The garden where all loves end

Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining
We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other,
Under a tree in the cool of the day, with the blessing of sand,
Forgetting themselves and each other, united
In the quiet of the desert. This is the land which ye
Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity
Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)

wrote T. S. Eliot in 1930, accurately capturing the essence of private life in our modern western societies. At some point we seem to have decided that any dream of accomplishing something great together, in community, is in vain, and that the best we can do is to set up the conditions for each individual or family to most effectively mind their own business.

Sometime during the general process that we might call modernisation, there was,
according to Hannah Arendt, (see my previous post) a general rebellion against the idea that any aspect of human existence should be considered crude and unimportant to the eyes of the public. It was no longer enough that the activities necessary for upholding our bodily existence would be carried out in the smaller communities called homes or households. The fact that working to support human life was at the same time an immediately communal activity was no longer enough to make it meaningful. Instead, even the basic bodily labour, human life itself as an activity, demanded a visible presence on the public stage which  had previously been reserved for heroic or artistic deeds of excellence. The recognition previously reserved for the excellence of unique personalities was being claimed for the very activities that made man man.

Karl Marx (1818-1883)

Thus arose what Arendt terms the social or society. A new realm where the basic concerns of every household and, increasingly, every individual, were a matter of universal interest and responsibility. The socialisation of man came about, only not in the form intended by Karl Marx. Marx used this very term, the socialisation of man, to lay out his vision of a society where the aforementioned survival labour would determine not only the organisation of households, but the organisation of society as a whole. Living the active life of labour together was what made human existence meaningful, Marx reasoned, and, therefore, global human community could be given meaning by arranging it according to this aspect of life, instead of orienting everything towards the extraordinary deeds of unique individuals.

Instead of this Marxian form of the socialisation of man, we got a society where both the former excellence of the public realm and the immediate community of the private realm are gone. The basic bodily concerns of the individual are now national political matters, but they are no longer a basis for community. The production of food, for instance, no longer serves as the hub of any meaningful social interaction, because we strive to maintain a system where any individual can be sufficiently fed without necessarily coming into contact with any other human being. Pushed to the extreme, the current situation is one where anyone has (or ought, politically speaking, to have) the opportunity to realise any conceivable dream, but where there is no longer any social scene upon which the realisation of that dream will have any significance. No lasting significance, at least. Whatever I
accomplish will be noticed briefly by friends, but forgotten by the next generation.

Society zealously guards  the rights of the individual, and these rights generally have to do with individual life not being determined or conditioned in any way by anything larger than the individual. Society takes great care to defend the individual against society. We fight and die for the right of anybody to be left alone.

Slavoj Žižek

Slavoj Žižek has said that the most precise image of global society today is that of the so-called masturbatorium (which, apparently, is a real phenomenon), where numerous people gather in great big halls to have sexual “intercourse” each with him- or herself only, all the while being visible to everyone else. The most extreme sense of privacy, the inviolability of the individual body, is secured by turning the public into an omnipresent, passive, asocial gaze.

Or, in the words of Eliot:

Rose of memory
Rose of forgetfulness
Exhausted and life-giving
Worried reposeful
The single Rose
Is now the Garden
Where all loves end
Terminate torment
Of love unsatisfied
The greater torment
Of love satisfied
[...]
Grace to the Mother
For the Garden
Where all love ends.

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here

 (INCEPTION  PLOT SPOILER ALERT)

http://xkcd.com/817/

No such thing as a sexual relation exists.

This is one of the statements for which Jacques Lacan, 20th century French psychoanalyst, became famous. What could he have meant by this?

Jacques Lacan (1901-1981)

It’s quite clear to most of us that sex and gender exist, isn’t it? At least they seem to come up fairly often in conversation and in the media.

Most of us still intuitively think of sex as something taking place between two people, a woman and a man. (You’ll notice that I say “most of us” and “intuitively”. That should be enough disclaimers for now). It’s something which most of us experience every day, to some extent – if not in action, then at least at some potential level (flirtation etc.) or in imagination. But does the fact that sex happens, and that it involves two and not one, necessarily imply that we are dealing with a relation?

Here’s what I think Lacan was getting at:

The modern sexual experience involves, generally speaking, two things. It involves

his perception of her

and

her perception of him.

It may seem more or less cold or detached to describe sex in these terms, but nonetheless, these are the two basic perspectives involved.

Now, these two perspectives remain separate. His perception of her can never include her perception of him, and vice versa. He can try to imagine “what it’s like for her”, but this imagined perception is not real, and he knows that it isn’t. And vice versa, naturally.

So the two lovers can make an infinite series of attempts at becoming one with the other’s experience. They can indefinitely keep on trying to break out of their respective sexual fantasies about the other, but all that each is really doing is getting more deeply entangled in a fantasy about a fantasy about a fantasy etc.

He imagines what it’s like for her. But, of course, that includes imagining what she imagines that it’s like for him – because her imagination is part of what it’s like for her. (Read that sentence over a few times )

Find that a little complicated? Well, it gets worse, because it goes on indefinitely.

He never meets with her real sexual experience; he just keeps opening the infinite chinese boxes of imagined experiences. And the same obviously goes for her, only the other way round.

Their experiences remain two; they never become one. There is no relation; only – in all vulgarity – two minds masturbating while fantasising about the other.

 

We actually see this phenomenon in Christopher Nolan’s film Inception.

It happens between Dominick Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), whose relationship history (which has taken place prior to the actual plot line of the film) involves an obsessive expedition further and further into “dreams within dreams”. Mal and Dominick work so hard on making a true common reality of their relationship, that they end up in Limbo, a dream world isolated from the rest of humanity. In Limbo they can build and rebuild the entire scenery exactly as they please, and they take care to make it a cooperative project. Thus they seem to have succeeded in breaking out of their separate existences and finding true relationship.

But Limbo, an idea borrowed from medieval cosmology, can never be a stable reality because it is, per definition, an in-between state (between Heaven and Hell, in fact). Mal continues to be haunted by the idea that their dream world is not (yet) real. So she has to keep on endlessly building and rebuilding, and thus cannot return to the real world and live out the relationship she and Dominick have built. In the end, in order to make her give up her obsession, Dominick has to plant in her mind the idea that nothing is real, and that, therefore, it doesn’t matter whether they are in Limbo or on earth as we know it.

Does all this seem a little over the top? Am I taking things too far, making something simple very complicated? Should I just relax and have fun, not worry so much?

Maybe I could do that. But why is it that sex takes up such a central position in the entire scheme of “relaxing and having fun”? Why is it that the ultimate experience, or trip, that I as a self can give to myself, is an experience that per definition involves another?

Is it so far-fetched to think that sex might be our attempt at breaking out of this one perspective from which each one of us experiences his entire life? And doesn’t it matter a great deal whether such a breaking out is real or only imaginary?

In the film, Mal comes to believe that it is just imaginary, and her ultimate reaction seems to me quite fitting.

Now, like many stories which have been told since the middle ages, the film Inception makes strong references to Dante Alighieri’s epic poem The Divine Comedy from the early 14th century. (Someone more perceptive than I had to point that out to me).

In the Comedy, Dante (who is himself a character in the narrative) descends through the various circles of Hell, which is echoed in Dominick’s descent though several levels of dreams. This will seem less far-fetched if we remember that the innermost circle of Hell is frozen – remember all that ridiculous skiing action towards the end of the film? (How boring was that, by the way?!).

Also, the fact that Dante, as well as Dominick, pays the world of Limbo a visit makes the parallel more clear. And then, last but not least, Dante’s story involves a relation between a man and a woman: namely Dante himself and his major(!!!) crush, Beatrice. Beatrice, the light of the poet’s life, becomes his guide as he ascends through the heavenly spheres towards the climax of the poem, when his love for Beatrice points him towards the even higher love:

the Love which moves the sun and the other stars.

The love between Dante and Beatrice unfolds within the larger context of the medieval cosmos, where all things, including human beings, were imagined to have their ordained positions in a universal hierarchy, decreed by the triune God of Christianity. In other words, it is a true sexual relation, because it does not merely involve two irreducibly separate perspectives. Both perspectives are swept up inside a third, greater perspective – the Gods-eye view that sustains the “great chain of being”, including the sexual relation, in its real existence. And ultimately, the interwoven double perspective of human love points towards that highest of loves, saying

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever, world without end.

I think I’ll leave us with these two visions, the modern one of Mal taking Dominick into Limbo, and the medieval one of Beatrice taking Dante up to heaven. “Long is the way, and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light”.

Oh, and a merry Christmas to all!

A Third Ode to My Love

 

my love dwells
in a fern-covered
star-circled cave
inside the wildest of gardens

silent pathless pregnancy
of birth-dense vegetation
and humid nebulae
in the primeval courts
of all that twinkles and grows

away in a grubby hole among
the starlight-sappy roots
at the bottom of nature

there my love is to be found

A Second Ode to My Love

 

my love is strange like an insect
as wings unfold from shell
to flee this room
and join the chant of dusk
through an open window

and later, at night
my love swoops down
like an overcast sky
towards me and my starving iris

 

An Ode to My Love

 

my love is the wingbeat
of a thousand days and nights
in timelapse
a perpetual rythmic shadow sweep
of feathers and sun migrating
to slowly carve an image upon
the retina of the sky