Logic at the Edges

"Words do have edges. So do you." Eros the Bittersweet by Anne Carson

Continuing her thoughts into Sappho's poem, fragment 31, author Anne Carson writes, "When I desire you, a part of me is gone. Your lack is my lack..." In this classical view, then, Eros is expropriation. Robbed of vital senses, limbs even, the lovers are left with essentially less. This attitude is grounded in the oldest of western mythology, it lies well within the classical Greek world; lovers are losers, or so they reckon. "But this reckoning proves a quick and artful shift. " Reaching, striving for someone, something that is outside the immediate self provokes a lover to observe that they have limits, they have "edges." From this vantage point, one might call it "consciousness," he sees in himself a hole. His desire then is for something that previously he "never knew he lacked; it is defined by a distance, a shift towards a necessary part of himself..." It is not a new acquisition, but something that "was always, always, properly his."

But the apparent geometry of the relationship "is a trick," Carson writes. And his next move is likely to collapse the trigonomic dimensions into a circle; all desire is longing for that which properly belongs to the one who desires, but has been taken away or lost..." Socrates writes, "so if you two are loving friends of one another, then you quite naturally belong to one another." Carson protests this reckoning, "it is profoundly unjust... to recognize a kindred soul and to claim possession as if the blurring in love with distinction between self and other is acceptable."

Yet desire, it seems, does indeed change the lover. It brings a newness, an expanded sense of possibility; a view of a newly formed self, enlarged. As with the Greek poets, the new self, the 'sweet-bitter' of eros brings the experiences of both utility and painfulness. Why? The ancients would say that pain arises at the edges which have been adulterated; bitter verging suddenly on the sweet. "Eros' ambivalence unfolds directly from this power to mix up the self. A lover helplessly admits that it feels both good and bad to be mixed up. And once mixed, asks the question, 'who am I?' Change gives him a glimpse of himself that he never knew before. This gives rise to a powerful insight into the importance of what Carson calls, Eros the Bitter-sweet, or love that alters the edges, and therefore the sense of the previously known self.

Building the Civilization of Love

Carl Anderson writes boldly in his book, A Civilization of Love, "there is no gap between love of neighbor and justice." Attempts to contrast justice and love, serve to distort them both. Within justice is the meaning of mercy itself. To pursue justice without love is to engage in revenge. Love is not about revenge. From the earliest time, religions have pursued the liberation of the self, and the collective from every type of oppression and evil; they have promoted in degree, the dignity of the individual.

Within the civilization of love, there comes the realization that love is not mere sentiment, it is not mere feeling. Love is action, it is active; it includes the necessity of vocation, so that a civilization founded upon the dignity and value of all Creation may be realized. The sharing of love is basic to human life.  A heart which 'sees' and directs itself accordingly is one of the first actions taken in a civilization of love; priority must be given to the formation and re-formation of human hearts-- all hearts. The heart that 'sees' is one that has learned to see its own history, thus it knows how to recognize the other. Indeed, when the moment arrives that the heart in charity recognizes an experience of love and gift, it can no longer be perceived without awareness of one's own history. That is, the awareness of the loves that came before us: our parents, our family, the Divine, who loved us first and most.

There was, at one moment, a great act of Creation that begot us from seeming nothingness; we were brought into the world. In the civilization of love, someone's love is revealed as the initial source of our existence. The heart now awakened is able to see with 'eyes'. With the heart, events are viewed not only from one perspective, but from the greatest perspective of the acts of a co-creator in creation. The one who is blind, who does not see, then lives as if the divinity rests solely within them. Others may easily be forgotten or omitted. And yet it is not divinely demanded that we, as individuals, produce a feeling, or any feeling that we are not yet capable of producing. In the civilization of love, all are called to action for hope that our sight shall illuminate the way of the other. This is what is also called charity.

Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta modeled her life upon this civilization of love. She called all to it; divinity and love are inseparable. She was well-seeing into the truth that loving one's neighbor was a central task of the heart in action. It is this which will form a better society for the common good, she wrote.