GAP THE MIND. THE BORDER OF LOVE
by MARCO MARANGONE
Love is intrinsically a question of border, crossing which leads to an elsewhere. In this sense, living in a territory marked by a border between states and sedimentations of history that those borders have made changeable, offers the privilege of walking daily on a metaphor of love.
I will borrow some considerations of others (old trick: the quotations reflect the light of their authoritative authors) using them as rungs of the ladder of crossed reasoning that I invite you to climb in the guided tour of the void that I propose. I would start from the following statement, taken from the book Keep the kiss by psychoanalyst Massimo Recalcati, which reasons on the causes of the transience of couple love: “There is no love that does not feed on lack”, to reiterate the necessity of love that remains in potential, hidden in the not yet expressed, in the not yet discovered that continues to make the other still mysterious and an object of curiosity.
Recalcati then reiterates the concept with the expression “I love you because I miss you and I don’t miss you because I love you”. This renunciation of the claim to possess entirely (the knowledge of) the other, implies the renunciation of the security that this entails as a form of control: I know you, therefore you are predictable and reliable. Love is therefore seen as a process that takes place over time and in which everyone is required to commit to renewing themselves so that it remains dynamically alive and vital. Now, apparently, we change our plane of observation.
As already pointed out by others, including the philosopher and psychoanalyst Umberto Galimberti, we do not verbally express what we think but follow an inverse process since we can only think what our personal linguistic baggage makes available to the thought of each of us.
If we dwell on some terms related to love, scratching with our fingernail the patina of habit that dulls its meaning and observing them in a temporal dynamic, we can bring out some interesting ideas.
To love. To love is the infinitive of the verb but in human experience love, infinite, is rarely so. When it is exhausted, loving are the tears that accompany the condition of those who are precipitated by the love relationship. The experience of abandonment, so feared by every human since his condition as a vulnerable puppy and totally dependent on maternal care, re-emerges because it requires us to understand love through its loss.
Beloved. Beloved, often accompanies the noun person: the loved one. It is a past participle, love is in the already lived, in the memory, in the already (precisely) loved. It has become a convention mediated by the mind and relegated to the album of memories.
Lover. In our culture, the lover is the clandestine, extramarital sexual partner. Lover is, as well as a noun, the present participle of the verb to love, love lives in the present like the scent of the flower; vice versa, the memory of the scent of the flower is a mediation of thought that evokes the feeling, emotion and sensation experienced, like a re-enactment in costume: of the experience, the memory is only a representation.
Loving each other. It seems to me the most interesting word. Reflexive verb (and Cupid only knows how much even in love it is not useful to reflect), it implies not only reciprocity in the plural (between partners, between family members) but also loving-kindness directed towards oneself. This is a necessary condition because we cannot quench the thirst of others by pouring from an empty jug and because it is through listening and self-care that sensitivity to the other is jointly refined. Reflective also means the restitution of the self-image: in loving you, I love the opportunity you offer me to express love and I can observe the limits with which I can do so, thus being able to try to improve myself. With loving each other, we observe a circular dynamic that makes the lover resurface as the one who does not consume the love candle inevitably destined to run out over time, but who knows how to perform a magical act: he generates the fuel on which love feeds, in a circular process that regenerates itself, emulating the sun. This is the key point of the concept that Recalcati expresses in the phrase “(to perform) the miracle most proper to love, to make the Same the New”.
Betrayal. Between saying and doing there is … the desire that turns elsewhere. Love has ceased to be new enough to arouse curiosity.
Forgiveness. Having already amply emphasized the etymology of the word (for gift) as a free offering, I borrow Recalcati’s metaphor (may Massimo forgive me for this shameless and protracted looting) concerning Kintsugi, the ancient Japanese art of making the broken vase precious by painting the signs of the fracture with gold after its recomposition. The wound suffered/inflicted is not removed by concealing it or, apparently, forgetting it, but rather it is elevated to a teaching. The teaching is that no one is unbreakable. The fracture that follows the fall is a lesson for both of us because compassion for the mistake of others is, in my opinion, one of the greatest acts of love and it is all the more so the more serious the insult suffered. The act of healing raises the quality of the relationship because it opposes the easier and more hasty solution of replacing the vase instead of repairing it. It reminds us that love requires care, patience and effort. The disposable of those who no longer make us feel good (knowing how to recognize that some relationships may objectively have nothing more to give, if they ever had it) is perhaps something other than the mere instrumental use of the other (the lover religiously consumes the male after mating: it is known that sex stimulates the appetite!
The transition from loving the other’s strengths to loving their fragility elevates the nature of the love relationship between two people, provided that both honestly do their best to be honest (I’ll be honest, it’s a deliberate repetition).
Shifting the accent, on the other hand, those who miss this opportunity for growth lose, easily darkened by the pride and anger that follows the betrayal/lack suffered but, mostly, by ancient wounds that have never been healed that resurface in resonance. Aldiqua dell’aldilà is a phrase of eschatological irony that is also useful to represent the motion of love: a continuous invasion into what I am not. The image of a swing straddling the border comes to me: the person swings and alternates his being on this side (of the afterlife) and the afterlife (of the hereafter). By trespassing into the other, you explore the border, you re-enter yourself, again and again … but be careful: the swing asks for continuous thrust of the legs otherwise it stops. And space for movement.
Thus we return to lack, to emptiness as the fulcrum around which to weave the love relationship so that it does not become loving.
In The Prophet, the poet and writer Khalil Gibran cites the need for space for a relationship to grow healthy, proposing the image of two trees that can grow straight and robust only thanks to the right distance that separates them and that prevents them from mutually shading themselves by depriving themselves of light.
If you are still convinced that you need a partner to complete you by filling the void of your existence, start reading again from the beginning.
Gap the mind!