Does She Love You?

“The world ought not to be a harmonious loving place. It ought to be a place of fierce discord and intermittent harmonies: which it is. Love ought not to be perfect. It ought to have perfect moments, and wildernesses of thorn bushes. Which it has. A “perfect” relationship ought not to be possible. Every relationship should have its absolute limits, its absolute reserves, essential to the singleness of the soul in each person. A truly perfect relationship is one in which each party leaves great tracts unknown in the other party.” – D.H. Lawrence, “Studies in Classic American Literature”

Men with mystic mindsets are a superstitious sort, especially when it comes to women. As they well should. Had we a little more scrutiny toward Eve in Eden or a little more responsibility to God after, we might still be in the garden naming wondrous beasts. We fear that power however, as to name it is to claim it. McCarthy says the same in Outer Dark, for to name is it to claim it and if you don’t name it then “you cain’t talk about it even.” Modern men, being gnostics of another notion, can’t even name their own own relationships with women, and thus cannot claim them.

The name, of course, is love but even to name it means nothing if you do not know it. Woman is always the esoteric of the sexes, to love her is to always be initiated in some peculiar and personal mystery cult. Woman gatekeeps the darkness, woman is the goal of a man’s nightfall. Home and hearth will always belong to her, when she is still within her nature. Everywhere that clerical man now walks he sees a life out of balance, nature inverted, and blood-consciousness denied.

How does a man love a woman? He just does, in spite of himself. In spite of herself. Call it the eighth sacred mystery.

Men do, women are, is the fundamental premise of man vs. woman. Men are exoteric, women are esoteric. Man is the sun, woman is the moon. And so on and so forth. But for man to even be doing anything he first must be, and that for the postmodern man is a nearly impossible challenge. He has to cobble together a personality made out of several damaged fractal selves and then attempt to succeed at anything in a rigged and high-stakes system where the expectations are so out or proportion they should be treated as satire. Man cannot live on bread alone, nor can he live on the search for a purpose. He must have one and believe in it. He certainly cannot marry without it either, unless he is a lumpen who has embraced the queer energies of total self-destruction.

It’s hard enough to fail, but it’s worse to fail so hard you lose feeling after ten years of floating through the miasmic haze of modernity. Men after a certain point accept that they probably won’t find love. Sex and love are separate things though both wanted at the same time. Sex does not embarrass this age but love does, so no man will name it as to name it is to claim it. You can’t talk about it even. What does it even mean to be loved, they ask after a certain point. Within just a few years of being exiled into the outer dark of emotion’s arctic tundra men will begin writing manifestos born out of their unrealized sensations, or delve so deeply into the mysteries they try to discover quantum complexities in love, women, and sex.

What a stupid miracle that people can even live in a society that breeds these idiot philosophies.

I never got so as far as this, despite my own forty years in the desert. I was an early adopter of break yourself so they can’t break you. It cushions the blows. It sounds melodramatic when all that is being described is a long dry spell of being alone. Talking about it will always take the form of coping, but that is what man has done since the gods breathed language into our mouths: made noise to cope.

Society’s greatest purpose now is to produce novelty forms of anaesthetic for a broken and disjointed population to take. Lewis Hyde notes in his essay “Alcohol and Poetry” that the word anaesthetic literally means “without sensation”. An-aesthetic. To be without aesthetic. This is a place millions find themselves, which makes the literal poison pills of opioids easier to swallow for people who live in constant pain, physical or otherwise. Even when sensation returns, it can be a while for a man to notice it or to even accept it. He would need to claim it, and to claim it you need to name it.

I fell in love with a woman, and she did with me. I’m not sure who usually falls for whom first. She gave in so sweetly immediately. It took me longer to acknowledge it however as I didn’t want to name it. To name it is to claim it. To claim it would mean opening myself back up to sensation, to living with pain. Romantic love was invented by the troubadours, a social construct if you will based on our ancient domestic habits. And since that time of its creation, before the greeting card industry put love on the sick path of counting orgasms and debating ages, love has always been coupled with the pain it caused. Love and pain cannot be separated, and it is not simply the pain of heartbreak. Love is pain itself and to be in love is to be in pain and to be prepared for pain for all the time it stays with you. One cannot be on an anaesthetic and be in love. Man cannot have love and be without sensation.

So I name her. I claim her. I claim her love and I love her as well. She is my future wife and the future mother of my children. I claim the pain she’ll cause, as all women do. I claim her mysteries. I will beat a path onward without looking back because I know she’ll follow. I love her in spite of myself. I love her in spite of herself.

I name it. I claim it.