O breathe a word or two of fire!
You say you love
I.
You say you love; but with a voice
Chaster than a nun's, who singeth
The soft Vespers to herself
While the chime-bell ringeth -
O love me truly!
II.
You say you love; but with a smile
Cold as sunrise in September,
As you were Saint Cupid's nun,
And kept his weeks of Ember.
O love me truly!
III.
You say you love - but then your lips
Coral tinted teach no blisses.
More than coral in the sea -
They never pout for kisses -
O love me truly!
IV.
You say you love; but then your hand
No soft squeeze for squeeze returneth,
It is like a statue's dead -
While mine to passion burneth -
O love me truly!
V.
O breathe a word or two of fire!
Smile, as if those words should burn be,
Squeeze as lovers should - O kiss
And in thy heart inurn me!
O love me truly!
- John Keats
Don Juan was written by Lord Byron. I read it once. It was rich and succulent. Every scene was dripping with color, flavor, and wit. Lovers escaping into each other's arms, doomed marriages, faithless wives, heartbreak, suicide, revenge, swordfighting, and swashbuckling-balcony-hopping declarations of the deepest love and passion.
Romanticism.
I read an 18th-century Romance yesterday. Some people have tried to pass it off as a novel, but 18th-century Romance seems to be a better label. The hero and heroine are wont to break into fits of the highest emotions and deepest of resolves. Honor, courage, love, grace, devotion, passion, grief, sorrow, and deep choking love. The villains are beyond sinister and the plot is tragic and glorious and shamelessly crafted from the stale workings of thousands of cliche medieval dramas. It was strikingly bland and overused - as though we, the audience, were a dusty bunch of amoral lumps waiting to be smacked and slapped and spun into shape by a very didactic and conservative fictionist. Bleh.
How could you?
I don't see how a person could go through life as that amoral lump. Even a moral lump. It still just sloshes and slumps and waits to be smacked into a certain acceptable shape.
Passionate people fascinate me. The ones who seem to have a drive for truth - something in them that makes them ask questions. Great minds. The Woolfs and Keatses and Wildes of the world.
Ever since we deserted the Victorian age, ever since that first world war... ever since Nietzsche proclaimed, "God is dead" - people have mostly been drones in the throngs of the happily opiated masses or members of the wandering cynical cliques of subculture.
There is no God.
I have known the men and women who are above religion. Their watertight minds of reason have cracked this God Theory in half. How could God make such a place for us to live? How could he allow these things to happen to us? If there is a God, why doesn't he make himself obvious to me?
And then it stops. The search for truth is answered by questions and then drops steep and wandering into the cavity of apathy.
This is not an essay to prove the existence of God.
It is about a lack of resolve to follow through to the essence of onionness.
Samuel Beckett made a famous metaphor. The search for Truth is like peeling an onion. There is a multiplicity of layers - every one peeled off brings you closer and closer to the center, the true core, the essence of onionness.
But there is no center to an onion. Just layers. True, the deeper you go, the closer you become to the center. However, there is no concrete inside. Not like a peach pit, the very core of a peach wherein the essence of peachness exists... with onions are just the layers. The questions, the strivings, the peeling back of each layer surrounding an ultimate Truth.
It's a lifetime.
So.
What about the questions? That internal drive, that need to locate the sacra or the sacred that is the truth of existence? How can something of such heightened passion be so easily dropped? Faith becomes a gumwrapper offered by the untrusted hand of chance. That cruel trick schoolchildren play on each other with empty foil - they laugh when you open it to find no gum inside.
And everyone else is chewing.
But Truth, the good, the right, the beautiful... Truth.. can it be so easily crumpled and tossed aside? After one empty wrapper, is there never a hope of unsheathing a real Wrigley's Winterfresh?
And the carelessly religious I can't even describe. They swallow the mother's vomit and prop their beaks open to the sky. When will they search out their own understanding of Truth? When will they listen, really listen, and realize that Faith and Religion is more than two hours on Christmas and Easter?
And the Drifters.
The Drifters. Nothing matters - why should we care about the definition of faith and beauty and truth and art and love? Why should the universally True and ringing ideas of humanity vibrate the chords in us at all? We like to eat cake and roller-blade. That is what Life is. Cake and Roller-blading.
I admire the Passionate People.
The writers, the thinkers. The ones who took our brilliant ideas and developments of science and history and decided what we digest and what we experience as Life.
Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Oscar Wilde, John Keats, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron... what happened to Don Juan and the quest for a truly passionate existence? What about the sacra? What is Art? What is Beauty? What is Love? Passion? Knowledge? Where do we turn to for a True and Good and Right system of beliefs?
So anyway.
For my classes I had the British Novel, British Modernism, and the Bible as Literature today. It just forced me to blush and reconsider my sense of knowledge and that throbbing lust for Truth that sometimes swallows my mind. I wish I could be so clever as Marx and Woolf and Keats and Wilde. I wish these great minds could in some way to shock the world into sitting up and taking responsibility for its apathy.
I am glad for your great minds. I am glad for the thinkers, the artists, the questioners of sacra and the status quo. I am glad I'm not just blowing self-righteous soap-bubbles of ego and isms... I know there are passionate people.
What I really want to say is I want to be brave enough to ask the questions. What I really want to say is I'm proud to have no idea what Life is and that I thrill at the question. What I really want to say is there is Truth scattered all over in fragments and shards of reason and emotion. What I really want to say is I'm glad that at least some people stop and pick them up every once in a while.
I want the passionate people.
You say you love.
O love me truly!
Just come on, though.