Love Explained
Guy calls the doctor, says the wife’s
contractions are five minutes apart.
Doctor says, Is this her first child?
guy says, No, it’s her husband.
I promise to try to remember who
I am. Wife gets up on one elbow,
says, I wanted to get married.
It seemed a fulfillment of some
several things, a thing to be done.
Even the diamond ring was some
thing like a quest, a thing they
set you out to get and how insane
the quest is; how you have to turn
it every way before you can even
think to seek it; this metaphysical
reframing is in fact the quest. Who’d
have guessed? She sighs, I like
the predictability of two, I like
my pleasures fully expected,
when the expectation of them
grows patterned in its steady
surprise. I’ve got my sweet
and tumble pat. Here on earth,
I like to count upon a thing
like that. Thus explained
the woman in contractions
to her lover holding on
the telephone for the doctor
to recover from this strange
conversational turn. You say
you’re whom? It is a pleasure
to meet you. She rolls her
eyes, but he’d once asked her
Am I your first lover? and she’d
said, Could be. Your face looks
familiar. It’s the same type of
generative error. The grammar
of the spoken word will flip, let alone
the written, until something new is
in us, and in our conversation.
from Funny by Jennifer Michael Hecht. Winner of the 2005 Felix Pollack Prize in Poetry. Copyright © 2005. (University of Wisconsin Press, 2005)
The Joke says to his psychiatrist, “It’s no good if I have to explain myself.” Jokes and psychotherapy rotate around the same core: the joke mustn’t be talked out or the *snap* of laughter doesn’t happen, but the patient’s issue must be talked out for some *snap* of insight and recognition. The cure only happens when the secret links are spoken. This, of course, is no joke.
Life is, if not short, let’s say it’s medium long. Anyway, it’s often long, but it’s limited. It’s too limited for us to be right in hiding from our fears. Are you still you when you face them and let them go? Could be, your face looks familiar.
Here’s a joke appropriate to Think Bank: Two goldfish are in a tank, one says to the other, “Do you know how to drive this thing?”
I like this joke because I like to think beyond the fish in armory and get them back in their bowl but now it has wheels and one puts the same question to the other, “Do you know how to drive this thing?” It is funny because “tank” has more than one meaning, and it creates two funny images: two en-fished tanks, one glass one steel. Really a bittersweet and sour image because wheels or no, the fish is mistaken if it thinks the tank is going anywhere.
Folks, this is a stationary fishbowl. For a lot of us, a lot of the time. How is the commute to and from the office (or wherever we go) so different from a goldfish swimming back and forth in her tank? Sorry/not-sorry to be so noir here, but it’s always darkest before love saves the day. Love lights up the film, lets the fishbowl roll a little.
In my poetry book Funny most of the poems have at least one old joke in them. To open the joke into poetry and philosophy my formula was to add time and empathy. Actual time is boring and actual empathy hurts, but needs must.
When I say “empathy” I mean the kind I tried to conjure above, regarding pacing goldfish, where we realize our lives also have wheels on the tank but nobody knows how to drive the thing.
The above joke poem “Love Explained” always makes me smile. It has two jokes in it, the first makes the husband look, well, spacey, out of it, more than a bit socially confused. The wife gets up on one elbow, I see her lying on a gurney, as she explains that she wanted a spouse, a magic ring, but that want was complicated. She got this life and it’s odd at times, but fine. I’m both of them, at times.
She chooses not to mind his gaffe. Why? Because she knows that she has no social sense either and recalls having been the butt of her own joke when she indicated the true magnitude of the number of previous lovers that she had taken. These two belong together. Love is a wild and inventive patience; a furious acceptance.
In the last stanza of the poem I try to suggest that beyond the poem’s specific story, the point is that jokes are cognitive mistakes, you expect one thing and get another. And that through error we progress. This works best the sooner we recognize that we ourselves have made an error. We need to make some assumptions, especially at first, in any situation. We’ve made a wrong one. Notice it, stop everything, take in the information. You will thrash and splash but eventually learn something. You can survive it. Who am I kidding? It’s too hard. Better to go with the flow.
Rumi said and Leonard Cohen brilliantly borrowed, that there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in. Jokes are cracks in meaning, snappy and streamlined misunderstandings. The light that comes through is love, is the only way to approach a world that is acting upon us all the time, in systems beyond our comprehension. Free will? Yes. But so constrained by context that we do have to keep our eyes open for these cracks in everything wherein we can remember who and what we actually are. Which is love. Mistakes get us to love better than perfection.
If the ob/gyn or midwife has to ask “Is this her first child?”, we have to assume that the woman’s regular obstetrician can’t be reached. This is a moment of serious tension. He says “No, It’s her husband.” Because he knows who he is, dammit. How can she be angry when he sort of does this all the time?
What does she do all the time, poor dear? She says too much to the wrong persons. It’s likely she’ll grow out of it. And he’s in treatment and less out of it than ever.
And you dear reader, Substack reader, ie Dear Seader, what is your joke, your fundamental misapprehension? For most of us, our problem is closer to the husband’s problem than the wife’s, we think things are about us that aren’t about us at all. Big systems. We try to tell people who we are when they can plainly see for themselves. Both take so much energy, believing things are about us, and posing as something, and both are pretty funny to watch — from a distance.
You, Dear Seader, are perfect just the way you are. It’s good that I don’t have to explain myself. Just keep splashing. Your face looks kind of familiar. No, goddammit, it’s her husband. I wrote this poem around the turn of the century, after meeting my husband in 1999 and published it in my second poetry book, in 2005, which makes it at least twenty years old. It feels like I wrote it just a few years ago. Time rockets, let alone flies. The nice thing I can report is that I’m still married, and it all seems, how shall I say? It all seems gentler now. One explains oneself. One asks fewer questions. Love is still on a gurney somewhere in the halls of our imagination, up on one elbow, making certain careful explanations and hoping to understand.
Okay my dears, there’s your Sunday sermon, do what you do, or don’t, but stay alive and I shall return to encourage you again.
love,
Jennifer