Tag: love

Random thoughts

On love, maturity, emotions, living in the present, problems, grief and stoicism

Karl MöllerLeave a comment

Here are some more thoughts from Alain de Botton’s book On Love.

First of all, on falling in love:

Albert Camus suggested that we fall in love with people because, from the outside, they look so whole, physically whole and emotionally ‘together,’ when subjectively we feel dispersed and confused. We would not love if there were no lack within us, but we are offended by the discovery of a similar lack in the other. Expecting to find the answer, we find only the duplicate of our own problem.

On maturity and emotions:

We could define maturity as the ability to give everyone what they deserve when they deserve it, to separate the emotions that belong to, and should be restricted to, oneself from those that should at once be expressed to their initiators, rather than passed on to later and more innocent arrivals.

On (not) living in the present. He asks, ‘Had there not been many times when the pleasures of the present had been rudely passed over in the name of the future …?’ and talks about ‘anticipation in the morning, anxiety in the actuality, and pleasant memories in the evening’, only to conclude that ‘the inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this is the only life that one is ever likely … to live’.

On problems: ‘One can think problems into existence‘.

On grief: ‘Bewildered and exhausted by grief, I suffocated on question marks: “Why me? Why this? Why now?“‘

On mature love:

… mature love is marked by an active awareness of the good and bad within each person, it is full of temperance, it resists idealization, it is free of jealousy, masochism, or obsession, it is a form of friendship with a sexual dimension, it is pleasant, peaceful, and reciprocated ….

On stoicism:

At the heart of stoicism lay the desire to disappoint oneself before someone else had the chance to do so. Stoicism was a crude defense against the dangers of the affections of others, dangers that would take more endurance than a life in the desert to be able to face. In calling for a monastic existence free of emotional turmoil, stoicism was simply trying to deny the legitimacy of certain potentially painful yet fundamental human needs. However brave, the stoic was in the end a coward at the point of perhaps the highest reality, at the moment of love.

There is much to ponder in these quotes.

Random thoughts

Correcting the false stories

Karl MöllerLeave a comment

Having looked forward to Alain de Botton’s book On Love, I did not find this as inspiring as I had hoped at first. However, now, half-way through, I have to say that the book is growing on me. Thus far, the chapter entitled ‘“I”-Confirmation’ has easily been the highlight. Consider, for instance, the following reflections on labeling:

the labeling of others is usually a silent process. Most people do not openly force us into roles, they merely suggest that we adopt them through their reactions to us, and hence surreptitiously prevent us from moving beyond whatever mold they have assigned us.

De Botton speaks about ‘shaping according to preconceptions’, adding that:

Children are always described from a third-person perspective … before they gain the ability to influence their own definitions. Overcoming childhood could be understood as an attempt to correct the false stories. But the struggle against distortion continues beyond childhood. Most people get us wrong, either out of neglect or prejudice. Even being loved implies a gross bias – a pleasant distortion, but a distortion nevertheless. … No eye can wholly contain our ‘I.’ We will always be chopped off in some area or other, fatally or not.

Looking at it from the other perspective, he notes:

Though I felt myself attentive to the complexities of Chloe’s nature, I must have been guilty of great abbreviations, of passing lightly over areas I simply did not have the empathy or maturity to understand.

Poetry · Spirituality

Secret places inside this violent world

Karl MöllerLeave a comment

Time for some more of Rumi’s poetry, again in the translation of Coleman Barks, from Bridge to the Soul: Journeys into the Music and Silence of the Heart.

I am sure I have said this before, but Rumi has been an amazing discovery for me. There is profound spiritual insight in the words of this Sufi master, and there is so much here that speaks to me at such a deep level. Some of it puts into words my own recent journey in ways that I could never have managed myself. Other parts express some of my deepest hopes and longings. And then there are many wonderful insights about God, love, friendship etc.

If only more people would read Rumi’s poetry. It would open their eyes to quite a different side of Islam. But then, he apparently is the most widely read poet in America today. There is still hope then …

We must die to become true human beings.

From gardens to the gardener,
from grieving to a wedding feast.

We tremble like leaves about to let go.
There is no avoiding pain,
or feeling exiled, or the taste of dust.

I can truly relate to those reflections on dying, grieving, letting go, experiencing pain and the taste of dust.

When someone feels jealous,
I am inside the hurt and the need to possess.

When anyone is sick,
I feel feverish and dizzy.

This I find comforting: that God is inside the hurt of those who need to possess others. And that he is inside our sickness.

For the grace of the presence, be grateful.

…

Imagination cannot contain the absolute.
These poems are elusive
because the presence is.

‘Imagination cannot contain the absolute’. Quite. No point to even try!

No more holding back. Be reckless.
Tell your love to everybody.

…
Stand up. The prostrating
part of prayer is over.

…

the beloved is absence
as well as this fullness.

I love that attitude to praying and loving God.

Be a helpful friend,
and you will become a green tree
with always new fruit,
always deeper journeys into love.

Worth aspiring to …

Learned theologians do not teach love.
Love is nothing but gladness and kindness.

…

When you see a scowling face,
it is not a lover’s.

Rumi really does understand true love.

Lovers find secret places
inside this violent world
where they make transactions
with beauty.

Reason says, Nonsense.
I have walked and measured the walls here.
There are no places like that.

Love says, There are.

…

Lovers feel a truth inside themselves
that rational people keep denying.

This is just brilliant stuff, so true and so well expressed. Secret places in a violent world where you make transactions with beauty – that’s truly wonderful and how I wish to live.

Random thoughts

Of bikes, poems in the dark and sex strikes

Karl MöllerLeave a comment

Fifty Shades of Feminism, edited by Lisa Appignanesi, Rachel Holmes and Susie Orbach, proves to be a fascinating collection of fifty brief reflections by an intriguing mix of voices: poets and novelists, politicians and social activists, journalists and physicians …. It also features women from a variety of cultural and racial backgrounds.

The contributions are, as I said, brief. Fifty chapters in about 300 pages, that does not leave much room for the individual authors to express their thoughts and reflections. And yet, in the first 100 pages (which is as far as I have got) I have already come across a few thought-provoking observations and some moving and also sometimes shocking stories.

Nathalie Handal, for instance, mentions her Lebanese grandmother, who rode a bike at a time when, unimaginably for us, it was considered a sin for women to do so. And she reports this story from Afghanistan:

Nadia’s son joined the Taliban. Her daughter wrote. Every evening, she would wake up in the middle of the night to write poems in the dark so as not to raise any suspicion of her audacity – a woman writing. When she finished, she would go to the window and like magic see her lines perfectly straight on every page. She hid them under the mattress. The day they found out her brother was killed, her father, in rage and in grief, shook his daughter’s bed and the pages spread across the floor like a testament challenging fate. He beat his daughter to death. Nadia did not say anything to her husband, she knelt by her daughter’s body, held her tight, went to the window where her daughter once read her verses, and fell.

Handal goes on to reflect on the need of women, in every culture, no matter what the nature of their oppression, to be brave and take the responsibility to define themselves.

She also notes that ‘men wage war when they lack imagination’ and that, ‘without the evolution of women, no society can evolve’. And she points out that Nadia’s quietness in that story from Afghanistan ‘was not silence but an assertion, I will not lie any more’.

Handal’s chapter is followed, rather fittingly, by Natalie Haynes writing about ‘Sex, Feminism and the Ancient World’. It’s a fitting sequel, because Haynes talks about Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata, in which the women of Greece, having got fed up with their warmongering men, decide to hold a sex strike. They will not make love as long as the men keep making war. Does the strategy work? The play being well-known, we all know the answer. But even if we didn’t, it would always be a foregone conclusion. There are some tactics that cannot fail.

And Handal is absolutely right to suggest that, ‘without the evolution of women, no society can evolve’.

Poetry

Aftershocks can go on for years

Karl MöllerLeave a comment

The inevitable happens …. Geryon meets Herakles again, with predictable consequences:

The effort it took to pull himself
away from Herakles’ eyes
could have been measured on the scale devised by Richter.

But things are not the same, for Herakles is with another man.

Volcanoes and earthquakes make repeated appearances in Carson’s work. They also feature in Autobiography of Red, where they symbolise some of the effects of a (troubled) love relationship. So when Ancash, Herakles’ new friend, notes that ‘aftershocks can go on for years’, Geryon laconically replies, ‘I know’, thinking not of tectonic movements but of the aftershocks of his relationship with Herakles, which are still troubling him many years on.

It is all too much for him. After a while, Geryon can’t cope with the company of the two friends any more. He ‘threw himself out the door’, we are told in typical ‘Carsonesque’ fashion, only to end up ‘in his hotel room on the end of the bed staring at the blank TV screen’.

It was seven a.m. Total agitation possessed him. He had held off phoning Herakles
for two days. Even now he was not
looking at the telephone (which he had placed in the bottom of his sock drawer).
…
when from deep in its cave of socks the telephone
rang. Geryon dove for it.

Some time later, Herakles, Geryon and Ancash visit a Peruvian volcano, which, in ancient times, used to be worshipped as a deity. People were thrown into it, Ancash explains, not for sacrifice but as a testing procedure:

They were looking for people
from the inside. Wise ones.

‘People from the inside’ – like Geryon, in other words, who not only is an inside person, an introvert, but has shown himself to be of considerable intellectual and emotional depth.

Then, in one of the book’s most poignant moments, Ancash explains to Geryon that some of those who had been thrown into the volcano return. They manage this due to their wings:

Wings? Yes that’s what they say the Yazcamac return as red people with wings,
all their weaknesses burned away –
and their mortality.

Like Geryon again, who is red and has wings, two features that have been troubling him all his life but are here shown to be something rather special. In a book that has layers upon layers, Carson plays with the ancient story upon which it is based and which features a red monster. But who is the monster in this story, deep, thoughtful Geryon, the wise inside person, or Herakles, who comes across as shallow and selfish, oblivious to the feelings of his two friends?

Geryon, we read, ‘thought about thoughts’.

Even when they were lovers
he had never known what Herakles was thinking.
…
What Geryon was thinking Herakles never asked. In the space between them
developed a dangerous cloud.

Or consider the following conversation, which illustrates so well how people can be together and yet not be together at all:

Geryon what’s wrong? Jesus I hate it when you cry. What is it?
Geryon thinks hard.
I once loved you, now I don’t know you at all. He does not say this.
I was thinking about time – he gropes –
you know how apart people are in time together and apart at the same time – stops.

All the while, Geryon keeps on struggling, as my last two examples, both couched in language that only Carson could manage, illustrate:

It is all wrong.
Wrongness came like a lone finger
chopping through the room and he ducked.

He slid off the bed quickly. Thorns all around him black and glistening
but he passed through unhurt …

.