Dylan Said: "I'm Sick of Love"

The sadness of love sickness is unlike other forms of sadness. These other forms, based in other causes, are always too mundane, too banal, to be worthy of the sadness of love, for this sadness is caused by the particularly of a person -- who cannot be replicated precisely because she cannot be generalized.

"I'm down, down, down. This whole world seems against me. I lost my job, wrecked my car, my dog died, I'm unattractive, obese, stupid, unoriginal, with no talents."
"Please. If you only knew the sadness I feel. Because of X! Ah! The endless ways to think of her!"

Which accounts for why love sickness is the most preferred of all forms of sadness; which also accounts for perhaps the leading cause for suicide. The coils will not be shaken off -- the cause seems heroic, noble, archetypal, and is fought precisely for the different characteristics that constitute this counter self. If the person is warm and endearing, the sorrow is for that; humorous and forgiving for that too; beautiful -- why, for that, oh, celestial wonder of this infinite cosmos, if only for that! And the latter cannot be escaped; the person is inexorably beautiful, just as beauty is inexorably attractive. The emotional release -- the pheromones, the endorphins, and other narcotics of the brain -- sets in place the gravity of focus, and, depending on the broadness of the luminous qualities of the person in consideration, this focus will either work within reason, or insanely hard to find at least a single quality that can be held in esteem -- and run it into the ground. The person is creative and charming and funny and poetic. This isn't to say that the emotional release predestines our perception of the other, though typically this is the case. These two attractive adolescents love because they are both -- attractive. Their positive qualities hold only black holes in their personalities. They reason out the angles of each other and conclude, with consciences pinpricked, that all is glory, wonder, beauty. They attempt a relationship -- and grow in emotional maturity. Their failure is obvious to the non-intoxicated: they have no matching characteristics with which to hold each other up. This is the spiritual test of love: to seek an obective set of matches in another while being gloriously suffocated with a torrent of glittering emotions, and if this cannot be done, suffer for the sake of future happiness by cooling the heat of passion and dropping it when it is closest to hypnosis.

Interestingly, whether one quality or ten doesn't matter; and some qualities can be created ex nihilo and still be worshipped as evidences of perfection. It's as if the mind, seeking a reasonable explanation for why a person is attracted to someone with no intrinsically good qualities, creates its own fantasies to satisfy the demands of reason, and reason, so transfixed by the magic of the imagination, resigns to the predisposed desires of the self. Thus the blindness of love, created by the emotional release. Thus the "falling" into love; the emotional swirl is a torrent of euphoria, a thunderstorm. Love is almost a vice of the unconscious inflicted on the person who is inebriated with it: it rises out of involuntary feelings, these feelings based in emotions, these emotions based (in part) in lower chemical neurological reactions. It rises out, and strangles the person "in" it, whether blessedly or as a curse, depending, of course, on the person's capacity to follow through with what love has fulminated in his being, unasked, but always subsequently preferred. If the person cannot follow through, his desire is broken off. Consequently he is tormented, and his love will, once again, abdicate reason through the possibility of imagination. He will be deluded into waiting -- until she is available, until she returns, until she consents; it doesn't matter. This period of waiting will bring before him the continual possibility of just breaking it off and getting on with his life; but this takes incredible spirit; often he will simply wait until his passion cools. The hardness of the way is what it is because, as alluded to previously, he thinks he is fighting for something scintillatingly particular, unreplicable, a portion of the universe with no equal -- and it has no equal; no self, no matter how superficial or nearing-nonexistence, is equivalent to the next (even though, spiritually considered, one has to look closer for differences the less of a self the self itself is in relation to the other). He is fighting for her beauty -- nothing compares! Her smile -- nothing compares! And, yes, dear reader, nothing compares! Glory to God! Mankind is a treasure! But skip ahead and imagine one year from now when he no longer desires her. He will say to himself, "yes, I was in love with her once. She was beautiful; she still is beautiful. Her depth was endless; her depth is still endless. Her smile is immaculate; why, her smile still is what it was. Why, then, did I ever torment myself over the fantastic chance that she would be mine then when I feel nothing now?" The answer is: the emotional playingfield. He could not break from the drug because he confused the drug with her. After all, attraction is not tantmount to the thing attractive. Hm. But to realistically think a person could think that, through cold, detached reasoning, in the moment of erotic ecstasy -- ludicrous! But, ah, yes, yes, glory to God again! He still has the impulse of the Eternal within him; the timeless signpost stamped on the walls of his soul, conscious of it each moment he is conscious of himself. The Eternal commands: move on. It does not reason; reason only invites doubt, and doubt is a stronger tide than certainty. It only stands, immutable, with the same advice: move on! Yes, move on; make the leap and get on with your life. God will provide. Enough of this futile ruination of a good soul! Move on, and in moving, yes, you will suffer too, but the darkness of your suffering will contain with it a light of hope, and with each step its rays will warm the skin of your happiness until it once again penetrates your whole being, and there you will stand, a stronger man because of the sufferings you overcame. Not the sufferings of despair, that always bear no fruit. The sufferings of righteousness; of responding in faith to the Eternal within you! Lovers of the world! I say, continue to love! But when your love wraps itself around you tighter than loving hands should and proceeds to constrict the very blood within you, simply resign it, and all will be well.

But how hard, how infinitely hard even this leap is! Broad is the way to destruction. Yes. Few find life; that is, few will the strength to live it. To suffer for love! What else is there to suffer for! But this suffering murders the one caught in it; thus it potentially murders, or at least mutilates, the relations the one has. This is worth fighting for? No, the higher love is worth fighting for, for in fighting for it there is none of the inner turmoil of erotic love; in fighting for it the inwardness of man is revitalized as he fights for it, and in fighting for it, he fights for the good of the whole world. This is the love worth fighing for!

But erotic love has brought so much as well. It is responsible for almost all of the beauty in the history of the world, whether as an immediate cause, or a cause proper. Its frustration is sublimated into creativity, whether explicitly with the beloved in mind, as the subject, or not, where the power of the love fuels the creative flow, undifferentiated (Freud was three-fourths wrong: love moreso than sexual desire as a motivation for creativity; at times sex predicated by love; rarely sex without love). Without love, more, we would not be capable of perceiving beauty. It is really love that opens the doors of perception; it signals the beautiful patches of the ontology of the beloved, and for once we see something for its own sake -- and with each taste we form an idea, a preference, for the beauty of the world. Consequently we desire to see it as often as we can. And eventually perhaps we choose God, for He is the keymaster to the floodgates of the beautiful.