“To Long”
The god Eros has, sometimes, more or less, given mythic variations, two or three lovely brothers: Anteros, god of requited love, the one who wants things to work out and believes that love must be answered if it is to prosper (Anteros honey! Where are you when we need you?); Himeros, who may or may not be Anteros; and Pothos, who, in the Museo Centrale Montemartini in Rome, is a Roman copy, and who, the label informs us in Italian, is the god of “love for someone far away.”
“Love for someone far away” … sweet, stripped-down description. I thought about what it feels like, to love someone who is far away. – A love that spins out from the body, that is sent out along airwaves, unfurls like sails, a love that goes long, like a coach’s instruction shouted to a football player. I looked again at Pothos, lovely armless boy, and I thought; I suppose that you could call his kind of love longing.
And in fact, later, looking up Pothos, I see that in English he is called the god of longing. But there is no word for longing in Italian; the translator had to spell it out.
The English word Longing, when you look it up, doesn’t say anything about distance, , though. The first def I find gives me: An eager desire; a craving; a morbid appetite; an earnest wish; an aspiration. The second one gives me “an earnest, heartfelt desire, especially for something beyond reach. REACH, involving distance.
A strong persistent yearning or desire, especially one that cannot be fulfilled.
n : prolonged unfulfilled desire or need [syn: yearning]
I consult an etymology dictionary online . I find that Etymologically, my only clues, possibility relating length to desire is the Greek endelekhes “perpetual” (relating time to distance?) whereas “to long” is O.E. “to yearn, to seem long” – and/or German verlangen, “to desire.”
“To long” – it is a very strange verb, when you stop to think about it. Once you understand that long is an adjective describing length it makes no sense as a verb. A native speaker accepts it without thinking, as a homonym, not wondering about the why. To long, long, longing. A peculiar group. We’re used to that peculiar feature of English, the fact that different words with the same sounds have nothing in common. But in this case perhaps they do, or is a coincidence that long refers to desire and to length, which might be construed as distance?
We use long to refer to spatial and temporal distance without thinking about it. A long street, a long day. A long walk combines these qualities: unless you’re walking “at a snail’s pace”, if you take a long walk, it is probably because you have walked a long way; it describes both time (an hour long) and distance (from here to work).
In Rome, the home of the Pothos statue, there is the Lungomare, a road that lines the sea. There is the Lungotevere, the modern road in Rome that lines the river Tevere. Lungo, meaning both “long” and “along,” is a prefix that occurs frequently in this way in Italian, but does not carry longing with it. “Desire” and “longing” translate to “desiderio” or “voglia.” (Voglia is the noun form of want – it is “wanting” as a noun. Yes, “want” can be a noun in English too, but always strange.) Is that it? I ask Marcello, disappointed. If you really want someone or something far away, either in distance or in time or in some other, more metaphoric sense? –Well, you can have a strong desire or wanting, or you can desire or want strongly. No, no, no, that’s not it; that doesn’t do the trick; longing is something else. And why? B wants to know. Well, because – I have to hesitate to sort it out – because LONGING, and TO LONG carries in it the idea of distance from the object of desire. I have never thought before, never realized before, how subtle, how beautiful and complex, this word is. It is not the same as desire, I have to say. It is desire with sadness. It is desire that is sent out, like a kite or a telegram or a voice, over a distance. It is desire with a sense of direction, and not with hopelessness, but with something like it, a particular melancholy. It is desire in space. It is desire with a spatial aspect. But then again one can long for something in the past or the future, which is desire with a temporal aspect; the distance as a factor of time, distance in time rather than in space. Desire with a spatial or temporal aspect. To long is to send your desire across space or across time toward a distant love object, and the distance, and the sending, give the desire a particular aspect that requires a special name, longing. The English “long” in this sense is both lungo, long ago and far away, and lungo, along, the way it is at night in the winter in Rome watching cars move in the dark along the dark river, or riding in a train along the sea, looking out over the water from the window of a train, both for me images of longing. Desire moves along specific trajectories, has paths and conduits, connects a and b. The whole process is longing. But shouldn’t we also call it across? Across time and space? Attraversare, to cross. TRA, which means “between,” as in “between us,” and is the root of … a million words.
I try to explain all this to B, my ideas about “to long” and “across,” and he says, “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”
I give up and pun foolishly, compulsively, without thinking, “You are my across to bear.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand. What it means?”
“Uh-oh, I mean, Oh, it’s a gioco di parole in inglese,” I say. “It doesn’t translate.”
“Please, I would like to know what you are said!”
This leads to one of our impossible sinkholes, which leads to: “Just FORGET IT, B! Jesus Christ!”
“No, no, I don’t want forget it Jesus Christ!”
“Shut up your face. I’m not talking to you anymore.”
“Terrible American person! Why you are speaking a so stupid English I who am so intelligent cannot understand?”
I could never have imagined I would fall for someone with whom I didn’t have a common language. What would be the point? How would we joke, how would we get each other, if one of us didn’t even know what “to get” meant?
Through trial and error, though – tough job – I have learned that the more you love talking, the easier it is to fall in love with someone with whom you don’t share a common language, not only because (the obvious, which I never thought good enough) you are free to project onto and into what they want to say, but also because the lack of a fluent common language is itself erotic, or perhaps it is pothotic, related to the god of love-at-a-distance. The absence of verbal language foregrounds other languages, methods of communication: the gestural and the sensual, and simultaneously foregrounds spoken language as an issue, an attempt, an essay, a longing. The struggle to communicate is itself erotic. The hurling of intention out into the distance between us. Because without the invisible, insensate, easy, unconscious “getting” of the common language, there is distance, always, to struggle with. There is always distance, but now you can’t pretend otherwise. It foregrounds distance.
