Friday, May 15, 2009

A Tyranny Against the Wind

A Defense of Romanticism

I would begin to unwind if I could just find a reason. Ahh, my heart is so very put upon by delusions of the perfectly romantic. My heart is put upon by the absence of love. I do love myself, but that is only so much masturbation. I need to share my love with another, but not just any other. My beloved must be able to requite and in so many ways. To be saved from this put uponness, yes, I need to share my love with another. What great selfishness and cruelty is it that says we must love simply ourselves for happiness, and to need another to love is unhealthy??!! That is the sentiment of the impotent to love.

I would begin to unwind into some perfect tapestry if I could love you. Now, I am all knotted up in balls of despair over your absence, dear love of mine. And love has the singular right to possess. My love. It is the solitary privilege of the beloved, to be loved solely.
And I say to you bastards of love, those of you who no longer know what it is to sing to the night hopelessly, because you love so much, and those of you who condemn us “hopeless romantics” because we “love too much”; and to all the insensitive fucks who have written me off, to you, I say goodbye and good luck. Go live your petty lives of liking and caring, revel in your hatred. That would be good. No, you could not even do that; you lack the passion to hate. Hate, a preference to dislike for the true lovers and dreamers of true love. You feeble minded mockers of the romantic soul are like a pestering wind beating against my bedroom window at night when I try to sleep and dream of love. You feckless idlers who cannot decide, cannot commit to anything, you, the wind that blows away all of my romantic fibers and twists them into knots. I can joyfully say that I hate the wind of indecision, of middle-paths, and frozen minds, fickle hearts.
Ah, but at least the fickle hearts have some inclination to love….

And I would lay down and bask, in the silent passion of the lover’s night, I ask, who doesn’t want to find completion with another being? Who wants to die alone, let alone live that way?
I lay down and I ask. I lay down on the earth’s heaven ground and croon to the sky; at least you accept my love. Still, the hopeless romantic spirit in me waits countless eternities for you to croon back, “I love you, too.” And even if I didn’t hear these words, I would give myself to you to save you from suffering, and take away all your bad habits, strip away all your bullshit, chip away your porcelain veil…and free you. And in your letting me love you, I would begin to unwind.

But still, I suffer endless and tiresome retreats into the lonely passages of love. I am strung out on a romantic buzz with no one to share it with. I do ask, I do beg and plea, I do pray and wonder, desperately, like a naked beggar in city streets. Where, who, when, and how, love? I have standards that breach the heavens and this is why, I am certain, I suffer this despair. No one is equal to my capacity to love, when I do. And in this great feat, I am abandoned to life, loveless. So I cry and I moan, I write unyielding words, feverishly, as if to conjure the one true One –for one is all there is, in romantic love. I dance stunning solos for the setting sun and all hope of requition. Then I lay down and die a thousand deaths; I crawl into silent corners and retreat. I wonder who is there that is like this, out there, in the world. I dream. Ah, dream is the salvation of lovers. It offers a momentary relief from the cutthroat necessity to shed the brightest loving light onto the beloved, however unimbued with the ability or desire to reciprocate the feelings the beloved is.

Ah, the hopeless romantic rants. The hopeless romantic chants this tirade in hope of an answer from her love, whoever, wherever he may be. And in the twilight, finds her final repose. At least the sun loves the west, unwaveringly. And, watching the sun sink toward the body of the earth at the horizon, she finds some subtle relief in this, the singular salve of night: a glimmer of hope, even if only symbolic.
And hope is the mana of the hopeless romantic, hope, the worst thing to come out of Pandora’s Box. The hopeless romantic thrives on hope like air to a normal human being, and this is why the hopeless romantic is hopeless, or at least always almost to the point of running out, but a true and total junkie. The hopeless romantic is singularly astonishing in resourcefulness. Only the hopeless romantic can always find a glimmer of hope somewhere, somehow, someway. The hopeless romantic is a master rationalist, adroit at finding evidence for loving, of maintaining hope. Maybe, the hopeless romantic is more full of hope than any other, and thus, the most sublime, for hope represents belief in the possibility of a finer reality, attained.

But as for the search for “ideal” love, the “perfect”, it teaches hope.

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