the moon and the scars

I particularly like these two passages from The Female Complaint:

1) This is why love's attack on memory is not usually considered a bad thing. Love is supposed to transcend or at least to neutralize the contradictions of history. When people enter into love's contract with the promise of recognition and reciprocity, they hope memory will be reshaped by it, minimizing out the evidence of failure, violence, ambivalence, and social hierarchy that would otherwise make love a most anxious desire for an end to anxiety. A fantasy norm unevenly bolstered by the institutions that are said to be its main supports, then, modern love requires the lover to produce an epistemology that works against the defenses of knowledge. In this convention, when love fails, the trauma of memory becomes a scar the failed lover carries around for life, declaring it as deserving of care, nostalgia, and mourning. But what is the failed lover ultimately mourning, if not the amnesia love's optimism creates?


2) As their smoke intermingles ... she says, "Oh Jerry. Don't let's ask for the moon! We have the stars!"

What does Charlotte mean by this phrase? Don't ask for a totalized object in love when we have so many bright and scattered opportunities? Or don't desire what you can't possess, and, ergo, desire what you can? Or, embrace your queerness, Jerry, don't be distracted by the big satellite when you can preserve the multiple practices and possibilities your desire has already created? Something about the difference between shining and twinkling? In the movie, the music swells when she makes this bargain, and the camera moves up to the starry sky, leaving the two lovers to their privacy.