Darconville's Cat (33 page)

  XXXVIII

  Love

  —I pursued

  And still pursue, the origin and course

  Of love, but until now I never knew

  That fluttering things have so distinct a shade.

        —WALLACE
STEVENS,
Le Monocle de Mon Oncle

  “LOVE,” wrote Darconville, “is as rare as the
emotion of hate. I pray your divided attention: they are the
extreme antipodes of each other in temperament but never in
endowment, and so bear a strange complementarity. Every time
someone executes the action of one of them, the other,
specifically, becomes the victim of not being executed. Each is of
each a mirror-image, yet explicitly looking at each we implicitly
look at both, as when looking in water face then answers to face.
To be in the grip of one is to relish precisely not being in the
grip of the other. A yes is valued only because it could have been
a no, and vice-versa, for the philosophical upshot of freedom,
shaped by choice, is that we would not be able to love in act if we
were not also able to hate in potency. The lowest number is two
which, lying down together in the sum it incorporates, pips the
child, Relativity. The mirror is, indeed, the parable of love, but
you will remember this also: what one sees in the mirror is not in
the mirror at all. The anagram of ‘Determination: thorough evil!’
is ‘I mean to rend it through love!’—the perfection of equation
being the missing i that must necessarily be lost for salvation in
another.

  “Love is the thirst which vanishes as you drink. It
is, however, always in a state of becoming, moving from one
definiteness to another, a synthesis of both identity and
otherness. Approaches solely rationalistic or empirical fail in the
face of it. We fall through such formulae weightless, for love
often declines as fast as reason grows: it is not a what but a
that. To ask questions of love is to commit the sin of avarice, for
it yields nothing of sense to those intellectual quackshites,
daubers of logic, and gowned vultures and spies who, with rule,
glass, and compass, surround it in some kind of official jingbang
to try to finger out answers and prod it into comprehension. The
emotion is not subject to the imperatives of Cartesianism nor is it
kind to men of literal minds, but, on the other hand, see it only
as figurative and you die starved on theories, impaled on promises.
The colors of love are hues. And yet we will never cease to hear
noises made, as they were of old, when in the white dust of the
Agora, the philonoetic Greeks sat with legs crossed, feet
decussated, and raised endless questions on “the unbridled
delirium”: does love love for love? Does love love to love? Does
love lack what it loves? Does love like what it loves? Love loves
to love love, it occurred to them, as hate hates to love love.
‘Therefore,’ exclaims Prometheus, ‘hate loves to hate love!’ ‘Hate
loves
?’ gasps Epimetheus. ‘Why, ‘tis impossible, sir!’
‘Say you so?’ replies Prometheus. ‘Then hate, hating, cannot desire
itself?’ And so they grapple, and so they will.

  “Knowledge is often used, mistakenly, in the sense
of wisdom. Of such ideas let us soon hope to be rid, for no
brainsick questions, mythical intricacies, or the froth of human
wit can probe love—you cannot explain it. You point to it with a
question exactly when it hasn’t an answer for you. It mocks the
academic efforts of men. Medicine talks mere folly. Theology must
hold its peace. And Logic, that parody of human reasoning, must
positively die of embarrassment in the face of it, for one cannot
pound arithmetic like a drench of yew. Love is not simply what it
is, for in this matter, strictly speaking, what it is implies also
what it ought to be, and as it exists always in a state of
becoming, when it exists at all, it is never fully in a state of
being. You define it only by preventing its development and
preventing its development you hazard its loss. You circumscribe it
only by limiting it. Persecute the syllable, logical positivists!
Shift it about your mechanic paws, polyhistors and polymaths! Does
it lisp? Did it cry out? Pinch it, cuff it, tweak it, employ the
bastinado, and squeeze it for moots and lessons! But come, come, I
will see the barometer wherein, that it might be read, will squat a
typhoon. lago is more rational than Othello. And thereby hangs a
tale.

  “True love is the
dolce nemico
of daily
life, for love deals not with what is happening but with what ought
to happen. The L of love is not the L of logic. For how many
centuries has the air of the earth been refrigerated by the tears
and heated by the sighs of ruined suitors who failed to realize
this? You cannot buy it, make it, fake it, steal it, or ever expect
it to appear, for, like can over may, it is only a question of
possibility, not permission. It is a grace all hear of, none
deserve, few understand; it owes little to merit, less to honor,
and, queerly, more often than not finds a home in those sad,
shipwrecked, and unready hearts not proud for the expectation. You
can only hope for it, which is to say you must shed tears and keep
boxes of alexipharmics in your pocket to support you in your loss,
for the very imagination that informs hope inflicts the horror,
always, of alternative.

  “A lover hopelessly in love is not only a lover
impatiently in love but a lover impatiently hoping. There is no
declaration of love which is completely true, true in the sense of
complete; it is always a declaration of hope, with equation the
paradigm—a phenomenon of projection that seeks to become a
phenomenon of equation, the only settlement of which rests in the
meaningless but mystical tautology: A=A. The proposition of
identity translates ‘I am’ and ‘I am’ to ‘we are.’ The finding is
in the seeking. But you are never fulfilled, satisfied only in that
other satisfactions await and with an equable temperament content
only by dint of approaching in mystery but not reaching in fact an
equation that never is solved. A real gambler always returns the
money he’s won.

  “Love, like flotsam, floats. It is proposal, not
proposition. There is no doubt but that it is through the
ineffability of its glory that men first feel the awakening of
their own real nature, becoming convinced, with overpowering
clarity, that they have a soul. Vision makes room for vision.
Everything is transcendent in love. The little Vatican of truths
within us—even those stupid, inelegant fibs which, when told, at
least give us an idea of what we’re trying to become—whisper to us
by hints of just how they may be confirmed, and confirmed, held,
and held, maintained. Lovers move asymptotically toward the
paradise the relative implies is to come in the absolute. Man loves
in order to live in another a life missing in himself, for perhaps
love does love what it lacks: we want to
be
what we love,
even if what we love wants us to be, when we love, what we are. A
couplet we may recall from the celebrated Welsh erotikon,
Duges
Ddu
, goes:

        Our life? Our
love. Or else indict us

        With merciless
quotes from Heraclitus.

  “In one way, the lover is the purest autobiographer,
for he must attend to his personality for another beyond his own,
all to shake out, shore up, and shape in an art that’s ideal what
he can in truth of his life that’s real. Love, in any case, means
union and what is not union is not love. You will either build a
bridge or build a wall. In building a wall you remain the
despicable crunchfist you always were, interested in neither
projection nor equation but only in acquisition. You are priap. You
will pray to St. Unicycle and use your nose for erotical labors and
your unloving hands shall be avaricious as horns. You shall be
called hard names: we shall call you Manchineel and perceive you
more and otherwise than you think. In building a bridge, then what?
Neither then, alas, can you be certain any will pass over. But you
shall be called Chevalier, for you are brave.

  “It is an emotion, love, the moral implications of
which quicken out of time, passing the clouds, to touch the instant
of Creation. Love murders the actual. (Reverse the sentence, it’s
still true, but terrifying.) You must be what you are, always,
however, in the hope that what you can be is exactly what you
pursue in love; and ideally, of course, you shouldn’t be anything
but what you should be, a difficulty which the thought itself
raises. Loved, nevertheless, you find yourself favored with the
greatest of all possibilities for transfiguration, assisted,
paradoxically, by what you would attain, but failing that, a kind
of devastation few can know.
Cave amantem
! It carries the
full weight of your soul with it. Our ideals are our perils. The
heart of the loved one is an autoclave in which you have placed
your own. Ravens bleed from their eyes during coition.

  “Love! Say the word: how the velarized tongue drops,
astonished, to the sigh of a moanworthy O that comes from low in
the throat and trembles into the frail half-bite that closes on it
like a kiss! The word is not spoken, it is intoned, proselytizing
both the one who breathes it and the one upon whom it is breathed.
What indeed has this to do with mortals? Whose spoor is this
tracked so inexorably and so repeatedly toward it—can it be mere
man’s? What supernatural flame leaps from the darkness of man’s
soul that it can not only conceive, not only imagine, but somehow
attain to such beauty? The philosopher increases in wisdom as he
grows old and rots. Oysters are generated in scummy foam, medlars
savored only if eaten when decayed, and ambergris is taken from the
whale’s rectum. Ovid explains that the sweetest Roman cosmetics
came from that part of the wool where sheep sweated most. The
wolf-spider impairs her womb to furnish the material for its
beautiful silk. The worst soil yields the best air. In the slopped
and muddied palette of Botticelli patiently sat
The Birth of
Venus
. Isn’t there a metaphysics in the making here?

  “Woman’s beauty is the love of a man: they are not
two things but one and the same thing, for love is the very shadow
of the monument it creates. ‘I am to each,’ says Love, ‘the face of
his desire.’ Now love creates beauty because love needs beauty—the
symbol of this act of worship—and the greater the projected image
of one’s ideal the greater the glory that settles on the loved one.
Love has to do with the comprehension of paragons; it tempts one
forward, and that the object of love, in reality, serves only as
the point of departure for incomparably greater vision, lambent,
beyond our very nature, should come as no surprise, for the nature
of the ideal is that it inspires what it isn’t. Where it isn’t, it
suggests to those disposed to it, it can be. The actual desire for
love, resident in so many hearts, is in fact only a tiny parody of
the emotion it seeks and proves this as it tries to bridge the gap
between what we have and what we want, what we are and what we want
to become. The beauty that love creates is precisely the ideal it
would realize. You receive—not the paradox it seems—what you have
given, the colophon of which, perhaps, is best expressed in the
matter of sexual congress. The beauty that love creates, the ideal
you would realize: this can be the foundation of real union only
when
two
people, irrevocably, find and maintain it in the
face of all odds, which is principally why so few people
successfully fall in love and live in it.

  “A love affair, easily, can be doomed the moment it
begins, due to a whole series of misconceptions, for of course one
believes or wants to believe that the other person is the
dream-complement of oneself; but, no, the other person mightn’t
be—the other person, after all, is only himself or herself. Only
the
aspiration
in each to be the dream-complement of the
other, effected always by sacrifice (the only way to prove one’s
love), can establish the basis upon which true love can be
structured. The statistical probability of an equal, exactly mutual
love existing is arguably next to impossible, and yet if both the
conception of and the will to the ideal, as exerted by each with
respect to the other, is jointly shared, then love, like death,
makes all distinctions void. Real love, to be successful, must move
each to each equally, an amphiclexis of souls wherein the giving by
one generates, not taking, but a natural impulse by the other to
give in return. It has been argued, nevertheless, that the
individuals involved may be—and possibly will be, and possibly must
be—unequal. All joy worth the name, some say, is in equal love
between unequal persons, that the entire disclosure of love, even
its necessity, becomes irrelevant when, for instance, equals meet.
Real friendship, thought Bacon, is mostly between superior and
inferior, where degrees are dissolved, willingly, in the sudden
miracle of the emotion. But then what is predictable of this
disease that, attacking the heart, the soul, the mind, and the
spirit all at once, has no remedy but to love the more? It wants no
cad or elf but is a perfect witchcraft of itself, promising nothing
less than a new life, giving you the chance to lead another’s and
to multiply hers by your own.

  “We have considered the projection of beauty and the
pursuit of the ideal as indivisible. Beauty
in se
is
kinetic; the
idea
of beauty is static, however, and to
understand the distinctions and differences here is paramount. The
only true paradise for us is the paradise we could lose—and the
nature of all significant attachment is that, when that bond is
broken, we are destroyed to that degree. The state of love,
curiously, generates both the fear of such loss and destruction and
yet simultaneously creates the only hope to prevent it. The song of
love is always a cry for immortality: the permanence we’d have of
love is only the perfection we would attain in the completion and
utter fulfillment of ourselves and a projection of the idea of
beauty. The
idea
of beauty is permanent, while every
beautiful thing, every part of nature, such as it is, is
perishable. Man has an upright face and advances his countenance
toward the stars. Love looks seaward, outward, upward through the
eyes of the kind of people in whom wonder never flickers down to a
doubt, teaching the soul to dwell not where it lives but where it
loves.