love?

The other day I was questioning something. Is love a constant process of hurting? Is it in the nature of love to feel torment? A favorite song of mine ends "Love's an excuse to get hurt, And to hurt, Do you like to hurt? I do, I do Then hurt me". It isn't until now that I am realizing how true that seems to be. No, I am not in an emotionally or physically abusive relationship, yet love seems to be my great delight and torment.

Rilke wrote a poem titled "Love Song" that seems to capture the delight and torment I now relate to love.

Love Song
How shall I hold on to my soul, so that
it does not touch yours? How shall I lift
it gently up over you on to other things?
I would so very much like to tuck it away
among long lost objects in the dark
in some quiet unknown place, somewhere
which remains motionless when your depths resound.
And yet everything which touches us, you and me,
takes us together like a single bow,
drawing out from two strings but one voice.
On which instrument are we strung?
And which violinist holds us in the hand?
O sweetest of songs.
Rainer Maria Rilke
New Poems: c. 1907

Rilke starts this poem with the imagery of two souls - two infinite beings- each holding him/her self so that they do not rest on the other and move beyond - lift up - to higher individual "other" things.

This self inflicted demand, he then follows by saying is counter to desire: "I would so very much like to tuck it away among long lost objects in the dark in some quiet unknown place, somewhere which remains motionless when your depths resound". His soul does not want to move beyond, it does not want to lift up gently above this other soul, it wants to find a home where it is not conscious of the movement of this other being. This is the torment of love. This is where the demand of love, to be loving (in the most radical and rarely understood sense of the term) and move above is necessary to stop the desire to pull away or break off and feel the release of the dark alone. This is torment.

Continuing in his work Rilke captures the great delight of love, the oneness which is felt by the harmonization of two separate strings which form together a united being. The infinite space between two lovers, the god-like being which is formed between the love of two people this is the sound, the chord that is played/created when is aroused.

At the base of all of this delight in the deepest fear of love, is the question of its absurdity. People in love play the "what if" game* to understand and embrace the absurdity of love, yet the question still exists. Why is it that these feeling exists, what is it that makes two people feel this way? Or, as Rilke worded it, "On which instrument are we strung? And which violinist holds us in the hand?"

In another of his poems (Phallic Poem VI) he continues this question:

To what are we near? To death, or that display

Which is not yet? For what would be clay to clay

Had not the god feelingly formed the figure

Which grows between us.

To answer the question of the absurd is to turn to, what for many, is the most extreme absurdity - a belief in God. Rilke was not a religious man, yet to understand how love exists pushed him to God.So yes, love hurts yet if we hold to love as what is best in us and makes us more than clay we can succeed in love.

*as in "what if I had not gone to this school" or "what if I had not gotten on that train" etc