Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Alternating Current
Selected Poems
Convergences
Preface
VII
ONE
The Kingdoms of Pan
T WO
Eros and Psyche
28
T HREE
The Prehistory of Love
53
FOUR
The Lady and the Saint
89
FIVE
A Solar System
124
v
Contents v1
SIX
The Morning Star
163
SEVEN
The City Square and the Bedroom
188
EIGHT
Digressions on the Way to a Conclusion
215
NINE
Recapitulation: The Double Flame
253
Preface
vii
viii Preface
MEXICO CITY
May 4, 1993
The Kingdoms of Pan
the world and the self that follows sexual climax. Solar
happiness: the world smiles. For how long? The time
of a sigh: an eternity. Yes, eroticism detaches itself from
sexuality, transforms it, diverts it from its purpose of
reproduction; but this detachment is also a return. The
couple return to the sexual sea and are rocked in the
infinite, gentle movement of its waves. There they re
cover the innocence of animals. Eroticism is a rhythm:
one of its chords is separation, the other is return, the
journey back to reconciled nature. The erotic beyond is
here, and it is this very moment. All women and all
men have lived such moments; it is our share of
paradise.
This experience of a primordial reality before eroti
cism, love, and the ecstasy of contemplatives, this return
is neither an escape from death nor a denial of the
terrifying aspects of eroticism: it is an attempt to un
derstand them and integrate them into the whole. Not
an intellectual understanding but a sensual one: the wis
dom of the senses. D. H. Lawrence sought that wisdom
all his life. Shortly before his death, as a miraculous
recompense, he left in a fascinating poem the testimony
of his discovery: the return to the Great Whole is the
descent to the depths, to the underground palace of
Pluto and Persephone, the girl who each spring returns
The Kingdoms of Pan 27
0 and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and
gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and
blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the
jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as
a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when
I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used
or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under
the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as
another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask
again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes
my mountain flower and first I put my arms around
him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel
my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like
mad and yes I said yes I will Ycs.1
again: sex is the root, eroticism the stem, and love the
flower. And the fruit? The fruits of love are intangible.
This is one of love's mysteries.
Beauty, truth, and virtue are three and one; they are
facets of the same reality, the only real reality. Diotima
concludes: "He who has followed the path of love's in
itiation in the proper order will on arriving at the end
suddenly perceive a marvelous beauty, the source of all
our efforts . . . . An eternal beauty, nonengendered, in
corruptible, that neither increases nor decreases." A
beauty that is entire, one, identical to itself, that is not
made up of parts as the body is or of ratiocinations, as
is discourse. Love is the way, the ascent, toward that
beauty: it goes from the love of one body to the love of
many, then from the love of all beautiful forms to the
love of virtuous deeds, then from deeds to ideas and
from ideas to absolute beauty, which is the highest life
that can be lived, for in it "the eyes of the understand
ing commune with beauty, and man engenders neither
images nor simulacra of beauty but beautiful realities."
And this is the path of immortality.
I . James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: The Modern Library, 1942), 768.
2. Translation by Helen Lane.
3 . Although the title of the novel,The Dream of the Red Chamber, is
a beautiful one and has been hallowed by the authority of the years,
it is incorrect. Hung Lou Meng actually means Dream of Red Man
sions. The houses of the rich were called that because of the red
color of their walls; the houses of commoners were gray.
The Prehistory of Love
53
54 T H E D0 U B LE F L A M E
she loves Delphis and will seek him out, but should he
reject her, she has poisons that will kill him. And she
takes her leave of Selene (and of us): "Farewell, serene
goddess: I will endure my misfortune as I have until
now; farewell, goddess with the resplendent face, fare
well, stars that accompany your chariot in its slow
journey through the calm of night." Simaetha's love is
made of persistent desire, despair, anger, helplessness.
We are very far from Plato. Between what we desire
and what we value there is a gap: we love what we do
not value and we desire to be forever with a person
who makes us unhappy. In love, evil makes its appear
ance: it is a pernicious seduction that attracts us and
overcomes us. But which of us dares condemn
Simaetha ?
' '
" A M O R C O N S T A N T E M A S A L LA DE LA M U E R T E "
88
The Lady and the Saint 89
Pair of nightingales
that sings the whole night long,
and I with my beautiful friend
beneath the arbor in flower
until the lookout shouts
at the top of the tower:
on your feet, lovers, it's time now,
dawn is descending from the mountaintop!8
united by their passion, kiss each other for the first time,
they stopped reading, looked at each other, blushed and
paled. Then
1 23
1 24 - T H E D0 U B L E F LA M E
The lover loves the body and the soul in equal measure.
It can even be said that were it not for the attraction
of the body, the lover would be unable to love the soul
that animates it. For the lover the desired body is a
soul, and he speaks to it in a language beyond language,
a language comprehensible not through the faculty of
reason but through the body, through the skin. And the
soul is palpable: we are able to touch it; its breath cools
our eyelids or warms the nape of our neck. Everyone
in love has felt this shift of the physical into the spiritual
and vice versa. Everyone knows it with a knowledge
that rebels against reason and language. In his "Second
Anniversary," John Donne tells us:
come into this world only once and only to save our
soul. In both cases there is an opposition between soul
and body, despite the fact that Christianity has miti
gated it through the dogma of the resurrection of the
flesh and the doctrine of glorious bodies. But love is a
transgression of both the Platonic and Christian tradi
tions, for it transfers the attributes of the soul to
the body, which then ceases to be a prison. The lover
loves the body as if it were the soul and the soul as
if it were the body. Love commingles heaven and earth:
that is the great subversion. To say, "I love you for
ever," confers on an ephemeral and ever-changing
creature two divine attributes: immortality and immu
tability. The contradiction is truly tragic: the flesh un
dergoes corruption, and our days are numbered.
Nonetheless, we love. We love with body and soul, in
body and soul.
human person was the lever and the axis. When I speak
of the human person, I am not evoking an abstraction
but referring to a concrete totality. I have used the
word soul a number of times, and confess that I
have been guilty of an omission: the soul, or whatever
one chooses to call the human psyche, is not only reason
and intellect, it is also a sensibility. The soul is bodily:
sensation, which becomes emotion, sentiment, passion.
The affective element derives from the body, but it is
more than physical attraction. Sentiment and passion
are the center, the heart of the soul in love. It is as a
passion and not merely as an idea that love has been
revolutionary in the modern age. Romanticism did not
teach us to think; it taught us to feel. The crime of
modern revolutionaries has been to reduce the revolu
tionary spirit to its affective element. And the great
moral and spiritual misery of liberal democracies is
their affective insensitivity. Money was able to expro
priate eroticism because people's hearts and souls had
already dried up.
Although love continues to be the subject of
twentieth-century poets and novelists, its very heart
the concept of the person-has been wounded. The cri
sis of the idea of love, the rise of labor camps, and the
ecological threat-these are concomitant facts and all
212 - T H E D0 U B L E F L A M E
214
Digressions on the Way to a Conclusion - 215