Novalis he warned those who intended to venture into understanding or even trying to explain love that the only possible initiation into this dark discourse was that offered by the poets. Poetry would be the only possible sentimental education, the only entrance door to the inaccessible mystery of Eros. Certainly not that of science which would like to reduce the experience of love to a storm of dopamine in certain areas of the brain and not even that of psychoanalysis which would tend to reduce that mystery to the inexorable repetition of love for the mother. So every love would be nothing more than the re-edition of a first love that was necessarily forbidden because it was incestuous. Yet psychoanalysis itself has made the incandescence of love the elective subject of its practice. That’s what Freud he discovers very soon, with great surprise and dismay: the analyst is destined to become the object of his patients’ transference love. In this sense he was able to compare the work of the psychoanalyst not so much to that, often mentioned, of the archaeologist who traces, starting from the surviving remains of the past, the ancient buried city of the unconsciousbut to the more sulphurous one of the chemist who is forced to handle dangerous substances which require extreme care and prudence in order not to explode or cause damage.
But if Freud believed that deep down love was inseparable from an unconscious repetition that places the beloved against the necessary background of maternal love and its primary character, it was Lacannourished by the poetry of Rimbaud, to underline how the love encounter is such not so much because it replicates an unforgettable love already experienced in childhood, but because it escapes any repetition, because it reveals itself as unprecedented, surprising, radically unexpected, new. It is, therefore, poets, not psychoanalysts, who teach us: the love encounter is a blow, a bump, a cut, sometimes even a catastrophe, which strips us of our ego, removing us from the reassuring order of canonical reality. In this the poem reiterates that in love there is always a loss of government at stake. Not only of one’s own ego, forced to live one radical experience of decentralization, but also of the ordinary laws of the world. In fact, in the love encounter it is not only the fate of the One who must discover himself as Two, but of the world itself, that is at stake. The birth of a love cannot ignore the birth of another world, of a new world, no longer, precisely, of the world of the One, but of the world of the Two. The secret sharing of the world event as event of the Two it is the most specific joy of love. For this reason the end of a love affair can be so traumatic. Not only because separation undermines the unity of the Two, but because every end brings with it the end of the new world of the Two, it highlights not only the death of a love, but the death of the world that this love gave birth to. The end of a love is the end of a world. This is why poets have always sung the agony of its end together with the exhilaration of love. If love marks a new beginning of the world, or, better, shows that the event of the world never ceases to begin, its death brings with it the death of the world of the Two. If love introduced the thrill of the eternal into the becoming of time, its end does not erase that thrill, but shows its transience. Without love the world loses its life, its nomenclature, its existence. This also means that the love encounter, like every encounter, belongs to the pure regime of contingency. It cannot be predicted, it cannot be necessary, it cannot be part of a program. For every love, what is always worth it Picasso he said of his artistic creation: “I don’t seek, I find”. The love encounter brings with it this displacement, it is an event that does not depend on our search but which resembles a visitation, a feeling of being found. An unexpected event that pierces every automatism, an unexpected impact that makes a light appear in the darkness. Yet in every love encounter there is something, the poets still teach us, which authorizes us to say that it is a re-encounter, a rediscovery. It doesn’t just happen in the duration of love; the event of the first meeting tends to be repeated and not exhausted; constancy, dedication, habit transform the pure contingency of that meeting into a necessity written in the stars, into a repetition that resembles, as Ungaretti writes, a “heated stillness”. But it also happens when the Two experience the sensation of having already seen each other, known each other, met.
In another time, in another season of life, in another world. Plato he built on this feeling iThe myth of Eros as the myth of the recomposition of the “whole”, destined first to break and then to resolidify thanks to the power of Eros which allows the two split parts to rediscover their ancient common origin. In reality, the fact that lovers declare the feeling of having recognized each other as already known, although it does not lead to any “whole”, does however say something essential about love. Not so much in the sense of a myth that would define the meeting as a fatal destiny, already written, already happened, but in that in which in the meeting the Two encounter something of themselves which however surprises them because it comes from another. This is the structure of every encounter: an otherness that disturbs us, as Freud would say, because it exposes us to something that is both foreign and familiar. In fact, these are the two deepest roots of the feeling of love.
Another lesson we can learn from love poems is that there is no love between souls because love is always a love between bodies. Poets do not forget this and for this reason they linger on the details of the body of those who capture our love. They are the hair, the lips, the face, the back, the tongue, the voice, the eyes, the throat, the breath, the hands, the navel, the heart, the breasts, the chest, the forehead, the eyelashes, the thighs, the feet, the pupils, the teeth, the shoulders, the arms, the blood, the skin, the belly, the thumbs, the lungs, the fingers, the tears, the flesh. Loving erotica elevates every detail of the body to the dignity of the divine. There is no love poetry that does not evoke the body of the one you love. Love shows not so much that a body hides a soul, but that there is no soul that is not a body. This is why writing about love is like making love. Not just talking but actually making love. It is the lust of poetic writing. Catastrophe of language, he would say Celan. Don’t use language as if it were a tool but let yourself be crossed by his trauma, by the impossibility of saying that it carries with it as his most radical secret. For this reason the word of love is always poetic and vice versa, every poetic word is a word of love.
It touches on the impossibility of doing and being One with the Other, the illusion of the whole, of the wasteless conjunction of the Two.
In war, poetry is the first to die
by Antonio Spadaro
Because of this love poetry renounces all ownership, all appropriation, all seizure. And for this reason one of the highest gestures of love is to close your eyes, give up vigilance, lose more than acquire, give more than have, love more than be loved.
Love requires not only desire and its eroticism but, as poets still know best of all, also care. Lovers are crystals that demand to be treated with the “grace of attention”he would say Simone Weil. This is why the love encounter, when it happens, interrupts the desert of existence and its neglect. It temporarily suspends our destiny as beings thrown into existence. It allows you to dig a refuge, a niche, a corner separated from the atrocity of life. It allows us not to abdicate our vulnerability. One cannot help but love the helpless life of the beloved. Not his prestige or his glory. Not his power or his knowledge. Not his possession or his kingdom.
But only the small untranslatable life of the proper name, its most naked heart.
The book – Not to you naked love by AA.VV. (Crocetti editore, edited by Nicola Crocetti and Massimo Recalcati, 180 pages, 17 euros)
#poem #Eros #Psyche #meet
– 2024-04-15 12:59:53
