I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Tuesday Book Club, I share an idea from a book.
Let us go a little deeper and develop the themes of negation and love, for their connection and the way they bleed into each other will be far from obvious. The thought here is that to love is to negate. Love is a process of stripping away, cutting away, tearing away, that opens us up to what exceeds the self and the realm of knowledge. As Marguerite Porete dramatically puts it, “One must crush oneself, hacking and hewing away at oneself to widen the place in which Love will want to be.” Only when one has hacked away at the self will love be able to enter.
Simon Critchley, Mysticism
Marguerite Porete (1250–1310) was a French-speaking mystic and the author of The Mirror of Simple Souls, a work of Christian mysticism that discussed the workings of divine love (agape). In 1310, she was burnt at the stake in Paris for heresy, after she refused to remove her books from circulation or recant her views. She was a member of the Beguine religious order, a Christian lay order active in Western Europe in the 13th to 16th centuries. She is one of many mystics that Critchley writes about in his book.
I came across Critchley’s work on mysticism through my ongoing listening of the Philosophize This! podcast. I have only listened to about ten minutes of Episode #215: How mysticism is missing from our modern lives (Critchley, Heidegger) but it was interesting enough that I checked out Mysticism from the library immediately.
Who knew that in reading it I would come to an idea that I’ve been thinking about as I write Reckless Romance, that to love requires a negation of self, an annihilation of self.
Last week, I started reviewing Iris Murdoch’s work which weaves together threads from Christianity, existentialism, the German idealists, and British analytic philosophy including Wittgenstein (one of my very least favorite thinkers when I studied philosophy in college). I suppose it’s not surprising that Murdoch promoted acting lovingly as a central ethical concept given her alignment with Christianity and Christian thinkers such as Simone Weil.
Both Weil and Murdoch highlighted the action of attention as key to living a good, ethical life and Murdoch, especially, saw it as necessary for truly loving someone. For Murdoch, attention required dismantling one’s ego so that one could appreciate the realness of another and apprehend them without one’s own fantasies and stories getting in the way. This is the same negation of the self referenced in the quote from Critchley’s Mysticism, above.
I have tentatively arranged my book in three parts: The Self, The Other / The Challenge, The Reward. It is intended to be dialectical. You start with yourself when you quest for romance. You meet The Other. They challenge you. To truly meet them, to see them as they are, you must tear down — negate — your self. And then with you annihilated and them, well, doing whatever they do as themselves, you can come together for the reward, what Hegel calls sublation (Aufhebung), a destructive synthesis of your two becomings.
Each part has three chapters. Each chapter represents some way of approaching the search for romance that is more reckless than the reckful alternative. For example, the first chapter is tentatively titled Openness over Control. In that chapter, I recommend dropping your checklists, relaxing your filters, and making yourself open to possibility rather than trying to control who you meet. I don’t intend to say you should not take any control at all; I am saying instead, prefer openness over control.
This morning I figured out how my memoir stories can be told in such a way that they trace the arc of the book structure, with one story per chapter. I realized I have at least one more essay to write for Things Men Gave Me, and probably two (I’ve written seven essays already). I started conceptualizing the painting to go with it last night. I’m happy to have found some inspiration and motivation towards continuing with that. I am allowing it to unfold at its own pace rather than trying to control the book and the memoir project with too much planning. That is the topic of chapter two of the book: Unfolding over Planning, the idea that life unfolds as it will and trying to hard to control it is counterproductive.
Of course I have to have a story about self annihilation and self negation. That is Chapter Seven. The story is already written. It’s A Title for a Painting. That was when I had to tear down who I thought I was — someone looking for remarriage, for a live-in committed relationship with a man who was as successful and accomplished as I was — and figure out who would arise after that metaphorical death.
When I left my live-in relationship with David, described in A Title for a Painting, I was experiencing the destruction of the Tower Tarot card. The life I had tried to build wasn’t right for me. I not only ended that relationship and moved out of the house I was living in, but about a year later, I left my corporate technology job, leaving me feeling financially and socially adrift. It all paved the way for this new life, with a new romance and a devotion to creative work.
It wasn’t easy though or pleasant. Self negation and self annihilation never is.