Bogumił Pacak-Gamalski-Graham

My Three Loves never left me. I have never left them, nor have I forgotten them. Through all my early years as a teenager, in an old country on the old continent, country that was greyer than the buildings sorrowing people, who lived there.

Mnemosyne

(by Dante Rossetti)

But my first love that had sprouted in my heart made it flowering, singing above the roofs of these grey buildings. The city of grey buildings, that rose from the ashes of the worst war that fell upon humankind. Yet – my first love gave it a warm embrace that belongs to the titanic Mnemosyne, mother of all the muses, daughter of Uranus and Gaia[i]. She was not the most sympathetic and meek of Titans with a slightly twisted taste in romantic escapades, after all she also bedded Zeus himself, who was logically speaking … her brother. But who’s blaming anyone? Not the Greek gods (or any gods, god forbid!) for their erotic (diss)behavior. I am merely a human, nothing more. For me then, in the grey city of my grey youth, Mnemosyne was the mother of Muses. That cleared her of any other crimes or indiscretions. Who would anyway, any other way? Surely, not when you are fifteen, seventeen or twenty! Love disregards all and any boundaries. And I was in love! Purely platonic, but fearless and furious; intellectually and emotionally on equal basis. And that love, otherwise called ‘friendship’, stayed with me my entire long life. I have never left her, she stayed with me in my traveling luggage all these decades.

My two other loves happened years after the first one. The next one happened almost unknowingly to my senses. It happened in that old country, still very much grey and poor, but on a threshold of new-found freedom, with dreams and appetites for brighter and greener fields ahead. A boy was borne of familial spring, just like the nymphs chasing after the image of Hyacinthus immortalized by songs of his Olympian lover – the God of Love Itself.  But beware of love offered by gods, my dear boy! They never end well for lesser lovers. I’ll tell you a story here, later on, in the last chapter, of the price I paid for asking for, and being granted the Love Immortal. The grief is as deadly, as the disk of Apollion that killed his lover – Hyacinthus. But wait, I take back these warnings and the words of sorrow and grief. For Love Eternal outlasts grief and sorrow. Each time and every time. Lament is temporary and is a sign of temporarily losing your perspective. If you grief losing a lover – the lover’s love will come back to you in time, for love can’t be solitary. It will seek and enter the other lover’s soul, because Love needs a nest.  

Alas, we went too far in this true fable, the allegoric story of my ordinary life and my Loves Immortal.

Boy was born in the Old Country, as I said. We all rejoiced. Remember walking with my parents, his older sister (a child herself), and the little boy in a walking stroller, a long walk through the countryside near Warsaw, through fields and meadows, to an old palace of some aristocratic imminence and a beautiful stream running through the meadows. Of course, we all loved the new boy. But I had no idea how important, how encompassing, and not always easy at all, that love would be. Didn’t have to wait very long, though, just few more years, few more of my returns to that old familial country and I knew. It was unspoken, unexplained, but very clear. She sprung not suddenly and unexpectedly, didn’t come from ‘the bolt in the sky’ (as it did happen in my last Love Eternal).

It was warmly growing inside me, flowering with tenderness. He was still a child, whom I could carry on my shoulders, as we walked through the streets of that old city that used to be so grey in my youth. But now the city was truly beautiful, transformed by modernity and embracing Western Europe. With that, it embraced the traditions of old Greece, of Zeus and Plato, and Plato’s talks with the boy Phaidros. The sweet youth, who desired his teacher, the old Socrato, and a thought that there must be something wrong with him, since his beloved teacher would not accept the gift of his pupil’s young body. But Socrates was wiser than simple desire. He knew that the boy deserves better than a tired body of not very attractive nor a rich old teacher. That in itself, without any further arguments, proves that Socrat was perhaps in love with that youth and choose of his own will a chanced possibility of better future for Phaidros. A sacrifice, if you will.

Not unlike relationship between Herr Aschenbach and sweet adolescent Tadzio, in “Death in Venice”[ii]. Sweet, tender and innocent – until one afternoon Aschenbach runs away from Tadzio to a park, exhausted and ashamed of himself collapses on a bench and hears himself saying aloud the dreaded proclamation: I love you. But once you say it aloud there is no escape, no turning time back. Ha! That ‘thing’: your desire, your dream could be the abyss of torment. Bliss and condemnation eternal.

What happened in that novella, if it happened and why, is totally irrelevant to our discourse on Love Immortal.  If you want to – buy or borrow that booklet from a library. It is not very long, but definitely it is master class of literature.

Hence – back to our story, my Second Love eternal to that boy from an old capital in Central Europe. Years (not that many in my calendar, but must have felt like an eternity in a teenager’s life of that boy) have passed and that boy, in a pivotal time of transformation into adulthood, comes to me in the New World, across the vast ocean and entire continent in search of his destiny(?), his ways through life. In short: in search of himself. At that time I was already well established, secured and totally committed and enthralled with my lifetime Love Eternal, one that consumed me happily, engulfed, and enthralled me without any hesitation. The one that was romantic and erotic. That boy from the Old Country came here exactly for these reasons, too. Firstly, he knew that I love him dearly and sincerely and I would not offer him anything that would be false, or based on pretense or judgment; would protect him, in as much as I could, from any harm that a sudden freedom can bring too.

That was the time, when my Love for that boy transformed to my Love Eternal: when he stopped being a boy from an Old Country, a nephew, for whom you care enormously – he became my Prodigal Son. Without any too strict connotation to the biblical story (of course, if needed, mistakes and transgressions would be forgiven – what proper father would not?). With another number of years the boy become a mature, well established, and educated man. For any parent, biological or emotional, it sounds like a solid reason to be proud. I am.

My Third Love

How should I name you, how should I call you, by what name? Who you are, who you were, where are you?

I can call you by my name for you are me. I can call you by your name for I am you. I can call you Love for you are My Love. Encompassing all my days and nights. Quivering like a blade of grass on summery meadow. Quivering and fluttering like my heart, when I call your name. I won’t be scared whispering to you: I love you – I will be brimming with pride, when I say it. You, who crossed the continent with me, to be with me. When I asked you, where we should settle for our sunset years, you answered: anywhere where you are going to be, because you are my Home.

When we met at the foothills of majestic Cordillera, bellow the amazing peak of Assiniboine Mountain, on the meadows flowing from the enormous Mount Temple, when we walked in the shadow of Mount Robson I wanted to hold your hand in mine. Wanted to show you how beautiful you look in the glory of these peaks surrounding you. Wanted to ask the angels floating around these peaks to come down and embrace you in their warm, godly wings. Just as I would, if I was a god. Maybe we were the gods? Didn’t we possess the most important attribute of deity: Love Eternal? Love that is everlasting. The Black Angel of Mercy in Hyde Park on Manhattan told us so, when we went on sunny October day to visit him.

When we walked the beaches of Northern Pacific in Tofino telling the anemones the story of our love – they danced in waves of happiness; when we walked the white beaches of Eastern Shore on Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia – the eagles danced above our heads and parasailors smiled seeing us traversing the beach.

You – my Third Love were the epitome of love, the Mount Everest of being alive. If I ever would lose the sense of smell – I would still remember the smell of your skin. If I ever lose my sight – I would still clearly see your eyes. If I ever lose my memory – I would want to not know who I am at all, because I would be nothing without the memory of Our Love.

[i] parents of Zeus

[ii] a novella by Thomas Mann