“That which I love in the Loved One--to the point that I want to die of love--is not that One in particular, but rather the shard of the universal that resides in it. Insofar as that part is in play, I put myself in play.”
“It is not the pure Unified Being that is the object of love, but the separate being, who is only nearby by sheer luck, who has fallen from the Unified insofar as it is a separate being, through the power that it has to deny separation. But this negation supposes an encounter with the Loved One. The negation has no effect but when one stands before the other, when one supposes an equal presence of chance in this other.”
-- Georges Bataille, Sur Nietzsche
If we can jive, more or less, with the above, we enter into a murky, idiosyncratic thread in the history of the theory of love: Though this thread certainly contains more chords than these three, I’ll limit my discussion, for the most part, to Georges Bataille, libertine author Dominique Vivant Denon, and the North Carolinian country duo Hiram.
***
Vivant Denon’s novella Point de Lendemain, in its 1812 version, begins with a form which will echo, in various permutations, throughout the work:
I was twenty, and I was naïve; she betrayed me, I got mad, and she left me. I was naïve, I regretted it; I was twenty, she forgave me: And because I was twenty, and I was naïve, ever betrayed but even more abandoned than betrayed, I thought myself the best-beloved lover of them all, therefore the happiest of men.
That is, there is no simple valence here: Abandonment is as much an indicator of love as a kiss: Love is a spiral which, when entered, turns everything into a sign and points all these signs toward it: The lover is fundamentally paranoid, and it is tempting to say that they vacillate accordingly. But there is no vacillation. Only superposition: Love is woe, as read through the Book of Isaiah 5:20:
Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, for they are as good as dead; woe to those who turn darkness into light and light into darkness, who turn bitter into sweet and sweet into bitter.
Love is the action of the philosopher’s stone: The lovers are at once lead and gold and, upon exiting the spiral, can be neither: Love places them on the heights of despair and of joy, which two heights, we may confidently say, are the same summit.
***
William S. Burroughs, when asked to define love: “Well, I suppose it’s a kind of mixture of sex and liking.”
Burroughs, that greatest of polemicists, could never have written a line like that with which Vivant Denon concludes Point de Lendemain: “I searched all over for the moral of the whole grand adventure, and I found nothing.”
***
“I melted a cold, cold heart, you know
and I was so surprised:
It froze right back into place again
right before my eyes.”
The final chorus of Hiram’s “Black Widow Waltz.” Such a freeze is the confusion which serves as love’s vehicle: It is as constant as the melting, it must be. Says the narrator of Point de Lendemain to his lover, “Love wants to multiply itself forever: It thinks it has obtained nothing when it ceases to obtain.”
“Black Widow Waltz” should be played on repeat: Melt, freeze, melt, freeze, melt...And then played from two speakers at once, starting at different times, like a canon:
“{I fooled her into falling in love/It froze right back into place again}
right before {her/my} eyes.”
***
“And the two shall become one flesh,” Christianity’s famous phenomenology of marriage. As echoed by Bataille some millennia later: Communication--the making-permeable of the borders of the self--is the height of evil: It destroys the individual: Love becomes a sacrificial rite: The lovers self-immolate so that their ashes may mix, and a single bird may emerge.
Of course, the bird must combust at intervals, and so the process is extended ad infinitum, love must constantly be decided: Death must constantly be decided: “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil, for they are as good as dead.”
What extremity of spirit, to be among the mythic polyamorous! One amorous superposition, one such lethal risk, can be accepted, even enshrined as a social norm: Marriage, though dangerous in its own right, is the minimal form of love’s evil. The constant descent, Bataille might say, from the summit of love. If we want to burn in perpetuity; to remain beyond good and evil, which is to remain on the climb, for the summit ever shifts, ever grows, above such volatile tectonic states that the earth’s own skin crawls; that is, if we want to take full advantage of the liberties of childlessness, to affirm life ardently, to test its most precarious peaks; then traditional monoamory is the coward’s escape hatch, though it allows some glimpse of the heights, albeit a glimpse filtered through layers of trees, fog, a cataract willingly suffered so as to receive a handicap parking pass…
***
The heights of despair and of joy: To take another into oneself and to insert oneself into another, it is a release of power. It is a fundamental opposition to the rationalist desire for “self-control.” This is no self-help tract. There is no self-mastery here. There is only self-immolation or, at the very least, the willingness to burn: Like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednigo, we leap into the fire, unsure whether we will burn but ambivalent--no, not ambivalent, but ecstatic at each possibility.
We become Hiram: “I got a switchblade knife, and I really care about life, but I ain’t afraid to lose it in a fight.”
We see Hiram in conversation with Bataille:
H: I don’t know if I ever could be true. Sucking love through a cocktail straw…
B: I never cease to rejoice: Such is the condition of a drunken heart.
H: I might up and run, or I might pull out some gun, but I highly doubt it, ‘cause I’m ready to die.
B: But that is to measure the nauseating foundation of things: To rejoice is to press against the limit, to go as far as possible and to live at the edge of the abyss.
***
Melt, freeze, melt, freeze: Each is a midpoint: The melting point of any material, at the right pressure, is the same as the freezing point. At any moment that one of the two processes occurs, some part of the material is melted, some part is frozen.
Simultaneously we may say, “I never cease to rejoice,” and “It’s the same old Blue Moon, the same old sad tune that I’ve written ‘bout a million times before.” Each applies to the same moment: To consider love the blissful goal of a comfortable life is to confine the burning sacred within a romcom-esque delusion-cage.
Let us take ourselves seriously. Let us talk gravely when necessary. By all means, let us emerge from the sea of irony into which we were born, exploding as flying fish into the clarity of earnestness. But let’s not be a bunch of goddamn cornballs.
***
“In love, chance is foremost among the things a lover seeks in the Loved One. But chance is also given as soon as the two encounter each other.” Elsewhere, Bataille expands: “I hate a lie (that poetic tomfoolery). But our desires never lie. It is simply a disease of desire that, often, we see a gaping abyss between the object we imagine and its real counterpart. The Loved One differs, it’s true, from the concept I love in her. The worst is that an identity of the real with the object of desire requires, it seems, an unheard-of type of luck.”
Note that, though the Loved One may differ from their conception, this does not mean that the love itself is not real, or that it is illusory. Does Hiram not express an undoubtable love in “Runaway,” when they sing, “These are the only words I hope to hear you say: Take me away from this town...Our love is the only thing we need.” Though the object of desire says nothing but, “No,” does Hiram’s love cease? Does is dissolve, having been proven illusory? Having declared itself, in the end, in opposition to God?
If so, they would not repeat this chorus thrice. Though it be a Kierkegaardian love, the love of a Knight of Faith, a concept to which many Eunuchs may declare themselves allergic, “Runaway” offers a reappraisal of faith: If the goal is to burn, all tools may be useful in the correct contexts, though such asymmetric love may not precipitate nearly so much self-immolation or perforation as its symmetric counterpart. Nevertheless, Hiram takes the imagined lover’s words into their own mouth in the final chorus…
***
Love permits no definition: No critique may describe its boundaries but that which describes the ever-shifting boundaries of human experience en masse. Bataille: “To speak of the absolute, that ignoble, inhuman word...It is the aspiration of larvae.”
To ask, “What is love?” is to deny the very existence of the constantly ascending summit upon which we seek to burn.
***
Love is patient. Love is kind. Love is gentle: Love does not boast. Love is evil. Love is hellfire and brimstone. Love is self-immolation: Love is constant torturous death: Love is sadomasochism. Love is being pierced in the side and having no blood left to spill, for the lance was tardy and superfluous. Love is “the infinite misunderstanding: That which I love, over which like a lark I cry my joy to the sun, that I should speak of it in demoralizing terms.”
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