Ghost!

I'm reading Susan Casey's, "The Devil's Teeth" -- an account of the Farallone Islands, a noted Great White Shark hunting area frequented by researchers, with a long and unusual history, and on page 111, there's a ghost story in it, which is especially interesting because of the concentration of scientists on the island who believe they witnessed things there, and the amusingly named room that appears to be the worst of the allegedly-haunted areas...

"Peter and Scot informed me that the Jane Fonda bedroom was notoriously haunted.  'There's a ghost there,' Peter said matter-of-factly, after a few beers. 'It's a woman.'

'In the house?' I'm not sure why I found this surprising. If any place deserved to be infested with ghosts, it was the Farallones.

'Around the island. There was a body found in a cave.' He went on to explain that a century ago, a well-preserved skeleton of a woman had been found in Rabbit Cave, down by East Landing, close to the site of the original Russian settlement. Most people assumed she was an Aleut slave; it was their custom to entomb their dead. But others believed she was a Caucasian, a claim they insisted could be confirmed by her dental work. The truth is that no one really knows, and there is no record of her death. Her bones remain on the island, buried near the cave's entrance.

In the years since there had been reports of odd, ghostlike encounters: trouble breathing was commonly cited, as were chills, whispering voices, glimpses of shadowy silhouettes moving across the cart path, footsteps and doors slamming in the night. Now, it's one thing for a few people sitting around on heebie-jeebie island to wind themselves up thinking about ghosts. It's another thing altogether for that group to be composed entirely of scientists, most of whom would rather eat dirt than admit to any sort of belief in the paranormal. But at the Farallones some very logical minds had been flummoxed and terrified by unexplainable encounters.

In the mid-eighties, Peter told me, a biologist was walking back to the house in the last, foggy light of day when he noticed a woman with long dark hair standing on the marine terrace in a filmy white dress. Figuring it was one of the two female biologists on the island, albeit in a fairly strange getup, he continued on his way into the house -- where he immediately encountered the two women, sitting on the living room couch. He turned on his heel and ran back outside, but the woman in the white dress had vanished, though there was really no place she could have vanished to, short of jumping into the ocean. 'And he was Mr. Science!' Peter recounted, snickering. 'A guy who would do things like rebuild the transmitter. He said it made a believer out of him.'

On another occasion, a visiting botanist was intercepted sleepwalking out the front door in the middle of the night, screaming, "NO! I'm NOT going up there!" When someone tugged on his arm and woke him, he explained that a dark-haired woman was trying to entice him to climb to the lighthouse with her.

'What about you?' I asked them. 'Had any ghost action out there personally?'

They both nodded vigorously.

'Oh, I've had scary experiences,' Scot said. 'You get the creeps. It's the feeling of a presence around you. It usually happens when you're alone. At night.'

For Peter, one incident in particular stood out: he awoke to loud, thudding footsteps on the stairs, followed by the front door slamming, an attic trap door in the Jane Fonda bedroom stuttering rapidly, and a chill wind that blew through the house, rattling the windows from the inside, after the door shut. At the time he was one of four people on the island, all of whom were cowering together in one bedroom, scared witless. There was no extra set of human feet that could possibly have been pounding up and down the stairs that night -- they all knew it, and they all felt it. This had occurred more than a decade ago, and I could see that telling the story still gave him a chill.

'Certain rooms are scarier than others,' Scot said, fingering his glass. 'That Jane Fonda Room...the one you stayed in...'

'Yeah, that's the one where most things happen,' Peter agreed. 'I've never liked that room, either.'

'I stayed there for awhile. Man, I couldn't wait to get out of that room.'"

I Melt With You

This is a great cover of the Modern English tune, which is a classic to the point of almost being a cliché of 80s music, but which is still a good tune. The one above is sweet and sensual, and it's fun to incorporate it into the overall "Love" meme I've been working on the blog this month, and a continuation of what I was musing about earlier this morning.

The nice thing with that song title is it's so lovey-dovey -- the song's not "You Make Me Melt" or "We Mix Well Together." Bahah! It's "I Melt With You." and so it embodies something of that idea of synergy, of becoming stronger and larger than yourself through love. Above and beyond the biomechanics of reproduction, mind you, there's the psychosocial strength of true love, that makes you melt and both strengthens the individual and bonds them to another. To a Romantic, it's a beautiful thing, that communion of spirits.

A better union is going to yield a purer blend, a stronger alloy; a less sanguine one is still capable of being spot-welded together, or bound up with duct tape and staples, but it's not going to match that alloy's strength, flexibility, and durability. Of course people aren't metal, but true love is an alloying of spirits, creating something greater than the sum of its parts. It must be.

I think some folks, for various reasons, are less comfortable with "melting with" someone else than others. You have to give up some of yourself to be able to love someone else, and for a taker, versus a giver, that has to be threatening. That's got to be a serious flaw in the ability to love, or to recognize true love when/if it even appears in one's life.

So maybe there really are weak loves and strong ones, represented by the nature of the relationships that result from them. A one-night stand is by its very nature devoid of love, about the most love-free human transaction you could have, short of outright prostitution. And, big shock, those tend to be the least-emotionally satisfying. With those as the street- and curbside view of relationships, and with true love cavorting in the penthouse, then you have a number of floors between. That's your continuum from loveless to true love, with the love growing stronger as you work your way toward the ideal.

The key is understanding what makes it stronger or weaker, then, and when you factor in individual foibles, quirks, stupidities, and out-and-out insanities (which'd likely be the love equivalent of taking a swan-dive out the window of one of those higher floors), it makes it really hard to get to that penthouse, that "Melt With You" place of peace.

So far in my musing/brooding, I think there's mutual attraction, appreciation, respect, trust, chemistry, acceptance, forgiveness, and reciprocity as vital and necessary elements to true love.

I distinguish between attraction and appreciation -- because you can greatly appreciate someone without being attracted to them; and, god help you, you can also be highly attracted to someone without appreciating them, too. And while chemistry is bound up in attraction, I think it's far more magical than that -- a good-looking person is attractive, but you can have two great-looking people together who simply lack chemistry; you can have two objectively unattractive people who have magnificent chemistry as well. You could have a Beauty and the Beast kind of pairing, too, bound up in chemistry. If you and someone else work, you just work; and it's an ineffable and beautiful thing. But if that chemistry isn't there, I don't think there's anything that'll make it work.

Chemistry matters. Big-time. No chemistry, no true love is even possible. I'm just going to flat-out declare that. A workable love could probably be had without much chemistry, but it would be like saltine crackers, not something magical, memorable, exquisite and beautiful.

And you'll notice I didn't include "Romance" in my list of vital components to true love, because I don't think romance is, strictly speaking, necessary to it. I think it's nice and wonderful if you have it -- hell, it's surely a blessed byproduct of that vital chemistry, a blending of attraction, appreciation, and desire. And as a Romantic, I hold that romance is a vital component to my conception of true love, I imagine a couple of statuesque Stoics could politely hold hands while sitting on marble pedestals and be perfectly happy with that. Romance is seasoning for love, but you can have love without that seasoning; it's just romance makes it so much better. No wonder the Romance genre continues to thrive even in an age when it seems fewer and fewer people read. Women in particular crave that romance, so while one can love without romance, it makes love more savory and sweeter and spicier.

But one cannot reach true love without that chemistry. It's what separates Mr./Ms. Right from Mr./Ms. Meh or Mr./Ms. Good Enough. And while someone can perhaps feign romance, I don't believe chemistry can be faked; either a couple of lovers have it or they don't.

Musical interlude

In for a penny, in for a pound

Does romantic love have degrees and/or levels? Can you love someone a little? A lot? Or is it all or none? I think the truest love has to be the strongest love, too -- the most intense, the purest. But I don't think it's possible to feel true love lightly, is it? Hearkening back to that SIMPSONS quote the other day, before I got sidetracked by the flu, the "true love lightly" is the "I Love You Like I Love Fresca" school of love, which, of course, is precisely the punchline of that joke. That can't be true love at all.

But are there shades of romantic love? I don't have a proper answer to this, except to view it in terms of the good and bad of a loved one -- if the good outweighs the bad (and the nature of the good and the bad itself is well-defined), then you love them, and if the bad outweighs the good in your eyes, then you love them less or not at all. And if the good vastly outweighs the bad, you love them the most. A continuum?

I don't know if that calculation is honestly made at the front end, when one is enamored of a new love, enthralled by them -- the "honeymoon period" of a romance, that dopamine thrill ride. At that point, a person is probably highly unlikely to be able to objectively assess the worth of a person they love, because they're just too high. And I'm only using "worth" in a romantic love context, because, obviously, if somebody's net worth is a factor in it, then you're falling into a rather commercial category of relationship, there. At the front end of a love, it's highly unlikely that one can make a reasoned or proper calculation of their love, because they've got pinwheels in their eyes -- that's how people fall in love with the wrong person. And the type of soul who is willing to actually fall in love will do that, versus the person afraid to commit to love, who may not risk anything at all, first and foremost being their own heart.

So, what's "right" -- what feels right? Are some loves stronger than others? More intense, more "right?"

Small wonder that the notion of "chemistry" comes into play (and it probably does, in all sorts of ways). If a couple has good chemistry, they accentuate each other, they complement each other, and are stronger together than apart by that chemistry (and sexual chemistry is surely part of that large alchemical bonding of love, as well). That's a powerful indicator and reinforcement of love -- that's an incentive. It's why some couples form that kind of a gestalt, a blessed synergy of two souls that leaves both parts stronger than they were alone. That kind of unity is apparent to those who see it: "They're such a great couple!" "What a happy couple!"

But the only true measure of happiness is whether the couple is happy -- whether both parties are happy together and happy with each other. I know friends were floored when they found out Exene and I were splitting, because we appeared to be a strong and happy couple -- but that was only because our relationship was built on me making her happy, and I was good at that. That was the bricks and mortar of our union. I stopped laying those bricks, and the structure came crashing down.

So, the only true measure of a couple's merit is whether the members of it are both happy, are both giving and taking equally (reciprocity is a vital component). High energy = low entropy. Stronger together than apart? Happy, energized, not drained. High entropic unions are, on the other hand, incredibly draining, accentuate weaknesses and faults and flaws, and bring out the worst in one or (more likely) both parties.

Those are the couples who actually seem to hate one another, or not like each other very much. I've known a few like that in my day, who actually can't stand each other, and I'd wonder "Why are they together??" You'd see them at parties actually sniping at each other, or even flat-out arguing, which was always uncomfortable. The "liferaft" school of love seems so co-dependent and joyless -- a pair of soaked, parched, and starving souls clinging to one another on a chunk of flotsam, on a perpetually stormy sea, not a speck of land in sight, sharks circling, clinging to each other because they're afraid of drowning? Bliss? Not in my book.

Love's a dance, not a grim death march. I mean, you can make it a death march, or a gladiatorial fight to the death, I suppose, but fuck, that's not fun. I mean, life is a death march, strictly speaking -- blessed entropy is going to claim us all eventually. So, from the Romantic/Epicurean's standpoint, make it a dance and a banquet, why not, so at least it's a happy trek before eventual oblivion.

This seems like a meander from my original premise about levels of love, but it kind of makes sense to me -- if the relationship is good, if both players are good to one another, are happy with one another and each other, then that's a better, stronger, worthier love. If you can just be you, and still be loved for that, then that's a stronger, worthier love. If you can look at someone just being themselves and find relish and delight in that, then that's a stronger, worthier love. The opposites, of course, point to structural flaws in the love, itself, or else in the individuals in the relationship.

This might be a "to be continued." I'm still thinking about this one....