Do things always work out in the end, for everyone? For the longest time we just don’t know. For the longest time it’s touch and go for all but the luckiest few. Things do not always work out in the end. As is true with the Capulet and her Montague.
I think you should have access to a luck-in-love potion. I don’t usually even play with magic power, as I don’t believe in it enough to play, but love was an exception. I felt highly uncertain about love for much of my life. I was anxious to know how I was going to solve the problem of myself. Somewhere over all those varied years, I made a few love potions and rituals for myself and others. It was total play, but with the reasonable intent of changing how we felt.
I like to start from the mood of Shakespeare’s witchy spells. That means that without going so far as “eye of newt,” you conjure a weirdness. You want a for instance? Here’s one I’ve written just for you. It is a simple Love Please Come Again Potion*:
Into a small blue cup, mix a walnut shell’s worth of apple-cider vinegar with the amount of grape juice that would fill a hamster (I don’t mean satiate a hamster but fill the skin of one wherefrom the hamster had been removed). Add crumbs rubbed from the bottom of a slice of cake. Do not eat the cake. Add water until the cup fills above the rim. Say your love poem while carefully drinking this libation creation. Do not spill. When you have finished drinking, face east (if above the equator; if below, face north), and shake out the sillies. If you perform these acts with your whole heart, your love life will improve within forty-eight hours, or possibly longer, if it works at all.** Good luck.
[*If you’ve never been in love before, it’s the same potion but at the end you can eat the cake. **You can double the spell’s power if you take a shower and leave the house.]
The question of love poems to offer to people you are trying to seduce, ahem, people you have fallen in love with, is more complicated. Your beloved does not want a used love poem. There can be a poem that you share with many, ahem, friends, as long as you introduce it as a poem you have loved and shared for a long time. If you want to do something that makes a person feel that a poem is specific to him or her, I think you have to find a new poem. I know, I know. It’s all touch and go. So make a commitment to a poem and stay with it.
Literature can coax us through poetic experiences of love that are mighty instructive, and it is a curriculum hard to communicate in straightforward prose. It’s not just that people you trust will break your heart (they will); and that it doesn’t all work out for everyone (it doesn’t); and that when love does work out, it requires a remarkable degree of compromise (it does). It’s the degree to which we fail to understand the other person; the gulf of unknowing between us all. A love isn’t all about understanding. It’s about knowing and getting known anyway.
Two people don’t become one, brains don’t work that way, the motormouths that they are, they never stop inventing schemes of personal interest, and imaging the possibility of its own need for mistrust. Literature teaches us that everyone has such a chatty Cathy of a brain. They stream different kinds of chatter, very different sometimes, but here is what is always true: no one’s actions and thoughts match up neatly, whether it is because we are trying hard to be good, or because we are lying.
So it’s about getting to know and be known anyway. Let’s all go sit under the cherry trees in spring and tell each other our stories and let the petals grace us. The season of cherry-tree petals is a fast one, but it comes back every year.
Once again, all of the above is in the Love chapter in The Wonder Paradox, FSG, out in paperback March 5 with Picador. Happy Valentine’s Day!
love,
Jennifer