measure of love – response from Robert

For Hannah,

 

I stopped at “being in Love”, then wavered between “we love” and “we are in love” and wondered of the the difference in relation to the One.

“How might it be spoken so that it is not at odds with itself?” … I arrived at the place, “at odds with itself” … this is the question of uniqueness and One again … no ?  What is it to name love ? Is it to make our representation of it coincide with the world itself ? It is love … there is love, … etc. Or do we try to name ourselves constantly ‘in love’  by making the representation of the world coincide with what we tell others.  I guess what I am trying to get at is that before naming things, we are caught in trying to name ourselves.  Is the problem augustine has ? (he wants to constantly hand naming over to someone naming someone else: god names us, for example)  But is the failure to name ourselves in language what requires or is the condition of love ( a bit like a child being read a night time story before they fade into sleep … ) Does this gap, this passage from speaking of things to “being in love” introduce something that we are constantly calling art ?  That
the passage from a mere referential relation to reality to the ACT of love, is constantly “odd’ in so far as it opens us to a difference of having to refer, but not knowing what we are referring to.  Is this the lack … we have been going around and working with: ONE and LACK ?  What is the mode of working with this ?  Perhaps already to call it One and Other ?

Well, this enough … for the moment,

Robert

measure of love : from vermillion notebook with chord

Do we believe that love is material, and that a piece, cut from the whole, and wrapped around the subject of our longing leaves an original gross amount diminished?  Are the remnants of this love, once the fairest share is allocated a place, only scraps of less integrity which cannot provide the warmth of the greater mantle?  Or is love much like the shattered mirror, whose individual shards reflect the world with equal potency as its full measure?

 

If love cannot be compromised or restrained except through our own systems of accounting, what name will it take such that any amount we impose will be equal to zero or infinity?

 

Is love chronic, or contiguous to time?  We say it dies, or fades, or flourishes.  As if it has a will and a vitality of its very own.  We say it unfolds and perseveres.  That it bites.  That it hurts.  Love can be lost, as well as found.  It can be tragic and true.  These words are ways before me, like the dips and valleys of a crater ripped into the earth by one massive impact with love, and I might only wander the ravaged site of the ancient thrust.

 

Is an ACT of love, one of its various states?  Does it pass through an act into an object?  Is love much like the self, in that it demands to be acknowledged through identification with an Other?  Does it exist in One? Must there be two or more for it to be manifest?  When we are IN love, where have we found our selves?  Are we IN love or is LOVE IN US?  Does it transcend the very thought of containment either way, such as Augstine’s God?

 

How might love be spoken so that it is not at odds with itself?  How can love even the score?

A White Stone Day : : for Robert : : from H.

Free Associations from Thursday, 19 June, 2008

 

“A White Stone Day”

albo lapillo notare diem – in Latin

I recall this phrase distinctly from the personal diary of Charles Dodgson a.k.a. Lewis Carroll.  He wrote it plainly in his journal the very day he met young Alice Liddell and took a photograph [the first] of her and her siblings in the courtyard of Christ Church, Oxford, where he was a young mathematics professor. “Mark this day, Oh Annalist, with a White Stone” This was his way of “indicating a day which had given him great personal pleasure“.  Perhaps writing this phrase was also Dodgson’s way of marking an event that for him, evoked the future perfect – he knew when he snapped his photograph – even before it was developed – that this chance meeting with the little girl of six or seven years,  [will have had an extraordinary and marvelous meaning].  (that’s my interpretation) I hadn’t heard of the expression ‘white stone day’ prior to that very encounter with it in the diary.   It struck me as fundamentally romantic, and exceptionally perceptive; another reason to love the writer.   I do not yet know where this expression originated.  But it has denoted an important and misunderstood  l o v e for me, for sometime now…. 

 

However,

 

Today when you mentioned “white letters”, a vague memory of the white stone day cropped up.   I had heard you say these words “white letters” on one other occasion when describing a conversation you had had with Giordano – something you suggested to him about reading between the black letters….and how difficult it could be as a parent saying things like this which might contradict his lessons at school.  I think perhaps I associated “white letters” with your son’s education, and then thought of Carroll, and Alice, at Oxford…..something like this….

 

In any case, the “white letters” you spoke about, somehow evoke the idea of the secret marker, or at least, an invisible marker, which brings me back to a white stone day….i didn’t know this until today when i researched it – that there is a very relevant passage in christian scripture which is based on a white stone. Here is a brief excerpt that illustrates what I am now referring to:

“To him that overcometh will I give of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it” (Rev 2:17).

In Revelation, a symbolic record of John’s initiation, the white stone is the new, pure, inner psychological vehicle in the person which the spirit within him is enabled to acquire and work through when the victory in initiation has been won; and the new name signifies the new self which has thus become manifest in him.

Given all of this, it is interesting, a white stone – with a name no one will know except the receiver – it seems at first glance, something very singular is acknowledged in this object/sign.  Also interesting that if we were looking at ancient text, the area of a page you call the “white letters” would actually be “white stone” – say on a tablet for example. It also reminds me of the white eraser I gave you as a gift, which was in the shape of a stone.  The object to me, and I assumed to you too – was a play on the idea of a sign, since it was marked by both the word and the picture for “bird”, but the object itself was something entirely different.  And as a marker of our time together, it neither represented an eraser, or a bird, but something far more singular.  ????

 

For Now.

eroticism of interpretation

 flower of darkness by nobuyoshi araki

 

. . . 

text by anna kingsford:

Behold the FIG-TREE, and learn her parable. When the branch thereof shall become tender, and her buds appear, know that the day of God is upon you.

The fig is the similitude of the matrix, containing inward buds, bearing blossoms on its placenta, and bringing forth fruit in darkness. It is the cup of life, and its flesh is the seed-ground of new births.

The stems of the fig-tree run with milk: her leaves are as human hands, like the leaves of her brother the vine.

Look for that tree which alone of all trees bears a fruit blossoming interiorly, in concealment, and thou shalt discover the fig.

Look for the sufficient meaning of the manifest universe and of the written Word, and thou shalt find only their mystical sense.

Cover the nakedness of matter and of nature with the fig-leaf; and thou hast hidden all their shame. For the fig is the interpreter.

So when the hour of interpretation comes, and the fig-tree puts forth her buds, know that the time of the end and the dawning of the new day are at hand,–”even at the doors.”

:::: augustine ::: from robert :::

From Augustine’s  On Christian Doctrine I,iv,4:

I am translating jouissance by ‘enjoying’ .

” To enjoy (jouir) is to cling to it (the thing) with love for its own 
sake. To use something, however, is to employ it in obtaining
that which you love, provided that it is worthy of love”

“It is to be asked whether man is to be loved by man for his own sake 
or for the sake of something else. If for his own sake, we enjoy him; 
if for the sake of something else, we use him. But I think that man is 
to be loved for the sake of something else. In that which is to be 
loved for its own sake the blessed life resides; and if we do not have 
it for the present, hope for it now consoles us. But “cursed be the man 
that trusteth in man” [Jer:15]. But no one ought to enjoy himself 
either, if you observe the matter closely, because he should not love 
himself on account of himself but on account of Him who is to be 
enjoyed [I xxii,20-21]

Note: does it follows for Augustine that only the thing that is 
absolutely not a sign (because it is the object of enjoyment par 
excellance) is God.  Is this not the ultimate notion of sign and 
meaning, in our culture today ?  it imparts a coloration of the divine 
to every ultimate signified = something that is signified without 
signifying anything in turn = the presence of an absence.

where am i

 

among other things that grew out of your speaking of clock time and the field of jouissance, is the memory of a suffering poet, who, through the experience of non-time, came to know {further on in this same text} that l o v e was his only truth…

 

. . . 

 

from de profundis - oscar wilde

Suffering is one long moment.  We cannot divide it by seasons.  We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return.  With us time itself does not progress.  It revolves.  It seems to circle around one centre of pain.  The paralysing immobility of a life, every circumstance of which is regulated after an unchangeable pattern, so that we eat and drink and walk and lie down and pray, or kneel at least for prayer, according to the inflexible laws of an iron formula: this immobile quality, that makes each dreadful day in the very minutest detail like its brother, seems to communicate itself to those external forces the very essence of whose existence is ceaseless change.  Of seedtime or harvest, of the reapers bending over the corn, or the grape gatherers threading through the vines, of the grass in the orchard made white with    b r o k e n    b l o s s o m s , or strewn with fallen fruit, we know nothing, and can know nothing.  For us there is only one season, the season of Sorrow.  The very sun and moon seem taken from us.  Outside, the day may be blue and gold, but the light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled glass of the small iron barred window beneath which one sits is grey and niggard.  It is always twilight in one’s cell, as it is always midnight in one’s heart.  And in the sphere of thought, no less than in the sphere of time, motion is no more.”

love & red skies

 

“Like a red morn that ever yet betokened, Wreck to the seaman, tempest to the field, Sorrow to the shepherds, woe unto the birds, Gusts and foul flaws to herdmen and to herds.”

- shakespeare in v e n u s & adonis

. . . . . . .

blossom’s mirror

fellatious murmurs

the cause which salivates

giving rise to unscrupulous delightful pleasures

pure hunger

. . .

a dedicated watchman in his dedicated watchtower

scouring the sea for divine delicacy

darkness pours as words into his gullet with rectified gains

digesting letters from a catch fresh from the netting of his eyes

. . .

to     s l e e p - 

this devotional framework, a fraternity, a social setting too cunningly devised in the absence of my thoughts

to     w a k e - 

to have been where needless dim light, like halos – corner every emotional rivot, and chew on the grass of my own fluids

to     d e m a n d -

a corporate sentimentality bound to spirits of the past

to     t a k e  a s  t r u t h - 

to love undyingly and to make wonders and motions of incomprehensible magnitude for the magnificence of the doing.  shipping soft, sensual signals into the porthole of his      i   r i s e s. . . . 

 

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

time is a  t e a r