gathering romance

What is romance? I don’t know. It has to do with a dreamy feeling, the promise of something beautiful and slightly sad. It’s creepy, with its symbols of purity entangled with erotic allusions. Nightgowns and candles. Prepubescent daydreams of teacher. Hearts drawn round names. It is the sweet denial of the reality of everyday life. It sells out real, whole humans for cardboard dreams. I reject it.

What is romance? I don’t know. It has to do with poetry. Floating images, disembodied voices. Conjuring up the far. Reeling it in, if only for a moment. Its origin is inextricably linked to medieval french poetry. A troubadour’s longing of the far away lady. The alba: dawn violating the sweet dreams of lovers. I live for it.

I once found a single rose on my writing desk when I came home. I was pleased, thinking it was a gift from my friend who lived in the room upstairs. When she came down, I asked her about it. ‘No,’ she said, ‘A boy dropped it off, said he came all the way from H****.’ My blood ran cold. He had been sending me e-mails. Now he knew where I lived.

Can we reject the hollow myth of romance, that destructive thing that makes people choose fantasies over flesh and blood companions, while at the same time preserving the beautiful potential of these fantasies? Can you sneak romance away from the couple, and experience it in a communal setting?

I organised a little Valentine’s day gathering around this question: food and reading about the love for joy, the lover and the world. I made 40 petit fours, a black tea jelly with edible roses, infused with a liqueur called bride’s tears (a wedding gift), and a model of a giardino pantescho, a round stone structure to trap moisture for the single orange tree inside it, with cantucci and kumquats. I made Cato the Elder’s recipe for placenta, the ancient roman cheesecake the organ is named after. Honey, cheese and bay leaf. Good to eat, very unfun to make.

We started the reading with Jef Last’s De Bevrijde Eros. Last was a revolutionary socialist poet, and one of the few Dutch to fight in the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil war. This collection consists of homoerotic poems to a moroccan lover. A rough translations of one poem:

Which is fairer
the body or the hands
the hands or the fingers
the fingers or the pores of the skin?
Which is fairer
the mouth or the lips
the lips or the teeth
the teeth or the heat of the tongue?
Which is fairer
the wheat or the oats
the oats or the weeds
the weeds or the stones on the range?
But — better than the dream is the tangible body
better than hate the gentleness of love
lovelier than all else in the world is man. 

Samuel Vriezen read two Heine poems, both satires, on sexual mores and antisemitism. He also brought wonderful love/sex poetry by baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven:

He said:
“I made –
The foreparts
And the hinderparts –
I made the farts –
I made the hearts – – –
I am grand master of the arts!”
He said:
“Ahee!
I made the oyster shit the pearl –
I made the boy to screw the girl!”
Said He.

Enzo read a Pasolini poem from Poesia in forma di rosa, a pretty brutal text:
Osservo me stesso massacrato col sereno
coraggio d’uno scienziato. Sembro
provare odio, e invece scrivo
dei versi pieni di puntuale amore.

Romy Day Winkel told us about her ongoing research project Romance Utopia, where she searches for romantic ruins. You can listen to her talk about it here and follow the visual archive of this project on instagram. Betül Sefika and I read an Alba: P.C. Hooft’s Galathea.

Layla Silbernberg read the first Duino elegy and a poem of her own. We talked about scents and unreliable narrators; the phenomenon of the rude man who ensnares you with his baby smell. We tried to draw ambidextrously. I made this lino cut for the occasion, an Eros carrying a book on his head, a spear with a heart shaped tip and a big raddish. I attached some love spells to it:

(from ancient folklore)

Touch the loved one’s hand with yours, and sat the following words: ‘Bestarberto corrumpit viscera epis mulieris,’ and you will sexually arouse all your lovers.

Let me know if worked.

P.s. Sorry for the long absence. I’ve been finishing the first draft of my novel. More on that very soon. Epilogue of Thursday coming by the weekend.