Giacomo Giovanni Casanova’s life is very fascinating to me, perhaps because of his constant pursuit for love or adventure…
Casanova’s reputation has degraded into a terrible cliché and this makes his memory rather negligible. However, it is precisely that fact that attracts me to his life; he is almost like a cocoon that failed to produce a butterfly; did it actually fail or are we all wrong to degrade him?
The love aforementioned and the one I will be talking about throughout this little entry is oriented towards Romantic Love, known to be only the first stage of Absolute Love.
His youth was dominated by a vegetative state until about the age of eight; suffered from chronic nosebleeds and was dumb-witted. Born as a child to actors, his father was a director/actor and mother was a beautiful Venetian actress. As he got older, his intelligence grew in proportion with his body, he grew more and more shrewd.
Casanova’s first encounter with a woman, and we know of the gravity of these encounters, was when he was at a tender age of eleven. As he put it, he fell in love with a girl called Bettina, an intensely beautiful but fucked up girl with a rather more than copious desire in the masculine species; she liked cock beyond proportion. The way she seduced him was inconspicuous, but at the same time bewilderingly simple and observable. After hot and cold encounters (coquetry was a pandemic to women of that time period) one after the other, one day she “accidentally” jacked him off, left without returning, and from that moment he felt shame mixed with guilt and shame at what he had done, he felt that he took away her innocence and dishonored her and her family. This lead to a melancholy, due to the fact that she wasn’t around so that he could induce closure; this was enough to make him fall in love.
It is precisely the moments when we are made to question ourselves that we open up our hearts.
There is an observable theory behind that, when you question yourself you are vulnerable; vulnerability is perhaps the last step leading to openness and surrender, constituents of romantic love. Think of all the times you surrendered and you will see that it was the times when you thought that you were vulnerable, that you had no other alternatives. When you are made to question yourself, you are made to question the very thing that you use to defend what you do and how you do it; via this questioning one is left vulnerable because their excuses have gone, their reasons for why and how have gone. Once your reasons for why and how have gone, you are left in a place of loss, you feel the biggest void there is, and that void can only be filled by an influx of deep admiration for the person who just made you question yourself. This admiration is inspired because, when someone makes you feel like you don’t know yourself, you automatically presuppose they must know themselves and they must be stronger, so you place that person in a pedestal and the moment you’ve done that you’ve ruined your experience. Not only that, but now you think that if they know themselves they can show you how you can know yourself too. Now the person becomes a salvation that can lead to your true nature. A dependency is synthesized, thus leaving you infatuated, and without the awareness required for you to escape it. Bare in mind, this is only one way to express how love happens, only one way that “romantic” love can happen.
The interesting thing about our notion of love is that it is usually bred by emotions of a contrary essence to love. How many times have you fallen in love with people you shouldn’t have fallen in love with? How many times has someone you perceived to love you has let you down or toyed about with you, by emotionally tossing you back and forth? Love, as we see it, has a peculiarity beyond that of words; it is almost so volatile and unpredictable that one wonders whether that is the reason for its hold on us? Giacomo Casanova chased love and adventure like a hungry lion chases a zebra. His life was altered around one word; experience. Experience to its fullest extent, he was truly a lover of life, in fact he loved it so much that he almost lost it a couple of times in his pursuit for experience.
One of the most important lessons one can learn from Casanova’s life is his innate and particularly contrasting ability to seduce nuns. Nuns in those days were supposedly the most chaste human beings alive, and still are now; virgin - most of them anyway- young, fair and innocent - as if. The distinct observation that I have made about so called chaste women, which I would have never made hadn’t it been for his life, is one that chaste women are perhaps the first to burn under the flames of temptation. When you see a woman forced into chastity and gaze in her eyes, you see an immaculate draining of her energy, a tenseness most unusual in women of freedom. This tenseness is very subtle however and at times masqueraded too well to even notice, without careful attention, but it is there. There are three that I have perhaps become distinctly aware of, feel free to add others if you so wish:
- Perhaps the most interesting is the look of anger, some women forced into chastity have a general disdain for everything and anything; the wrinkles on their brows as they are floating about harmoniously scream of tension, so much tension that one wonders just how loud she could scream had she been in the hands of a “real” individual. Forced tension has the drawback of forced release, temptation easily succumbs those forced into renunciation, when you fight something, you are weakened simply by the energy you expend on fighting it. Thus, and on account of that expenditure, you will always lose.
-The subtle kind is the kind of woman that hides her tension behind a veneer of self-deception by attempting to feel fulfillment. She expends so much energy that she even hides it from herself, her look is one of fulfillment, and her gaze is so peaceful and innocent that it can trick anyone. However she too is given away by her curiosity, her peaceful look turns into one of fear when in contact with a man. That fear is never of the man; it is of her temptation towards the man, of what she would do to the man if she was alone with him.
-Lastly, and the easiest one to spot, is the look of humility or timidity, these are women that are floaters around the world, hardly noticeable and always fly under the radar - usually librarian women. The kind of women that can’t look at you in the eye for longer than you feel you deserve to be looked at, are by far the most intoxicating of the lot, and have much more to offer. These women are the best fighters of all the other types, they don’t hide it, and they are such great fighters of temptation that they have taken it to the next level. They force you not be attracted to them or even notice them, and in turn they are partially, if not fully, salvaged from the poisonous fangs of temptation. This perfect mechanism once understood unleashes a passion beyond words. A passion that render words meaningless; the experience speaks words that will never be heard.
Chastity and lewdness are nothing but aspects of the same coin. They are nothing but a house with two entrances, one rather more comfortable than the other. To experience one is to lack the other; to be faithful to one aspect is to be unfaithful to the other. Each aspect, as we see from the countless encounters of our present hero, must have its dedicated time and fulfillment, for there is no escape. Adultery makes one feel alive, decency makes one feel divine; both mandatory human desires. There is no midpoint, both aspects are mandatory for living a healthy life. Bare in mind that the aspects mentioned are not the actions, but rather the feelings that arise from the actions, those are mandatory. To feel alive and to feel divine. A coin’s both sides must be observed so that the shop keeper or the owner of the coin may be sure of its value and worth.
Casanova’s first encounter with a woman was enough to shape his whole life with other women. On a perspective oriented by determinism, a crude explanation of determinism is, when your future or present is determined by your past (key emphasis on causality), his encounter with Bettina was enough for him to understand the complexity of romantic love. From that moment forth he developed a certain weakness towards women, a weakness he masqueraded as extremely potent seductive ability. Bettina’s actions were enough for him to draw the much desired distinction between male and female psychology. Bettina helped him become engulfed in the feminine psyche; being feminine himself also contributed in his learning. Bettina, although young at the time (fifteen years old), managed to play the game of love with the cunning of a woman many years her age. She used the ever-interesting tool of coquetry with masterful skill, this was the primary weapon of women in those years, given the strength men had over them, it was an excellent way to get men to do what they wanted them to do. This one encounter with coquetry was enough for him to understand its essence and thereby counter it extremely well. The game of love* is one of leverage, and as degrading and painful as this may seem, romance is very closely related to business. Whoever has leverage over the other will invariably hold power over the other. When the leverage is equaled, it creates an interesting phenomenon called mutual love. However, the key to maintaining this mutual love is to maintain the balance of leverage, the moment the balance is lost, love is gone with it.
He was, without doubt, the breath of fresh air women were looking for in that time and age. He created an ego oriented towards becoming the perfect romantic hero, the damsel in distress, the adventurous bad boy, the charismatic gentleman, the mysterious stranger, the dandy and many, many others.
Each woman he came across, that he desired, managed to create in him her personal and perfect man. It was like he was walking around as a blank sheet of paper, in which the desired woman could write herself in; a canvas for the desired woman to paint her heart in. He did this with utmost perfection; in fact he went so far that many times he almost lost his life in the process of being a precise representation of the feminine desire. He never did anything to women; all he did was become that which they desired. His ability to alter characters in order to accommodate the woman he desired, was fascinating; his exquisite capabilities of being able to read women fast and understand what it is they are burning inside for and what is missing in their life. This he performed intuitively. He never gave a girl what she said she wanted; he always gave her what she absolutely needed and couldn’t live without. In this way he was able to become her innermost desire; a cunning tool.
Getting off on a tangent a little, there are a few points one should know about his self-conception. Perhaps the most admirable point he makes about his life is;
“I am writing to laugh at myself, and I am succeeding” - Casanova
Such a view of his very immoral and unconventional life is enough to inspire interest as to why he would make such a bold claim. How can someone laugh at a life of heart-break, death, crime and many other such incidents? It seems paradoxical to find amusing, things we hold to be horrendous. What’s even more mind blowing is his claim of being a Monotheist, his claim of a belief one God.
“I believe in the existence of an immortal God, creator and master of all forms.”
How can someone leading such a dissolute life claim to have a belief in a religion? The audacity seems penetrating to one who fancies himself a believer of Spirituality and Religion. Yet he made the claim none-the-less. His understanding of the duality of the world is remarkably spiritual, and one wonders how can someone prone to lasciviousness, be able to accommodate a spiritual understanding? He also claimed that in the times of distress he relied on faith, and it was precisely his faith in the divine providence that allowed him to escape phenomenally inescapable situations. One can draw many conclusions about such a paradoxical man, the most important I reckon however is that he was getting closer and closer in his understanding of the spiritual and so he would have moved higher up the ladder of true love. Romantic love is merely a parenthesis in the journey to absolute love; it is merely a pit stop that one has to make should he be able to continue. Giacomo seemed to have made the pit stop very well. To make him a cliché for pleasing the women of lazy and boorish men is unfair.
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*It was very difficult for me to make this move, but I made it none-the-less. There is a game to Love, and anyone who denies that contemporary romance has no games in it, should definitely try and enhance their observational capacities. So don’t be offended that you are caught in a game, playing with a thing you think should be game-less (or shouldn’t be played with), because you are only kidding yourself. Accept that there is a game involved and transcend it, rise above the situation. What would life be if it weren’t for games and fun? Love is not a serious energy, because if it was serious it would not be so intoxicating. It’s its freedom that intoxicates us; it comes and goes as it pleases, and it chooses those who are worthy, no questions asked.
incognitio
