“in the presence of the Other”

Alas, why does my mind, even in its best days, never possess but a particle of the assimilative powers of the body?

I used to once believe that a certain feeling for beauty would serve me in place of virtue, and would render me immune from solicitations of the coarsest kind. But I was mistaken. The lover of beauty ends by finding it everywhere about him, a vein of gold in the basest of ores; by handling fragmentary masterpieces, though stained or broken, he comes to know a collector’s pleasure in being the sole seeker after pottery which is commonly passed by.

The cynics and the moralists agree in placing the pleasures of love among the enjoyments termed gross, that is, between the desire for drinking and the need for eating, though at the same time they call love less indispensable, since it is something which, they assert, one can go without. I expect about anything from the moralist, but am astonished that the cynic should go thus astray. Probably both fear their own demons, whether resisting or surrendering to them, and they oblige themselves to scorn their pleasure in order to reduce its almost terrifying power, which overwhelms them, and its strange mystery, wherein they feel lost. I shall never believe in the classification of love among the purely physical joys (supposing that any such things exist) until I see a gourmet sobbing with delight over his favorite dish like a lover gasping on a young shoulder. Of all our games, love’s play is the only one which threatens to unsettle the soul, and is also the only one in which the player has to abandon himself to the body’s ecstasy. To put reason aside is not indispensable for a drinker, but the lover who leaves reason in control does not follow his god to the end. In every act save that of love, abstinence and excess alike involve but one person; any step in the direction of sensuality, however, places us in the presence of the Other, and involves us in the demands and servitudes to which our choice binds us. I know no decision which a man makes for simpler and more inevitable reasons, where the object chosen is weighed more exactly for its balance of sheer pleasure, or where the seeker after truth has a better chance to judge the naked human being. Each time, from a stripping down as absolute as that of death, and from a humility which surpasses that of defeat and of prayer, I marvel to see again reforming the complex web of experiences shared and refused, of mutual responsibilities, awkward avowals, transparent lies, and passionate compromises between my pleasures and those of the Other, so many bonds impossible to break but nevertheless so quickly loosened. The mysterious play which extends from love of a body to love of an entire person has seemed to me noble enough to consecrate to it one part of my life. Words for it are deceiving, since the word for pleasure covers contradictory realities comprising notions of warmth, sweetness, and intimacy of bodies, but also feelings of violence and agony, and the sound of a cry. The short and obscene sentence of Poseidonius about the rubbing together of two small pieces of flesh, which I have seen you copy in your exercise books with the application of a good schoolboy, does no more to define the phenomenon of love than the taut cord touched by the finger accounts for the infinite miracle of sounds. Such a dictum is less an insult to pleasure than to the flesh itself, that amazing instrument of muscles, blood, and skin, that red-tinged cloud whose lightning is the soul.



MARGUERITE YOURCENAR, Memoirs of Hadrian New York : Farrar, 2005.

Less than twenty pages into it and already wanting to quote/read you the book in its entirety, the above being but a paragraph and a bit. Lucid gems illumine every page. Thank you for the gift, Warren.

Photo: Pakonectar

“Every bliss achieved is a masterpiece.”

. . . and what is the act of love, itself, if not a moment of passionate attention on the part of the body?*

It is not a question of sublimation, which is itself a very unfortunate term and one that insults the body, but a dark perception that love for a particular person, so poignant, is often only a beautiful fleeting accident, less real in a way than the predispositions and choices that preceded it and that will follow.

MARGUERITE YOURCENAR, Fires

*from Memoirs of Hadrian

Photo: Pleasure

This is the use of memory:

For liberation—not less of love but expanding

Of love beyond desire, and so liberation

From the future as well as the past. Thus, love of a country

Begins as attachment to our own field of action

And comes to find that action of little importance

Tough never indifferent. History may be servitude,

History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,

The faces and places, with the self, which, as it could, loved them,

To be renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.

T.S. ELIOT, from Little Gidding (No.4 of ‘Four Quartets’)

Divine

I understand it so well, and know what you must have suffered. I have been through similar storms and trials myself. I suppose we gain something from them. Would the person one loves ever seem divine if there were no difficulty in winning their love? How wonderful when the Gods appear to us poor mortals—even in the faces and figures of those who say Farewell to us!

EDWARD CARPENTER, responding to a friend’s distress about a thwarted love for another man.

Nicholas, originally uploaded by snoopvac.

Deeply subversive

Boys Holding Hands During Gay-Rights March, originally uploaded by markdworthen.

I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious teachers, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man’s meaning.

Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.

VASILY GROSSMAN, Life and Fate

Worthy

“…only he who is willing to give his body for the sake of the world is fit to be entrusted with the world. Only he who can do it with love is worthy of being the steward of the world.”

-Tao Te Ching

Pictured: “ifun” @ dudesnude

Firsts

Everybody loves the first glimpse of naked love

Everybody’s story is the most thrilling in the world

Everybody tells their best friend their tale of the raw behind

First time they discovered an open heart with their pants down.

ALLEN GINSBERG, on the back cover of WADS: True Homosexual Experiences from S.T.H. Writers, Vol. 6, Edited by Boyd McDonald ; San Francisco : Gay Sunshine Press, 1985.

Just married

Damon D’Oliveira & Maxime Desmons, Bastille Day 2009, Wards Island, Toronto

I am only a child.

I am lonely, Neal, alone, and always I am frightened. I need someone to love me and  kiss me and sleep with me; I am only a child and have the mind of a child. I have been miserable without you because I had depended on you to take care of me for love of me, and now that you have altogether rejected me, what can I do, what can I do?

ALLEN GINSBERG in a letter to Neal Cassady, November 1947. The Letters of Allen Ginsberg, edited by Bill Morgan ; Da Capo Press, 2008.

Love Letter – Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Palace Theatre, Melbourne 2009

Allen Ginsberg em foto de William S. Burroughs, N.Y., Outono de 1953

3 things

 

To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go. 

 

MARY OLIVER, from “In Blackwater Woods“ from American Primitive