The Song In The Song Of Songs

by Ira Rosenberg

Chapter 5: Set Me as a Seal Upon thy Heart

Now we've come to the very heart of our inquiry and we can ask: What do the stages and phases of love, in all kinds of love, as epitomized in the Song of Songs, tell us about our chances for satisfaction, contentment and unification with the beloved? It tells us that when desire awakens it longs for the closest union, but the attempt at union can fail at any moment.

I sleep, but my heart waketh;
Hark! My beloved knocketh:
'Open to my, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled;
For my head is filled with dew,
My locks with the drops of the night.

(5:2)

She hesitates; she reins back the mutuality of the approach by considering that "I have put off my coat, how shall I put it on?" She moves too slowly and the moment is lost.

My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door,
And my heart was moved for him.
I rose up to open to my beloved;
And my hands dropped with myrrh,
And my fingers with flowing myrrh,
Upon the handles of the bar.
I opened to my beloved;
But my beloved had turned away, and was gone.
My soul failed me when he spoke.

(5:5-6)

Sometimes it doesn't fail. And still the union cannot last.

I held him, and would not let him go,
Until I had brought him into my mother's house,
And into the chamber of her that conceived me.
'I adjure you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem,
By the gazelles, and by the hinds of the field,
That ye awaken not, nor stir up love,
Until it please.

(3:4-5)

But when it pleases, better get right to it because separation always follows union, and when it does we are swept successively out of tactile range, thermal range, close visual and auditory range, in a natural order until finally a distant circle is reached where the senses no longer meaningfully pick up the presence of the other, who now only resides in memory, in sense memory.

I sought him, but I could not find him;
I called him, but he gave me no answer.

(5:6)

And then you understand, in solitude, that though you hurt you have grown because once you forgot yourself, you went out of yourself in closest intimacy. In all kinds of love a visceral memory is stamped on us by the power of closest approach in the moment of closest union. You are changed by another in that moment.

But the moment of closest approach is both a joining and a parting. In its intimacy a physiological imprinting process occurs, carried across from one lover to the other through the close-up senses, mainly touch and smell (and for the infant taste,) and perhaps through deeper thermal and electromagnetic resonance effects between people. The lovers are entrained to each other in those moments when physiological rhythms are transferred and internalized. In that moment of deep entrainment, the being of the other crosses over and is shared. Conception, gestation and the birth of the child represent the direct expression of the change that happens during closest approach -- its highest result. But it happens in all kinds of love with high results: you forget yourself during the turning point at closest approach and you live in the field of the other. In every kind of love, in its crucial moments, we experience a kind of giving that is indistinguishable from receiving, and receiving that is indistinguishable from giving.

By night, Love, tie your heart to mine, and the two
together in their sleep will defeat the darkness
like a double drum in the forest, pounding
against the thick wall of wet leaves.

(Neruda sonnet 79)

But the it is the nature of life in its changefulness that union never lasts. You must come back into yourself. The separation begins. This "coming back to oneself," though less celebrated by the poets and mystics, is as basic to love as union. After closeness separation follows. The great poets know this. Pablo Neruda writes:

Thorns, shattered glass, sickness, crying: all day
they attack the honied contentment. And neither the tower,
nor the walls, nor secret passageways are of much help.
Trouble seeps through, into the sleepers' peace.

Sorrow rises and falls, comes near with its deep spoons,
and no one can live without this endless motion;
without it there would be no birth, no roof, no fence.
It happens: we have to account for it.

(Pablo Neruda, from Sonnet 55)

What changes us in the turnings at furthest separation derive from the imprinted knowledge of the other, the visceral as well as intellectual knowledge, the scent of the other, the touch of the other, the fine details of the memory of the other, the recollection of the looks and words and shared moments. In furthest withdrawal the raw materials for transfiguration are cooked in loneliness, even when there's no coming back from it:

Here's that rainy day they told me about,
and I laughed at the thought that it might turn out this way.

In closest approach one ingests the beloved; at furthest separation, when imagery surfaces, one assimilates the beloved to oneself. Only then does the longing so weave the visceral memory of the beloved into your being as to change you by it Other than in death or other final separations, the components assimilated in the turning at furthest separation are returned to the world, and to the beloved, in the next approach.

The living energy in every kind of love -- as the songs from all over the world attest -- comes from its natural rhythms that bring periodic separations and new approaches. These entail both intimacy and isolation, pain and ecstasy, engulfment and abandonment in alternation. In love gain follows loss and loss follows gain, not extrinsically but as part of the rhythm of life itself. Without reversal there is no drama, no story, no change. But with reversal there is no final peace of mind in life or love. In the turning points the real matter of life resides. The Song of Songs is full of them.

Turn, my beloved, and be thou like a gazelle or a young hart
Upon the mountain of spices."

Turn, my beloved." Those are the crucial words. They show that love is dynamic and changing, that constancy is not its nature but a desperate wish that distorts its nature. Listen to what follows next:

By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth;
I sought him, but I found him not.
'I will rise now, and go about the city,
In the streets and in the broad ways, I will seek him whom my soul
loveth.

The most poignant verses in the song, because they are so plain and so deeply embedded in such extravagant sensual imagery are:

Return, return, O Shulamite;
Return, return, that we may look upon thee.

(7:1)

Return, teshuvah, a turning point, reversals, transformations!

© Ira Rosenberg 2002, updated 09/03/2002 - rge

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