Wuv, True Wuv

There are few moments in life when a desire is so overwhelming that self preservation and prudence are abandoned to pursue it. These are exhilarting moments and each should be feared and embraced. In modern times this desire is most often erotic love.

In the C. S. Lewis Essay "We Have No 'Right to Happiness,'" he writes, "When I was a youngster, all the progressive people were saying, "Why all this prudery? Let us treat sex just as we treat all our other impulses." I was simple-minded enough to believe they meant what they said. I have since discovered that they meant exactly the opposite. They meant that sex was to be treated as no other impulse in our nature has ever been treated by civilized people. All the others, we admit, have to be bridled. Absolute obedience to your instinct for self-preservation is what we call cowardice; to your acquisitive impulse, avarice. Even sleep must be resisted if you're a sentry. But every unkindness and breach of faith seems to be condoned provided that the object aimed at is "four bare legs in a bed."

The rest of the essay is here: http://www.sunnipath.com/library/Articles/AR00000268

Lewis argues that erotic love should actually be treated as any other desire and that our obsession with eros is causing a spiritual and moral denigration in our society. If we are allowed to act however we like in the name of love,the laws lose meaning, virtue becomes outdated and moral codes vanish. Few would argue that in the pursuit of erotic love all is permissable, but perhaps against what Lewis assumes, erotic love is better that our other desires and there is more room to bend morality for its sake than for our other desires.

In his essay Lewis compares erotic love to self-preservation, avarice, hunger and the desire for sleep, but what separates love from these other impulses is that erotic love in this sense is a communal act. Our desires tend to focus us inward and cause us to fight for our own personal needs disregarding our empathetic and communal feelings for the sake of the self. Hunger and sleep deprivation cause us to snap at others and often to be cruel. Satisfying those desires is always a selfish act. Self-preservation is obviously only concerned only with the self, but love is consumed with satisfying the self and the other. The act of turning focus outward, and recognizing a being who has the same needs and wants is the beginning of empathy. Compassion for the other follows and, so long as that love lasts, the desires of the self and the other are comingled. What one wants becomes confused with the other. The identity of the self remains itself, but in the act of perceiving being in another it is wrenched out of narcicism and into shared experience.

Without a doubt people have sex for their own satisfaction while disregarding the other person, but in any healthy lasting sexual relationship there is always some witholding of personal sexual pleasure, or even going through some discomfort to please the other. Erotic love begs for us to share it with another and that love is at the basis of the purest and simple form of community, families. To say that the roots of all our communal and shared experiences are in this erotic love may be an exaggeration, but not much of one.

Socrates once said that “the only thing I say I know is the art of eros.” For him pursuing erotic love was the same as pursuing truth and being. Whitman took this eroticism and turned it into something more literal (see song of myself, O me! O life! or many of his other writings). These men both saw that in the soul of a man overcome with erotic love there is a desire more profound and powerful than the baseness that can accompany other desires. The precious few times in my own life when I’ve felt real, erotic passion, I have felt the desire to become a better, kinder person and they have always reignited my need to learn and understand the world and myself better. That’s why I always cling to those times and continue to search for new ones.

Falling in love with a girl who isn't there

Sometimes I want to write not to express meaning to others, but to attempt to gain a clearer grasp of my emotions. Reading over some previous posts, many are difficult to understand because through the course of writing them I failed to do this, while others suffer from only beginning to understand what I want to say by the end of the post. Sometimes I'm hiding from troubling thoughts by obscuring my meaning . If this post lacks coherency or style it is because I am dealing with painful and difficult emotions might struggle to tie their chaos into something intelligible. I will not attempt to make my situation abstract or personal, I only attempt to write about my life. Here goes.

I met a girl at a sci fi convention and soon after, or perhaps during, we started dating. I adored her. Before I met her my life was manic. Since about February, when my blood was thining out for the spring I became desperate to figure out a part of my life which always seemed important to me, but only in the abstract. Sex, I had always thought, was wonderful, but sacrificing personal time and friendships for an erotic relationship was a waste. No longer. I awoke my womanizing side and headed out to the places where I could meet single people. Karoeke bars I found were often the best, but I learned to excel nearly everywhere. I became a slut. Short term dating and hopping from bed to bed is thrilling, and convincing myself that I could like a girl that I couldn't sometimes works. After the booze wore off, and I left another bed, the high was gone and only a feeling of guilt and sadness stayed.

The guilt isn't one over sexual relationships, but because I was misleading and manipulating girls who were not as intelligent as me. The sadness was lonliness and fear. To quote High Fidelity, "We were frightened of being left alone for the rest of our lives. Only people of a certain disposition are frightened of being alone for the rest of their lives at the age of 26, and we were of that disposition." I am too.

This, however, is not what I want to write about, and even now I am dancing around the subject.

By April I knew I was tired of sleeping around, but not as tired as I was of being single. It so happened that in April was the greatest singles convention I've ever seen. It was called Starfest. Laugh if you must but it's true. We met and talked all night and then one thing lead to another and we were making out outside of the hotel. Then we went to a Klingon/BSG party and ended up making out for an hour or so next to the vending machines on the fourth floor.

Sometime strange happened the next day. I woke up without the feeling of disgust. I was happy. We spent the next week texting and talking to each other and we went on a first date. She said she wanted to sing karaoke and we did. She was amazing. She was a senior studying physics at the Scool of Mines. She wanted to use that degree to teach physics. It shouldn't now surprise any reader who knows me that I would like her. Unfortunately what I also found was that she was going to Spain for the summer to begin work on her masters in physics. From late May to early August she would be studying electron disperal patterns with a Spanish physicist.

So we passed the one month we had getting to know each other. Sometimes we were good together. Sometimes we struggled with the pangs of getting to know someone with all of the unnatural expectations surrounding 'dating.' There were also moments of sheer greatness. Moments when the awkward pauses and sometimes jilted rythyms of a conversation with a near stranger, were forgotten and what showed was the underlying emotional state of our souls. The feeling that she could satisfy me like no one before her. The last night came and we stayed up all night whispering to each other. Then she left.

We could break up, we could stay together, or we could see other people while she was away. The third option is the same as the first in reality. I couldn't see myself finding anyone better, and I didn't want to forever wonder if I made a mistake.

I am unsure about things, jealous all the time, convinced in so many ways that by the end of summer I'll have just wasted three months pining away. I barely remember the way she looks. I fall asleep every night thinking about her. I wonder if we're actually a good pair or not. A month is such a short time to get to know someone and it's impossible to understand who she is in any profound way. She tends to keep her distance more than myself, but when she expresses herself it's passionate.

In the first week she sent me a song with one of her emails, and ever since we've been sending songs back and forth. Some about ourselves and some about us. These songs serve as the emotional nourishment of our relationship. They dictate how I feel about her, and I use them to prolong those emotions. I wonder if my perceptions about her are any longer tied to her true self. Since I never knew her well, and since she's been gone so long, I've become uncertain about whether she's the person I think she is, or whether she's something else and I've forced a desired set of perceptions on her.

So I pine and wait for summer to end. My desperation to figure out my lovelife has led me to limbo. I can't search for love while she hangs over my head, and I can't move forward with my relationship to her. I wait and it wears on me. The advancement of my life seems to depend on her, and she's not here. Perhaps she isn't even real, and perhaps I'm an overdramatic drama queen. I can't tell, and the story won't continue till August.

Living in a Material World

Life as an avid pop culture omnivore isn't always easy. There is something wonderful about the crisp written dialogue of movies, television and music that can't be replicated in speech. Well written conversations are wittier and more charming than what people are capable of real life. There aren't awkward pauses or clarifying questions in writing. Tv characters always talk over the laugh tracks instead of letting conversations getting derailed by a joke. Each phrase is filled with a host of sub-textual emotions, and every character's life is boiled down to a handful of scenes which contain the most dramatic moments of his life or year. Elton John doesn't waste time singing about Commuter Man, and the people at CSI are never seen doing the massive amounts of paperwork that would be required of them for all the illegal acts they perform in the name of 'justice' (I've never seen that show, but I figure a cop drama is a cop drama and CBS isn't known for it's originality in programming). Pop culture offers us fantasy and wish fulfillment, and having spent tens of thousands of hours watching, reading and listening to a wide variety of entertainment seeping through the funnel that is pop culture, I often mix up my emotional desires with those of Ted Mosby or Nicholas Hornby.

Paraphrasing the central question of High Fidelity, "which came first, what the tv told me or my emotional disposition? In the land of TV, the shows I enjoy are the shows which offer me emotional satisfaction, catharsis and characters that I adore. What follows, however, is emulation of my adored characters. It begins innocently by borrowing a catch phrase or an opinion about a banal subject, but then I perceive my entire life through the lens of a show (Most recently that show has been Community, which is a show about this very phenomena as much as anything else). Sometimes all it takes to make a brand new lens for the world is a 3 minute pop song with a perfect line or two.

This is all well and good day to day and contributes to my social life and the personae with which I meet people. It becomes a problem, however, when I am confronted with relationships which put me into a state of hyper-emotionality. The foremost of those being the chance of falling in love. No subject is treated more in pop culture than that of finding your special someone (except perhaps breaking up with that special someone). Pop music loves the feeling of falling in love with people because people love that feeling too. What pop culture does, however, is give us the impression that this person will sweep you off your feet and from that day forth you will always every moment feel that same feeling of falling in love and you will never have feelings or desires for anyone else ever because that's what true love is forever and ever. That is, of course, bullshit with a sprinkle of truth, but since it is the dominant concept in pop culture I can't help feeling like the Elephant Love Song in Moulin Rouge portrays a real emotion and one that can last forever. This is, of course, contrary to all experience. My parents have been married for over 40 years, and the love they share is nothing like anything in Moulin Rouge, yet because of my youth and influences, I feel like it should be. My love will be different and more pure. An unending erotic whirlwind that lifts me up where I belong. This attitude lends itself to having hordes of utterly unfair expectations of life and relationships. I expect them to be more like Casablanca than the dreary day to day that actually composes so much of life.

There is a reason to let my fancies slip into real life in the surprisingly many moments where life actually does emulate the feelings or events of pop culture. This moment is where the interior world of dreams and fantasy meet with the external world which so often mocks and rejects. Seizing these small victories is the only way to stay sane in this crazy world and once you know where to find them it becomes easier to recreate those moments and to continually force these fantasies onto the world.

When reality can be elevated to the level of fantasy, it becomes possible to change reality on a whim, and even though my fantasies may be as silly as a handful of songs and movies, they allow me to shape and change my fantasy world, make a dreary day into a necessary scene in the narrative and keep life interesting even if it's just for a line or two.