When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of space of which I am ignorant, and which knows me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there, why now rather than then.
~ Blaise Pascal
Sing we for love and idleness,
Naught else is worth the having.
Though I have been in many a land,
There is naught else in living.
And I would rather have my sweet,
Though rose-leaves die of grieving,
Than do high deeds in Hungary
To pass all men's believing.
~ Ezra Pound, An Immorality
I.
There is no salvation in hope; it is an empty style of living which renders the existent mere flesh on the bone, waiting on others, or on some event(s), to inject meaning into the meaningless.
Socrates said "the unexamined life is not worth living." I say, the solitary life is not worth reflecting upon ... Art does not come from a lonely individual in his private chamber, but rather from a walker, a thinker ... a lover.
To wonder why I am in the here-and-now, rather than elsewhere, is to avoid the challenge of forcing meaning out of the void of "thrown" existence, or what the German existentialists called Geworfenheit. I am here to create and to love: that is the only "truth."
The beauty of the beloved, and the clear spectacle of her presence -- no specter! -- is the reality ... the lips that the nihilist kisses and is forced to say, "I refute it thus!": the emptiness of absurd existence, now filled with the truth of Beauty, which is "all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know" (Keats).
The gnwsiV that rose up from the abyss, or descended like a coiling snake upon brute unfeeling matter ... The knowledge that returned from a long exile, to re-discover ousia the way the prince re-discovered himself in the Hymn of the Pearl, for example ... That knowledge born of exhaustion and longing, working together to lighten the far edges of an aborted universe, and renew the seemingly lost hupostasis ... Such was the love of Sophia for her accidental offspring, in Sethian Gnostic myth. And it is the love that causes specters to dissolve.
Sidney said that poets gild nature with gold. Lovers lighten the dark spaces, and reveal themselves to that which never sets, as sage Heraclitus once said ... Nature may die so long as the legacy remains ... the light, the gold, the monuments of our own magnificence.
II.
Warm pastoral! Idle contentment after demiuirgic endeavor -- such is the threshold of renewed existence!
When light falters at the end of day, shadows lengthen, bringing that oft-sung melancholy that is more than meaning: it is promise ... for to feel the feathery touch of this world, which we call emotion, is to find ourselves remaining, for a while, still -- and knowing that self is not all there is.
There will be time, there will be time, to embrace a future that is all hope ... It will not bring salvation but the knowledge that the here-and-now is the ground of our being, the 'upokeimenon that permits us to turn metaphysical when brute existence begins to frighten us ... or else to produce "Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears" (Wordsworth).
The fear of death, the crisis of the absurd, the angst that makes life seem like a pointless gesture ... or rather, the realization that life without love, creation, and infinite yearning -- a decision! -- is the cause of angst ... The recoiling from the other ... the retiring of self into private contemplative quarters where art languishes, and with it -- Life ... the motivation to rebel out of a frustrated sense of creative impotency ... the sabotaging of the Good, True, and Beautiful for the sake of a power that is not world-historical but pointless and draining ...
A future there will be, and to it we must answer. Indeed, it is our self that we will be answering to ...
Have you guess'd you yourself would not continue?
Have you dreaded these earth-beetles?
Have you fear'd the future would be nothing to you?
~ Walt Whitman, To Think of Time
Crippling fear of the future is the death of all art and love ... The ancient Stoics, for example, with their theory of eternal recurrence and terrifying ekpurosis, did their best to banish that fear, but it was at the expense of the moral development of the person. Ethics, meaning civic responsibility, may have flourished ... But how often did a Stoic man say to his beloved agape sou? I LOVE YOU.
III.
Hustle and bustle all around ... but two at table ... a pair of brown eyes by dark ringlets framed ... of the softest hair ... The world did not shake, my heart did not pound, but a peace settled upon me as our eyes met. 'Twas the peace of contentment ... No matter what was to come, the immortal gods smiled upon that moment, and it would have been ingratitude of the grossest kind to expect more ... yet more did come ... and shall -- I pray! -- continue ...
All measure, and all language, I should pass
Should I tell what a miracle she was.
~ John Donne, The Relic
Fine metaphysical Donne! Nothing is done ... I shall amend your lines by writing WHAT A MIRACLE SHE IS!
Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves' eyes.
~ Song of Solomon 1:15 (KJV)
