Chapter 1. Chapter One

“Chapter one...” -- Woody Allen, Manhattan

Why this story and not that one? It’s not just because the dude got his balls cut off, i’m certain of that.

Okay, so i’m no Alexander Pope.

Restart.

Years ago, R. emailed me a somewhat oblique take on the melotraumatic tale of one Pierre Abélard, né Pierre du Pallet, and Héloïse. Today, she barely remembers sending it and surely has no recollection as to her motivation for passing it along. But Abélard Pierre and Héloïse have haunted my mindspace nearly daily since, even poking through pop culture into surreal life from time to time in between.

•••••

It’s hot. Summertime nighttime hot, but the oppressive chemical sting of the city air is miraculously blunted and the windows opened. Inside, the computer hums and i stare.

“What is it about this story that fascinates you so much?” asks R. She’s wearing the thin pink robe untied over nothing, like nothing she bridges the distance between from the study doorway to here. Making as to read the latest floating bit caught bobbing on the information ocean now entrapped on-screen, she leans forward so that her breasts cradle my neck and i can smell her. R. has a delicate powdery scent.

Something i'm saying about Abélard’s take on The Crucifixion as a moral influence for humanity and the implications on his own Conceptualist philosophy is interrupted by a gasp as R. roughly pinches my nipple; theories of Abélard as romantic love’s first original sinner are blown away as her hands ease downward toward my lap.

•••••

Briefly put, the story of Abélard and Héloïse runs as follows. Abélard, the greatest philosopher/dialectician of the late 11th/early 12th centuries, cockily came to Paris full of piss and red-wine vinegar. He is paid to privately tutor teenager/scholar (and o yes, serious anomaly) Héloïse by her guardian, her uncle Fulbert. Abélard seduces Héloïse. She gets pregnant. Fulbert demands that Abélard marry Héloïse, which would require Abélard to surrender his post at Notre-Dame University. Abélard marries Héloïse in a very privately, then has her live out her pregnancy in a nunnery. Unsatisfied, Fulbert hires a group of men to find Abélard and castrate him. Which they do.

And that’s not, as they used to say in the infomercials, all! Abélard recovers (well, sort of). He becomes a monk and basically insists Héloïse become a nun. Which she does (!). They correspond for several years thereafter, and Héloïse outlives Abélard by 27 years, the exact difference between their ages. Their bodies were reportedly exhumed more than once, ultimately ending up (maybe) in the Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

•••••

The story has endured, but endured barely, for the Abélard and Héloïse romelodrama appears to have surrendered much of its currency over the course of the last century. Mark Twain noted that while the real story was known to “precious few people,” the lovers’ “names are perfectly familiar to every body.” Twain describes the couple’s Lachaise gravesite as essentially an 1800s version of Jim Morrison’s, replete with treasures of affection, tokens of lust and damn near worship for the dead. Of course, Abélard and Héloïse are hardly household names today. At least not compared to, say, Jim Morrison.

•••••

So it’s the “terrible and nameless mutilation,” right? I mean, that’s what sticks. With the cruelest cut of all – promised ever thereafter to make your own sorrows “in truth nought, or at the most but of small account, so shall you come to bear them more easily” – came a legend that has endured to the present day.

•••••

Read enough on the original modern doomed couple, and you’ll believe there’s a bit of Abélard and Héloïse in every love affair. Identify with the hero’s brash youthful vanity, the student-teacher attraction dynamic, or the tricky beauty of mutual seduction; identify with the common adoration for bookishness and over-intellectualizing, the tragic breakup, or the lifetime long-distance life support for a mortally wounded relationship ... but identify you will.

That just makes it a proper love story.

And I believe.

•••••

An unbelievable breeze flows through the bedroom window to cool the sweat from our bodies, while outside teenagers raucously talk and laugh their way onto the next summer romance.

•••••

Tom Stoppard knew that of love, blood, and rhetoric – and this story is right chockfull of all three – it’s the blood that is essential.

The emasculation: It’s that particular detail at 900 years removed, admittedly perhaps pure shock value, which captures the 21st century imagination. The sacrificial castration makes the Abélard and Héloïse story true nearly beyond the realm of credulity, and therefore so so real.

Because what would you give for love?