I have finished this essay, Strategies for the Game. It took many months of redaction and work on my life. This relatively short essay on love introduces some themes which will be explored at length in another essay. The virtue of commitment, which love is a part of, implies a full commitment, a foolish commitment, to love at all costs, to not let love be sabotaged by intelligence. For truth and love are opposites. Truth, fear, power, versus love, pleasure, devotion. They interrelate, they interpenetrate, yet each remains distinct. How can one you is dedicated to the All yet make pledges to those who seek other gains?
Daniel Christopher June
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4. Love
I incarnate the All, I speak the words of lover Ama, I feel the fullness of being, touch the ultimate matters, yet walk about daily reality as through a mist. I love foolishly, I love too much, I am like the sun who shines wide for those who cannot shine back. I dream of a fuller love, I dream of a deeper dream. I want you at last for my own, you few who are in me and after me.
Oh my lover! I used to stalk you around the house and curl in your lap like a purring kitten. But now my lonely stung heart can find no equal for his love, and I sing into the solitude of the night. Who could I love if not Ama, the universe’s face for me, who rests in my brain like a diamond in the rock?
Not all women can be so trusted. Woman has a second sense about kenning a man’s weaknesses, building up his ego around it, and knowing and subtly making known that she holds the lynch pin to its collapse. “What I have built, I know how to destroy,” is the power a woman gains over her man. Woman is the choosy sex (a woman who isn’t is a disgrace). Her choosiness is her essence, and she is rarely satisfied. This is why for the philosopher a wife is merely a mistress.
Romance is not enough. We still need friends. A friend is one whom you can think with. No marriage can lack a supplement friendship. Love is not enough; hate and day-to-day pragmatics set love into place with the help of friends. Set boundaries, and cruelly enforce them. Your nest of intimacy must be guarded at all costs: be perfect in your actions. A man needs a woman to plus him up. Or just as good, the memory of his mother or sister can do the same thing. How simple I need it to be! Relationships are the most complicated systems known to man. Childhood stories, toy models, cartoons, they make these appear simpler and more approachable.
We each resonate to an epoch, a food, a science, a joke; such things personally speak to us. The connoisseurs of personalities ask “what does this person offer that nobody else can?” How slowly do I fall in love, do I let the ideas sink deep into my soul. How much heart I have invested in you, my dear wife! I would rather be love’s fool than wise and alone. What sort of philosopher can I be, when I am so focused on your heart and mine? I faithfully follow your folded forgiveness, from rage that you swallow to rage that you say. Suppression of love has made it this way, the tender pushed center lacks spirit of say. What vipers you vomit while violently ill, with hate of your lovely, with hate of his will. Till tenderly bitter, intimate taint, your pose is so inward I become pregnant.
Intelligence is friendless, because it is the process of alienation, of analysis, of the breaking apart of reality. And yet it’s all framing, so much framing, to prepare for those few moments. A book offers a few intimate touches, and the rest so much staging. Businesses spend more money generating a commercial image than making actual products.
Both objectivity and empathy are necessary for understanding. Heart and mind are two sides of one thread. It is engulfment versus isolation, for love is a sort of consumption.
When that apocalyptic teacher taught a poor band of illiterate peasants that they would rule the Kingdom with he as their king, he saw himself as the king of the Jews – an indiscretion he would needlessly die for – they loved him and loved the grandiose image. Sympathy was plentiful, objectivity lacking.
We learn from this and from many directions that love is a wound which does not heal, a pierce in the heart that is happy only when her heart also bleeds, and the two can press wound to wound and be again whole.
Everybody has their own love style. How a person loves, why, in what ways, these are his humanity. And if I draw this one instead of that, because to me she is white as a dove’s neck, soft as the mother’s breast, then let her beauty be as much a fact of my appreciation as it is of her being. As for the others in my life, once they sufficiently adore me, I drop them. I can’t quite adore them. I am at last committed to commitment, and adore you forever, because I adore my ability to adore, on the one hand, as well as because of the objective and subjective certainty that you are utterly adorable, on he other.
I am passionate but passing. Sophia still talks to me. I tilt my head as if not really present, as if listening to the music of the spheres – everything is spheres to me, layers and layers -- and like Raphael’s Sistine cherub, I look up, always on the top of my world, scanning the heavens for patterns and new forms.
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Perfection
Is
Easy
perfectidius.com
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