Love’s Abyss
Don’t follow me into this Abyss.
I’m a little terrified of the thoughts I’m about to explore here. A little like the French philosopher, I sometimes think of my writing as archaeology. Digging into thoughts, memories, fantasies… and phantoms of a kind both real and implacable. And there’s no way of knowing in advance what will be unearthed.
But right now I feel like I’m breaking ground on a sacred site. A graveyard, or a catacomb, or a place where, once, long-forgotten gods could be glimpsed through the fog as if from a great distance. A place, at any rate, that should not be disturbed by human hands.
But it will be.
Get out of here now. You don’t want to go any further than this.
I want to talk about love. Passionate sexual love in particular — the kind of love that’s an absolute disaster to anyone who falls victim to it. Not the even-handed, responsible, adult sort of love healthy marriages and sturdy societies are made of.
No, I’m talking about the corrosive sort of love that’s absolute kryptonite to the social order. The kind that’s fun to write and think about — after all, even the most sensible people pick Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina over his Family Happiness. Oh, and The Kreutzer Sonata is a fun one too, even if it is ostensibly a deeply moral tale. Haven’t read that one in years, come to think of it, and of course at the time I was much too young to really understand it…
But love. Yes.
It’s one of the inexhaustible topics of literature. Full of the joyfulest joys and the painfulest pains. It’s something everyone cares about, as a memory to look back on, a future state to anticipate, as a present reality to be enjoyed and suffered through, or as a million other manifestations. None of us can really be indifferent to love.
One strategy that’s common for young men is to cut themselves off from the possibility of love. To say things (at least behind closed doors if not out in the streets) along the lines of, “I’m not interested in love, I just want sex.” And so either you have the good fortune of being at least tolerably decent with members of the female faction as a teenager, or you’re terrible with women all your life and get hitched with the first woman who will actually accept you, or you obsessively learn and implement what they call “Game” so you can make up for some Elysian sexual idyll you swear the other boys and girls got to experience as teenagers but you were left out of.
(I’ll leave you to guess which of those three groups I fell into.)
Here’s the thing about Game though: it’s really not all that fun. Delicious Tacos, probably one of the best fiction writers active in America today (and the fact that he has to self-publish under a ridiculous pseudonym like “Delicious Tacos” tells you pretty much all you need to know about the state of American publishing specifically and corporate culture more generally), expresses it perfectly: “You get girls so you can feel something. But you can only get girls if you feel nothing.”
And you do end up feeling something. Annoyance at the idiot role you end up playing because it’s the idiot role that seems to get the girls more than anything you could call the “real” you. Sort of a vague nostalgia where you try to remember what it was like to have sex without the involvement of any kind of drugs or alcohol. Guilt, at some point, because no matter how hard you try to keep your intentions clear and not string anybody along, somebody ends up catching feelings at some point.
And heartbreak, because sometimes you’re the one who catches feelings.
All of this, really, out of a fear of falling in love. Just look at the way I’ve avoided actually talking about love in this post, instead talking about strategies to avoid falling in love. That wasn’t intentional. I promise, when I sat down I fully intended to write about romantic love.
I won’t belabor the point, but it’s interesting to note the isomorphism between avoiding falling in love in life and avoiding talking about falling in love in writing. This is the part where I claim that such was my intention from the beginning — but even I have some scruples, so I won’t lie about that.
So instead of writing about falling in love, I’ve written a pseudo-critique of the concept of Game. Will come back tomorrow and attack the subject of love again.