Wedding Vows

for B.

Each time I use my credit card, smiling at the pavlovian beep, I am presented with a strip of paper on which to affix my signature. These are contracts in miniature, and their profusion is increasingly rendered seamless. If it’s under ten bucks, that’s cheap enough for trust. Sometimes I sign with my finger on a touch screen, worse than my old work with the knobs on an Etch-a-Sketch. But then you face the seriousness of the signature: certifying a lease, a loan, closing on a home, endorsing a confession. This special piece of literacy is what makes our civilization possible: the promise concretized. It conjures credit and aims the coersions of debt, permits the relative peace that reigns in the sunlight of our cities, fields and towns; and therefore children are necessarily terrorized into its appreciation when they discover the earthmoving power of the lie. With age, it becomes less frequently foregrounded, save for moments of legal or social terror: being exposed in the abject nudity of what is then called your “word.” It’s your word against theirs, you’re told; or, you only have your word. This is a smiling bit of wisdom inherited from the violence of packed dirt trading routes and the ruthless hospitality of the Levant merchants that rode them.

The premise that the testimony of a single witness is invalid as proof alone is apparently a principle that predates even the Roman Law in which it served as a touchstone: two witnesses are required. This is still the case: wills, real estate deeds, powers of attorney are invalid without the additional signatures of two witnesses. Historians adhere to this rule when legitimating the events of the past. This is not just a bulwark against lying but an earnest concession to the most sympathetic admission of the law and of history, its worthlessness if not common.

The history of the wedding vow is unclear, buried in the blare of its more proximate popularization as centerpiece of the “traditional wedding” invented by magazine editors in the 1920s and 30s, the advertisers of ritual consumer goods, and diamond slavers. Still, the “vow” is a genuinely ancient concept—“wedlock” comes from the Old English wedlec which connoted pledge-giving in general—and is heavy with the weight of so many lives thrown into its rigour: vow’s most widespread early use was in reference to the monastery or nunnery, to membership in a religious order where it renders the promise lifesize, distends it into a vocation, to embrace study, prayer, poverty, and abstinence; and its association with marriage follows the logic of obversion, two sides of the same idea—worldliness, pleasure, multiplication and flesh. This close association which, like undertow carrying seawards in the rising tide the debris of yesterday’s beach debauchery, crashed backwards on these white marriages to G-d or Christ and stretched the scandal of that analogy. In early Judaism the vow was so severe a promise it was usually only demanded as punishment for a great affront or crime, it so inflexibly bound whoever uttered one. In our time, the promise is so myopically central to marriage that almost no event can occur in a marriage save for its breaking: see, the unbelievable ubiquity of cheating’s discourse and suspicion, where the sacredness of the promise joins the everyday magic of ownership.

There is another thing called love. In the blitz of modernity’s mass suicide of sentiments, in the 1930s when hoards of the unemployed clotted the urban byways, waving their caps and picking up and putting down spent cigarettes and spitting into tin buckets and at each other, like good animals, emerged a slogan projected into the slums of genteel aspiration, “Love knows no depression.” It was to sell a diamond ring. Love is the automatic providence of the grifter. There were stupider days, when people would give their whole lives to carving half a gargoyle and never wake up until seven grandchildren down the line some son’s son said the thing was bogus and cancelled their ancestors with the thin deflationary dagger of the reality principle. Because a select and brilliant group of Cambridge-area pederasts in the mid-19th century were lonely in time, they convinced the world that Greece was the origin of Western Civilization even though it is an Oriental almost-isthmus transmitted to them by the dreamy labors of Arabian eunuchs off-duty, and tentatively legitimated a new horizon of love by the force of this pedigree. I think they were even right. Typically, what survived of love was its dictionary specificity, in four Greek parts, missing what no doubt was responsible for its popularity, the nereids and nymphs that clotted woodlands and streams; and by that amorous ecological crisis, Greece fell.

Different schemes arose after: and there is something adorable and devastating about how Christianity’s central image remains a mother’s love for her child, no matter how elaborately the theologians try to distance themselves from this simple folk interpretation, touched paisans shooing away egghead numerologies; a long memory of the neolithic worship of the mother-goddess. Romance, love’s visible extension and provocation, like a mushroom’s sticky cap trumpeting its enormous mycelial web, was invented at the edge of the Medieval era to plop epistolary tickles into the laps of noblewomen, as a racket to fund art. This has had a long career and the history of what we call literature has depended on the leisure of young women and their emphatic tastes. Love was invented again in the 18th Century in a quiet revolution where moneyed layabouts democratized high feeling, flirting with damnation to convince peasants and longshoremen of the infinite expandability of their hearts. For all this sacrifice, the ladies pulled out their handkerchiefs, getting moist. How quickly this got turned around in the era that followed, where love got its bad name, as a four letter word employed to trick laborers into believing their wage was holy, the fire under their ass to coerce them into furnishing their family with food, smelting a billion products. It was discovered that there is something not very debonair about love, that it is not a good way to be very invincible in violent, surveilled streets. To counter this, people became cool and started professionally countering love’s insistence with misery, alcoholism, derangement and evil, to get out of their suburban home and have a personality of their own. It took maybe another fifty year for this thing to curdle too and people were left holding spitefully their precious selfhoods, crammed therapeutically with actualization, food preferences, “types” (hair-color reductionism or penis-size personality determinism), pet-peeves and fashions. What was the self other than a position in the universal casino of cliches, whose only hope was to be luckily desirable on this go around? Love became a low trade in compatibility, an old euphemism for convenience, what used to have the open glory of celestial soulmate predestination or at least traffic in the world-shaping flows of commerce. It’s amazing how this alleged abstraction, to this day, can gain you access to some stranger’s apartment, with variegated monsteras, radiators of alien music and private cats—an opened-up interior in the anonymity of brickface and headphone use; and let you use a stranger’s car on the weekends; and intervene in the heat distribution of the universe, by maybe producing children, or whatever holding hands for fifty years, or an evening, does thermodynamically to the planet, affecting crops.

My grandmother collected charming bars of soap that would decorate her bathroom and wore petrified the smears of their past use, errant trespasses on their ornamental function—and like water reanimating these unused and arid bars after who knows how long, religion flows abruptly around weddings. If people knew how to welcome the solstice with the capture and release of fireflies, how to wear the walrus mask of winter, chant the tales of the long road and the cherry blossom or worship the bonfires at the extremities of spring, I suspect they would not have to get married so often. I know about a dozen true believers in astrology who I never catch looking at the stars, dimly winking over central Brooklyn; they have an Excel file instead, from Babylon. Here, love meets the promise: and the ready-made vows, standardized by Protestant television, by their faux-antique formula, by the bizarre and singular employment of the verb “to do,” wrench tears from the truest wellspring inside us—and smear the face of heirloom feeling.

I got mass married at Lincoln Center. There was a time when this was not uncommon. In the 70s and beyond, Moonies unified thousands in Madison Square Garden, in Yankee Stadium. Young nations took it upon themselves to bureaucratically synchronize the certification of unions to the same calendar day, to wrest private feelings into the town square, in sight of the marketplace, court and scaffold; another attempt to make love civic. And yet the model of love evoked was not that of an interpersonal trinket, a minor craft between two people who work out their peculiarities into a lower-case love that fits uniquely them; this quirky and resigned love that was meant to counter the imprisonment and abuse of State or Catholic wedlock or the imposition of obligation—but a cosmic impersonal force instead, something like the frost that shivers the top of pines in the earliest of October’s hemispheric teeterings, that could only be summoned by human numbers (over 600 people were there, loving)—the innards of clouds make the leap to precipitation, by pressure, and comes the rain. We were in the presence of the savage hieratical logic of size, how the Assyrian princes appear larger than the lions in the bas-relief—this amassing of bodies out of want to lure heaven into reacting. In all weddings, something of this terror is preserved. The exchange of rings, for example, exploits the allegory of eternity that rhymes between precious metals, diamonds and love and fulfills the need for an inaugural act of violence, usually rendered more symbolically, the stomping of a glass, the shattering of plates, the crashing of champagne against a new vessel’s hull, with the outsized extravagance of generational suffering in mines in Angola, Lesotho, Botswana, Russia, Australia—other families descending ladders into the pits.

And yet even at this mass wedding, from the ecstatic leaders of four faiths, came this piece of friendly, battered advice, included in the synchronized vow: a promise not to try and change your lover, to be absolutely true to yourself. Again was visible the wound of that uneasy graft: love in its supernatural monumentality to the contractual specificity between shabby selfhoods. Were we really being asked to armor ourselves against the love we came here to summon? Mine was a fragile body, commanded to remain upright despite gravity’s universal crush: what poor vessels, I thought, making my vow, and I thought of the sad tummy of Van Eyck’s Eve. It was three years, and a dense week, of telling her I love her—and sometimes she kisses me, and sometimes love’s anonymous face.

Love is a stone smoothed by speech, not the riverbed; plunked in the mouth and sucked like on the hottest day of August having water and wanting salt. This summer I was on a trip with my family and, to see the largest lily pads in Europe, we took a train from Stockholm into an exurb, where stood this old Victorian greenhouse. An old man gazed on the purple, yellow and white of wildflowers along a sloped road and exclaimed to me in Swedish. I made the universal gesture of ignorance, a finger to my forehead, that I then twirled. Just wanting to communicate, he said then what I took to be the only phrase he knew in English, “I love you.” Without hesitation, I repeated the same. “I love you,” you see, is famous worldwide.