A little over two years ago, I gave a decent toast at the EDS-MA(T)S nuptials in Carlisle, PA. It was one of those grand events (the wedding, not my toast) – perfect weather, perfect ceremony, everyone in high spirits. I suspect we all felt very young and very old simultaneously – vibrant but still experienced enough, or something like that.
Every time I try to do or say something heartfelt, I end up regretting it shortly thereafter. This is why I absolutely empathized with my dad when he told me that he cringes when he thinks back to the toast he gave at my wedding because it’s the same for me. What was said is frozen in time, and by saying it you more or less record one facet of reality, but the record is inflexible. You keep wanting to go back and edit it, and the fact that you can’t makes what you said seem untrue or less-than-artful.
The toast I gave at the wedding in Carlisle doesn’t quite fit into that category for me – I was happy with it at the time, I thought the couple enjoyed it, and I think the guests did too. If there’s not much I would take back, it’s maybe because in the end I may have said very little. And now, two years later, I see that one of my main points was completely inaccurate.
See, I told the story of how EDS and I had tried to come up with a poem for the occasion, or a good reading at least. And we turned to our usual sources – poets, songwriters, mystics and bearded fellows – but came up empty. Not empty, exactly, because there are good poems and excerpts that fit the wedding-day bill, but they’re a little hackneyed. A lot hackneyed, in fact.
Finding something both appropriate and original was a challenge. I’d look back to a poem that filled me with a strong sense of joy or purpose and find out that it had a couple of ugly passages about how in the end, we’re all alone, or the poems said something about death, or genocide, or god knows what else. Not things I wanted coming out of my mouth at such a joyous occasion.
Thinking about this, I had concluded that true love had this wonderful finality – that once it’s there, there’s very little to say about it, because it becomes a fact. What do you say about the fact that you have five fingers, or that a ball is round? Nothing – the fingers are there, and the ball bounces. With love, I reasoned, it must be the same – we talk about imperfect things, but we have little to say about things that are exactly right.
But I realize now I was confusing facts with objects. Facts may be static, but objects are not. Gravity is a fact; it doesn’t change. But the feeling I get when I see my street on an early morning does. The street is immutable, like Holden Caulfield's Museum of Natural History, but I get to invent it anew every time I look at it.
My moods end up painted all over my street. They are in the rearview mirrors of parked cars and they frame the angled doorways. A little over a year into my marriage, and many more years than that into the great love of my life, it has only now occurred to me that the story keeps getting told over and over again. I once wrote a very good line, if I can brag for a second - something casting a relationship as a recurring improbability, staving off estrangement one day at a time. This seems right.
And it seems wrong to say that there's nothing to say about love. I may be better suited to capture a peculiar, borderline-desperate kind of mood (I am); and I may feel more alive when I'm at my most wretched (I do).
But that's my own failure, and I know that I am only me when I am living out the story of the two of us, even though sometimes the story is stifling, and though sometimes it ends in a sullen fight. I am probably more addicted to our story, more willing to submit to its chemical alterations of my psyche, than I am to any other facet of my life.
Two years on, I am thinking back on myself giving that toast, wondering how many older people there already knew what I've only now come to realize - that love, far from being final, is a canvas that never gets filled completely, it's a picture that is still slowly developing throughout and even after our relatively short lives, but we see hints of the final product here and there, knowing of course that the work is never really finished, just as a sculpture will continuously change, erode, seemingly standing idle while its features grow softer, massaged into abstraction by the firm hands of time. The process is hypnotic if your mechanism of perception is tuned correctly.
And that's what I might say if I were this smart two years ago.
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