Love

Love, as we all know, was invented by novelists – and that too of the rather middling sort, whose chief-clientele are the petit-bourgeois, who contract unhappy marriages for the sake of social conformity and gild it with the name, happy domesticity….and those who therefore, men and women alike, enact their fantasies in the broken-eared yellowed pages of novels, and their reality on broken beds with mosquito nets over them, a cheap substitute for a royal canopy --- it is to please this clientele, and defraud them, that novelists invented love. That is why no self-respecting maestro ever gives a happy ending to his novel – imagine Anna Karenina knitting wool in her old age – it is vulgar. Love is crass, it is loss alone which gives a certain grandeur to man. Man is never, I assure you, more beautiful than when he is mourning. So the catholic church calls the death of her savior – the Passion. She exults in her sorrow, as a bride for three days she mourns her bridegroom, taken away by the soldiers, hastily buried in a cave. She celebrates it in the eucharist – the doctrine of the real presence – it is not a commemoration of death, but the loss itself, a sacrificial orgy that recurs with frightening beauty, the real body and the real blood offered for consumption, the bridegroom presented in his death to the bride, a body of roses and lilies, for the flowers do not toil, they merely are beautiful in their everlasting sorrow. So too did Venus mourn for Adonis, the handsomest of men – and Cybele for her Tammuz. The presence of the lover is best felt in his absence.

Love creates unending paradoxes. To use a demotic metaphor, like Newton’s third law of motion….if you love someone, they will not love you back ; but the moment you fall out of love with them, or better still ignore them because you feel no passion for them, they will chase you as moths to a candle. One of my friends loved a man. When she did not show it, he chased her ; when she confessed her feelings, he left her. Vulgar, but true. That is love. You can never quite repeat the magic of the first meeting, because it is not love that we crave, but the mere sensation of tasting something new. Replace a man with a new lace shawl that is latest a la mode, and a woman will not regret it, replace a woman with a tacky gold watch, or better, a stimulating detective novel with enough magic-eyed femmes fatales, and a man will forget his thousand-confessed passions. Love is nothing but our craving for something insubstantial and vague, that which makes us suddenly wake up from sleep and feel sad….it is frightful because we do not know why it is that we are sad, just a strange fatality that hangs over us, over some more than on others, giving even quite undeserving individuals a sensitivity that is almost a martyr’s halo. One doesn’t need to be a good man in order to be an artist, one only requires that queer morbidity that ruins life and makes it meaningful. To die is to live, to love then is nothing but to desire desire itself.

All love therefore is doomed, if satisfied in the short-run, it leaves us unsatisfied soon, if unsatisfied, it is still a slave’s fetter, a lost traveler’s mirage. For how can one capture desire itself? It is a mere magic bird that sings a song and flies into the neverending forest, it is a wolf that howls to the moon to ask her not to fade away. Love is the feeling that is left when a feast is just over, that indefinable flame that burns us, refines us, and in the end destroys us.



But I have spoken of mere human love, bound by the twin ropes of virtue and temptation. Above that is a love which the ancient fathers called agape, and the latin monks, caritas, . but feebly translated in English as charity. It is the sun that vivifies, the seraphic flame, loving which, man loves all the world, lost in whose beauty, he sees all the world as beautiful, and so loves all, yet is faithful to his god. For all we see are mere shadows as Plato would say, or as shimmering darknesses under a candle-flame, pointing to the Beautiful, yet never reaching it. It is the tragedy of modern man that he worships god but loves man, man who is a mere nothing, a symbol drawn on parchment, an Egyptian god with the face of a beast, yet we seek to see god in this strange being, fervently worshipping him more than all the heathen nations….we seek god in man for we love man with all the fervour that a nun loves her absconding God.

And so must modern man forever be sad, for what human being, howsoever comely or gentle a friend she or he maybe, ever incarnate the power and the charity of godhood….beneath whose dark luminosity, whose cruel affection, even the angels shield their faces with wings (for who shall behold the face of God, and still live?)…and cry, incessantly, in unfulfilled ardor

Sanctus Sanctus Sanctus
Dominus Deus Sabaoth.

~~scio.