Demonstration IV

Edward Moore (c) 2014

I.

He loves to sit and hear me sing,

Then, laughing, sports and plays with me;

Then stretches out my golden wing,

And mocks my loss of liberty.

~ William Blake

Poets agree that Life's greatest gift is Love -- of the all-embracing type. Overwhelming Joy that imprisons us, as we attempt to hold fast the one we love -- knowing it to be only for a season (if that!) ...

Such is the manner of existence the great poets have dubbed melancholy.

... if thy mistress some rich anger shows,

Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,

And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

~ Keats

If that rich anger, however, is directed at us, what then? The hand and the heart escape our attempts to hold ... to maintain something which, for us, is still lioving and palpating, like sensual flesh beneath a touch ...

No doubt: for those of us with emotions that froth and foam like hearty beer in a mug!

Philosophers have doubted Erotic Love's ability to raise us to the highest levels of Intellectual Delight.

Plato, of course, in his endlessly ironic Symposium teaches us quite a lesson. A lesson that produces a lesion of the heart.

William Cartwright, in his poem "No Platonic Love" summed up the problem thus:

I climbed from sex to soul, from soul to thought;

But thinking there to move,

Headlong I rolled from thought to soul, and then

From soul I lighted at the sex again.

For years the idealism of Platonism tormented my mind, and forced me into structures of existence which are simply not befitting a healthy young man (now old) ...

I think of Isaak Dinesen's tale, "The Old Chevalier," for some strange reason.

.....

Perhaps someone may help me remember?

Of course, I could simply re-read the tale ...

But who wants to re-read a past life?

I grew old a long time ago ... When others called me young.

The unknowing still do.

II.

I should be glad of another death.

~ T. S. Eliot

Dying is an art, as Sylvia once wrote ...

I, however, don't do it well.

I cling to the little things:

The birds outside my window in the morning,

the poems I love,

the music of Bach (played on period instruments),

and good, strong, coffee ...

.....

To die is to experience what Heidegger called "my most authentic, significant moment, my personal potentiality, which I alone must suffer."

But why alone? Does no one care sufficiently about the stranger in our midst?

When I held my ex-wife close at night, and called her silly pet names, I never thought (for a moment!) that she would ever experience my death.

But she did; for she brought it about.

Alone now I pine, knowing there is no such a thing as a human dove ...