Good afternoon, and boy, is it a good afternoon. No exclamation mark, but that's supposed to be an exclamation.
I want to share a passage from a novella by Carson McCullers. I read her book "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" during summertime, when I was meditating, living on greens, and feeling sad and misanthropic. She really feels like a friend. I'm reading "Clock Without Hands" now, but the following is from "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe", which I haven't got round to yet. I found it yesterday night, and it was exactly what I needed to read.
Here it is:
First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons - but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which had lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his lover within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world - a world intense and strange, complete in himself. Let it be added here that this lover about whom we speak need not necessarily be a young man saving for a wedding ring - this lover can be man, woman, child, or indeed any human creature on this earth.
Now, the beloved can also be of any description. The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love. A man may be a doddering great-grandfather and still love only a strange girl he saw in the streets of Cheehaw one afternoon two decades past. The preacher may love a fallen woman. The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed, and given to evil habits. Yes, and the lover may see this as clearly as anyone else - but that does not affect the evolution of his love one whit. A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. A good man may be the stimulus for a love both violent and debased, or a jabbering madman may bring about in the soul of someone a tender and simple idyll. Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.
It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fear and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is for ever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.
I don't want to comment much on what's written above - I don't want to detract from its beauty (which stems from its truth), and I don't have much that I'd like to say now about it. I don't have much that I'd like to say on this blog anymore, during these present lapses of time. But one thing I really appreciated in that passage was that she took into account the fantasy element of love, and acknowledged a need for dreaming space within the heart of any person who has loved. Many people I've come across, and whose views on love I've been privy to in one way or another, have had a tendency either to belittle, or to bypass entirely, the necessity of the dreaming space, which, to me, is a fantasy world and a spiritual playground all the same. I am happy to have felt, in my eighteen years on this earth, moments of complete self-submission in favor of the freedom and harmonious continuity of another. I find this the ultimate prayer. But Carson is right. This is a private experience that has its tinge of bittersweetness. And no matter how hard the heart pounds against the rib cage, struggling to escape the human Being and unclench its reservations for the perusal of the beloved, this can never be achieved. And I don't believe it should be achieved. Such experiences, I'm learning, are always savored alone.
To me, love comes in moments. Take my feelings for my mother as an example. I could say that I love my mother all the time, but I would be simplifying things too much and reducing them into inaccuracy. I have felt intense and potent hatred towards her at times, the French face of the Lebanese coin of "love", to which I shall assign the Arabic half of that shiny silver whole. But if someone comes up to me and asks me, "So which is it? Do you love your mother or don't you?", I would answer in the affirmative, knowing that the natural assumption the asker would make is that I love her "forever after". Why? Because the moments of love I have felt within my lonely world outnumber the moments of indifference, or blind anger and hatred. And somehow I feel this is the only love that's real. The "fantasy world" is not such - these dream-like moments are the manifestations of the true and deep feelings of each and every heart, unclouded by the reason allocated to the mind by society's conditioning, or its limited, hypocritical stances on human morality. When a human being lets oneself experience such unconditional and unselfish strands of love, they are placed directly in communion with God.
Take sex, for instance. Sex is the saving grace of all sinners. Yes, I'm going ahead and saying that. The sheer naturalism of connection with another human being in a sexual sense fills the atmosphere between two people with so much potentiality for reaching God, whether one or both parties realize it or not. I have more than once felt the presence of God with me during sexual intimacy, and it's no surprise I feel like praying sometimes before I've loved in a sexual sense, other times after. Sex establishes a promise between two or more people, one that may or may not be kept. That promise encompasses a variety of journeys people embark upon throughout life - knowledge of the self, understanding of another human being, wholistic sensual fulfillment. The desire is different for each person. I've come to understand that for me, sex at all times has the capacity for moments of love, and closeness to the Creator. But it doesn't necessarily mean that because I am filled with love, my beloved is also undergoing an identical spiritual metamorphosis, in the moment of passion or otherwise. Love is a silent experience. She's right about that. If the promise is kept within the self, consider yourself lucky. If the promise is fulfilled between your spirit and that of another, consider yourself blessed. Oftentimes, the soul union occurs within, and for whatever reason cannot manifest itself without, into the consciousness of the beloved. Speaking for myself, I have found myself capable of deep love - but its expression eludes me. So I feel it in myself, and try to atone for my inadequacy by doing more good than harm to the beloved, and curbing my natural harshness and emotional volatility into gentleness, patience, and a listening ear. Anyway, if the expression of love will bring pain and unhappiness to the beloved, I would rather not express it at all. A few nights ago, a friend of mine said to me, "I admire your desire to be impartial to all, but this can't be possible if someone is more special to you than others. Love isn't fair." I think by nature love isn't fair - still, just because love isn't fair, doesn't mean you can't be. It's not fair to burden someone with the constant expression of what you feel towards them in your private world. If it gives them grief, experience your suffering within. But don't drag someone down with you, especially an innocent victim of your own intensity.
There is, however, one channel of love that is always open for two, and that is the one established through prayer and meditation with God. This love can't let you down, ever. Because God is the aggregation of all moments of love, in the tangible world and the hereafter. Stick to God. You won't be disappointed. In God I trust - of people I hold my suspicions.
One final thing, before I go. Sex isn't dirty. There's no clean sex and dirty sex. Sex isn't "cleansed" by love, nor is it sullied by the lack of it. Any kind of sex that doesn't meet society's terms and conditions is qualified as "dirty". Don't feel too bad about it if you try to feel love for a person when you're sleeping with them, but can't. The act itself is prayer enough, if gone into with an awareness and awe of its naturalism, and is a mutual exchange between the people involved. But the emotional experience is private, at all times, in some way. Don't ever give yourself to another person. Share, but retract eventually. Life has much of the bitter and hard, and you need to hold onto yourself and never prostrate yourself before anything other than God, least of all another person, a false idol. Feel your idolatry/prayer within, but don't let it take that part of you that's only for you. "If the self is lost, all is lost." I trust in God, and I trust in me. That's it. And yeah - I said I wouldn't talk a lot, but shit like that happens where I'm concerned :)
Eventide hails outside my window. I'm going.
Signed, your friendly Water Bearer.
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