BEARINGS OF LOVE
May 26, 2016

Hallucination of interiority, sovereign of rage and complaint, master of habit and personhood, where does your love go?

Where does your love go, your bizarre signals of desire and distress?

Where does your love go—with life or with death? Emerging to serve the purpose of rest, or to tumble endlessly in dread of no requital?

(For Andre Breton, only requited love could fuse and reconcile essence and existence; it alone conditions us for a “total magnetization” and “turns the mind into an eternally welling spring, unalterable and always lively.” Such love lives from one principle: sensual pleasure and intellectual activity, all that can be expected from within and without, are only ever reconciled in a single being, in a single instant that one can only surrender to as in a trance, seizing thus the eternal. Such was the only alternative to a life devoid of meaning in a denatured world: to seek for this “state of grace” in which perception and visualization are one, an ecstasy beyond the distinction between subjective and objective in which I and the other I love make up an indestructible unit of light. It is here that you take me back to my most spiritual source: our tingling embrace, edging beyond consciousness, where we could conceive, from all the sorrow we’d felt, a reason for the accidents of existence and it seemed, if only for our ‘instant’ together, that there might be a justification for creation after all and that, in some not-unimportant way, our lives and our moment not only participated in it but sealed its truth and delivered on its promise directly, in the heart of a world otherwise vile and senseless.)

O beloved others I’ve so often united with beyond the bounds of time and space, all those who have turned my way, extending their touch and thought and merging their words with mine in an event of seizure without proportions, whoever has come this way and called me out—where are we now? To what have we come? Who else shall get lost in our reflectionless gaze?

(A white butterfly unfolds its torn wings, exposing the soot black design to the fire’s glare, and instantly it metamorphoses into a smoke trail escaping under the street lamp, into the nothingness of night; far above, high on the proud weeping willow’s branch, sits a young cardinal who catches the peculiar scent of that trail and twists his head and hops here and there to discern it until he decides to rebel against it all, taking flight madly just then and refusing to land anywhere for years of miles, until one day he comes by a similar willow and a similar flame and, catching sight of himself inwardly for the first time, realizes he too is a white butterfly prepared to unfold its untorn wings, and just as he approaches the light, whimsically and enthralled, he metamorphoses…)

Irreparable frivolity of this craving for rebound and relay: in love one says anything for a fix, the chest beats like a locomotive with the unified force of freedom and affection; action that leads to uncertain consequences cannot be avoided, the legs uncrumple and dance, the mouth spits out its silent resignation and demands the saving word of possibility, everything rushes into orbit around the obscure inkling of a coming frisson that will shiver the agent down to perfect relation, to the passionate patience of nonsense and playfulness and in that strengthened against every obstacle with the promise of the encounter shared, in adoration of a time without horizons, revoking every inscription and summoning the one necessary thing: love, singular dive of nothing, faith finding its refuge in its leap—a confidence unbroken, unique and repeating until all hope has been rewon for life’s cause and the dead rise in us to sing out our own hymn, this frivolous, irreparable expression of our one being.

Where will my love go then? Into the funeral march or the baptismal procession? Calmly returning you to the peace that surpasses all effort, or agitating you to reach with utmost urgency for the limits of the possible?

Where will my love go, with its contradiction and awkwardness, its naivety and underdevelopment, its irreverence and irresponsibility?

Obsessed by the indefatigable exterior, called out by intangible timbres and textures, exhibited fully vulnerably to the other’s magic act, fumbling decisions and fabricating commitments, dispossessed servant of a self whose intention wholly escapes it, who remains in adoration of you and only you, stranded on the shore of your infinity, sparkling incommensurably—tell me, tell me where, where shall our love go?