A Study Guide to Love - Texts

A Study Guide to Love Texts by Artists, Philosophers & Psychologists from ancient to modern times "What does the number of your lovers matter, if none of them gives you the universe?" Jacques Lacan, lettre à Madeleine Chapsal 18 janvier 1956 “Love is giving something you do not have to someone who doesn’t want it.” Jacques Lacan "Dearest! One more night and one more day and then I'll be back with you. I will hold you in my arms ... my hands will glide over your hair ... and I will feel how your body centers under my hands .... .. " Maurice Renard/Ludwig Nertz, Orlac’s Hände (film by Robert Wiene) “My only happiness is loving you, my duty is to avoid you, but my virtue is nothing more and nothing less than remaining true to you for days, for years, for life, holding my head up high through the dust of life to a new purity that is greater than that of innocence. And all of this for you, who are the god of my life!” Ingeborg Bachmann, Briefe an Felician 17.Mai.1945 [Letters to Felician] “Our belief that we know each other is the end of love, every time, but cause and effect may be different than we are tempted to assume – not because we know each other does our love end, but the other way around: because our love comes to an end because its strength has been exhausted. At the same time we are amazed and disappointed that our love has ended.” Max Frisch, Tagebuch 1946-1949 "I - sometimes - think with a little detachment about this curious story - our love. ‘In the eyes of the philosopher,’ as Stevenson said, it appears (this story) as essentially faked, from the start. “The day after our meeting I offer you, in all simplicity, ‘the great love for a month.’ You gently refuse, apparently not having immediately appreciated my amazing qualities. And for three weeks we play this bizarre couple: you fickle, indifferent and cold, me jealous and clumsy ... “This does not mean, however, that this drama lacks interest, or strength. Remember what happens with carnal loves: they only reach their climax in fictions, images, symbols, myths. Perhaps it is the same with feelings and everything else, perhaps ‘reality’ is not what we generally think, perhaps life ... And then what are you afraid of? “You say: ‘to suffer.’ Isn't it rather to be disappointed? (to be disappointed and to disappoint at the same time - because always the reverse is playing) Do you still trust me so little? " Alain Robbe-Grillet, letter to his wife Catherine “You might love her! Then I'll tell you, you poor mischievous pork leg, that love is another word for lust, plus lust plus lust plus a damn lot of deception, lies. falsehood and. general scam. Love is the blackest of all plagues and if you died of it, there would probably be some joy with love, but it almost always passes. Only a few poor sheep's heads occasionally die of love. If everything is imperfect in this imperfect world, then love is most perfect in its perfect imperfection. ” Ingmar Bergman, Det Sjunde Inseglet [The Seventh Seal] “Do you know what love is? It is the louse of the soul, the mildew of the vine. ” Agustina Bessa-Luís, Fanny Owen (Francisca, film by Manoel de Oliveira) “Love is a sexual instinct, but we do not love with the sexual instinct, but with the presupposition of another feeling. And that assumption is, in effect, already another sentiment. ” “Bernardo Soares” (Fernando Pessoa), Livro de desassossego “There is no such thing as a sexual relationship . . . or worse.” Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire: Livre XIX, . . . ou pire “The trouble is, there are bodies, and worse yet, sexes.” Louis Althusser, L’avenir dure longtemps [The Future Lasts a Long Time] “I would like to report on my life experience. I know, I think, like almost everyone, the strength, the insistence, of sexual desire. My age has not made me forget it. I also know that love inscribes the realization of this desire in its becoming. And this is an important point, because, as a whole very old literature says, the fulfillment of sexual desire also functions as one of the rare material proofs, absolutely related to the body, that love is something other than 'A declaration. The declaration of the type ‘I love you’ seals the event of the meeting, it is fundamental, it engages. But giving up your body, undressing, being naked for the other, performing immemorial gestures, renouncing all modesty, shouting, all this entry on the scene of the body is proof of abandonment to love. Love relates to the totality of the being of the other, and the abandonment of the body is the material symbol of this totality.” Alain Badiou “Love is just a crystalization of desire.” Agustina Bessa-Luís, Fanny Owen (Francisca, film by Manoel de Oliveira) “A great love is a huge responsibility” Susan Sontag, Duett för kannibaler (Duet for Cannibals, film written and directed by Susan Sontag) He doesn’t understand yet. It’s the same. Love, desire … MAX THOR Truly. It has become the same.. Marguerite Duras, Détruire, dit-elle (film written and directed by Marguerite Duras, adapted from her novel Destroy, She Said) ALISSA STEIN “The problem was, did my desire overcome my boredom?” Jean Aurel, Cécil Saint-Laurent, Les Femmes (film by Jean Aurel) “Ashes instead of desire, conscience instead of passion. Can this be a soul? ” Agustina Bessa-Luís, Fanny Owen (Francisca, film by Manoel de Oliveira) “Discovering that one is loved in return really ought to disenchant the lover with the beloved. 'What? this person is modest enough to love even you? Or stupid enough? Or-or-” Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse [KSA 5] “Wise men of old gave the soul a feminine name. Indeed she is female in her nature as well. She even has her womb. As long as she was alone with the father, she was virgin and in form androgynous. But when she fell down into a body and came to this life, then she fell into the hands of many robbers. And the wanton creatures passed her from one to another and [...] her. Some made use of her by force, while others did so by seducing her with a gift. In short, they defiled her, and she [...] her virginity. “As long as the soul keeps running about everywhere copulating with whomever she meets and defiling herself, she exists suffering her just deserts. But when she perceives the straits she is in and weeps before the father and repents, then the father will have mercy on her and he will make her womb turn from the external domain and will turn it again inward, so that the soul will regain her proper character. For it is not so with a woman. For the womb of the body is inside the body like the other internal organs, but the womb of the soul is around the outside like the male genitalia which is external.” L’Exégèse de l’âme (Jean-Marie Sevrin, ed.) [Exegesis on The Soul] “That’s how women are, I thought, she had already understood that she doesn’t matter to me. A kind of vague anger flared up inside of me as if she was someone different and as if I did not enjoy being with her. She had told me so much about those past days – all my talk, glances, sudden outburst had made her think that I needed her. ‘It isn’t true,’ I thought. ‘She’s just a woman. It’s no proof that she’s after me.’ I felt I must go home and be alone. Was I going to have her dogging my steps all day and all night? “…’ Padrona,’ I said, ‘is there anything wrong?’ “She flung her arms around my neck and stayed there like a silly idiot. I kissed her as I had done before and she said, ‘What’s up? You don’t give anyone confidence. You’re not thinking about me at all.’ “That morning I realized that if you’re fond of someone the chances are the other person is laughing at you. I felt myself being amused without any wish to be so. I didn’t say as much to her but I did tell her she had to be careful.” Cesare Pavese, Il Compagno “Did you sleep with Alain?” “He didn't ask. Anyway in my experience, an intellectual is never a good lay.” Marcel Carné, Les tricheurs “The best men always end up with the worst women.” Robert S. Hichens/David O. Selznick, The Paradine Case (film by Alfred Hitchcock) “Women who are with good guys always cheat on them with zeroes... It’s a way for them to maybe assert themselves.” Jean Eustache, La maman et la putain “God gives everyone a talent.” Lars von Trier, Breaking the Waves “When I saw myself in a mirror I wanted to be a man. My man.” Alban Berg, Lulu “You fall in love when you see some part of yourself reflected in another person.” Jay Simms, Creation of the Humanoids “Love me as I love your blood.” Cesare Pavese, letter to Doris Dowling (in English), Torino, May 4th, 1950. “Now I know I’m with the right girl.” John O’Brien/Mike Figgis, Leaving Las Vegas “Now he had won her love, perhaps because she thought she had tricked him. That is to say, her love bore a direct relationship to his gullibility, and when, in the morning, he asked himself over and over again ‘Do you believe in your Maria?’ his intelligence, having had a full night’s sleep, translated it into ‘Am I sure that I can outwit her?’ No, there could be no love with open eyes; to win a woman with frankness was impossible. To approach her with head held high and unambiguous words would be to push her away." August Strindberg, I havsbandet [By the Open Sea] “Nay, even thy husband will believe no ill. All this a wondrous witch did tell me true: One who can guide the stars to work her will, Or turn a torrent's course her task to do. Her spells call forth pale spectres from their graves, And charm bare bones from smoking pyres away: 'Mid trooping ghosts with fearful shriek she raves, Then sprinkles with new milk, and holds at bay. She has the power to scatter tempests rude, And snows in summer at her whisper fall; The horrid simples by Medea brewed Are hers; she holds the hounds of Hell in thrall. For me a charm this potent witch did weave; Thrice if thou sing, then speak with spittings three, Thy husband not one witness will believe, Nor his own eyes, if our embrace they see! But tempt not others! He will surely spy All else—to me, me only, magic-blind! And, hark! the hag with drugs, she said, would try To heal love's madness and my heart unbind. One cloudless night, with smoky torch, she burned Black victims to her gods of sorcery; Yet asked I not love's loss, but love returned, And would not wish for life, if robbed of thee.” Albius Tibullus, Elegy I,2 (Love and Witchcraft) “Out of this first blood Eros appeared, being androgynous. His masculine nature is Himeros, because he is fire from the light. His feminine nature is that of a soul of blood and is derived from the substance of forethought. He is very handsome in his beauty, having more loveliness than all the creatures of chaos. Then when all the gods and their angels saw Eros, they became enamored of him. But when he appeared among all of them, he made them inflamed. Just as many lamps are kindled from a single lamp and the light shines but the lamp is not diminished, so also Eros was scattered in all the creatures of chaos but was not diminished. Just as Eros appeared out of the midpoint between light and darkness, and in the midst of the angels and people the intercourse of Eros was consummated, so too the first sensual pleasure sprouted upon the earth.” On the Origin of the World, (Nag Hammadi Codex II, 5) “I never really believe what women say to me.” Oliver Stone, Natural Born Killers “Their duenna in their midst, These girls wore such perfume In their hair and on their breasts Even old men Desired them. And, Glaukos my boy Their cunts [but here the papyrus is torn] A parade of girls From that shuttered house With all its coming and going. What shoes! [here the papyrus is too tattered to read] Ignorance Of the good Of Things. “To engage with an insatiable girl, Ramming belly against belly, Thigh riding against thigh…” Archilochos (from Carmina Archilochi, The Fragments of Achilochos, Guy Davenport ed. & trans.) “Count on this now! Let some other man possess Neobule! My god ,she is overripe, her girlhood bloom has withered and dropped off, also the grace of before: she's never yet kept down her lust – a frenzied slut that's shown her woman's prime. Out to the crows! Keep her off! May never he who rules the gods decree that I – possessed of such a wife – stand as a neighborhood butt. Instead, I much prefer you, for you are neither faithless nor two-faced: but she is very piercing, makes many men her 'very own'; I fear lest, by acting in a rush I (just like the bitch) may beget blind and untimely things." Archilochos “He said, 'I love you,' and someone close said something cheeky." Alexander Kluge, Die Macht der Gefühle ”I ask you to refuse me what I offer you because it is not that.” Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire: Livre XIX, . . . ou pire “His dream had always been that he would come to arouse a woman's love to the extent that she would come begging, crawling to him, saying: I love you, worthy to love me! That would be nature's order… ” August Strindberg, I havsbandet [By The Open Sea] For millions of women marriage is their desire.. Perhaps. But there are also monkeys.. Fyodor Dostoyevsky/Robert Bresson, Une femme douce (film by Robert Bresson) LUC ELLE “All beginnings are a new ending.” Pieter Van Hees, Christophe Dirickx, Dimitri Karakatsanis, Linkeroever “In love, only the beginnings are delicious. This is why we must continually start over… The greatest tragedy of man is his ability to imagine many lives while remaining trapped in one body. We make it worse by being held captive by another.” Jean Aurel, Cécil Saint-Laurent, Les Femmes (film by Jean Aurel) “Love is just lust with jealousy added.” Lars von Trier, Nymphomaniac “If people killed themselves for my sake that didn’t lower my worth.“ Alban Berg, Lulu “Pain is like personal property. When one has too much property one becomes like a thing.” Alexander Kluge, Die Macht der Gefühle “Every heartache has a name.” Raúl Ruiz, Het dak van de walvis “With a broken heart, is it better still to go back to sleep than to dare to wake up? " Luce Irigaray, Amante Marine (de Friedrich Nietzsche) “A boat breaks in the middle, It goes straight to the bottom. Heartaches float forever. You had ‘em, you’ve got ‘em.” Sopwith Camel (Peter Kraemer), Leave the Light on for Linda “Do you see, dear, that when your heart breaks it is like an unpublic theater?” Elfi Mikesch, Monika Treut, Verführung: Die grausame Frau “Who better than a lizard in love can tell earthly secrets.“ René Char, Le Soleil des eaux (Pierre Boulez, Le Soleil des eaux) ”You really need four men. One to support you, one to fuck you, one to entertain you, and one to take care of your soul.” Ingmar Bergman, Riten [The Rite] “You keep your radio turned on all the time, you have the effect of a wife anyway.” Viña Delmar/Edwin J. Burke/Rudolf Sieber, Bad Girl (film by Frank Borzage) “If I had remained in New York, I would’ve been killed by an overdose of affection.” Ishmael Reed “I said no more, but took her hand, Laid her down in a thousand flowers, And put my soft wool cloak around her. “I slid my arm around her neck To still the fear in her eyes For she was trembling like a fawn, “Touched her hot breasts with light fingers Spraddled her neatly and pressed Against her fine, hard, bared crotch. “I caressed the beauty of all her body And came in a sudden white spurt While I was caressing her hair.” Archilochus “Climbed over mountains, Traveled the sea, Cast down off heaven, Cast down on my knees. I've lain with the devil, Cursed god above, Forsaken heaven To bring you my love” PJ Harvey, To Bring You My Love “I should have loved a thunderbird instead; At least when spring comes they roar back again.” Sylvia Plath “I read in a book today that chance, desire, fear and death leave men and women face to face, and alone." Chantal Akerman, La captive “A man loves a woman who refuses him. She constantly chooses to undermine male pride by refusing final submission. They make a deal she is in for, but he will not be able to satisfy her desire even if he meets the conditions. Many years later, this man observes in front of the same woman that ‘chance, desire, fear and death leave people face to face.’ To which she replies: ‘Chance, desire, fear and life leave them solitary.’ Statement of failure, violent story of a crazy love story full of intransigence...” Agustina Izquierdo, Un souvenir indécent The dreamer in her Had fallen in love with me and she did not know it. That moment the dreamer in me Fell in love with her and I knew it Ted Hughes “I felt the heart, the great soul, in whose presence I seemed to be more than I was, because I was everything I could be. " Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers “One cannot have too much from life (!), but all one has looks like thrash. It’s a long time I realized that my lot is to hug shadows.” Cesare Pavese, letter to Doris Dowling (in English), Torino, July 6th, 1950. “If God existed we’d be married and have children and be happy.” Raúl Ruiz, The Golden Boat “Life is not a lot of fun when you don't love anyone.” Arlette Langmann, Maurice Pialat, À nos amours ”What is wife to me? What is son to me, my Spirit?” "almoi carakwtwn (Psalms of the Wanderers,1 C.R.C. Allberry, ed.) “Every man who marries marries the wrong woman. True suffering cometh when a man is in love with a woman he cannot marry.” Robert Pirosh, Marc Connelly, René Clair, André Rigaud, Dalton Trumbo, I Married a Witch (film by René Clair) HIPPOLYTUS NURSE HIPPOLYTUS 1 But woman is the root of all evil. Full of her wicked schemes she lays siege to men’s minds. How many cities have burned because of their adulteries? How many wars have they caused, how many kingdoms overturned, How many enslaved! Forget the rest, remember only Aegus’ wife, Medea, proof enough that women are the devil. Why should you blame all women for the crimes of a few? I hate them all, I curse them, I shun them, I reject them. Be it reason, nature or passion which inspires me My pleasure is to hate them. Water and fire will mix. The tricksy quicksands of Syrtis will offer a friendly welcomea To wandering ships, and from her farthest shore Hesperias Tethys will raise the shining dawn in the west, And wolves will turn with gentle faces to the deer, I disagree with Allberry whose opinion was that carakwtwn was not the Coptic word carakwte (meaning “wanderer”) with a Greek genitive plural appended to it. To me this is obviously the case. Before I will yield and welcome any woman. . Seneca, Phaedra “Women are worse than villains. With the villains, at least, everything is clear. At first the woman is cute, then she makes you lose your head. And then you will even find that she sleeps with your best friend.” Helmut to Barbara and Ket, Семнадцать мгновений весны, film by Татья́на Миха́йловна Лио́знова. (Seventeen Moments of Spring, film by Tanyana Lioznova) “At this moment the Woman came to him…. He was listening in the dusk when she came, listening so intently that he did not hear her enter. From the door she spoke to him, and he winced at the regularity of her clear, steady speech. It was the usual story, vulgarly told: admiration for his genius, sympathy with his suffering, only a woman could understand…. He clenched his hands in a fury against the enormous impertinence of women, their noisy intrusive curious enthusiasm, like the spontaneous expression of admiration bursting from American hearts before Michelangelo’s tomb in Santa Croce. The voice droned on, wavered, stopped. He sketched a tired gesture of acceptation, and prepared to withdraw once more within that terrifying silent immobility. She turned on the light and advanced carelessly into the room. An irruption of demons would not have scattered his intentness so utterly. She sat down before him at the table, and leaned forward with her jaws in the cups of her hands. He looked at her venomously, and was struck in spite of himself by the extraordinary pallor of her lips, of which the lower protruded slightly and curled upwards contemptuously to compress the upper, resulting in a faintly undershot local sensuality which went strangely with the extreme cold purity stretching sadly from the low brow to the closed nostrils. He thought of George Meredith and recovered something of his calm. The eyes were so deeply set as to almost cavernous; the light falling on the cheekbones threw them back into a misty shadow. In daylight they were strange, almost repulsive, deriving a pitiless penetration from the rim of white showing naturally above the green-flecked pupil. Now as she leaned forward beneath the light, they were pools of obscurity. She wore a close-fitting hat of faded green felt; he thought that he had never seen such charming shabbiness…. When at last she went away he felt that something had gone out from him, something he could not spare, but still less could grudge, something of the desire to live, something of the unreasonable tenacity with which he shrank from dissolution. So each evening, in contemplation and absorption of this woman, he lost a part of his essential animality: so that the water rose, terrifying him. Still he fought on all day, hopelessly, mechanically, only relaxing with twilight, to listen for her coming to loosen yet another stone in the clumsy dam set up and sustained by him, frightened and corruptible. Until at last, for the first time, he was unconditioned by the Satanic dimensional Trinity, he was released, achieved, the blue flower, Vega, GOD…. After a timeless parenthesis he found himself alone in his room, spent with ecstasy, torn by the bitter loathing of that which he had condemned to the humanity of silence. Thus each night he died and was God, each night was revived and was torn, torn and battered with increasing grievousness, so that he hungered to be irretrievably engulfed in the light of eternity, one with the birdless cloudless colourless skies, in infinite fulfillment. Then it happened. While the woman was contemplating the face that she had overlaid with death, she was swept aside by a great storm of sound, shaking the very house with its prolonged, triumphant vehemence, climbing in a dizzy, bubbling scale, until, dispersed, it fused into breathy of the forest and the throbbing cry of the sea. They found her caressing his wild dead hair.” Samuel Beckett, Assumption. “Self-professed profound Till the chips were down Know you're a gambling man Love is a losing hand Though I battled blind Love is a fate resigned Memories mar my mind Love is a fate resigned Over futile odds And laughed at by the gods And now the final frame Love is a losing game” Amy Winehouse “If we now look into the chaos of life, we see all busy with its distress and plague, exhausting all forces, satisfying the endless needs and warding off the many forms of suffering, without, however, being allowed to hope for anything other than the preservation of this troubled, individual existence, for a short period of time. In between, however, in the midst of the turmoil, we see the looks of two lovers longingly meeting; - but why so secretly, timidly and stealthily? - Because these lovers are the traitors who secretly seek to perpetuate the whole hardship and drudgery which would otherwise reach an early end, which they want to thwart as their peers have thwarted earlier." Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Kapital 44, Metaphysik der Geschlechtsliebe (The World as Will and Representation, Chapter 44: Metaphysics of Sexual Love) There is no god above sex. It is the stone, I tell you. Many gods are wild beasts, but the snake is the oldest of the gods. When he conceals himself in the ground, there you have the image of sex. There is in it life and death. What god can incarnate and include so much? OEDIPUS But you yourself. You said it.. TIRESIAS Tiresias is old and is not a god. When he was young he was ignorant. Sex is ambiguous and always equivocal. It is a half which appears a whole. Man succeeds in incarnating it, in living inside it like the good swimmer in the water, but meanwhile he has got old, he has touched the stone. At the end one idea, one illusion is left to him: That the other sex comes out of it satisfied. Well, don’t believe it: I know that for all it is a wasted fatigue. Cesare Pavese, Dialoghi con Leucò (Diologues with Leucò) TIRESIAS “The happy couple who recognize each other in love defy the universe and time; it is sufficient, it realizes the absolute.” Simone de Beauvoir, Le deuxième sexe, tome 2: L’expérience vécue “The ideal of the amorous enterprise is alienated freedom: each one wants the freedom of the other to be alienated.” Jean Paul Sartre, L'Être et le Néant [Being and Nothingness] “’Between us,’ he explained, by using a vocabulary that was dear to him, ‘it is a necessary love: We should also know contingent loves.’ We were of the same kind, and our understanding would last as long as we could; it could not supply the ephemeral riches of encounters with different beings; how would we deliberately ignore the range of astonishment, regret, nostalgia, pleasures that we were also able to feel?” Simone de Beauvoir, La Force d l’âge [Force of Circumstance] "The lover does not desire to possess the beloved as one possesses a thing; he demands a special type of appropriation. He wants to possess a freedom as freedom. “On the other hand, the lover cannot be satisfied with that superior form of freedom which is a free and voluntary engagement. Who would be content with a love given as pure loyalty to a sworn oath? Who would be satisfied with the words, ‘I love you because I have freely engaged myself to love you because I do not wish to go back on my word?’ Thus the lover demands a pledge, yet is irritated by the pledge. He wants to be loved by a freedom but demands that this freedom as freedom should no longer be free. He wishes that the Other’s freedom should determine itself to become love – and this not only at the beginning of the affair but at each instant – and at the same time he wants this freedom to be captured by itself, to turn back on itself, as in a dream, so as to will its own captivity. This captivity must be a resignation that is both free and yet chained in our hands.” Jean Paul Sartre, L'Être et le Néant [Being and Nothingness] ”Atrocious contradiction of the anger that is born of love and that kills love.” Simone de Beauvoir, La femme rompue “Love is, in its essence, the project of being loved.” Jean Paul Sartre, L'Être et le Néant [Being and Nothingness] “We never understand the loves of others.” Simone de Beauvoir, La Femme rompue “Pleasure is the death and failure of desire.” Jean Paul Sartre, L'Être et le Néant “Love is craving when we don’t love anymore. All that time lost…” Simone de Beauvoir, Les Belles Images “A woman who caused the death of a man in the past no longer has the right to love.” コクククテキジョイユロン (Confessions Among Actresses) a film by 吉田喜重 (Yoshishige Yoshida) “So here I am, a prisoner of myself, in this room without anyone, where I only try to sleep, and where I will have to try a little more (read) to try to survive. I'm still torn by your last message and your last words: ‘What am I going to become?’ I am with my back to the wall: you have to become something and someone. If I could then help you as I want. I kiss you my darling, as I love you, with all my soul.” Lettre de Louis Althusser à sa femme Hélène (1974) “It was not you I lost, but the world.” Ingeborg Bachmann, Eine Art Verlust [A Type of Loss\ “I cannot postpone love. Not for a new century. Not for next year. Not for a single day.” Christa Wolf, Unter den Linden You from the outset Lost Beloved, my Never-Arrived, I’ve no idea, none, what tones are dear to you. No longer do I hope, when the moment wells up, To recognize you. All the vast Scenes inside me, so far off, so familiar, Cities and towers and bridges and unForeseen winding of ways And that stormy world where gods Once strode through the lands: All this within me presses toward one meaning: You, vanishing. Oh, the gardens are you, Oh, I saw them with such Yearning. An open window In the country-house —, and you almost stepped forth To me, bemused. Streets I came upon, — You had just gone down them, And sometimes the mirrors in the shops Were still giddy with you and, startled, shot back My too-sudden reflection. — Who knows if the very same Bird didn’t call through us both Separately, yesterday, in the evening? Rainer Maria Rilke, aus Späte Gedichte [Late Poems] “. . . Remembering love, but fearing The memory of the beloved, I once cut Three thistles which I put In a glass of water, then sat beside them, staring. Asking the flowers, silver under water, To tell me about time and love and doom, Those great blue grottos of feeling where the rank intruder Is moved to think in rhyme; But the thistles could indicate only that face which came Abruptly to mock with its usual witty anger My nakedness, my hunger, And the thistles jabbed my wrist when I reached for them. *** Friday. Clear. Cool. This is your day. Stendhal At breakfast time. The metaphors of love. Lucky perhaps, big Beyle, for whom love was So frankly the highest good, to be garlanded Accordingly, without oblivion, without cure. His heedful botany: not love, great pearl That swells around a small unlovely need; Nor love whose fingers tie the bows of birth Upon the sorry present. Love merely as the best There is, and one would make the best of that By saying how it grows and in what climates, By trying to tell the crystals from the branch, Stretching that wand then toward the sparkling wave. To say at the end, however we find it, good, Bad, or indifferent, it helps us, and the air Is sweetest there. The air is very sweet.” James Merrill, Variations: The Air is Sweetest that a Thistle Guards, from The Black Swan MY DEAR LOVE “Look up my dear at the dark Constellations above.” “Dark stars under green sky. I lie on my back and harken To the music of the stars, My dear love.” “You and I, my dear love, Shall never die, never die.” “Not again, my dear love. Lie on your back and hark The music of moon and stars, My dear love.” “Why do you never lie On my breast, my dear love?” “Oh, that was another sky. Here, each of us on his own, Each on his own back-bone, My dear love.” “Is that the law of this land, Each one of us on his own?” “Oh yes, we are underground With the elves and fairies: lonely Is the word in this country, My dear love.” “What? A law in this land That breast can never meet breast?” “After while you will understand. The mole is our moon, and worms Are the stars we observe, My dear love.” Robinson Jeffers, My Dear Love, from Be Angry at the Sun Who ever felt the deepest of all wounds Has felt in mind and spirit Pain of bitter separation; Who loved what he lost What he must give away, The beloved heart. He understands in joy the tears, And the eternal longing of love To be one in two, To find oneself in another. So the borders of twoness vanish, And the pain of existence. Whoever could learn to love a being So fully in heart and mind. Oh, it won’t comfort him New ones will be born anew: It’s not the same. The beloved sweet life, This taking and giving, Word and mind and gaze, This searching and finding, This thinking and feeling No god will give back. Karoline von Günderrode, Die Eine Klage [The One Lament] “The wedding date was June just like any other bride She loved him like no one before, it was good to be alive But sometimes that can slip away as fast As any fingers through your hands So you let time forgive the past and go and make some other plans And you are not alone Laying in the light Put out the fire in your head And lay with me tonight You are not alone Laying in the light Put out the fire in your head And lay with me tonight” Patty Griffin, Not Alone “And if rainbows could chase the clouds away And if prayers were answered in good time And if sins were meant to be forgiven Once again, one day, you’ll be mine.” Carrie Rodriguez, from Red Dog Tracks (CD by Chip Taylor & Carrie Rodriguez) “Things have changed since those times, some are up in ‘G’ Others they are wand'rers but they all feel just like me They'd part with all they've got, could they once more walk With their best girl and have a twirl on the sidewalks of New York” James W. Blake, “The Sidewalks of New York” (1894) ”The time comes when you forget everything around you. When we love we are true. In separation we perish, like flowers without sun.” Rudolf G. Binding, Veit Harlan, Hans Radtke, Opfergang (film von Veit Harlan) “Her kisses fell like a rain in May. Her Tenderness dripped, like a shiver of Almond blossoms in the evening winds. Her flattering Words jumped, like the cascade of shimmering Pearls in the park pond. ‘You teach me!’ She breathed, ‘you – you - Show me what love is - now you have to stay for my love, which you created!’ " Hanns Heinz Ewers, Alraune “Now for the matters you wrote about: ‘It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.’ But because of sexual immorality, let each man have his own wife, and let each woman have their own husband. The husband should fulfill his wife's sexual needs, and the wife should fulfill her husband's needs. The wife does not have authority over her own body but yields it to her husband. In the same way, the husband does not have authority over his own body but yields it to his wife. Do not deprive each other of sexual relations, unless you both agree to refrain from sexual intimacy for a limited time so you can give yourselves more completely to prayer. Afterward, you should come together again so that Satan won't be able to tempt you because of your lack of selfcontrol. “Thus much in the way of concession, not of command.” Saint Paul, 1 Corinthians 7:1-7 “How the earth and the sun and the universal ether of the sky and the celestial Milky Way and the most remote Olympus and the burning force of the star were thrown into birth. The narrowest rings are full of fire without admixture; those that come after are full of night, but between them both a portion of flame penetrates. In the center is the divinity that governs everything, for it is everywhere the origin of the giving birth of Styx and of coupling, sending the female to be unified to the male and the male to the female. First of all the gods, Eros, it is he who was contrived. Clear in the night with borrowed light, around the errant earth, Always carrying its worried regards toward the rays of the sun.” Parmenides, Poem, XI-XV (trans. Jean Beaufret) “Coition is a slight attack of epilepsy for man gushes forth from man and is separated by being torn apart with a kind of shock.” Democritus, Fragment 68B32 D-K “When a woman and a man mix the seeds of Venus, the power forming in the veins from differing blood preserving the blend fashions well-formed bodies. For if the powers in the mixed blood fight and do not make a union of the mixture in the body, gravely will they disturb the sex growing in the twin seed.” Parmenides Poem, Fragment 18 (surviving only in Latin translation) “What does the world need in order to become perfect? First of all, and for quite a long time, it needs perfect love. Even if only for the sake of our memories, for which occasionally one does have to provide, and even if, at first anyway, it’s only for the sake of appearances. Who’s talking of love? Love is what one hides, love shuts one up in oneself like an evil sickness…” Christa Wolf, Nachdenken über Christa T. ”I shall be earth, the very grave for heroes, Which fervent sons invoke to be fulfilled. ‘They bring the second era. Love engendered The world and Love shall kindle it again.’ I spoke the magic and I drew the circle. Before I drown in night a vision sweeps Me upward: Soon the god will set his weightless Foot on my cherished land.” Stefan George, Hyperion, aus Das Neue Reich Ejaculation – I want to die – I want to live – Between this Lovembrace! The Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven “The only way to behave toward a woman is to make love to her if she is pretty and to someone else if she is plain.” Oscar Wilde, Algernon “A man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man. For man did not come from woman, but woman from man. And man was not made for woman, but woman was made for man.” Saint Paul, 1 Corinthians 11:7-9 “He was her teacher - that's true. He opened her gaze, she taught all Zenans’ secrets in the lands of the morning, all the games of the old ones, peoples for whom love is an art. But it was as if he did not say anything strange to her, just that memory invokes in her something that has long been her own. Often before he spoke there were flames. Her quick desires broke out like a forest fire in summer.” Hanns Heinz Ewers, Alraune “Have you run an audit on his books yet, or are you still screwing on faith?” Roger Ebert, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (film by Russ Meyer) “… that a feeling so complex as what we call ‘love’ to remain the same only someone who draws his feelings from bad literature can believe, and it would certainly not be desirable.” Christa Wolf, Nachdenken über Christa T. “The ‘walking straight up to dreadfulness,’ he said, ‘that is love.’” Djuna Barnes, The Passion “Do you understand what love is, with its sharpest joys inseparable from sharpest suffering, happiest when it is most bitter?” Indra’s Daughter to the Poet. Ingmar Bergman’s 1961 television adaptation of August Strindberg’s Ett Dromspel “Love is never as ferocious as when you think it is going to leave you. We are not always allowed this knowledge, and so our love sometimes becomes retrospective.” Anita Shreve, The Weight of Water, film directed by Kathryn Bigelow Parted I always longed to say to you many words of love – now you search restlessly for lost wonders. But when my music-clocks play, we celebrate our wedding. Oh, your sweet eyes are my favorite flowers. And your heart is my heavenly kingdom – let me look inside. You are pure glistening mind – you daydream so tenderly. I always longed to say to you so many words of love – why didn’t I? Else Lasker-Schüler, Abschied Late (II) The glances thus come to an end, the glances back to the past: fields and lakes merged into your days and the first songs from an old piano. Encounters of the soul! Youth! Then self-fabricated, the betrayal, failure, decline – the background of happiness. And love! “I know that you would have gladly remained with me but were unable to do so. I absolve you of all guilt.” – Ah, love difficult and complex, hidden for years, we will call out to one another: “Don’t forget”, until one is dead – – thus come the roses to their end. petal by petal. Gottfried Benn, Spät „And? I asked you once, What do we do when the deliciousness is over? Over once and for all. You don’t like questions like that.” Christa Wolf, Leibhaftig (In the Flesh) “But if you are my friend, take the bed of a younger woman, for I will not endure being the elder one in a partnership.” Sappho (quoted in Stobaeus, Anthology) “Love is the most effective means of overcoming feelings of shame.“ Sigmund Freud “Percussion, salt and honey, a quivering in the thighs; He shakes me all over again, Eros who cannot be thrown, Who stalks on all fours, Like a beast. Eros makes me shiver again Strengthless in the knees, Eros gall and honey Snake-sly, invincible.” Sappho “Shame is the shadow of love.” PJ Harvey “Nothing can take the place in my mind of This beauty of girls.” Sappho ”Now I can die in peace, for I have seen a great love.” Herman Bang, Mikaël “One is not in love unless one wishes to die with one’s beloved There is only one happiness it is to love and be loved” Harry Crosby A marriage that is also closed for death is a wedding that a comrade gives us for the night. In death love is sweetest; for the lover, death is a bridal night, [a secret] of sweet mysteries.” Novalis (wie von Karoline von Günderrode transkribiert) [as transcribed by Karoline von Günderrode] “O most sacred virgin, I will die with you.” Brief von “Eusebio” (Friedrich Creuzer) an Karoline von Günerrode, seine “Lateinschülerin,” fragte sie, was diese Worte bedeuteten. [Letter from „Eusebio“ – Friedrich Creuzer – to Karoline von Günderrode asking what these words meant.] “He soon reaches that wonderful land in which air and water, flowers and animals, differ entirely from those of earthly nature. The poem at the same time changes in many places to a play. ‘Men, beasts, plants, stones and stars, the elements, sounds, colors, meet like one family, act and converse like one race. Flowers and brutes converge concerning men. The world of fable is again visible; the real world is itself regarded as a fable.’ He finds the blue flower; it is Matilda, who sleeps and has the carbuncle. A little girl, their child, sits by a coffin, and renews his youth. ‘This child is the primeval world, the close of the golden time.’ ‘Here the Christian religion is reconciled with the Heathen. The history of Orpheus, of Psyche, and others are sung." “Henry plucks the blue flower, and delivers Matilda from her enchantment, but she is lost to him again; he becomes senseless through pain, and changes to a stone. ‘Edda (the blue flower, the Eastern Maiden, Matilda) sacrifices herself upon the stone; he is transformed to a melodious tree. Cyane hews down the tree and burns herself with him. He becomes a golden ram. Edda, Matilda, is obliged to sacrifice it. He becomes a man again. During these metamorphoses he has the very strangest conversations.’ “He is happy with Matilda, who is both the Eastern Maiden and Cyane. A joyous spirit-festival is celebrated. All that has past was Death, the last dream and awakening. Novalis, Heinrich von Ofterdingen “Living is a prayer that only a woman’s love can answer.” Romain Gary, Au-delà de cette limite votre ticket n’est plus valable “I am searching for the blue flower, I am searching and never find it, I have a dream that my good fortune Will flourish in that flower. I am hiking with my harp Through countries, cities and wetlands, To behold the blue flower Anywhere in the earthcycle. I am hiking for a long time, For a long time I hoped, I trusted, But alas, I have not yet Beheld the blue flower anywhere.” Joseph von Eichendorff, Die Blaue Blume “It blooms deep in the forest the blue flower fine, to win the flower we draw into the world. The trees rustle, the brook murmurs, and whoever wants to find the blue flower must be a wanderer – must be a wandering bird.” Horant (Hjalmar Kutzleb), Wir wollen zu Land ausfahren “A black-haired maiden stamps roses – Ten thousand blue roses – In an a little album in which a young girl writes loose sayings. With lick and brack the machine goes, Daranda’s black-haired maiden stands And stamps blue roses.” Otto Sattler “Because: when dead to love, and hardly caring Whether another’s love could sink or save it -- She came. And my old verve in dreaming, daring, Resolving, up-and-doing – this she gave it. If ever love restored a human soul, It took my shrunken self and made it whole.“ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, „Elegie“ (aka „Die Marienbader Elegie“, aus „Trilogie der Ledenschaft“) Crimson You, deeply red, Until death My love should be like you, Should never pale, Until death, You glowing red, It should be like you.. Karoline von Günderrode This is my first love. This is my last love. MELUSINE Can you ever know that? COUNT One can never know. MELUSINE In the restless of the water I slept and slept, and then you found me.. COUNT No, my love, it is you who found me!! I ran and ran, the earth rolled after me, it rolled my youth away from under my feet. I wandered without a future.. And then I find you, in whom I can rest, In whom I can repose, before my death! MELUSINE Before your death? I am freed from myself, as I belong to you.. COUNT I belong to you.. MELUSINE Who sang? COUNT A star? MELUSINE A nightengale? COUNT You? MELUSINE Your heart? COUNT Shall we live together? MELUSINE Die together? COUNT Die? Now? MELUSINE Soon? COUNT Come, night is falling.. Libretto nach dem Schauspiel Melusine von Yvan Goll von Claus H. Hennenberg. Oper von Aribert Reimann MELUSINE COUNT “Yes! Man is a sun, all-seeing, all-illuminating when he loves, and when he loves not, he is a dark dwelling in which a smoking little lamp burns.” Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion, Oder der Eremit in Griechenland, Zweites Buch ”But you don’t have to want to help me anymore. You once gave me light. I was allowed to see them. I am going back to my night.” Harriet Bloch, Carl Mayer, Der Gang in Die Nacht (film by F. W. Murnau) .”I want to read this to you. This is Pavese’s last letter: ‘Life was horrible, but I found myself interesting. Now I know that life is wonderful, but that I am left out. Can I tell you, my love, that I have never woken up with a woman who was mine beside me, never been taken seriously when I loved, and I never had the grateful look of a wife.’ “He must have suffered a lot. Women are bitches.” Tito Carpi, Maurice Pialat, Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble [We Won’t Grow Old Together] (film by Maurice Pialat) “In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.” Oscar Wilde, Mr. Dumby “We want to remain unknown to the curiosity of those who love us. We love them.” René Char, La bibliothèque est en feu ”My grandmother always said, you just change your pants, what's inside stays the same.“ Anna Seghers, Die Toten Bleiben Jung [The Dead Die Young] ”Rhodope, Melita and and Rhodoclea competed to see who had the best cunt, and chose me as judge; like the goddesses famed for their beauty, they stood naked, dripping with nectar. Between Rhodope’s thighs the of the Cyclops gleamed like a rosebush cleft by a foaming stream . . . Rhodoclea’s was like glass, it’s wet surface like a temple statue freshly sculpted. But as I knew well what Paris suffered owing to his judgment, I at once gave the price to all three goddesses.” Rufinus, The Greek Anthology, v, 36 “A woman ought to get a man first and then want him.” Anya Seton & Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Dragonwyck (film by Joseph L. Mankiewicz) OTTO KERNBERG: The capacity to fall in love implies the ability to idealize another person. In a sense, all love begins as infatuation. We see the loved one as extraordinary, remarkable, even perfect. Inevitably, disappointment sets in; things look different in the light of an ongoing relationship. But when one is in love, one can regenerate the feeling of idealization of the other person again and again throughout a long-term commitment. I have often observed this clinically with good couples. But the narcissist cannot idealize any individual for very long. As soon as an idealized person responds to the narcissist, that person loses his or her value. The narcissist is thus purely exploitative in his relationships with other people. It is as if he were squeezing a lemon and then dropping the remains. For example, I had a narcissistic patient who thought he was in love for a time with a woman he considered very gifted, beautiful, warm – in short, completely satisfying. For a while she didn’t respond to him, and he wanted her to do so, and even wanted to marry her. Finally she did respond, and then accepted his offer of marriage, he quickly became bored with her and soon he was altogether indifferent to her. LINDA WOLFE: Does the pathological narcissist, then, tend to move from one person to the next more often and more rapidly than the normal narcissist? OTTO KERNBERG: Yes, again typically, the pathological narcissist tends to be sexually promiscuous. Pathological narcissists feel sexual excitement for people considered valuable . . . Their unconscious envy and greed is stirred up by such people. . . Otto F. Kernberg, interviewed by Linda Wolfe (1978) “I always dreamed of having a storybook wedding, and now I am.” Zalman King, Two Moon Junction FAY TODD FAY I like you a lot. I love you. Don’t spoil it. I love you Don’t say that. TODD: It’s true. FAY Love’s special TODD Yes it is FAY Don’t make me argue. You’re very kind, and clever, but: I could only let a really rich man love me. I could only love someone criminally handsome… Please try to understand… That’s how I am. I’m sorry. The Day of the Locust (Screenplay by Waldo Salt from the novel by Nathaniel West. Motion picture directed by John Schlesinger.) TODD FAY ”Poverty and love are my two woes. Poverty I will bear easily, but the fire of Cypris I cannot.” Anonymous. (Greek Antholotgy, v) “Tell me, love, what I cannot explain: Should I spend this brief, dreadful time only with thoughts circulating and alone knowing no love and giving no love? Must one think? Will one not be missed?” Ingeborg Bachmann “Love shows how far we can be sick within the limits of health: The state of love is not organic, but metaphysical intoxication.” Emil Cioran, Le crépuscule des pensées “I love everything in you. I hate only your undiscerning eye which is pleased with odious men.” Rufinus Domesticus (Greek Anthology, v., 284) “The components of real love are two: the erotic attraction and the tender feelings, which work in such a way that they drive back the erotic attraction” Sigmund Freud “Rivals assert that Menophila’s mouth (decency) is quite different and admits every kind of indecency. Hither, you astrologers! For it can hold both Dog (penis) and Twins (testicles).” Marcus Argentarius (fl. 60 A.D.) (Greek Antholotgy, v. 104) “… Years without her! Whose image haunts me in a thousand ways. Sun on her hair, the falling dusk about her – The memories lag, or dwindle off in haze.What good’s all this? What comfort? shaken so By all this coming, going, ebb and flow? * “I’ve lost it all, earth, heaven, self. Ignore a Man the gods coddled with a ‘lucky star’! They put me to the proof with that Pandora So rich in gifts, in havoc richer far. They pressed me to sweet lips that gave and gave; Then crushed and flung me headlong. Toward the grave.“ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, „Elegie“ (aka „Die Marienbader Elegie“, aus „Trilogie der Ledenschaft“) (translation by John Frederick Nims) “… It is wonderful to watch you, A living woman in a room Full of frantic, sterile people, And think of your aching buttocks Under your velvet evening dress, And the beautiful fire spreading From your sex, burning flesh and bone, The unbelievably complex Tissues of your brain all alive Under your coiling, splendid hair. I think of you naked. I put your naked body Between myself alone and death. If I go into my brain And set fire to your sweet nipples, To the tendons beneath your knees, I can see far before me. It is empty there where I look, But at least it is lighted. I know how your shoulders glisten, How your face shrinks into trance, And your eyes like a sleepwalker’s, And your lips of a woman Cruel to herself. I like to Think of you clothed, your body Shut to the world and self-contained, Its wonderful arrogance That makes all women envy you. I can remember ever dress, Each more proud than a naked nun. When I go to sleep my eyes Close in a mesh of memory. Its cloud of intimate odor Dreams instead of myself.” Kenneth Rexroth, Between Myself and Death “Lyde, who serves three men at the same speed, one on top, one below, and one behind, says: I accept buggers, fuckers and irrumators. If you’re in a hurry, even accompanied by two, don’t hold back.” Gallus (The Greek Anthology, v.) ”We always love too little, and always too late.” Jan Twardowski “If one has lost an object of love, the most obvious reaction is to identify with it, to replace it, as it were, by identification from within." Sigmund Freud, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur “I hate Love. Why doth not his heavy godship attack wild beasts, but shooteth ever at my heart? What gains it for a god to burn up a man, or what trophies of price shall he win from my head?” Alcaeus of Lesbos (7th Century B.C.) Greek Anthology v., 10 “To love and accuse at one time were a labour Hercules himself could scarce have borne.” Titus Petronius Arbiter (102 P.L.M.) “War and love are the same thing.” Bruno Dumont “You have forgotten me, or maybe you love someone more than me.” Sappho “When a man is in his prime the woman is finished. It's a pity but she's finished. You might just as well throw her away now.” Ivor Novello, I Lived With You (play by Ivor Novello; film directed by Maurice Elvey “The erotic is about saying yes. Love appeals to the lowest instincts, wrapped up in lies.” Lars von Trier, Nymphomaniac “What is it men in women do require? The lineaments of Gratified Desire. What is it women do in men require? The lineaments of Gratified Desire.” William Blake, Notebooks (The Rossetti Manuscript) (quoted in Bad Timing, film by Nicolas Roeg) “I can only give you some advice and make you aware of some precautions. You may know that loving is to be learned like everything else. It is therefore difficult to avoid errors; it doesn't have to be the first love that becomes the lasting one. Your resolution to have an acquaintance with R[obert] H[ollitscher] until you have met is certainly the only sensible one. But you also know the dangers involved, how little freedom society leaves a girl and how hopeless the opposition to society is for the individual.” Sigmund Freud (Brief an seine älteste Tochter Mathilde) [letter to his dautghter Mathilde] “Hadewijch by Bruno Dumont is a call to grace. This is the definition of the author himself. Continuing: ‘It’s a mystical experience. But not an act of faith. It’s a movie about love. I think true love is totally mystical because in mysticism you come to true union. y ou have to be able to absolutely love inside an ordinary body and in the world. This is what I film at the end: the limit of superstitions and ideals. Hadewijch dies to God and is reborn in the arms of a man where she will find the fullness of love ". Bruno Dumont, re his film Hadewijch The moon shines in the dark blue sky. I have extinguished my lamp, – My lonely heart is heavy with thought. I weep, weep; my poor tears Course so hot and bitter down my cheeks, Because you are so far from my great longing, Because you will not understand The pain I feel, when I am not with you. Sengru Wang, trans. Hans Bethge, Anton Webern, Die Einsame. Vier Lieder für Sopran und Kammerorchester, Op.13 “We are never more unprotected against suffering than when we love, never more helplessly unhappy than when we have lost the beloved object or its love.” Sigmund Freud, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur BASIL RATHTBONE That’s what love does to you. It makes you terribly lonely no matter where you are. CONSTANCE BENNETT We’d better not talk about love to Gaylord. Men so dislike discussing things they don’t understand. Horace Jackson, Sin Takes A Holiday (film directed by Paul L. Stein) “my love is building a building around you, a frail slippery house, a strong fragile house (beginning at the singular beginning of your smile)a skillful uncourth prison, a precise clumsy prison(building thatandthis into Thus, Around the reckless magic of your mouth) my love is building a magic, a discrete tower of magic and(as I guess) when Farmer Death(whom the fairies hate)shall crumble the mouth-flower fleet He’ll not my tower, laborious, casual where the surrounded smile hangs breathless” E.E. Cummings, Sonnets-Actualities II (from Chimneys) “M’amour, m’amour what do I love and where are you? That I lost my center fighting the world. The dreams clash and are shattered – and that I tried to make a paradise terrestre.” Ezra Pound, Notes for [Canto] CXVII et seq. Lune Malade The Sick Moon O Lune, nocturne phtisique, Sur le noir oreiller des cieux, Ton immense regard fiévreux M’attire comme une musique! You nightly deathward sinking moon Draped upon Heaven’s blackened bed. Your face, so fevered, overlarge, Haunts me, like some exotic song.. Tu meurs d’un amour chimérique, Et d’un désir silencieux, O Lune, nocturne phtisique, Sur le noir oreiller des cieux! An all-consuming lovesickness Kills you with longing, suffocates.. You nightly deathward sinking moon, Draped upon Heaven’s blackened bed. Mais dans sa volupté physique L’amant qui passe insoucieux Prend pour des rayons gracieux Ton sang blanc et mélancolique, O Lune, nocturne phtisique! Your loved one, senseless with desire, Without a thought speeds to his love, Delighting in your dancing beams, Your white contaminated blood, You nightly deathward sinking moon. Albert Giraud, Pierrot Lunaire Arnold Schoenberg, Pierrot Lunaire “Two people are walking through a bare, cold wood; the moon keeps pace with them and draws their gaze. The moon moves along above tall oak trees, there is no wisp of cloud to obscure the radiance to which the black, jagged tips reach up… He puts an arm about her strong hips. Their breath embraces in the air. Two people walk on through the high, bright night.” Richard Dehmel, Verklärte Nacht (musical setting by Arnold Schoenberg) De profundis clamavi From The Depths J'implore ta pitié, Toi, l'unique que j'aime, Du fond du gouffre obscur où mon coeur est tombé. C'est un univers morne à l'horizon plombé, Où nagent dans la nuit l'horreur et le blasphème; O my only love, I pray thee pity me From out the dark gulf where my poor heart lies A barren world hemmed in by leaden skies Where horror flies at night, and blasphemy. Un soleil sans chaleur plane au-dessus six mois, Et les six autres mois la nuit couvre la terre; C'est un pays plus nu que la terre polaire — Ni bêtes, ni ruisseaux, ni verdure, ni bois! For half a year the sickly sun is seen, The other half thick night lies on the land, A country bleaker than the polar strand; No beasts, no brooks, nor any shred of green. Or il n'est pas d'horreur au monde qui surpasse La froide cruauté de ce soleil de glace Et cette immense nuit semblable au vieux Chaos; There never was a horror which surpassed The icy sun’s cold cruelty, and this vast Night like primeval chaos; would I were Je jalouse le sort des plus vils animaux Qui peuvent se plonger dans un sommeil stupide, Tant l'écheveau du temps lentement se dévide! Like the dumb brutes, who in a secret lair Lie wrapt in stupid slumber for a space -The time creeps at so burdensome a pace. Charles Baudelaire, Les fleurs du mal Alban Berg, Lyrische Suite "How dear, how dear, I've had you ... Lived far from all things ... Strange to all ... I knew nothing but you ... this whole year since you first took my hand ... Oh, so warm ... never before have I loved someone so ... your smile and your talk ... I loved you so ... “Dearest, dearest, tomorrow is coming ... What should I do here alone? ... In this endless life ... in this dream without borders and colors ... because my border was the place where you were .. and all the colors of the world broke out of your eyes ... The light will come for everyone, but I am alone - in my night?" Marie Pappenheim, Erwartung (monodrama by Arnold Schoenberg) ”Deep is the sorrow that darkens around me. Once more I enter, Lord! thy house… Lend thy coolness, quench the conflagration, cancel all hope, vouchsafe the light! Fires in the heart still grow openly. Deep within me a cry is still awake. Kill all longing, close the wound! Take love from me, give me the joy!” Stefan George, Litanei (text for soprano solo, Arnold Schoenberg, Streichquartett II, iii. Langsam “I've taken The best room, what they call the bridal chamber What they call  what do they call it?  And I dressed up All in these new things not a red ribbon You ever had on before and mind you keep The shoes you were married in and all to go Into a closed room with a bed in it, To lie in a shut chamber, what they call  Something the chalked letters does he say That I wonder or what  She held his hand Against her breast under the flowers. She felt The warmth of it like the warmth of the sun driving Downward into her heart. And all those fields Ready, the earth stretched out upon those fields Ready, and now the sowers  What is this thing we know that they have not told us? What is this in us that has come to bed In a closed room?” Archibald MacLeish, The Pot of Earth “What can I say? Three years absence and the total change of scene and habit make such a difference that we have now nothing in common but our affections and our relationship. But I have never ceased nor can cease to feel for a moment the perfect and boundless attachment which bound and binds me to you, which renders me utterly incapable of any love for any other human being. What could they be to me after you? But I can never be other than a has been and whenever I have anything it is because it reminds me of yourself. The say absence destroys weak passions and confirms strong ones. Alas! Mine for you is the union of all passions and all affections.” Unrevealed für Bariton und Streichquartett. Music: Aribert Reimann. Text: Lord Byron, Letter to Augusta, Venice, May 17th 1819. “Round and round I’m spinning in a daze. I saw her like a cloud in a crystal haze. Lost and found I’m spinning in a maze. I saw her catch a star from the milky way. Time is an illusion my confusion Takes away from me the pleasure of your smile, the way you used to smile. Love is an illusion my confusion Takes away from me the pleasure of your touch, the way you used to touch… Love is supposition life’s condition takes away from me the pleasure of your eyes, the loving in your eyes Mystical delusion life’s intrusion takes away the magic two of us, without the you of us. Blue sleeping waters clearing confusion no more delusion peaches and ice cream dreams.” Norma Tanega, Illusion (from her LP “It Won’t Hurt If You Smile”) Do you still think that understanding sexuality is central for understanding who we are? MICHEL FOUCAULT I must confess that I am much more interested in problems about techniques of the self and things like that rather than sex . . . sex is boring. Interview conducted at Berkeley, April, 1983 INTERVIEWER You confuse love with morality. You think loving people means wishing them well, but it also means wanting them for yourself. Marc Cholodenko, Philippe Garrel, Les baisers de secours [Emergency Kisses] (film by Philippe Garrel) MAURICE GARREL “. . . he of the iron staff, he of the . . . face . . . . lord, from the salt water to the Cataract, whom the whole female creation obeyeth, as cometh out of the sea, like to a . . . in his might. He aid unto me, ‘If thou deemest me a brother, I will [do?] if for thee.’ I said unto him, “. . . thee unto So-and-so, the daughter of So-and-so, that thou give her unto me, that I may fulfill my will [with] her.’ He said unto me, ‘As a father taketh thought for his children, (so) take I thought [for thee.’ I said] unto him, ‘I adjure thee and (?) thy might and the right hand of the Father [and. . . of] the Son and the head of the Holy Ghost and Gabriel [that] went to Joseph and caused him to take Mary to wife, that thou neither delay nor tarry, till thou bring me So-and-so, the daughter of So-and-so, that I may fulfill my will with her. ‘With desire may she desire me, with love may she love me. Let desire and love for me be in the breast of So-and-so, and daughter of So-and-so, as if it were an angel of God before her. For this longing is that which Mastema proclaimed in. . . and threw down in the source of the four streams and did . . . thence that the children of men should [drink] thereof and be filled with devilish longing. So-and-so hath drunk thereof and with been filled with devilish longing. So now [too?] invoke the this day, I So-and-so, over this wine, that is in my hand, to give it unto So-and-so, that she drink thereof and that a pleasant (?) desire arise within her toward me, as if it were an angel of God, and that she obey me. I adjure thee by these three names: Ousklem ousklemann Arshesef Eloe Elemas Iathoth, he that came up [up?] upon the offering, that thou come up before me, me So-and-do, the son of Soand-so, like an angel of God. If she obey me not I expel her from the (presence of the) good Father. I adjure her by these three names: Iamalel, Thamamael Thae.” W. E. Crum, Magical Texts in Coptic – I (sixth or seventh century of the Christian Era) Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, Vol. 20,Issue 1, 1934 “Carolyn: You know I spent six years in the merchant marine, and I ran into an awful lot of no good women in just about every part of the world. Bur I never once ran into one like you.” Don Martin, John K. Butler, No Man’s Woman (motion picture directed by Franklin Adreon) YOUR KISS I am – It was your kiss that made me Gather bright arrows For the day of death A death more beautiful than death A fire upon fire Behold your beauty carrying fire – Apparition seen and gone Cannot make the prospect less Summer with autumn shall undress. Harry Crosby “Round dance – sometimes love lasts in the extinguishing of the eyes and we look into their own dead eys inside. Cold smoke from the crater breathes on our eyelashes; it only held its breath once in the awful emptiness.. We have seen the dead eyes and have never forgotten.. Love lasts the longest, and it never recognizes us.” Ingeborg Bachmann (tr. R. Pitts) “Only this is the meaning of our covenant, that we want to leave when nature will call us, full of confidence that we will find love even in the shadows.” Friedrich Creuzer to Karoline von Günderrode, March 1805 ”It’s the wound that never wants to close.“ Richard Wagner, Parsifal TERRY O’QUINN The whole M.O.: A complex series of seductions and murders. That’s not a thing you see a woman do. DEBRA WINGER Which part do you think a woman isn’t up to: the seduction or the murder? Ronald Bass, Black Widow (film directed by Bob Rafelson) “Women are terrifying.” Andrzej Żuławski, Mes nuits sont plus belles que vos jours First Meetings We celebrated every moment Of our meetings as epiphanies, Just we two in all the world. Bolder, lighter than a bird's wing, You hurtled like vertigo Down the stairs, leading Through moist lilac to your realm Beyond the mirror. When night fell, grace was given me, The sanctuary gates were opened, Shining in the darkness Nakedness bowed slowly; Waking up, I said: 'God bless you!', knowing it To be daring: you slept, The lilac leaned towards you from the table To touch your eyelids with its universal blue, Those eyelids brushed with blue Were peaceful, and your hand was warm. And in the crystal I saw pulsing rivers, Smoke-wreathed hills, and glimmering seas; Holding in your palm that crystal sphere, You slumbered on the throne, And - God be praised! - you belonged to me. Awaking, you transformed The humdrum dictionary of humans Till speech was full and running over With resounding strength, and the word you Revealed its new meaning: it meant king. Everything in the world was different, Even the simplest things - the jug, the basin When stratified and solid water Stood between us, like a guard. We were led to who knows where. Before us opened up, in mirage, Towns constructed out of wonder, Mint leaves spread themselves beneath our feet, Birds came on the journey with us, Fish leapt in greeting from the river, And the sky unfurled above… While behind us all the time went fate, A madman brandishing a razor. Arseny Tarkovsky ANDREI DONATELLA ANDREI DONATELLA ANDREI DONATELLA ANDREI I don't love myself. We don't love ourselves enough. If we did we could also love the others. He, who doesn't know why he lives, cannot feel love for people or for life itself. I don't love myself enough, so I don't love people enough… I cannot approach people with sympathy; they annoy me… Andrei, what is love? A catastrophe. Do you like being in love? No, I don't, because it's like a disease. I am not happy when I love a woman. I feel rather... upset, which is quite a different emotion. Are you in love now? I am, probably. DONATELLA ANDREI Are you happy? No. Andrei Tarkovsky: A Poet in the Cinema (film directed by Donatella Balivo) Lit de Mort I shall not die within a mad man’s cell Or in the city of unconquered pain Or on the ocean of a cockle shell When mad March winds a blowing hurricane. I shall not die among the multitude Or as a martyr tortured at the stake, I shall not die in business servitude Nor as a soldier for my country’s sake; But i shall die within my lady’s arms And from her mouth drink down the purple wine And tremble at the touch of naked charms With silver fingers seeking to entwine. My dying words shall be a lover’s sighs Beyond the last faint rhythm of her thighs. Harry Crosby FOG LAND In winter my lover lives among the beasts of the forest. The vixen knows I must return by morning, and she laughs. How the clouds tremble! On my snow collar a shower of brittle ice falls. In winter my lover is a tree among trees, inviting the hapless crows to nest in her beautiful limbs. She knows that the wind, when dusk falls, will lift her stiff, frost-covered evening dress and chase me home. In winter my lover is a fish among fish and mute. A slave to water that her fins stroke from within, I stand on the bank and watch, til ice floes drive me away, how she dives and turns. And hearing the bird’s hunting call as above me it arches its wings, I fall onto an open field: she plucks the hens and tosses me a white collar bone. I hang it around my neck and walk off through the bitter down. Faithless is my lover, For I know she sometimes slips off on high heels to town, kissing the glasses in bars deep in the mouth with a straw, finding a spare word for everyone. But I don’t understand this talk. For it’s fog land I have seen, Fog heart I have eaten. Ingeborg Bachmann “This is what his dream had always been, that he would awaken such love in a woman, that she would come begging, groveling to him saying: ‘I love you, condescend to love me.’ That was nature’s way: the weaker approached the stronger in a humble spirit and not the reverse. The opposite was still the case with those who lived on vestiges of superstitious conceptions of the mystical superiority of women, even though research had shown that the mystical was only disorder, and the superiority a poetical anthology of the concentrated demands of male appetites. “Now she had come in the way he had dreamed she would. This woman, emancipated from prejudice by a new era, had exposed the whole depths of her glowing nature, and he had drawn back. Why? Perhaps the dictates of usage and habit still ruled him. For there was nothing immodest about her outburst, not a trace of the whore who offers herself for sale, not an indecorous gesture or an impertinent glance. She loved him in her way. What more could he ask?” August Strindberg, I havsbandet [By the Open Sea] ORGASMIC TOAST WARLOCK WITH GRIM SPACELARGE MIEN CREATOR DIFFUSED COMPRESSED IN RAPT CLAY LIFTEST DEEP BELLED DULL GOLD CHALICE OMNIPULSESPUN CRISTALINE DISC : 1= 2 2=1 =x = 1. 1=3 SPCIRCLESPHERIC OMNIPOTENCY GENERATORS INTERNAL EXHAUSTS SUBSTANCE INVOLVED SPIRIT APEXED SELF INCENSED HERMAPHROSICAL SOURCES' IMMORTAL FIX . HOHO! SHOUT I TO HIM - MINESELF HOHO! MAGICIAN OF GUTS! HOHO! PROHIBITION PROTOTYPE! HOHO! SELFKIDDING WITCH! THY CIRCLEBRAINS RADIANT SNAKE HAILS "WHOSE WHO" : HIP NOA! ARCSCIPPER HEP ARCHAIC SOUSE! ARCHAIC SOUSE! SOWEDST SEED FOR BLOOD SWIGGEDST SWIGGESTDRANKEDST SWIGGEDST SUN TO PLEDGE STILL Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven [Published by Tanya Clement, Office of Digital Collections and Research (DCR), University of Maryland] “I love you even more than I love myself.” Natural Born Killers (film by Oliver Stone) “It is the secret that a man and a woman keep from each other that makes them a couple. Max Frisch, Meine Name sei Gantenbein “Love it what happens to men and women who don’t know each other.” W. Somerset Maugham “It’s interesting to fall down with an interesting lady.” Andrei Tarkovsky, Mirror “I have to confess something to myself, namely that there is rarely a woman whose conversation interests me if she does not interest me as a woman.” Max Frisch, Meine Name sei Gantenbein “When we have passion, everything is easy.” Anita DeFrancesco, Live Free: Re-Create and Liberate Your Life “The dream is over, but not yet the night.” Aribert Reimann’s opera Medea after the play by Franz Grillparzer “The love that lasts longest is the love that is never returned.” W. Somerset Maugham, A Writer’s Notebook (1946) “Love is in the moment.” Anita DeFrancesco “You said the word ‘love’ to me. How could you not have noticed my emotion? How could you not want to provoke me?” Robert Desnos, Liberty or love! “When, if not now?” Christa Wolf, Nachdenken über Christa T. “Attractions are proportional to destinies.”\ Charles Fourier "When a girl spreads her legs only secrets fly away like butterflies. Leos Carax, Mauvais Sang “Once, when I was young and true. Someone left me sad - Broke my brittle heart in two; And that is very bad. Love is for unlucky folk, Love is but a curse. Once there was a heart I broke; And that, I think, is worse.: Dorothy Parker “For all its accolades and celebrated recognition as sound guidance, I have personally noticed that sometimes, 'follow your heart,' is really bad advice.” Steve Maraboli “I wanted pure love: foolishness; to love one another is to hate a common enemy: I will thus espouse your hatred. I wanted Good: nonsense; on this earth and in these times, Good and Bad are inseparable: I accept to be evil in order to become good.” Jean-Paul Sartre “Are you in?" I roll my eyes and try to kiss him again, but he won't let me. I pinch his nipples, and all he does is wink and growl at me. "Say it." "Fuck you" "We'll get there, Naomi. Be patient. But first, you have to say it." I keep glaring, but I feel my body melting, my shields and my walls crashing down in flames. "Say you're mine, tell me that you're my girlfriend." "You're my boyfriend," I say, and the words nearly kill me. "That's all you get for now. Best I can fucking do.” C.M. Stunich “The pleasure of living and the pleasure of the orgasm are identical. Extreme orgasm anxiety forms the basis of the general fear of life.” Wilhelm Reich “I realized that loving people, depending on them, NEEDING them, is just too dangerous. Love is just a way to set you up for a bad fall. It's the rug they pull out from under you at the very moment you decide that everything's going to be fine. We're all so ephemeral. So fragile. And life's so unpredictable.” Dean Koontz “Full sexual consciousness and a natural regulation of sexual life mean the end of mystical feelings of any kind. In other words, natural sexuality is the deadly enemy of mystical religion. The church, by making the fight over sexuality the center of its dogmas and of its influence over the masses, confirms this concept.” Wilhelm Reich MOE: Why do you reject all the pretty girls? CURLY-G: I gotta reject them before they reject me. Curly’s Grandson (You Tube) “Originally and naturally, sexual pleasure was the good, the beautiful, the happy, that which united man with nature in general. When sexual feelings and religious feelings became separated from one another, that which is sexual was forced to become the bad, the internal, the diabolical.” Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism “If the sexual body The few bad poems which occasionally are created during abstinence are of no great interest.” Wilhelm Reich. “If the sexual body is indeed historical – if there is, in short, no orgasm without ideology –perhaps ongoing inquiry into the politics of pleasure will serve to deepen the pleasures, as well as to widen the possibilities of politics.” David M. Halperin “The few bad poems which occasionally are created during abstinence are of no great interest.” Wilhelm Reich. “Good sons in law aren’t always good husbands, and good husbands aren’t always good lovers. And good lovers are rarely good husbands. There’s nothing left to say after that.” Hubert de Montille “Love is in the depth of bodies, but also on that incorporeal surface which engenders it.” Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues ANITA DE FRANCESCO: “I just have one quick question: What is good sex?” “Good sex to me is my partner being present, my partner moving slow, slower than he usually thinks he needs to move, like slower than anyone even imagined, even I didn’t imagine, having communication before, during and after, and my partner wanting to produce oxytocin in my body. LAURIE HANDLERS: ANITA DE FRANCESCO: LAURIE HANDLERS: MICHAEL GIBSON: “Does good sex include looking in the eyes and saying ‘I love you’?” “We say that before, during and after.” “That turns it from being an ordinary experience into a sacred experience.” Interview with Extraordinary Lovers Laurie Handlers and Michael Gibson by Anita DeFrancesco of Tantra Wisdom (TantraWisdom.com) for her podcast Discover Joyous Love RANDOLPH: “If I say ‘tantra’ and ‘love’, how do those two ideas fit together for you?” “It fits together in the sense that sex is love. Sex is not a sport. Sex is an emotion of love. And even if you are having that pickup sex or that meeting someone for the first time and having sex just for fun, casual sex, to me that is still an emotion of love. It doesn’t mean I’m in love with you just because I want to have sport sex with you. But it is the emotion of love that I want to live. ANITA: That’s why the Tantra is important… Even if it’s just a pickup you’re just expressing your love to someone that you just pickup up. Because you need for that emotion to come out and live… You have to practice love in order to get to the Big Love.” Interview with Anita DeFrancesco of TantraWisdom.com by Randolph Pitts, “Mr. Sensuality,” for his podcast Explore Ecstatic Sexuality. "The magic and the most powerful effect of women is, in philosophical language, action at a distance, actio in distans; but this required first of all and above all -- distance." FriedrichNietzsche, Die Fröliche Wissenschaft “Life is an island of suffering in an ocean of indifference.” Sigmund Freud, 1939 “According to Jacques Lacan, we are not in control of our own desires since those desires are themselves as separated from our actual bodily needs as the phallus is separated from any biological penis. For this reason, Lacan suggests that, whereas the zero form of sexuality for animals is copulation, the zero form of sexuality for humans is masturbation. The act of sex for humans is so much caught up in our fantasies (our idealized images of both ourselves and our sexual partners) that it is ultimately narcissistic. As Lacan puts it, ‘That's what love is. It's one's own ego that one loves in love, one's own ego made real on the imaginary level.’ Because we are working on the level of fantasy construction, it is quite easy for love to turn into disgust, for example when a lover is confronted with his love-object's body in all its materiality (moles, pimples, excretions, etc.), the sorts of things that would have no effect on animal copulation. By entering into the symbolic order (with its laws, conventions, and images for perfection), the human subject effectively divorces him/herself from the materiality of his/her bodily drives, which Lacan tends to distinguish with the term ‘jouissance.’ The primordial Law is therefore that which in regulating marriage ties superimposes the kingdom of culture on that of nature abandoned to the law of copulation.” “Sensitivity is built on a foundation of reasonableness. If a man is reasonable, with a woman or with other men, he believes that he gives up part of his dominance. If a woman is reasonable, with a man or with other women, she believes that she gives up part of her feminine right to by impulsive and arbitrary. The marvelous thing about reason is that it is asexual and ungendered. ”As for me, I have never experienced a conflict between sensitivity and masculinity. Sensitivity (a bit part of which is acknowledgment and communication) is a part of being human. Even (you might say) of being polite. Being strong is part of being human. Feeling and appreciating others' strength is part of being human. Sharing one's partner's strength and glorying in it is part of being human. Love is, in a certain way, a matter of sharing what I would call tender strength.” R. Pitts, Kiss and Make Better (The Sophia Tetralogy v. iv) “To give a better sense of what’s at issue, I’d like all the same to call to mind what’s involved in those, as it were, initially uncouth dealings between man & woman. After all, in conformity with what I put forward on the relation between anxiety and the desire of the Other a woman doesn’t know who she’s dealing with, she doesn’t stand before a man without a certain uneasiness as to how far the path of desire is going to lead her. Once the man, my goodness, has made love like everyone else does & lies uncocked, if it so happens that the woman has not derived any, I’ll say, tangible profit from it, which, as you know, is quite conceivable, she has at any rate gained the following – she can now be quite easy in her mind as to her partner’s intentions.” Jacques Lacan, Seminar X, Anxiety “I’m a philandering louse,” said he. “They say I must marry a man I do not love,” she replied. “Then let’s get married and solve BOTH problems,” he suggested. And they did. Their cockamamie plan may have succeeded, if only they hadn’t fallen in love on that first night.. Aleister Crowley “The object of man’s desire, and we are not the first to say this, is essentially an object desired by someone else. One object can become equivalent to another, owing to the effect produced by this intermediary, in making it possible for objects to be exchanged and compared. This process tends to diminish the special significance of any one particular object, but at the same time it brings into view the existence of objects without number. "What we give in love is essentially what we do not have and when what we do not have returns to us there is undoubtedly a regression and at the same time a revelation of the way in which we have failed the person." Jacques Lacan, Seminar X, Anxiety “Love is when we dress up our narcissism and inflict it on another -- on many others. It justifies and ennobles our narcissism, and when we step away from ourselves and look at it from the standpoint of an imagined other, it appears ridiculous -- something to be ashamed of. Love and shame often go hand in hand.” R. Pitts, Kiss and Make Better (The Sophia Tetralogy v. iv) “What can be the motive for ‘fidelity’ apart from having given one’s word? But often one gives one’s word lightly. And if it weren’t given in such a manner it is probable that it would be given far more infrequently.” Jacques Lacan, Seminar I, Freud's Papers on Technique, 1955 “The greatest satisfactions of love are giving your beloved pleasure and caring deeply about them. Did you ever stop to think how wonderful it feels to care deeply about someone? When you do you feel good about yourself. Not only about yourself. About the universe. About life. And suddenly – maybe the only time – everything has meaning. Other people say ‘The way to find love is to love yourself.’ I say “The way to find love is to make yourself loveable.” You don’t do that by getting plastic surgery or becoming a billionaire. You do it be listening and responding with empathy, kindness and interest respect. You do it by making people you meet feel good about themselves rather than by making sex your conspicuous raison d’etre. Do you believe in ‘Love at first sight’? Do women experience it the same way that men do. It has happened to me three times, once when I was in my twenties and the others whenI was over forty (not that I am over forty by much now). One time it developed into a marvelous but off-and-on relationship. The other two times it led to excellent friendships. And that’s that thing… love at first sight. R. Pitts, Kiss and Make Better (The Sophia Tetralogy v. iv) “Then saith the prophet and slave of the beauteous one: Who am I, and what shall be the sign? So she answered him, bending down, a lambent flame of blue, all-touching, all penetrant, her lovely hands upon the black earth, & her lithe body arched for love, and her soft feet not hurting the little flowers: Thou knowest! And the sign shall be my ecstasy, the consciousness of the continuity of existence, the omnipresence of my body.” Aleister Crowley “The few love affairs which had come my way had been rather silly and sordid. They had not revealed the possibilities of love; in fact I had thought it a somewhat overrated pleasure, a brief and brutal blindness with boredom and disgust hard on its heels.” Aleister Crowley “Sweet pangs, quiet pangs Love, love will never stop Crumpled, the flower blows away. Sway upward, sway upward In deep waves High to the lofty arch of dreams Then back to where one must return. Sweet luck Can only bring a tiny part of love. No one can ever achieve it completely.” Christoph Friedrich Heinle “My dream is to live with the man I love, protecting each other. And I'll die with a smile on my face.” Sion Sono, Himizu Lonely, you go the way of the creator: you want to create a god out of your seven devils! Lonely, you go the lover's way: you love yourself and therefore you despise yourself as only lovers despise. Friedrich Nietzshce, Vom Wege des Schaffenden (Also Sprach Zarathustra) Love everywhere Can I carry hot wishes in my heart? Seeing life's wreaths of flowers, And walk past it without a wreath And do I not have to give up despondency in mourning? So outrageously I renounce my dearest wish? Should I bravely go to the realm of shadows? Other gods beg for other joys, To ask for new delights among the dead? I descend, but also in Pluto’s realms, In the bosom of the night love burns embers That longing shadows lean towards shadows. Lost is he whom love does not make happy, And if he also descended to the river Styx’s flood, Undelighted he remained In the splendor of heaven. Karoline von Günderrode Love is infinity within the reach of poodles and I have my dignity!” Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, dit Céline “The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.” Walter Benjamin “Socrates at any rate is full of the good and the beautiful and offers the young man communication in the virtues; he descends (κάτεισιν), as it were, to activity in relation to another, and proceeds from his inner life to a movement lower in the scale of being; for this reason he terms this procession (πρόοδον) ‘daring’, (τόλµαν) after the manner of the Pythagoreans, and manifests his forethought (προµήθειαν) for the young man;…But because Socrates ‘ventures (τολµᾷ) to declare his own mind’, he descends to an activity inferior to that which abides within him; since for divine lovers, to turn towards the inferior is at any rate venturesome; but nevertheless Socrates does descend, in order that like Hercules he may lead up his beloved from Hades,8 and persuade him to withdraw from the life of appearance…” Proclus, Commentary on the First Alcibiades “The lover wants to create because he despises! What does he know about love who does not have to despise what he loved!” Friedrich Nietzshce, Vom Wege des Schaffenden (Also Sprach Zarathustra) “According to Jacques Lacan, love is no more than an illusion designed to make up for the absence of harmonious relations between the sexes (whether presented in mythical terms, as in Plato's Symposium, or in psychoanalytic terms, as in Balint's concept of genital love). The sexual drives are directed not towards a "whole person" but towards part-objects. There is therefore no such thing as a sexual relationship between two subjects, only between a subject and a (partial) object. For the man, the object a (”objet petit a.” the object of desire which we seek in the other) occupies the place of the missing partner, which produces the matheme of fantasy (SOa); in other words, the Woman does not exist for the man as a real subject, but only as a fantasy object, the cause of his desire. As something rooted in the real, sex is opposed to meaning; and "sex, in opposing itself to sense, is also, by definition, opposed to relation, to communication. “We love the one who harbours a true response to the question ‘Who am I?’” Jacques-Alain Miller “A woman is not complementary to a man, but she embodies his lack. This is why Lacan can say that a beautiful woman is a perfect incarnation of man's castration.” Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology “Love is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision.” Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving “I analyzed a woman whose love-live was markedly polyandrous, and who was invariably anæsthetic of she had to acknowledge that the man was superior to her in any way. If, however, she had a quarrel with the man and succeeded in forcing him to give in to her, her, her frigidity disappeared completely. Such cases show very clearly how necessary is the acknowledgment of the male genital function as a condition of a normal love-life on the part of the woman.” Karl Abraham, Selected Papers “It's afterwards you realize that the feeling of happiness you had with a man didn't necessarily prove that you loved him.” Marguerite Duras “I can't give any absolute definition of what love is, or even whether it ought to exist.” Michelangelo Antonioni “You have to be very fond of men. Very, very fond. You have to be very fond of them to love them. Otherwise they're simply unbearable.” Marguerite Duras “I can't imagine love without a sexual charge.” Michelangelo Antonioni “Love is the wish to give, not to receive.” Bertolt Brecht “A woman of generous character will sacrifice her life a thousand times over for her lover, but will break with him forever over a question of pride.” Stendhal “It was the men I deceived the most that I loved the most.” Marguerite Duras “Some men have a good luck. All they have to do is keep their mouth shut and they can take home any prize they want.” Michael Green, screenplay for Murder on The Orient Express (2017) “True values entail suffering. That’s the way we think. All in all, we tend to view melancholia as more true. We prefer music and art to contain a touch of melancholia. So melancholia in itself is a value. Unhappy and unrequited love is more romantic than happy love. For we don’t think that’s completely real, do we?…Longing is true. It may be that there’s no truth at all to long for, but the longing itself is true. Just like pain is true. We feel it inside. It’s part of our reality.” Lars von Trier “How many women does one need to sing the scale of love all the way up and down?” Georg Buchner “That love is a conflict seems to me obvious and natural. There isn't a single worthwhile work in world literature based on love that is only about the conquest of happiness, the effort to arrive at what we call love. It's the struggle that has always interested those who produce works of art literature, cinema or poetry.” Michelangelo Antonioni “When you love someone, you don't want them to suffer at all.” Charlotte Gainsbourg “I will cover you with love when next I see you, with caresses, with ecstasy. I want to gorge you with all the joys of the flesh, so that you faint and die. I want you to be amazed by me, and to confess to yourself that you had never even dreamed of such transports.... When you are old, I want you to recall those few hours, I want your dry bones to quiver with joy when you think of them.” Gustave Flaubert “True love, as we call it, is precisely a condition in which the two factors coalesce and become indistinguishable, in which ease of mind and happiness are perpetually being derived from the fact that the man or woman is full of a love which can satisfy and fulfill the needs even of another beside himself. A mutual love serves as a double insurance to each partner. The other’s love, added to one’s own, doubles one’s store of love and well-being and so of insurance against pain, destructiveness and inner destitution ; and also, in complementing and fulfilling each other’s sexual needs, each transforms the sexual desire of the other from a potential pain and source of destructiveness in him or her, to an absolute pleasure and source of wellbeing. By this partnership in love, therefore, satisfaction of the harmonizing and unifying life instincts, the selfpreservative and sexual, is gained; and security against the destructive impulses and dangers of loss, loneliness, and helplessness is increased. A benign circle of enjoyment with a minimum of privation and aggression has been achieved and the advantages of dependence are being used to the full. Even so, pleasure in safe and constructive forms of aggression must be obtained somewhere to a sufficient degree.” J oan Riviere, Hate, Greed and Aggression “How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved.” Sigmund Freud “The mark of a good marriage is when only one of you goes crazy at a time!” Heinz Kohut “If one reads the psycho-analytical literature for references to genital love to one's surprise two striking facts emerge; (a) much less has been written on genital love than on pregenital love (e.g. 'genital love' is missing from the indices of Fenichel's new text-book); and of Nunberg's Allgemeine Neurosenlehre); (b) almost everything that has been written on genital love is negative like Abraham's description of his famous term 'postambivalent phase'. We know fairly well what an ambivalent love relation is—of postambivalent love we know hardly more than that it is, or at least ought to be, no longer ambivalent. This emphasis on the negative qualities, i.e. on those which have, or ought to have been, superseded in the course of development blurs the whole picture. It is not the presence of certain positive qualities that is accentuated only the absence of certain others. To avoid this pitfall let us examine an ideal case of such postambivalent genital love that has no traces of ambivalency and in addition no traces of pregenital object relationship: • • • • a.There should be no greediness, no insatiability, no wish to devour the object, to deny it any independent existence, etc., i.e. there should be no oral features; b.There should be no wish to hurt, to humiliate, to boss, to dominate the object, etc., i.e. no sadistic features; c.There should be no wish to defile the partner, to despise him (her) for his (her) sexual desires and pleasures, there should be no danger of being disgusted by the partner or being attracted only by some unpleasant features of him, etc., i.e. there should be no remnants of anal traits; d.There should be no compulsion to boast about the possession of a penis, no fear of the partner's sexual organs, no fear for one's own sexual organs, no envy of the male or female genitalia, no feeling of being incomplete or of having a faulty sexual organ, or of the partner having a faulty one, etc., i.e. there should be no trace of the phallic phase or of the castration complex. What then is ‘genital love’ apart from the absence of all of the enumerated ‘pregenital’ traits”? Well we love our partner 1. because he or she can satisfy us; 2. because we can satisfy him or her 3. because we can experience a full orgasm together, nearly or quite simultaneously. Michael Balint, On Genital Love “The man who is loved by a woman is lucky indeed, but the one to be envied is he who loves, however little he gets in return. How much greater is Dante gazing at Beatrice than Beatrice walking by him in apparent disdain." Eric Berne "Lovers, of course, are notoriously frantic epistemologists, second only to paranoiacs (and analysts) as readers of signs and wonders." Adam Phillips, On Flirtation “… to be wroth with one we love, Doth work like madness in the brain.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge “The essential requirement to cure psychic illnesses is the re-establishment of the natural capacity for love. Psychic illnesses are the consequences of the sexual chaos of society… When I speak of sex, I do not mean ‘fucking,’ but the embrace prompted by genuine love; not ‘urinating into the woman,’ but ‘making her happy.’” Wilhelm Reich, The Function of the Orgasm: The Discovery of the Orgone “It is interesting, though, that a strong psychological tendency is now manifesting itself to restrict and defy the force of love in erotic relations.” J oan Riviere, Hate, Greed and Aggression “It’s like what Plato talked about, anamnesis. Recognition. You share a glance with someone, your eyes lock for an instant. You turn away, and then… You realize that you have recognized each other. It is like a memory. But perhaps more a memory of the future. A future that may or may not happen. A future they may not have the potential to happen because – because of a thousand things. Months or even years later you may find each other because of some sad circumstance signing emails Love. And then one day you may stop doing that. You may leave the love out and sign something banal. “I think about you from time to time and wish you all the best.” And she stops writing. And so do you. So you wonder when the next holiday may be when it is appropriate to send a card. Thanksgiving? Nobody sends cards for Thanksgiving. Christmas. “I lied. I think about you often. Love, Roger Morhange.” Randolph Pitts, The Sophia Tetralogy iv. (Kiss and Make Better) “There are two ways and means at our disposal in hypnotizing, or giving suggestions to others, i.e., in compelling them to (relatively) helpless obedience and blind belief: dread and love. ... The hypnotist with an imposing exterior, who works by frightening and startling, has certainly a great similarity to the picture impressed on the child of the stern, all-powerful father, to believe in, to imitate whom is the highest ambition of every child. And the great stroking hand, the pleasant monotonous words that talk one to sleep: are they not a re-impression of the scenes that may have been enacted many hundred times at the child’s bed by the tender mother, singing lullabies and telling fairy-tales?” Sándor Ferenczi, Introjection and transference “There are no more love stories. However, women desire them and men too, when they are not ashamed to be tender and sad like women. Both are in a hurry to win and to die. They take planes, suburban trains, high-speed trains, connections. They don't have time to look at that pink acacia that extends its branches towards the interspersed clouds of sunny blue silk… You can see that there is no time without love. Time is love for the little things, for dreams, for desires. We don't have time because we don't have enough love. We waste our time when we don't love. We forget the past tense when we have nothing to say to anyone. Or else we are prisoners of a false time that does not pass.” Julia Kristeva, The Samurai “It cannot be easily determined if unconscious fantasy activity is also at rest. Certain factors would indicate that it is. Fantasies that are not allowed to become conscious can only detract from the experience. It is necessary to determine two groups of fantasies which could accompany the sexual act, those in harmony with the sexual experience and those at variance with it. If the partner is capable of attracting all sexual interests to herself or himself at least momentarily, then the unconscious fantasies are also superfluous. In terms of their very nature, these fantasies are opposed to the real experience, for one fantasies only what one cannot have in reality.” Wilhelm Reich, The Function of the Orgasm: The Discovery of the Orgone “Demons have a demonstrated interest in illicit human sexual activity. Satan has used demons to contaminate your normal, God-given sexual desires.” J.F. “Jeff” Coogan, The Demon Possession Handbook “To sum up, what this research tells us is that women who choose men as boyfriends or husbands whom other women find attractive are more likely to have orgasms. Or to put it another way, if Annabelle finds the somewhat quirky or individual looking Marshall to be attractive but other women do not, and if Annabelle enters into a relationships with Marshall, she is less likely to have orgasms than if she had chosen Craig, who other women think is attractive. It’s not the individual woman’s taste that counts. It’s the taste of other women. Who knew? But of course this is something men on the dating scene have known all along. Women at any particular time always find the same “look” in men sexy. For one generation it’s (I don’t know) Paul Newman or Burt Lancaster, and for today it’s… Paul Rudd? Hey, I had to Google it. Robert Pattinson? Hell if I’m not in need of a serious makeover…” Randolph Pitts, The Explore Ecstatic Sensuality Podcast “Love is a shorthand for sympathy, empathy, emotion, thus the multiplicity of interpersonal processes (contact, care, communication) that underlie the social reality of being human.” Zvi Lothane, Omnipotence, or the delusional aspect of ideology in relation to love and power. “The normal attitude of love towards the other sex is both in man and in woman indissolubly bound up with the conscious or unconscious desire for genital gratification in connection with the love object.” Karl Abraham, Selected Papers “In a successful love relationship, the unconscious minds of the love-partners correspond.” Melanie Klein, Love, Guilt and Reparation “Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.” Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving “In speaking of love, I do not mean sexual infatuation, but think of all varieties of human closeness, friendship, and affection. Sex may or may not be a part of the relationship. I am thinking of the sort of love for which we all long — even the so-called “hard-boiled” among us — for not only does it denote happiness, but it is uniquely instrumental in our growth as human beings. Since it is so important, the question might well be raised, is it possible to overemphasize or overrate love? Does not the danger lie rather in underrating its importance? Would not the world be a far better place in which to live if people loved more? Might this not be the answer to the age-old problem of how to eliminate war and other forms of human strife? And then there are the children — is it possible for them to have too much love? Do they not have a much better chance to develop into constructive human beings when they get more love, instead of too little? Do we not all concur in the belief that a life without love of some kind is unfulfilled? I wholeheartedly agree, for it would be difficult to find anything that outweighs the importance of love. Nevertheless, if we expect of love what it cannot give, or anticipate its benefits under faulty circumstances, it will not grow. What, then, is love — real love? Is it merely a romantic illusion? Does it necessitate living through another in a state of dependency, or sadistically? These questions are frequently raised. Yet, while they are scientifically valid, they are not the reason for our scientific interest. What we sense in them is a note of distress — a protest against what is felt as debunking — an anxious plea, “Is there nothing but neurotic love?” And this question is of the utmost value. But are we debunking love? I do not believe that we are. What we are seeing, and with reasonable conviction, is that neurosis impairs the capacity to give and to receive love. In some cases, this very incapacity creates a compulsive need for love, while in others, it leads to a defensiveness and hostility. Fortunately, however, even a neurotic love, though it may be impaired, is rarely completely submerged, for there always a remains a part of ourselves that is not determined by unconscious or ulterior motives, that is not given to secretive manipulations, that does not, in short, consider other people as means toward an end. To put it positively, there exists within all of us some degree of genuine sympathy — a sincere liking for others, for what they are.” Karen Horney, Overemphasis on Love (lecture, 1950) “So can the mind - again we must come back to the point - can the mind understand the nature of pleasure and its relationship to love. Can the mind that is pursuing pleasure, an ambitious mind, a competitive mind, a mind that says, I must get something out of life (laughs), I must reward myself and others, I must compete. Can such a mind love? It can love sexually. But is love of sex, is that the only thing? And why have we made sex such an enormous affair? Volumes are written on it. Unless really one goes into this very, very deeply, the other thing is not possible even to understand. We can talk endlessly about what love is, what love is not, theoretically. But if we use the word 'love' as a mirror to see what is happening inwardly, and I inevitably must ask the question whether it is pleasure in its multiple forms. Can a man who is top executive, got to that position through drive, through aggression, through deception through ruthlessness, can he know what love is? And can the priest who talks everlastingly of God, he is ambitious to become a bishop, archbishop or whatever his ambitions are - to sit next to Jesus. “So is love pleasure? I can only answer it is not, when I have understood pleasure. And understand not verbally, but deeply, inwardly, see the nature of it, the brutality of it, the divisive process of it. Because pleasure is always divisive.” J. Krishnamurti, Dialogue 12 San Diego, California, USA - 25 February 1974 What wasn’t I looking for: Someone ‘to complete me.’ My doppelgânger Jeremy already functions in that questionable role. Of course it is practical to be in an alliance with someone whose abilities are complementary to one’s own. But does that mean that I am not whole spiritually or functionally without such a person? No. It strikes me that some bad relationships begin with that premise. Neither was I looking for a caretaker or replacement mom. Neither was I looking for someone to condescend or bully or lord over, which I truly believe that many men are. Neither was I looking for a woman to show off, however believe me, there are few greater thrills and satisfactions for me than to be with a woman who is dazzling in every way. That is a high. One of the highest highs that I know. Up there with “creative” acts, and that’s saying a lot. What I was looking for: Tenderness. Respect. Someone with whom to laugh and weep and scream without embarrassment. Someone with whom not to feel shy and self-conscious. Someone I can be with and my entire being is saying “You amaze me. You delight me. You inspire me I…” I want to look into the eyes of the woman I am with and melt with joy. “You inspire me…” Keeps coming back. Tenderness keeps coming back. Tenderness keeps coming back Randolph Pitts, The Sophia Tetralogy iv. (Kiss and Make Better) “Love is a complex neurobiological phenomenon, relying on trust, belief, pleasure and reward activities within the brain, i.e., limbic processes. These processes critically involve oxytocin, vasopressin, dopamine, and serotonergic signaling. Moreover, endorphin and endogenous morphinergic mechanisms, coupled to nitric oxide autoregulatory pathways, play a role. Naturally rewarding or pleasurable activities are necessary for survival and appetitive motivation, usually governing beneficial biological behaviors like eating, sex, and reproduction. Yet, a broad basis of common signaling and beneficial neurobiological features exists with connection to the love concept, thereby combining physiological aspects related to maternal, romantic or sexual love and attachment with other healthy activities or neurobiological states. Medical practice can make use of this concept, i.e., mind/body or integrative medicine. Thus, love, pleasure, and lust have a stress-reducing and health-promoting potential, since they carry the ability to heal or facilitate beneficial motivation and behavior. In addition, love and pleasure ensure the survival of individuals and their species. After all, love is a joyful and useful activity that encompasses wellness and feelings of well-being.” Tobias Esch, Charité-University Medicine Berlin, George B. Stefano “All acts of love and pleasure are my rituals.” Doreen Valiente “So she thoroughly taught him that one cannot take pleasure without giving pleasure, and that every gesture, every caress, every touch, every glance, every last bit of the body has its secret, which brings happiness to the person who knows how to wake it. She taught him that after a celebration of love the lovers should not part without admiring each other, without being conquered or having conquered, so that neither is bleak or glutted or has the bad feeling of being used or misused.” Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha “So sweet and delicious do I become, when I am in bed with a man who, I sense, loves and enjoys me, that the pleasure I bring excels all delight, so the knot of love, however tight it seemed before, is tied tighter still.” Veronica Franco, Poems and Selected Letters “Pleasure cannot be shared; like Pain, it can only be experienced or inflicted, and when we give Pleasure to our Lovers or bestow Charity upon the Needy, we do so, not to gratify the object of our Benevolence, but only ourselves. For the Truth is that we are kind for the same reason as we are cruel, in order that we may enhance the sense of our own Power....” Aldous Huxley, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan “As long as it still hurts, it isn’t love yet.” Silvia Hartmann “It was there, in particular, that I confirmed the truth that love, which we cry up as the source of our pleasures, is nothing more than an excuse for them.” Pierre A.F. Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses “Why had peace given place so soon to turmoil? To two separate solitudes? Because peace had been without thought? Without...integrity? How could she have felt like that without love? Was love essential? Did it even exist - the love she had dreamed of her life? If it did, it was too late now for her to find it. Must she make do with this instead, then? Only this? Pleasure without love?” Mary Balogh, Then Comes Seduction “Pleasure is, quite literally, the fundamental building block of our universe.” Wendy, Trauma-informed orgasm coach “If you love without evoking love in return - if through the vital expression of yourself as a loving person you fail to become a loved person, then your love is impotent, it is a misfortune.” Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 Lonely, I come to you Bewitched by the fires of love. You wonder – I do not call. I myself have been cheating for a long time. From the heavy burden of years I was saved by one divination, And again I tell fortunes over you, But the answer is unclear and confused. Divination-filled days I cherish the years - do not call ... Soon the lights will go out Enchanted dark love? Alexander Blok, June 1, 1901, from About a Beautiful Lady “Simply as a matter of love, the wife ... of the individual is cherished deeply in his heart ... he wants to be assured that the wife is somewhere, in sensuous spatial existence, even if things are going badly with her, rather than that she does not exist at all. The cloak of love is only a shadow – the naked empirical ego, self-love, the oldest love, remains at the core.” Karl Marx’s Doctoral Thesis, 1841 I do not love you; passions And the old dream rushed off the torment; But your image in my soul Everything is alive, although he is powerless; Others indulging in dreams I couldn't forget him; So the temple left - all the temple, Idol defeated - everything is God! Mikhail Lermontov To Jenny I Jenny! Teasingly you may inquire Why my songs "To Jenny" I address, When for you alone my pulse beats higher, When my songs for you alone despair, When you only can their heart inspire, When your name each syllable must confess, When you lend each note melodiousness, When no breath would stray from the Goddess? ’Tis because so sweet the dear name sounds, And its cadence says so much to me, And so full, so sonorous it resounds, Like to vibrant Spirits in the distance, Like the gold-stringed Cithern’s harmony, Like some wondrous, magical existence. See! I could a thousand volumes fill, Writing only "Jenny" in each line, Still they would a world of thought conceal, Deed eternal and unchanging Will, Verses sweet that yearning gently still, All the glow and all the Aether’s shine, Anguished sorrow’s pain and joy divine, All of Life and Knowledge that is mine. I can read it in the stars up younder, From the Zephyr it comes back to me, From the being of the wild waves’ thunder. Truly, I would write it down as a refrain, For the coming centuries to see – LOVE IS JENNY, JENNY IS LOVE’S NAME. Karl Marx ‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘it's about a love unknown to the two lovers, sometimes of a love that they feel and want to hide from each other: or else, it is a timid love that they dare not declare; Where still it is an uncertain love and as if undecided, a half-born love, so to speak, which they suspect without being sure, and let them spy within themselves before to let him soar.’ Not that the most delicate lover desires to have his way, but at least it is that with him the feelings of the heart mingle with the senses; it all melts away together: what makes a tender love, and not vicious, though indeed capable of vice; because every day made of love we do things crude things but with great delicacy… The pleasure of being loved always finds its place in our heart or in our little vanity. Are we merely wanted? Nothing is lost yet. It is true that virtue is scandalized; but the virtuous is not sorry for scandal.” Marivaux, The Life of Marianne “The meaning and worth of love, as a feeling, is that it really forces us, with all our being, to acknowledge for ANOTHER the same absolute central significance which, because of the power of our egoism, we are conscious of only in our own selves. Love is important not as one of our feelings, but as the transfer of all our interest in life from ourselves to another, as the shifting of the very centre of our personal life. This is characteristic of every kind of love, but predominantly of sexual love; it is distinguished from other kinds of love by greater intensity, by a more engrossing character, and by the possibility of a more complete overall reciprocity. Only this love can lead to the real and indissoluble union of two lives into one; only of it do the words of Holy Writ say: 'They shall be one flesh,' i.e., shall become one real being.” Vladimir Solovyov, The Meaning of Love I love you all my life and every day, You are above me like a big shadow, Like the ancient smoke of the polar villages. I love you all my life and every hour. But I don't need your lips and eyes. It all started - and ended - without you. I remember something: a ringing arc, Huge gate, pure snow, Star-studded horns... And from the horns - in the full sky - a shadow ... And the ancient smoke of polar villages... - I understood: you are a reindeer. Marina Tsvetaeva “Sex is for the young.” Personal communication from a beautiful and brilliant woman, November, 2022 "I want to serve you" 1 I want to serve you On an equal footing with others; From jealousy, to tell your fortune With dry lips. The word does not slake My parched mouth, And without you, the dense air Is empty for me again. 2 I am not jealous anymore, But I want you, Alone I will take myself, Like a sacrifice, to the hangman. I will call you Neither joy, nor love; Some wild and strange blood Was switched with mine. 3 One more moment, And I will say to you: It is not joy, but torment I find in you. And, like a crime, I am drawn to you by Your tender cherry mouth Bitten in confusion. 4 Return to me at once: It is awful without you, I have never felt More strongly about you. And in the midnight drama In dream or reality, In alarm or languor, I will call you. Osip Mandelstam Sonnet: Beatrice I fell in love with you when I first saw you, dearest, I still recall the insignificant chitchat going on around us – only you were silent -- and fierce, fiery speeches. Silent words were sent to me by your eyes. Days upon days faded. A year has passed since then. And again the spring sends us its living rays, The flowers are set in fairy dress again, But I? I am in love you as before, like the first time. And you, as in the past, are the silent one and sad; Only your gaze sparkles and speaks at times. Isn’t it sometimes the lady moon Hiding her radiant face behind the mountain? Yet, and behind the rock, with her forehead inclined, From darkness, narrow, she burns brightly. Konstantin Balmont (translation by R. Pitts) “This is not friendship I have for you, mademoiselle; I have first thought it was just that, but I was wrong, it is love and the most tender; can you hear me here ? Love, and you lose nothing by the change; your fortune will not be the worse for it: there is no friend who is worth a lover like me.” “You, my lover!” I exclaimed, lowering my eyes; “you, sir! I did not expect that.” Marivaux, The Life of Marianne “Orgasm precedes essence.” Abdellatif Kechiche & Ghalia Lacroix, « La Vie d'Adèle – Chapitres 1 & 2 » “Love is being stupid together.” Paul Valéry “When I look into my heart it’s true The empty space defines the shape of you. And when I awake I try To recreate Your image In my mind.” Peter Kraemer, The Sopwith Camel, The Chant “One does not kill oneself for love of a woman, but because love - any love - reveals us in our nakedness, our misery, our vulnerability, our nothingness.” Cesare Pavese “I was a young, and had deep loves, and my heart would overflow with enthusiasm! And I mingled with the crowd, I mixed with my fellow men, speaking my thought out loud! And they gaped back at me, without understanding. And I withdrew from them, and they said to me: Arrogant one! And from time to time in my solitude, my loves, my repressed enthusiasms broke out into odes, conversation; and my companions laughed and used to point at me as a madman. So I suffered, doubted, cursed, and no one believed me sincere. It’s as if this heart, once so full of strength and love were annihilated.” Comte de Lautréamont “To happiness in the strict sense, we may prefer pleasure, as a brief moment of ecstasy stolen in the course of things, gaiety, the lighthearted drunkenness that accompanies life's development, and especially joy, which presupposes surprise and elation. For nothing can compete with the irruption in our lives of an event or a being that ravages and ravishes us. There is always too much to desire, to discover, to love. And we leave the stage having hardly tasted the feast.” Pascal Bruckner, Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy “If you have reasons to love someone you don’t love them.” Slavoj Žižek “Love has triumphed over marriage but now it is destroying it from inside” Pascal Bruckner, Has Marriage for Love Failed “My love for you isn't just my affair, it's yours too. My love says something about you that maybe you yourself don't know.” Jacques-Alain Miller "And alas, poor plowman on her rosy and fruitful lands, I never rose to the level of her delirium." Pascal Bruckner, Bitter Moon “Making love is not just becoming as one, or even two, but becoming as a hundred thousand. Desiring-machines or the nonhuman sex: not one or even two sexes, but n sexes.” - Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia "Love, of course, is two loners who pair up to make up for a misunderstanding. But is there a more charming misunderstanding? And isn't real wisdom the ability to fall in love again and again?” - Pascal Bruckner, Bitter Moon “Love is a labyrinth of misunderstandings whose way out doesn’t exist.” Jacques-Alain Miller "To love means to give the other, with my own consent, infinite power over me. How could I contribute to my own servitude?" - Pascal Bruckner, Bitter Moon Sister Without Peer My one, the sister without peer, The handsomest of all! She looks like the rising morning star At the start of a happy year. Shining bright, fair of skin, Lovely the look of her eyes, Sweet the speech of her lips, She has not a word too much. Upright neck, shining breast, Hair true lapis lazuli; Arms surpassing gold, Fingers like lotus buds. Heavy thighs, narrow waist, Her legs parade her beauty; With graceful step she treads the ground, Captures my heart by her movements. She causes all men's necks To turn about to see her; Joy has he whom she embraces, He is like the first of men! When she steps outside she seems Like that the Sun! First Stanza, Beginning of the sayings of the great happiness, from Papyrus Chester Beatty I, 1500 BCE "A couple that lasts is, paradoxically, a couple that accepts that it is mortal, and lives itself as the villain of an affair that surpasses it. The strength of the loving couple is that it is imperfect and malleable, protected from the very thing that makes it vulnerable. Being imperfect, it can be endlessly reformed. It remains, in what is essential, a promise thrown over the abyss of doubt, a bet on longevity, an act of trust in the fecund powers of time." Pascal Bruckner, The Paradox of Love\\ “The only thing that kills a demon is love.” Natural Born Killers (film by Oliver Stone) “Why does a man who is truly in love insist that this relationship must continue and be ‘lifelong’? Because life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic. Who would want to wake up halfway through an operation?” Cesare Pavese It Is Her Love That Gives Me Strength My sister's love is on the far side. The river is between our bodies; The waters are mighty at flood-time, A crocodile waits in the shallows. I enter the water and brave the waves, My heart is strong on the deep; The crocodile seems like a mouse to me, The flood as land to my feet. It is her love that gives me strength, It makes a water-spell for me; I gaze at my heart's desire, As she stands facing me! My sister has come, my heart exults, My arms spread out to embrace her; My heart bounds in its place, Like the red fish in its pond. O night, be mine forever, Now that my queen has come! Egyptian, c. 1500 BCE Search for Love “Those that go searching for love only make manifest their own lovelessness, and the loveless never find love, only the loving find love, and they never have to seek for it.” D.H. Lawrence