The great thing about love {or erotic attraction} is that “it” transgresses all boundaries: psychic/social bounds and territorial/nationalistic limits - if luck takes kind, one can either expend or fall.
Emmanuel Levinas is wrong, the other per se, is not a transcendental escape from our self-enclosed ego prison of pure immanence. Only a particular (elective) other will give us signs or means of escape. The other is an “object” like any other, immanent, material and egoistic, (an economic bundle of lust and unfulfilled desire) all the way down, like everything else; as Schopenhauer says, the Will swirls everywhere from the micro to the macro.
What makes the possibility of escape possible is the elective affinities between two self-enclosed subjectivities, two others, that on their own would be nothing, economically enclosed on themselves without eXtasy: we are all made of the same economic “wilful stuff”, and yet, some others are more equal than others…
How many elective affinities are there? How many erotic ones are there to light up the gargoyles of being? How many loved ones are there out there? Chinese, Japanese, African, Arab etc…what would be the age limit? illegal, 16, 20, 30, 40, 50, illegal; What would be the physical limit? How many elective affinities will never reach eye or spirit?
What would be she be doing right now?: a darkly Goth girl head-banging to a cradle of filth band of the moment, a beach girl wailing to the sea surfs of a Californian sunset beach; a managerial clean cut precision lady closing a deal in spires of neon light; a down and out junkie burning caramel for the night; high-cheek bones hitting her trade in the prowling shadows of Prague’s nightly visits; a Zazie skating rainbows in the metro; jaded ladies burning bright in the arcane boundaries of higher learning, studious ladies setting off the cold pages of laborious texts to a brighter immensity …right under my eyes?
Whilst all these virtual ladies exist in the actual, they exist divergently, will never actualize into the convergence of actual proximity - an ecstasy of life never shared, a higher peak of life never reached, a valley of rest never lived…
Are there any limits to love, to Eros? Why the marketing pretence of the absolute? Sex sells, ok, but why does Love or Eros sell? if there is no such thing…As a useless film once said: “Can a full grown woman fall in love with a midget?” The “beauty and beast” syndrome - the other way round seems less likely in our culture, ugliness or deformity for a man is a misfortune, for a woman unforgivable…
… lonely hearts in virtual space:…to all those virtual ladies out there in the cold infinity of our finite existence: maybe in the next world, or some other world beyond the known horizons of deep space…either way, a Lovecraftian pale beauty beyond all earthly bound existence, a whiter shade of pale, a thinly figure from the outreaches of unspeakable and unfathomable horrors of abysses within abysses, will do just fine…
