One must begin by acknowledging the innate selfishness of marriage. Couples erect a magical barrier between themselves and the rest of mankind. This barrier is endlessly invoked as justification for the severing of simple obligations which single persons accept as a matter of course .The high sanctimony in the phrase the need to support a wife and family , can be used as a convenient mantra for avoiding coming to the moral, economic or political aid of one's fellow creatures. Indeed nothing serves selfish ends quite so well as the fall-back position of having a family. Feeling superior to those who do not carry one's burden of responsibility, one can tell there rest of mankind where to get off.
The burdens of married life are real enough, and we are not contesting them; yet marriage is a handy device for putting conscience out to pasture. Its formal status cuts many normal human ties. Many people feel that by having made the supreme sacrifice of marriage they have already given society more than it had any right to expect. The false equation balances on the fiction of social stability and is accepted as such.
On the other hand married couples are under pressure to promote the fiction that what may be nothing more than a pragmatic solution to economic difficulties is actually grounded in a high spiritual state known as Love. The social order will not tolerate anything but hypocrisy from married couples, which is another way of restating the view that society impresses itself as the third partner in the relationship . In exchange for a near total surrender of personal freedom couples are granted , by a feint of lese-majeste ,( like the scraps tossed from the banquet table to a domestic pet) , the banal satisfactions of a legal prison.
It is our intention therefore to institute a vocabulary for marriage so that society's invasive excesses will be checked. The enlarged perspective which results is bound to improve our understanding of those emotional involvements which do not fall under the normal social definition of a marriage , though containing all of its essentials.
This work of restoration of the vocabulary of love must begin with a discussion of the two fundamentals of the loving state: Communication and Fidelity.
A state of love will be said to exist between persons by virtue of a common perception , a privileged insight into a shared destiny. This insight is unique to them; it cannot be communicated to persons outside of the relationship. Such communion through intimate knowledge, which is merely a heightened awareness of linked Fate, sets up the bounding cycle of the involvement, by definition obscure and impenetrable to the outside world.
This insight must ever be tragic, the act of perception traumatic, a ritualistic re-enactment of universal archetypes in the souls of all involved parties . In passionate love's refrain is the reverberation of memory always detectable , echoes of formative events which, in the distant past, set the course of a lifetime. It is in this sense that one speaks of communication. The marital situation consists of a shared wordless intimacy, a communion of souls at their deepest level.
Fidelity may be defined as the obligation laid upon each party to be faithful to the higher truth present in the recognition of common destiny which is the ground of Love. Each protagonist may well behave in a fashion which, when judged by conventional notions of fidelity, is incapable of being understood: they may cheat on one another, abandon each other in moments of crisis or need ( Chekhov's Sea-Gull ) , deny the existence of any association between them, even marry with different partners ( Tristan and Isolde ) . As long as the idea persists, despite all disguises, evasions and transformations, that they are obedient to a common insight, they remain faithful to the state of marriage which unites them.
It is a paradox inherent in this baroque edifice of contradictions, that outsiders should be mindful of the obligation to treat the manifestly ridiculous statements made by lovers about their partners with a measure of respect. At some level they are always true.
Love relationships unfold in mythic time: their narratives arrange themselves through a sequence of private revelations. Through them comes the emergence of a personal mythology, amplified down to the least detail. This zodiac of gods and demigods forms a shelter around the two partners, like a grand flowering arbor covering the spiritual pact to which it owes its existence.
The first encounter, the first meaningful encounter , the early moments of communication , the ruptures of communication , the binding oath of fidelity , and memories of ecstasy, union, betrayal, failure : such details are stingily hoarded, deposited in hidden chapels like saints' relics , tenderly caressed like beads on a rosary, pondered with fascination in withdrawal , meditated upon like Zen koans, endlessly permuted in associative patterns in private memory to produce an inexhaustible torrent of legend , myth, epic, poem and song.
This egoistic treasury, shared with others only through its transmutation by Art , this dream-work filling the erotic indwelling, is effectively religious. The oneiric fabric clothing lovers is woven entirely from myth. So delicious is this imbibing in the perpetual restoration of a mutually shared mythology, situations must inevitably arise in which even the presence of the loved person will be perceived as unwelcome whenever it constitutes a serious threat to the continued survival of the high drama, the wealth of leitmotif and story of Love's cosmology.
Sooner or later, the epistemological schemas of the cosmology of love will be turned against the loved person, and therefore the relationship itself. The rude realization that the loved person is deficient in those perceptual components from which love's motive force is derived, sets the stage for brutal estrangement. From the need to defend the inertial state of oneiric passivity, lovers begin, with a vigor they themselves find astonishing, to reject each other in lived confrontation. Those scenes of lacerating violence that , burdened with tragic power, are the inevitable outcome, will in their turn become incorporated into the primal mythology of love at some later date, vibrant with floral growth and resonant with romantic passion, assimilated through aesthetic reduction into the dreamwork.
In the manner customary to imperialism generally Love colonizes its mythic cosmos with every person encountered in its passionate advance. How this comes about is depicted in all the classic epics that sing of the mutual reinforcement of love and war. One thinks of the long train of consequences arising from the theft of the Rhinegold. Insatiable in its yearning, love strives to ignite an Apocalyptic conflagration in which all relationships, friendships, the structures of society, realms earthly and supramundane, are alike incinerated.
Friends, confidantes, well-wishers, meddlesome busy-bodies, go-betweens, professional counselors like priests and doctors, relatives, rivals, sympathetic or hostile witnesses, unwelcome intruders, even the personnel of restaurants, trains, hotels and other settings where significant events have taken place , people who just happen to have been at a certain place at a certain time, will be incorporated, simplified, to be ressurected in a mode of timeless perfection in the hierarchies of mythical Being , function supplanting form, symbol displacing predication, transposed, abstracted, disassembled and re-united via the apriori categories of mythic cognition.
This proliferation of intermediaries is the logical consequence of the militarism agitating the erotic quagmire . As the actions of each protagonist come increasingly to resemble a military campaign, both anyone caught in the middle will be assigned some role: negotiator, spy, hostage , decoy.
It is from the autonomous temporal flows of two mutually dependent cosmologies in conflict , neither of which correspond to the real time of the collectivity of confidantes, unsuspecting victims of the rupture in consciousness at the root of love, that the exploitation of the go-between arises. The role of go-between is at best equivocal. In the long run it is unenviable. Sooner or later that the go-between will feel that he or she is being used, that the confidences received from the two lovers have been more scheming than honest.
Along with confidantes one must also take into account the meddlesome busy-bodies who attach themselves to a passionate love involvement like tourists invading a seaside resort. Although they may not realize it, these persons are unconsciously welcomed, even encouraged by lovers intent upon intensifying the sabotaging of surface communication, which is required so that the deeper communication of intimacy be protected.
The cosmology of Love assigns to busy-bodies, unwanted suitors, unsympathetic relatives and so on, roles akin to the ogres of the great epics: Polyphemus, Quasimodo, Grendel, the Morholt, Varuna, Fafner. Their vanquishing in glorious battle is an archetypal drama of romantic love. At the same time they are constantly in demand, their ungracious qualities valued as weapons to be used by either party against the other. Since meddlesome busy-bodies will invariably be persons who themselves feel rejected or unloved, lovers derive added enjoyment through witnessing the spectacle of the bad-intentioned, destructive, invariably frustrated efforts of a hostile individual, unable to grasp the inner fate-secret which has bound them , that ineffable contract from which no amount of interference or hostility can give release .
Here is the essential point: that all of the intermediaries adopted by or imposed upon either or both parties will themselves become carriers of the potent leitmotifs of the poli-sexual cosmos. Lovers only relate in part to them as human beings, but otherwise largely in terms of their function. This assignment of roles is neither realistic nor honest. Go-betweens, confidantes, rejected suitors and busy-bodies are indeed exploited, not in the sense of their being taken advantage of , but in their being dreamt along with all other persons and events in the context of a mythological history unfolding in oneiric time.