The readable city and the rhetoric of excess: a reading of the Song of Songs

Cross Currents, Wntr, 2003 by C.C. Pecknold

3. Love

More fundamental than the category of beauty is the category of love. Though beauty is a sign of love, it is not always easily read. It can be a sign of the hunger for love as much as a sign of love's fullness. In the Song, the body is described as beautiful. And yet a whole banquet table of beautiful descriptions seem insufficient to the love that beauty would describe. Beauty is a sign of love, and finds its true source in the love that exists in the relation between lover and beloved (I and Thou).

The whole body is loved and figures in the Song, and from the opening verse, "Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!" The body is described as beautiful because it is the object of love, but an impossible object, an object which defies description. The descriptions are absurd, but we are not deterred. We do not read the descriptions as absurd, but immediately shift our practice of interpretation to read the signs of love. We know that love transcends human description. We look to the poets to teach us about love, and we immediately recognize that we are being taught something about love in the excessive descriptions of the body which, if taken literally, would seem grotesque to us. But this is precisely why love is a more fundamental category than beauty in this Song. Even the grotesque would be beautiful if loved, because it is love which teaches us what is beautiful, indeed, gives beauty its significance ("you are beautiful, my love," 1.15; "you are beautiful my beloved" 1.16).

Love of the body figures the text, and figures the spaces of the text. The reading of fruits onto bodies is part of the logic of this text. And not only reading fruit onto bodies, but reading animals, precious gems, jewels and spices onto the body. The reading of these signs in relation signifies the intensity of the love that is center-stage. This logic of reading signs in relation teaches us to read the Song in an open way, reading other bodies onto these bodies. If I read Israel's body onto the body of the beloved, is this consistent with the logic of the text? This is the extension I think the text itself warrants. It would also warrant other extensions too. But these extensions, these readings of bodies in relation depends on a coherence with this logic that makes love center-stage, and that gives the greatest possible significance to this love between lovers. It is good to read God's love and God's beloved onto these bodies. This is how the text intends to be read.

But there is the waiting for love, and even, the suffering for love's sake. "Do not stir up or awaken love until it is ready!" (2.7) And there is the promise that this love will transform. "Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away." The logic of love in the text teaches us that transformation is the fruit of love; that in this relation of love, the beloved will change, and will want to change, in order to be where the lover is. Nature itself is invoked to teach this very point. "For now the winter is past" (2.11). The transformation promised, however, is like the transformation of the earth from winter to spring, or from darkness to light. But the transformation can only be talked about, for there is the waiting still. The promise is that transformation in love is something to hope for, to live for, to be open to a future when we will be found and not beaten, but loved and made different by this logic, this path of love. Is it not significant that it is when the beloved sleeps, that when she dreams, her hea rt is most awake? (5.2) It is when she dreams that she is most open to union with her lover. This is where the Song leads us, to union with the lover who has the greatest possible significance for us--we who are not voyeurs of this text.