by
Octavio Paz
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The amatory feeling is an exception within that larger exception that eroticism is to sexuality. But it is an exception that appears in all societies and all periods. There is no people or civilization that does not possess poems, songs, legends or tales in which the anecdote or the plot – the myth, in the original meaning of the word – is the encounter of two persons, their mutual attraction, and the labours and hardships they must overcome to be united. Their encounter requires, in turn, two contradictory conditions: the attraction that the lovers experience must be involuntary, born of a secret and all-powerful magnetism; at the same time, it must be a choice. In love, predestination and choice, objective and subjective, fate and freedom intersect. The realm of love is a space magnetized by encounter.
This description of the five elements that make up our image of love, however superficial it may be, does seem to demonstrate love’s contradictory, paradoxical, mysterious nature. I discussed five, but they can be reduced to three: exclusivity, which is love for only one person; attraction, which is one’s fate freely accepted; the person, who is a soul and a body. But these elements cannot be separated; they exist in constant struggle and reconciliation with themselves and with others. Contrary, as though they were the planets of the strange solar system of the passions, they revolve around a single sun. This sun, too, is twofold: the couple. There is continual transmutation of each element: freedom chooses servitude, fate becomes choice, the soul is body and the body is soul. We love a mortal being as though he or she were immortal. Lope said it better: “To call what is eternal temporal.” Yes, we are mortal, we are the children of time, and no one is spared death. We know not only that we will die but that the person we love will die. We are the playthings of time and accident; sickness and old age disfigure the body and cause the soul to lose its way. But love is one of the answers that humankind has invented in order to look death in the face. Through love we steal from the time that kills us a few hours which we turn now into paradise and now into hell. In both ways time expands and ceases to be a measure. Beyond happiness or unhappiness, though it is both things, love is intensity: it does not give us eternity but life, that second in which the doors of time and space open just a crack: here is there and now is always. In love, everything is two and everything strives to be one.
Each minute is a knife blade of separation: How to trust our life to the blade that may slit our throat? The remedy lies in finding a balm that heals forever the wound inflicted upon us by time’s hours and minutes. Ever since it appeared on earth, the human being has been incomplete whether because it had been driven out of paradise or because it is a passing stage in the evolution of life. Almost from the moment of birth, humans flee from themselves. Where do they go? In endless search of themselves. A human being is never what he is but the self he seeks. Once he catches up with himself or believes that he has, again he separates himself, leaves himself behind, continues his pursuit. He is the child of time. And time is his essence and his infirmity. The cure lies only outside time. And if there is nothing or no one outside time? Then he is doomed and forced to live with the terrible truth. The balm that heals the wound of time is called religion; the knowledge that we must live for a lifetime with our wound is called philosophy.
Is there no way out? Yes, there is: at certain moments time opens just a crack and allows us to glimpse the other side. These moments are experiences of the merging of subject and object, of I am and you are, of now and forever, here and there. They are irreducible to concepts, and we can express them only through paradoxes and the images of poetry. One of these experiences is love, where sensation merges with sentiment and the two with spirit. It is the experience of complete otherness: we are outside ourselves, hurtling towards the beloved. And it is the experience of the return to our origin, to the place that does not exist in space and is our native land. The beloved is, then, both terra incognita and the house where we were born, what is unknown and what is recognized. It is helpful here to quote not a poet or mystic but a philosopher such as Hegel, the great master of oppositions and negations. In one of his juvenilia he says: “Love excludes all oppositions and hence it escapes the realm of reason … It makes objectivity null and void and hence goes beyond reflection … In love, life discovers itself in itself, devoid now of any incompleteness.” Love does away with excision. Forever? Hegel does not say, but in his youth he probably believed so. It may even be said that his entire philosophy and in particular the mission he assigns to dialectics – an illusory logic – is simply a gigantic translation of this youthful vision of love into the conceptual language of reason.
Modernity desacralized the body, and advertising has used it as a marketing tool. Each day television presents us with beautiful half-naked bodies to peddle a brand of beer, a piece of furniture, a new model of car, or women’s hosiery. Capitalism has turned Eros into an employee of Mammon. Sexual servitude is added to the debasement of the human image. Prostitution is already a vast international network that traffics in all races and ages, not excluding children, as we know. Sade had dreamed of a society with weak laws and strong passions, where the only right would be the right to pleasure, however cruel and lethal it might be. No one ever imagined that commercial dealings would supplant libertine philosophy and that pleasure would be transformed into an industrial machine. Eroticism has become a department of advertising and a branch of business. In the past, pornography and prostitution were handicrafts, so to speak; today they are an essential part of the consumer economy. It is not their existence that alarms me, but, rather, the proportions they have assumed and their nature. Now an institution, they have ceased to be transgressions.
Clarke’s words represent a widespread way of thinking, especially among scientists and engineers. I was a devoted reader of his books, which are a fascinating synthesis of science and fantasy. With pleasure and nostalgia I remember a sun-filled afternoon more than thirty years ago: I saw him sitting with a friend on the terrace of the Hotel Mount Lavinia, on the outskirts of Colombo. The sea was beating against the shore, covering the cliffs of the tiny bay with a ragged mantle of bubbling foam. I didn’t dare to say one word to him: he impressed me as being a visitor from another planet … In the novelist’s statement about a new species there reappears, hidden beneath the science, the old speculative spirit that enlivened not only philosophy but also, more frequently, the visions of the prophets and founders of religions. Science began by forcing God out of the universe; it enthroned history, embodying it in redemptive ideologies or philanthropic civilizations; today it is replacing these with the scientist-engineer who builds machines more intelligent than their creator and possessing a freedom unknown to Lucifer and his rebel host. The religious imagination conceived of a God superior to his creatures; the technological imagination has conceived of an engineer-God inferior to his inventions.
ahh this anecdote is just pretty
There is no remedy for time. Or, at least, we do not know what it is. But we must trust in the flow of time, we must live. The body ages because it is time, as does everything that exists on this earth. I am well aware that we have succeeded in prolonging life and youth. For Balzac the critical age for a woman began at thirty; today it begins at fifty. Many scientists believe that in the not too distant future it will be possible to avoid the ailments of old age. This optimistic prediction stands in contrast to what we know and see every day; poverty is increasing on more than half the planet, there are famines, and in the former Soviet Union, in the final years of the Communist regime, the rate of infant mortality rose. (One of the causes of the collapse of the Soviet empire.) But even if the optimists are right, we will continue to be subject to time. We are time and cannot escape its dominion. We can transfigure it but not deny it or destroy it. This is what the great artists, poets, philosophers, scientists and certain men of action have done. Love, too, is an answer: because it is time and made of time, love is at once consciousness of death and an attempt to make of the instant an eternity. All loves are ill-starred, because all are made of time, all are the fragile bond between two temporal creatures who know they are going to die. In all loves, even the most tragic, there is an instant of happiness that it is no exaggeration to call superhuman: it is a victory over time, a glimpse of the other side, of the there that is a here, where nothing changes and everything that is, truly is.
Youth is the time of love. But there are old young people incapable of love – not because of sexual impotence but from an aridity of soul. There are also young old people who fall in love – some are ridiculous, some pathetic and some sublime. But can we love a body that has grown old or been disfigured by disease? It is very difficult but not entirely impossible. We should remember that eroticism is singular and finds no anomaly contemptible. Aren’t there beautiful monsters? It is also true that we can go on loving a person despite the erosion of habit and daily life, or the ravages of old age and infirmity. In such cases physical attraction ceases and love is transformed. In general it turns not into pity but compassion, in the sense of sharing another’s suffering. When he was already an old man, Unamuno said: “I do not feel anything when I brush against the legs of my wife, but mine ache if hers do.” The word passion also means suffering, and in this way too it designates the sentiment of love. Love is suffering and heartache, because it is a lack and the desire to possess what we lack; in turn, it is happiness because it is possession, even though the possession lasts but a moment. The Diccionario de Autoridades records another word no longer in use today but one employed by Petrarch: compathía, which might be translated as shared suffering. It is a forceful expression of that sentiment of love transfigured by the old age or infirmity of the beloved.
No less sad than seeing the person we love grow old and die is the discovery that our lover is betraying us or has stopped loving us. Subject to time, change and death, love can also fall victim to boredom. Living together day after day, if lovers lack imagination, can bring the most intense love to an end. We have little power against the misfortunes that time has in store for every man and woman. Life is a continual risk; to live is to expose oneself. The hermit’s abstinence turns into a solitary delirium, the lovers’ flight into a cruel death. Other passions can seduce us and enthral us: some of them lofty, such as the love of God, of knowledge, or of a cause; others base, such as the love of money or power. In none of these passions does the risk inherent in life disappear. The mystic may discover that he has been pursuing an illusion; knowledge does not protect the wise man from the disappointment that all learning yields; power does not save the politician from betrayal by a friend. Glory is a frequently miscalculated goal, and oblivion can get the better of any reputation. The misfortunes of love are simply the adversities of life.
Unexpected events had brought me graveside: when I was thirty-two, my fifty-seven-year-old mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. It wasn’t genetic; no one knew why she got it. We would, the doctors said, have three to nine more years with her. Everything wobbled. This knowledge raised questions against every part of my life: was this worth it? And this? And this? I was heading for children in the suburbs with the husband I’d met at nineteen, but this life, the one that so many people want, I doubted was right for me. I was trying to find my way as a writer, but jumping from genre to genre, not working out what I most wanted to say, and not taking myself seriously enough to discover it, even. Who do you tell when you start to feel these things? Everything seemed immovable. Everything seemed impossible. And yet I knew I had to change my life.
At first, I took my freedom as a seventeen-year-old might: hard and fast and negronied and wild. I was thirty-four and I wanted so much out of this new phase of my life: intense sexual attraction; soulmate-feeling love that would force my life into new shapes; work that felt joyous like play but meaningful like religion; friendships with women that were fusional and sisterly; talk with everyone and anyone about what was worth living for; books that felt like mountains to climb; attempts at writing fiction and poetry and memoir. I wanted to create a life I would be proud of, that I could stand behind. I didn’t want to be ten years down the wrong path before I discovered once more that it was wrong.