'la grandeur et la vérité' - et l'absurde

Hmmm. I don't quite know what to make of this. And it's not the Philipponnat I'm sipping, either. I'd show you a picture, but the bottle is lodged between the hideous plastic vat of palm oil, a candle holder that belongs by the other ones nestled between the jungle and the television, a box of wire nails and a resin tincture I'm trying to remember to agitate. Not to mention the emergency extra cellphone that, despite its life of idleness, nonetheless manages to run out of steam every so often and emit a desperate chirping sound audible from the car. Which I'm charging.

So.

I gave a teensy decant of the in-process 'Catherine of Siena' scent to the dear and impressive lady I made it for, with a printout of its description and intent. (With ample caveats as to its need of more time and tinkering.)

But that's not my point.

My point is that I had not remembered that the French Resistance fighter, and Nazi prisoner, Fr. Joseph Marie Perrin, who was basically Simone Weil's guide into Catholicism, was a - yes, okay, it's obvious by now - Dominican. They met in Marseilles, had a long and close interaction in person and in letters -- and to me, I guess, the Little Manual of Perfect Prayer and Adoration - written, it should be added, during the occupation of France and his activities in the Resistance - seems to have been too envelopingly universal/catholic, as were what few of his thousand other works I've read, for one to be able readily to recall the author's particular/'partisan' Catholic spirituality. Simone Weil - who bridges the gap between fellow École Normale Supérieure brooding Gallic leftist alums like the preceding post's Sartre et tchums and the equally august roll-call of modern-day thinky Catholic converts like Chesterton, Merton, Jacques & Raissa Maritain, Dorothy Day, Claire Booth Luce, Avery Dulles, Graham Green, Brubeck (yes, Brubeck!), Gerard Manley Hopkins, Malcolm Muggeridge (yay! Punch! I never get Michael Bywater in here anymore) and even newly-minted Maronite, WSJ bigwig Peggy Noonan - was roped by a Dominican.

Anyway, since everything is strange and confluent and doubly-signified, and I have no hope of cohesion in this post, in 1946 Vogue magazine ran a spread called 'Portraits of Paris' of photographs by Messrs. Sartre and Camus. On the one hand, I admit this seems a bit like Wittgenstein offering up prose-poems about the rights or wrongs of the New Look; on the other, I do understand that these days Derrida or at least Baudrillard is invoked every time there is a change in heel shape or skirt length, and that every fashion magazine no less than every home-decorating periodical considers itself 'cutting edge. ' Still, it is a bit shocking considering the state of magazine journalism today, and I like to imagine Elle commissioning Ismael Kadare to do a photographic series on 'Sidewalks of Tirana,' which he fulfills with portraits of improvisational Rom 'habitation-artists,' impromptu scenes of trafficked 'sex artists,' and a 'location shoot' of 'hunger artists' in a car trunk lumbering across the immeasurable divide between Nogales and Green Valley.

Undoubtedly at this point that IS the Philipponnat talking, as it's taken me about an hour to write this that in any way makes sense even to me.

Schlieβlich, bin ich ja auch ein Mensch.

Nobody, I imagine, intends to spend the evening in bed crying.

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.

Because Underneath ,You Feel Pure Permanence

I don't think most people know how to be in relationships. I don't believe most people are, in their hearts, really looking for something huge and overpowering, something not merely substantive, which is unusual enough itself, but transformative. Love can do that, can change us immeasurably for the better, but one has to be opened to it, one has to accept the vulnerability that is both a prerequisite and a consequent of real love.

And of course that is terrifying. It is totally unlike our normal interactions, which are based on suites of deliberately congruent, affected manners, dictions, postures, appearances, that correspond to and flesh out whatever role we are enacting in that context. This isn't base or even dishonest: on the one hand, we really do need the second cellist behaving like a cellist during the symphony and not a botanist or ironworker; and on the other, he really is a cellist, as evidenced by the presence of his chair in the pit and his bowing of the strings. That isn't disingenuous; it's getting the job done!

But maybe it is the difference between a Bach fugue and bebop. Precision, order, the beauty of the work found in its elegant mathematics, in its stolid girders, right angles and re-bar, in perfection of Form above all else, as against the piercing, unutterable glory that can come only from leap of faith compounded geometrically by subsequent leap after leap after leap -- all these being, not 'explored' in a self-indulgent descent into solipsism, and certainly not 'reconciled' or 'rescued' once the head reemerges --no, not at all, but bared, freed, radically embraced, and then transcended and born anew, via that selfsame melody that could always so easily enslave a pedant or fundamentalist.

So I think it's a big deal, Love. I have difficulty understanding shopping for it, I admit, and I get prickly thinking of the people who don't bother to reflect on it and its significance, especially when they do already, or could if they expended effort, live inside it. I think it takes work, yes, but so do wine and music and childbirth, and yet people keep doing those without saying Wait, I need some Time to Listen to 'Self' in the middle of a bloody solo or parturition.

When you are in love, when you cherish someone, you honor them. Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved. It leaves all the other secondary effects to take care of themselves. Love, therefore, is its own reward. According to Thomas Merton, at any rate, and I agree that Love is indeed that elegantly simple, and that boundlessly rewarding. Still, it requires effort, requires temperance; and that miraculous, supple, and overpowering solicitude born jointly of eros and agape can only exist where there is sufficient maturity, wisdom, and openheartedness to allow its first seeds to grow.

I think where that sort of genuine and mature love is present, there are lines not merely inconceivable, but impossible, to cross. It's quite easy to see why kvetching about 'never getting any' to your hot boss or flirty assistant is risky, but while it may not be a Gateway to Sin! in everyone's view to lament someone's weight gain, odd facial hair choice, lack of understanding, bad habits, or emotional issues to friends, it nevertheless creates a rift. It lets someone in where they shouldn't be, between the man and the woman. It also keeps those complaints or critiques closer to the front of your mind, even when it's just you two. Joe from the pool hall is right there, in bed with you, with his I-Hear-You-Man comments from yesterday about his wife's growing middle as you run your hands up your wife's now-size-40 hips.

We are conditioned that, to a certain extent, articulation makes it so. Nearly all of our experience is filtered, necessarily, through language. This is why people do affirmations. 'I am good. I am strong. I do not eat Snickers.' Imagine if instead of desperate, last-ditch efforts at 'I love my husband. I love my husband. I love my husband' we had the wife daily complaining to her girlfriends about his stutter, his pot belly, his skin condition, and his lack of sexual skill. And, as we all know, our friends can be relied upon to take our side in such things. It is rare indeed for one of these sort of confidants to interrogate the speaker, ask him why it is he would want to say such disrespectful things, what it is he is really feeling, whether he understands that speaking out of class like that is going to leak a poison in and keep all those things in his mind.

I cringe when I hear such things spoken by people in a relationship -- and we hear them all the time. If it is one on one, I at least have the liberty and the opportunity to ask the other sorts of questions, the sort that can go somewhere, the sort that can open the person's heart rather than seal it shut for good -- but so often people just spout this crap, and don't care who hears. And then someone else commiserates, and tells private details about his partner. And then I perhaps know more about the state of his relationship than his spouse does!

Meanwhile, I am course am thinking You bloody idiots: you have someone who loves you! I am not speaking here of abusive things, or of gambling addictions, or infidelity. Instead, it's stupid, quotidian annoyances, or habitual ways of doing things regarding which the individuals' tendencies and preferences are at odds. Or, of course, pot bellies, skin conditions, Comfortable Shoes, fatigue at sex-time, and, simply, two people who were once together, engaged now in building up separate lives, deliberately or indeliberately. After a certain point, the fissure is irreparable, and if not 'Man,' then surely man's ego, has rent the two solidly asunder.

I have a stance, as well, partly ethical, partly aesthetic, part pragmatic, and part just Healthy Living, that distills down to wait and see, I suppose. A few bucks lost here and there at the race track is not the same as the mortgage payment going to the bookie. An otherwise shockingly thoughtful anniversary gift ordered too late for timely arrival is not the same as spending that anniversary with another girl in a hotel room. And, again (this is the pragmatic angle, I suppose, mixed in with the ethical), if you spend all the time collecting notes on what is not perfect, that, my dear, is what is in your head. Not the moments of beauty, not the act of deep tenderness, but the why-didn't-he-X-when-I-felt-sure-he-would? And if you take all those to your friends, because they're all clustering around your brain making you sick because you chose to focus on them and now can't think of the other things, after your iteration of all his/her failings, what do you think they will say? What average friend ever counsels, Yes, but she's so.... Or, But those are trivial, and look what he does when.... Or, Work on it, work on it, work on it, and keep your love for that person always in your mind?

But perhaps that is what distinguishes Love and friendship. Friendship so often concerns itself with reinforcing the status quo, with affirming assumptions rather than challenging them, by 'supporting' the friend in the least difficult, most prosaic ways. Love, by contrast, keeps always one hand outstretched to the Divine and the other gently opened to the beauty to be found here. It is the turning of the Mevlevi, the name of God ceaselessly on the lips, each step and every breath a rupture and mediation between the ineffable and the temporal.
Love seeks alternately to veil and to transcend the less savoury aspects of what we see in this pathetic, finite moment, pointing always to the grander vision that lies beyond. It reaches, challenges, wounds, elates, soars. Love never disappoints, although it sometimes kills.

I know you touch so fervently because the caress preserves,/because the place you cover up, O tender ones,/doesn't disappear; because underneath, you feel/ pure permanence. Thus your embraces almost promise you eternity. -Rilke, Duino Elegies, 'Second Elegy'

Uncanny is human existence and still without a meaning

Well, it's not a terribly interesting admission on the face of it, but I went on a date. Not as uninteresting as it sounds though, when I say I actually wanted to, and still less so when I say I blew it quite roundly.

I talked a bunch of crap, for starters. I don't know what crap, or I'd tell you, but I was so nervous that I ran on at the mouth about anything that came up. Well, not anything, as I at least had very little to say about Fibonacci spirals or stochastic finite-state machines, but don't let that stop you from thinking I'm an idiot.

Additionally, and this shocks me, I drank too much. I don't know how pronounced the visible effects were, but it was no more enjoyable for me during or after than I imagine it was for my companion while I went on about whatever it was I was going on about. I suspect I know why I drank: nerves. And I know why I got loaded from it: I weigh ninety pounds or under and normally don't consume any alcohol, I had nothing in my stomach prior, and there is a reason drunks go for fish and chips and burgers and fries rather than sautéed clams when the bar closes... That is, if they hope to find their way home.

So that was unfortunate. It was more unfortunate the day after, when the physiological effects of alcohol withdrawal commingled torturously with regret, embarrassment, and after-the-fact recalculations of what I might better have said when ____. Adrenaline, clams, and unassuming French reds are a bad, bad combination.

And if it is surprising that I had anxiety or nerves about this rather than merely my usual dread and stalwart pessimism, it was because I thought there was Potential. Which never happens usually so I should have known. But known what? If you have optimism, you don't know anything. That's the point, the beautiful, delicate, feather-soft, unpointy point of it, of looking up at the billowy clouds and the V of geese flying in for the summer and the budding branches softly waving in the sifted sunlight rather than straight ahead at the flaccid, factual mundanity of things. Hope doesn't spring eternal, at least not after the first time a daunting third-grader steals your favorite doll and puts her head in the toilet, but we do at least hold out some expectation that it will visit us from time to time and allow us the fleeting luxury of seeing what we wish to see.

We hope for hope, we have faith in hope, and, as Unamuno asserts, we believe what we hope for. The ingratiating Spaniard also admits that, beauty being the goal of hope, hope is perhaps in its essence irrational (_Tragic Sense_ cheap Dover English Ed., p.205). And, indeed, hope regarding the mundane world does amount at some level to a rejection of reality, or at least a refusal to read the small print on parts of reality from the correct perspective or distance. It is a failure of exegesis, a problem with literacy: if we had our thinking caps on instead of the baseball ones and the correct prescription for our invisible-line bifocals, we'd accept that it's broken, all of it -- and move on.

But we don't, of course. We're stuck here, presbyopia, lisps, stutters, and all. There is nothing to read and nothing to say in this dissolving, insubstantial pageant. And we're big, strong Derrideans or Lacanians or situationists or even deviously retro hardcore structuralists, so we can do what Unamuno couldn't, and eschew eschatology and with it the only real reason for hope, and stare once again from our poorly-upholstered fold-up chair at the proscenium arch in the half-light, crank the pot to 10 on our collective ingenuousness and convince ourselves that we're dying to know if that Ariel gets set free in the end.

Which has very little to do with my date, really, since there were no pretend-shipwrecked actors pretending to be actors in a pretend shipwreck. It was just my date and me, with little distraction from the 'pressure' (what pressure? it was a bloody date, girl, not the Kyoto negotiations!) other than my adrenaline-fueled, disordered thoughts -- and the wine.

But that pressure, I suppose, was the problem. If I could see no potential whatsoever beforehand, I wouldn't go out with someone, so there is no pressure in that case. And if at some point on a first or subsequent date it becomes clear I wouldn't wish to spend another hour with him ever, let alone the rest of my life, involitionally I pull back a bit, relax, and it feels like I'm talking to a friend of my brother's visiting from elsewhere: no risk, no investment, no stress... It doesn't matter, then, that he spends the remainder of our time together droning on about how early he got Microsoft stock or with how many wives he had to suffer inside before he came into his own, listened to himself, trusted himself and his inner voice, and finally accepted his heart's true desire for a Ferrari.

And most men in my purported demographic seem these days to have some kind of 'Ferrari' lurking around. They wear oddly casual clothes either always or at unexpected moments; they decided at the midcentury mark to grow their hair; all presets on their car stereo are rock stations of varying descriptions; they have convertibles, jukeboxes, $5,000 beer dispensers, leopard print, baseball cards, 'flip-flops' beneath their chinos at dinner in restaurants, bubble gum, sports caps for sunscreen, labels, vintages, iPods with Avril Lavigne and Nickleback and Matchbox 20, 'Tuscan' toilets, knockoff watches that can't tell time but do what they're meant to, season tickets, McMansions and McBungalows, plastic and MDF 'craftsman' everything, and soul-sucking careers...

So it should not be surprising or unforgivable if I feel a frisson when someone diverges. When I encounter someone who has read a book from other than the self-help section. Who doesn't once reference the Food Network, the next big arena show he's going to, what he's currently 'listening to' 'inside himself,' how early he got in on Google ( Really, IPO? Wow. You must be ____ --- what, able to listen to the radio, numbskull???) , 'soft jazz,' books about wine, magazines about wine, food intolerances, any business located in a strip mall, and why he doesn't stay at the Sheraton anymore when he is in Paris.