Love and Pathos

Excerpt- Aldo Carotenuto

An Unexpected Occurrence

By its very nature love belongs to the realm of the inexpressible. Like everything that has to do with the soul, it is near to mystery and keeps company with silence. To leap the barrier, to give form to what cannot be said, is a wild, fearful enterprise risked only by artists and poets. Psychological investigation often stops short with a rational pseudo-understanding that violates the soul’s reality. To raise the veil with which the soul covers its essence it is necessary to proceed with respect and trepidation.

To gather the thousand shadings with which we encounter the other, to venture into the labyrinthine world of images, means to abandon any single focus and give voice to all the daemons that live there. To write about love means to confront the inexplicable, to recount a subversive experience, give utterance to one’s fantasies. However, since to read is to reinvent the text, to translate the author’s imaginal world into one’s own, the reader meets his or her own most intimate images.

A characteristic phenomenon of the love experience is that the presence of the other captures us with an intensity and an immediacy that is not to be encountered at any other time. The lover is bewitched and obsessed by the image of the other. This experience has an improvisatory, unreal and almost compulsive character. Plato went so far as to speak of a divine delirium, a kind of ecstatic rapture. In the presence of the beloved, one has a feeling of incredible fulfillment and at the same time the impression that until then one has lived in a state of deprivation. The presence of the beloved is truly a source of well-being and new life that seems to, nay does, have inexhaustible possibilities.

Proximity provokes this turmoil. We feel we have been captivated. But actually love is fed by what happens within ourselves. The one on whom my eyes and desire have focused takes on a unique significance for me and becomes irreplaceable, for only that person can invoke a deep and special inner dimension of my own. Being in love always confronts us with the incomprehensible. The other person is atopos, that is to say unclassifiable, because definition implies knowledge of that other. For as long as love lasts, the attempt to stand face-to-face with the source of mystery and fascination really represents the attempt to translate it into a familiar and comprehensible experience. But even while we try to understand, to rip away the veil, we don’t want entirely to abandon that illusion whose brilliance blinds us and so makes it possible for us to stay in love.