We use the word romance for everything: candlelight, flowers, flying to Paris on a whim (which may be the most romantic). It’s defined as, “a quality or feeling of mystery, excitement, and remoteness from everyday life.” My own ideas of romance range from ’90s romantic comedies, photographs by Brassaï, or any film starring Cary Grant. The more I try to examine anything deeper than those impressions, the concept turns to dust under any weight. It’s strange how the word is such common parlance, but its essence remains unclear.
The earliest usages of romance were tied to storytelling in a vernacular style of Latin, and by the Middle Ages, it denoted stories specifically on themes of chivalry. Chivalric romances were a popular medieval form of storytelling in prose or verse, centered on the heroic adventures of knights and their participation in a higher form of courtship, known as courtly love. These stories set out to be codes of conduct, but were idealized fictions and served as light encouragement for how one should act, effective mostly as entertainment. One may be surprised, but the power in courtly love lied squarely with the woman. A knight pledges allegiance to a married noblewoman, and he must obey her every whim. Her whims are what propel him to do heroic acts to gain her favor, which she can choose whether or not to appreciate. The woman is put on a pedestal, and with his devotion (mostly) unrequited, the knight is given an education in courtesy and honor. Our most recognizable portrayal of courtly love would be the story of Lancelot and Guinevere. It’s odd, then, to see how ideas of chivalry and romance have trickled down. Though, it makes sense that they would be historically intertwined, because the idea of romance has always involved a kind of gesture, a reaching across to the other person.
Without the historical context, romance is often dismissed as a commercial invention. Perhaps it seems frivolous or an impractical fantasy when our standards are at an all-time low. “We don’t cherish it enough. People mistake it for something it isn’t (kitsch, sentimentality),” Aria Aber, a poet and Stegner Fellow at Stanford, says. Courtly love, if looked at gingerly, was useful, because it held up an example of what could be done in the name of romance, if you chose to love nobly. Now, Valentine’s Day is one of the only nudges in modern life where we are prompted to be thoughtful—to do something romantic. I wanted to aspire to a higher ideal than a yearly reminder to gently tend to my relationships. Not rules, but a framework to tide me over. To keep me from being aimless, cruel, or otherwise. After all, romance should be fun and in service of betterment for those in its glow.
To understand what I wanted to aspire to, there was nowhere else that felt appropriate but to look to poetry. I have never been able to gracefully uncoil a cerebral standard for poetry, but like romance, I just recognize when something is good and true. Frank O’Hara’s love poem “Having a Coke with You” still elicits a magic for me that has not dissolved even with its online popularity. Though the reader is only observing this intimate overture—O’Hara was inspired by his lover, the dancer Vincent Warren—we are still close enough to feel its flickers. The poem’s success comes from a coy balancing act of dazzling art and exotic locales, pulled in by the simplicity of the speaker’s desire. Romance is someone yearning so much for you that even your most modest of features is made extraordinary.
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as
still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of
it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles
It was Cole Porter and George Gershwin who made the soundtrack for romance in the 20th century. They knew how to capture the sound of divine longing and the humbling acceptance that love might get the best of you (and why sometimes, that can be funny). One of my favorites, Porter’s “Just One of Those Things,” recounts a fervid yet brief affair from beginning to end. The laissez-faire slant of the song always felt so adult, “So goodbye, dear, and amen / Here’s hoping we’ll meet now and then / It was great fun / But it was just one of those things.” The classic standard is performed as though the singer accepts the inevitable with a shrug, a laugh, and a kiss goodbye. I’ve always loved the notion that there’s no need to sour the romance just because it was short-lived. Often, a running theme in Porter’s songs is that you’re a fool to believe in romance, but the belief must be suspended in order for you to get carried away. Porter’s songbook is best sung by Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, who display a profound dexterity in performing their emotional, and sometimes humorous, arcs. I don’t think Frank Sinatra has the same effect because of the boastful masculinity his voice takes, his signature. The differences in their renditions of Porter’s “Night and Day” is like a seasoned playboy picking you up with false promises, and the glamorous woman at the bar holding a secret or two.
In the 2012 Noah Baumbach film, Frances Ha, Frances is at a dinner party and, unprompted, intimates the kind of relationship she desires. “It’s a party … and you’re both talking to other people, and you’re laughing and shining … and you look across the room and catch each other’s eyes … but not because you’re possessive, or it’s precisely sexual … but because that is your person in this life. And it’s funny and sad, but only because this life will end, and it’s this secret world that exists right there in public, unnoticed, that no one else knows about.” It’s a speech that disarms because of its inexactness, despite an air of embarrassment for having revealed such vulnerability in a room of practical strangers. She describes a moment of recognition across a room full of strangers that illuminates you both and makes you feel lit from within. A silent affirmation that you are indeed pursuing life. Poet Jameson Fitzpatrick tells me that romance is the idea that “love of another person can rend the fabric of the everyday.” She describes an image akin to Frances, “Romance is going to the store, or to work, or being on the subway, and knowing something that no one around you knows: that the love of another person has made you the star of a movie in which they are all extras.” This goes back to the word’s definition—to feel a remoteness from everyday life, to break from the mundane. Romance seems to be a form of polishing, a way to make domesticity and the endless churn of capitalism a little easier to bear.
Ira Sadoff writes of Frank O’Hara in The American Poetry Review, “That existential angst, that romantic feeling of loneliness, was a response to a dominant culture that found increasingly little room for either art or pleasure lovers.” It is unfortunate to think of the many artists who gave prominence to beauty when there was little appetite for it. It’s unfortunate to think of all the beauty people missed in an effort to be stringent—emotionally or otherwise. In Rebecca Solnit’s latest book, Orwell’s Roses, Solnit writes of George Orwell’s love of nature and its pleasures, arguing that this was no diversion, but fundamental to his work and politics. Solnit writes, “The left has never been short on people arguing that it is callous and immoral to enjoy oneself while others suffer. […] Underlying all this is a utilitarian ideology in which pleasures and beauties are counterrevolutionary, bourgeois, decadent, indulgent, and the desire for them should be weeded out and scorned.” Solnit writes of political slogan “Bread and Roses,” as the latter “in these declarations stood for the way that human beings are complex, desires are irreducible, that what sustains us is often subtle and elusive.” Being brushed by the fortifying stroke of romance—in all its different forms—is just what the world needs.
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In Defense of Romance
Source: Filipino Journal Articles
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