Love Song

This is my favorite poem about love, because it rescues us from the prison of idealism and leads us to a more mature, realistic ideal of freedom:

SONG

Sweetest love, I do not go,
For weariness of thee,
Nor in hope the world can show
A fitter love for me;
But since that I
At the last must part, 'tis best,
Thus to use myself in jest
By feigned deaths to die.

Yesternight the sun went hence,
And yet is here to-day;
He hath no desire nor sense,
Nor half so short a way;
Then fear not me,
But believe that I shall make
Speedier journeys, since I take
More wings and spurs than he.

O how feeble is man's power,
That if good fortune fall,
Cannot add another hour,
Nor a lost hour recall;
But come bad chance,
And we join to it our strength,
And we teach it art and length,
Itself o'er us to advance.

When thou sigh'st, thou sigh'st not wind,
But sigh'st my soul away;
When thou weep'st, unkindly kind,
My life's blood doth decay.
It cannot be
That thou lovest me as thou say'st,
If in thine my life thou waste,
That art the best of me.

Let not thy divining heart
Forethink me any ill ;
Destiny may take thy part,
And may thy fears fulfil.
But think that we
Are but turn'd aside to sleep.
They who one another keep
Alive, ne'er parted be.

-- John Donne

Fidelity to the otherness of one's partner trumps fidelity to a standard that invariably inspires anguish. What really matters is life, not the limits we impose upon it.

Showerspiration

So I was standing in the shower just now, thinking about that Theory's Empire book I need to hunt down and decided that I'd love to write a book about practical applications of abstruse cultural theory. You know, something like, "Judicious application of Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the rhizome can lead to a more fulfilling social network and better sex to boot." This book would be a total scandal, both to the anti-theory camp and to all the theorists out there who think that practical application is always a reductive ideological closure. And it would sell!

More Hot-Water Musings

After I conceived of my "practical theory" book that I will almost certainly never write -- I have several other books to write first -- I started musing, less irreverently, on the benefits that such a project might have. What are the lessons that we can learn from theory? The first thing that crossed my mind is that the right mixture of psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, and the philosophy of language a la Wittgenstein can demonstrate the paradoxes of intention. If someone asks you why you did what you just did, you usually feel compelled to answer. Frequently, though, the first answer and then the second and then the third are all unsatisfying. The questioning, whether from outside or within, proceeds until a decent response is finally ready. And then you declare, "That's what I was really doing." But every answer to the question in this series is what is known in theory circles as a "back formation." Describing your intention after the fact involves a backward glance that can't help but focus, not only on the state of mind that preceded the action you are trying to explain, but also the outcome of that action itself. As a result, your judgment will always be colored, no matter how hard you try to imagine your way back into a time before you did what you did. What that means in practical terms is that retroactive statements about intentions exist in a different realm than the intentions that they purport to explicate. Even if you have a clear sense of intention prior to doing something, the description of that sense that you provide later on, looking back, will never be pure. Typically, when something turns out favorably, you say, "I intended to do that," and, conversely, when it turns out unfavorably, you say, "I didn't mean for that to happen." In either case, though, the knowledge of how everything turned out cannot be boxed up in a closet somewhere. It's always there. And that's where theory comes in. The theoretical brew I delineated above puts all sorts of handy tools at your disposal for reflecting on the complexity of this relationship between intention and retrospection.