Love is the moment of the two in unison

Play gives the soul its form—the body whose moments animate the sublimely true. Without this form, there might not be a soul; or at the very least, the soul would be lost upon us in life. It would crush against the world, passing before us as nothing more than a shocking spark, inexpressible. The matter of life and the matter of living recede from one another at one moment and collide again in the next. Living happens when the soul, essence, and truth of those colored coverings is discovered in ever-higher degrees of approximation to the spirit—its most powerful actualization is in love. Rather than in love, living is defined by love. The soul of love, falling everywhere like hapless leaves into water, sinks below the surface with the thousand husks of summer if one forgets its supporting body. Love is that eternal breath and illumination that cannot but be both wind and leaf—the object and its path. One cannot begin with the hollow and move subtly to its shaping parts, however silent and transparent they might be, and hope to glean an understanding. Love is the moment of the two in unison, the moment of unity in disjunction. And this love conferred upon disjunction includes many shades of longing, sorrow, and aching, each with its own formal elaboration of the infinite. It is that eternal stuff that enlivens the present and highlights the nearness of infinity. It does not care for understanding, only truth. But such nearness of this infinite soul also threatens life. The thing that feeds can over-fill; the heart and passion of life tempts the sundried embers toward a house fire like a dry, cold wind. It teases the empty onlooker into believing that there is a third position of knowledge. The onlooker is not a third position, but an imaginary stance that denies truth in exchange for practicality.

 

an understanding: la mythologie d’amour

1. If one wishes to say something secret to a few in a large, mixed company, and when is not sitting close to another, one must speak in a special language. This special language can be foreign either in its tone or in its images. The latter will be a metaphoric and cryptic language.

2. Many have thought that one should use a learned language to speak of delicate, abusable things, for example, that one should write in Latin about such matters. But the attempt should be made to see if one cannot speak in the customary language of the land, so that only those can understand who should understand. Every true mystery excludes the profane by itself. Whoever understands it is of his own accord, and with good reason, an initiate.

Novalis Faith and Love

The language of mythology does not need address itself to the question of language of languages, but reaches into the depths of the highest letter and shapes the pen on the page towards it. Novalis’ first fragment in his introduction to Faith and Love, like the other five fragments in the preface, point out that a new mythology, or a mode of linguistic creation in the popular tongue, will take on the appearance of the quotidian whilst procuring the philosophical and aesthetic space to create a new world. When Novalis says that the “latter will be a metaphoric and cryptic language,” it is clear that the following piece d’occasion is not at all the occasion of a mere coronation in Prussian monarchy, but a cryptic undermining of the corrupt underpinnings of social and moral power that had since polluted the aesthetic and “cultivated” spheres.

Novalis’ piece elevates the king and queen to the status of gods, (something that he explicitly states later in the text), that these figures should be hung in the home, especially the figure of the queen. I cannot help but be drawn to the imperatives and implications of Novalis’ explicit favor of the image of the ideal to be internalized over the adoration of the public power. This process of mythological elevation takes up its brush against the courtly pavement in many different places of the short text, with all of them sharing the common sentiment that the queen is a mode of relating to reality in order to transform it. The queen is the more important image of this transference, I think, precisely because of her  de-politicised location in the power sphere (whose rank perfectly corresponds with the aesthetic realm of society). She is already mythologized in her relation to the kingdom and to power, and this relation is usually mediated through moral purity and aesthetic grace. But the queen should not be misunderstood as the locus of moral mythology… that is the focal point of the painting but it is not the stroke-work that illuminates Prussia. The significance of this piece is really its exercise of the revolutionary within the sphere of the accepted discourse: the queen is a myth, and ideal and an image that is only understood* and elevated to that rank through the systematic work of image-making. That is to say that the queen and the king come to stand as a union between the universal and the particular via a cryptic type of cultural and aesthetic overwriting. This process of aesthetic and political mythologizing originates in the genesis of philosophical inquiry and elevation of the particular (monarch in this instance: Freidrich Wilhelm III) to the universal imperative of liberated and ideal humanity.

more on this and it’s relation to an everyday ethic later.

A love letter

In life, longing has to remain love: that is its happiness and its tragedy. Great love is always ascetic, whether it raises the object of love to supreme heights and by so doing alienates it from itself and from the lover, or whether it merely uses that object as a springboard; whereas petty love abases love and causes mutilation, which is another form of asceticism. Great love is the natural, the real, the normal kind of love, but among living human beings it is the other kind that has become normal: love as silence and repose, love which cannot and will not lead to anything else… In life, longing has become love, and now love is struggling to be independent from longing, its lord and begetter.

Longing and Form, 115

No secret messages. Love is soul that is excited through human form, but this human form kills it. Longing is a bridge. The bridge that connects the two that cannot become the one. And these bridges, these are the constructions of madness, the forms that stretch out not to realized souls but merely towards their attempts. Longing was the very bridge destroyed for the lived life. One without the other is nothing. Love as silence and repose always gives something away. The self that has no divides cannot share secrets, it cannot play games or live externally. The innards are external. Love is teeth upon the ice-block, the excitement and the pleasure of immanent numbness: the realization of love is always the refusal to allow that silent, lying body to feel its own truth in another form, a reflection carved from the novice’s hand, an arbitrary use of pieces and parts.

“It is that feeling of being both near and far which comes with great understanding, that profound sense of union which yet is eternally a being-separate, a standing-outside,” (112). In life, that which takes human form, love cannot but be actualized as that aside from longing. Love is the unity and understanding, the acknowledged life that remains unwhole. Its unwholeness is not due to a non-realization. In fact, love and longing are most purely felt as the sublated unity in human isolation. In this life, they are felt in isolation but this conference of unity in difference is based on the dream of some great and true infinity. And how painfully that silent death, that maskless death must be. The soul evacuating its formal actualization- the final act of love.

For the kernel of love is an unbearable sentiment to life–in silence, in hardened, dusty soils, the body of what is or even what could ever be realized is the unbearable truth of humanity: that which predicates actualization is at its core the blistering and glittering beauty of the inexpressible.

I wonder if longing in life is yet another imagined duality which provokes man to discover true love–the cruel knife-twist in the heart from l’autre that reaches out, builds bridges, no matter how tentative, to the manifold sky yet without shape. There can never be love of the two–there is desire for the other and longing for the one. And this longing in its earthly shape has already foreclosed itself in our best interests so that we no longer desire, but ache.

Great love is the soul, the utopian heart of the matter, and is only realized insofar as it is located within earthly matter, or form. The question is of which form and for what end will this heart beat?

A heart that hardens
on the ice-block had better let its red
life-ribbons melt it;
unity of difference,
blood and water, better than
a frozen soul,
a shattered life.

sing it, goethe.

We passed a woman who had attracted my attention before because of the kindly expression on a face no longer young. She looked at Lotte, lifted a warning finger and, as we flew by, said the name “Albert” twice, with emphasis.

“Who is Albert?” I asked. “If I may be so bold as to inquire.”

Lotte was about to reply, when we had to separate for the figure eight, and I though i could detect a certain reflectiveness in her features when our paths crossed again. “Why shouldn’t you know?” she said as she gave me her hand for the promenade. “Albert is a good man, and I suppose you might say I am engaged to him.” This, of course, should not have come as a surprise to me; the ladies had mentioned it on the way over. still it came as a complete surprise because I had now somehow not connected it with her, who had now become so precious to me. At any rate, it served only to confuse me utterly, I became involved with the wrong couple, the result was chaos, and it took a great deal of Lotte’s presence of mind and a lot of pulling and readjusting to get all of us in orderly motion again.

The lightning, which had been noticeable to everyone on the horizon for some time–I had tried to assure everyone that it was only heat lightning–became more and more violent, and the rumbling of thunder began to drown out the music long before the dance was over. Three of the ladies left the dance floor, their partners followed them, the restlessness became general, and the music stopped.

Johann Wolfgnang von Goethe; Sorrows of the Young Werther, page 40

Suffering, joy, contingency, sorrow, resolution, deep sorrow, consolation, feeling, contingency, bitter contingency.

love

It is play which gives the soul its form. And it is equally true to say that without this form, there might not be a soul. The soul of love, falling everywhere like hapless leaves into water, sinks below the surface with the thousand husks of summer if one forgets that body of wind which carries it. Love is that eternal breath and illumination that cannot but be both wind and leaf—both the object and its path. One cannot begin with the shape, move subtly to its shaping parts, however silent and transparent they might be, and hope to glean an understanding. Love is the moment of the two in unison, the moment of unity in disjunction. It is that eternal stuff that enlivens the present, the near. It does not care for understanding, only truth.

tidbit of thesis

Love, then, is no particularly of this movement, but is embedded in the totality of it: the disjunction of the two does not make the third position of the child, but reconfirms unity through the evocation and production between the disjunction. This familial logic might easily fall into pitfalls of various derivative symbolic readings (i.e. as a real correspondence to the family, or to gendered discourses, or to physiological reproduction, in general, of which there is no way out except by a given identity politic, hence re-instating the logic of the one). Love’s unity, disjunction, and unity from the disjunction is the dialectic, itself. Hegel says “Thus the process is: unity, separated opposites, reunion” (Hegel 33). Love is the process by which oppositions are nullified through synthesis towards a genuine unity, where “equality” itself is dismantled as a categorical imperative, because sameness of difference has been erased through the process of legitimate production.