there is no love that does not pierce the hands and feet
I thought this reply warranted it's own post.
Winterson, Jeannette
from Powerbook :
"In your face, in your body, as you walk and lie down and eat and read, you have become the lineaments of love. When I touch you I touch something deeper than you. This touches something in me otherwise too sunk to recover.
I suffer. I intentionally put myself in the way of suffering as a test, as a measure, to see what will be drawn up -- to stop myself from closing up. I don't want to close the wound."
"Love wounds. There is no love that does not pierce the hands and feet. Love's exquisite happiness is also love's exquisite pain. I do not seek pain but there is pain. I do not seek suffering but there is suffering. It is better not to flinch, not to try and avoid those things in love's direction. It is not easy, this love, but only the impossible is worth the effort.
In the Grail legends Lancelot, the best knight in the world, never does see the Grail because he cannot give up his love for Guinevere. As a moral essay this suggests that human passion is no substitute for divine love and that it prevents us from experiencing love fully. This has been the basis of Christian thought since St Paul.
There is another reading. Lancelot fails, not because he can't give up Guinevere, but because he can't distinguish between love's symbol and what it represents. All human love is a dramatic enactment of the wild, reckless, unquenchable, undrainable love that powers the universe. If death is everywhere and inescapable, then so is love, if we but knew it. We can begin to know it through each other. The tamer my love, the farther away it is from love. In fierceness, in heat, in longing, in risk, I find something of love's nature. In my desire for you, I burn at the right temperature to walk through love's fire.
So when you ask me why I cannot love you more calmly, I answer that to love you calmly is not to love you at all."
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CrimeThinc. Collective, Anonymous
from Fighting For Our Lives:
"Purity is the opposite of integrity-the cruelest thing you can do to a person is make her ashamed of her own complexity. The stories of our lives have no morals. Any single conclusion drawn would be false; the episodes, taken together, are untranslatable, incomparable. If we are to conclude at all, we can only conclude against conclusions."
Love, Alan Bajandas
Winterson, Jeannette
from Powerbook :
"In your face, in your body, as you walk and lie down and eat and read, you have become the lineaments of love. When I touch you I touch something deeper than you. This touches something in me otherwise too sunk to recover.
I suffer. I intentionally put myself in the way of suffering as a test, as a measure, to see what will be drawn up -- to stop myself from closing up. I don't want to close the wound."
"Love wounds. There is no love that does not pierce the hands and feet. Love's exquisite happiness is also love's exquisite pain. I do not seek pain but there is pain. I do not seek suffering but there is suffering. It is better not to flinch, not to try and avoid those things in love's direction. It is not easy, this love, but only the impossible is worth the effort.
In the Grail legends Lancelot, the best knight in the world, never does see the Grail because he cannot give up his love for Guinevere. As a moral essay this suggests that human passion is no substitute for divine love and that it prevents us from experiencing love fully. This has been the basis of Christian thought since St Paul.
There is another reading. Lancelot fails, not because he can't give up Guinevere, but because he can't distinguish between love's symbol and what it represents. All human love is a dramatic enactment of the wild, reckless, unquenchable, undrainable love that powers the universe. If death is everywhere and inescapable, then so is love, if we but knew it. We can begin to know it through each other. The tamer my love, the farther away it is from love. In fierceness, in heat, in longing, in risk, I find something of love's nature. In my desire for you, I burn at the right temperature to walk through love's fire.
So when you ask me why I cannot love you more calmly, I answer that to love you calmly is not to love you at all."
--------------
CrimeThinc. Collective, Anonymous
from Fighting For Our Lives:
"Purity is the opposite of integrity-the cruelest thing you can do to a person is make her ashamed of her own complexity. The stories of our lives have no morals. Any single conclusion drawn would be false; the episodes, taken together, are untranslatable, incomparable. If we are to conclude at all, we can only conclude against conclusions."
Love, Alan Bajandas