Standing in the Doorway | Flaming September

LOVE IN FOURTEEN SONGS – THE FOURTH PAIR

Bob Dylan | Mark Seliger, 1997

‘Short Letter, Long Farewell’, the title of a 1972 novel by Peter Handke, could well serve as a leitmotif for many a Dylan song. ‘Standing in the Doorway’ is a late instalment in the lover’s long farewell: the song’s tired dignity testifies to the long road travelled. Indeed, its weariness is everywhere. Consider, for example, the self-pity: ‘You left me standing in the doorway, crying’: The lover, giving up the fight, admits defeat; passive, reduced to a spectator, he can only watch as the beloved walks away.

Jeanloup Sieff, Normandie, 1997

The pity slips into pathos: ‘I got no place left to turn’, ‘I got nothing to go back to now’, ‘even if the flesh falls off of my face, I know someone will be there to care’. But the only one who can give him a destination, replace nothing with something, give him the care he cares about, has turned her back on him. His fixation on her, kept alive for so long, has become a weary abdication of responsibility for himself. The lover’s evocation of his state, however, can still be touching. He is out of time: ‘Yesterday everything was going too fast, today it’s moving too slow’. He is out-of-sync with other people: ‘All the laughter is just making me sad’. He is lucid: ‘I know I can’t win, but my heart just won’t give in’.

Jeanloup Sieff, Les Baux-de-Provence, 1971

As for his evocation of the relationship itself—the dead horse he’s not quite resigned to stop beating, the tired horse he’s still clinging to on the merry-go-round of his obsession—what he says shows he still has farther to fall. ‘Don’t know if I saw you, if I would kiss you or kill you’ testifies to the hate rejected love can engender, while the devastating line that follows it—‘It probably wouldn’t matter to you anyhow’—makes it clear the beloved has had more than enough of the lover’s beseeching.

Jeanloup Sieff, Maroc, 1967

‘I would be crazy if I took you back, it would go up against every rule’: a pathetic reversal designed to salvage the man’s pride, for the last thing the woman wants is to be ‘taken back’. ‘I see nothing to be gained by any explanation, there are no words that need to be said’: The communicative impasse, the despair that comes when the coin of language has become a counterfeit currency, here gives way to the fantasy that reciprocal presence may suffice to restore lost communion. But the fantasy is not full-bodied, it’s more a relic of an illusion now given up. Indeed, the lover is aware that he’s ‘standing in the doorway, crying’, and that the beloved is not coming back.

Jeanloup Sieff, Lacoste, 1975

The lover’s inability to accept that the beloved has drawn a line under the relationship, that it’s over and she has moved on, borders on the pathological. If she refuses to slip into the co-dependent slot he has reserved for her, it’s likely because she has learned that ‘love’, in this relationship, rhymes with push and shove. Clearly, the lover is impossibly needy, his demands can never be met, and he is alienated from his own desire. Intuitively, we sense, she understands that he is full of bad faith and will only find grace if she refuses to play his game; her self-respect, then, precludes her from being his partner in dependence. Thus, in rejecting the pathos of his self-pity, she is doing him a service. Indeed, she knows, like Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne, that the way out of the impasse he’s in is through the mirror she, in her silence, is holding out to him.

Jeanloup Sieff, Israel, 1968

Marianne Faithfull | Jim Rakete, 1999

How does ‘Flaming September’ respond to ‘Standing in the Doorway’? With gravity and grace, with compassion and determination. Here, the woman is fully a subject, not defining herself against the lover who has gone. Her stance is entirely free of the sentimentality, the self-aggrandizement and the self-pity that characterizes ‘Standing in the Doorway’.

Jeanloup Sieff, ‘Mouche’, 1968

Her vision has been purified by the flames she’s been through, and those flames, we sense, date before any particular September. The witches, the weird sisters, are dancing; it goes without saying there’s ‘no happy ending to the game’. Armed with such lucidity, the woman will never be taken for a ride on a dead horse.

Jeanloup Sieff, Robe Madame Grès, 1980

She could show disdain, she could heap contempt, on the man who’s gone; instead, she simply reminds him of ‘all the life she gave to [him]’. Note that she says ‘life’, not ‘love’, for what passes for love (as we saw in the Dylan song) can often be deathly. She already knows the answer to the questions she asks, ‘What can you give me that is true?’, ‘What can you show me that is new?’. The authentic can touch her, she’s open to discovery, but she knows where it’s not coming from: ‘Don’t bother to call me’, ‘Don’t bother to tell me’.

Jeanloup Sieff, Jean-Marc Sinan mode, 1987

And while her ‘youth lies bruised and broken’, she takes responsibility for it: ‘I’ll live on here just the same’. She doesn’t claim to be self-contained, she does say she doesn’t need anyone, but she knows who and what she doesn’t want.

Jeanloup Sieff, Queen (London), 1961

Where ‘Standing in the Doorway’ displays a weariness that, despite the long road travelled, still can’t accept the independence of the other, ‘Flaming September’ shows not a personal but a world-weariness, one that, paradoxically, is free of complacency. Indeed, neither denying vulnerability nor making an exhibition of it, the song is all the more touching for being free of both illusion and self-pity: the dignity and courage evident in it testify to a life lived in self-respect and responsibility.

Jeanloup Sieff, Harper’s Bazaar, 1962

LOVE IN FOURTEEN SONGS – I

LOVE IN FOURTEEN SONGS – II

LOVE IN FOURTEEN SONGS – III

LOVE IN FOURTEEN SONGS – V

LOVE IN FOURTEEN SONGS – VI

LOVE IN FOURTEEN SONGS – VII