Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

Parch the pen in the other’s hand.

The fair, they say, requires foul;

An owl is cognate to its howl.

And if with love you see your fate,

Why, be prepared to suffer hate!

In the duchess you woo at the midnight hour

Claws a black-faced bitch mad to devour.

You seek to select and select what you see,

But is what appears what then must be?

The nature of choice itself is sin.

Where one must lose and one must win!

One eye’s inaccurate. Two we need

To watch, to learn, to know, to read.

One image is gotten of those two:

But is it real? And is it true?

Distinctions! Differences! All life long!

You can’t do right if you can’t do wrong.

The bride, the groom on a nuptial bed?

Spills one white, spills one red.

Yet each fulfills defect in each,

The epistemology of stone and peach.

(But when it comes to the hungry lip,

Are equally praised, the flesh, the pip?)

A paradox, say, that can never be:

The strange conundrum of lock and key.

Man’s “too much” he boasts to show;

Woman’s “too little” down below

Incorporates as best it can

The larger half of her messmate, Man.

A larger half? Yes, there’s the catch!

It’s the deathless quintessential,

The flint, the strike, the spark sequential

That fires every human match.

—D. I. DODYPOL

Darconville put it on the desk — a mouse-colored paper with the thirty or so jumping jingles pecked out so hard that the typed letters, snap-riveted and bitten full into the page, made the verso side read like a lunatic cantrip in braille. He read it several times. What could he reply? Wasn’t keeping faith a cause, not an effect? And the irony of love, who knew, perhaps it gave us the relative dimension we needed to experience it without being fully consumed by either the absolute or the agony of it, no?

Axioms, axioms. Darconville picked up his pen and spent most of the day writing to his friend an essay that had been growing within him for some time. It had a simple title.

“LOVE,” wrote Darconville, “is as rare as the emotion of hate. I pray your divided attention: they are the extreme antipodes of each other in temperament but never in endowment, and so bear a strange complementarity. Every time someone executes the action of one of them, the other, specifically, becomes the victim of not being executed. Each is of each a mirror-image, yet explicitly looking at each we implicitly look at both, as when looking in water face then answers to face. To be in the grip of one is to relish precisely not being in the grip of the other. A yes is valued only because it could have been a no, and vice-versa, for the philosophical upshot of freedom, shaped by choice, is that we would not be able to love in act if we were not also able to hate in potency. The lowest number is two which, lying down together in the sum it incorporates, pips the child, Relativity. The mirror is, indeed, the parable of love, but you will remember this also: what one sees in the mirror is not in the mirror at all. The anagram of ‘Determination: thorough evil!’ is ‘I mean to rend it through love!’—the perfection of equation being the missing i that must necessarily be lost for salvation in another.

“Love is the thirst which vanishes as you drink. It is, however, always in a state of becoming, moving from one definiteness to another, a synthesis of both identity and otherness. Approaches solely rationalistic or empirical fail in the face of it. We fall through such formulae weightless, for love often declines as fast as reason grows: it is not a what but a that. To ask questions of love is to commit the sin of avarice, for it yields nothing of sense to those intellectual quackshites, daubers of logic, and gowned vultures and spies who, with rule, glass, and compass, surround it in some kind of official jingbang to try to finger out answers and prod it into comprehension. The emotion is not subject to the imperatives of Cartesianism nor is it kind to men of literal minds, but, on the other hand, see it only as figurative and you die starved on theories, impaled on promises. The colors of love are hues. And yet we will never cease to hear noises made, as they were of old, when in the white dust of the Agora, the philonoetic Greeks sat with legs crossed, feet decussated, and raised endless questions on “the unbridled delirium”: does love love for love? Does love love to love? Does love lack what it loves? Does love like what it loves? Love loves to love love, it occurred to them, as hate hates to love love. ‘Therefore,’ exclaims Prometheus, ‘hate loves to hate love!’ ‘Hate loves ?’ gasps Epimetheus. ‘Why, ‘tis impossible, sir!’ ‘Say you so?’ replies Prometheus. ‘Then hate, hating, cannot desire itself?’ And so they grapple, and so they will.

“Knowledge is often used, mistakenly, in the sense of wisdom. Of such ideas let us soon hope to be rid, for no brainsick questions, mythical intricacies, or the froth of human wit can probe love — you cannot explain it. You point to it with a question exactly when it hasn’t an answer for you. It mocks the academic efforts of men. Medicine talks mere folly. Theology must hold its peace. And Logic, that parody of human reasoning, must positively die of embarrassment in the face of it, for one cannot pound arithmetic like a drench of yew. Love is not simply what it is, for in this matter, strictly speaking, what it is implies also what it ought to be, and as it exists always in a state of becoming, when it exists at all, it is never fully in a state of being. You define it only by preventing its development and preventing its development you hazard its loss. You circumscribe it only by limiting it. Persecute the syllable, logical positivists! Shift it about your mechanic paws, polyhistors and polymaths! Does it lisp? Did it cry out? Pinch it, cuff it, tweak it, employ the bastinado, and squeeze it for moots and lessons! But come, come, I will see the barometer wherein, that it might be read, will squat a typhoon. lago is more rational than Othello. And thereby hangs a tale.

“True love is the dolce nemico of daily life, for love deals not with what is happening but with what ought to happen. The L of love is not the L of logic. For how many centuries has the air of the earth been refrigerated by the tears and heated by the sighs of ruined suitors who failed to realize this? You cannot buy it, make it, fake it, steal it, or ever expect it to appear, for, like can over may, it is only a question of possibility, not permission. It is a grace all hear of, none deserve, few understand; it owes little to merit, less to honor, and, queerly, more often than not finds a home in those sad, shipwrecked, and unready hearts not proud for the expectation. You can only hope for it, which is to say you must shed tears and keep boxes of alexipharmics in your pocket to support you in your loss, for the very imagination that informs hope inflicts the horror, always, of alternative.

“A lover hopelessly in love is not only a lover impatiently in love but a lover impatiently hoping. There is no declaration of love which is completely true, true in the sense of complete; it is always a declaration of hope, with equation the paradigm — a phenomenon of projection that seeks to become a phenomenon of equation, the only settlement of which rests in the meaningless but mystical tautology: A=A. The proposition of identity translates ‘I am’ and ‘I am’ to ‘we are.’ The finding is in the seeking. But you are never fulfilled, satisfied only in that other satisfactions await and with an equable temperament content only by dint of approaching in mystery but not reaching in fact an equation that never is solved. A real gambler always returns the money he’s won.