Dr. Moore
(c) 2014
I.
Tired as I am
Afraid to seek newer worlds
Lest they betray me as the coward
That I am
Not really a coward, just a dissatisfied tyrant
We know
When Dante found himself at the tail-end of hell
When Virgil recommended him to Beatrice
Such things hold no voice in the loud world of our lives
We are alone
~ Edward Moore
Many people claim to love a resounding success story. But what the majority of our sadistic fellows really enjoy is a pitiful downfall from dizzying heights of success and/or happiness (the two not always being concomitant, but that's another topic). When I told my best friend recently about an old love that had (so I thought) come back into my life, he said, "Damn! That's awesome. Let's go grab a beer." However, when the thing fell apart, when the ship went down, my friend was all ears; he couldn't wait to hear all the details of my shattered emotions, my disappointed hopes, my complete loss of confidence in my ability to judge those inscrutable 'signs' that set so many lovers adrift in a sea of pseudo-amorous logoi. I say pseudo-amorous because this lady rightly pointed out that I was, so to speak, in love with an earlier version of her -- of about twenty years earlier. No amount of sound reasoning can allay the onset of violent emotion; no level of insight is capable of kicking the rational principle in our soul into high gear ...
Idealized woman is as old as Homer. In Dante's Commedia, Beatrice was the very pinnacle of femininity deified; the lure of the sexual was entirely absent, for she was (to Dante) a being beyond his ability to possess. Eve, in Milton's unequaled masterpiece Paradise Lost is, besides Satan, the most human; she is, however, overtly sexual (especially in Milton's description of her luscious untamed hair) -- and when she drops the little crown of flowers that Adam made for her, we feel our hearts go out to the poor adoring sod ... and we witness, in the finest poetry ever written, the shattering of the heart that lost or irrevocably altered love can cause ...
Yet at the end of Milton's poem, Adam and Eve walk, hand-in-hand, out into the barren world, where they must endure, together. And we know the rest.
But a question that struck me the first time I read Paradise Lost was: Do Adam and Eve ever recapture anything, even a flitting ghost of a symbol, of their paradisaical love? Genesis, of course, is no help. Milton, as only the greatest of poets do, leaves us to our own imaginings ...
Of course, in the Septuagint translation, we get (in Gen 4:25) the phrase sperma heteron in reference to Seth. The Gnostics made much of this, since heteros can mean "other" or "different," but also "alien," in the sense of absolute other. Sethian Gnosticism owes much to this passage. Our modern sensibilities, which lead us to wonder just how much Adam and Eve loved each other, simply get left to the whirling dust of ages past.
The 'success' of the great epic comes much, much later, with the advent of Christ and His Passion, etc. ... But at the level of merely human life (by which I mean the lives of those of us who seek a warm body to embrace at night, with a mind capable of enduring a bit of Orff's Carmina Burana before the final drooling snuggle of slumber) there is little edification in the Genesis narative.1
A retreat, comforting as it is, into past literature(s), sometimes sets the pained soul at ease, knowing through echoes from the past that others have (if not actually experienced) at least imagined the sufferings that we endure on this very day. Alone.
Sometimes, however, when a hurt, a lacertation, an emotional scourging, is too great to bear, we blacken a pure white screen with words meant for someone we know will never read them.
II.
Serene will be our days and bright,
And happy will our nature be,
When love is an unerring light,
And joy its own security.
~ William Wordsworth
In Alcoholics Anonymous the "Serenity Prayer" is said, constantly. It irritates me to no end. The refrain from The Beatles' song "Across the Universe" ("Nothing's gonna change my world") is far more fitting for lost souls, languishing amidst a beauty they cannot possess. 'Accept the things I cannot change'!!! Bullshit. I then become a machine, processing "life on life's terms" (another favorite saying of those cultish barbaroi) without any 'input' of my own, other than mute acceptance and an impotent humility that turns me into a uniformed officer of the Court of Sobriety. So what then?
Love lost, denied, or given briefly and then taken away ... These are the worst punishments this pathetic life has to offer, especially the latter. Love is no "unerring light," it is an obligation, one that allows the other to make demands upon the weaker partner, by whom I mean, the one who is most in love. Equality, there is none; companionship means nothing more than sharing material burdens. Sex is a relief from stress, not a commingling of two bodies sharing one soul. The beloved has an ethical responsibility to the lover: not to destroy, dishearten, nor even to disappoint. Love raises us up from the level of beasts. But all around me, I see just that: ugly, ignorant, stunted abortions. I severely insulted one of them today, dug deep and even threatened violence ... And I am happy about it!
.....
Happy marriages are simply the result of years of mutual acculturation. How well do I know the one with whom I share my body? A ticklish spot here, a cute little dimple there ... But what of the soul?
Joy is nothing but a myth dreamed up by miserable old folks watching their grandchildren play, and pretending that these brats will grow up to change the world, for the better. Only the leg- and arm-bearing spermata do not. They carry guns and wear uniforms that displace their personality with ideological symbolism, of which most of them know nothing. If I see a yellow ribbon on your SUV, or a "Support Our Troops" bumper sticker, I'm going to cause my old friend the red to flow ...
Great job, you breeders. You've filled the world with sacks of piss and shit, with intellect occupied by sports, vehicles, and bad music ... oh, and gadgets. Let us not forget gadgets.
Security? In the depths of my own mind, especially after some booze and pills.
III.
Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in his hand
Who saith, 'A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be
afraid!'
~ Robert Browning
My ex-wife once told me of a vision she had of the two of us, walking hand-in-hand along the path of eternity. But some drunken ramblings of mine, some blackouts, a bit of the old spitter-spatter, caused her to abandon me, as so many others have done since then.
But God listens. And some time ago, in the deepest despair I have ever known, I said a prayer, in which I handed myself over to Him. I recanted almost immediately. Sincerity, however, is powerful. God doesn't want fearful beings for His world. He wants courageous, self-accepting, loving, idealizing, persistent, intellectual, soft and gentle, compassionate, humorous, lovers of this world ... the glory of which will never pass away. For our memories are eternal. This coming from a chronic alcoholic, who should be dead by now. Thank my Lord that I am typing right now, as angry as I am at ...
She knows.
Notes:
1. Unless one makes the intellectual adventure into Harold Bloom's and David Rosenberg's The Book of J (New York: Grove Weidenfeld 1990). Rosenberg's translation/rendering of Gen 4:28: "Now Adam still knew his wife in the flesh; she bore a son, called him Seth -- [and in the voice of Eve] 'God has settled another seed in me ...'." (p. 68). That, to me, is indescribably beautiful.
