Eros Squandered

Ever since Snapchat reminded me of a poem I read almost eight years ago, it has been sporadically popping up in my mind. 

love’s function is to fabricate unknownness

(known being wishless;but love,all of wishing)

though life’s lived wrongsideout,sameness chokes oneness

truth is confused with fact,fish boast of fishing

and men are caught by worms(love may not care

if time totters,light droops,all measures bend

nor marvel if a thought should weigh a star

—dreads dying least;and less,that death should end)

how lucky lovers are)whose selves abide

under whatever shall discovered be)

whose ignorant each breathing dares to hide

more than most fabulous wisdom fears to see

(who laugh and cry)who dream,create and kill

while the whole moves;and every part stands still:

While love has been a central theme for many poets, E. E. Cummings had a transcendental quality to his work, distinguishing him from others in his generation. By the time of his death, he was the second most-read poet in the United States after another household name, Robert Frost.  

For the last year, I’ve been spending a considerable amount of time thinking about love, namely romantic love. Those who know me on a more personal level are familiar with my somewhat cynical nature, yet I’ve always been drawn to poets, artists, muses, and great love stories. 

Unfortunately, the current discourse on love seems to be more barren than ever. Love and romance became mere placeholders for how we communicate about other things in life. Love is the lingo of our relationships but not the essence. 

Humans are relation-based creatures. We need one another. So much so that it becomes a part of how we define ourselves; in this transitionary period in history, we don’t socialize and build identities with communities as we used to. I’m an optimist on this subject; I believe we will find better ways of doing things. As an individualist(some even call me a radical individualist), I see the value in a community. It shouldn’t be thought of as mutually exclusive. In a community, we have the opportunity to get our needs met and go beyond it. To create something. I think due to the paradigm shift in how we approach relationships, many of us are under the illusion that romantic relationships have the capacity to satisfy all of our social needs. I disagree. Our needs exceed the bounds of a romantic relationship. Serving, to be served, to belong, to help, to cherish, to care for. Platonically. Nowadays, apart from certain circles, we have lost these types of interactions with one another except for “dating.” Thus, all of the unfulfilled needs that were previously satisfied in a community are now being projected upon an ideal partner. We have misplaced the desire to belong in romance. One side effect of this is that it makes other forms of relationships redundant, especially between a man and a woman. Both genders end up hypersexualizing each other and every interaction between them and missing a chance to have meaningful connections. 

In a previous post I made I talked about how our culture has become too much about chasing love and putting great emphasis on the importance of it. Yet, I realize I missed it; it was a specific function of love that we were pursuing. 

We all know we are going to die. If you peel everything layer by layer—your career, school, family, pets, values, games, cities, food, and travel. At the end of it all, you will die. 

Love’s function is to make you forget. It’s an existential attempt to survive. Falling in love creates a sense of unknowness with a directionality. Now, everything you do, everything you are, can only flow one way towards the object of your desire. 

Another one of my favorite authors, Oscar Wilde, says: 

If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment. If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call the dynamic life but what I will call the artistic life, if each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know, you will never become anything, and that is your reward.

When you’re in love, you opt out for a familiar unknowness. Which solves the problem of knowing what you want while creating the illusion of not knowing. Which I believe Beckett says better than I do

“terrified again

of not loving

of loving and not you

of being loved and not by you

of knowing not knowing pretending

Pretending” 

Falling in love is an authoritarian demand. It’s an act of self-destruction, creative destruction -if you will. It’s an act of birthing yourself in the eyes of another. Lending what exists in you to someone else and demanding it back piece by piece. Falling in love is not primal. It doesn’t get our needs met. It’s existential. It’s an act of creation.

In our romance-obsessed world, we aren’t falling in love at all. We’ve lost Eros someway along the way. If anything, modern love became a memetic version of falling in love—tragic simulacra.