Longing, the Beloved, and the Phone

I recently taught Dorothy Parker’s hilarious paean to longing: “A Telephone Call.” The premise is as brilliant (and relatable) as it is simple. A narrator awaits a telephone call from the man she is dating. Because it is the 1920s, she must remain at home near the object of her capture and potential release.

The story is structured as a prayer. “Please, God,” she begs, “let him telephone me now. Dear God, let him call me now.” The narrator thus externalizes not only the absent beloved, the one with the power to pick up his damn phone to call her, but also her idea of God, “so white and old,” surrounded by His angelic posse.

In this geometry of desire, only three routes are visible to her.

First, the man eventually calls and the narrator feels the euphoria—as one of my students put it—of the wish fulfilled, only for the cycle to inevitably repeat.

Second, she calls the man and either dons her “sweet” mask, which he accepts, or expresses her true longing, which he rejects: “They don’t like you to tell them you’re unhappy because of them. If you do, they think you’re possessing and exacting. And then they hate you.” And so, “You always have to keep playing little games.” Any relief felt in this second timeline is therefore temporary.

The third route is that she and the man never speak to each other again, and, having transmuted nothing, the cycle repeats with someone else. This third option is the one in which most people remain stuck, not only in relation to desire, but in general; moments of suffering that could become opportunities for transmutation instead become repetitive loops.

If she were to allow the mask to burn, to surrender to the ego-death or initiatory blaze this painful experience is inviting her into, however, she would perceive a passageway at an angle previously hidden to her. Down that passageway, she would walk, and, perhaps, encounter the initial filaments of a geometry that routes desire differently, and definitively so. Were she to surrender to the initiatory blaze required to sear the lesson into her very cells, she would embody the knowing of what her soul longs for and her egoic self/personality keeps outsourcing.

For it to be a true transmutation—that is, for that fourth timeline out of the illusory geometry of desire that has held her captive—she must go beyond intellectual- or speech-level knowledge and emotional-feeling knowledge, which are both surface layers that many confuse for true transmutation.

For a person whose daily geometries require external validation (e.g., “You matter to me and, as such, in general,” “You are worthy of my attention and, as such, love,” “You exist”) to suddenly know, in the body, that the Beloved is actually within her would shatter her way of experiencing and creating reality.

To yearn for the beloved, as Parker’s narrator does, is a simulacrum of a memory of one’s own Divine Flame—the Beloved. While some have found ascetism and celibacy clarifying, for me, returning to Divine Flame was returning to Eros. In the human realm, eros with a beloved (both with a lower case) can be a way to joyfully mirror and echo—not replace—this original Love.

The intense yearning in Parker’s story—considered in our society as unattractive, unhinged, and definitively uncool—holds a key to potentially unlock this initiatory blaze in a way that the detachment of the “cool girl” character cannot. Longing here is not meant to be a permanent state, as it is unsustainable and painful; it is meant to be a threshold before integration of a new understanding of the self.

If you wish to reprint (part of) this pulse or to engage for another reason, feel free to reach out here.

Image: Still from Pedro Almodóvar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), in which several women wait for a man to call them. (Spoiler: he is playing all of them.)