step beyond the narthex of my beauty…

Konstantin Somov, The Lovers.

“Love…is our fate, [a] twisted thing, tortuous, delicate, eager, insatiable, the best, and worst thing, the junction point between everything and nothing, the oxymoronic knot of all existence, love which makes cattle meat of us.” – Helene Cixous.

* * *

“To love someone is to isolate him from the world, wipe out every trace of him, dispossess him of his shadow, drag him into a murderous future. It is to circle around the other like a dead star and absorb him into a black light. Everything is gambled on an exorbitant demand for the exclusivity of a human being, whoever it may be. This is doubtless what makes it a passion: its object is interiorized as an ideal end, and we know that the only ideal object is a dead one.” – Jean Baudrillard.

“Love is the first lie; wisdom the last.” – Djuna Barnes.

* * *

The uncovering, or stumbling-on of preexisting structures. A young woman finds her boyfriend’s stash of internet porn, discovers that he has desires which do not conform to her own body and their love, but to entirely different kinds of bodies, to entirely different modes of engagement with those bodies, perhaps to a mode of engagement that treats women’s bodies as disposable, as targets for humiliation.* One walks into a structure and finds a discord between it and oneself, realizing anew that the structure (in this case the collective mythology and repertoire of abusive imagery of women) has been around for some time and will stay around for some time longer. You can imagine the beginnings of this as a bar joke: A woman walks into a discourse…

The opposite relationship: one walks into a structure and finds oneself molding into its contours, melting into its crevasses and curves. Its hard edges cut away at parts of you, you become assimilated into the structure deep enough that you forget there is a structure at all, that there was a moment of shock when you first saw its strangeness.

“No one would fall in love if they hadn’t been told what it was.” – Anonymous, variously attributed.

“Erotic acts are instinctive; they fulfill a role in nature. The idea is familiar, but it is one that contains a paradox: there is nothing more natural than sexual desire; there is nothing less natural than the forms in which it is made manifest and satisfied.” – Octavio Paz.

* * *

“True love covers everything

Well, like the shadows lay up under the ground

If you got the kind of love in your heart for me

Lord, you will never, never let me down.” – Lil’ Son Jackson.

* * *

“It is worth speculating whether love is the only discourse still available to us that is capable of salvaging singularity in a late capitalist epoch, or whether it is rather a case that ‘love’ has become (or perhaps always was) a decoy that lures us into a libidinal economy no less indifferent to individual suffering than the macroeconomy overseen by the IMF and the World Bank.” – Dominic Pettman, Love and Other Technologies.  **  

 

“Love is just a lie, made to make you blue.” – Felice and Boudleaux Bryant.

* * *

“Life, go easy on me;

Love, don’t pass me by.” – John Martyn.

 

 

*(This is based off a friend’s summary of a poem by a woman whose name I can’t remember, but will eventually post later, perhaps with a link to her tumblr.)

** The use of “singularity” here has nothing to do with the en vogue conception of a technological singularity.