Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

“Love, like flotsam, floats. It is proposal, not proposition. There is no doubt but that it is through the ineffability of its glory that men first feel the awakening of their own real nature, becoming convinced, with overpowering clarity, that they have a soul. Vision makes room for vision. Everything is transcendent in love. The little Vatican of truths within us — even those stupid, inelegant fibs which, when told, at least give us an idea of what we’re trying to become — whisper to us by hints of just how they may be confirmed, and confirmed, held, and held, maintained. Lovers move asymptotically toward the paradise the relative implies is to come in the absolute. Man loves in order to live in another a life missing in himself, for perhaps love does love what it lacks: we want to be what we love, even if what we love wants us to be, when we love, what we are. A couplet we may recall from the celebrated Welsh erotikon, Duges Ddu , goes:

Our life? Our love. Or else indict us

With merciless quotes from Heraclitus.

“In one way, the lover is the purest autobiographer, for he must attend to his personality for another beyond his own, all to shake out, shore up, and shape in an art that’s ideal what he can in truth of his life that’s real. Love, in any case, means union and what is not union is not love. You will either build a bridge or build a wall. In building a wall you remain the despicable crunchfist you always were, interested in neither projection nor equation but only in acquisition. You are priap. You will pray to St. Unicycle and use your nose for erotical labors and your unloving hands shall be avaricious as horns. You shall be called hard names: we shall call you Manchineel and perceive you more and otherwise than you think. In building a bridge, then what? Neither then, alas, can you be certain any will pass over. But you shall be called Chevalier, for you are brave.

“It is an emotion, love, the moral implications of which quicken out of time, passing the clouds, to touch the instant of Creation. Love murders the actual. (Reverse the sentence, it’s still true, but terrifying.) You must be what you are, always, however, in the hope that what you can be is exactly what you pursue in love; and ideally, of course, you shouldn’t be anything but what you should be, a difficulty which the thought itself raises. Loved, nevertheless, you find yourself favored with the greatest of all possibilities for transfiguration, assisted, paradoxically, by what you would attain, but failing that, a kind of devastation few can know. Cave amantem ! It carries the full weight of your soul with it. Our ideals are our perils. The heart of the loved one is an autoclave in which you have placed your own. Ravens bleed from their eyes during coition.

“Love! Say the word: how the velarized tongue drops, astonished, to the sigh of a moanworthy O that comes from low in the throat and trembles into the frail half-bite that closes on it like a kiss! The word is not spoken, it is intoned, proselytizing both the one who breathes it and the one upon whom it is breathed. What indeed has this to do with mortals? Whose spoor is this tracked so inexorably and so repeatedly toward it — can it be mere man’s? What supernatural flame leaps from the darkness of man’s soul that it can not only conceive, not only imagine, but somehow attain to such beauty? The philosopher increases in wisdom as he grows old and rots. Oysters are generated in scummy foam, medlars savored only if eaten when decayed, and ambergris is taken from the whale’s rectum. Ovid explains that the sweetest Roman cosmetics came from that part of the wool where sheep sweated most. The wolf-spider impairs her womb to furnish the material for its beautiful silk. The worst soil yields the best air. In the slopped and muddied palette of Botticelli patiently sat The Birth of Venus . Isn’t there a metaphysics in the making here?

“Woman’s beauty is the love of a man: they are not two things but one and the same thing, for love is the very shadow of the monument it creates. ‘I am to each,’ says Love, ‘the face of his desire.’ Now love creates beauty because love needs beauty — the symbol of this act of worship — and the greater the projected image of one’s ideal the greater the glory that settles on the loved one. Love has to do with the comprehension of paragons; it tempts one forward, and that the object of love, in reality, serves only as the point of departure for incomparably greater vision, lambent, beyond our very nature, should come as no surprise, for the nature of the ideal is that it inspires what it isn’t. Where it isn’t, it suggests to those disposed to it, it can be. The actual desire for love, resident in so many hearts, is in fact only a tiny parody of the emotion it seeks and proves this as it tries to bridge the gap between what we have and what we want, what we are and what we want to become. The beauty that love creates is precisely the ideal it would realize. You receive — not the paradox it seems — what you have given, the colophon of which, perhaps, is best expressed in the matter of sexual congress. The beauty that love creates, the ideal you would realize: this can be the foundation of real union only when two people, irrevocably, find and maintain it in the face of all odds, which is principally why so few people successfully fall in love and live in it.

“A love affair, easily, can be doomed the moment it begins, due to a whole series of misconceptions, for of course one believes or wants to believe that the other person is the dream-complement of oneself; but, no, the other person mightn’t be — the other person, after all, is only himself or herself. Only the aspiration in each to be the dream-complement of the other, effected always by sacrifice (the only way to prove one’s love), can establish the basis upon which true love can be structured. The statistical probability of an equal, exactly mutual love existing is arguably next to impossible, and yet if both the conception of and the will to the ideal, as exerted by each with respect to the other, is jointly shared, then love, like death, makes all distinctions void. Real love, to be successful, must move each to each equally, an amphiclexis of souls wherein the giving by one generates, not taking, but a natural impulse by the other to give in return. It has been argued, nevertheless, that the individuals involved may be — and possibly will be, and possibly must be — unequal. All joy worth the name, some say, is in equal love between unequal persons, that the entire disclosure of love, even its necessity, becomes irrelevant when, for instance, equals meet. Real friendship, thought Bacon, is mostly between superior and inferior, where degrees are dissolved, willingly, in the sudden miracle of the emotion. But then what is predictable of this disease that, attacking the heart, the soul, the mind, and the spirit all at once, has no remedy but to love the more? It wants no cad or elf but is a perfect witchcraft of itself, promising nothing less than a new life, giving you the chance to lead another’s and to multiply hers by your own.

“We have considered the projection of beauty and the pursuit of the ideal as indivisible. Beauty in se is kinetic; the idea of beauty is static, however, and to understand the distinctions and differences here is paramount. The only true paradise for us is the paradise we could lose — and the nature of all significant attachment is that, when that bond is broken, we are destroyed to that degree. The state of love, curiously, generates both the fear of such loss and destruction and yet simultaneously creates the only hope to prevent it. The song of love is always a cry for immortality: the permanence we’d have of love is only the perfection we would attain in the completion and utter fulfillment of ourselves and a projection of the idea of beauty. The idea of beauty is permanent, while every beautiful thing, every part of nature, such as it is, is perishable. Man has an upright face and advances his countenance toward the stars. Love looks seaward, outward, upward through the eyes of the kind of people in whom wonder never flickers down to a doubt, teaching the soul to dwell not where it lives but where it loves.