week of 2/13/02
 
 
 

Musings on love, rain and adolescents
By Dawn Gilchrist-Young
My tenth-grade students have just finished James Joyce’s “Eveline,” a short story about a young girl who chooses to keep a promise to her dying mother and live with a familiar misery, an abusive father from whom there is no protection, rather than break the promise and run away with a man she loves. As I begin this article, they begin their essays about this Eveline, this timid Joycean version of the female doormat. Most of them think she is an idiot because they are just learning of the intoxications of love in their own lives, and this makes her choice seem to them almost unimaginable. While we write, it is raining outside, and I, like they, am thinking about lost loves, found loves, what keeps us safe in love, and how writers have depicted love in general.

Anytime it rains hard, like it is today, I think about the man I love. Flood warnings make him happy. Rain has always made me happy, but after marrying a man who thrives on kayaking mountain creeks nearing flood stage, I have learned yet another reason to find joy in rain. I love “love,” he loves paddling, and we both love books and rain. An older and wiser friend once told me that those things alone were a sound basis for a marriage. Perhaps so. They have stood us in good stead thus far.

Poets and sages have always known that rain, among all types of weather, brings with it memories of love. Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote much about love and rain. I think about the first line from one of her sonnets, “That August should be leveled by a rain,” a poem about a lost love, or the following lines:

“What lips my lips have kissed, and
where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms
have lain
Under my head till morning; but
the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap
and sigh
From the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet
pain
For unremembered lads that not
again
Will turn to me at midnight with a
cry.”

And there’s more love, and more pain, and even more rain, but it doesn’t fit here. And then, because I need cheering whenever I read or think of Millay, I recall instead the less mournful line of Robert Frost’s from “A Line- Storm Song” — “Come over the hills, and far with me/ And be my love in the rain,” and I think, well, that isn’t too bad for a crusty and reserved New Englander who indulged in the occasional rant and petty jealousy.

Maybe there is something in the incessant and luxurious abandon of great quantities of water falling from the sky that is similar to the incessant and luxurious abandon of obsessing over a lover, especially when that someone is lost to us. Certainly, many poets have used rain as a parallel, if not a metaphor, for tears. Pablo Neruda, my pick for love poet of the ages, (even before I saw “Il Postino,” thank you), wrote, “... farewell, the tears of Nature fall.” But lost loves will haunt us as long as humans have emotions. Willie Nelson, a poet of a different stripe, said in a radio interview, “Ninety-nine percent of us aren’t with our first choice. That’s what keeps the jukebox playing.”

We think lingeringly over lost loves because they have altered our life’s plan, and so we are left with the wisps of longing for what might have been, especially when we feel our own great merit goes unappreciated, perhaps, by the one who does not leave us. One way that the poet Dorianne Laux, less famous but equally wise, looks at this situation is to accept the fact that her husband, even (or maybe especially) when lying in bed beside her, thinks of women lost to him. In her mind, she says, she becomes them all.

I do not know if this kind of acceptance and wisdom borne of experience, or philosophizing borne of reading, can make the preoccupation any less, but at least it allows a common perspective in the context of the universal. And at this moment, our universe still filled with rain, I wonder if the thoughts of my students are maybe filled with love, or maybe just the cramp in their writing hand. But I want them to at least know what is out there in terms of what has been written about love, and that it might help keep them safe, if only in their own heads. I think about the German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, how he describes Eurydice, the love lost to the mythical Orpheus, when Rilke says, “She was already loosened like long hair/ and given over like fallen rain.” Perhaps that is what the adolescents I teach would like, to find someone to whom they can be “given over like fallen rain.” (For that matter, perhaps that is what we all would like, although with adults, the “to whom” too often becomes the “to which” of cars, ambitions, and credit card debts.) But they, my romantic and idealistic students, still without credit card debt, write about what they see as the foolishness of Eveline, a 19-year-old who informs them of the mistake of giving up love for a promise made to an unreasonable parent.

They have watched the mistakes of their parents, teachers, and national leaders, and from these mistakes they have understood the ultimate and inherent desirability and danger of love. They understand a great deal, and, like most adolescents of every generation enabled to articulate its woes, are themselves largely misunderstood.

They are the generation whose parents chose, for the most part, career and material goods over children, for good or ill. Their parents (and I am included among them) are a group so dedicated to giving themselves over to the “which” that they have been little aware their children were growing up and away in the company of strangers, their toddlerhoods spent in daycare cribs and play yards, their childhoods spent in classrooms with pencils and paper, and then afterschool programs with paste, crayons, and whiffle ball. And now they are with me in this last year of their childhood, the year in which everything changes irreversibly, the seminal year of the driver’s license, the newest chapter and, for them, the most real kind of freedom. After this, if they have not done so already, they will take their place in what poet Robert Lowell described as “a servile economy” that “slides by on grease.” But for now they sit in yet another classroom with a hopeful, sometimes melancholy, sometimes silly English teacher who asks them to write about love on the rainiest day of this winter.

I circulate through the room, and I see they like the word “lover.” They use it often in their essays — “She had a lover,” “Eveline’s lover,” “She had a lover who lost her to a promise.” In general, the majority of them like most anything that reminds them of sex. This may be because of their stage in life, or because they have grown up in a culture that is remarkably preoccupied with sex and youth, or because of both, but it is so, and I try to use it to my advantage in getting and holding their attention. I read once that the average adolescent male thinks of sex every 19 seconds. I have never read how often the thought of sex occurs in the average female brain, but from my own experience as a teenager, I would guess that it is just as often. In the female version, the most obvious difference might be more time spent on hand holding and roses. When they make the occasional bawdy comment, often apropos of nothing, I like to remind them of this thought pattern. They laugh at themselves. They know better than anyone what it is to be hormonally challenged.

Here at their desks, in an atmosphere that I have consciously tried to make welcoming with my comments, encouragements, posters of movies, and a CD player from which ribbons of sound (George Winston today, maybe Mozart or Chris Thomas King tomorrow) issue, they are safe, warm, dry, and maybe thinking fine and lofty thoughts. Or maybe not. But they are still warm and dry. Ms. Millay also wrote “Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink/ Nor slumber nor a roof against rain.” I, however, am not going to be the one to tell them this. I will let the school system supply the roof, meat and drink. With my infrequent lectures, I will provide the slumber. But literature, ah, literature, it will provide the vicarious knowledge of love. All too soon, my students will provide for themselves, if they have not already done so, the hands-on experience.

Nonetheless, maybe before they do, they will have gleaned enough information about human foibles and flaws in the realm of love that they will be a little easier on themselves. Or if not, maybe they will take consolation in the universality of the experience of love and passion (after all, the Latin root, “passio” means “to suffer.”) as exemplified in the literature of the entire world.

In the latter half of the last century, however, and continuing today, the way children are exposed to human sexuality at earlier and earlier ages has created difficulties that present new challenges for parents, clergy, counselors, and educators. In an informed and controversial essay on the pervasiveness of “hard” pornography, Margaret Atwood raises issues concerning what sells and who is being manipulated when it comes to the formation of the human libido. Perhaps the most frightening scenario she mentions is the one in which she speculates about what little girls reared on Disney’s Snow White and Cinderella do when they are being courted by little boys reared, perhaps inadvertently, on the Playboy channel. She doesn’t provide any answers in her essay, she just raises terrible questions with her descriptions of what sells as entertainment now and who has access either through television or the Internet.

I cannot really say if asking students to think about the love and suffering of a James Joyce character on a rainy day is a more wholesome alternative than Disney’s depiction of human romance, but it is more realistic. I am very aware that no action of mine can protect them, safe though they are in this room. I cannot even guarantee that they will take with them anything they learn from our reading or writing, or, if they do, whether it can possibly provide anything like solace at a time when they need it, even though all the poetry I have mentioned here has, at times, provided solace for me. All I can do is offer what I know and love — that the rainiest and darkest days bring forth something in the human psyche that is beautiful and moving, that literature, at its best, makes us more completely human, and that their own thoughts and feelings, when mulled over and clarified, are worth preserving on paper. And all I can say, as they file out of the room and into the less secure but more exciting world outside, is “Stay dry. Be safe.” And then, because it makes them laugh, “Abstain. Abstain. Be celibate if you can,” and finally, softer but still audibly, I add, “and if you can’t, use protection.”

(Dawn Gilchrist-Young lives in Cullowhee and teaches in Swain County schools. She can be reached at youngericyoung@cs.com)