What's Love Got to Do With It?

In 1902, the Austrian composer Gustav Mahler composed a love song to his wife, Alma. It occurs as the fourth movement in his expansive 5th symphony and is considered by many to be the most beautiful piece of music in the world. This music has undergone a curious transformation.

If you have heard “the adagietto,” as it is popularly known, you almost certainly remember its swelling waves of chords and it’s stately melody proceeding step-wise up and down the scale. The effect is beautiful, rich in color and immense, and somehow remote — like a window onto a vivid sunset on an impossibly distant planet. The music hangs in the air after the last note sounds. It fills us with grief, it pierces the heart with a sense of cosmic fait accompli.

This is a strange turn for a love song. In recent decades, the adagietto has most publicly been associated with funerals and other memorials. What happened?

Mahler marked the fourth movement of his symphony with the instructional words Sehr langsam, which translates as very slow. This is in ambiguous relationship to the word adagietto itself, which implies a tempo between largo and andante, and faster than a full-fledged adagio. Those most acquainted with Mahler the person attested that he would conduct this movement so that it clocked in somewhere between seven and eight minutes. Performances of the adagietto in the second half of the 20th century, and in our own era, often stretch the time to twice that amount or more.

Performed in seven or eight minutes, the adagietto takes on a sweet and lively quality, an ephemeral consideration of love. It is a confession of tenderness with a light touch. It serves as a counterpoint to the military rhythms and keening lamentations of the funeral march which does launch the fifth symphony. Mahler was very hands-on with his direction of how to perform his music, and it probably would have bothered him greatly to see what the adagietto has become.

However, I feel it in my heart that the music has become something greater, now. Slowed to the pace of a true adagio, the chords reach to a more profound juxtaposition of sentiment and universality, speaking to the inevitability of sorrow inherent in growing attached to that which is constantly changing…and also the grace that comes with holding that truth for the many short years of our lives.

What was once a romantic garden stroll becomes a walk along the contours of our truly mysterious plight as heartfelt beings.

The elastic connections that are so taut and breathlessly binding in the first blush of attraction become more interesting and meaningful as they become stretched by time and the mystery of constant evolution. What was it that first drew us together? Where has that quality gone? What has it become? What have we become? These could well be zen koans, embodied riddles that shatter the illusion of Self. We destabilize the persona in each other.

It is unfortunate that many people bail on love before they ever get to this formidable terrain. In the world of seemingly random and serendipitous relationships, people are often initially attracted to someone else through an encounter that falls in the uncanny valley of Otherness. Whereas the uncanny valley experience of meeting an entity almost human, yet somehow not quite right, evokes feelings of fear and repulsion, the experience of meeting a complementary being who is like you in so many ways, but who is excitingly, alarmingly not you…that experience takes the same circuitry and flips it’s polarity so that feelings of desire and allurement take root in us.

Who is this other person? How can they know you? How do they understand you, and even seem able (perhaps) to share your subjective experience? By what secret arrangement did the Universe single out the pair of you for love — and not only that, but shared life, hardship, joy, familiarity with the same frying pans and doorknobs and floorboards and Christmas trees and everything else that we so temporarily and so deeply share? Who put us in the same lifeboat on the sea of life?

Then, we get soft. It’s easy to find safety in numbers, to script the new love in your life as your protector rather than your challenger. Pleasure and stability are the Grail for our thirsty wandering in the desert of loneliness — particularly when stability whispers reassurance that a transcendent comfort is here to hold us and to guide us.

The parable about two pairs of footprints in the sandy beach (yours and God’s) reminds us, when we cry out that one set of footprints has vanished, of the beloved possibility that God is the Constant One who has picked us up and is now carrying us. What we don’t like to imagine are the waves of high tide, the larger surf running up the beach behind us to wash away all trace of God and man.

Often, we end up seeking refuge from change in the sanctuary of love; and that creates a cycle of paranoia, resentment, resistance, and disgust that serially dooms relationships. Insecurity abounds. We sit in the foxholes of our domestic lives and fire rounds at intruders real and imagined until we run out of ammunition, and then we are exiled to the no-man’s land at the bottom of the uncanny valley — wondering how one who has been so close could be so cold, so strange and mean.

Or, sometimes, it’s not so blatant. Leonard Cohen wrote a rueful ballad in which the protagonist fails to “warn all the younger soldiers that they had been deserted from above,” leading him to be reviled on battlefields “from here to Barcelona,” and “listed with the enemies of love.” Still, his own moment of reckoning is much quieter, in the midst of a relationship that does not tangibly end, but drifts apart like two galaxies wheeling away from each other in the cold eternal of space:

And long ago, she said, “I must be leaving. But, keep my body here to lie upon. You can move it up and down, and when I’m sleeping, run some wire through the rose and wind the swan.

We don’t stay the same people we fell in love with, not even for a second. Inside our atoms is mostly emptiness, vast distances punctuated by tiny oases of greater probability of “thingness,” flickering like an aurora in the darkness. Intimacy at first seems convergent — surely, we grow closer and closer together? Surely, we share more and more as time goes on? — but reveals itself to be asymptotic, falling away both infinitely and infinitesimally as we approach the limit. The shallow familiarity of the early days of relationship drops to vertiginous and murky mystery, like looking over the edge of the continental shelf, undersea.

And yet, we sense the fundamental truth of this paradox, the allure of it. This is the mystery we come for, what makes us fall in love. Dan Fogelberg wrote a curious stanza in his otherwise misguided song, “How Do We Make Love Stay?”:

Elusive as dreams
Barely remembered in the morning
Love like a phantom flies
But held in the heart
It pales like the empty smile adorning
A statue with sightless eyes.

If we cling to love desperately, if we try to contain it, it becomes pale and sightless, anodyne. But, if we have the courage to let the tempo slow to an ancient rhythm, and shed its luster of sentimentality, then we can discover the true nature of love, beyond its personal resonances.

In the 2014 space-epic Interstellar, one of the main characters suggests that “love” might be the human experience of a multi-dimensional “force carrier” particle mediating the gravitational force field. Dr. Brandt imagines that gravity and love could well be similar in how they are not time-bound. Our own experience of love — feeling it for those who are dead and departed, feeling it for those who are outside of our own sphere of mutual reciprocity and benefit — indicate that it’s not merely a biological expedience.

Historically, there have been two perspectives at work regarding the experience of love. One wisdom tradition holds that passion must be muted in order to see the nature of reality clearly. We must stare out from the coldest night into the dark of the Universe to behold an image un-blurred by rippling currents in the air. Then and only then, we can witness the faintest stars and the origin of things.

The other perspective holds that passion is ecstasy — taking us outside of our fear-nibbled selves and offering a transduction of our personal desires into a sublime adoration of All as it Really Is…if we let our passion run its fullest course, uninhibited. Again, Leonard Cohen:

Confined to sex, we pressed against the limits of the sea. I saw there were no oceans left for scavengers like me. I made it to the forward deck, I blessed our remnant fleet, and then consented to be wrecked a thousand kisses deep.

One feels the shimmering, forlorn, and exultant resignation to experiencing everything! One has the sense that Cohen realizes his vessel is too small for these waters. This version of passion is a tomcat’s song — with an omniscience-acquired-at-great-cost aura to it.

Which perspective is right?

From the ground-level of direct emotional experience, it may seem that these two perspectives are forever irreconcilable. Certainly, a vapid culture that delights in heart-and-brain squabbles in a cartoon setting and idolizes Carrie Bradshaw as its erstwhile urban seeker of romantic meaning has nothing incandescent to offer about the conundrum of passion.

There is an interesting, esoteric possibility: that these two perspectives are not really different at all — that passion fully expressed becomes passion released. If it’s true that we never really get closer to a substantial core of each other, then passionate adoration of the Other can only accomplish the highlighting of this fact, the illumination of the mysterious selves we inhabit so transiently, that are already departing the moment they arrive for examination and animation. “And long ago, she said, ‘I must be leaving…’”

Shifted to a geometry that does not converge upon intimacy, love reveals its true secrets. Passion carries us through the illusion of possession of another; and, in the experience of holding something which is always slipping through your hands, a strange kind of grace emerges. The tempo slows, and the song shows us that the love which is slipping is not falling and breaking, but soaring upward out of reach to its true register, to sing of the ancient connection between all of us — the leitmotif of the primordial paradox.

Coda: As I write this, my toddler son, all of two-and-a-half, plays around me with his little figurines and a doll’s house. He is lighthearted and charming. He asks me to help him bring the figurine of a knight in from “the cold rain” he imagines falling about the house, setting the knight to warm by the pretend fire in the hearth. I do so, and I am overcome with joy for his sweetness, his compassion in miniature.

I say to him, “I love you,” and he looks at me and smiles. “No, not,” he tells me with a impish grin. I tousle his hair. This is his insistence to me, every time I try to express my love in words: don’t say it, don’t name it, don’t classify its type, don’t draw attention to it, or put it in a frame, or hold it for safe-keeping. Let it go, let it fly. Let it be acknowledged silently in simultaneity of being. Let it simply be what it was, what it is, what it will be. Let it spool upon the floor and gather at our feet as the bitter end of our shared joy. Let it sink through the floor and return to the Earth, crawl away and escape the ruin of this house, long after we are gone.

I kiss the crown of his head, and he puts the knight out in the cold rain so he is ready for the unlikely invitation once again.