But I want to get back to the question.
Now I want to formulate my thoughts about two kinds of life-transforming experiences: falling in love and becoming politically oppositional. Alain Badiou places them together under the heading of life-transforming events, though the first is personal and oriented toward one other and the second social and collectively oriented. Before I begin, I want to humbly apologize for the presumptuousness of an older guy lecturing people fifty years younger about such matters. I would be grateful for corrections or comments. Nonetheless, I have noticed certain changes in the love life of younger people. First of all, the sentimental, popular music of my youth celebrating love, longing, or disappointment in love is no longer widely heard. Second, the sexual focus of love and desire is no longer swathed in mystery. Every young person knows what “the obscure object of desire” looks like. This was different back then. Finally, one is less likely than in the 60s to encounter “public displays of affection.” Back then, being in love often meant defying the public order. Love meant not giving a shit what anyone thought. I would assume that these three things went together. Since the object of sexual desire was more obscure and literally out of reach, feelings were ratcheted up in song to wish it into availability. This has been the case throughout history. Read the language of Romeo and Juliet. And since social norms stood in the way, defying those norms expressed the seriousness of one’s passion. The more intense passion of love raised the stakes. Of course there was just as much deception and dishonesty. Yet hook ups were not really the norm. Quite the opposite. But I want to get back to the question posed by Badiou of the relation of falling in love to becoming politically aware and oppositional. I want to use as a paradigm a great short story called “After the Ball” by the author of War and Peace Leo Tolstoy. Here was a great author who knew first-hand whereof he wrote. He knew war as a soldier in the ghastly Crimean War and the bloody Caucasus. He knew love as a man tormented by his sexual drive but also devoted to deep spiritual union. And he knew the experience of crisis and conversion that made him one of the most radical and egalitarian opponents of repression in modern times.
All this informs his short story “After the Ball.” The story is simple, confined to the action of a single life-transforming night. A young guy, a student, is in love with Varenka whom he expects to see and dance with at one of the many balls that enliven society and offer opportunities for courtship. He arrives late and can’t wait for his turn. But a dignified older gentleman, her father, takes his turn first. Father and daughter dance tenderly and touchingly before the old gentleman in his officer’s uniform hands her over and takes his leave on the excuse that duty requires him to rise early. So they dance and dance. He falls completely in love, not only with Varenka but with the dignified old father and with the whole ball society, with life and with the whole world. Finally, the ball is over and he goes home, but sleep is out of the question. He sneaks out and strolls in the direction of Varenka’s house as dawn is breaking. As he approaches with the graceful mazurka melodies still in his ear, he hears the staccato of fife and drum and sees a blazing fire and two lines of soldiers armed with knouts. A Tartar soldier is being punished by running the gauntlet as the blows rain down upon his bloody back. Shouting furious orders and threatening any soldier who withholds his full force is Varenka’s father on horseback, executing the brutal punishment. The bachelor narrator never joins the administration or serves in the military. He is transformed into an unyielding opposition of one.
Confrontation with the cruelty and oppression which lurks behind the beautiful façade of society radicalized the hero. But is love for Varenka irrelevant to that conversion? I don’t think so. Only his susceptibility to love makes him vulnerable to the military cruelty that is not directed against him. Only his celestial enchantment enhances the hellish intensity of his disenchantment. His capacity for love signals his propensity for the truth about his world, its duality and hypocrisy. Today we live in mental serenity within driving distance of the incarceration centers that contain one of the world’s largest prison populations and pass on street corners the fugitive population that performs its cheap labor from which we also profit. There would be no shortage of brutal material for writers who attempted to match Tolstoy’s story. Many try. But I’m not aware of the equivalent of the experience Tolstoy recorded so powerfully and economically. Are we jaded in matters of justice as well as in matters of love? I ask because I do not know.
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 