DON'T LET MARRIAGE BRO YOU DOWN

I speak as someone who swore off marriage -- to the opportunity instead of endless lifelong lovers. Because when two people agree to love each other forever, that's all they need to establish and defend their love. Where if the two should agree later not to keep the bargain, they are free to go on with at least some departed love scarcely allowed any longer the ones who fight and sue for property.

I know gentleman and lady friends of mine who I loved for years, knew all at once, and never married, and then again never needed to break up, no finality, letting friendship as love continue even past the worst fights. When someone knocks me down and I don't want to get up in any but their arms, maybe then i'll find marriage is after all for me -- but even if so, why would I want the state or church to have any say about it. I'm married if I say so and she does too, and if it's in both us already, why need marriage?

Here is something I wrote to speak at my friend's wedding this summer:

Once upon a time the spokes fell off the world and folks got separated from one another. Love is the song that ever since led folks to get together. We here are led together, gathered together, the saying goes, here today by not love but love in concert. These two so already long beloved, their union did not initiate in marriage. For love like jazz is more than shooting stars and fallen astronauts. A marriage is not stood and watched, it’s blessed, it’s made by being witnessed.

It was for this readiness to give witness the Ancient Mariner, when he chose someone to tell his awful journey, told a wedding guest.

“Day after day, day after day…
A painted ship upon a painted ocean…
Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink.”

Of course I’m kidding but probably somewhere marriage does lie between there and Jay Hawkins words: “I put a spell on you, because you’re mine.”

Not just because marriage is itself an entrancement, but the wedding vows are of those rare acts of speech that has the performing power casting a spell has. The vow doesn’t just tell or answer, describe or imagine a state of the world as do so many other words. These words are a declaration like a nation’s declaration of independence, bringing as they are spoken a new state into being. A marriage is love in concert, as I have said, and the performance is done on our memories.

We have witnessed already today the four directions: the west with the sun, we have witnessed the east with the growing harvests, and the north where lies that mushrooming civilization, the south with the coast and its seldom storm-blasts.

Fix these surroundings in mind then while you view the unfolding. We are here to join the entrancement, to countersign as witnesses this declaration. Put it in our memories and walk into the stream.