Sometimes it seems that I have become the master of a single plaintive note, sung by the disembodied voice of the patron saint of grasshoppers, Marie Antoinette, from somewhere beyond the tomb.  And it is true that often, when I reread whatever I have written, I am reminded of Russian dictionaries of fenya, or for that matter of English dictionaries of cant, where just about every word in the criminal argot that is a verb means “to steal,” and nearly every noun is translated as “passive homosexual.”  Yet that’s what these people do and are, when out of prison and in prison respectively.  Blame it on their extraordinary lifestyle, if you like, that conventional language is blind to the kaleidoscopic subtleties of the Proudhonian notion of property, or of the Wildean idea of a good time.

Accordingly, conventional exegesis of love, which strikes many as monotonous, has always struck me as lacking in nuance; I suppose it’s never monotonous enough for my money, dealing as it does in everything under the sun except the earth I want, or anyway the earth I long to hear described.  “People love for amusement, for fashion’s sake, for revenge, for riches; in order to forget, or to excite envy; sometimes to find happiness; but hardly ever to find love,” wrote Etienne Rey, an unjustly forgotten French aphorist of a century ago.  The writers have tended to follow the distracted lovers, and the readers were left to follow the distracted writers.

One must have the pathfinder’s ear for the polyphony of the forest.  Then the wind in the branches, which seems to reverberate with one single deafening note of abandonment all the night long, will recede and die down, revealing subtle shades of meaning it has been obscuring.  One must persevere, waiting for some inner prism to break up what seems like a monochrome of white light into a rainbow of significant color.  Then the rogue verb will take on a life of its own—a woman’s purse and a man’s wallet being so very unlike each other—while the inmate noun will acquire the thousand senses of loneliness and frustration otherwise unknown to those who imagine that having laces is a God-given right of their bench-made English shoes.

“Under communism,” went a popular quip of my childhood days, “we’re going to order things by telephone and receive them by television.”  The claustrophobic atmosphere of hopelessness, which hung over the predicament in which I had found myself during my Venetian sojourn at the close of the 1990’s, was likewise almost funny, in the sense that a drunk accused of drunk driving, upon finding himself in a prison cell for the night, may think the situation quite funny for as long as the effects of alcohol have not worn off.

On the one hand, even Marie Antoinette would probably have agreed that there was nothing terribly serious, that is to say life-threatening or emotionally devastating, about the plight of a person who had got himself lost in a labyrinth of his own devising; as the inveterate faro players of Versailles knew only too well, any given game is bound to get out of hand once in a while, and on the face of it the opening punts of my marriage would not have seemed out of place on the playing fields of green baize.  But, on the other hand, as the martyred queen of the grasshoppers could be persuaded to see—if only I could have an hour’s tête-à-tête with her in the Petit Trianon!—in love as in life, it is only volition that matters.  It is the absurd and fraudulent promise of all realizable desire that the Russian quip ridiculed, not only the ludicrous implausibility of ever seeing it realized under Soviet communism, or French absolutism, or any other political system.

I had conceived a lifelong caprice whose name, I thought, was love.  When it transpired that my sacred volition with respect to the realization of this caprice had found itself waterlogged in an island cul-de-sac of torpid brine and Istrian stone, weighed down by fatherhood and motherhood, nostalgia and acedia, I felt defeated, cheated, emasculated, made a fool of by a bunch of cardsharps.  And these feelings, to me, meant the world and were the world.

“Don’t you know there are people starving in Africa?” ran another quip I vaguely recall having laughed at in my American adolescence, with the heartless punch line in attendance: “Name one!”  No doubt, that world of mine was subjective to the point of sheer and utter callousness.  Even in its own terms of reference, a random sympathizer, such as a wedding guest looking for a gift to add to the matrimonial treasure trove, could find many virtues inherent in it that many a married man might envy: a comely wife, perfect health, a clever and handsome child, plenty of money, few responsibilities and even fewer obligations, palatial residence on the Grand Canal, bibulous evenings and ebullient nights . . .

Certainly this wedding gift list, with a triumphant tick in the margin against each object of desire, would have looked impressive to the parents and friends of many a young couple.  But the groom’s volition had gone into liquidation, and the mixed feelings of desecration, claustrophobia, and disillusionment outweighed by a great gross whatever the most generous sympathizer could throw on the scales.

Would you have shed a tear for the inmate of so cushy a prison cell?  Not very likely, I wager.