We still don't know what makes the song in the Song of Solomon a song of songs? Here's the answer: it perfectly epitomizes, on very deep levels, the essential contours of every full love affair, the fullness that all little pop songs catch in briefer bits. Rabbi Kook caught the sense that the best singers sung on multiple levels: "And then there is one who rises with all these songs in one ensemble, and they all join their voices. Together they sing their songs with beauty, each one lends vitality and life to the other."
(Rabbi Kook. Lights of Holiness. Paulist Press. 1978. p.228)
The architectonics of the whole of love, when it is considered carefully, shows that the reason all kinds of love move with the dynamics of approach and separation is that this rhythm is very basic to nature. Systole-diastole, hunger-satiation, attraction-repulsion show it: the polarities are everywhere. In love the dynamic fits everything from the sexual act, to the separation from the womb, to the approach to the mother's breast, to the lover's first kiss, to sexual ecstasy, to marriage and to the separation at death. Every kind of love pulses the same rhythms, but at different tempos. Even religious love comes in the same waves. Saint Teresa, a Spanish Jew who lived during the period of the of the expulsion from Spain and Portugal, wrote detailed descriptions of the changes: "This supreme state of ecstasy never lasts long, but although it ceases, it leaves the will so inebriated, and the mind so transported out of itself that for a day, or sometimes for several days, such a person is incapable of attending to anything but what excites the will to love of God."
"Such great graces," she says in another place, "leave the soul avid of total possession of that Divine Bridegroom who has conferred them."
(St. Teresa El Castillo Interior)
The heightened moments for self-knowing and for the knowing of the other occur at the two extremes of closest approach and furthest separation. In these moments the crucial event that makes love meaningful, that gives it its transformational energy, is the overcoming of duality, an experience comes of unity, of oneness, but it is a unity (however eternal it feels) that cannot last..
Our two souls therefore, which are one,
[John Donne. From A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning )
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion
Like gold to airy thinness beat.
The union is first manufactured in our nakedness in closest approach, and then it is renewed as a pledge in furthest separation.
O! Never say that I was false of heart,
(Shakespeare. Sonnet 17)
Though absence seemed my flame to qualify.
As easy might I from myself depart
As from my soul, which in they breath doth lie:
That is my home of love
Hart Crane's poem Carrier Letter says it well:
My hands have not touched water since your hands, --
Yet, -- much follows, much endures... Trust birds alone:
No; -- nor my lips freed laughter since 'farewell'.
And with the day, distance again expands
Between us, voiceless as an uncoiled shell.
A dove's wings clung around my heart last night
With surging gentleness; and the blue stone
Set in the tryst-ring has but worn more bright.
In the Medieval romance of Aucassin and Nicolete it takes half a lifetime for the lovers to overcome their unfortunate separation. Yet, driven by longing, from far away, Aucassin assimilates the beloved in memory and imagines the course of the way back to her which takes him through the four sensory distances we have described:
Nicolete how fair art thou,
(Charles Jones ed. Medieval Lit in Translation. Longmans, Green.
1950. p. 573.)
Sweet thy foot-fall, sweet thine eyes,
Sweet the mirth of thy replies,
Sweet thy laughter, sweet thy face,
Sweet thy lips and sweet thy brow,
And the touch of thy embrace,
All for thee I sorrow now,
Captive in an evil place,
Whence I ne'er may go my ways
Sister, sweet friend!
But a song needs more to be a song of songs. it would have to contain in its embrace all the different kinds of love. The ancient Greeks, for example, described four kinds of love: sexuality (the physical act with its pains and satisfactions, Eros (full intimacy between lovers), philia (good fellowship, affinities, group efforts) and agape (universal, unconditional love, charity, compassion, spiritual love.) Because the kinds of love open to each other, the full spectrum of love, even in its carnal dimension, has a spiritual dimension. As Martin Buber tells it, the Rabbi Lieb, son of Sarah, the wandering rabbi, overheard a boy singing along a riverbank: "'Shekinah, shekinah, how far, how far! Galut, Galut, how endless you are!...' After listening for a while, Rabbi Leib approached the boy and asked him where he had learned his song. 'Why all the herdsman here sing it,' answered the boy. 'Do they really sing those words?' the zaddik insisted. 'Well,' said the boy, 'they say "beloved" instead of "Shekinah," and "wood" instead of "galut", but that's just stupid.
My midrash on this midrash of a midrash is that only because he was a boy did he say it was stupid.
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