Where to begin, oh diary -- if only you had a voice, it would tremble and falter in telling the story about to be told. This story contains the wound of the world and the broken heart of a being, determined to love at all costs and the terrifying realisation that 'all costs' may involve the sacrifice of part of his own substance, despite knowing better: that life needs must be lived through the individual in equal proportion to his relations with others. Surrendering one's ineluctable self-determination renders the love-situation for this poet, akin to the sovereignty of serfdom which has maintained a hegemony over all romantic types during all eras and provided a back drop against which, the perennial enemies of love, can spew their insidious charms, of 'free-love', consequence-less betrayal and perfect autonomy: a tension, all lovers must negotiate in their delusional quest for a satisfying co-existence.
One both denies and relinquishes some part of his own total self, in order to open and make room for the fusion with that part of the other that is offered and denied simultaneously when we fall into that abyss we call 'in love'? Do we not hope to close ourselves around them? Or do we want them to close themselves around us? Perhaps it is a matter of mutual containment, on agreed terms, implicit and unspoken as they may. The silent contract of the love-situation: you hold me where i am hurt and i hold you where you are hurt. And is not that abyss, filled with the most wonderous and fascinating creatures; creatures of the dark, indwelling shadow. The hinterland of what is overwhelmingly unknown and thus inexpressible in this secondary language i am resigned to use. Images, evoke powerful emotions in the economy of the psyche and when one becomes symbiotic with another, the specular mirage of each to themselves, through the vista of the other's eyes, thoughts, actions and intentions, intensifies to an, at times, intolerable extent. The extent where one feels utterly annihilated by the others' misunderstanding or insensitivity: for if they truly were at one with you, they too would surely know and feel the pain and despair brought on by the slightest of misdemenors, let alone to flood of unbearable and unnameable affects that destroy all but the most impenetrable core (pithy as that may be) of the personality when, where one hurts most the other also hurts most. And is not this place, of mutual annihilation, the perfect starting point for a new and deeper appreciation of the uniqueness of each half of the round? Perhaps this is the confession of an innately over-sensitive type, but in another perspective, this softness of heart, guides Warriors to their fullest definition in the infinite world of possibilities around us.
So, should a lover, be always open to those infinite opportunities for unity, however impersonal? The sophistication of one's answer to this will be concretely dependent on the experience and spirituality of the one answering. Of course a young man, with a high sexual drive (unquestioning in respect of that drive), will quite probably think that there are so many more experiences to be had -- but give him a few years and those experiences will become less and less meaningful as his inner self yearns towards a higher form of completion; a completion that understands the impossibility of perfection, totality or union; yet a perfect form in itself, beauty as such -- whereby, the gains achieved through the pursuit of something higher than our basic animal needs (which are valuable in themselves and serve their function with varying degrees of psycho-somatic fall-out) are discovered to be supreme amongst the possibilities we are each beset with. Then one wonders, where did this destructive force come from, if it comes to no good psychologically, save for the temporary relief of pressure as in a hydraulic model? The economy of our libido is far more complex than that. Men may have a delusion that sexual release is valuable in and of itself, but then how does one explain the ubiquitous decline of libido into maturity? Could it be that, we are somehow meant to siphon this libido towards greater goals than mere stimulus response reflexes? I would ask, what things in life does one value most? Those experiences that came and went like the wind, spectacular as they might have been, monumental in their aesthetic importance, but substantially vacant -- do these fleeting moments, (as if life itself were not a mere fleeting of moments from birth to grave) when one is taking his last breath, impact the soul to a greater or lesser degree than the far more difficult to substantiate quality of having loved and been loved by people who share a certain portion of this world with you intimately, people you tried to know, struggled to exist with, but showed it all to -- all of who you were, including the temporary or more chronic disliked aspects.
Loving means trying to better yourself. Would you have preferred to be a solo agent, free to enjoy any or all impersonal intimacies? Then what would you have built? Or perhaps you think there is another out there who can fit you more fully -- in which case lovers should say to one another: "cherished angel of my undying heart -- i beseech you to cut loose these chains that bind my essence to yours; release me from this wounded vision in which your complicity resides ahead of me, you see it too. As i am bondage to you, you are to me fair love. Farewell on that splendid journey of promiscuity; farewell all semblance of self-respect and tread carefully on that ground of self-loathing, for you know it as do I, as a barren place for the soul. Yet take me with you, if you will, and remember me always, as the part of yourself you were not yet ready to embrace. I would find love always -- never like this one -- would that i ever saw but you."
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