Love and Space

"I can be your hero baby
I can kiss away the pain
I will stand by you forever
You can take my breath away" -Enrique Iglesias, et al.

"Man is reluctant to accept that his life has come to a conclusion in that most important respect, that his hopes have been fulfilled. He hesitates to look death in teh face, and there is little that comes so close to death as fulfilled love." --Ivan Klima




Born without a choice. Thrown without a word. Running towards nothing.

These conditions--those of existence--equal isolation. They result in alienation not only from one's self, but also from all others. Is it possible to not be alienated from others when you are alienated from yourself? In this case, alienation equals isolation. So, at bottom, we hope to find ourselves. And, we think we'll find it with another. It is as if our desire--the one we didn't choose--the one with no beginning--is somehow instinctively directed at another as it searches for itself. It bellows silently--"If you overcome isolation, you will overcome alienation." It drives us to believe that if one can have an encounter, they be will his or her self for the first time.

This is why death and love are so similar. This is why death and love are always blurred to indistinction--why completed love is indistinguishable from death. Why would else would love involve one person taking another's breath away? In any other context taking someone's breath away means ending their life. Death is the end of desire; fulfilled love is meant to amount to the fulfillment of all desire. The problem is that it is in the hope--the space--where desire moves that life is lived.

Alienation is a fact of existence we owe to time. Isolation is a fact of existence we might owe to death. Love isn't overcoming either of these. Love is recognizing one's interior infinite within, moving in, within, and between the endless space in which the insatiable desire for fulfillment dwells and the infinite abyss in an-Other. Love--eros--Revelation--is never a substantive, nor can it be configured in the past tense. Love is a verb we can conjugate only in the present because it signifies the endless quest for presence--the quest, doomed to failure, to give the present of presence to an-Other and thus to receive it in return.

"Perhaps, it occurred to me, I was in some new space. I'd entered the place where oblivion was born. Or despair. And also understanding. Or perhaps even love--not as a mirage but as a space for the soul to move in." --Ivan Klima