March 28, 2025
A famous story by Raymond Carver is titled “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” In the story, two couples sit around a table trying to decide what love truly is. By the end, they have worked their way through two bottles of gin, and night has fallen, leaving them in darkness. That is the end of the story.
I have no great confidence I can do better than the couples. It is tempting to say that Carver’s own answer is that none of us has a damned clue what love is, even though we are stuck with it, each of us pursuing what we think, what we hope, is true love and not one of the many illusions that pass for it. But I think the title also implies that we are driven, not just to seek love, but to talk about it. And that is intriguing—if love is just feelings, isn’t talking about it just an evasion, just chatter? Maybe we keep endlessly talking about love as a way of not loving, as a way of distancing from it. That’ s always a possibility. How much talk therapy, how much literary criticism is a way of seeming to pursue insight while really driving around it in a circle? If you’re glib, you can keep this up indefinitely.
But talking, and writing, are all we have. Without them, love is blind, our whole lives are blind. Cupid is blindfolded: what would happen if he could see?
What follows is my own, possibly idiosyncratic, typology, but let me strike out boldly by saying that love can be categorized as rational or irrational. Rational love values closenesss and connection, but preserves difference and therefore a degree of distance. It is the type of love that Jewish theologian Martin Buber called I-Thou. Whether spiritual or secular, an I-Thou relationship is, despite its closeness, able to preserve what is seen as a saving distance precisely because it is not driven by desire. It is therefore, as it is portrayed in literature, a happier love, the love of romantic comedy and fairy tales, in which “they all lived happily ever after.” This kind of love makes sense because it is based on the truth that no one is an island. We are an interdependent, social species, and we need one another, a fact that originates in evolutionary biology. Because of their large brains, human young have to be born prematurely, and spend much longer time in a dependent state while growing to maturity than the young of other animal species. Nor are we equipped even in maturity to be rugged individualists, like the large predators idealized by Social Darwinists. The myth of the rugged individualist, almost always male, is a pathology. Such individualists end up in solitary confinement inside their own heads, and people in solitary go mad. They brood, and then they erupt in rage. Hence Donald Trump. Hence Elon Musk.
Rational love, based on mutual, necessary interdependence, is not the same as codependence. Codependence clings out of terror and learned helplessness, and it usually clings to a toxic male who is unconsciously dependent himself. One of the women in Carver’s story was in a relationship with a violent abuser, yet she still insists that what they had was love. But such “love” has left the realm of the rational, in which love is nurturing rather than destructive. Rational love spans a whole spectrum, based on the nature of the Other, moving from various dual to various communal forms. There is, first, friendship, philia. It may in some ways be the most beautiful kind of love. Friends are there for each other, are mutually supportive, because, again, no one is self-sufficient, but friendship is not based on need. Friends merely thrive on each other’s company. The words of Montaigne about his close friendship are quietly eloquent: “Because it was he, because it was I.” Friendship used to be characterized as a male thing, “passing the love of women,” but that is mere sexism. Some of the deepest friendships of my life have been with women. If men and women did not often become friends in earlier days, it was because the social set-up made it next to impossible. Friendship is not limited by age, as I can tell you after a lifetime as a teacher. It is also not always dual: the close-knit group of “kindred spirits” is an important form of friendship.
Second, there is the companionate love of a good marriage. There may not be many, but they do exist, and companionate marital love overlaps to some extent with friendship, as in the trite and yet moving phrase, “I want to fall in love with and marry my best friend.” In fact, it’s a common plot in romantic comedy that the woman spends most of the story or movie pursuing, or being pursued by, some male who is an Object of Desire, in other words bad news, but comes to her senses by the end, rejects irrational love, and marries the nice guy whom she’s been friends with since forever. It can work the other way as well: Odysseus dallies with the irrational but tempting loves of Circe and Calypso, but in the long run Penelope is the only woman for him. Married partners—not always heterosexual by any means—differ from friends in being a team devoted to a common task, that of building and maintaining a family, which does not necessarily have to include children. Friends who are a duo united in a common enterprise, from Achilles and Patroclus to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza to Holmes and Watson, always strike us as quasi-married. Marital love also includes the love of parents and children for one another. More marriages than not are dysfunctional, even though they may not end in divorce, but in the marriages that work and last for a lifetime, the partners are so close-knit that the death of one often leads to the other dying shortly thereafter. Contrasting with the abusive relationship in the Carver story is the story of an elderly couple left in full-body casts after a terrible car accident. The husband is terribly upset that he cannot see his wife’s eyes within the body cast.
Third, the type of communal love that in Christian form is called agape, could be called impersonal love, in a way. We love the Other, who sometimes may be a complete stranger, not because we like them but because they are a fellow human being who may be in need and suffering. Christianity exalts it as the supreme kind of love, the kind of love God has for us, but in the parable of the Good Samaritan that exemplifies it, what we see is the compassion and empathy of one human being for another. God is not in the parable, which does not depend on any kind of religious faith. The greatest form of agape is self-sacrifice, actually giving up one’s life for others. This is what Christ did for all humanity, although that assertion drags into the discussion all the intractable problems of theodicy, the problem of the existence of evil and innocent suffering and God’s responsibility for them in the first place.
The Biblical tradition struggles to accommodate the fourth type of rational love, the love of nature, because of its fear of idolatry, its fear that people will worship nature instead of God. Romantic nature poetry such as that of Wordsworth is likely to be accused of “pantheism,” the heretical belief that there is a spiritual presence dwelling in nature. The party line says that we may admire nature as a way of complimenting God on his handiwork, and may even view nature as a fellow creature also worshipping its Creator, the mountains clapping their hands and all that. But start sensing God as a presence in nature, to feel that it is, as Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, “charged with the grandeur of God,” and you are on your way to paganism, which means regression downward towards the primitive rather than upwards towards the proper location of spirit, which is supernatural, above nature. The fact that Hopkins was a Jesuit indicates, however, that a less neurotic and more rational attitude is possible. Moreover, the great tradition of nature writing in the 19th and 20th centuries is for the most part secular. It is based rather on a rational, though heartfelt, feeling of connection and interdependence, reinforced as the science of biology developed the notion of ecology—influenced, in fact, by the nature writers. The idea that we are part of a worldwide natural system that behaves, according to its boldest formulation as the Gaia hypothesis, as if it were a single organism, is a kind of natural counterpart of agape, in which we are members of one body.
Which brings us to the fifth kind of rational love, the love of God. The idea that love of God is rational is a difficult sell in our time, when the only forms of religion that get any media attention are deeply pathological. It seems, too, that there is a further difficulty. I am not a historian of religion and speak here with no professional authority, but intense love for and a personal relationship to a deity do not seem to be universal characteristics of religion outside of the three Biblical religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Bhakti, one of the four forms of yoga in the Hindu tradition, is the path of emotional devotion to a deity, but it developed rather late, in the 7th through the 10th centuries. In Classical myth and literature, as in the Vedas, the gods are powerful and must be worshipped through proper sacrifice, but that is for the sake of social order. The gods may have their favorites, as Athena has a special regard for Odysseus, but as a rule they avoid emotional involvement with mortals because we are like pets: we only live a short time, and then die. But Jewish Scripture, the Old Testament, is based on the idea of a Covenant, a special, personal bond between God and his people, faithfulness to which is constantly likened to fidelity within a marriage. Christianity widened that personal bond beyond a chosen people to the whole human race. Jesus taught that God was not just a powerful order principle but a loving Father, and taught the Lord’s Prayer as a way of speaking to him.
I am not of much use here because, as I confessed last week, I have never known what to do with this notion of loving a personal God and being loved back. It would not occur to me to ask for God’s attention any more than some celebrity’s. When I have been in the presence of famous people, it was just awkward. I would avoid it at all costs. I guess this just means that my path is not bhakti but jnana yoga, the intellectual path of meditation and inwardness. My religious feelings, such as they are, are cosmic and mystical on the one hand—an escape from the personal—but counterbalanced by an agape sense of empathy and compassion lest the mystical turn into an evasion, a way of forgetting that people suffer. All I can say is that the Hindu idea of multiple paths makes sense to me, and that all the paths are forms of religio, the root meaning of religion, which is to bind together, as in “ligament.” The fact that this etymology is disputed linguistically does not make it any the less useful. That in fact sums up the function not just of the religious forms but of all five of the forms of rational love—it is what makes them “rational,” in their healthy manifestations, at any rate. Such love not only makes the world go round, it keeps the world in place. It provides the stable grounding of life, keeping us from free fall into the uncertainty we spoke of last week, the nothing, the Ungrund that we sense always beneath our feet.
Irrational love is ecstatic, a word originally meaning “going out of oneself.” Where rational love preserves a degree of distance, establishes a boundary even as it seeks relationship, the principle of irrational love is what Northrop Frye, following Heidegger, called “ecstatic metaphor.” Metaphor is a statement of identification rather than relation, A is B. Because that is paradoxical, metaphor is normally taken as figurative, really meaning merely that A is like B. But ecstatic metaphor is metaphor taken literally. Who would do such a wild thing? As usual, the speech of Duke Theseus in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a touchstone: the “lunatic,” meaning the religious visionary or mystic, the lover, and the poet, the devotees of the imagination. Contrasting with the various forms of rational love, we have romantic love, which has been normalized by familiarity, but is in fact deeply strange. Much romantic love is role playing rather than the real thing, but when it is real such a love is a seizure, a madness that may break through the boundaries of rational, socially acceptable behavior. The Classical world gave us a name for such love, Eros.
Then as now, social authorities and proponents of the rational have attempted two methods of damage control in the face of the dangerous power of Eros. Eros is grounded in the body, in the senses and in the body’s drives. Medieval Christianity did its best to demonize the body and its urges. God created the human body and found it good, but because of the Fall the body became corrupted, its urges becoming sinful and destructive. The body, with its undignified physical functions, is in fact repellent, and its urges are disgusting and animalistic. The Christian ideal from the beginning was celibacy, and numerous ascetic regimes were invented as disciplines to free people from their attachment both to the body and to the material world that is the body’s natural context. Paul’s notorious remark that “It is better to marry than to burn” means that Christians should only marry as a second-best solution. If you can really not manage the ideal of celibacy, you should marry rather than damning yourself through the sin of lust. But even within marriage, sexual craving is only lawful when its goal is reproduction. “Recreational sex,” as the likes of JD Vance are calling it these days, is no better than lust smuggled into marriage in disguise. Reproductive sex is a necessary evil. It is not sinful, but God never intended the human race to perpetuate itself in such a repellent way. Augustine said that unfallen reproduction would have been by will rather than desire. Desire is threatening because it so easily overpowers the will, and Augustine knew about that personally, having been, by his own description, something of a sex addict when he was young. In other words, it was the powerful irrationality of Eros that was more threatening than the body itself. To be swept away, no longer to be in control, was deeply frightening. Most hellfire and brimstone sermons tended to be about lust, all the way up to modern times, such as the one that goes on for pages in the center of James Joyce’s autobiographical novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
The problem with “just say no” is that it really doesn’t work, which is why so many sex scandals emerge from sexually repressive Christian communities, often among church elders and authorities, who have the power that creates opportunity. A more effective way of coping with the potentially lawless power of Eros is sublimation, or rechanneling. Eros is energy, and depth psychology gave that energy a name, libido. But that energy, though originally sexual, can be rechanneled to serve higher purposes—literally higher. That is, it can become the means of an ascent up the ladder of being, the axis mundi. Christianity did not invent the idea of sublimated love, but was instead profoundly influenced by Plato’s treatment of love in the Symposium and the Phaedrus. In the Symposium, Socrates describes the progress of love as an ascent up what has sometimes been called the Platonic ladder. The lover begins by being physically attracted to the beloved, but as his love matures he perceives the beloved as the embodiment of an ideal Form of love whose actual location is a higher level of being. Love becomes an act of the mind rather than the body, as the mind seeks that higher Form of love, and by that act rises towards it.
The ascent quest of sublimated Eros was adopted from neo-Platonism by Christianity. In an essay called “The Survival of Eros in Poetry,” Northrop Frye showed how Eros survived by being at once sublimated and subordinated to Christian love, to agape. Dante’s Divine Comedy is crucial in this regard. His love of Beatrice, originating as romantic Courtly Love or Eros, actually becomes the means of his salvation, as his will to be reunited with Beatrice leads him to ascend the mountain of purgatory, and then, once reunited with Beatrice, to continue ascending under her guidance to the highest reaches of heaven and the presence of God, who is, in the poem’s last line, “The love that moves the sun and other stars.” This synthesis of agape and Eros remains controversial within Christian theology, however. The Lutheran theologian Anders Nygren rejected it in his book Agape and Eros (1930, 1936), arguing that Eros, because based on desire, is a self-seeking love that turns us away from the love of God. Modern Catholic theology, on the other hand, affirms the sublimation of Eros into agape in what it calls caritas. In 2005, Benedict XVI issued an encyclical called Deus caritas est, based in part on unfinished writings by his predecessor John Paul II. As its title implies, it reaffirms the medieval continuity of Eros and agape, an affirmation found also in the theology of the Lutheran Paul Tillich and the Catholic Karl Rahner.
All this sounds pious and safe enough, but we should make no mistake. As a poet, Dante emerged from the Courtly Love tradition that began with the troubadours in southern France, and Courtly Love was irrational in that it was outside of marriage and social authority. Any number of people today would call it adulterous, as I know from having taught Dante for 40 years. Dante would not agree, and in fact argues his case implicitly in canto 5 of the Inferno, in which he visits the circle of the lustful in hell and talks with Paolo and Francesca, a real-life pair of Courtly Lovers who fell into adultery by reading together of the love of Lancelot and Guinevere and convincing themselves that their desire was really a virtue, only to find out differently after they are discovered in bed together by Francesca’s husband and killed. What Dante does not acknowledge in that canto was that his love of Beatrice is likewise outside of marriage. Dante was married to Gemma Donati, who bore him 3 children and is never mentioned in any of his writings. His love of Beatrice bore him upward rather than downward because it was unselfish, but he is uncomfortably aware that selfish and unselfish Eros can easily be confused—so uncomfortable that he faints for pity of Paolo and Francesca’s fate.
Sublimated romantic love has a strange affinity with mysticism. The words of the traditional marriage ceremony say that husband and wife become “one flesh,” a radical metaphor which is nevertheless not usually taken literally. It is rather romantic love that exceeds not only the boundaries of society and law but also the boundaries of personal identity. In his love poetry, John Donne, for example, seems virtually obsessed with the idea that he and his lover form a unified third identity that is a 2-in-1. In a poem significantly titled “The Canonization,” Donne playfully yet seriously regards himself and his lover as saints of Eros, and their act of love, their consummation, as a martyrdom:
We’re tapers too, and at our own cost die, And we in us find the eagle and the dove. The phoenix riddle hath more wit By us; we two being one, are it. So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit. We die and rise the same, and prove Mysterious by this love.
“Die” was Elizabethan slang for orgasm, the moment in sex in which the boundary of the ego-self dissolves and two become one flesh. The phoenix was immortal through repeated death and rebirth, but its self-immolation was singular, not with a mate. Yet, strangely enough, Shakespeare has a riddling poem called “The Phoenix and Turtle” in which the red-flamed phoenix and the white turtledove, the colors of Eros, consummate their love and rise “in a mutual flame from hence.” The poem is a mock funeral conducted by the other birds left behind in the world of ordinary experience in which the demarcations of self and Other, of sameness and difference, remain in place. The phoenix and turtle, however, have risen to a higher level of being that can only be spoken of in a series of paradoxes:
Property was thus appalled That the self was not the same; Single nature’s double name Neither two nor one was called.
Reason itself, “confounded,” cries out “Love hath reason, reason none.” The same imagery occurs in the mystical tradition, where the lover becomes God himself, based on the Biblical imagery of Christ as the Bridegroom and his people as the Bride. The Song of Songs in the Old Testament is an Eros poem spoken by two separated lovers seeking each other out, but the imagery was interpreted by Christian writers as sublimated. The Song of Songs is “really” about the quest of the soul seeking union with God. And the mystical experience, in Christianity but also in other mystical traditions such as in Islam, is not a close relationship with God but an experience of total union with him. The self dissolves, in a recurrent image, like a drop of water into the sea.
Ordinary people unthinkingly take the language of complete union with an Other, whether a human lover or God, figuratively—well, it really means we feel very close to a beloved or to God. To take the metaphors literally, ecstatically, would be extreme and probably neurotic. But that is not quite honest, a way of trying to evade and dismiss the power of the experience of Eros. Lovers may not speak of mutual identity—but love is a madness in which people are willing to crash through any barrier, defy any law, in order to be with someone else. When parents, in Shakespeare’s time or now, try to control their sons and daughters, it is partly, yes, an expression of patriarchal property rights, for children were traditionally the property of their parents. But property is appalled when a son or daughter seems utterly, dangerously possessed and out of control when infatuated with someone who may be unsuitable or outright dangerous. We are terrified when our children act half-crazed in the name of love, but may forget or deny the risky behavior in our own past. We say the young naively think they are immortal, but the truth is that the young are not yet resigned to living safely within the boundaries, including the final boundary of death. They are not as attached to themselves and their lives and their assets as we are.
We try to socialize the young, supercharged with hormones, by teaching sublimation. Yet, if puritanical repression does not succeed in the long run, sublimation only half-succeeds. It tends to split Eros in half, one half sublimated and idealizing but the other half stubbornly attached to the body and the pleasure principle. Freud analyzed this tendency brilliantly in an article of 1912 bearing the fearsome title “The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life.” Its premise is what is popularly called the virgin-whore syndrome. Men may suffer “psychic impotence” with certain women, women for whom they have idealistic feelings, while having no problem with women they do not respect. There is a tendency to be in denial about this syndrome by dismissing it as a product of the sexual repressiveness of the Victorian age, in which men visited prostitutes by the millions because the woman they were married to was “the angel in the house.” Women were taken to be so “pure” that there was something wrong with them if they liked sex. This is what Blake means in “London” when he says that the harlot’s cry “Blights with plagues the marriage hearse.” It is anything but an attack on prostitutes: the problem is with the “marriage hearse.” Dickens, who also sympathized with prostitutes as society’s scapegoats, played out the pattern in the partly autobiographical David Copperfield. David is strongly attracted to playful, kittenish Dora, but Dora has to be killed off so that he can marry the serious, respectable Agnes. (Note the names: a “gift” and a pure “lamb”). On the final page, there is a tableau with Agnes pointing upward, presumably towards the higher things one is supposed to have one’s mind on. The running joke, however, is that she is pointing towards the bedroom and David doesn’t get it. Maybe his author did, though: Dickens disrupted his marriage for the sake of an 18-year-old actress.
Pierce Moffett, the protagonist of one of the most ambitious fantasies of our time, John Crowley’s Aegypt tetralogy, is a scholar and academic who finds himself involved with two women with almost the same name. For three of the four volumes, he is entangled with intense, dark-haired, psychologically wounded Rose, with whom he initiates a BDSM relationship. The fourth and much shorter volume appeared after a long hiatus, and in it Pierce has totally changed his life and is married to Rosie, who has a child. He has given up somehow the dark side of his erotic imagination, and, like David Copperfield, married the girl he “should” be with. At the same time, he has renounced his involvement in magic and the occult, becoming a Faust who recanted. I do not, I am afraid, find much of this very convincing. Jung himself had the courage to try to live out this split, maintaining over decades what we would now call a polyamorous relationship. The two women were opposites, as you can see in photographs. His wife and mother of his children, Emma, was down to earth and by all accounts had a wonderful sense of humor. The other woman was Toni Wolff, dark and as intense as her name, who, when he met her, was suffering from psychosis. So was her predecessor, another Dark Lady named Sabina Spielrein, with whom Jung had been involved early on. The resulting melodrama was dramatized in the film A Dangerous Method (2011) by David Cronenberg, in which Freud was played by Viggo Mortensen and Spielrein by Keira Knightley, showing Jung’s willingness to overstep the boundaries of professionality and a few other boundaries as well: once again BDSM gets into the mix, based on the fact that Spielrein, when a psychiatric patient, had a spanking fetish. These days we are plagued with many very confused young men trying to cope with what this split has become in post-feminist times. They are very confused indeed, but they are playing out, or being played by, a long-running scenario. On the one hand they want women to be “trad wives,” goody-goody parodies of the 1950’s. On the other, under the influence of porn and “influencers” such as Andrew Tate, they want women they can grab by the pussy. The women they want nothing to do with are feminists with independent lives and careers. They claim to be furious because such women won’t date them, but this is a lie. They are afraid of such women, afraid of rejection, of being called inadequate.
The ascent quest of sublimated Eros is a compromise, an attempt to appropriate the vital energies of Eros and put them to the service of rationality. Freud claimed that all the energy that built civilization is really sublimated Eros. But in a late work, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), he admitted pessimistically that sublimation on a social level had the same limitations that he had showed on an individual level in the “Degradation” essay. Sublimation is only partly successful, and the erotic energy that is not sublimated has to be repressed. But repression only works so long, and when a civilization reaches the point of decadence, it suffers a “return of the repressed” and its rational order is troubled by antisocial disruptions of sex and violence, which is what we are living through now.
The sublimated ascent quest is an attempt at a rational compromise. But, as Frye recognizes in the “Survival of Eros” essay, the Eros quest in itself is a descent. Dante’s love of Beatrice is part of a divine comedy because it is totally sublimated. Even when Beatrice was alive, the relationship was sublimated by the easiest means possible, by being completely distanced. It was entirely a love from afar, playing out in real life the pattern of the Courtly Love sonnet sequences. It is easy to avoid the fate of Paolo and Francesca when your beloved is a “cruel mistress,” “cruel” meaning unavailable for one of several reasons, the commonest being that she simply keeps you at arm’s length. How many of us play out the same pattern in adolescence, writing poems of unrequited love? We studiously avoid the insight that the love is beautiful and ideal because it is unrequited, and we have no doubt colluded in maintaining that distance, if only by choosing an unavailable woman.
But when Courtly Love breaks out of the safety of idealized lyric poetry into actual narratives, the pattern reverts to that of Paolo and Francesca. All the great Courtly Love romances are in fact tragic: Tristan and Isolde, Lancelot and Guinevere, Diarmud and Grania in Ireland, and, in Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra. All of them break through the boundaries set up by society, especially the rationally-arranged marriage. Romantic love is illicit love, forbidden fruit, a taboo. We are supposed to put duty before passion. Those who refuse to do so are outcasts and outlaws, outside the boundaries, and their ultimate fate is a liebestod, a love-death, what amounts to a mutual suicide pact. And they may bring down others with them, may even bring down the whole social system. Teaching the ending of Malory’s Morte Darthur in the fall, I was shocked at how unbearably painful it was. The love of Lancelot and Guinevere leads to the death of Arthur, a truly good man, to the death of Lancelot’s friend Gawain, to civil wars that leave the great ideal of Camelot in ruins—and in the end Guinevere cloisters herself and refuses to see Lancelot again, who dies of a broken heart. It is not lyrical, it is not pretty. What good was this love? No hope here that the liebestod will be a phoenix-death out of which some good may come.
There is a very similar mood at the end of Part 1 of Goethe’s Faust, which Goethe titled a tragedy. It is the tragedy of Gretchen, not of Faust, who is no hero but a toxic male. Poor innocent Gretchen has overstepped the boundaries of society (and her domineering mother) and become involved with an older man, to whom she gives herself freely out of love. She gets pregnant, is abandoned by Faust, goes mad and drowns her newborn child, and is in prison waiting to be beheaded the next day. Faust tries to convince her to escape, but she cannot make a move because the real prison is that of her despair. Most of the ending is in prose, and I cannot think of another 19th century work that is so emotionally raw and open except Wuthering Heights. Where was Faust while Gretchen was going through her ordeal alone? At an orgy: attending the witches’ sabbath on Walpurgisnacht. This being the 19th century, the orgiastic details have to be mostly hinted at, but the hints are pretty heavy. In other words, Faust is suffering his own virgin-whore split, and he is guilty of the disaster that ensues because he does not handle it well.
Why does Part 2 of Faust, which is far longer and more complicated than Part 1, exist at all? Certainly not to expiate Faust’s guilt for Gretchen’s suffering. He utters not one word of remorse, and in fact Gretchen is not mentioned at all until the very final scene. He does not say so, but apparently Faust agrees with the sentiment of Yeats in “A Dialogue of Self and Soul”:
I am content to follow to its source Every event in action or in thought: Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!
Guilt is sterile and traps one in the past, which cannot be changed. The only thing to do is to go on. What is there to go on to? To go on is to descend, and what lies below are two things. One is the realm of repressed, unsuccessfully sublimated, instinctual desire. Part 2 has a second Walpurgisnacht, Classical rather than Christian, pagan rather than puritan. The Romantic movement began the ongoing attempt to liberate the repressed desires of Eros, but on Eros’ own terms. Rather than trying to socialize the pleasure principle through sublimation, some people began to dream of dropping social taboos and seeing whether much of the tragedy of thwarted Eros might simply resolve itself. Hence such poems as Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion and Shelley’s Epipsychidion, which argued for what the 60’s would call “free love. The 60’s was when I read those works for the first time, along with their later descendents, Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land and, later, Theodore Sturgeon’s Godbody.
It was an experiment worth making and by no means a totally failed one. For all our puritanical hangups, we are less neurotic about sex, and less punitive, than when I was young. But relaxing sexual repression did not lead to sexual revolution, because there was an obstacle other than mere prudery. If you read D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, if you watch the films of Ingmar Bergman, you learn that the project of liberating our deeper instinctual selves is most often thwarted not just by social convention but by the contest of egocentric wills. This can lead to marriages that are one long battle. I knew this from my parents’ marriage, about which I used to wonder: how can two people do absolutely nothing but fight? If you are that mismatched, end it and try again. But when my dad remarried, his second marriage was as antagonistic as his first. The ego has a will to mastery that can become murderous. Jealousy, exclusivity, and possessiveness are all manifestations of this egocentric will. Even marriages that are not a contest for domination find “free love” difficult. Polyamory sounds easy, letting it all hang out, but it is actually very hard, especially because Eros does not rest content with one object of desire but goes everywhere. Shelley’s Epipsychidion is an attempt to resolve on an archetypal level the conflicts, jealousies, and insecurities of his own entourage, and the result was not successful. Still, conventional marriage is so problematic these days that people are making all sorts of experiments, pragmatically and not out of some ideological program.
But Faust’s quest goes deeper than any Walpurgisnacht, down to a mysterious realm of “the Mothers,” described only by a series of paradoxes. The realm of the Mothers lies beneath the phenomenal world. This descent is what I have called decreation and it arrives at the point of the Nothing out of which All has sprung. What Faust brings out of nothing is Helen of Troy, the ultimate object of Eros desire, the face that launched a thousand ships. He courts her, has a child by her named Euphorion, but it does not last. Euphorion plunges off a cliff and dies, and Helen disappears. For the rest of his life, from presumed later middle age until he dies at the age of 100, Faust is alone and sublimates his energies in various civilizational projects of war (Act 4) and peace (Act 5, in which he has become a civil engineer reclaiming land from the sea to build a utopia). Faust is a failure, and his failure is probably meant to be that of Western man, and I do mean “man.” But the quest to the realm of the Mothers, the realm of Nothing, and the attempt at a mystical marriage comparable to the mystical marriages of the sublimated ascent, is described through the imagery of alchemy, which was, Jung came to feel, a kind of counterpart and complement to Christianity. Alchemy was simultaneously a mode of meditation close to what Jung called “active imagination” and an attempt to redeem the material world that had been largely rejected by Christianity. The problem of irrational love is the problem of our moment. Thwarted, Eros has become nihilistic and may yet cause the end of civilization. Some of the prophetic books of the 60’s were written out of that foreboding, such as Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization and Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death.
But what can all this highfalutin imagery mean to the common person? Maybe that it is not enough to be common, to be simple, to be a low-information voter and reject the mystery out of which all life springs because, man, that stuff’s just a bunch of intellectual talk. If you do not descend to Eros, it may come and take possession of you, and then you may see Helen of Troy in every skirt, as Mephistopheles contemptuously says to Faust at one point. Rational love is good, is necessary, but it is not enough. We are driven beyond the boundary, seeking something for which the object of desire is a symbol. What is the object of desire a symbol of? That is what we talk about when we talk about love.
The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan said that the unconscious is “the discourse of the Other.” Whenever I speak, the Other speaks through my language. I know its presence at moments where what I say exceeds my intentions and even my knowledge. What is the Other speaking through me? The answer may lie in another of Lacan’s aphorisms: “Man’s desire is the desire of the Other.” Perhaps we talk about love in an attempt to listen to the voice within our voices telling us what love is, as if we are our own Delphic oracle. Maybe that is the only answer we will ever get.
References
Frye, Northrop. “The Survival of Eros in Poetry.” In “The Secular Scripture”and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1976-1991. Edited by Joseph Adamson and Jean Wilson. Volume 18 in The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 2006. 252-286. Also published in Northrop Frye: Myth and Metaphor. Selected Essays, 1974-1988. Edited by Robert D. Denham. University Press of Virginia, 1990. 44-62.