The blog theme for 2011 is "lust." Providing we can find enough of it; otherwise we might add other deadly sins. But quite honestly, I am not looking for another year of sensational posturing like I encountered in the year of picaresque novels. Maybe I'm "looking for love in all the wrong places," because I am not added erotica, sado-mas themes nor romantic unrequited love stories. I want novels/biographies of people who loved passionately.
And so I decided to benchmark and establish criteria by resorting to Octavio Paz' literary criticism of love and eroticism, The Double Flame. His examples rely heavily on classical Greek, Latin and Renaissance Italian and Spanish masterpieces and he does not give laurels to any contemporary efforts. In fact, he quite succinctly echoes the observation some of the Slackers have made:
"The period we are living through is not sterile, even though serious damage has been done to artistic productions by the scourges of commercialism, profiteering, and publicity. Painting and the novel, for example, have been turned into products subject to fashion -- painting by means of the fetishism of the unique object, the novel by means of mass production ... Our time ... is simplistic, superficial, and merciless. Having fallen into the idolatry of ideological systems, our century has ended by worshiping Things. What place does love have in such a world?"
After that introduction to our pursuit of lustful love, here is Paz' definition of the double flame:
"According to the Dicionario de Autoridades, the flame is 'the most subtle part of fire, moving upward and rising itself above in the shape of a pyramid.' The original, primordial fire, sexuality, raises the red flame of eroticism, and this in turn raises and feeds another flame, tremulous and blue: the flame of love."
Love will by force provide wonderful tensions in the selected readings and the following quotes in essence become those characteristics I am looking for in the 2011 selections:
"In love, predestination and choice, objective and subjective, fate and freedom intersect. The realm of love is a space magnetized by encounter"
"Our flesh covets what our reason condemns."
"The mystery of the human condition lies in its freedom: it is both fall and flight. And therein resides the immense allure that love has for us. It does not offer a way of salvation; neither is it idolatry. It begins with the admiration of a person who is physically present, followed by excitement, and culminates in the passion that leads us to happiness or disaster. Love is a test that ennobles all of us, those who are happy and those who are wretched."
"Almost always, love manifests itself as a rupture or violation of the social order; it is a challenge to the customs and institutions of the community. A passion that, uniting the lovers, separates them from society."
"Love is not a desire for beauty; it is a yearning for completion."
"In all loves, even the most tragic, there is an instant of happiness that it is no exaggeration to call superhuman: it is a victory over time, a glimpse of the other side, of the there that is here, where nothing changes and everything that is, truly is."
"In love, everything is two and everything strives to be one ... The beloved is then both terra incognita and the house where we were born, what is unknown and what is recognized."
Like The Perfect Orgy's analysis of Madame Bovary and the components of a great, unforgettable novel, Paz' short reprise on the elements of love as found in literature should be a well-worn reference for serious readers. As I typed up these quotes, I was pulling off a blizzard of post-it notes from a volume that runs only 275 pages. His insights are poetic and as such capture the evasiveness of the most personal of human emotions.
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