Attained at last: love spiritualized, love unworkable, o Alienor of Equitania! Truly I do not know if these vagaries of mine into your bosom thou shalt receive, o Madonna born in the shade of a volcano, or if you shall disparage them and the primeval pathos of an errant knight as un-developed and crass as I am, incapable of ataraxia, drowning in cheap brandy and cheaper nostalgia. Came to the reluctant conclusion (though momentary, empirical of course, awaiting ulterior verifications etc.) that we cannot ignore Doctor John Bowlby and his acute observations on attachment, loss and separation. We cannot ignore the etiology of affect and secure base. The detachment preceding and impeding the creation of an intimate relationship is as ‘neurotic’ as the blind yearning for symbiotic union. That symbiosis should come before dissociated separation confirms my thesis, gentlemen of the jury. So now answer me, Alienor, alien remote lover: can we truly depart from someone we haven’t truly met? “And if love were but demonic intersection, the obscure flurry of blood and hormones?” the chorus of gravediggers ask in unison. And if love were mere dance of transference & counter-transference, raising its pathetic stems against the horizon only to mow them down to the music of a prosaic flute? And if the avatar were found to be master of the world, the technological overhuman conjured up by Herr Martin Heidegger? Is the avatar a John the Baptist or the Messiah himself of technological transmutation of human nature and human deeds? The point of contention is not the alleged contamination by the machine, but the fact that such blatant anthropocentrism is being concealed by the seduction of virtual worlds.
Since the vicissitudes of Verona’s amateurs, love has become an outlaw. Where art thou Romeo? Why, he is in a bar downtown, where else? He is sipping a semi-macchiato semi-skimmed medium frappuccino whilst sending clandestine text messages on his shiny mobile, accumulating erotic capital on Fuckbook, linked, linked-in, linked up. Love is contaminated – impossible love exults all too briefly, transgressing the established order of things, painting secrets anew. The giddy rapture is always one step away from punishment in the orchard of the Capulets. I have a question: do Romeo and Juliet enjoy more the fullness of being together or the thrill of being found out? The third party is an essential component if the criminal bliss of the illicit liaison is to continue. The ardour of the woman with her secret lover is being fuelled by revenge against her father. The man who betrays his companion flees from the image of a possessive mother. The scene is set for incumbent disaster, for the unwitting summon of the night mercifully bringing this preposterous suffering to an end.
So I found myself at the Café Chagrin, fully packed under a cold sky in an empty universe. I love your absence now that you are not here – power of love’s negative theology. I chant an elegy to sunlight, to the absent God evoked by the notes of a mute symphony, soundtrack to the meeting of bodies who in mutual consummation enlarge the present time and fool each and everyone into believing that this is love this is love this is love that I’m feeling. Muzak of fake jazz now takes its place – we go back to our diving bells after a brief stroll on the bottom of the sea. Dunno ‘ow to ‘andle this thing. But I did warn you, didn’t I, sweetie – what did I say? I said, Beware, darling, I am just a poor devil.
It humbles us somehow, having to bow down to the unbroken power of transference, dissociation and projection (first positive, then negative) of neglected or eclipsed parts of the self, even after decades of ‘work on oneself’. Speaking of which, when will working on oneself come to an end and the celebration of our ephemeral life begin? Could it be that love is the work? And if we were to learn that this work (evolution, transformation, cosmetic art, you name it) is animated by our resentment towards impermanence, by the delirium of a metamorphosis deemed impossible, by the refusal to accept ourselves as human and transient, as no big fucking deal?
But why then do I find myself stupidly wanting to share with you, a mere fantasy, moments of joy like, say, the day before yesterday exiled from our virtual love all gathered inside my black coat telling a phantom in my head of a lovely morning spent with pupils studying the exhilarating journey of the soul undertaken by Jung? Why do I catch myself lost and happy in the blue icy noon while searching for a seat and then settling down to hot soup in a Chinese joint next to the theatre, why do I catch myself happy and exiled from love with the fixed gaze upon me of a blonde table-guest sharp as a fencing move? Precious little is allowed during lunch break – people gulp down their food, blather and laugh and cry and rub their hands in the blue ice of noon. Cut a long story short: still love you, kind of, only a bit less though, because of self-respect you know because of my innate sense of independence, of my dignity as a man for Chrissake. Yes I love you still, figment of my pseudo-emancipation, only a bit less though and under the morning shower hurrying along before work I improvise hate limericks, parodies of pop songs filled with insults where you come out all pummelled and buffeted, just what you deserve after all methinks ex-fake love of mine, considering that you have betrayed me for a bloody idea, a generality, as any fatuous creature straight out of Goddard, considering that you have betrayed me for your one true love, your stupid pride.
Hannah Arendt phoned Martin Heidegger after seventeen years and the meeting brought joy to both of them. An act of generosity, of folly, of gratuitous forgiveness, a.k.a. forgiveness motivated by grace. Now that I think of it, I wanted to sing the praise of triviality, against Heidegger’s highfaluting redneck authenticity so popular in blooming existential psychotherapy…Instead I flounder about at the Café Chagrin, opposite the theatre, distracted by the cruel gossip of two pretty women seated at the table next to mine, one blonde one dark as the femmes fatale one meets at the crossroad of eternity, at the crossroad of destiny. Undecided between the two, our protagonist vanished into the cold street and went back to work.
Summing up: let the river follow its course; let it pass beyond the twenty-one days milestone; may the relics of a love that was be buried. Because everything flows and I’m fine and how are you? May familiar places re-assert their autonomous presence, free from the haphazard phantom of fantasy – station exits at Embankment and Belsize Park; Waterloo Bridge, the river, the dark river I survey every morning on my way to work. Because everything flows and all’s well that ends well. Let winter follow autumn. May the year come to an end with a death rattle (and how similar the moan of the dying to the moans of pleasure). May new couples discover love and hatred anew in the immaculate dawn. May we all go happily back to work. May the everyday be splendid again. Because everything flows. And I’m doing just fine.
In the silence this night I hear the song of a sleepless bird, then another. A distant engine. Buried in sleep, my fellows roam the shadows of Hades. Wide awake, eyes wide open into the very heart of darkness, I lose the contours of things until the moon high in the sky restores the shapes that separate us. Everyone I’ll meet in the morning will be the shadow of another; in his eyes I’ll seek the code that might open me up to pervasive murmur. Providing there will be a morning, that the widespread glare I begin to perceive heralds its arrival and not the soiled radiations of a shameful end as written in the scriptures and in science-fiction cartoons. Provided another day will be granted, the Day of the Dead, so that I may take my debonair sorrow out for a stroll along the Camden canals, the enraged absence of your gaze in my gait, bearing witness to what everyone knows, that you can’t give your life, you hear me, you just can’t give your life to an Emma Bovary to some mixed-up individual who confuses intensity for ‘grand emotions’, who thinks she’s given her heart when all she proffered was her body, who sips Soffocone wine believing it to be the wisdom elixir! Goldoni’s innkeeper fancies herself as Lady Macbeth! You must be joking! And for what bloody reason, I ask in this night where even the moon is dark and hazy, why on earth should one get all stirred and genitally agitated if all this doesn’t caress the soul? Why the exhausted tears and the sweat if from such tedious spluttering and expurgations we don’t emerge with a heart more tender but with the armour intact,
with the Heraclitean profanity of everything flows and I’m doing just fine?
Triumph of transference – as in Oscar’s example, poor Oscar you understand, handcuffed in anno domini 1895, broken and cut in two, waiting for a train with two cops on a cold November day. Triumph of transference – as it occurred since Socrates and Plato – essential condition for the fertilization of knowledge, the subtle dance of Eros in ministerial classrooms. Triumph of transference – the sister with her hibernated heart eternally knocking at the door of conscience demanding the replay of our folie a deux. She comes back in disguise, dressed up as an Italian lover, assails you with the violence of amorous projection, chains you to a sofa after a sly embrace. Triumph of transference – the sister is younger prettier smarter; she appears as pupil on your course and says I put you on a pedestal, I thought you were a great teacher, but now I think you are shit. Triumph of counter-transference: come little sis, come and play with me. It makes me sad and it makes me mad when you refuse to play with me. Sister with a barricaded heart, a heart in the freezer while on TV they’re showing The da Vinci Code.
The call of the homeland: biology, nostalgia, the alarming beauty of its hills, a whirl of emotions, the green eyes of a woman from Molise I believed to be dark, my perception clouded by twenty-four years in foreign lands. The price to pay if one obeys the call is one’s own freedom. Payul pangwa jangsem lag-len yin: to abandon one’s land is the practice of the bodhisattva. The immigrant lives a life in counterpoint, in two spatial and temporal dimensions at the same time, one receding in the background and refusing to vanish, giving out a perennially uncertain twilight glare, the other never fully becoming flesh and bone. After my final departure, the world has never been the same again; what linked me to it is forever broken. Homeland gods, tutelary deities and ancestors are now phantoms to me, hovering in the perennially uncertain glare of the dawn – inaccessible, anemic and remote. There is no greater solitude than the solitude of the immigrant. And if he finds himself in the liquid and exhilarating reality of a metropolis, he himself, like his own gods and ancestors, will become one of Baudelaire’s wandering and homeless ghosts, an individual for whom no place can ever become, as once his native town was, the centre of the universe. His only hope is to make of the entire earth, of the whole blue planet his centre. There is no greater solitude than that of the cosmopolitan citizen. Homecoming? An illusion; you can never go back.
And if love itself were an illusion? Like Jacopo da Lentini, I am a ship broken by the sirens’ smooth song. I naively believed the siren to be a muse. And what if the sceptical discipline of hope were an illusion too? We believed in gilded love, in the sunshine of an eternal June, but autumn follows summer and winter will be here soon, and death one day will come with two empty cavities where the eyes were and with bitter laugh, with an acrid taste in the mouth, as a door shut in one’s face.
Not for me oh no the benevolence of a savior gesturing through the flames of love; if anything a drop, a lone drop distilled from the river of tears, a thin droplet of poetry. My own face emerges out of the dark well of insomnia: the face of Farewell, of Too-late, of Nevermore. Unto thine ear I hold the dead seashell and so forth. I extend my heartfelt thanks to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, equal partner in these hellish realms. The dead seashell brings to your ear ghostly whispers from a garden in summer – you dream of lovers reading haikus, slanted light in the darkness of the firmament, the darkness that claims me with its deadly whispers on this endless night. Couldn’t have been otherwise. I find in my biography a continuum punctuating the silent triumph of negative theology: God is great because he is absent; the homeland is present because it’s lost; love unreachable and finally trans- figured, taking its leave, becoming the longing for poetry, the longing of poetry, the song of distance, a thirst never quenched. How can I rely on the deranged logos of sleep- lessness? But isn’t perhaps in this nudity, in this very wound an echo of our condition as refugees, of storytellers who lie down on a field at night and gaze at the sky and are suddenly startled by the mystery? With Kierkegaard, faith becomes dangerous. With the Romantics, love becomes risk-taking. Religion and love both restored to the straightforwardness of existential questions. I’m not speaking of a melodramatic faith that makes of every pain a tralalà, or of the pornographic rapture hiding a deadly incapacity to give. The nakedness of the body simply hides real nakedness, i.e. vulnerability, being open to caress, to the other’s imperfections. In covert love, founded on passion and on the unreality of short-lived encounters where the blood reaches boiling point, the flame dances at first, and later solidifies in frenetic sex fuelled by desperation. It is then of course an act of courtesy to let a lover believe that sex with the spouse isn’t quite as satisfying. Economizing with the truth is in such cases an act of tenderness. If love is to survive the flimsy glare of summer, lovers need to direct the flame into a common task. But the task is hijacked by generalities: matrimony, property, children, obeisance to conventions founded on the blind imperative of the continuation of the species. The creation of a third is essential: an offering, a hymn of praise to existence that allows the fortuitous and miraculous encounter: the locus of art, of meditation, of an ecstatic dance that respects natural distance.
You won, I admit it, and I know why: to my bad poetry you opposed the everyday, the very same weapon I had brandished in order to circumvent the pseudo-religious seductions of Heidegger (it was to be my personal tribute to Lefebvre, to Lukacs and to the now subterranean river of Heraclitus), to circumvent the pseudo-philosophical seductions of all religions. You managed to use the everyday (home, work, child and so forth) as a weapon brandished in the name of drab realism, right inside the domain of das Man, right inside universal quiet desperation. But it wasn’t you who did the talking, oh no, now I know. It was the dark virgin in black, the creature who from time to time borrows your name to plaster the error of your ways, the sin of gratuitous happiness, to rectify through her raptures of contrition the primal error: being in the world without any bloody reason. The dark virgin is a nurse. The dark virgin is a scientific informer. She never quite kills what she loves but keeps it hanging between life and death. This is because her specialty – some say her addiction – is to perform artificial respiration.
How things truly are: the room of the natural health centre where I work has a clock on the wall opposite and an alarm clock next to the window. I sit here waiting for a client. Silence is absolute, enunciated by the sharp counterpoint ticking, one pursuing the other sometimes to contradict, sometimes to validate its claim. Linear time is death, legalizing the ineluctability of separation. Only love and desire are able to resist it. At first, a desire to touch and caress, a desire to take. Then the desire to be taken, to become one with the beloved. Hermaphroditic fluctuations between polarities. Episodic union catapults lovers into deeper and more painful separations. John Berger tells us how in Caravaggio’s Narcissus the face catches fire for a moment; it is a lamp lit in the darkness surrounding us, hanging over us. For a moment we tail the twinkle, the tenuous warmth of the apparition before going back to the shrouding darkness protecting us, like death, from having to exist, i.e., to come out, to exit. Desire alone makes us exist…Only desire makes us exit the ego’s diving bell. Desire alone defies separation. But only brave souls know how to hold quixotic combat with entropy and gravity, with the double ticking of clock of the clinic where I sit waiting for a client who is late and has perhaps abandoned her contest with entropy and gravity, with the blind belief in linear time, in being-towards-death in which Heidegger, orphan of Arendt, wanted to believe. Could it be that bitterness against the fleeting nature of life is what animates the psychotherapy?
Against Time I’ll use the shield Memory and the poetry of Desire. In the theatre of Memory your eyes will remain as they are (what colour are they?) and your lips will manage a smile. In the theatre of Memory which is the theatre of Hades you will remember my eyes, those eyes who once loved you. You’ll also remember the shyness for which
you used to mock me. In the theatre of Memory which is the theatre of shadows every embrace will recur eternally – question without an answer, koan unresolved, free from the servile obligation to perpetuate our spectral species. We defied original cruelty and our exiled steps now revisit its rocky path, aware of the body aflame, as a night star reveals to us as to Caravaggio our brief passage on the blue planet.
I love London: among its metal and dust I was born again in the spring of ’89, stealing two narcissi from a suburban garden in Kilburn, and in January of 1990 I was baptized again on a bare floor in Cricklewood by someone who vanished leaving a trail of childish laughter. Love graffiti on the plane tree next to the tiny bridge that saw us ill-concealed with our breaths hung on unmovable time, inexorable yet clement time agreeing to carry us hand in hand for a while along the river (not the ocean, not the sea), along the dark river Thames. Heraclitus’s river: dreamy, celebrating appearance.
How naïve to expect that the Western world would listen to Heraclitus rather than to that pair of buffoons Socrates/Plato! The world needs the grand scheme, doesn’t know what to do with fragmentation. Even a gratuitous aimless act such as meditation is divulged and classified as ‘tool’ by the utilitarian brigades: selling water by the river. Meditation: useful for relaxation, good for health, to lower cholesterol; constructive to the creation of a new Platonic utopia, the Polis from whose walls (surprise surprise) fragmentation, incoherence, gratuitousness will be excluded (alongside refugees, homeless, and gypsies).
English melancholy has become congenial to me; the contemplation of dust, the dustsceawung of the ancient Saxons, those archetypal laments of wanderers and sailors, full of the exile’s chagrin and loneliness. I can laugh and dance. But tonight I am not running away from melancholy, from this window open to the damp wealth of the soul, from the dark space that feeds on my sailor’s face. Only those who did not travel long on it idealize the ocean, that lugubrious desert of water and sky. Only those who never left friends and loved ones on the shore, who did not open their eyes to the tragedy of impermanence can disport themselves with ocean metaphors. But in the ocean everything slips away and you find yourself alone, facing the wyrd, facing what will be, the disquieting fate sang by the ancient Anglo-Saxons. I wander among the ruins of ancient temples and realize that of all those works and deeds what remains are scattered fragments. These very same words the dust covers them fast. You will read them in a remote corner and will perhaps remember a love, an all-too-distant love. It exists among Italians too, such contemplation of dust and I recognize it in disparate souls, from Foscolo to Tenco, and in the serenely meditative countenance of my friend Subhaga. Such aristocratic and humane spirit does exist under the braggart veneer inherited by the Caesars and by the daily fascism of the common man or woman who delights in inventing new versions of Schadenfreude under the shade of cypresses.
Speed of Angels Page 6