Breaching any language barriers

Feb. 8, 2007

Dear Julie,

At the beginning of the musical "The Light in the Piazza," American tourists Clara Johnson and her mother Margaret are walking in the work of art that is Florence when a gust of wind blows Clara's hat high into the sky. It lands in the grasp of a handsome young man who doesn't speak English but has been Clara's since the second he saw her. And she his.

Fabrizio can't fall in love with her words. It's her Clara-ness that entrances him. She is lovely and guileless.

But Fabrizio doesn't know that something happened to her when she was a child. An accident left her with a body that has become a woman's but emotionally and intellectually not quite grown up.

Clara's mother has shielded her from the world and from entanglements that could hurt her. She hopes to shoo Fabrizio away and to prevent them from falling further in love. But Fabrizio will not be discouraged by language barriers or a mother.

This e.e. cummings poem knows how he feels:

"since feeling is first

who pays any attention

to the syntax of things

will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool

while Spring is in the world"

I think it means that limiting yourself to thinking things -- most especially love -- are supposed to be a certain way means missing out on the juiciness of life. The syntax of things does not account for being wholly kissed. The syntax of things always makes sense, expects the world to be orderly, is on time, is never surprising, finds reasons not to.

Often language is only in the way.

Ultimately Margaret decides she cannot deny her daughter the unbounded love she herself has never known. In the end, what else will have really mattered? Nothing, cummings writes:

"my blood approves,

and kisses are a far better fate

than wisdom

lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry

-- the best gesture of my brain is less than

your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then

laugh, leaning back in my arms

for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis"

Near the end of "The Light in the Piazza," Clara overhears her mother say something that makes her realize something must be different about her. Didn't he see, Clara insists to Fabrizio, that they shouldn't marry? Almost a week after DC and I gave each other "The Light in the Piazza" for Valentine's Day his tender response in the song "Love to Me" still hangs in the air for me like Clara's hat and the memory of DC's face the first day I ever saw her in the ninth grade.

"The way you lean against the wind, and do not know that you are beautiful, Or that anyone is watching you, This is what I see," he sings.

Happy Valentine's Day.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is managing editor of the Southeast Missourian.