The Lady of Shalott by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Another day, another episode, in this Valentine's Day Extravaganza, and today, we are talking about Limerence and unhealthy iterations of love. What's wrong with wanting to love and be loved? Nothing, as long as it's not all in your head.

Among lonely people, there is often a trend to get caught up in the dream of love, instead of the actual reality. Sometimes, the dream takes over, and leads us down some troubling pathways. 

Loneliness is part of the human condition, and with modernisation, we have all the appearance of being connected, while the reality is significantly different. A Victorian age poet predicted such a world, in the poem, "The Lady of Shalott", in which a lovely young woman is stuck in a tower, watching  people's lives through a mirror. She has not contact with them, and her loneliness grows as she watches them move on, grow, get married. Sound familiar? Well, it should. 

Such a set up is exactly right for loneliness to take over, and for Limerence, the state of being caught up in obsession over a runaway crush to take over.  In this episode I talk about the Lady of Shalott, and my own experiences of Limerence, and why reality is much better. 

Transcript

The Lady of Shallot

"Out flew the web and floated wide. 

The mirror cracked from side to side. 

The curse is upon me

cried the Lady of Shallot."

Hello and welcome back to there’sabookforthat, a podcast in which I, Rumbie, a bookworm, talk about books I have read and apply them to social issues in everyday life. This week, we are looking at LOVE, in honour of the commercial love extravaganza that is Valentine’s Day. I wasn't sure if I wanted to do this episode in the middle of the Valentine's Day week extravaganza, but then I decided to be mischievous and do it because why the hell not?

Our book for today is the Lady of Shalott, by Lord Alfred Tennyson, a well to do Englishman who was the Poet Laureate during much of Queen Victoria's reign, to give you an idea of both the time period in which he lived, and his importance. 

I first encountered the story of the Lady of Shalott in a book called " The Mirror Cracked” by Agatha Christie. In it, someone dies, and Miss Marple, the resident detective has to solve the murder. All that happened as usual, but there was this short stanza, which was key to the story, from the poem, the Lady of Shalott. I was completely enchanted by the few lines I read, and spent ages trying them out in different inflections, trying to figure out what this lady would have sounded like, realising that she was cursed and therefore doomed. As you heard at the beginning, I have not quite nailed it.  

How would she say it? She cries out, and the narrator tells us that she cried out, so you have to change your voice quickly between the two. 

The curse is upon me, cried the lady of shallot. The curse is upon me, cried the lady of shallot. The curse is upon me. 

Out flew the web and floated wide. Is it dramatic? Out through the web and floated wide. The mirror cracked from side to side. Out flew the web. I couldn't figure it out, but I just loved the sound of it. I loved the way that it rolled off the tongue and so I wanted to read the whole poem and find out what happened next.

I then found the book, a slim volume with illustrations, in the library at Thamesmead Community College where I went to school. I think I was about 13, and perhaps it was the summer, because I seemed to have a lot of time. The poem is 20 long stanzas, a full story told from start to finish, I think it's 8 or 10 lines per stanza, but I loved it so much that I copied the whole thing out from this beautiful hardback book. I copied it line by line, onto multiple pieces of lined paper, and then put them in my binder and just kept them there. I would reread it every so often, trying to memorise it. It might still be at my mum’s, in neat, faded, blue handwriting. Aah, what a simpler life I led. Such an interesting child. 

Today in this podcast I get to talk about this poem that I love so much. It’s not the most fun story, which is why I was not sure if I wanted to talk about it today, but as we're talking about love, I think it's important for us to talk about unhealthy iterations of love. It's important for us to talk about how things can go wrong, how you can get lost in a dream that weaves you into itself like a spiders web. Once there, it’s difficult to escape and you toss and turn but all that happens is that you're getting more and more wound into it until eventually it stifles your breath, it stifles you. And you are no longer. 

How dramatic, I apologise, I will try and keep the hyperbole to a minimum. 

But I'm hoping that as we talk about this subject today, as we think about the lady of Shalott, or Shally, we can learn from her life, the intensity of her experience and the futility of it all. At its heart, it is a story about the problem of loving too hard, of unrequited love, and invisibility. In the words of Alicia Keys, it feels like OOOH, you don’t know my name. 

So, let’s rewind. This is fast becoming a confessional podcast, but I assure you, it’s just for this week. At 23, I had my first brush with ill-fated love. My mum was recovering from chemo, I was in the second year of university, finally, after multiple attempts, and I was ready for life to surprise me with good things. Then I met this man, and within 24 hours, I had lost my mind. The shame, the drama, the pain of those days comes back to me, and I can but laugh, Wow! I really lost my mind. I will of course blame it on being young and innocent, but I really was so enamoured of this guy. I lost perspective. Like everything about him just seemed to set me on fire. I was like, this is my destiny. This, this is the one. 

It wasn’t even a secret, everybody knew, for reasons beyond my control actually, that was not a fun part of the story, so we won’t talk about it, but suffice it to say, I went from never thinking about marriage to picking out my wedding dress in a month. It was a lovely dress, on a plus size model, so I could really see what it would look like on me, but there was one problem. 

This man seemed quite, ambivalent about me. He was a sailor, so he was away a lot, and like the sea, he had a lot of moods. I just wanted nice sunny days and calm waters, but it felt like every time that we spoke, I was meeting a new person. Still, I persevered, what did I know, I was young and dumb. I thought things would eventually work out. Nowadays, when I act decisively and disqualify myself from playing people’s mind games, people are always like, “Oh Rumbie, why are you like this?” I am like this, because I know from experience, 100% of the time, if someone does not see your value from day one, and act like you are valuable from day one, they are not going to have an epiphany on day 620. Maybe for other people it might work, and like I said in yesterday’s episode, we have the single outlier in our friend Mevlut who managed to rewrite his destiny while asleep, but that was a work of fiction. I have yet to see it in reality.

I was perplexed, why was this person not acting the way I expected why was there hot and then cold and then frost, and then hot again? I hate inconsistency in people, it brings out the worst in me because I become paranoid, how do I know how to behave when I never know if I will be dealing with Jekyll or Hyde, so after a year, I directly asked, and received indirect answers. To me, that’s always a no, so I took my bruised heart, and moved on. Looking back though, I lived so much of that year in my head, the dreams and hopes and plans I made felt real. I wanted them to happen, and as long as the hope was there it was possible. There were times we made plans, and he didn’t turn up, not a word, and then it would turn out that he thought it was the next day, or he had some emergency and didn’t bother to communicate, (today’s Rumbie would have him blocked and have moved on within hours, but like I said, I was young and dumb). I lived so many dreams in my head, imagining what we would do when he came back from the sea, ah, what a silly girl I was. Looking back, I realise that I might have been trying to run away from my actual life. Maybe, I just wanted something that was mine, in the midst of all that chaos, and as we will see today in our discussions of unhealthy obsession and limerence, this is frequently the case. 

Eventually, I concluded that really what I was in love with was the feeling of the unrequitedness, that becomes the addiction at some point, it’s what you're used to. I grew used to the anxiety and started to associate it with him. Today, if I feel even a whiff of that anxiety about anyone’s feelings, I get my HR speech out and start wishing people well in their future endeavours. I refuse to live like that, but this friends, is the story of the Lady of Shalott. A state of anxiety induced by the appearance of a man. Instead of accepting that people come and go, this was not the love of her life, he did not even know she existed, she got stuck on her first love, infatuated, and obsessed, as I am sure many of us have been, but she could not escape it, and it led to her doom. 

Stuck in her little tower with nothing but images of the real and a loom for company, she too was stuck in her head, with nothing but dreams and hopes of what could be if only life was different. I am so glad that I read this story before I lived her life, but I am also disappointed with myself, that having read her story a decade before, I still fell into the same trap as our dear friend Shally. 

I think more of us live in dreams than we may like to admit, and I would like in today’s episode to remind us that it’s not healthy. As a fellow addict, I understand the attraction. You get caught up in the chase, in the dream, you're able to control the pace, the events when you are living inside your head. You're able to imagine the worst and feel it, and immunise yourself as it were, to the worst that can happen, but none of it is real, so there are no real stakes. At the end of the day, you are safe. But what if that was your entire life? What if you were so tied into that life and you couldn't escape it anymore. What if the pursuit of the real actually killed you?  Let’s go to our story. I will read most of it today, so be prepared. There are a lot of beautiful lines which contribute to the telling of the story, so I will make sure that we get all of them. 

Let’s set the scene. This is the background to our tale, Quote 

“On either side the river lie

Long fields of barley and of rye,

That clothe the wold and meet the sky;

And thro' the field the road runs by

       To many-tower'd Camelot;

And up and down the people go,

Gazing where the lilies blow

Round an island there below,

       The island of Shalott.

Willows whiten, aspens quiver,

Little breezes dusk and shiver

Thro' the wave that runs for ever

By the island in the river

       Flowing down to Camelot.

Four gray walls, and four gray towers,

Overlook a space of flowers,

And the silent isle imbowers

       The Lady of Shalott.” End Quote

All alone on a silent little island, where all she can do is look down to Camelot where people are living their lives, our poor young lady is stuck. She has no choice in the matter, we know not why, or how. There are some who speak of her, from among the villagers, but no one can truly be sure that she is there, it is only the reapers working early in the morning, (this was the Victorian age, there were a lot more people doing these jobs) occasionally hear her sing, and call her a “fairy”, a make-believe personage shrouded in myth and mystery. But what of her life? How does she spend her days, what is she doing embowered in this silent isle? Well, poor thing, she is a captive of sorts, though we know not why, Quote

“Part II

There she weaves by night and day

A magic web with colours gay.

She has heard a whisper say,

A curse is on her if she stay

       To look down to Camelot.

She knows not what the curse may be,

And so she weaveth steadily,

And little other care hath she,

       The Lady of Shalott.

And moving thro' a mirror clear

That hangs before her all the year,

Shadows of the world appear.

There she sees the highway near

       Winding down to Camelot:

There the river eddy whirls,

And there the surly village-churls,

And the red cloaks of market girls,

       Pass onward from Shalott.

Sometimes a troop of damsels glad,

An abbot on an ambling pad,

Sometimes a curly shepherd-lad,

Or long-hair'd page in crimson clad,

       Goes by to tower'd Camelot;

And sometimes thro' the mirror blue

The knights come riding two and two:

She hath no loyal knight and true,

       The Lady of Shalott.

But in her web she still delights

To weave the mirror's magic sights,

For often thro' the silent nights

A funeral, with plumes and lights

       And music, went to Camelot:

Or when the moon was overhead,

Came two young lovers lately wed:

"I am half sick of shadows," said

       The Lady of Shalott.” End Quote

So, she has to weave images that she sees through her mirror, day by day, and has been told that a curse will come on her if she “stays to look down at Camelot”. First of all, why? What did poor Shally do? There is no hidden redemption in her fate, except to mind her business, stick to her loom until she dies, watching other people live their best lives, as though on TV, (Tennyson obviously envisioned the future that we now live, in which we watch people living their lives, cooking, eating, sleeping on tv), but who would choose to live such a life, without the option to get out there and do something worth watching yourself? Unlike for example the Beast in Beauty and the Beast who could recover his form if someone loved him or he loved them, whichever it was, the Lady of Shalott has no get out clause. 

She watches other people live their lives, like shadows in Plato’s cave- although they were in a mirror, so presumable clearer, but still she says, I’m half sick of shadows. Shades back in the day, her day could also mean ghosts, and that’s fitting, because these people in the mirror are only half lives. She cannot be sure they are real; she cannot interact with them. They only half exist, but to them, she does not exist at all. I would be sick of it too girl. 

Unfortunately, I think a lot of women are encouraged to live for shadows. Growing up we are encouraged to think about marriage and babies and weddings, as though we know anything about these things. All we see are other people’s lives, and then only the good things, the propaganda intended to make you think it will be worthwhile. Even now, as people start to tell stories more publicly about how hard it all is, the pitfalls, and the reality of it all, we are still encouraged not to look at the real, and focus on the shadows. “It will be worth it, because it will be yours,” we are told, in the face of a 1000 red flags. 

We are sold the shadow of romance, but that’s all it is. Unfortunately, as Valentine’s day proves, year on year, and the global wedding and marriage industry, the magazines, the diamond industry and the myth of 2 months’ salary, people love shadows. Who doesn’t want romance? I am not making this podcast because I am anti romance, I am all for it. I LOVE LOVE. 

I just think we might need to redefine it so it actually works for everyone, and the first thing, is to move away from the dreams of romance and into the reality of what it really means to love, (listen to Monday’s episode featuring the Prophet by Khalil Gibran) and be in a relationship. Yuk. Who wants reality when you could have flowers and candy, holding hands, long walks on the beach and whatnot. 

Romance is not new. There have been stories of romance across the world and throughout the ages, and the world that our Shally inhabits is no different. In fact, hidden in Tennyson’s rhyme is a little hint at what her life could have been like, had she not been a captive on her little island. Quote 

“And sometimes thro' the mirror blue

The knights come riding two and two:

She hath no loyal knight and true,

       The Lady of Shalott.” End Quote

Here is a little history for us, hidden away in this story, at least my generous interpretation. So, there was this idea back in the day of courtly love, and this basically meant that because people were not necessarily getting married for love, or what we know as love today, especially among the rich, they needed something else. In those days, your parents might betroth you as a baby to marry the Prince or the Duke from the next area next to you, and you just had to go along with it. But as a way of bringing some titillating excitement into the lives of people, there was this idea of courtly love. This involved, for the royals, the knights, those glorious fighting men who were the very image of valour and honour what we might call today, “work husbands and wives”. 

They would choose, or be chosen by certain ladies at court, and they would “serve those ladies”, wearing their tokens, or colours, when jousting or going to war. It’s all very Game of Thrones, or the American tradition of wearing someone’s blazer. It was just a way of saying; this one is mine. But, in all of that, everything still had to be kept very chaste, because these were very Godly, Christian people. So, it was all non-sexual, they just did it for the romance. Writing letters, sending flowers, being dramatic, little looks at dinner whatever, it was all a part of it. So, when Tennyson says, she has no knight, he means that she does not even have access to that romance, which in itself is a shadow of a real love, or marriage. He’s basically saying that she is ALONE, ALONE. Valentines is coming, where is her boyfriend? Lonely, she is so lonely.

That stanza, connected to the next section shows why she falls in love so deeply and suddenly. Our girl is doing her thing with her loom and mirror, when she sees in her mirror, this man. Quote,

“A bow-shot from her bower-eaves,

He rode between the barley-sheaves,

The sun came dazzling thro' the leaves,

And flamed upon the brazen greaves

       Of bold Sir Lancelot.

A red-cross knight for ever kneel'd

To a lady in his shield,

That sparkled on the yellow field,

                                                 Beside remote Shalott.” End Quote!

What, you may be wondering, is a Red Cross Knight? I hope you are wondering, because I am about to tell you. The Red Cross Knight is from the allegorical poem The Faerie Queen by Edmund Spencer, written during the first Elizabethan age, (so before this epic poem we are looking at today). The Red Cross Knight represents virtue- Christian virtues, such as temperance, (being able to control yourself), Holiness. Chastity (zero body count), Friendship and Justice. The Red Cross Knight is basically the embodiment of goodness or virtue, in the Western world. They were the knights in pursuit of the Holy Grail, going to the Middle East to start wars for the Holy Land in the name of God. Look how little things have changed in all these hundreds of years. In Spencer’s poem, well, you know the story of Othello, it’s that with a Super Mario twist with Princess Peach doing the rescuing. Like Peach Melba. Like Shrek maybe. 

Basically, the Knight is in love with a girl, she loves him too, but then somebody else who's trying to keep them apart and that person is lying. And then he (the knight) gets all jealous, and thinks something old timey, like, “this trollopy wench”, “this strumpet”, she doesn't love me, she's not chaste (a nice virgin girl) because that's a virtue men have been obsessed with forever. And then it turns out that she is chaste, and she rescues him from a scrape, and then they live happily ever after. Roughly. There are entire English departments that have just caught fire from my description, but I really only had time for the Wikipedia version of this, I have enough to read this week. 

So, anyway, Tennyson takes the idea of the Red Cross Knight, this virtuous man, and applied it to Lancelot, who was also one of the legendary (fictional) Knights of the Round Table. So, what we are supposed to know here is that 1Lancelot is a great guy, squared. He’s the best of the best, of the best. Poor Shally never had a chance is what Tennyson wants us to know. She was not just being silly, he was amazing.  Quote

“His broad clear brow in sunlight glow'd;

On burnish'd hooves his war-horse trode;

From underneath his helmet flow'd

His coal-black curls as on he rode,

       As he rode down to Camelot.

From the bank and from the river

He flash'd into the crystal mirror,

"Tirra lirra," by the river

       Sang Sir Lancelot.” End Quote 

Shame. The moment she saw him in that mirror, it was over for her. I get it girl, sometimes you meet someone and it’s like that, but you know what, it’s hardly ever good news. I am team slow burn and this story is exactly the opposite of that. He was handsome, could sing, riding a horse, a whole ass knight, damn! If love is going to kill you, you should at least be able to justify it 300 years later, and our lady could- except for one thing. This man had no idea she existed. 

I think what makes me saddest about this story, and the general problem with unrequited love-is how unbothered the object of the love is. He simply does not know. In the Alicia Keys song, you don’t know my name, she goes on and on about him not knowing her name, and yet on the other side, she is convinced that this is a coupling that could work. Delulu is the only word that we can use to describe the state of having feelings for someone who doesn’t know you exist. It’s a parasocial relationship, and about as real as me calling myself Mrs David Boreanaz when I was 15. It’s not real. The Lady of Shalott throws her life away upon seeing Lancelot in her crystal mirror. It’s a one-way mirror, in which only she sees him, but his world continues unmoved. For her though, it’s instant. There is barely a moment’s thought, and we see finally what it means to “stay to look down to Camelot”. 

Quote

“She left the web, she left the loom,

She made three paces thro' the room,

She saw the water-lily bloom,

She saw the helmet and the plume,

       She look'd down to Camelot.

Out flew the web and floated wide;

The mirror crack'd from side to side;

"The curse is come upon me," cried

       The Lady of Shalott.”

Ah, the drama. I still feel it now as I read, over 20 years since the first time. This is a masterpiece. Moghel was just living her life, and then this man came along and he ruined everything for ever. Within two seconds, the curse was upon her, and her doom was sealed. Ahhh, women really suffer in life, especially for love. My sisters, be careful, don’t give it all up for Lancelot, especially when he doesn’t even know your name. 

In that moment, her life broke, and all for a dream. I would like to take the time to self-diagnose my illness, as well as that of my old friend Shally. 

According to the lady who coined the word in the 70s, Psychologist Dorothy Tennov, Limerence, is Quote 

“Not love. It is the force of evolution expressed as the compulsion for the particular, this particular one above all others. Often it is called love”. End quote

She states that, quote 

“Limerence occurs across sexual, racial, age, cultural and other categories. It also follows immutable rules: It endures as long as do the conditions that sustain both hope and uncertainty”.

All well and good, but what is she talking about? What is Limerence? Well, she says that it is first and foremost a condition of cognitive obsession. I will make it simpler and say it’s a runaway crush. When you find yourself having real feelings for someone you don’t actually know, and you cannot get out of it, or stop thinking or talking about them, while there is nothing coming back on their end, you might be caught in the limerent loop. 

She (Dorothy Tennov) goes on to describe the basic components of Limerence. She did a study where she spoke to 500 couples in the 70s, and that research is what she then based the book on. I’m not going to read all of them, but most of the book is free in Google Books. You can take a look at page 23 of Love and Limerence for the actual components of limerence. Here is a quick summary of what I thought were the most significant ones. 

1.      Intrusive thinking about the object of your passionate desire. 

2.      Acute longing for a super reciprocation. 

3.      Dependency of mood on the limerent object’s actions, or more accurately, your interpretation, because it's all in your head 

4.      Some fleeting or transient relief from unrequited limerent passion through vivid imagination of action by your crush. In the lack of any reciprocity, you conjure up a relationship and have a relationship with the person in your head, which is why sometimes the actual relationship is disappointing. I talk about limerence and these kind of mental projections that we have, this maladaptive daydreaming that we do with respect to the lady of Shallot because there's no reason, when you read the whole poem, for her to feel as strongly as she does about Lancelot. She literally has only seen his helmet and his helmet feather, his plume. There's nothing real there. He doesn't know her. She's not even really seen his face. And yet there's a hope that takes over her, that makes it enough for her to think that this is something that I want and something that I'm going to pursue. 

5.      The inability to react Limerently to more than one person at a time, which means you're in this monogamous relationship with your head, probably unable to respond to other people who might actually like you in real life. 

With limerence, the same kind of thing is happening where things are in your head. There's nothing actually real, but it's enough for you to pursue your Limerent object, that person that you want to be in that relationship with, even, to your death, in the case of our friend Shally.

Other things that Tennov says are components of this runaway crush that causes havoc are an aching of the heart, so you actually have physical symptoms. One might also experience a general intensity of feeling that leaves other concerns in the background and a remarkable ability to emphasise what is truly admirable in the limerent object, the crush, and avoiding dwelling on the negative. This is where you start to make excuses for why the person doesn't love you or treat you how you want to be treated. Tennov describes a couple, (n which the lady describes her feelings for her love, saying quote, 

 “Yes, I knew he gambled, I knew he sometimes drank too much and I knew he didn’t read a book from one year to the next. I knew and I didn’t know. I knew it, but I didn’t incorporate it into the overall image”. 

Reading through the descriptions of the components of limerence, I am pretty sure I went through all of them.

According to Shaver and Hazan, social psychologists working in the area of attachment theory, who also built on Tennov’s work, Quote,

 “Those suffering from loneliness are significantly more susceptible to limerence.”

They state that

"if people have a large number of unmet social needs, and are not aware of this, then a sign that someone else might be interested is easily built up in that person's imagination into far more than the friendly social contact that it might have been. By dwelling on the memory of that social contact, the lonely person comes to magnify it into a deep emotional experience, which may be quite different from the reality of the event.” End Quote

Who is lonelier than a young woman with a mirror and a loom for company? Or a single girl who has spent the past year trying to hold it all together while watching her mother battle cancer? Limerence is not a response of healthy, happy people, and if you are caught in the cycle, thinking about someone on a loop, unable to break out, whether they show you any sign of affection or not, well, “You’re in danger friend”. Loneliness is breaking you and it’s time to talk to someone. It’s not healthy to live out a whole relationship in your head. Come back to us. 

Part of the reason why limerence is separated from love in Dorothy Tennov’s theory and why I personally separate it from love looking back on myself as a 23-year-old, is because there is so little that you know about this person and so much of it is in your head. “This is how this person is going to treat me. This is how this person is going to feel about me. This is how we this is what we're going to do. This is where we're going to go, but none of it is real, and even if it did happen, it would always be anticlimactic. I regularly experienced this every time I met the sailor. After spending weeks imagining Sunset Beach level storylines, there was no way he could compete by taking me to dinner and a movie. It was always going to be disappointing. 

The reason I wanted to talk about the lady of Shalott and the reason why she's stuck in my mind for 25 years. Oh my, has it been that long? How old am I? Nearly 25 years, is because I've always been struck by how much she was the agent of her own undoing. Obviously she does not know what the curse is, but she knows it exists. She knows that if she stay to look down at Camelot, the curse will come upon her. Stay has two meanings here, but I always take only one. You stay your hands or you stay. Your anger means you control yourself. You don't let it overtake. She had no self-control, so it’s obviously not that one. Option B is you stay. You remain. For me, reading that the curse will come down on her if she stays, and thinking about the religiosity of the people at that time, I associate the curse and the admonition not to stay and look down at Camelot with the curse of Lot’s wife in the Bible. Lot’s wife, in the Bible, was told not to look back at the cities of Sodom and Gommorah which had been cursed, or sentenced to death by God. Some religious scholars have said that it's not the actual act of looking back, but it's the act of looking back with longing that was the issue. Lot’s wife wanted to go back to Gomorrah. She wanted her life back, because you know, that's where she had her friends, and her family, where she had her life. She looked back at the life that she was living, and that's what made God turn her into a pillar of salt, because she was not ready to let go. She stayed her heart in Sodom and Gomorrah. Or her heart stayed there. I believe that this is the same kind of curse. Shally does not just look down at Camelot in a fleeting way. 

She remains to look down at Camelot, leaves her heart there. She knows that she shouldn't, but something catches her eye and in that moment, looking at Lancelot in the mirror, she says, this is not enough. Perhaps she wanted him to see her, she wanted a duet, both of them singing Tirra Lirra by the river but unfortunately, the curse is fast acting. She stays, she lets her heart go down there and build a home for her and Lancelot, and with that, she is undone.  

One of the most astonishing things from this point, is that she seems to instinctively know what to do next, and none of it is happy. Oh, you didn’t know she died. Oh yes. As soon as she looks, that’s it. She comes outside of her tower for the first time, like a bald Rapunzel, finds a little boat, writes her name on it, “the lady of shallot”, and sets a course to flow through Camelot. It’s sort of like London, with the river running through it, so the current bears her all the way down, and the villagers are obviously terrified to see this dead lady in a boat flowing down. Quote

“In the stormy east-wind straining,

The pale-yellow woods were waning,

The broad stream in his banks complaining,

Heavily the low sky raining

       Over tower'd Camelot;

Down she came and found a boat

Beneath a willow left afloat,

And round about the prow she wrote

       The Lady of Shalott.

And down the river's dim expanse

Like some bold seër in a trance,

Seeing all his own mischance—

With a glassy countenance

       Did she look to Camelot.

And at the closing of the day

She loosed the chain, and down she lay;

The broad stream bore her far away,

       The Lady of Shalott.

Lying, robed in snowy white

That loosely flew to left and right—

The leaves upon her falling light—

Thro' the noises of the night

       She floated down to Camelot:

And as the boat-head wound along

The willowy hills and fields among,

They heard her singing her last song,

       The Lady of Shalott.

Heard a carol, mournful, holy,

Chanted loudly, chanted lowly,

Till her blood was frozen slowly,

And her eyes were darken'd wholly,

       Turn'd to tower'd Camelot.

For ere she reach'd upon the tide

The first house by the water-side,

Singing in her song she died,

       The Lady of Shalott.

Under tower and balcony,

By garden-wall and gallery,

A gleaming shape she floated by,

Dead-pale between the houses high,

       Silent into Camelot.

Out upon the wharfs they came,

Knight and burgher, lord and dame,

And round the prow they read her name,

       The Lady of Shalott.”

Then Lancelot sees her, does he die too? Does he cry? Does he know that she died just so she could see his helmet and silly feather? Not at all! Listen! Listen to what Lancelot says eventually when he sees her poor dead body floating down the river.

“Who is this? and what is here?

And in the lighted palace near

Died the sound of royal cheer;

And they cross'd themselves for fear,

       All the knights at Camelot:

But Lancelot mused a little space;

He said, "She has a lovely face;

God in his mercy lend her grace,

The Lady of Shalott."

That’s it. That’s everything. Listen, if you have ever been the victim of unrequited love, don’t bother trying to claim compensation, because that is the best you will get, “Sorrows, sorrows, prayers”. This man was unmoved, and just thought, “Oh, I might have moved to that if she was alive”.

Fuck you Lancelot!

So, in conclusion, I want to finish by saying that to this day, I still consider my most healthy relationship to have been my shortest lived. I spoke about him in the episode on the prophet, and honestly it was great. In 2 weeks, I was wowed, and dumped, but in the gentlest, most respectful way. Everything about that relationship still stands out to me as holding a lot of what I want today, and if I had met that person a few years later, I would have been the right person for that relationship. It wouldn’t have worked out due to his roving eyes, but for as long as it lasted, it would have been great. Probably! The most important thing though, to which I want to draw attention now, is how little I thought about him, when I was not actually talking to him. 

I remember noting it at the time, I was at work, at Waitrose, and I mentally compared the feeling of this nascent relationship with the obsession of the previous man, and it was so refreshing. He had said how he felt, I had said how I felt, and until we told each other differently, that was it, so I did not have to do any mental gymnastics or algebra to try and figure out what he wanted from me, or who he was- nothing. The communication was 100 % with no games. A lot of the times when we get stuck in limerence, what we are really trying to work through is the lack of information that would enable us to decide. If I know if my love loves me, then I can feel secure, and focus on being happy, but as long as I am not sure, as long as nothing has been said, then all I have are shadows and my imagination, in which I torture myself, and suffer as a result. 

As we think about love, about Valentines, about making commitments, I invite you to perhaps consider that if nothing has been said, if no commitments have been made, if the communication is opaque, then perhaps you are dealing with someone who is hedging their bets and is not going to be able to give you what you need. If you spend more time thinking about them than you do talking to them, you are in a relationship with yourself, and you will be disappointed. You should not have to be a detective in your relationship, looking for clues that you are loved or cared for. If you aren’t tripping over the clues, they do not exist. 

The web is still flying and floating wide, trapping us under its curse, but we can fight back. We can make the choice to look down at Camelot, curiously, but without commitment, to look, without staying, without leaving ourselves there, unlike our friend Shally. 

Lancelot’s helmet and plume, and his pleasant song, tirra lirra, may catch our eyes and ears, but to lose your head over a man who does not know your name, how much they mean to you, I beg you, let’s declare a moratorium on that foolishness. That’s all good when you are still young and figuring things out, but once you stop being a teen, mind your business. If that man is going to wander the corridors of your mind, wearing out your floors, make sure he is building you a home in his mind, so you have somewhere to go. It also becomes an act of kindness to the other, to let them go, release them from our expectations, our hopes, to see them as they really are, completely uninterested, completely different from what we imagine. When we let Lancelot go, and let him lead his life free of the knowledge that for us, he was our greatest hope and final demise, we allow him to live his life with the people of his own choosing. We then also liberate ourselves to choose, to love and be loved, in the real world. 

Are you not half sick of shadows, of chasing dreams, of putting your hopes to sleep and waking up empty handed? Liberate yourself from the curse of unrequited love, of longing, of yearning. Be free my sisters!

I deliberately focus on male female relationships here, because I believe they have the most inequality and least amount of honest communication, making everything we have been talking about today much more likely to happen, with dire consequences. 

Reality isn’t all that bad. Step out of the limerence and join us here. Don’t go the way of the Lady of Shalott. 

Thank you for joining me on day four of our Valentines week extravaganza. Join me tomorrow to talk about our wild card, another cautionary tale about the dangers of losing yourself in love, Mon Mari, by Maud Ventura. 

Bibliography

1.      https://www.britannica.com/topic/Red-Cross-Knight

2.      https://www.medieval-life-and-times.info/medieval-knights/medieval-courtly-love.htm

3.      Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love, By Dorothy Tennov

4.      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Faerie_Queene

5.      https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4612-5044-9_8

6.