Ali Rahnamae’s Reviews > Love and Will > Status Update

The fact that many people tend not to give themselves time to know each other in love affairs is a general symptom of the malaise of our day. We are the age, says John Galbraith referring to the motels along the highways, of “short order sex.”

A dynamic dialectical relationship—I am tempted to call it a balance, but it is not a balance—is a continuous give-and-take in which one asserts himself, finds an answer in the other, then possibly asserts too far, senses a “no” in the other, backs up but does not give up, shifts the participation to a new form, and finds the way that is adequate for the wholeness of the other.

The child who is the “little angel” for too long a period is the one we should worry about; the growing youngster who is a “little devil” at least at times gives us more hope of potentialities for future development.

If the daimonic is shown particularly in creativity, we should find the
clearest testimonies to its presence in poets and artists. Poets often have a conscious awareness that they are struggling with the daimonic, and that the issue is their working something through from the depths which push the self to a new plane. Said William Blake, “Every poet is of the Devil’s party.”

Eros is the center of the vitality of a culture—its heart and soul. And when release of tension takes the place of creative eros, the downfall of the civilization is assured.

I am proposing a description of human beings as given motivation by the
new possibilities, the goals and ideals, which attract and pull them toward the future. This does not omit the fact that we are all partially pushed from behind and determined by the past, but it unites this force with its other half. Eros gives us a causality in which “reason why” and “purpose” are united.

We have been led astray by our economic & biological models to think
that the aim of the love act is the orgasm. The French have a saying: “The aim of desire is not its satisfaction but its prolongation.” André Maurois, speaking of his preference for love-making to which the orgasm is not the goal but an incidental conclusion, quotes another French saying, “Every beginning is lovely.”

Alienation is felt as a loss of the capacity to be intimately personal. As I hear these people, they are crying, We yearn to talk but “our dried voices” are “rats’ feet over broken glass.” We go to bed because we cannot hear each other; we go to bed because we are too shy to look in each other’s eyes, and in bed one can turn away one’s head.

It is an old and ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way; and we grasp more fiercely at research, statistics, and technical aids in sex when we have lost the values and meaning of love.