Love is a Rhapsody and Agony (video)

Love is rhapsody. Love is agony. Love is heaven. Love is hell. Love is immortality. Love is obsession. Love is love.

There's a lyric from a Radiohead song that perfectly captures the wistfulness of lost love, the wistfulness of what could have been and might have been and should have been, if only. The lyric goes like this "I wish I could be who wanted, I wish I could who wanted." It so perfectly captures that bittersweetness, that aching sadness, that anguish of longing for what might have been, if you or I could have been what we hoped each other would be for one another.

Romantic love is a projection it is an investment; it's an act of faith, it's a leap of faith. It's an overinflation of the other person; it's raising a person up on to a pedestal. It's turning a human being into a god or a goddess and hoping that by consummating with perfection itself, we will be raised above our animal condition and made to be as gods outside of time, temporarily stepping off that people-mover that's carrying everyone else toward death. To fall in love is to enter the forever box with somebody else, it is to live inside of a pop song, it's to stare at somebodies eyes and feel so reassured that you want to cry. It's the crescendo of your favorite song. It's that sweeping, swelling moment, where your heartstrings are pulled by the melody, and you are carried somewhere else. When you exceed yourself when you tear up (well up) when you're crying because it feels so good to have found something in which your desires have been abolished by the plenitude of their satisfaction. It's like holy shit it doesn't get better than this, and you enter that halo, you enter that holy space that sacred holy ground with someone.  It's an intersubjective lifeworld that's shaped like a heart, a cosmology of two, a universe shaped by two people, a lucid dream, a fusion of cognition and dream. An altered state of consciousness that you enter with this person, now that is a lot of pressure. Psychologist Ernest Becker says "as glorious as the song of songs is when you're in love the ravishment of romantic love it is everything it is heaven on earth," but can a relationship bear the burden of godhood. Will our gods eventually show their clay feet? Will the cracks in this benevolent, perfect being you put on a pedestal reveal your cracks back to you? will the dream be deflated by the ontological reality of death and transience and aging? Who can bear love's aging? Who can bear the end of the honeymoon phase? It's a fundamental problem with our wiring, it's called hedonic adaptation, and we can't produce enough dopamine to stay in that halo forever. We will crash, we are bliss junkies, we are hooked on that state, but can we raise the stage? Jamie Wheel has talked about it, David Pearson the hedonistic imperative has said: "maybe in the future, we will  have to rewire our neurology." 

 To storm heaven to become paradise engineers, to create a consciousness that can experience a rapture a rhapsody of love forever. When you marry someone, you say I will love you forever; I want to feel this way forever. Miguel de Unamuno wrote in a Tragic Sense of Life, eternity eternity nothing is real that is not forever.

So what do we do? What the fuck do we do? I'm still mourning, I'm still grieving for every love that I lost. How in the fuck am I supposed to get over that? I didn't sign up for these terms.