Well, that's not true, not even for me: I remember that in the past on occasion I tried to schedule nervous breakdowns. I'd force down some wine (beer doesn't help for this, and I'm 'scared of' liquour), stare at a wall or read A Lover's Discourse or The Captain's Verses or something equally drippingly love-riddled while listening to Dwight Yoakum or Leonard Cohen assuring me that it could be far, far worse, and hoping that the expulsion of excess saline from my system would dismantle and implode the oppressive palimpsest of whatever melancholia and frustration had been of late clogging my chi and messing with my chakras.
I'd stare, and think terriblyhorribly plaintive thoughts in so deep a way as to verge on the Continental, but it very seldom worked. These days you can orchestrate Armageddon but not a good old-fashioned emotional meltdown. Lucky, then, that they sometimes come unbidden, or I'd have no chi left and all of my chakras would be stuffed down somewhere in my perfectly-manicured feet.
If you actually know me, then you know I have struggled with this for some time. Dating, that is, not missing appendages or wondering what to do for hosiery. I don't miss any appendages, for what it's worth, just some extra organs and clearly extraneous bones in my face. Plus, I have the addition of bone filler in there, so I'm actually ahead of the game!
No, it's Dating. Nothing ever killed me so much. No deadline long or short, no employer going bankrupt and issuing bad checks, no marauder on the street, no toilets exploding as soon as the gay husband pulls away to go to a music conference. No bad tailoring, no smashed face, no ventilator or morphine or housemice stealing a great-grandmother's platinum square-set diamond ring I was only so recently considered 'mature' enough to be given. All of that I can take, and more, too, and still feel well enough to enjoy what remains of the remains.
It doesn't work for me. I don't know how else to say it. I think there is perhaps one person who knows precisely what I have at stake, but he is far away and has enough unpleasantness of his own going on but if he were here he would let me cry on his shoulder and it wouldn't help me in the slightest but at least I wouldn't be reading Neruda.
So I quit the Match.com. They made one check a box for reason leaving (no one wrote me; I found someone; I'm too busy; not the right time...) and write a 'suggestion' as to how they could better assist people finding people. I couldn't see very well at the time, so brevity was in order, but I did try to think for a moment, for my own purposes not theirs, get some clearer if not clear idea of what the deal was, and what I managed was something hideous and dripping with bathos on the order of 'if you are an exception it is perhaps better to be alone.' That was my unconscious sense of things previously, and it appears I have circled full round to embracing it as an explicit Mission Statement or something akin. In between I thought --
well, it doesn't matter what I thought. I thought I'd take a chance, that's all.
But why should it be so hard? Why do I think I'm so bloody different that I have anything to whine about at all? In a way I don't: I think we're all walking stereotypes of one sort or another. If I am in any way misanthropic, I am universally so, and, after all, bin ich ja auch ein Mensch. As anthropoid as you. So I'm lumped in with the lumpens, and with you, so have no fear.However, leaving aside the fact that we all have our share of frailties, fears, and outright stupidities, we are nonetheless individuals, whether you imagine us to be barred subjects, children of God, overembellished limbic systems, or neurotic egos tucked inside moribund skin bags. This being the case, I have my singular perspective on life, my unique experiences, my own tendencies, my particular desires, and my peculiar, annoying idiolect, to boot. All of this makes me ill-suited to most; it may well make me unsuited to all. The latter, at any rate, is my current stance, despite the enormous social pressure on us all to sort ourselves in twos at any cost.
However, my faraway friend insists that part of what makes me different also makes me want to be in love, be in a large, expansive loving relationship with one person. And I think he is right sometimes, but I don't want to hear that sort of thing. To hear that I was made to sing, but have to figure out some way to do it without a throat.
In the Christian tradition, Lucifer was the king of the angels, a big guy on the heavenly roll call, and when God told him man was now above him, it was his ego, his excess of pride, that made him wince and protest and ultimately get demoted and exiled, the job transfer to Hell. In the Sufic tradition, it was his Love. Iblis was as true, as natural, a Lover as could be imagined. Roses sprang up where he knelt in praise. He was a creature of fire, yes, a djinn, and man was made of dirt, which pales by comparison. But it wasn't a sense of superiority that caused him to disobey God. Rather, how could he prostate himself before anyone, anything, other than the object of his worship?
God sent him an impossible task, according to this reading. An immoral order. Mercurial and vain and wishing to have His new creation - and His Will - acknowledged and obeyed, He issued an edict: the Angels will bow down. But Iblis loved; he loved God beyond anything; he spent his days in adoration and veneration. So, he obeyed the First Commandment, and his heart, and his love - for he could bow down before no one but his only Love, God - while flouting the letter of the new, para-doxical dictum that God had now promulgated. For this mind-numbingly difficult choice, his sentence was revocation of the one thing his heart desired: to live in the sight of God and continue to be the Lover he was meant to. He was forever thus denied the one thing that defined him, enriched him, gave him meaning and life. In this telling, God sends him to Hell, where Shaitan nonetheless continues to sing his praises and to whisper Hallelujah, with every damned breath.
Well, I'm not a djinn, interior design preferences notwithstanding. But I don't like things that look like other things while not possessing the core, the essence, that is constitutive of the real thing they are so cruelly resembling. And so I want little truck with facsimiles of Love, approximations of ardor, or close cousins of intimacy. To me, casual sex sounds like the sort of thing someone might resort to because the bowling alley is done fulled-up.
If you have any sense in you, you walk between two worlds, all the time everyday. There is how you endeavor to be, which is the fruit of years of study and prayer and introspection and pain and glory and hard-won knowledge. And then there is the reality of living in a postmodern, postindustrial, capitalist culture, in which one still must be functional, and be able successfully to fill the gas tank or snake the toilet or insert a hyperlink or navigate the wilds of a wine list when necessary. In which constant self-less-ness does not work. A culture, as well, predicated not merely on the ceaseless satisfaction of desire, but on its constant cultivation. Obviously those two appear at odds.
Yet in Love these two, and so many other ostensible antinomies, can be reconciled. In true Love giving is a form of receiving. In true Love the Lover seeks less his own selfish satisfaction and rejoices in pleasing his partner. He takes joy, as well, in actions that further their Love, their bond. He finds that their desires mingle, and her pleasures become his own. In pleasing her he pleases himself. No one commands Iblis to sing as he does, in other words; he simply cannot help it.
They also create a world and a refuge. They see parts of each other no one else does. The sad, the holy, the weak, the child. The pained, the vexed, the parent, the patient, and all the flecks of the eternal spirit dimmed to others' view by the pressures of everyday life. And it becomes, rather than frightening, a relief, a release -- because of the different, extraordinary sort of trust that exists between and over and around them.
And to some extent all of this sounds absurd and fantasaical. And I know I am fourteen in some quite obvious and substantive ways. But I retain the right to my position that Love can be this sort of thing by pointing out the frequency with which people take the Song of Solomon and anything by Rumi to be secular love songs. Ergo, I am not alone in this notion that Love can be something quite distinct from Like.
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