Hope Not, Love Much

September 23, 2009

And the greatest of these is not hope! 

“The only way to avoid hypocrisy is not to act – or to speak one word of advice.” - another sentence from Uncle A.

Not one word. For what do you know of anyone else that you can advise them? How far can your eye see? Can it see through? How well do your ears hear? Not like a dog’s that can hear his master's mind. And your ears become duller, your eyes become weaker as you get older. Still, the first problem is density. People are dense. You cannot see into them. You cannot hear what they are thinking.

But, would you want to?

          Isn’t this why people drink – and take pills? – to make other people more opaque. If we could buy working x-ray glasses from the backs of comic books, if we could plug our minds into super-hearing, would we? We know, don’t we, that the view might well be too raw, the music too discordant, full of shrieks and weeping?

So, best to stay away, stay home, stay in bed . . . if someone that doesn’t require looking into will stay with you. Then:

          It could be, with the right one, as it is in the love epigrams of Antipater the Thessalonian. Outside, the gods might thunder and groan, howl, stomp around in the garden, piss against the windows, beat the roof with their fists. Inside there is a fire, an inexpensive but good bottle of wine, a jug of wine and . . . thou – no longer young, oh thank those gods.

          And when the one is above the other or the other is above the one or they’re stuck together side by side, all skin and heat from knees to elbows, fork to crown, an ocean of each other, waves rumbling so all-encompassingly that all outside clacking, banging, hissing, shouting – the thunder and the hail and the dogs barking – all outside sound falls away into no sound.

Giving into love is the opposite of giving into hope. In hope you are re thinking, “It’ll be okay, if I can just get past this.” In love, you don’t want to get past. You want to stay in it, steep in it, fall to sleep in it, die in it before it ends. For when it ends, the ocean recedes and, ye gods, the noise!

Q