Love is a burning thing. And it makes a fiery ring.
So said The Man In Black and what Johnny says is usually handed down on tablets of stone.
In 1897, Arthur Schnitzler wrote a play that caused something of a sensation called La Ronde, in which ten people form a circle without their knowledge, through their sexual relationships, from across all levels of society, transgressing class boundaries. And this is what it’s like in small places. Even with the advent of dating apps — the name Tinder itself nods to the incendiary nature of it — when you live in a small community, the internecine conflicts brought on by relationship breakdowns and the close-knit, travel averse nature of rural towns encourages it to remain inside a small perimeter. It ends up like a game of sexual musical chairs. I describe it as a daisy chain of stirring other people’s porridge. I can be quite repulsive when the mood takes me.
And that’s before we get to the Valley. They call it Valley Fever round here. With good reason.
Where there is smoke, there is fire. The smoke is gossip. Nothing is secret, or at least, not for very long. Speculation runs rife. Jungle drums beat incessantly, sending rivers of rumour coursing, rat-runs of tittle-tattle. It’s impossible to hide anything. One smouldering look across a bar and everyone sees it. And the dogs are away.
This has never previously been my thing. I preferred to keep my counsel. I abhorred the airing of my dirty laundry and chose not to sit in judgement on people’s peccadillos, preferring closed-shop constancy for myself.
Yet now, one of my myriad functions in The Robin seems to be that of Catholic priest. I can barely get through an evening without someone approaching me:
“Forgive me, Lupo, for I have sinned. It has been about twenty minutes since my last confession.”
It’s almost always about who’s done what, with whom and where. Sometimes I offer penance, sometimes I just move straight to absolution.
And it becomes a sort of chess game about how much one keeps to oneself. I have a sort of rule of three about this. If at least three separate sources have come to my booth with the same piece of information, then I consider it public domain. If it’s less, then I stay schtum. Otherwise, you’re juggling, and I have long held the opinion that juggling is the very definition of futility. It is the pursuit of keeping things in the air until you can’t anymore, until something is dropped. It is an exercise where the end goal is inevitable failure.
So, I take a pragmatic perspective on the rumour mill.
The downside for anyone partaking in the various bed-hopping, tent invasions and backseat boogaloos is that it’s very much like dropping a stone into one of the local millponds. It creates a series of concentric circles that ripple out, disturbing the calm all the way to the edges. The backwash sets up entrenched positions, rifts between lifelong friends, chasms and abysses opened. Although, with the passage of time, eventually they dilute down. Nobody can keep the rancour in a country cleft like this without being consumed by their own bile.
So, it ebbs and it flows. The gossip sustains the conversations; the actions that created it keep everything physic, driving a kinetic energy that, accidentally, keeps the art of storytelling alive, the act of narration, the verbal passing on. A campfire tradition, no different to Boccaccio’s The Decameron, back in the fourteenth century, ribald tales relocated from a Florentine tavern to the inns of Cragg. Wine comes from the grapevine; Bacchus and Dionysus would have loved it.
So, let them shilly-shally, shag and stand in full salute if they wish. Then whisper the deeds to me in the bar, while I search for a rosary and a Hail Mary that will permit them to go out and do it all again. Pass my hand down my body and then, left-to-right, in the sign of the Cross, completing the ritual by kissing the ring on the second finger of my right hand. A skull ring that was designed for Lemmy in Motörhead. A little levity is required, given I am very far from ordained. I think Lemmy himself would agree.
But here, in my confessional booth, there is one flaw in all this. It leaves me asking the question where this leaves love, real love. The only thing this atheist has ever truly believed in.
So, love burns. It’s charred and scarred me. Now, when I come back for more of its brutal beauty, I don’t look for the instant.
I prefer to wait. With the patience of Job.
For my heart’s idea of perfection.
