Art of Flux Thinking

Woman; what a sight – I thank fortune for my ability to savour it. Ovid was right. To love her is tough, it is painful, it is revolting and I am simply ill, afflicted and she is the only cure; the most difficult thing in the world is to truly Love woman. I too am omni-susceptible Mr. Ovid. I too hate what I am, but can’t help but be that which I hate. Can one fault me, or my wide-ranged interests? Is there anything wider than woman in general? Not ‘a’ woman, ‘a’ specific woman; woman in her totality – what Eastern Philosophy has been calling the Yin. Love for a particular would salvage me. The latter would be no problem Mr. Ovid, and unlike you I can’t Love a hundred, or a thousand, or any more. Either I Love them all, or none at all.

I am a Lover, and as such I find myself caught in a paradox, caught like fish in a net, helpless, struggling, vainly swimming in air. I have lead you astray with this last comment. Instead of being ‘in’ a paradox, it is more accurate to say that I am the paradox. How can that be so; and what is this paradox?

I love woman. As such I find myself wanting to be as close to ‘woman’ as is possible for a ‘man’. I want to understand her, and experience her in her totality. I have done much and I have come close, very close: inside her, outside her, around her, head to heart-beat length, eye to eye and thought to thought. There is only one boundary: I cannot ‘be’ her. What a boundary that is indeed, a boundary worthy of the denotation of the word ‘perfect’. I could never have yielded such admiration, such passion, such Love for her; had I been her.

The Lover loves woman is the tautology, the identity statement carrying hardly anything existential, hardly anything over that, hardly anything more than what is obvious. But this obviousness carries so much.

In my Love I understand. In my Love I accept. In it I am no more important than she is. In it I reject that which is harmful to my beloved, as I would if it was harmful to me. The harmful is that which stops me from being myself in my totality, my potentiality; that which stops me from flourishing, that which is like a weed to my growth, to my joy, to my bliss, to me and, what is the same, to her. There is no distinction for me, I think of her as I would think of myself – hence the egocentrism, rather the appearance of it.

The paradox, with a slight bow, can reveal itself at last. I desire ‘for’ her what is best, that which is best is what I judge to be best. Woman is her own being. I have no power over her judgments. If woman sees not a Lover in me, and sees not my ‘what is best’ the way I see it, then I have no value in her eyes. Thus, I find myself immersed in loneliness, the Lover becomes the loner.

He who truly loves woman, who is the most closest to woman, has become, in time, in actuality, the furthest away. Oh, I used to imagine the feeling Mr. Ovid but now that it is here, no imagination can compare. How did it feel for you Mr. Ovid, to be stripped of all glory, of all possibility and to enter oblivion with a march forward and a slight step in the right direction but nobody there to see it happen. Left with nothing but your thoughts, and your patience – alas, left to die thus. Left armed with nothing but reason and desire. What meaningless weapons, what powerless and feeble weapons to use in order to combat the paradox, to combat the loneliness. It speaks to you with a whisper, a whisper you either choose to ignore or allow it to tempt you,

“Love one, forget the others, you have no Godly power in you, you are just small, feeble, a number. You have no potential to Love on such a grand scale. Who do you think you are?”

It implores you to stop and turn back, to just embrace the epoch, embrace the custom, embrace the ways of now, and forget the dreams of something else, the dreams of, and propelling into, the future.

“Forget the dreams of something so seemingly impossible. Nobody can give Love a meaning, nobody can define it. What a futile attempt. Many have tried, and died doing so. What makes you any different?”

The paradox has created a limit, a stop sign, a no way further, an evident no-through-road. Yet, the Lover is wiser than that, he knows of paradoxes. He understands, albeit evanescently, of their relationship to time (and the individual). One of his useless weapons can take him thus far, but any further and he is pained and penetrated by the loneliness; by that incessant nudge to be viewed and acknowledged, an altogether irrational and unproductive nudge.

There is a fine line between reason-for-something and no reason at all. A line that only needs one whisper, one thought, the right or wrong thought, the right or wrong word and it is easily crossed. The Lover goes that far; I have been this far, any further and I can’t, I have not the fuel, I have not the strength, I have not the inspiration, I lose hope. Like a drug addict whose high is subsiding, my reason leaves me, slowly, quietly, like a night-partner early morning who was only in it for the sex.

I am the paradox by my name, by what I have chosen to be, by who I am after the choice. A Lover loves woman. Woman is a general abstract term grounded to actuality by particular instances – definition and meaning aside in this post. Woman denotes gender as well as sex in this occasion, and I am very aware of the ‘humble’ distinction that separates the two. There is however a relationship between the sex and the gender, a relationship of affinity. The move from the natural (the physical) to the social (the mental) is a steep one, par excellence. This move shows a gap between the two, but also an affinity for those of sex ‘male’ to gender ‘man’, alas, we categorize each other as such. Whereas before, in the past, in history, we held ‘man’ and ‘male’ (same for ‘female’ and ‘woman’) by a hazy definition and understanding. Now that haziness, that cloud has subsided leaving us with nothing, a mess, a jumble, a scattering of understanding from both sides. This is not something that happened randomly, this is something that was destined to happen from the moment we began thinking and questioning. Behind every social change- alas, allow me to make it as radical as possible, behind every change to human existence – is a question, and behind every question is a thought. So the moment man began thinking the way he thinks momentarily, there was a kind of fatalism that was given birth to. A kind of fatalism that was made salient from the first convenient category of experience, in history, to be introduced and accepted. From then on everything coming under thought was made as if God made it himself, all with an undeniable outcome: preservation or destruction. We see these effects now in Gender and Sex.

I, as a Lover am in a paradox; one that causes me to choose between the understanding and acceptance of the freedom of the agent who just happens to be my beloved, and the appearance of an egocentrism of a child who just wants things to go his way. An egocentrism that is grounded precisely in the perspective of others anyway, not in my own eyes. In other words, do I just accept that my perspective is meaningless and has no value, and just alter it to ‘fit it’ and become ‘effective’, or do I reject that perspective because I truly think it’s bogus and ineffective, and as such risk loneliness. This is the dilemma of the Lover, alas, of all adults/teenagers in one stage or other. The dilemma of choosing between individuality and alienation, or collectivity and unhappiness. The only difference between the Lover and the rest is that he just refuses to do the latter. Whereas the others are happy (or are they?) being what is required of them no ‘questions asked’, he on the other hand frowns and even cringes at the very thought. He knows that doing what others have will only breed the idea of victimization, the idea that he is a victim of life, the age old excuse: “this is the way things are, we can’t do anything about it”.

The paradox: Love woman and be closest to her (than sometimes even herself), but by that very closeness be the furthest away because woman is herself a free agent and does not see what you see. The Lover is the closest and furthest away from his beloved than anybody.

There is only one way out of this Existential parameter, of this boundary, of this either a free agent, or a mechanical bi-product of forces over the agent that act as fatalistic, and as catalysts for being and existing in a particular way. That way out is the child, that archenemy of Existentialism, that impenetrable fortress of, and by, freedom. First we consider time, then we consider the child. These are the two elements that will either prove meaningful to this bitter paradox, or meaningless and Love becomes worthless, an interplay of power between two free agents or between two mechanisms projecting themselves on each other. Love cannot be a paradox, it is something higher beyond the paradox, or Love has never existed simply because it has always existed. 

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 > Inspired by a song I accidentally ran into, Wilco – How to Fight Loneliness, while looking for an Odd Project instrumental called “Love” on mySpace. What random places we get inspirations from.