Love, My Muse, SRH

Do we really “make love”? Traditionally, actually, yes we do. The bible speaks of lying with a woman and then loving her. I always assumed this meant following up the conception of a child with the duty of being faithful to her. More accurately, and following the analysis in this blog, it is the seeking to limit her offspring with any other men so that the efforts to support her and her children are efforts toward ones own children and not the parasitic children of other men – in true neo-Darwinist style. Finding oneself in marriage means the male finds himself bound by the same rules of extra-celibacy (i.e. we are celibate to other women)…. at least in theory. Marriage is not for the benefit of the woman only the male who as argued is never sure whose children he is bringing up – a problem a woman never has. In a nut shell the more practical reasons for the “abuse” and “inequality” that feminists build their case upon and which I have felt is more derived from personal anger at men than rational investigation. Anyway the point here is that we do “make love”, but it isn’t the love of which I seek… maybe here is the problem.

Women do seem to conform to the above analysis. This is a surprise as I have spent my youth taming my own passions in line with a different romantic conception. Maybe because my first experience with a girl aged 6 was that she fled in terror crying hysterically at my advances to undress her which left me feeling guilty by the age of 7 (when obviously that part of the frontal-cortex had developed) and vowing never to harm another person ever. Maybe also because of deeper understandings…

Love I am thinking once again this morning should never be declared. I am writing a best-man speech for a couple whose trigger for getting together was a declaration in a beer festival that love, above all other things, must be declared…. I still had a chance then to say things to “my muse” but the possibility of things was over by then in my mind. My reason for thinking it shouldn’t is that love doesn’t belong to us! In Kantian terms the condition for the possibility of love at all is clearly not something we decide. I have toyed with the idea that it is, and we can indeed make some choice about who our hearts are attracted toward – but even if we master this the very activity of falling in love is something we are born with, and innate function of our being, something that originates in that world outside ourselves. This is the whole point about destiny. I felt in the genuine arising of this experience with “my muse” a sense of wonder at the origin of it. It came from outside me. This is why it should remain silent because it is not mine to declare. Now whatever is outside me that originates this function, does it not also operate amongst my fellows? So if I developed love for my muse that was of extra-soul origins then so could she – in which case there is no declaration to be had in true love – there is no work to do, no construction and no game to play. This is why she never knew how I felt – at least directly. I hid it in the letters and poems I sent her, and which she acknowledge in an odd way accepting that it was teaching her a new meaning to the wor(l)d love but never giving it a name. If I had ever encouraged the seed of love in her, if I had ever made love, then I would simply be loved by my own creation. Love must be from outside to be true, and so can never be declared.

Yet there is this “real world” of imperfections, competing outcomes, game playing. Had I played my cards at all I feel there is no doubt that things would have been entirely different from how they are. Maybe she wouldn’t even have died since I would have been able to alert her to the extreme negative energies that she was subject to, and the sense of dread at her fate I felt from 6 months before her death. It is very possible she was the victim of black magic now I have learned some more. But this is the contingent world. I have been playing chess a lot recently and yesterday from a terrible losing position I engineered a stale-mate. It has never been something I have pursued before but in true Samurai tradition (my interpretation of Tarantino’s interpretation after watching Kill Bill last week) there is always the possibility of victory even in what seems like a losing position. This I see as the misuse of Buddhist wisdom, but it is true – if we wish to play games in the contingent world for us transcendent creatures there (unlike for a computer) always the chance of a win. A computer can never think outside the “box”, can never reengineer its own framework, can never reconfigure a problem and set of rule so that it can win. Men with the help of gods can. (Saw Clash of the Titans last week – rubbish in 3D but retains the good philosophy).

This is all very much SRH. Someone somewhere has to find the paradox in this. I will settle for a paradox rather than a proof. What the liar paradox had Godel formalised. What Berry’s paradox had Chaitin formalised. the SRH ought start with a contradiction or paradox. That Love cannot originate with the person who loves is the key to what I sought in love – yet it is dazzling how few seem to comprehend this. It seems it is a much more basic process in most, about possessions and game playing, and winning and outcomes. How can we forget that without love in the first place we wouldn’t even be here to play these games! How can any system forget that without itself it couldn’t even play those games?

Have I forgotten in all the SRH analysis that were a system to examine itself it would become a new system? If this process can be proven then the infinite (unresolvable) regress is assured. On Saturday it is 10 years since I last hugged my muse and dismissed her tears as fake; I’ll always remember her feeling me through my shirt wondering what she meant by that, but now 10 years later I have the same thought in my head as I had on that day kneeling before Guan-Yin - “what do I do about this girl?”