU8I/s400/0-14.jpg
...and I looked up at the summit, smoking away like the funnel of a transatlantic liner (it's an active volcano), and thought, "man, I'm never gonna make the crater rim let alone the summit..."
gotexassoccer.com/trips/highpoints/mex_mex/popo05.jpg
And I hear a noise behind me, and I turn to see this AeroMexico 727, at eye-level, roll in on its final approach to Mexico City between the slopes of Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl...
c2.staticflickr.com/2/1211/918551834_a0298df12f_z.jpg?zz=1
..and I realized that nobody who bothered me, not the creepy-ass old civil servant who had fucked my career, nor the ex-lover who had TOTALLY DESTROYED MY LIFE!!!1!!1!!1 was there, or ever had been there, or ever could be there. I had physically risen above them, on my own two feet.
So then I realized I had planted my flag and planted it good and I could come back home with victory got.
That was, mm, twenty-three years ago, and "oh, haddocks, I'm too old to show that anymore." But it was a defining moment of my life, in that it taught me that if you want to restore your amour-proper after folks have done you wrong, don't seek to harm them--seek to outdo them.
Oh, wait, sorry: that's revenge, not romance. Different erotic thrill altogether.
A lamp appears brighter at midnight than noonday, though it emits the same light.
I sometimes wonder if there isn't an innate desire for a love that can transcend death. We seem to need to know there is; we keep squishing the two together. There's something almost eternal in there, it feels.