The Consolation of Pessimism

Without someone to love this world is a desert.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft

Many loves but no one great Love. Such is the theme of many great (and not-so-great) poems and novels. The imagined or idealized beloved, such as we find in Machen's novel The Hill of Dreams, or in Richard Crashaw's poem Wishes, subtitled "To His (Supposed) Mistress," demonstrate that the mind is the realm of glorious fulfillment, while the 'real' world is the realm of disappointment, frustration, and finally -- despair. Crashaw's poem ends on this poignant note:

Let her full glory,

My fancies, fly before ye;

Be ye my fictions, but her story.

The best of these types of works leave us with a sense of introspective -- and not unpleasant -- sadness; what the older writers called melancholy. The worst leave us despising the writer as a pathetic sap. Yet they point to a universal experience: that of frustrated idealism -- and it is precisely this which produces the pessimist.

The pessimist despises the world (and for the most part, the people in it) because it exists as it is, not as it ought to be. Daily doses of annoyance, disappointment, and occasionally heartbreak lead the pessimist to resign him or herself to the sad fact that the beauteous mind-wrought realm is nowhere to be found. In so-called love, when I give myself to my partner, telling her things I would tell no one else, sharing myself body and "soul" -- when I do this, I am expecting a sort of eternal state of devotion, of shared existence. When the thing falls apart -- and it always does -- nothing is left but what Milton called "Myself, my sepulcher, a moving grave."

The question, then, is: Why persist in misery? in a walking death? One could easily speak of hope and quote Pope's annoying line about that pointless emotion springing eternal, etc. ... I don't believe in hope. One could also speak of the need for human beings to work together for a better world. However, we are all too steeped in our own self-centered misery and false hope to do so. Schopenhauer wrote, in one of his essays, that anyone, at any time, can find someone in a worse state than themselves. But then, he asks rhetorically, "What does this tell us about the state of the whole (of humanity)?" There is no consolation in simply observing the collective misery of human beings. The pessimist must seek consolation elsewhere.

I find my consolation in the fact that there is no hope, and that those who permit themselves to hope are simply sailing blindly towards temporary bliss, perhaps, but certainly to final, absolute destruction. And I do not mean the grave, but the destruction of all joy, however temporary. I have reached a point where I don't seek even petty loves anymore ... I have given up. My consolation lies in the fact that this is the end-point of life, that the sun is setting, and peace will arrive, sooner rather than later.

This does not mean that I am made of stone, and cannot find some joy, or at least quiet admiration, in watching a sunset or walking along the banks of a placid lake. Nor does it mean that I have ceased to enjoy the embraces of a woman. Quite the contrary. It is the fleeting nature of these things that lends them their melancholy poignancy. Every day is not the same; new things are arising all the time, to capture my imagination. In moments of exquisite loss of self, when a new idea is presented to me, or I meet some interesting person, I forget the evanescence of life and its all-too-brief glories. When I drink, I imagine that my bliss will last forever. Of course, it doesn't. In my occasional bouts of religious devotion -- the height of contradiction, as I am, at heart, an atheist -- I am forced to engage in existential or phenomenological interpretations of my experience, when in fact the devotion is merely an outlet for pent-up emotion.

I believe that emotion rules our lives, that rational thought is an ideal to which none (or perhaps very few) has ever lived up to ... Controlled sorrow is the one ruling emotion of everyone's life: the introspective person admits it, while the extraverted one simply, well, persists in his optimistic engagement with this charnel-house of a world. To know that one is doomed to sorrow is the first step on the road to freedom. When one ceases to place faith in anything but the fading light of sunset, then one has gained liberation from the sunlit world of the damned optimist and his ever-fluctuating hopes and dreams.

Memorial to Marilynn

Edward Moore (c) 2014

Ptolemy's planets, playing fast and loose,

Foretell the wisdom of Copernicus.

Dante calls Primum Mobile, the First Cause:

Love that moves the world and the other stars.

~ Vernon Watkins

I.

Sleep arrives in many ways ... its sources manifold, some peaceful, others terrifying ... The direct moment is the nightmare -- that is a promise: everything, it tells you, has been erased, you are starting over! But then you open your eyes to the pale glow of an early morning room, alone, no one to hold, to tickle, to nuzzle, to love.

II.

Do we ever know what we are? I mean that in a utilitarian sense: How am I capable of being a successful human being? Answer: I am not. My face meets me each day, and it ages, only in the eyes. She aged in her soul. My soul is damaged, ravaged, corrupted, taken captive by the sapping monsters of a dream-life ... I never expected that I would love another human being ... So fucking much.

... I never expected to compare all to Her. The ceiling fan that makes my hair messy ... that makes my beer stale ... So I take some Klonopin ... Must sleep. But no Tinder-Box ... Lonliness cannot be assuaged by drugs, no matter how strong.

There were three: a slut, a self-righteous Mother, and a rock-n-roll monster who wanted to fuck behind a diner in a bad part of Philly. I did it all. Felt like shit, and rolled into a gin-soaked bed at 4:00 AM, weeping over my Loss.

III.

Glory! Oh, the shine of eyes, the glint of a smile ... her pretty toes ... smiles real and feigned ... I had a life with her!!! ...

Whatever powers hold sway in the realms above ... whatever emotions echo and reach to the uttermost ends of human worth ... Let me know a bit of them!

... When the sun sets and the melancholy sets in, and I want her voice, whatever is out there, let her know that I do not just love her ... I think of her, daily, and she has apotheosized into an Aeon of my personal Intellectual space.

Direct speech:

Marilynn, you are the Beauty, the Mind, to which I wanted to connect myself, irrrevocably.

I am broken, a fragment ... a shard ... but there is something left ... a little thing ...

A runt of a kitten struggles to follow his mom, and I give him a hand ... Next thing I know, I have a new pet.

No matter how many pieces of my heart I have to pick up, there is a heart left, and it shows.

I hate that you are missing it.

As I miss you.

My Love.

Stanzas to April

Time and again, my feelings let me know

You and I were meant to walk ...

I like paths that are crooked, difficult, filled with no work of human hands, no destiny but what my imagination crafts, demiurge-like ...

You love the paths that are serene, noble, filled with human experience and effort, the love of Nature's brute force, the joy of experience ... the new, the adventurous, the growing ...

How different we are, yet so drawn.

A sweet brief kiss was enough to remind me that I can easily fall into your gentle grasp ... that I can find no fault with you, ever ... that of all the words and deeds that block connection, nothing can possibly separate me from you.

The lovely curls and the brown daring eyes and the smirky smile that makes me shudder with delight at what I know (?) will never come ... the pretty hand on the cup of tea ... the giggle over something I didn't quite get ... wet streets at night, alone, thinking of you ... a cold bed where your form resides, embraced already, and never, yet the hope ... Shit in one hand and hope in the other and watch which one fills up fastest ... Yet I hope and replace nothing with a dream, at least a notion, an image, a drive in a car ... I brought you a little present, all I could afford, and you didn't kiss me ...

I don't mind. Just don't tell me that you don't feel something ... maybe not love, but a yearning ...

To hold you, just for a moment. Your breath, your sweetness, your Life ...

Everything about you ...

Just for a moment

Complaint to Intellectual Beauty

Edward Moore (c) 2014

God is a concept, by which we measure our pain

~ John Lennon

The heart of the atom with electrons: what is humanity in this cosmos? For him, the last

~ Robinson Jeffers

I.

Minds never connect ... always an obstacle ... Minds run rampant, wild, rigid in their ideas, variable in their notions, exempt from criticism because we just do not criticize anymore.

Heartsick at these demons of slavish love, greasy children in tow, using the most abominable grammar and pretending that this glorious Earth that feeds us all was forced into being only for them! ... Tired to the depth of my slowly decaying being at the track-marked teenagers who never discovered the equivocal beauty of the bottle ... Tired and sore over the men who sleep, drug, fuck, and sap the souls of everyone but themselves ... Tired and complacent at my own lack of desire to change any goddamned thing ...

Awake! at the sound of my own voice creeping in ... Statement to the contrary, from Shelley himself:

I vowed that I would dedicate my powers

To thee and thine -- have I not kept the vow?

~ Shelley, Hymn to Intellectual Beauty

I vowed, so long ago, to devote my life to that which I thought (and now know!) was being stripped from me: my love of Beauty, my idealism, my belief that AGAPH OUDEPOTE PIPTEI (1 Corinthians 13:8) ... my devotion to a woman for whom my entire essence rallied -- only to be defeated, at the end ... Only I did not recognize the end when it came ... such was the source of my sorrow, my self-loathing, defeat ...

II.

But a sunrise on a day with no demands ...a spirited romp into a bad part of town ... a kissing of the toes of a lovely female drummer of a punk band after a long & sweaty concert ... a howling and dismal descent into a bottle of bourbon, to rise again, pistol in hand, awaiting all comers ... Making the name known ... being the one who ... who .... who ...

Only to wake up and say, in a frothy voice: This is not me! To remove the clip, drop the piece, walk, walk, walk ... walk ... to a place of security. ???

No more horse. Freud likened sexual desire to an unruly horse, which one must control. I think of a poem by Jeffers, "The Roan Stallion" ...

III.

I want to be the horse.

IV.

Beauty is momentary in the mind, but it lasts a long damned time in the loins.

Overpopulation, ignorance, dances of death, foul music with no tonal center, escapes that cost more than they're worth ... broken promises that were made at diners at 2:00 AM after a night of feasting on ... Lordship over the vast landscape of life that one perceives when young ... Concerts that bring delight, and others that bring nausea and contact high: difference between Perlman playing Beethoven and Page & Plant ...

The mind is indeed its own place, and makes of life what it will. My complaint is simply this:

I IMAGINE A LIFE THAT I KNOW TO BE IMPOSSIBLE, AND YET I STILL MUST LIVE.

Suicide, of course, is for the courageous.

I am a coward.

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 ...

Demonstration I

Edward Moore (c) 2014

Revenge is her motive.

~ Beowulf

I.

Talk of a new life

Conceals apathy

Talk of feelings

Costs money

Watching a bold face

Smile across table

Knowing all the time

That she will demur

When the stark face is shown

A capacity

For evil in which

You ignorantly

Disblieve ...

Then!

Her fingers tighten round my throat

As I recall all the past

I make it a ceremony

Fools like me don't deserve to live.

II.

Forgiveness: a Christian virtue.

She is a barbarian

Ready to cleave spleens and skulls

And make art out of my suff'ring

Does she suffer?

Of course not.

III.

You smile at your spermatic

LOGOS

And ignore love as it works

Intently upon your deadened

Mind.

IV.

Partakers of the repast

They hailed him as the best of men

The fall of their lord cut them

To the quick

They cried

Knowing his love was lost

To the grave

Unburdened was his soul.

.....

edhwyrft

Klonopin, Beer, and a Big Raspy Brrrr of Lip Music (To Thee & Thine)

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.