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Love
Love
My body is built for love
Hands tongue thighs
For love only love
You who are closest
Never fall close enough
I would press my heart into yours
So I will talk philosophy
Chop and tie ruthless definitions
And dose my heart into drops
I will give you always
An ounce more than you give me
I am deluge
I could drown you
The love that knits flesh to my bone
Skin unto skin, nerve unto nerve
The yearning damming urge of love
Like atom bound to atom
---No! I withhold that from you.
I will shine a little, like the sun upon the moon
My shining I
Will gather for brains clouds and thunderbursts
To filter the full
Lightning tips to carve out books
forbidden to your eyes
I’m honored to die unread.
You see grammar and form
But do not see
Amidst the threads
the love I’ve mingled insatiate
Tongue and thirst of Love
Lick of tooth
Bite of Lip
I say you
Without echo.
What is love and how shall we characterize it? Greek has four words for love. Sanskrit has fourteen. In this, English surpasses both Greek and Sanskrit, for English has only one word for love, and so unites all that is love into one idea. What is love?
There is love for ourselves, love in sex, love of parents, love of children, love for friends, love for neighbors, love for enemies, love for art, love for food, love for money. All these loves are the same. How?
In action? Love is not action. Kindness may come from cruelty, affection may destroy, love may devastate. A wife may unknowingly cook her husband a meal lethal to his allergies and, though she spent the evening making it just right, he died nevertheless. Her cooking came from love. For love is not an action, nor a result. Love is a passion. What then is the nature of this passion?
Love is habitualized enjoyment: habitualized, structured, systemized enjoyment. Enjoyment is the combination of pleasure and desire we place around an object and the activities we habitualize to get at that object. Love enjoys the object, be it thing or person, which fulfills our need. Therefore, we love most what fulfills most. We love peanut butter for fulfilling our nutritional need. We love brother for fulfilling our companionship need. We love enemies for fulfilling our kindness need. We love our own virtues to fulfill our self-esteem need.
Love is not simply enjoyment, but habitual enjoyment, for enjoyment is a specific instance, whereas love is continual, delighting in the here and now, as well as the memory of the past, and the hope for the future. A man loves his girlfriend by enjoying memories of their first kiss, by harboring hopes of further intimacy, by developing loving habits of kindness, decency, courtesy, concern, sympathy, by sharing time and conversation with her. For love seeks the loveliest relationship with his beloved. If kindness and service heighten the relationship, he clothes himself in kindness and service. If in disciplining, as a mother or father, then in disciplining. If in sharing fun, as a friend, then in sharing fun times. Thus love builds relationships that heighten enjoyment. For this reason love does lovely things to the beloved. Only through kindness can we fully enjoy our friends. Only through kindness can we fully own anybody. Love is systematic enjoyment.
Do not confuse love with his conceptual partners. First, love is not value. Value recognizes the goodness of an object, whereas love feels it. I may respect the vaccine for its medicinal value, but I do not love it. Second, love is not concern. Concern attends to the necessary, and thus is a thinking habit. Problems concern man. Once a man solves himself, he no longer is concerned, though he still loves himself. Thirdly, love is not justice. To demonstrate justice, one gives what is appropriately due. Love gives more than what is due, or rather, what is due to himself as giver. Not owed, but appropriate. Fourthly, love is not pity. Pity is a desire to fix a problem that another is too weak to fix. Pity the pitiable, for few things are pitiable. Fifthly, love is not mercy. Mercy is a form of justice. The merciful man does himself good, the cruel man does himself harm, but the merciful man thinks also of the good of the criminal: will his mercy help or destroy? Sixthly, love is not altruism. Altruism is meeting the needs of the needy because they are needy; this requires no love. Last, love is not regard, which is seeing the best in others and hoping to see the best future for them.
Though kind acts require no love, no love can avoid kind acts. If I love my friend, I will seek a bond with him, and do whatever altruistic deed I can to maintain or amplify that bond. If his car breaks down at night, I go to get him, and complain none. If somebody tries to yank our rose from your hand, will you not bleed to preserve her?
Love is always intimacy. We do not love vagueness; we do not kiss shadows. Nor do we love strangers, though there is potential. We do not love society, but the parts of society we touch. Love seeks union with the beloved. Therefore, love knows no abstractions. Rather, love knows through abstractions: for even if we enjoy the idea of justice, this compares nothing to our love for the just men before us.
Intimacy is presence and conversation. Presence seeks to be near the girl, familiar with her memory, upon the lake, hopeful of being upon the lake soon, filled with life, remembering ecstasy.Conversation seeks to interact with the beloved, to speak and move her mind, to excite her emotions, impress her, to instruct her, to touch the lake, to swim in its waters, to revere ourselves, to seek that height. Sex is conversation, a conversation involving the utmost in presence. Union is conversation in presence.
If I do not seek present conversation with another, if I do not meditate on what I like about her, or plan on how I can please her, then I cannot claim love. If I am not enjoying her in the way she ought to be enjoyed, then I am not loving her. I may enjoy her superficially, massaging my need for attention, admiration, or physical touch, and so halfway meet my need for intimacy, but without the relationship of respect, interest, hope, kindness, the relationship is half alive, not infant but zombie.
How do you enliven love? There is a trick to act as if you love, so that you will soon really feel it. William James says, "acting teaches the heart," and the very title Imitation of Christ, publishes this mistake. For of all the prigs who donate to charities or volunteer their services, I remain skeptical. To act as if you love dodges the chore of establishing a genuine love. This is supposed to reduce our apathy, giving half of a whole. Rather, by building the second floor without the first, we must grab whatever support lies nearest. As if your hatred lacked meaning! As if your indifference were as accidental as the fall of your hair in the morning! No and no: do not act. First think, "why do I lack love, and what does this habit mean? How is it right and good, and can love improve it?" Find your foundation and you cannot help but love the lovely. You do not need to be tricked into loving: you need to know what is lovely and why. For love flows when honesty faces loveliness. To act as if we love, without love, inaugurates a life of hypocrisy. Pretending denies capacity. Reason must precede the act, to choose love for her loveliness, not because you ought or are good to do so. Hate can be more divine than love.
Only pretense is made by pretending. Imitatio Christi? As if Christ imitated another. Be true to yourself, and you rise higher than myth. For of all the herd, I find scarcely a Paul-per, let alone that fool upon the hill. If acting made virtuous, than celebrity worship would have soul. But no, actors are no clue to virtue, for they play at appearances, nothing more. Acting, the bastard art, what can it teach us? To lie even to ourselves. "Act as if you believed and you will"—I know of no more despicable formula. It is playing a part that breaks apart. For the effort of masking, against the tension of abyss below, this prevents deeper living.
What is the deepest love? Love begins as Narcissism. It grows into greed, the love of things. Then it grows into Philia, the love of friends. Then it grows into esteem, love of worth. Then it grows into kindness, the love of improving. Then it grows to Eros, love of co-creation. Then it grows into creativity, the love of transfiguring. Every love flowers from the previous. All love grows from the narcissistic foundation.
For love is identification. If there were something beautiful in the world, and I recognize that beauty, it must correspond to my preformed valuations. It is beautiful to me, so I love it. And we love in others what we love in ourselves. Love is identification. One identifies himself in others, and changes himself to more fully identify with others. What began as self-recognizing ended in self-changing. For in narcissism there are five: I love what I once was, what I am, what I wish to be, what was once part of me, and what is the opposite of me, the balance and complement of me.
"Love without judging." But love can only love what he judges lovely. You make it out not to love at all. I say judge. I say love people conditionally. If we do not love a man because he is good, then we do not really love him. If I claim to love my wife's bad cooking for her sake, I am loving her through the cooking, and the cooking not at all. In the same way, if I love a sinner for the sake of righteousness, I really love myself as righteous, but not truly do I love the sinner.
So love your enemies: from their threats, learn what is important, from their insults, learn what is improvable. Love them for what they are, or else you are deceiving yourself. Love them as you would a teacher. Choose for yourself only the strongest and brightest as your enemies, and love them as exemplars of honor. Love your enemies for their virtues. Man is made of nobility; every man can be known and loved. Would you love gold more than the depraved man? He is a mind and a soul; if you can own him as you own the gold, so much more you can gain. Even his depravity springs poetry. Every man is lovable. What does "unconditional" mean? Unconditional love is coward's love. Whoever must love unconditionally is afraid to love the good. For in seeking goodness, one is whipped and warded off; love requires such work from the lover that he must be strong enough to love the depraved man. If you cannot love him, do not pretend.
A mother’s unconditional love must be balanced against a father’s conditional: I love you if you honor me. If you dishonor me and my family, we will cast you out.
What presumption that love must be afforded dime for dime, “give and get in measure”—no. It is love and lose to gain new heights as lover. If the scales are uneven, then blind justice has her sword, but love was always a hit or miss archer.
Earn your love! Unmerited love slaps the face of love. What? Unconditional love? Then what am I truly loving? I am loving myself as a kind person, through you to justify my vanity? Yet with this twisted love I do not even see you, let alone do I unite with you. Do I love my enemies or do I love God through my enemies? Where is love's reward if I only love through my enemies? Shall they debase love even more by calling it “action”? So they tear out the heart of man.
"Love every man as yourself"––no no! Cease to preach to me that promiscuous love, a love that doesn't even see people for what they are, but loves all men equally. Love is as unequal and ranked as men are unequal and ranked. My love is too perfect to be spent equally: I give my goodness to the good in their good portion. Love knows only the lovely. I do not even know what it is you feel for these men you are kind to. "Be kind to every man as befits his person"––yes yes, you are getting closer. And rudeness is kind. And slaps are kind. And insult is kind. All things are kind from a kind heart, if only in the right context. And so I say treat kindly according to each his kind, loving the lovely, and giving no love unmerited.
Be cruel and slap? Always abstract. And don’t totalize a mere part. Sometimes slaps and criticism are needed in the beloved. Have you ever seen a marriage without them? Even the fullest love sets boundaries, and must enforce them. The full heart is a complex set of feelings at once. The more we idealize one idea for love, rather than a full experience, the more emaciated and painful she is.
Love the lovely, loathe the loathsome––what could be clearer? Why has common sense been so smeared? If you meet refuse, politely refuse him; if politeness fails, then harshly reject, for this is the kindest act. To feign friendship with what you have no part, to pretend acceptance and tolerance, this is the profound lie. Love the lovely in proportion to her loveliness to you. I love not by duty, but by sight.
I take the pretense to love from the so called “religion of Love.” The whole repertoire of Jesus sayings, though often borrowed from the rabbis of the time, fills our literature. "Love your neighbor as yourself," we are told. Why? Well no need to bother with whys: it sounds good. "If only we would follow this command, the world would be heaven," a pastor once said in my presence. I reflected. Something was amiss here. I sniffed and pawed the roots of this tree, never satisfied with fruits alone, and came to realize: no! I do not love my neighbor as myself. I do not love my family as myself. I do not even love my lover as myself. Why? As simple as the sun: they are not myself. I love my brother with brotherly love, my other brother with brotherly love, but even then, I love each differently. To love all men, all my neighbors, equally is promiscuous enough. To love them as myself? Absurd!
"Love your neighbor as yourself," but love requires intimacy. Love requires a breaking of defenses, a knowledge of, an appreciation for, respect and admiration of. Would I love any Joe with the same fervor I reserve for my child? Then corrupt is my love! The way I love myself is unique. I care for my needs, I pride my deeds, I search and research my depths, and concern myself with myself. To invest this energy and intimacy into any other person--supposing they even wanted it, which they shouldn't--would waste my time and dull my blades. No, I love every man as a self unto himself. I love my mother as mother, my brother as brother, my friend as friend, each according to his kind, and each to the degree I choose, free from command and order.
Not that Deuteronomy, the source of Jesus' command, really meant that Samaritans and Gentiles are neighbors, as Jesus is said to imply. They meant fellow Jews. But if the statement is supposed to have any philosophical worth, beyond a Hallmark how-do-you-do sentiment, then we must ask "What is meant by love? What is meant byMyself? What is meant by ‘in the same manner’?” Try as I may, I see no real program here. None is provided. Why should love be commanded? Why should I be threatened to love? My heart is my own. (As a side-note, I have heard preachers say, as if they were surprised, that Jesus intended us to first love ourselves. This appears to be a sort of revelation to some of them.)
Often hailed as a stroke of brilliance, and a sentiment known by all great men, from Confucius to Hillel, is the so-called Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. C. S. Lewis, in his Mere Christianity, claims that the entire "natural law" presupposes this sentiment. But again, we have all dress and no depth: Jesus gives no argument, no system, no proof. Yet this sentiment hardly proves itself, nor is "wisdom proven by her children" but by arguments and reasons. Why should I do unto others as I would they did to me? Are they me? I expect treatment as Daniel, you as Mike, Jill as Jill: Do unto others as deserved!
Consider a simple reading: every teenage boy should think twice before applying this to his date: maybe the kisses you would have unto you are unwelcome to her. So the Christian counters: "Do unto others as you would if you were them"; but now it is "do unto others as they wish you to do"--both compromising to do, and removed from the original precept anyway. And further, this assumes that they know what they want, and that what they want is also what they need. The criminal wants a break from the law, but doesn’t deserve it. He probably doesn’t need it either. Jail may be the best thing for him. The fact is, we do not always know what we want. Perhaps you need slaps, insults, criticism, sooner than kisses and forgiveness.
For to do-as-you-would-be-done-by overlooks the question "And what should I desire from them?" So much for the simple eloquence of this command.
Do unto others as they deserve. The whole law lies on this command. Deserts are not all punishment. Every man deserves respect and polite treatment as a man. Do unto others as you deserve to do. Perhaps the criminal deserves justice, but not from me the bystander. I am not the judge nor the police. I do not deserve to have to punish. In the same manner, I deserve to give gifts and be kind because I am a lover, not because the other deserved love. I may give gifts greater than your deserts, because I deserve to do this.
“Love your neighbor as yourself,” the Jews made God say to them, and they meant Jewish neighbors, certainly not Samaritans or the Goy. But let’s pretend Jesus was an improvement on this ethic when he said, “everybody is your neighbor, love everybody as yourself.” No, this is much worse, despite its hallmark sentimental appeal. Why love others as myself when they are not myself? I love myself in a way different then I love anybody, I love myself as the only self I can directly experience. There is no substitute for this. Furthermore, love is based on intimacy; therefore I literally cannot love all others as myself, because intimacy is a risk that requires much effort, and my mental effort is limited. Love those who are like you, be politely distant from everybody else. These neighbor-lovers are God’s prostitutes—promiscuous love!—love for whoever asks for it, agape, and my God hole agape for any man to love me, God as celestial pimp, and Christians the whores for divine reward.
Do unto others as they deserve to have done; how golden to include justice in our love. Do unto others as you deserve to do; as lovers we deserve to love. Do unto others as deserved. For why should I demand anybody treat me beyond my deserts? Would I really expect pity to negate justice? Pity, for love cannot. Only fear denies justice. I desire punishment, not mercy.
“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” is therefore repulsive. Should a masochist follow this? Should a horny teenager? Then nobody should. Or rather, should we not treat them as they deserve to be treated, fairly, and if we care for them, tenderly. Do unto others as they deserve to have done to them, and do unto them as you deserve to do—do unto others as is deserved. We cannot say, “I will treat others as they should treat me,” because my wants and needs are unique to me, theirs to them. Nor can we rationalize a more abstract formula, “I will treat others as I would be treated if I were them,” because they might not know what is best for them, might not know how they ought to be treated. Once we get practical, moral, virtuous, and reasonable with this formula, we realize the cheap sentimental version of “do unto others as you would have them do to you,” is immoral and disgusting. Be kind to others according to their kind.
Those least interested in being saved are those most worthy of heaven.
The less you need others, the more you can love them. Whom one depends upon, he can never love.
In this mud and guts world of relationships, I limit myself. Lovers hide their loveliness. Beauty is shy, and this is her shrewdness. The public makes common what passes through common hands. The innocent is not a man of the people, by the people, and is only for the people as he emerges from his haven. A secret garden is too delicate to lose her high stone walls. And even when the lover emerges, he is as a man who walks above the waves––mature and holy. That is to say, he is independent. He who emerges entrusts his dearest to none save the dear.
I am lonely, and so make heaven in the image of love. What I lack I paint into eternity. For those who need love, they make love into God. You seek love? Rather, seek life. I say life is the fullness which plants love in its right place, but will not be transplanted thereby.
See the sun that nobody can sees but you—the inner man. Secrecy: to do deeds nobody will ever know, to think and create for yourself alone. Do this from your secret love of your own beauty. Never share your best: save that for yourself.
“Because I have the power to shred you to pieces, my tenderness is that much more real.” Thus do theologians think of their God, and indeed, a weak lover is an oxymoron. For women, who seek power and confidence in their lovers, a great lover who will pulse with power, with “The arrow poised and ready to be made drunk on your blood.” To trust such a man enlivens, exhilarates. Men, who prefer to be tended and cared for, frown if their beloved holds claws. Rather, men wish claws on their kittens—a miming of power, vulnerable in her attempt.
Love seeks love even from those hiding in fear. A man exudes angers, fears, frustrations, sarcasms, rudeness––all defenses. We fear intimacy, real intimacy. To gain it from another: a long and slow process. To win trust, we must exemplify honor and honesty again and again, to prove we are worthy of trust. There are, however, shortcuts. As one psychologist said: “Realize that every personality is so multifaceted that we can each relate wholly with one facet of another. Find one thing both you and he cherish, and give full excitement to that. Show that you think like him, for who resists his own thinking? Reason as he reasons, celebrate as he celebrates, and he will love you as he loves himself.”
I look at the world and call her Sherry, cherished, intoxicating, beautiful: my world is Sherry: I burrow into her soul and lap the honey from her hands. I am in love and lovely.
All relationships are a play of defense and intimacy. One must reinforce right defenses, undermine wrong defenses, initiate right intimacies, prevent wrong intimacies. Men defend themselves against the world, and this is psychological health. Yet to unite, you must seek intimacy. You must excel at recognizing and dismantling defenses without frightening him whom you seek. Intimacy terrifies. You trust, you open, you allow, you give, you serve, you identify, and what? He destroys you. You hope in another and he cuts you. Or just as dark, he yawns and is silent. Thus the inveterate defense system. It allows no spontaneous intimacy, nothing novel and hope-ridden, but allows small intimacies, calculated and regulated, for being practical we know we must not starve.
Yet for the lover, he is given to intimacy, instant intimacy, he swifts through a barrage of defenses, skirting them with grace and finesse, playing through to a raw moment of nearness. For we are unaware of the myriads of defenses, jades, and traps we set, the little withholdings, the walls and masks: they are far too easy and regular to be felt at all. Interacting with others requires no conscious dance; consciousness peaks only as the smallest cusp. For he who wishes practice in relationships, he must realize that relationships are the plays of intimacy and defense, identity and variety, unity and alienation. An intimacy is you and me together, a defense is you and a not-me, a part of me that is not my own person. Thus a boxer differs from a lover, avoids touch, blocks it, presents the toughest parts of himself in defense; the lover wishes his most personal, most sensitive parts touched.The most common defense is silence, absence, averted gaze, nothing.
There are certain tricks for instant intimacy that work on most people, breaching the basic defenses. To break through and sustain, however, requires a unique method in accordance with her unique machinery.
You must feel the fighter's fancy, the warrior’s will which opens and allows love. If he says "I am a lover not a fighter," believe him not. Anybody who has achieved intimacy realizes that you must be brave enough, strong enough for it. A true lover overcomes. Amor her hammer, Eros her heroes. Give peace a chance? Peace must fight for her chance. And thus the exultation in the my of strength and possibility. I am a lover, therefore a fighter.
For intimacy is a horror meant for snapshots, not endurance. So much focus, so much energy, so much concern is in intimacy, utter intimacy. Few maintain it. That is to say, it takes strength to maintain, an ability to relax and sustain that relaxation by a strength that does not feel like strength. I have seen the greatest pains in those who permitted this touch. I love them for it. And those who maintain this, despite devastation, these I admire. Intimacy requires great power to control, is in fact uncontrollable. Thus we fear it. Yet with intimacy we deeply teach others and direct their lifecourse.
And so, sustained intimacy begs for pauses, distances, breaks, absence. The sweetness of honey nauseates if supped at every sup. The soul loves intimacy, but dances from one to the next, returning to the first when the time is ready.
“Love your fellow man,” they say, and the intensity of intimacy is flippantly implied. Between men there is distance. Between men there is coldness and hardness. Give us a tender man, a mother’s touch for his fellow man. For if we fear him, we build walls between men. “Tender to women,” you say, for it is easy and you are unashamed. Yet women have learned this well, to be sisters. So then be brothers.
“Love is not all”—and that's where the poem should end. What is love if it puts no bread on the table?
For what shall we say of Platonic love? Is it pure love? Yet all the deepest friendships have a tickle of eroticism. Irrelevant of whom the friendship is between.
In any love, nobody wants to be dissected. A woman wants to be kissed for her flaws as well as her virtues. It is for this reason that somebody who has worked to perfect himself is so much more loveable then somebody lazy. Love the whole person. Love the scar upon the soft cheek. Love the “vice” for advising the virtue. For what you dissect grows from the same plant. What if the lotus grows from the mud? Shall we despise the mud? No lotus flowers without it. Therefore, take the bad as source of the good. You cannot have the smile without the girl, nor the purr without the cat.
“Sometimes it is hard to love,” and you misunderstood altogether. Hard to love? What is it you really want from this person? You set the anvil on his back and now you want to hammer out ideals. Love is not hard. Love is not a gift. Love is not kind. If you struggle, it is not to love, but to know. I say hate me if it perfects you. I would be hated by all if I knew it would help. In the same way, then, do not say it is hard to love, because then you are farthest from love. You do not convince yourself to love.
For there is something greater then love, and that is life. We love to live, but we do not live to love. Life. The life of your heart, the life of your mind, the life of your body is not going to be allowed, opened, or transfigured through somebody else’s text. Your own heart is the text, and every other book mere commentary. Man lives. And therefore, man is all.
Kindness is not love, is not wedded to love only, springs from many soils and from many seeds. For the teenager, still swirling in her sexual soul, she finds romance a pretty option. “Are you the one to love me and only me? Are you the one to love me and always me?” These questions are symptoms. They are not really asked, not really meant. They mean by not meaning. “Love me as long as there is me, love me as long as long as there is love.”
No love wants to convert another. Hate wishes to convert, and uses love to subdue. But for the one that is me outside of me, there is no conversion. I love as the sun loves, because my light creates. Be my sister sun, and us in mutual orbit.
Love frustrates. Consider Milton's Satan. Satan flies free from hell and lights upon Eden. Finally, naked from hell's fire and alone from his minions, he considers his place. The sun reminds him of his lost glory: why did he rebel? Unclouding his self deceit he realizes ambition and pride lead him to do so. Yet why? Why rebel against a good and fair God? He reasons through the dreaded words "subjection" and "gratitude," and realizes they were not his true concern. Finally, he comes to the crux of the problem: "Who has thou then or what to accuse, / But Heav'ns free Love dealt equally to all?"
Satan loved God stronger than any other, wanted to be loved by God first, to be loved eminently as the eminent, as the greatest he was. Most lovely yet not most loved. Since he could not have God's greatest love, he revolted in his heart against love. Satan's love: unmatched in all of history and time, without compare, epic and unmitigated, with a heart like a bird which, when given full wing, flies straight for the sun. Only individuals can be loved with all our being, concepts never. Only God could consume and overwhelm a mind like Satan's. Not to share, but to take all, to be all, to deserve all, to own all. And unable to find return for his love, revolt. Without that which he loved, he became hell, his heart is hell. Satan loved God the most and for that he is given hell. For an orthodox lover is a contradiction. And indeed, when Lucifer became Satan, he also became God.
The art of love is a subtle and rare art. I have never seen a convincing manual for it, though I have seen a few artful instruments. For those who can love like a virtuouso plays a cello—well, I am yet to see it. You will not see it in the pity fiends and feeders on the sick such as are the saints. True love transfigures the beloved, does not get him worshipping ghosts, but makes him into a man. For the kind soul, he knows the subtlety of making others into heroes. The brilliant lover knows how to make his friends’ souls sing. Call not love a duty or a command, or if you do, expect to get what the last two thousand years have given: mediocrity. Some men (not all) are called to be lovers and I would to see them Men of love, and virtuosos of her.
The saints are bad examples of lovers. Getting flayed for believing absurdities is gross, disgraceful, weak, and stupid. But evidently, to be a saint you must do magic tricks and die painfully. Consider the myth man himself: a Canaanite woman requests to Jesus that her daughter be healed, and he says No, he will not help her because she is not Jewish, being therefore not a child of God, but a dog. All he had to do was twinkle his nose to cure her, since the depth of his love was the cheap and easy magic-show miracles, by which he earned his bread, but even this seems too much for him. She persists by saying that dogs eat crumbs. Outwitted, he does twinkle his nose, and her daughter is cured. This is not where we learn the art of love. The only kind thing he seems to do is kill himself, no good example for us. Love is much more decent and honorable than that. Live is not melodramatic morbidity. It is perfect subtlety. The myth man and the myth saints that followed him are distasteful. The excellent art of love requires a new teacher.
Believe not that myth prince either. The Buddha contradicts himself whenever he utters the word “loving kindness.” The calm of meditated enlightenment contradicts generosity, kindness, intimacy, and passion. Those others are praised purely for advertisting. What religion can sell itself on isolated meditation? Human beings love to love, and any religion that is going to survive the market must make love into duty. Yes, this destroys the basis of love, but it is a flashy ad.
“There is no self” they tell us, and then contradict themselves to tell us to love others. Other what? Nonselves? I am not to love myself, but I am to love other selves? What exactly is it that loves? There is no self to do the loving. Is it love itself that loves? Then what is being loved? Love itself? Yes, the annatta “anhilated self” is a riddle, rich like manure for fertilizing the lotus of meditated enlightenment, but it contradicts the Dhamma. What does love have to do with nirvana? Be yourself, Buddhism. Don’t copy the Christian charity. You don’t believe in God or sacrifice—keep yourself pure.
Love enjoys, fear pains. To fear something is to pain at its presence, its memory, its concept. Love acts, fear freezes. Whereas love is intimacy, fear is ambiguity. Love has knowledge, fear willful ignorance. Fear seeks to not know, not think, not address its object. It is for this reason that you must always do what you fear to do, for love knows no other birth.
"So you see," says Alex, who is such a shadow friend to me, "Alive and choosy, I choose the lives that best complement mine. My few friends deserve my love, everyone else my mere respect."
"Aha!" says Amanda the passionate. "You fail to recognize your own history. You love yourself, and those who look and talk like that self, but see beyond your manhood and see mankind. To love one thing is to love all things. To convert to the full lover means you love all things in all ways you can. Let me tell you a story. Percolating in her eternity was Goddess All. But in her great one-itude, she felt lonely. For you see Alex, she was only one. And so she spread a carpet, called it cosmos, and reincarnated herself a trillion times throughout history. Which is to say, we are all the same person. From the swollen headed professor to the thinly mittened beggar, we are all the exact same person. Only we don't recognize ourselves. I traded my omniscience for ignorance in order to feel friendly, and friendfulness is a sort of ignorance. For you see, I am you, you are me, we are all the same person, all the single All, the Alicia called Goddess."
"Yet again," chimed the third, "Man's focus finds limit in time. Love is from intimacy is from focus; therefore, I cannot love all things, but only those I take into my intimacy. I can only love these by pushing those away. And a little cruelty goes a long way in amplifying love."
You need love. You need to feel love for others, express that love through kindness, witness the acknowledgement of your love and the gratitude for its gesture, receive similar expressions from those you love, and consider yourself loved by them.
This is obvious to most people. Others would do without it. After all, love takes work. Participating in a community, completing a family, pleasing a spouse, these all take commitment, devotion, and daily practice. Are they worth it? Perhaps, perhaps not. If your place is to sculpt like no man has sculpted, or write a poetry that scars the face of history, if you are a man among men, then you waste your breath submitting to love. You are not the lover, and would do love injustice by pretending.
Yet there is a sense that those who value love and friendship less then still need it, and can still make an art of it.
Then there are those men and women who make love a skill and art. I do not mean charity workers or missionaries. I mean the men and women who are virtuosos of kindness, the geniuses of friendship, the powerhouse fathers. These people make love their top aim, and bend the rest of their life to it. This is good, as long as they don’t demand it of everyone. To each his own. But if they would be an example, let them practice at love and make it into skill. Let them be as Pagannini on his violin: masters and Gods of love.
Not that they will grandstand. Love is, after all, a subtle art. Those who make a show of it, those who insist you admire them, those who give to charity in open, or go to save poor lost souls, what have they to do with love? They merely mime the most obvious forms. A true lover is as subtle as the night, and deep and rich as her. He is well practiced at kindness, at cruelty, knowing them to complament each other, to allow the full force of love. True love can pluck a butterfly from the sky and smudge no dust from her wing. True love can fetch an eyelash from his lovers eye without a tear. Yes, and true love sets a second sun in the sky. It is a great art, and one I have not seen practiced well enough by those around me. Yes, love does minimize its show to avoid scabs and parasites. Leeches to Venus, that’s what they are. Thus one must not advertise, nor give unfittingly.The greatest lover knows to be the cruelest. He is cold in his judgment, and does gives no love where love is undue. Promiscuous love given to any neighbor whores love. Love must be fitting.
This book will attempt a manual at the art of love. It assumes perfection, which means freedom from self-deceit, the best my best in every situation. I also assume Love will return my efforts. For the composition of this book is an experiment and a new way for me. My passion has thus far been for writing and ideas. Now I will try a new way, and balance love against philosophy, as on the back edge of a sword.
Let us break open the heart.
The greater the reverence, the less the understanding, the louder the praise, the quieter the knowledge. For if you truly know something and have become it, you have already given it the greatest praise, worship, and blessing: you have become it. Rest assured then that those who praise love are the farthest from knowing it. They praise to hide their ignorance, and indeed praise is the song of camaflouging ignorance. They sense that love is great, but they cannot say why it is great, why it is divine, or even what it is. You curse me when you praise me.
What is love? I have defined love elsewhere by looking at the essence of every use of the word. Love is habitual enjoyment. Love enjoyes a lovely relationship with the beloved, loving in the way the beloved should be loved.
Since love is a feeling, it has many possible outlets. I may feel love for my wife, but there are many ways I can express (and thus amplify) my love. Kindness is one means, and cruelty another. My love may choose any and many expressions; some will be appropriate to my beloved, but some are not. Love, like all emotions, is an activity of the heart, and thus requires constant infux and outflow. I need constant fuel from my beloved, and I need to pour that activity out in my participation with my beloved. That is what it is to love.
The heart of love is creativity. The first thing a self creates is itself, first as a creative principle, and then as everything else. Therefore, the basis of all love is narcissism, selflove, selfishness, the truest, greatest, deepest love, which in fact exists in all people, though obscured from som. From this grows the necessesity and glory of greed, greed for a healthy body, for extensions of the body, called property. From this grows love of family, love of friends, called philia. From this grows esteem, the love of greatness. This includes the love of the imagined greatness of Gods, and also the perceived greatness of the self. From this grows kindness, which is the love that brings out the greatness in others. From this grows Eros, the highest of loves, the partner’s joy in creating. It is the love of couples in their shared creation of a third thing. And higher then this, but is the special form of eros called Mother Love, crea, the love of a couple not in creating a third thing, but in creating each other, of a mother’s love for her children and spouse.
Love progresses from narcissism, to greed, to philation, to esteem, to kindness, to eroticism, to creative love. Each step is inclusive. One does not step beyond narcissism, beyond greed, but deepens them, opens them up, makes them more profound.
Narcissism is self love in the purest sense: I love I, whatever I am, exactly what I am, because I am me, my very me-ness, I love eternally and unreservedly.
Greed is the love to own, to possess things, to possess people, to possess knowledge, to be able to control it, to have the right to control it, to own it. A very beautiful love. The professor, insofar as he seeks to be the most learned man, is greedy for knowledge, the saint, insofar as he seeks treasures in heaven, is greedy for spirit.
Philial love is the love for family and friends. There is no essential difference between family and friends other then family is looked upon as permanent, and friendship as less so. This is the love of those who live with you, among you, share time and space with you, because they are like you.
Esteem is the love of greatness, of loving the greatness in yourself, and hating the weakness in yourself. You love others because they are great. You love God because you imagine him to be great.
Kindness is loving those of your kind, and loving them in such a way as to bring out the best in them. Kindness is giving and receiving.
Eros is sex, eros is romance, eros is the divine love for which mankind exists. The hightest love, no love can be complete without the sexual element. And sex is about sharing the joy of creating a third.
Crea is the most refined form of eroticism. Creative love is to mutually create each other, like twin suns, orbiting each other, making each other more profound. Creative love is maternal love, is the full embrace and never letting go of what you have become and bound yourself to.
Narcissism is a mytho-psychological term with a history and a series of meanings. I use the term to mean all forms of self-love. It is a mode of loving, one with its own stages and forms. An infant loves itself in that it loves for itself. It seeks for itself. Its world is itself. The other is directed at itself. This is the way I understand infantile psychology. I look at the purpose of love to be to satisfy human needs, and therefore, self love is a deepening of what love is for, to love for yourself. It was necessary for me to center love on this for a series of reasons which will become clear later. Suffice it say that you should view these loves as a series of consecutive circles, as the world of the infant, as its self, expands. Technically, the child loves his mother first, before his toys, but I make the next step of the progression “greed” in that I believe the child loves his mother greedily—infants get jealous. The child at first does not love her for her desires, for what he is to her, but for what she is to him. Also, the things that belong to him become important to him. Family/friend love (philial) rises when one no longer looks at the world as something to own or disown, but to share. Therefore, this could be called the joy of sharing, the love of sharing. At what point the child loves the mutualith of ownership, I do not know. I believe that the ability to share and the awareness of others as other persons, arises at the same time. Therefore it is only after one realizes there are other selves, and thus knows what a self is, that he can esteem himself, especially in respect to the other selves, and, when he is older, in terms of his own self, based on his previous self, and his future potential selves. Kindness arises from esteem in that once we have esteemed what a person is, what he is worth, what is worthy to him we can treat him according this kind, and we can decide how to treat others we esteem worthy of our love. Erototicism is the desire to mutually please, and is greater than kindness in that it is a shared and mutual venture, wheras mere kindness is not. Eroticism is mutual kindness in respect to both sharing creating a third thing—a child, a relationship, a coupling, a project. Creative love is no longer sharing the creating of another thing, but the creating of each other.
All beings are situated within the whole. Consciousness itself is situated between needs and world, and exists in order to relate the two in a fulfilling way.
We are all narcissistic in that as a self we love, and we love for ourself. Our love is not a commodity for others; love is a function for fulfilling the self. There is no disembodied love. Love too is situated.
May some people love others and hate themselves? You must never take talk of “self-hate” too seriously. Self-hate and suicide are means of preserving the self in a certain shape, of avoiding growing pains.
It might be noted that Christianity, which is touted as the religion of love, isn’t, and that Buddhism, which is called the religion of compassion, also isn’t. Christianity fails to understand love, views it as self-sacrifice, and even makes a sacred symbol out of a torture device. The joke is on them in their constant mockery of mankind, the crucifix. I spied one in a hospitol room, which was an irony and contradiction that didn’t fail to make me sick.
Romantic love is one step below crea, mother love. Christianity misunderstands eros. It stops at a lower love of pity (not kindness), and the Godawful charities are an example of what Christianity is all about. Mother love, or the love of mutual devotional creation, is necessarily an outgrowth of romantic love, which is the love of adventure. The adventurer cannot create. He must risk all to gain the materials to create. Thus, romantic love transfigures into family love, mother love.
Sympathy, compassion, and pity are the opposite of Buddhism, which, in a word, is nonattachment. Nonattachment, means, above all, that one is uncaring of all things. For to care is to be attached. The benevolance that later Buddhists added to the doctrine for respect of human nature, must always be understood as disinterested compassion, as an abstract benevolance. If this “kindness” is taken too far, it destroys the original Buddhism.
For the primary virtue in Buddhism is disattachment, and the primary virtue in Christianity is guilt. Insofar as all these other virtues allow these centers to unfold, they are good. Insofar as they don’t, the ruin the religion.
Eros is the highest love, the joyful self affirming creativity. Yes, and creativity is the height of this in the joy of creativity, and not mere unity.
Eros is the attraction of like to like. By eros all that is of the same is underconscious of all the like in the entire universe.
Ask a man what he wants most of all and it is never “altruism.” Who could live off altruism. A world of altruism and we all commit suicide. He wants eros: mutually creating each other in joy.
The child becomes a binding mirror of the adult love, the fulfillment of romance, the creative parentage.
Love because it fulfills you. Any other reason is hateworthy. Do not love because it is the right thing to do, because you ought to, because it is your duty to love. That leads to self-rape. You love because you are a lover and this is what you choose to do.
Kindness to any asker is waste, and is not true kindness. Gift no penny. Trade only, for this is love.
Love because it is your style. Do not counteract your own style. If you have pulled off an artful coldness, don’t negate it for the sake of duty. For duty is deceit. Duty is the word they put on owning you. You owe no love, nor can love be owed, but only gratitude. Your love chooses which values to give loyalty to.
A strong, noble, manly devotion and support of his family need not be romantic in nature, nor even intimate. It may maintain its nobility without becoming sentimental. It may be duty and this is good, but it is not love. You may be loyal without love. But for love, devotion and loyalty are the easy path, the only path, and there is no temptation against them.
Love is habitual enjoyment. That is, it is structures, systematized, enjoyment, implying, of course, a commitment. One cannot love without commiting himself to it. There is no selfless love, there is no disinterested love.
If you like somebody, you will forgive all wrongs they do; if you dislike them, you will fault them even their goods. I had a nurse who admired my intellegence. Despite her many mistakes, I still grudge her nothing.
Well then: what is kindness?
Framing love and kindness as “duties,” “obligations,” “Laws of God,” is the surest way to kill them. The servant knows no love. Love is love among equals. It is precisely the moral commands to love which make kindness the byword of freespirits. Yet no poet can disdain the passion of romance, the ardor of sex. These last ones were characterized as “low” loves, different from agape, the “Godly love.” But of course there are no “charity” songs, no passable poems about “agape,” but passion and romance are the endless muse of life, love, and art. Don’t command me to be human. And if you command me not to be, to hell with you.
In many ways, I am not the one to teach the art of love. I am too inward, too much in love with ideas—do you really ask the philosopher how to love? But of course the philosopher is the source of all knowledge. I too will try to understand this literary fountainhead.
Word massage. Put pressure on others, touch them lightly and painfully, but touch where it is tight, tense. Combine this with literal massage—and listen! We ought to be touching each other much more than we do; friends ought to hug, cuddle, clasp hands, kiss, and yet reserve their sexuality for their beloved—and we can achieve intimacy with others in ways no psychologist is allowed to. Put your arm around your friend as you chat, male or female of whatever age. How much we need to be touched and are not. But we can word massage—this alone being somewhat acceptable in our culture—although there is an incredible anxiety with intimacy. It is, after all, a subtle art.
Every child knows the true three sixteen: for mom so loved the world, that she lived herself within it, that none who believed or doubted her should be damned, but return at last to her; for he who does not believe has his reasons, and doesn’t need threats framed as “love” to interefer with his own plans.
Each man’s ultimate heirarchy of love, his pyramid of lotalties, is rarely exposed, rarely brought to light, nor does it need to be, and sometimes full disclosure would threaten the system, for the will to disclose is also the will to upset. If a man prizes his job over wife and son, he need not parade this, nor mention it. A famous quip has a man tell his wife, “I must you now for war, for I ceould not love you so much if I did not love honor more.” Perhaps she bought it. I would have said the same thing to my naval officers, and retreated to nature to work out some ideas.
So I am with Emerson: “Hate mother, child, Jesus and God before your own creative Genius” the modern twist on an ancient propaganda.
Wisdom is deeper than love. Love is foolish, leads to foolishness, unless it is limited by wisdom. Love of wisdom is nothing: one must be wise himself in order to know how to love wisdom or anything else. I am no philosopher: I am a sophist.
Just as judgment must be just, and justice is fairness and one cannot be too fair, therefore, as well, love leads to excess: love cannot be a first principle, the basis of morality, the law of the universe. Love can be foolish. Love can be stupid. Love can be suicide. Love must be completely controlled, allowed, contained within wisdom. Only idiots say “do not be too wise,” for wisdom can have no excess, since it is the basis by which we know and balance excess.
Some of the greatest loves of my life grew from much patience. Love at first sight is hate at final sight. The greatest beauties are subtle. They may take even a decade to be seen at all.
Christianity is called the religion of love, as if religion should be about love! “Love and power” and I would believe you. Jesus at one point says that greatest command is to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, body (!), soul, and mind,” and since Jesus himself was later determined to be “full God of full God,” and one lacking this love will be “condemned to the eternal flames of burning shit (Gehenna) where the worm will never die”---too much, too much. Its all such nonsense.
I do not love Jesus. Because I do not see him as an equal. He seems too shallow and hung up on petty matters. Where is his “create such and such,” where is his “study this and that,” where is his “sing, dance, write, and be glad,” where is his “strive for greatness and excellence” nor do I see him as having achieved greatness nor excellence. He does not impress me, I would count it no acheivement to become more like him. At best he seems to have been granted magic powers and a sloganists wit for moral truisms. He was certainly no genius, and he was by no means deep. Nor do I find anything about him all that lovely, noble, beautiful, or divine. And so you command me, you impudent thing, to love you? And not only to love you, but with all my heart, soul, spirit, body (gross), and mind! But this is insane.
Who has my love? Emerson I love as I have loved no other man, and Nietzsche beside him, not with “all my heart, soul, mind” but with more love than I have for any other, and not upon anybody’s command, but because his voice speaks to me, sings to me, teaches me to be what I am deep down.
It is not a religion of love that commands me to love what to me is relatively mediocre. Socrates was more the saint than Jesus, and even him I distrust. Anybody who commands love has no sense of the nature of love.
You may speak of your love for God or Christ
But I have never loved a literary figure more than Nietzsche and Emerson. I love them because they speak to me. Nobody else does that, nobody else can. I read hundreds of books. Once in a great while I actually love the author. Quite exceptional when such a thing happens, not to be forgotten, not to be spoken lightly of, not to be dodged, denied, or suppressed: here my heart has made an exception! Such a hard and difficult heart still makes an occasional exception!
But of course, to even put Jesus in the same category as Emerson or Nietzche is ridiculous: he is much less: he writes nothing because he is a mythological creation from head to foot: insofar as there was an actualy Jesus of “Nazareth” we have not an ounce of him, he is lost to history. He is probably a complete fabrication. Is it any wonder then that the stories of him seem vacuous?
“God is love” was a Greek cliché, as the first God in the Greek Panthean was Eros (love) “the first and most beautiful of the gods” later reincarnated (strangely I think) as puckish Cupid.
So John was recycling Greek clichés. The idea that God is love makes less sense coming from a Christian than a Greek.
Love is desire and consummation, and the mindset that ever consummates his love with every part of her he has already consumed: her memories, her ideas, her possibilities. He is modelled his ME from her, redefined the parts of him he could still redefine to fit in her world, so that their combined WE was necessary and perhaps even forever after. For sexual love is the greatest and best love, and the precursor to love of children. In the same way all love for children is sexual, but nicely appropriate and decent, allowing the child to grow and be himself, without imposing a wrongful carnal relationship. For sex is much more than carnal knowledge. The sexual love between man and wife is every love they feel for each other, and without that sexual basis, every other love is merely a black duty.
The Christ, as a heavenly bastard – historically, the garden variety – was infinitely in need of love, of everybody’s love, of complete love, and insatiable. Such a longing for love ends in suicide. You fancy that such a one would remain virginal? That he would save himself for metaphorical sex with a metaphorical church bride? But haven’t you studied reality? If not, how can you read through the myth?
No, do not ask me to make love to the demi-Jew; were you to brave my face, I know he would cringe before a greater love than his. Granted, he preferred the love of whores to priests, and do not tell me he tucked his tail between his legs and thought of sheep, this man was too love-starved to be God’s eunich, but this cross-breed can find love nowhere, and is spiteful as a woman, grabs from the persions their hell and says: if you don’t burn with me you will burn without me. Christians do not talk to me of love, for I hear better then you speak, and I see better then you shine. Love triumphs over love, heaven conquers your heaven, and the hell you made is no bigger then to hold you her inventors. Make love tot his Jewling indeed! Give me beauteous Eros! Let flirty Aphrodite skip a few rocks across my lake, but do not say Salvation and Mercy, my love is too gentle for S and M, my heart too large and too subtle for your histrionical “look daddy I’m dying!” I would prefer Mary Mara’s love to yours, or let Judas or John nuzzle my collar bone, but for the seven eyed lamb, my love would drarf your spite-spent love.
Desire is language. The tongue is forever the instrument of desire, to taste, to consume, to swallow up, to call out, to sing, to request, to speak the soul. Love is tongue. Such a quivering thing, love. When she needs she sweats, grows thick, aches to be filled. Beware the tongue! The best men choke on her. The tongue speaks the heart, and isn’t the heart also shaped like a yoni?
It is impossible to love a woman who does not love herself: she will turn against you and hate you. It is unwise to give your passionate to an unpassionate man, he will turn coward. Love a little more than you are loved, no more, and if your heart sings like the sun, you always have your art.
You theologians and sages are quick to speak of what you do not know. Perhaps you are a gossip? God this, profundity that. Perhaps you should speak of what you have seen face to face? When a man speaks from his direct experience, nobody in the world cares to dispute him. People fight and rant and rave about things they have no clue of. Sit next to a man or woman has has seen and you will not doubt.
Causality is an interpretation. Immediate reality does not feel caused but obvious only. Who knows why lovers leave, and friends deceive? There ar many causes in the world, and there are also must bes. Being is a perpetual becoming. Only what acts is actual, and so everything is made of force. Why do I now love you with such fierceness, when tomorrow I will nuzzle up into the vulva of my book?
Love is everything social, and half a man. The other half is mind.
I will speak of lust, since I doubt any man lusts as much as I lust, returning lust to his glorious throne of first meaning: pleasure. What pleasure I take in the beauty of others, in finding all the beauties of my friends. I will enjoy you in every way I can enjoy you. If I have pledged my body to my wife, so much more will I enjoy your ideas, your speech. There is no limits to my lust. If you do not lust after the woman in the street, pluck out your eyes—they are good for nothing.
People speak and gossip and groan of all the things they have no experience in, but I am interested only in direct experience, and my own, or if I have a friend, in her own, what she knows, and not what she has heard second hand, third hand. I interrogate you, dear one, I take your cheek and guide your eyes so I can see first hand what you have seen. What you know and what you truly I know I will know you for. What you gossip about I could care less: gossip is easy. Anybody can gossip. It would be more interesting if you were incapable of gossip. Such a one would tempt me, I might even ask a question.
The theologians are quick, are they not, to speak of things they have no experience of? I do not speak of God or Gods. If I experienced God himself, I would never say “God” but “what a delightful experience my self is able to make!” For everything I experience of is still owned as an experience to me. They gossip idly, do they not, all these peoples, and they speak of love. They don’t even feel the lick of tooth and bite of lip the word feels, not even the word they have, let alone the experience of love. Yet they do love. They do not know where they love, or what of them is truly love.
I will speak to you AA, though you are never there when I recognize you, and so you never hear me when I speak. I feel a great love for you as soon as I see you, but they love I feel is quicker then the love I say. It may be that I never even see you again, but for me, all the world’s a mask over the mask called AmA, and behind her the All herself.
My love is a sun, and the world will not know it. So I will riddle them with dark sayings. Its funny. Everything I say and write is eight times encoded, ten times a parable, and I laugh and laugh at everybody how they spin and do not guess at me, cannot guess at the mirth that is deepest in me. My deepest name is a laughing name.
So I love you and send you away. And you will never say a word to me again, perhaps, and that is funny too. Did you know crying and laughter are the same sort of thing? One let’s go. In laughter, he releases an imposition, in crying, a reposition.
My love for you is utter and ever. Obvious to me, never gone, never forgotten. I speak of no tempts or attempts. My love abides.
Abraham loved God more than children – but the Jewish religion just the opposite. I see him wasting not even a shrug when God told him to kill his second born son – “the son of promise” – and it is equally impressive if Abraham existed in some form and really did hear some schizophrenic voice telling him to kill his kid. Because God or no God, the message is the same: you must determine for yourself your ultimate priorities. That he resorted to such a literal and dramatic measure is, according to the story, not his fault, but God’s, for the entire charade was only for the sake of God, so he could say “now I see that Abraham is a loyal servant” – for the doubts and jealousies of God are cosmic, and has no faith at all in mankind or anything else, being the spirit of world class cynicism, and spite against mankind. Better still, the love Abraham had for God is more a God than Yahweh.
The same for Buddha when he abandoned his family to seek enlightenment. The legend has him make friends with his abandoned son, who becomes a disciple – that would be the Disney ending. It stinks of disciple rationalization. More likely, if Sid was a prince and decided to become a beggar, that he was barred forever more from his family – and this at least is poetic justice, for if you want to detach, you thoroughly detach, and give your full effort to that one high priority you belong to. But for most of us, high priorities require no detachments, but merely negotiation, subordination, and a graceful gentle drawing of limits. Buddha’s absolutist and extremist emphasis on disattachment shows spiritual immaturity, although meditative mastery.
Nata-lou: I love you
Nata-lie: you love I
Nata-bom: we love mom
Nata-bus: mom loves us!
My greatest asset and center of integrity shines through my persistent narcisissism, not merely my love of writing, but my adoration of my own writings, ranging from mild pride to golden orbed grandiosity, saving me the pain of many an inevitable rejection, and assuring me the wisest eye blinked from my eye, and history, insofar as he could see, would second my motion.
About the Author
Grad Student in English Literature and Rhetoric, and author of three books, including The Perfect Idius, due to be published spring 2010.


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