One Hundred and Twenty Three

Beyond all this, the wish to be alone.
However the sky grows dark with invitation cards
However we follow the printed directions of sex
However the family is photographed under the flagstaff
Beyond all this, the wish to be alone.
Non timor mortis conturbat me. 

Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs.
Despite the artful tensions of the calendar
The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites
The costly aversion of the eyes from death
Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs.
Non timor mortis conturbat me.

One Hundred and Twenty Two

This morning I made an online search for articles related to Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia. It led me to articles about something called ‘homoerotic mourning’.

What Freud called love is the desire to possess the beloved as a predator possesses its prey, based on the mistaken belief that the beloved is as necessary to the lover's existence as food is. He claimed we all fall in love with a woman who reminds us of our mother because she was our source of nourishment when we were infants, and falling in love as adults infantilizes us.

What we call love is an illusion based on a naïve overestimation and idealization of the beloved. In reality all women are alike, which perhaps explains why Freud appears to have had an affair with his wife’s sister.

Or his affair may have been an example of the Rachel/Leah illusion, in which a man marries a woman and then discovers, too late, that she’s not the ideal woman he imagined. The man usually blames his wife for deceiving him, when it’s his naïveté that’s responsible for his mistake.

A woman, according to the old saying, marries a man hoping he’ll change (i.e., will mature) and a man marries a woman hoping she won’t change (i.e., will remain his infantile ideal).

Ironically Freud claimed women it's women who are childlike, and therefore untrustworthy. Beautiful women are especially dangerous to men because they’re narcissists, and love themselves more than they do any man. But she was the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen outside of a movie (and she didn’t have a key light), and as good as she was beautiful, which is why everyone who knew her loved her.

Adolfo was no exception. “You don’t understand her the way I do,” he told me, “because you’re an American, and she’s a typical European woman”. His naïveté amused me because he was a psychiatrist, and therefore should have understood her, and me (and himself), better. To me the supposed otherness of women seemed less than than the otherness of Americans.

Women in a patriarchal society are constrained by the expectations of men; but European women learn how to play the game, and manipulate men’s rules to their advantage, while American women want to change the rules. I enjoyed watching her because she did it so well, and because I also enjoyed manipulating the rules.

Beauty gives a woman power, but every woman knows it also sets limits on what she can do, because it arouses expectations in others; and when we don’t conform to the expectations of others, they blame us, not their own naïveté, for deceiving them.

Freud said mourning is the natural process by which we deal with the loss of a beloved. Melancholia is pathological because it never ends.

She wasn't and isn't necessary to my existence. I can live without her, but I’m a different person without her; and I don’t like the person I’ve become. I mourn the person I was with her; therefore I suffer from what the articles call ‘homoerotic mourning’, which is the loss of my ideal self, the person I could be and should be.

Most people eventually come to believe this ideal self is not lost to them, but is embodied in someone they love as they can’t love themselves.  This explains not only hero worship, but also homosexual love, which seems to me as much a mistake as Freud thought heterosexual love was. All three overestimate and idealize the beloved.

Freud was almost right in saying we love the beloved as a predator loves its prey, because the only way we can possess the beloved is by making her (or him) part of us: emulating her, and making her virtues ours. In loving her I loved myself, or that part of me which most men learn to suppress in order to become men as our society defines manhood. But I can’t love myself without her. Or rather I have no incentive, no desire, to do so without her.

Freud was also almost right in saying all women are alike. All women - and all men, too – are alike, despite their differences, in that all deserve to be loved. But not by me. I used to love them all because I saw in her what we all could and should be. Now I love no one.

The articles are mostly written by genderqueer authors who claim most people suffer from homoerotic mourning because our society refuses to allow men to love other men, and women to love other women, sexually. It seems to me that, on the contrary, our society refuses to let men love other men, and women to love other women, except sexually. Freud taught us that love is merely a euphemism for lust.

There is a place in heterosexual society for homosexuals, just as there is a place in patriarchal society for women, so long as they masochistically embrace their inferiority. Their inferiority confirms the superiority of (heterosexual) men, as well as the danger of love in a society based on war.

Heterosexuality and homosexuality are equally perverse when the only way we can express our love for each other is sexual. Sex is what we settle for when we aren’t allowed to love, therefore most of us learn to live without love. Homosexual panic, the fear that if we allowed ourselves to love others we would masochistically embrace our inferiority to them, makes us unable to love anyone, including ourselves.

Society expects all of us, men as well as women, to conform to our respective social roles, of which gender roles are only one. Our pundits devote their attention to gender roles because it allows them to ignore the others.

One Hundred and Twenty One

Why are we so cruel? Other animals hunt and kill each other because they must, because life must feed on life. Only we humans hunt and kill for the pleasure of it, the schadenfreude.

I assume it’s because of our neotony. The young of other species play at hunting, play with their captured prey before killing it. But by the time they’re adults they’ve mastered the art of hunting, and take death seriously. It remains a game for us because we remain children.

It’s because we’re children, conscious of our helplessness, that we turn some into our servants so we won’t have to work, and others into our livestock so we won’t have to hunt. We do it not because we must, as other species do, in order to survive, but because killing and/or enslaving others merely because we can allows us to forget how helpless we really are.

We respected our slaves and our livestock when we still recognized our kinship, our common weakness. That respect was one source of religion. We deified the totem animals who died so that we might live, just as we did our ancestors. But as we seemed to grow strong, we lost respect for everyone and everything that seemed weak.

Natural philosophers studied the world, hoping to know their creator through his creation. Finding no evidence of him, they did not conclude that he didn’t exist. They concluded instead that he existed only in us, brahman to our atman. Only we are immortal, as he is. Other animals are avatars of god in the east, and in the west machines he invented for our convenience, pawns in a game god plays with man, his only natural child (they include those animals who look like us, and appear to be as human as we are, but do not worship god as we do). Using them as god intended is not cruel because they are mere automatons, as Descartes said, and do not suffer as we do.

This world is what we’ve made it. It seems cruel to us because we’re cruel to each other, and to ourselves. We alternate between exaltation, thinking we’re all-powerful because we have the power to destroy the world (which our ancestors called the sin of hubris), and depression because we can’t or won’t do what all our wise men tell us we should. We know what we should do, but only as children know what adults do, without being able to do it themselves.

But this doesn't matter. This is what our life, my life, is, but I don’t care. I don’t care about myself. Even if this planet circling this star should be home to the only life there is, the only things alive as we are, I want to know and understand more than this, as much as I am able to understand of what life is and what it can be, before mine ends. I want to understand myself as well as I can before I cease to be myself.

I know I’ve been cruel. Not wittingly, but because it’s my nature, human nature. None of us mean to be cruel. We’re cruel as children, left alone on the shore of the eternal sea, are thoughtlessly cruel to the little creatures they catch and play with to pass the time.

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.

We are children without a parent, ronin without a master. Edward Abbey said that because most men are unable to govern themselves, they’re even less able to govern others. He imagined this was an argument for anarchy, but most people see it as an argument for putting up with any master, however bad. The only thing worse than a bad master is no master. Namque pauci libertatum pars magna iustos dominos volunt.

Before Lord God made the sea and the land
He held all the stars in the palm of His hand
And they ran through His fingers like grains of sand
And one little star fell alone.
And the Lord God hunted through the wide night air
For that little star lost in the wind down there
And He stated and He promised
He'd take special care
So it wouldn't get lost again.
Now Man don't mind if the stars grow dim
And the clouds blow over and darken him
So long as Lord God's watching over him
Keeping track of how it all goes on.

But I've been walking through the night and the day
Till my eyes get weary and my head turns grey
And sometimes it seems maybe God's gone away
Forgetting His promise that we heard Him say
And we're lost out here in the stars.
Little stars

Big stars
Blowing through the night
And we're lost out here in the stars.

One Hundred and Twenty

Other animals kill because they know no better. Knowing better makes us human.

Knowing better is our blessing and our curse, because we seldom do better.

Human history is a record of our crimes and our gods. We created gods to forgive us for crimes we couldn’t forgive ourselves. But now we know there are no gods. After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

One Hundred and Nineteen

There’s still much to learn, if I wanted to. But I don’t. Everything I’m learning now disgusts me.

We haven’t always been disgusting. Once we were like other animals, killing each other because we knew no better. But now we do know better. Now we know the difference between right and wrong, and to my disgust we choose to do what we know is wrong.

We’re destroying ourselves because we’re disgusted by what we've become.

One Hundred and Eighteen

Scientists of the mind claim we can’t imagine the world without us in it. They mean we can’t imagine not existing. I can easily imagine the world without me in it, because I don’t feel I belong in it.

I know most people feel the same. But most other people imagine there's another better world in which they do belong.

Most people seek to escape from this world into that other better one. Few accept that this is the only world, and try to make it better.

One Hundred and Seventeen

Despite the pain, it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Not because the memory consoles us, but because knowing and accepting that we'll never be happy again reconciles us to life, and to death. Love. like life, is a disease, and those who recover from it are thereafter immune.