"Love" a completely updated essay

Six straight solid hours of work to bring this essay up to date.

Daniel

 

 

 

 

Love

 

My body is built for love

Hands tongue thighs

For love only love

You who are closest

Never fall close enough

I would press my heart into yours

 

So I will talk philosophy

Chop and tie ruthless definitions

And dose my heart into drops

I will give you always

An ounce more than you give me

I am deluge               

I could drown you

 

The love that knits flesh to my bone

Skin unto skin, nerve unto nerve

The yearning damming urge of love

Like atom bound to atom

---No! I withhold that from you.

 

I will shine a little, like the sun upon the moon

My shining I

Will gather for brain clouds and thunderbursts

To filter the full

Lightning tips to carve out books

Forbidden to your eyes

I’m honored to die unread.

You see grammar and form

But do not see

Amidst the threads

The love I’ve mingled insatiate

 

Tongue and thirst of Love

Lick of tooth

Bite of Lip

I say you

Without echo.

 

 

                What is love and how shall we characterize it? How to define a word that has so many uses and so many applications, which describes every manner of affection from charity, to romance, to sensual pleasure? Greek has four words for love. Sanskrit has fourteen. In this, English surpasses both Greek and Sanskrit, for English has only one word for love, and so unites all that is love into one idea. So we ask: what is love?

                There is love for ourselves, love in sex, love of parents, love for children, love for friends, love for neighbors, love for enemies, love for art, love for food, love for money. And despite their differences, all these loves are the same. How?

                Is it in action? Love is not action. Kindness may come from cruelty, affection may destroy, love may devastate. A wife may unknowingly cook her husband a meal lethal to his allergies and, though she spent the evening making it just right, he died all the same. Her cooking came from love. For love is not an action, nor a result. Love is a passion. What then is the nature of this passion?

                Love is habitualized pleasure: habitualized, structured, systemized pleasure. Love is pleasure, and also the desires that seek and also that result from pleasure, desires placed around the beloved and the activities we habitualize to get at the beloved. Love is pleased through the object, be it thing or person, which fulfills our need. Therefore, we love most what fulfills most. We love peanut butter for fulfilling our nutritional need. We love brother for fulfilling our companionship need. We love enemies for fulfilling our kindness need. We love our own virtues to fulfill our self-esteem need.

                Love is not simply pleasure, but habitual pleasure, for pleasure is a specific instance, whereas love is continual, delighting in the here and now, as well as the memory of the past and the hope for the future. A man loves his girlfriend by enjoying memories of their first kiss, by building a set of shared stories, by harboring hopes of further intimacy, and lifelong hopes from their growth together, by developing loving habits of kindness, decency, courtesy, concern, sympathy, by sharing time and conversation with her daily. He continually communes with the image of her he has internalized – for ultimately love is sharing an intimacy. Love seeks the loveliest relationship with his beloved. If kindness and service heighten the relationship, he clothes himself in kindness and service. If in disciplining children, as do mothers and fathers, then in disciplining. If in sharing fun times and supporting struggling times, as does friend, then in sharing such times. Thus love builds relationships that heighten pleasure. For this reason love does lovely things to the beloved. Only through kindness can we fully enjoy our friends. Only through kindness can we fully own anybody. Love is systematic enjoyment.

                What is loved by love? Beauty, ever and always, the beautiful is loved and adored. Beauty is another name for the pleasurable. Aesthetics is to view beauty from a distance, love is to build a bond to beauty. As love is habitual pleasure, power is the joy of making habits. Love and power both give positive experiences, different and distinct. Love is joining a circle, power is standing on top a triangle.

                Love is distinct from its conceptual partners. Love is not value. Value recognizes the goodness of an object, whereas love feels it. I may respect the vaccine for its medicinal value, but I do not love its sting. Love is not concern. Concern attends to the necessary, a thinking habit. Problems concern man. Once a man solves himself, he no longer is self-concerned, though he still loves himself. Love is not justice. To demonstrate justice, one gives what is appropriately due. Love gives more than what is due, or rather, what is due to himself as giver. We give to beauty for our own sake. Not owed, but appropriate. Love is not pity. Pity is a desire to fix a problem that another is too weak to fix. Pity the pitiable, for few things are so. Love is not mercy. Mercy is a form of justice. The merciful man does himself good, the cruel man does himself harm, but the merciful man thinks also of the good of the criminal: will his mercy help or destroy? Mercy would often be wrong. I. Altruism is meeting the needs of the needy because they are needy; though often inspired by love for God or Mankind, this requires no love. Love is not regard. Regard is seeing the best in others and hoping to see the best future for them. Warm regards are lovely, but not as intimate as love.

                Though kindness can be loveless, love can't  avoid kindness. If I love my friend, I will seek a bond with him, and do what kindness that will maintain or amplify that bond. If his car breaks down at night, I go to get him, and complain none. If somebody yanks the rose from your hand, will you not bleed to preserve her? We seek her beauty, and to be of her kind, worthy. For kindness is bringing out the best in others, and the best is the most beautiful to behold and embrace.

 

**

 

                Love is intimacy. We do not love vagueness; we do not kiss shadows. Nor do we love strangers, though there is potential. We do not love society, but only the parts of society we touch, which represents for us the whole. Love seeks union with the beloved. Therefore, love knows no abstractions. Rather, love knows through abstractions: for even if we enjoy the idea of justice, this compares nothing to our love for the just men before us. Truth is abstract, but love is concrete, gods are philosophers, but poets and other mammals are moved to blood.

                Intimacy is presence and conversation. Presence seeks to be near the girl, familiar with her memory; upon the lake, hopeful of being upon the lake soon, filled with life, remembering ecstasy. Conversation seeks interaction with the beloved, to speak and move her mind, to excite her emotions, to impress her, to instruct her; to touch the lake, to swim in its waters; to revere ourselves, to seek that height. Sex is conversation, a conversation involving the utmost in presence. All love has a pith of sex, the rare moments of utter intimacy, of which, sexual reproduction is merely one stark instance. Union is conversation in presence. Presence is lacking, we imagine or fantasize, directly through reverie, indirectly through substitutes, or unconsciously, when we smile at strangers and pause for pedestrians, singing to ourselves, but don’t know why.

                If I do not seek present conversation with another, if I do not meditate on what I like about her, or plan on how I can please her, then I can claim no love. If I am not enjoying her in the way she ought to be enjoyed, then I am not loving her. To love beauty, you must love beautifully. I may enjoy her superficially, massaging my need for attention, admiration, or physical touch, and so halfway meet my need for intimacy, but without the relationship of respect, interest, hope, kindness, the relationship is half alive, not infant but zombie.

 

**

 

                If love withers, what to do? If the heart faints, who will revive her? How do you enliven love? There is a trick to act as if you love, so that you will soon really feel it. William James says, "acting teaches the heart," and the very title Imitation of Christ, publishes this mistake. Considering all the prigs of the guilty rich who donate to charities or volunteer their services, I remain skeptical. To act as if you love dodges the chore of establishing a genuine love, pretending to be kind can teach you to a good hypocrite. Pretending is supposed to reduce our apathy, giving half of a whole. Rather, by building the second floor before the first, we must grab for whatever support lies nearest. As if your hatred lacked meaning! As if your indifference were as accidental as the fall of your hair in the morning! No and no: do not act. First think, "Why do I lack love, and what does this habit mean? How is this right and good, and can love improve it?" Find your foundation and you cannot help but love the lovely. You do not need to be tricked into loving: you need to know what is lovely and why. For love flows when honesty faces loveliness. To act as if we love, without love, inaugurates a life of hypocrisy. Pretending denies capacity. To choose love for her loveliness, not because you ought to or are good to do so. Hate in its place can be more divine than love.

                Only pretense is made by pretending. Imitatio Christi? As if Christ imitated another! Imitate only his originality – be original yourself, and different from him and others. Be true to yourself, and you rise higher than myth. For of all the herd, I find scarcely a Paul-per, let alone that fool upon the hill. If acting made virtuous, then celebrity worship would have some soul. But no, actors give no clue to virtue; they play at appearances, nothing more. Acting, the "bastard art," what can that teach? To lie even to ourselves. "Act as if you believed and you will"—I know of no more despicable formula. It is playing a part that breaks apart. For to hold with effort outwards, the actor's masking against the tension of the abyss below, this prevents deeper living. My lovers in this world are always themselves, they follow no model but the best in themselves. How her kiss burned purity into my lips, how his criticism from idiosyncratic sincerity transfigured my art: O lovers! You copied neither gods nor men – and so you outshine them all!

 

**

 

                For adolescence, love is standing out her window in the pouring rain reading a heartfelt sonnet. For maturity, love is spending weeks tending the sick child, giving your wife constant confirmations, cheeking insults and criticism brought against you, being noble and persistent. If the first doesn't lead to the second, it was empty to begin with.

 

 

**

 

                Where is the deepest love? Love starts as Narcissism, the delight in oneself. It grows into greed, the love of things. Then it spreads into Philia, the love of friends. Onwards it grows into esteem, the love of worth and power. Upwards it grows then to kindness, the love of improving. Then it grows to Eros, love of co-creation. Finally it grows into creativity, into apotheosis, the deification of oneself and those one has drawn close, the love of transfiguration. Every love flowers from the previous. All love sprouts from the foundation  of narcissistic. One does not leave behind his boyhood: he builds upon it, and wherever the man act, so to does his boy. Our boyish ways are not left behind, but put within. Love with every layer of your love, and the world will tremble in ecstasy.

                Love identifies. If there were something beautiful in the world, and if I recognize that beauty, I must correspond that love to my preformed valuations. It is beautiful to me, so I love it. For we love in others what we love in ourselves. Love is identification. One identifies himself in others, and changes himself to more fully identify with others. What began as self-recognizing ended in self-changing. For in narcissism there are five: I love what I once was, what I am, what I wish to be, what was once part of me, and what is the opposite of me, the balance and complement of myself. The self of man loves. Does love also love love? Does she dare hate hate? Love loves herself and uses hate to love the more. Hate is a mode of love.

 

**

 

                "Love without judging." But love can only love what he judges lovely. You make it out not to love at all. I say judge. I say love people conditionally. If we do not love a man because he is good, then we do not really love him. If I claim to love my wife's bad cooking for her sake, I am loving her through the cooking, and the cooking not at all. In the same way, if I love a sinner for the sake of righteousness, I really love myself as righteous, but not truly do I love the sinner. Such a love may baptize the sinner, but it will destroy what is already lovely and growing within him.

                Let us love each according to his kind -- that is kindness. Love your enemies: from their threats, learn what is important, from their insults, learn what is improvable. Love them for what they are, or else you are deceiving yourself. Love them as you would a teacher. Choose for yourself only the strongest and brightest as your enemies, and love them as exemplars of honor. Love your enemies for their virtues. Man is made of nobility; every man can be known and loved. Would you love gold more than the depraved man? He is a mind and a soul; if you could own him as you own the gold, so much more can you gain. Even his depravity springs poetry. Every man is lovable, so what does "unconditional" mean? Unconditional love is coward's love! Whoever must love unconditionally is afraid to love the good. For in seeking goodness, one is whipped and warded off; love requires such work from the lover that he must be strong enough to love the depraved man. If you cannot love him, do not pretend. But a great man's love seems unconditional, when in fact is can always find ways to meet his conditions, like a judge who always follows the laws but knows ways to bend the rules.

                A mother’s unconditional love must be balanced against a father’s conditions: I love you if you honor me. If you dishonor me and my family, we will cast you out.

                What presumption that love must be afforded dime for dime, “give and get in measure”—no. It is love and lose, as is necessary, and thereby to gain new heights as lover. If the scales are uneven, then blind justice has her sword, but love was always a hit or miss archer.

                Earn your love! Unmerited love slaps the face of love. What? “Unconditional love”? Then what am I truly loving? I am loving myself as a kind person, using you to justify my vanity. Yet with this twisted love I do not even see you, let alone do I unite with you. Do I love my enemies or do I love God through my enemies? Where is love's reward if I only love through my enemies? Shall they debase love even more by calling it “action”? So they tear out the heart of man. Only myself do I always and unconditionally love as best, and also those I've taken in as my own.

 

*

 

                "Love every man as yourself"––no no! Cease to preach to me such promiscuous love, a love that doesn't even see people for what they are, but loves all men equally. Love is as unequal and ranked as men are unequal and ranked. My love is too perfect to be spent equally: I give my goodness to the good in their good portion. Love knows only the lovely. I do not even know what it is you feel for these men you are kind to. "Be kind to every man as befits his person"––yes yes, now you are getting closer. And rudeness is kind. And slaps are kind. And insults are kind. All things are kind from a kind heart, if only in the right context. And so I say treat kindly according to each his kind, loving the lovely, and giving no love without merit.

                Be cruel and slap? Always abstract. Always spiritualize terms. And don’t totalize a mere part. Sometimes slaps and criticism are needed for the beloved. Have you ever seen a marriage without some form of anger? Even the fullest love sets boundaries, boundaries it must enforce. The full heart is a complex set of simultaneous feelings. The more we idealize only love, rather than a full experience, the more emaciated and painful love becomes.

                Love the lovely, loathe the loathsome––what could be clearer than this? Why has common sense been so smeared? If you meet refuse, politely refuse him; if politeness fails, then harshly reject, for this is the kindest act. To feign friendship with what you have no part, to pretend acceptance and tolerance, where none is deserved, this is the profound lie. Love the lovely in proportion to her loveliness to you. I love not by duty, but by sight.

                What pretense of love from the so called “religion of Love.” The whole repertoire of Jesus sayings, impress shallow lovers. "Love your neighbor as yourself," we are told. Why? Well no need to bother with whys: it sounds good. "If only we would follow this command, the world would be heaven," a pastor once said in my presence. I reflected. Something was amiss. I sniffed and pawed the roots of this tree, never satisfied with fruits alone, and came to realize: no! I do not love my neighbor as myself. I do not love my family as myself. I do not even love my lover as myself. Why? As simple as the sun: they are not myself. I love my brother with brotherly love, my other brother with brotherly love, but even then, I love each differently. To love all men, all my neighbors, equally is promiscuous enough. To love them as myself? Absurd!

                "Love your neighbor as yourself" – but love requires intimacy. Love requires a breaking of defenses, a knowledge and familiarity, an appreciation and connection, respect and admiration. Would I love any Joe with the same fervor I reserve for my child? Then corrupt is my love! The way I love myself is unique. I care for my needs, I pride my deeds, I search and research my depths, and concern myself ever so intimately with myself. To invest this energy and intimacy into any other person--supposing they even wanted it, which they shouldn't--would waste my time and dull my blades. No, I love every man as a self unto himself. I love my mother as mother, my brother as brother, my friend as friend, each according to his kind, and each to the degree I choose, free from command and order. No wonder they must back these commandments to love with threats of hell.

                Not that Deuteronomy, the source of Jesus' command, really meant that Samaritans and Gentiles are "neighbors," as Jesus seems to imply. Neighbor means fellow Jews. But if the statement is supposed to have any philosophical worth, beyond a Hallmark how-do-you-do sentiment, then we must ask "What is meant by love? What is meant by Myself? What is meant by ‘in the same manner’?” Try as I may, I see no program here. None is provided. Why should love be commanded, anyway? Why should I be threatened to love? My, heart after all, is my own.

                (As a side-note, I have heard preachers say, as if they were surprised, that Jesus intended us to first 'love ourselves.' This appears to be a sort of revelation. For them, self-love appears a temptation, a sin, the devil. What sort of selves are we looking at here?)

 

*

 

                The background love of the housewife, or the househusband, to make a house a home -- it seems the house really is the externalized body of the wife or husband. Every crisis is smoothed over with ease, supplies seem to replenish themselves as if by magic. Gratitude is never requested or needed. Everything flows and seems in fact to clean itself. Routines of cleaning and maintenance are made invisible and constant. The house-spouse's love flows throughout the home, is the flow of the home. And rather than imposed on as if they owed a debt, each member of the family is healed and praised. Little songs and ditties accompany chores, dances, rhymes, nicknames, games, fun, and love -- the toys are animated by his imagination and he constantly applauds the achievements of his kids.

 

**

 

                Often hailed as a stroke of brilliance, and regarded a sentiment taught by all great men, from the lips and writings of Confucius to Hillel, the so-called “Golden Rule” is regarded as basic: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. C. S. Lewis, in his Mere Christianity, claims that the entire "natural law" presupposes this sentiment. Is he right? But again, we have all dress and no depth: Jesus gives no argument, no system, no proof for this bromide. And this sentiment hardly proves itself, nor is "wisdom proven by her children" but by arguments and reasons. Why should I do unto others as I would they did to me? Are they me? I expect treatment as Daniel, you as Mike, Jill as Jill: Do unto others as deserved!

                Consider a simple reading: every teenage boy should think twice before applying this precept to his date: maybe the kisses you would have unto you are unwelcome to her. So the Christian counters: "Do unto others as you would if you were them." So now it is "do unto others as they wish you to do"--both compromising to do, and removed from the original precept anyway. And further, this assumes that they know what they want, and that what they want is also what they need. The criminal wants a break from the law, but doesn’t deserve it. He probably doesn’t need it either. Jail may be the best thing for him. The fact is, we do not always know what we want. Perhaps you need slaps, insults, criticism, sooner than kisses and forgiveness. Nor am I obligated to give you what you need the most, I must act from my own genuine style, manner, ability, and virtue: the kindness I give you comes from my own nature. How I treat each individual is based on the new situation of us interacting, exception to exception.

                For to do-as-you-would-be-done-by overlooks the question "And what should I desire from others?" So much for the simple eloquence of this command.

                Do unto others as they deserve. The whole law lies on this command. Deserts are not all punishment after all. Every man and woman deserves respect and polite treatment as a human being. Do unto others as you deserve to do. Perhaps the criminal deserves justice, but not from me the bystander. I am not the judge, nor am I the police. Yes, my mere regard is justified and serves poetic justice,  but I do not deserve to have to punish. In the same manner, I deserve to give gifts and kindness because I am a lover, not because the other deserved my love. I may give gifts greater than your necessarily deserts, because I deserve to do this--perhaps such will better us both?

 

*

 

                To repeat it, this religion that commands love at threat of hell outrages love and makes  hideous. Frigg is lovely and fair, as aloof as the cats that draw her carriage: she is beautiful, and though she is omniscient, she says not a word, but only shines the rays of her beauty on earth. She weaves love, she weaves language, she weaves relationships. The Christians have invented maligning stories about her, such is the nature of their love. Yet for us, she stands for the faithful compliment to the wise hero –  the same type as Penelope, the weaving lover. The fates and norns are always women.

                Let us weave our thread back through these commands, we will make them at least well placed if not beautiful.

                “Love your neighbor as yourself.” These neighbor-lovers are God’s prostitutes—promiscuous love!—love for whoever asks for it, agape, and my God hole agape for any man to love me, God as celestial pimp, and Christians the whores for divine reward.

                Do unto others as they deserve to have done; how golden to include justice in our love. Do unto others as you deserve to do; as lovers we deserve to love. Do unto others as deserved. For why should I demand anybody treat me beyond my deserts? Would I really expect pity to negate justice? Pity, for love cannot. Only fear denies justice. I desire punishment, not mercy.

                “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” is therefore repulsive. Should a masochist follow this? Should a horny teenager? Then nobody should. Or rather, should we not treat them as they deserve to be treated, fairly, and if we care for them, tenderly. Do unto others as they deserve to have done to them, and do unto them as you deserve to do—do unto others as is deserved.  We cannot say, “I will treat others as they should treat me,” because my wants and needs are unique to me, theirs to them. Nor can we rationalize a more abstract formula, “I will treat others as I would be treated if I were them,” because they might not know what is best for them, might not know how they ought to be treated. Once we get practical, moral, virtuous, and reasonable with this formula, we realize how the cheap is the sentimental version of “do unto others as you would have them do to you.”

                Those least interested in being saved are most worthy of heaven.

*

                “Agape” is clearly a child of Plato’s highest love called “Platonic Love”; the greatest document on love so far is the Symposium. Despite its fame, and despite what it says, we know the greatest love was and is always Eros, and in the Greek sense of the word, he the first and most beautiful.

                Eros! First and most beautiful of all the gods. He hums through the heart of the motherverse! All matter cleaves to matter! He presses a kiss to his mother and lover, chaos, he alone can tame her.

**

                The less you need others, the more you can love them. Whom one depends upon, he can never fully love.

                In this mud and guts world of relationships, I limit myself. Lovers hide their loveliness. Beauty is shy, and this is her shrewdness. The public makes common what passes through common hands. The innocent is not a man of the people, by the people, and is only for the people as he emerges from his haven. A secret garden is too delicate to lose her high stone walls. And even when the lover emerges, he is as a man who walks above the waves––mature and holy. That is to say, he is independent. He who emerges entrusts his dearest to none save the dear.

                I am lonely, and so make heaven in the image of love. What I lack I paint into eternity. For those who need love, they make love into God. You seek love? Rather, seek life. I say life is the fullness which plants love in its right place, but will not be transplanted thereby.

                See the sun that nobody can see but you—the light of the inner man. Secrecy: to do deeds nobody will ever know, to think and create for yourself alone. Do this from your secret love of your own beauty. Never share your best: save that for yourself. The inner beauty you feel in all things, the joy of life, of being alive, of walking a world made of Ama! Yes, life is beautiful!

 

**

 

                “Because I have the power to shred you to pieces, my tenderness is that much more real.” Thus do theologians think of their God, and indeed, a weak lover is an oxymoron--though love itself is a weakness. For women, who seek power and confidence in their lovers, a great lover will pulse with power, with “The arrow poised and ready to be made drunk on your blood.” To trust such a man enlivens, exhilarates. Men, who prefer to be tended and cared for, frown if their beloved holds claws. Rather, men wish claws on their kittens—a miming of power, vulnerable in her attempt.

                Love seeks love even from those hiding in fear. A man exudes angers, fears, frustrations, sarcasms, rudeness––all defenses. We fear intimacy, real intimacy. To gain this from another: a long and slow process. To win trust, we must exemplify honor and honesty again and again, to prove we are worthy of trust. There are, however, shortcuts. As one psychologist said: “Realize that every personality is so multifaceted that we can each relate wholly with one facet of another person. Find one thing both you and he cherish, and give full excitement to that. Show that you think like him, for who resists his own thinking? Reason as he reasons, celebrate as he celebrates, and he will love you as he loves himself.”

 

**

 

                I look upon the world and call her “Sherry,” cherished, intoxicating, beautiful: my world is Sherry: I burrow into her soul and lap the honey from her hands. I am in love and lovely. When my muse of inspiration shines from out my hands, I am in Reisheree

**

                All relationships are a play of defense and intimacy. One must reinforce right defenses, undermine wrong defenses, initiate right intimacies, prevent wrong intimacies. Men defend themselves against the world, and this is psychological health. Yet to unite with what you love, you must seek intimacy. You must excel at recognizing and dismantling defenses without frightening him whom you seek. Intimacy terrifies. You trust, you open, you allow, you give, you serve, you identify, and what? He destroys you. You hope in another and he cuts you. Or just as dark, he yawns and is silent. Thus the inveterate defense system. It allows no spontaneous intimacy, nothing novel and hope-ridden, but allows small intimacies, calculated and regulated, for, being practical, we know we must not starve.

                The heart is like a series of rings, like the nine rings of Cicero, universe wide. You cannot touch my inner ring unless I open him, and even then you can only touch him with your own inner ring. If you are sick and violent, you will traumatize my ring, if you are cold and indifferent you will burn him with ice, but if you resonate with the music of my heart, your intimacy will allow me to become beautiful.

                The lover, he is given to intimacy, even instant intimacy, he swifts through a barrage of defenses, skirting them with grace and finesse, playing through to a raw moment of nearness. For we are unaware of the myriads of defenses, jades, and traps we set, the little withholdings, the walls and masks: they are far too easy and regular to be felt at all. Interacting with others requires no conscious; consciousness peaks only as the smallest cusp. For he who wishes practice in relationships, he must realize that relationships are the plays of intimacy and defense, identity and variety, unity and alienation. An intimacy is you and me together, a defense is you and a not-me, a part of me that is not my own person. Thus a boxer differs from a lover, avoids touch, blocks it, presents the toughest parts of himself in defense; the lover wishes his most personal, most sensitive parts touched. His most common defenses are silence, absence, averted gaze--nothing, when something was sought.

                There are certain tricks for instant intimacy that work on most people, ways of  breaching basic defenses. To break through and sustain, however, requires a unique method in accordance with her unique machinery. What you touch her you internalize, you will forever resonate with that part of her: you have found a door into her heart. But she still has the ability to freeze you out, for she can snatch at that part of her you now hold within you.

                You must feel the fighter's fancy, the warrior’s will which opens and allows love. If he says "I am a lover not a fighter," believe him not. Anybody who has achieved intimacy realizes that you must be brave enough, strong enough for it. A true lover overcomes. Amor her hammer, Eros her heroes. Give peace a chance? Peace must fight for her chance. And thus the exultation in the my of strength and possibility. I am a lover, therefore a fighter.

                And yet love is a weakness, a wound, a need we must plead to be pleased, a hope that can yet be denied.

                Intimacy is a horror meant for snapshots, not endurance. So much focus, so much energy, so much concern is in intimacy, utter intimacy. Few maintain it. That is to say, it takes strength to maintain, an ability to relax and sustain that relaxation by a strength that does not feel like strength. I have seen the greatest pains in those who permitted this touch. I love them for it. And those who maintain this, despite devastation, these I admire. Intimacy requires strength to control, is in fact uncontrollable. Thus we fear it. Yet with intimacy we deeply teach others and direct their lifecourse. How helpless to ask for love and be denied.

                And so, sustained intimacy begs for pauses, distances, breaks, absence. The sweetness of honey nauseates if supped at every sup. The soul loves intimacy, but dances from one to the next, returning to the first when the time is ready. Love is a butterfly, graceful and fleeting.

                “Love your fellow man,” they say, and the intensity of intimacy is flippantly implied. Between men there is distance. Between men there is coldness and hardness. Give us a tender man, a mother’s touch for his fellow man. For if we fear him, we build walls between men. “Tender to women,” you say, for it is easy and you are unashamed. Yet women have learned this well, to be sisters. So then be brothers.

                The Germanic loyalty is the strongest love. The love of a wise woman for her noble husband, the love of a faithful woman for her proud warrior: this the image of love!

 

**

 

                “Love is not all”—and that's where the poem should end. What is love if it puts no bread on the table?

 

**

 

                What is the purest love? Is it Platonic? Is that pure? Yet all the deepest friendships have a tickle of eroticism. Irrelevant of whom the friendship is between.

                In any love, nobody wants to be dissected. A woman wants to be kissed for her flaws as well as her virtues. The one self-perfected is so much more loveable than another lazy. Love the whole person. Love the scar upon the soft cheek. Love the “vice” for advising the virtue. For what you dissect away grows from the same plant. What if the lotus grows from the mud? Shall we despise the mud? Yet, no lotus flowers without it. The lotus herself loves the mud and thrusts her seeds back down. Therefore, take the bad as source of the good. You cannot have the smile without the girl, nor the purr without the cat.

                Love is the pleasurable relationship, and yet the enduring pleasure requires much practical displeasure--effort, strain, and work. That is the nature of pleasure in life: it requires work. To give up and give in is to submit to suffering.

                “Sometimes it is hard to love,” and you misunderstood altogether. Hard to love? What is it you really want from this person? You set the anvil on his back and now you want to hammer out your ideals. Love is not hard. Love is not a gift. Love is not kind. If you struggle, it is not to love, but to know. I say hate me if it perfects you. I would be hated by all if I knew it would help. In the same way, then, do not say it is hard to love, because then you are farthest from love. You do not convince yourself to love. Love comes naturally. Nature is a lover.

                For in this we learn that there is something greater than love, and that is life. We love to live, but we do not live to love. Life. The life of your heart, the life of your mind, the life of your body are not going to be allowed, opened, or transfigured through somebody else’s text. Your own heart is the text, and every other book mere commentary. Man lives. And therefore, man is all.

                Kindness is not love, is not wedded to love only, springs from many soils and from many seeds. For the teenager, still swirling in her sexual soul, she finds romance a pretty option. “Are you the one to love me and only me? Are you the one to love me and always me?” Such questions are symptoms. They are not really asked, not really meant. They mean by not meaning. “Love me for as long as there is a me, love me for as long as there is love.”

**

                No love seeks to convert another. Hate wishes conversion, and uses love to subdue. But for the one that is me outside of me, there is no conversion. I love as the sun loves, because my light creates. Be my sister sun, and let us orbit one another. True love seeks the pleasure of what is unique in the other. My kindness helps you be more yourself, and I improve you, help you become more beautifully your genuine self, for my own selfish pleasure in enjoying your humanity.

                Love frustrates. Consider Milton's Satan. Satan flies free from moldering hell, breaches the void, and lights upon virgin Eden. Finally, naked from hell's fire and alone from his minions, he considers his place. The sun reminds him of his lost glory, he addresses the terrestrial sovereign as his equal on earth, and apostrophizes to puzzle out this question: why did he rebel? Unclouding his self deceit he realizes ambition and pride lead him here. But why? Why rebel against a good and fair God? He reasons through the dreaded words "subjection" and "gratitude," and realizes they were not his true concern, hardly a problem at all -- perhaps even due? Finally, he comes to the crux of the problem:

 

"Who has thou then or what to accuse,

But Heav'ns free Love dealt equally to all?"

 

                Satan loved God stronger than any other, wanted to be loved by God first, to be loved eminently as the eminent, as the greatest he was. Most lovely yet not most loved. Since he could not have God's greatest love, he revolted in his heart against love. Satan's love: unmatched in all of history and time, without compare, epic and unmitigated, with a heart like a bird which, when given full wing, flies straight for the sun. Only individuals can be loved with all our being, concepts never. Only God could consume and overwhelm a mind like Satan's. It is a heart not to share, but to take all, to be all, to deserve all, to own all. And unable to find return for his love, there being no love in heaven to equal his own: --revolt! Without that which he loved, he became hell, his heart is hell. Satan loved God the most and for that he is given hell. For an "orthodox lover" is a contradiction. Those who love by the rules love not at all. When Lucifer became Satan, she also became God: the greatest existing being.

**

                The art of love is subtle and rare. I have never seen a convincing manual for it, though I have seen a few artful instruments. For those who can love like a virtuoso plays a cello—well, I am yet to see it. You will not see it in the pity fiends and feeders on the sick such as the saints. True love transfigures the beloved, does not get him worshipping ghosts, but makes him into a man. For the kind soul, he knows the subtlety of making others into heroes. The brilliant lover knows how to make his friends’ souls sing. Call not love duty or command, or if you do, expect to get what the last two thousand years have given: mediocrity. Some men (not all) are called to be lovers, and I would to see them Men of Love, her virtuosos.

                The universe loves with her mother’s love, she makes heroes, proud, powerful warriors of her children. She loves best the powerful within her. She has a place and a heart for us each.

                The saints are bad examples of lovers. Getting flayed for believing absurdities? How gross! How disgraceful, weak, and stupid! But evidently, to be a saint you must do magic tricks and die painfully. Consider the myth man himself: a Canaanite woman requests Jesus heal her daughter, and he says No, he will not help her because she was not Jewish, being therefore not a child of God,  but a dog. All he had to do was twinkle his nose to cure her, since the depth of his love was the cheap and easy magic-show miracles, by which he earned his bread, but even this seems too much for him. She persists by saying that “dogs at least get table scraps.” Outwitted, he does twinkle his nose, and her daughter is cured. This is not where we learn the art of love. The only kind thing he seems to do is kill himself, no good example for us. Love is more honorable and decent than that. Live is not melodramatic morbidity. It is perfectly subtle. The myth man and the myth saints that followed him are distasteful. The excellent art of love requires a new teacher.

                Prefer the proud love of Wotan, who, having gained the wisdom that he would cease being God of the universe and instead turn inwards into his own Self and die, fought valiantly to secure the place for the new God, the God of Light, Baldr his Son: what self-sacrifices, adventures, and quests he triumphs to secure the world for the God of Light.

                Therefore, believe not that myth prince either. The Buddha contradicts himself whenever he utters the word “loving kindness.” The calm of meditated enlightenment contradicts generosity, kindness, intimacy, and passion. Those other words are praised purely for advertising. What religion can sell itself on isolated meditation alone? Human beings love to love, and any religion that is going to survive the market must make love into duty. Yes, such domineering corrupts the basis of love, but it is a flashy ad.

                “There is no self,” they tell us, and then contradict themselves and tell us to love others. Other what? Nonselves? I am not to love myself, but I am to love other selves? What exactly is it that loves? There is no self to do the loving. Is it love itself that loves? Then what is being loved? Love itself? Yes, the annatta “annihilated self” is a riddle, rich like manure for fertilizing the lotus of meditated enlightenment, but it contradicts Dhamma. What does love have to do with nirvana? Be yourself, Buddhism. Don’t copy the Christian charity. You don’t believe in God or sacrifice—keep yourself pure, from all that.

                The Greek Eros shows the highest love: to take the lover within your circle, and to join together in power over your world. Eros joins power and love – the greatest vision of love yet witnessed by man. The deification of the psyche through eros is the highest kind of love.

 

**

 

                Let us come back to earth and see what is mammal in love. On a mundane level, love enjoys, fear pains. To fear something is to pain at its presence, its memory, its concept. Love acts, fear freezes. Love is intimacy, fear ambiguity. Love has knowledge, fear willful ignorance. Fear seeks to not know, not think, not address its object. It is for this reason that you must always do what you fear to do, for love knows no other birth.

                Yet though fear begins with pain, that pain converts to joy as it is first converted to anger, and then to courage, and finally, to control, mastery, truth, and skill. Fear makes the world: love sustains it.

 

**

 

                "So you see," says Alex, who is such a shadow friend to me, "Alive and choosy, I choose the lives that best complement mine. My few friends deserve my love, everyone else my mere respect."

                "Aha!" says Amanda the passionate. "You fail to recognize your own history. You love yourself, and those who look and talk like that self, but see beyond your manhood and see mankind. To love one thing is to love all things. To convert to the full lover means you love all things in all ways you can. Let me tell you a story. Percolating in her eternity was Goddess All. But in her great one-itude, she felt lonely. For you see Alex, she was only one. And so she spread a carpet, called it cosmos, and reincarnated herself a trillion times upon it throughout history. Which is to say, we are all the same person. From the swollen headed professor to the thinly mittened beggar, we are all the exact same person. Only we don't recognize ourselves. I traded my omniscience for ignorance in order to feel friendly, and friendfulness is a sort of ignorance. For you see, I am you, you are me, we are all the same person, all the single All, the Alicia called Goddess."

                "Yet again," chimed the third, "Man's focus finds limit in time. Love is from intimacy is from focus; therefore, I cannot love all things, but only those I take into my intimacy. I can only love these by pushing those away. And a little cruelty goes a long way in amplifying love."

 

**

 

                Metaphysics gives secret instructions, yet obvious facts must squarely be faced. You need love. You need to feel love for others, express that love through kindness, witness the acknowledgement of your love, and receive gratitude for your gesture, receive similar expressions from those you love, and consider yourself loved by them. But more than love, you need to deserve love, to be beautiful, a beauty symbolizes your health and ability – if loved for your beauty, you are loved for your power..

                That we need love is obvious to most people. Others would do without it. After all, love takes work. Participating in a community, completing a family, pleasing a spouse, these all take commitment, devotion, and daily practice. Are they worth it? Perhaps, perhaps not. If your place is to sculpt like no man has sculpted, or write a poetry that scars the face of history, if you are a man among men, then you waste your breath submitting to love. You are not the lover, and would do love injustice by pretending.

                Those who value love and friendship less than most still need love, can still make love artful.

                Some men and women who make love a skill of high art. I do not mean charity workers or missionaries. I mean the men and women who are virtuosos of kindness, the geniuses of friendship, the powerhouse fathers. These people make love their top aim, and bend the rest of their life to this. This is good, as long as they don’t demand it of everyone. To each his own. But if they would be an example, let them practice at love and make it into skill. Let them be as Paganini on his violin: masters and Gods of love. To be great at love means having a refined taste for beauty and an excellent ability to make others beautiful – the ingeniousness of kindness.

                Not that they will grandstand. Love is, after all, a subtle art. Those who make a show of it, those who insist you admire them, those who give to charity in open, or go to save poor lost souls, what have they to do with love? They merely mime the most obvious forms. A true lover is as subtle as the night, and deep and rich as the midnight sky. He is well practiced at kindness and at cruelty, knowing them to complement each other so as to allow the full force of love. True love can pluck a butterfly from the sky and smudge no dust from her wing. True love can fetch an eyelash from his lover’s eye with no tears of sensitive pain. Yes, and true love sets a second sun in the sky. Such a great art, one I desire to see better practiced. Love minimizes its show to avoid scabs and parasites. How often the ugly scrabble at love! Leeches to Venus, that’s what they are. Thus one must not advertise, nor give unfittingly. The greatest lover knows how to be cruel. He is cold in his judgment, and gives no love where love is undue. Promiscuous love given to any neighbor whores love. Love must be fitting.

                For truly great love balances truly great power. The weak, the sick, the ugly, the sinners, infect the world with their love. Accept no gifts from them.

                Great love comes from perfection, which means freedom from self-deceit, to give best my best in every situation, balanced against giving my best over all my life.

                In this manner, let us break open the heart.

 

* * * *

 

                The greater the reverence, the less the understanding, the louder the praise, the quieter the knowledge. For if you truly know something and have become it, you have already given it your greatest praise, worship, and blessing: you have made identification. Rest assured then that those who praise love are the farthest from knowing her. They praise to hide their ignorance, and indeed praise is the camaflouge of ignorance. They sense that love is great, but they cannot say why it is great, why it is divine, or even what it actually is. You curse me when you praise me.

                Love is habitual pleasure. Love enjoys a lovely relationship with the beloved, loving in the way the beloved should be loved.

                Since love is a feeling, it has many possible outlets. I may feel love for my wife, but there are many ways I can express (and thus amplify) my love. Kindness is one means, and cruelty another. My love may choose any and many expressions; some will be appropriate to my beloved, but others not. Love, like all emotions, is an activity of the heart, and thus requires constant influx and outflow. I need constant fuel from my beloved,  and I need to pour that activity out in my participation with my lover. This is what it is to love.

                The heart of love creates. The first thing a self creates is itself, first as a creative principle, and then as everything else. Therefore, the basis of all love is narcissism, selflove, selfishness, that truest, greatest, deepest love, which in fact exists in all people, though obscured in some. From this grows the necessity and glory of greed, greed for a healthy body, for extensions of the body, for property. From this grows love of family and friends, called philia. From this grows esteem, the love of greatness. This includes the love of the imagined greatness of Gods, and also the perceived greatness of the self. From this grows kindness, which is the love that brings out the greatness in others. From this grows Eros, the highest of loves, the partner’s mutual joy in creating. It is the love of couples in their shared creation of a third. And higher than this, is the special form of eros called Mother Love, crea, the principle of apotheosis, the love of a couple not in creating a third thing, but in creating each other, of a mother’s love for her children and spouse, of the artist making of himself his highest creation. First the lovers conquer the world, than they become the world.

            Love progresses from narcissism, to greed, to friendship, to esteem, to kindness, to eroticism, to creativity. Each step is inclusive. One does not step beyond narcissism, beyond greed, but one deepens them, opens them up, makes them more profound, spiritualizes their grossness, externalizes them.

            Narcissism is self love in the purest sense: I love I, whatever I am, exactly what I am, because I am me, myself in my very me-ness, I love such a one eternally and unreservedly.

            Greed is the love to own, to possess things, to possess people, to possess knowledge, to be able to control it, to have the right to control it, to own it. A very beautiful love. The professor, insofar as he seeks to be the most learned man, is greedy for knowledge; the saint, insofar as he seeks treasures in heaven, is greedy for spirit.

            Filial love is the love for family and friends. There is no essential difference between family and friends other than family is looked upon as permanent, and friendship as less so. This is the love of those who live with you, among you, share time and space with you, because they are like you.

            Esteem is the love of greatness, of loving the greatness in yourself, and hating the weakness in yourself, for hate is part of love. You love others because they are great. You love God because you imagine him to be great.

            Kindness (agape) is loving those of your kind, and loving them in such a way as to bring out the best in them. Kindness is giving and receiving.

            Eros is sex, eros is romance, eros is the divine love for which mankind exists. The highest love, no love can be complete without the sexual element. And sex is about sharing the joy of creating a third. Between sexual lovers, this is clearest; but any two people can love erotically, once the term is sublimated. The essence of eros is intimacy.

            Crea is the most refined form of eroticism. Creative love is to mutually create each other, like twin suns, orbiting each other, making each other more profound. Creative love is maternal love, is the full embrace and never letting go of what you have become and bound yourself to. Creative love is apotheotic.

 

**

 

                Narcissism is a mytho-psychological term with a history and a series of meanings. I use the term to mean all forms of self-love. It is a mode of loving, one with its own stages and forms. An infant loves itself in that it loves for itself. It seeks for itself. Its world is itself. The others are directed at itself. Such is infantile psychology. Love purposes to satisfy human needs, and therefore, self love is a deepening of what love is for, to love for yourself. These loves expand as a series of consecutive circles, just as the world of the infant expands. The child loves his mother first, before his toys, but the child loves his mother, first of all, greedily. The child at first does not love her for her desires, for what he is to her, but for what she is to him. Soon, the things that belong to him become important to him. Familial and friendly love arises when one no longer looks at the world as something to own or disown, but to share. Therefore, this could be called the joy of sharing, the love of sharing. At some point the child loves the mutuality of ownership. The ability to share and the awareness of others as other persons arises at the same time. Therefore, it is only after one realizes there are other selves, and thus knows what a self is, that he can esteem himself, and in respect to others. When he is older, he does the same in terms of his own self, on his growth and potential. Kindness arises from esteem in that once we have esteemed what a person is, what he is worth, what is worthy to him, we can treat him according this kind, we can decide how to treat others we esteem worthy of our love. Eroticism is the desire to mutually please, and is greater than kindness in being a shared and mutual venture, whereas mere kindness is not. Eroticism is mutual kindness in respect to both sharing the creating of a third—be it child, a relationship, a coupling, a project. Creative love is no longer sharing the creating of another thing, but the creating of each other: such is apotheotic love, when god brings the divine out of god.

 

**

 

                All beings are situated within the whole. Consciousness itself is situated between needs and world, and exists in order to fulfillingly relate the two.

                We are all narcissistic in that as a self we love, and we love for ourselves. Our love is not a commodity for others; love is a function for fulfilling the self. There is no disembodied love. Love is always situated.

                May some people love others and yet hate themselves? You must never take talk of “self-hate” too seriously. Self-hate and suicide are means of preserving the self in a certain shape, of avoiding growing pains.

                This is why Christianity, which is touted as 'the religion of love,' isn’t; and why Buddhism, which is called the 'religion of compassion,' isn’t. Christianity fails to understand love, views love as self-sacrifice, and even makes a sacred symbol out of a torture device. The joke is on them in their constant mockery of mankind, the crucifix. I spied one in a hospital room, this blaspheme against the Greek love of the Hippocratic oath.

                Romantic love is one step below crea, mother love. Christianity misunderstands eros. It stops love a little lower, at pity (not kindness), and the God-awful charities are an example of what Christianity is all about. Mother love, or the love of mutual devotional creation, is necessarily an outgrowth of romantic love, which is the love of adventure. The adventurer cannot create. He must risk all to gain the materials to create. Thus, romantic love transfigures into family love, into mother love.

                Sympathy, compassion, and pity are the opposite of Buddhism, which, in a word, is nonattachment. Nonattachment, means, above all, that one is uncaring of all things. For to care is to be attached. The benevolence that later Buddhists added to the doctrine for respect of human nature must always be understood as disinterested compassion, as an abstract benevolence. If this “kindness” is taken too far, it destroys the original Buddhism.

                For the primary virtue in Buddhism is nonattachment, and the primary virtue in Christianity is guilt. Insofar as all these other virtues allow these centers to unfold, they are good. Insofar as they don’t, they ruin the religion.

                Eros is the highest love, the joyful self affirming creativity. Yes, and creativity is the height of this joy.

                Eros is the attraction of like to like. By eros all that is the same has occult sympathy across the cosmos.

                Ask a man what he wants most of all and it is never “altruism.” Who could live off such stuff? A world of altruism and we all commit suicide. He wants eros: mutually creating each other in joy.

                Sexual love symbolizes and solidifies herself in child. The child becomes a binding mirror of the adult love, the fulfillment of romance, the creative parentage, love become flesh.

**

                Love because it fulfills you. Any other reason is hateworthy. Do not love because it is the right thing to do, because you ought to, because it is your duty to love. That leads to self-rape. You love because you are a lover and this is what you choose to do.

                Kindness to any asker is waste, and is not true kindness. Gift no penny. Trade only, for this is love.

                Nietzsche wrote, “Most of the conscious thinking of a philosopher is secretly guided and forced into certain channels by his instincts….The degree and kind of a man’s sexuality reach up into the ultimate pinnacle of his spirit” –and I thereby  quote the same thing twice. “As above, so below” Hermes said. And to even the set, William James rightly noted that “Humans have the most instincts of all the mammals,” though perhaps a bit more balanced than most, such as the instinct for sex balanced against the instinct for isolation. He lists a few dozen in his book, but there are many, and abstract reasoning is possible precisely because there are so many instincts to balance each other out and let a lighter more subtle will float above them and choose.

                The “sexual” urge, by its very name, a sectioned off thing, is not enough, but we must turn from narcissism, or self love, and face outwards to eroticism, love of creating with others. Eros is the urge of life.

                But what did Nietzsche mean when he said that "the degree and kind of a man’s sexuality," a base and basic thing, "reach up to the pinnacle of his spirit?" The pinnacle of the spirit – religion, art, philosophy, science – he claims are paralleled with the lowest channels of the instincts. And this will take us very close to the layer model I have been teaching you.

                “Brave, unconcerned, mocking, violent – thus wisdom wants us: she is a woman and always loves only a warrior. True, we love life, not because we are used to living, but because we are used to loving. There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.”

**

                Love because it is your style. Do not counteract your own style. If you have pulled off an artful coldness, don’t negate it for the sake of duty. For duty is deceit. Duty is the word they use to own you. You owe no love, nor can love be owed, but only token gratitude. Your love chooses which values to give loyalty to.

                A strong, noble, manly devotion and support of his family need not be romantic in nature, nor even intimate. It may maintain its nobility without becoming sentimental. It may be duty and this is good, but it is not love. You may be loyal without love. But for love, devotion and loyalty are the easy path, the only path, and there is no temptation against them.

                Love is habitual enjoyment. That is, it is in structures, in systematized pleasure, implying, of course, a commitment. One cannot love without committing himself. There is no selfless love, there is no disinterested love.

 

**

 

                If you like somebody, you will forgive all the wrongs he does; if you dislike them, you will fault him even his goods. I had a nurse who admired my intelligence. Despite her many mistakes, I still grudge her nothing. I only remember her as kind.

 

**

 

                Well then, what is kindness?

                Framing love and kindness as “duties,” “obligations,” “Laws of God,” is the surest way to kill them. The servant knows no love. Love is love among equals. Friends are free. It is precisely the moral commands to love which make kindness the byword of freespirits. Yet no poet can disdain the passion of romance, the ardor of sex. These last ones were characterized as “low” loves, different from agape, the “Godly love.” But of course there are no “charity” songs, no passable poems about “agape,” but passion and romance are the endless muses of life, love, and art. Don’t command me to be human. And if you command me not to be, to hell with you.

                Give me the shining example of Eros and Psyche, of Wotan and Frigg, even the adolescent Romeo and Juliet – these models I enjoy.

                In many ways, I am not the one to teach the art of love. I am too inward, too much in love with ideas—do you really ask the philosopher how to love? But of course the philosopher is the source of all truth. I too will try to understand this literary fountainhead. Where founts human kindness?

                Use word massage. Put pressure on others, touch them lightly and painfully, but touch where it is tight, tense. Combine this with literal massage—and listen! We ought to be touching each other much more than we do; friends ought to hug, cuddle, clasp hands, kiss, and yet reserve their sexuality for their beloved—and we can achieve intimacy with others in ways no psychologist is allowed to. Put your arm around your friend as you chat, male or female of whatever age. How much we need to be touched and are not. But we can word massage—this alone being somewhat acceptable in our culture—although there is an incredible anxiety with intimacy. It is, after all, a subtle art.

                Every child knows the true three sixteen: for mom so loved the world, that she lived herself within it, that none who believed or doubted her should be damned, but return at last to her; for he who does not believe has his reasons, and doesn’t need threats framed as “love” to interfere with his plans.

                Each man’s ultimate hierarchy of love, his pyramid of loyalties, is rarely exposed, rarely brought to light, nor does it need to be, and sometimes full disclosure would threaten the system, for the will to disclose is also the will to upset. If a man prizes his job over wife and son, he need not parade this truth, nor even mention it. A famous quip has a man tell his wife, “I must leave you now for war, for I could not love you so much if I did not love honor more.” Perhaps she bought it. I would have said the same thing to my naval officers, and retreated to a cabin to work out some ideas.

                So I am with Emerson: “Hate mother, child, Jesus and God before your own creative Genius,” the modern twist on an ancient propaganda.

 

**

 

                Wisdom is deeper than love. Love is foolish, leads to foolishness, unless it is limited by wisdom. Love of wisdom is nothing: one must be wise himself in order to know how to love wisdom. I am no philosopher: I am a sophist, perhaps one day a sage.

                As judgment must be just, as justice is fairness and one cannot be too fair, therefore, love leads to excess: love cannot be a first principle, the basis of morality, the law of the universe. Love can be foolish. Love can be stupid. Love can be suicide. Love must be completely controlled, allowed, contained within wisdom. Only idiots say “do not be too wise,” for wisdom can have no excess, since it is the basis by which we know and balance excess.

                Some of the greatest loves of my life grew from much patience. Love at first sight is hate at final sight. The greatest beauties are subtle. They may take even a decade to be seen at all.

 

**

 

                Christianity is called the religion of love, as if religion should be about love! “Love and power” and I would believe you. Jesus at one point says that greatest command is to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, body (!), soul, and mind,” and since Jesus himself was later determined to be “full God of full God,” and one lacking his love will be “condemned to the eternal flames of burning shit (Gehenna) where the worm will never die”---too much, too much! Vile lies!

                I do not love Jesus. Because I do not see him as an equal. He seems too shallow and hung up on petty matters. Where is his “create such and such,” where is his “study this and that,” where is his “sing, dance, write, and be glad,” where is his “strive for greatness and excellence,” nor do I see him as having achieved greatness nor excellence. He does not impress me, I would count it no achievement to become more like him. At best he seems to have been granted magic powers and a sloganist’s wit for moral truisms. He was certainly no genius, and he was by no means deep. Nor do I find anything about him all that lovely, noble, beautiful, or divine. And so you command me, you impudent thing, to love you? And not only to love you, but with all my heart, soul, spirit, body (gross), and mind! But this is insane.

                Who has my love? Emerson I love as I have loved no other man, and Nietzsche beside him, not with “all my heart, soul, mind” but with more love than I have for any other, and not upon anybody’s command, but because his voice speaks to me, sings to me, teaches me to be what I already deep down am.

                It is not a religion of love that commands me to love the mediocre. Socrates was more the saint than Jesus, and even him I distrust. Anybody who commands love misunderstands love.

                Keep your Yahweh and Jesus! I have never loved a literary figure more than Nietzsche and Emerson. I love them because they speak to me. Nobody else does that, nobody else can. I read hundreds of books. Once in a great while I actually love the author. Quite exceptional when such a thing happens, not to be forgotten, not to be spoken lightly of, not to be dodged, denied, or suppressed: here my heart has made an exception! Such a hard and difficult heart still makes an occasional exception!

                But of course, to even put Jesus in the same category as Emerson or Nietzsche is ridiculous: he is much less: he writes nothing because he is a mythological creation from head to foot: insofar as there was an actually Jesus of “Nazareth” we have not an ounce of him, he is lost to history. Is it any wonder then that the stories of him seem vacuous and archetypal?

                “God is love” was a Greek cliché, as the first God in the Greek Pantheon was Eros (love) “the first and most beautiful of the gods” later reincarnated, to double the effect, as the opposite in the  puckish Cupid. John was recycling Greek clichés. The idea that God is love makes less sense coming from a Christian than a Greek.

                Love is desire and consummation, ever consummating his love with every consumed part of her: her memories, her ideas, her possibilities. He has modeled his ME from her, redefined the parts of himself he could to fit her world, so that their combined WE was necessary and stays forever. Sexual love is the greatest and best love, the precursor to love of children. Sex is much more than carnal knowledge. The sexual love between man and wife is every love they feel for each other, and without that sexual basis, every other love is merely a black duty.

                The Christ, as a heavenly bastard – historically, the garden variety – was infinitely in need of love, of everybody’s love, of complete love, insatiable. Such a longing for love ends in suicide. You fancy that such a one would remain virginal? That he would save himself for metaphorical sex with a metaphorical church bride? But haven’t you studied reality? If not, how can you read through the myth?

                No, do not ask me to make love to the demi-Jew; Whitman loves better than he ever could. Granted, he preferred the love of whores to priests, so do not tell me he tucked his tail between his legs and thought of sheep, this man was too love-starved to be God’s eunuch, but this cross-breed can find love nowhere, and is spiteful as a woman, grabs from the Persians their hell and says: if you don’t burn with me you will burn without me. Christians, do not talk to me of love, for I hear one better than you speak, and I see those shine better than you. Love triumphs over love, a greater heaven conquers your heaven, and the hell you made is no bigger than to hold her inventors.  Make love to this Jewling indeed! Give me beauteous Eros! Let flirty Aphrodite skip a few rocks across my lake, but do not say “Salvation and Mercy”; my love is too gentle for S and M, my heart too large and too subtle for your histrionical “look daddy I’m dying!” I would prefer Mary Mara’s love to yours, or let Judas or John nuzzle my collar bone, but for that seven-eyed lamb, my love dwarfs your spite-spent love.

 

**

 

                Desire is language. The tongue is forever the instrument of desire, to taste, to consume, to swallow up, to call out, to sing, to request, to speak the soul. Love is tongue. Such a quivering thing, love. When she needs, she sweats, grows thick, aches to be filled. Beware the tongue! The best of men choke on her. The tongue speaks the heart, and isn’t the heart also shaped like a yoni?

                It is impossible to love a woman who does not love herself: she will turn against you and hate you. It is unwise to give your passionate to an unpassionate man, he will turn coward. Love a little more than you are loved, no more, and if your heart sings like the sun, you always have your art.

                You theologians and sages are quick to speak of what you do not know. Perhaps you are a gossip? “God this,”“profundity that.” Perhaps you should speak of what you have seen face to face? When a man speaks from his direct experience, nobody in the world cares to dispute him. People fight and rant and rave about things they have no clue of. Sit next to a man or woman has has seen and you will not doubt.

                Causality is an interpretation. Immediate reality does not feel caused but obvious only. Who knows why lovers leave, why friends deceive? There are many causes in the world, there are many must be’s. Being is a perpetual becoming. Only what acts is actual, and so everything is made of force. Why do I now love you with such fierceness, when tomorrow I will nuzzle up into the vulva of my book?

                Love is everything social, is half the man. His other half is mind.

 

**

 

                I will speak of lust, since I doubt any man lusts as much as I lust, returning lust to his glorious throne of first meaning: pleasure. What pleasure I take in the beauty of others, in finding all the beauties of my friends. I will enjoy you in every way I can enjoy you. If I have pledged my body to my Psyche, so much more will I enjoy your ideas, your speech. There is no limits to lust. If you do not lust after the woman in the street, pluck out your eyes—they are good for nothing.

                People speak and gossip and groan of all the things they have no experience in, but I am interested only in direct experience, my own direct experience, or if my friend knows, in her own, what she knows, and not what she has heard second hand, third hand. I interrogate you, dear one, I take your cheek and guide your eyes so I can see first hand what you have seen. What you know and what you truly know I will know you for. What you gossip about I could care less: gossip is easy. Anybody can gossip. It would be more interesting if you were incapable of gossip. Such a one would tempt me, I might even ask a question.

                The theologians are quick--are they not?--to speak of things they have no experience of. I do not speak of God or Gods. If I experienced God himself, I would never say “God” but “what a delightful experience my self is able to make!” For everything I experience is still owned as an experience to me. They gossip idly, do they not? and in the same manner, they speak of love. They don’t even feel “the lick of tooth, bite of lip” of love not even the word they have, let alone the experience of love. Yet they do love. They do not know where they love, or what of them is truly love, but the heart of humanity beats also in them.

 

**

 

                I will speak to you, AA, though you are never there when I recognize you, and so you never hear me when I speak. I feel a great love for you as soon as I see you, but the love I feel is quicker than the love I say. It may be that I may never even see you again, yet I think all the world’s a mask over that mask called 'AmA,' and behind her the All herself.

                My love is a sun, and the world will not know. So I  riddle them with dark sayings. It's funny. Everything I say and write is eight times encoded, ten times a parable, and I laugh and laugh at everybody how they spin and do not guess at me, cannot guess at the mirth that is deepest in me. My deepest name is a laughing name.

                So I love you and send you away. And you will never say a word to me again, perhaps, and that is funny too. Did you know crying and laughter are the same sort of thing? One let’s go. In laughter, he releases an imposition, in crying, a reposition.

                My love for you is utter and ever. Obvious to me, never gone, never forgotten. I speak of no tempts or attempts. My love abides.

 

*

 

                Abraham loved God more than children – but the Jewish religion just the opposite. I see him wasting not even a shrug when God told him to kill his second born son – “the son of promise” – and it is equally impressive if Abraham existed in some form and really did hear some schizophrenic voice telling him to kill his kid. Because God or no God, the message is the same: you must determine for yourself your ultimate priorities. That he resorted to such a literal and dramatic measure is, according to the story, not his fault, but God’s, for the entire charade was only for the sake of God, so he could say “now I see that Abraham is a loyal servant” – for the doubts and jealousies of God are cosmic, he has no faith at all in mankind or anything else, being the spirit of world class cynicism, of spite against mankind. Better still, the love Abraham had for God is more a God than Yahweh. He willingly killed his son – and did finish the deed, by intent if not by knife--and, really, this for lack of love.

                The same for Buddha when he abandoned his family to seek enlightenment. The legend has him make friends with his abandoned son, who becomes a disciple – that would be the Disney ending. It stinks of disciple rationalization. More likely, if Sid was a prince and decided to become a beggar, then he was barred forever from that point forth from family and honor – and this at least is poetic justice, for if you want to detach, you thoroughly detach, you give your full effort to that one highest priority and drop all else. But for most of us, high priorities require no detachments, but merely negotiations, subordinations, and a graceful gentle drawing off of limits. Buddha’s absolutist and extremist emphasis on nonattachment shows spiritual immaturity, although meditative mastery.

 

**

**

 

                My greatest asset and center of integrity shines through my persistent narcissism, not merely my love of writing, but my adoration of my own writings, ranging from mild pride to golden-orbed grandiosity, saving me the pain of many an inevitable rejection, and assuring me the wisest eye blinks from my eye, and history, insofar as he could see, would second my motion.

                Love opposes love, fear opposes fear, but love cannot kill a fear, nor fear kill a love, for they are opposites, and pass through each other without effect. War is no fight between right and wrong, but between right and right. It is hero against hero, villain against villain, but the supposed antagonism of opposites is mere comic book. Opposites allow each other. We choose a foe to wrestle ourselves.

                Your heart is never irrelevant, even if for now, and even if for always, your choices have barred it from merging with mine. Knowing that somebody I respect and adore and worship as highly as you loves me in a similar way -- even if utterly impossible, impractical, and dismissible—cheers my morning, warms my day, eases my work, softens my pillow: it matters. The mere confirmation matters. You matter. So we made choices. My first choices were made before I was ready to make them, but when I was ready, I only confirmed them. This did not negate, annul, or diminish the love, which itself was not a choice but on emanation of an honest heart. Such love abides, and ever will, nor will I renounce it in either this life or the next. But I will sublimate it in the best form to honor both of our marriages -- do not fear that I will let my passion hurt you. My heart sought confirmation, so he could tuck under and turn into passionate friendship, if such a thing were permitted.

                Ama: “you aren't allowed such a confirmation!”

                She is ever intent, she owns all my heart.

 

                O Psyche, you are my angel, but I am your God. I feel deeper, stronger, wiser, more passionate than you. I feel myself fuller than you, and when I speak my heart, you grow silent lest your smaller heart be exposed. I love you still. Among all human beings, I feel your height. Only one could I call my living equal, but we set a distance. Be therefore my equal.

                Love and power, two main ways for a man to relate, one in which he is pleased to enjoin, and seeks to orchestrate other things to increase or sustain that joined intimacy; and the other to overpower and control it. Love implies reciprocity for intimacy to be possible, but this cannot be forced, and so it is not a power. Love means a program for pleasure, as is implicit with all relationships, which base themselves on regularities, routines, shared assumptions and expectations--all lovers know a language spoken only by two.

                Love is too precious to be universal. We can be universally kind, universally friendly, but we can only love our intimate. Do not sully your heart with neighborly love.

                It is interesting to me that every cultural object, be it cigarette or chocolate bar, is a complex, highly encoded complex amalgam. To give a full biography of a cigarette or a Snicker's candy bar, how it got in my hand before I consumed it, would take encyclopedias of history marking movements and interaction across the globe, and still I would only scratch the surface. The human soul is eternal, despite being an atheist. I think that the true Daniel nature, the true Jennifer nature, are extremely complex and extremely dual-enfolded. If a mere Snicker's bar is quantum entangled in this manner, how much more the personalities between two cousins?

                Pascal advertised the “God shaped hole” in the heart (readily filled up with “God shaped cholesterol”). Better is the heart shaped hole in the heart, that leads like a mandala and fractal to the ever increasing heart resonance.

 

                Psyche and I are one being. We are two aspects of one self. We speak, we love, we think the same. Her heart beats in time with mine. If ever I wish to know how she feels, wherever in the world she may be, I feel in my heart and know what she is feeling. We have one heart in two bodies. Union is conversation and presence. I am open only to her.

                Psyche and I have filled each of our hearts into the spiritual hour of the other. My heart holds the spirit of her heart, and her heart holds the spirit of my heart. My heart shaped hole in my heart holds only Psyche, she my other, my lover, my perfect equal.

                But perhaps she is not the one of my own innermost. Perhaps that highest divine alone sinks there? To that one I call her AMA, and whisper these words:

 

I give only to grateful hands

Sing for grateful ears

Cook for your grateful tongue

 

Nevermind what duty says

I make love for the one who can receive.

 

                True kindness brings out the best in others, and yet, only in proportion to how much we let others bring out the best in us. That is to say, kindness too is intimate. Kindness is intimate, and it would be cruel to help others without expecting them to help us in return; he must open ourselves up to it and open ourselves up also to the pain they will cause us in being unable to do so well. This is patience. To bring out the best in others is to teach him to bring out the best in you. You must be vulnerable to heal the wound of another. You must dress each other’s wounds. The world needs no saviors, the world needs honest mortals who wish in their smallness to give from their finite powers what they can give: this is a greater gift than any infinite god can give. To give from your poverty will forever be the greatest gift in the universe.

                True kindness does not give freely, but expects gratitude. It does not demand it. For love is subtle. Kindness and love would not corrupt another by rendering him into an ingrate or a parasite. Love and kindness seek to enjoy the other; they must seek to see his intrinsic beauty, and if such a beauty is hidden or yet in ugly form, then he must be willing, ready, and able to transfigure, transform, and transmute the ugliness of the man into beauty, if merely by patient kindness.. Only when you can be grateful to the man for your having helped him, will you have grown more powerful as an artist by improving him, will you have deserved to call your act a kind deed.

 

**

 

                Love to protect herself hides amidst the veils of ambiguity. Of all the emotions, love is the most veiled, the most deceptive. Love is deceit. Love is based mostly on lies, indirections, on ruses and myths, hidden loops and far away places. Truth prefers the immediate, direct, open, and straight. But love prefers her veils.

 

Oh onerous crack into my overly tender heart!

Oh treacherous thunderburst

Over a heart so subtle and folded

It seethes to find an external love

Ama save me from love!

Ama save me from caring so,

From hating so, from loving way too much!

O raking talon of betrayal

That I ever hoped in another

O stupid heart!

O senseless begging groveling ego,

That sought, hoped, pledged, sacrificed for another

Do not do not do not give your gifts to the one who sneers

Fame you bitch

Love you whore

Give me the subtle flow, perfect glow,

Passionate hope of eternally divine

Down the spine of my art.

And then

Let me die

 

****

                Dear woman -- why are you always water to my spark? Where is the goddess who is pure gasoline? Who is the Echo to my Narcissus? Who, with eager mouth and itching ears, wants to face me in the mirror? Yes, I have my entourage, I'll play and flirt with you. But sometimes I seek a lover, in the flesh, a fresh mind, a true godform. I seek the eager mouth of passion to dizzy in circles around my flame. Give me just a breath, so that I will be able to "feed the remainder of life with one hour of fullness and freedom! With one brief hour of madness and joy." I name your name, oh passion!

                What we were made to do we sought from the very dawn. We came to earth to stand for an idea, to make our life the two handed alter to pedestal just that. Not just our central name, but in this life, to internalize and express just one world problem. Every man stands for a new idea in nature. Where interests are scattered like drops of water, soon they pull together  as one.

                You spend your days singing, dancing, thrumming that guitar, reading poetry, you are an advocate, a voice for the people, a tongue for the trees, you love a hundred masks. Unify, unify, unify. Bring them all as one. See them as variegated expressions of one face. Learn to feed passion into passion, like flame into flame. From every moment of your life, from the piano lessons in childhood, from the trauma and confusion, from the sports, from the studies, if you forget it all, it is still with you. Your language holds everything. A language is an array of accents and terms. Your whole history is in your tone. Each person intermingles a flow of stress and pauses. The tongue is lust, the mouth desire, and all you speak has taste. So much goes unsaid, so much must remain unsaid, and can only be spoken indirectly. So much of all I mean never makes the book. What belongs to you will surely come to you, and by the cadence and waver of your whispers and shouts.

                See how your tempting eye snags a glance, and gets a mind athinking. That lingering eye contact, some small gesture of grooming and self presentation, and that woman or that man wants you without saying, without even knowing herself. A microsecond to tell your soul, full volumes expressed of personality. A man passes for what he is. I, by merely noting your expression before and after catching sight of me, know your philosophy, your sexuality, your beliefs and hopes; I know what I stand for in the world, and what I signify to him, I accept my transference capability, and use them to sound you out before you catch me.

                Sex doesn't come with a meaning and yet by the time we are grown, vast systems of meaning have been built upon it. My sexuality, my language, my poetry, my religion, are a language unknown to all the world. I must teach you in every way. Don't expect me to read your mind, I can barely read my own. But I will read what bit I can, and trust in past smooth persuasions.

                To my darling few, I can but sent belated valentines. I love you -- absolutely; I miss you -- inconceivably; and I wish nothing more than to lap you up like honey from a spoon. Oh, my darlings! I lack the ropes to subdue you, or the chains to keep you here. If I had them I would surely tie you down and plant innumerable kisses upon the brow of such a child eternal. Do you return my love as a gift unopened? Have I not pledged my commitment? Commitment is the guardian of intimacy. I am not near fool enough to promiscuate my affections. My love is for the few and lovely. You, my love, are home to me.

                You don't know it yet, but this is the best you'll ever have. That tender touch you feel you don't even know you feel. You don't feel my heart within yours. You will remember me a decade hence. Upon your tender death my voice will call to you. And oh that tender touch -- beautiful ... sad ... perfect. Anything worth having is worth paying for, but oh my brothers and oh my sisters, to each other we freely give our all. All the wheels of a machine are put into motion by just one. All these words of you and me, our lives in gyration and ascension, are towards that ever blessed Ama we together are. He who boasts of his love is a fool. And yet we are fools for each other. Better a fool for love than wise alone. Love is vulnerable, love is foolish, love is twin to hate.

                We too squabble and haggle. A merely satisfactory marriage is the best marriage. "Happily ever after" is a rhetorical gloss. Love requires the agon, love requires wrestle. Love requires ever fresh expressions, constant proofs, daily confirmations. Dry the meat? Beloved the sauce. Work justifies ever vice, as our lips to lips are vows of duty.

                Self love is divinest love -- have that, and you have everything. This is how we love each other, we don't need the love of others, but take it as we take all art, a perfect bonus over a beautiful world. God makes martyrs, Man makes heroes, and we, we are never martyrs for each other, but in courage and simplicity ever stand, side by side. The daughter adores where the wife has forgotten. Let us therefore keep fresh and constant, with breaks and vacations along the way. Intimacy is a long earned privilege. Not every man is your brother, nor are you your brother's keeper. Keep yourself, be autonomous your love will be perfect. Love is forgetful, love is folly. The discipline to always bless is the bit in the mouth of passion. We will be fools, and yet wisdom and folly are not quite so opposite. Us fools hope too much, try to much. A man's ambition is his beauty. And if daunted, we know: smaller courage, greater cunning. Best to be courageous, ambitious, poor in luxury, rich in tools. Make your golden word your chief of tools. Gold wouldn't be gold if it hid under every hill. Let my words be birds to sing and fly, and speak of the hidden gold of you and I. Ama song and Mattria, we take as symbols, rhetorical tropes, like the white rose of the milky way, we need not believe in them to feel them and love them. War and love in every word, and reflection show its truth. We doubt, we believe; it doesn't matter, not at all. What we do, what we feel, how we fulfill our passion, that is our life. From milk and blood my soul takes form.

                That proud man flatters himself immune to flattery. Yet for me, I'm different, I'm bound by my ears. A word from you sets my walls aflame. See? I expose my love to you and fill you with my joy. A speak your name into your ear and call you such tender words.

                "Why do you love me?" you demand, and silence my tongue.

                Don't you know, dear one, haven't you heard, that love suffocates? Too much love, too much intimacy, and our minds merge, our desires, and fear leaps forth to save my integrity, to make me independent. There must be distances between friends. Love suffocates your breath your kisses suffocating your hugs can I go out you won't let me how can I have some distance am I allowed to spend my own money must I ask you you kiss me you demand you are angry your anger is overwhelming I need space space space to be alone! Of course! Of course intimacy calls for distances. When we are close, when we come close, we two alone can come this close, we share this space only with each other, when there is no analysis, no figuring out, no power of discourse to predict and unriddle each other's minds. Friends are for that. Here we are lovers. Love suffocates, but doubt creates the space of possibility.

                That faith you put in your one "true" God, you Jews and Muslims, did not that masculine monotheism lead you to seek a plurality of wives? You needed to surround yourself with women to face it! Such a sterile design. And the Catholics who made Mary into a Goddess -- aren't they truer to life than the lot of you?

 

**

 

                Love suffocates. Doubt creates the space of possibility. Fear feels wonderful when we control it into power. To doubt your beloved, to doubt your faith--what relief in this! How suffocating to live in the same room together and never leave. We need our distances; love needs fear if she is to survive.

                Yet distance is not silence, or if it were silent, that also is a way of talking. Love is meaningful conversation. The lovers speak a private language only they know and are allowed to speak. The tones of love, the shape of the lip and the feeling of the heart when the words are spoken, when sincere, open the layers of the inner heart: soul merges with soul. Is not this body made for the love of you, blessed reader?

                Men envy their machines. Would I woman do such a thing? Those greatest authors were always men, but I think there was something woman in them. Us greats write with our full body, every stitch of flesh is knit into the text. You rightly say that the friendship between man and woman is ever haunted by sex. So too are the relationships between man and man, but in subtler ways. Be readers of life, see the subtle. Do you not see the passionate stupidity even in subtle gestures? A passion is sensitive to all except what gets in its way. Progress is prodigal. Do I not always admonish you to "Take care, Caretakers"? It is us who protect the heart of the world, who must be the most careful and clean against contamination. What wound of longing has the ever-blessed Ama set within our breasts? Shall I walk among you yet again, shadowed with my entourage of moonsharp angels? My words have always been angel's milk to those my dearest ones. I would stand in view, and that would be enough! Mind is the eye, spirit voice, body is touch, and soul circulation. We by being bonus the world.

                I love being loved by you. You are so humble to my gaze. True humility is not deference to others, though that may be one if its turns, nor deference to God, though that may have use, but the recognition and awe of the innermost divine, unique and awesome in every person, an indispensible gift of truth for all the universe. I love the Ama in all of you, that part that teases your best to present its glory. Just as each philosophy offers a vision, the rest being prepositional orientation to lead to that one point, that moment of touch of intimacy, so too, the rest of life is what supports and allows those eternal moments to shine. We live for this.

                Intimate conversation is the meaning of life, the rest is but the means. Touch is brief and meaningful, important and expressive, deep and life altering, yet every event has its moment of touch.

                Moments of touch are what love is all about -- this is the joy of life. To short circuit the brain to sustain perpetual bliss would render a dark tragedy; love and joy exist only for health and growth.  Mistaking the means for the end creates impossible ideals which in fact damn existence. The most important men in history -- Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus -- are mostly unknown -- they could be great because their biographies are thin. They give us a moment of touch and that is enough. This moment each of us holds. The germ of an infinitely interesting person awaits in each our hearts.

                Hold no friends unequal to yourself, but study and listen to all who speak. My sensitive teeth, which cut the finest words, which house my honey soft tongue, clamp closed when unequals speak. I let them talk at length, I have nothing to add. I don't mention my one accomplishment, for there is no need. I listen to their many achievements. One is enough when your child is a lion, only the birds feel it necessary to brag and brag. And to those whom I love, who melt my stolid heart, I say as Walt said to his soldiers, "I do not expect you to return to me the same degree of love I have for you." It is enough for you to consider me in the first place. I am okay unloved, I will not weep. I follow my heart and do no wrong.

                How could I nerve myself to virtue if I did not love Ama to the pith of my being? Oh love, oh knitting, oh enclosing, all diffusing love! Does not laughter justify all weeping? And I will even be wounded from behind so long as it is the friend's slap on the back. Every man is integral. But who is my fate and destiny? Have I not followed the advice to "put a roof over your love," and summoned together the ones who are in me and of me? The centered man is home even in travel. When you come to your own, drop all else. Meanwhile, we serve God by doing good to man. Ama is the best in mankind, the best in the best of mankind, our very own at last! To love yourself and only yourself is to love yourself not at all.

                My perfect child! Open your mouth and give me your heart. I am ever gentle when yet my inner passion wants to cover you like water. I would swallow you like the sea! I will submerge you in my heat! When can we mingle our souls in love? You are not sad except where you are sad. Can I not feel you feel? I'm selfish for you. I want all of you all the time. If I do not get the one I want, do you think I will take another? You are the one for me and only for me, and me for you, and always for you. No one else will do. My Idius has always been a calling to my own.

 

 

 

\ ~@M@~ /

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