🪟 25 - The frame of love

Frame & Axiom #25 (Part 3): Love as a divine ideal.

Euwyn Goh

Dec 19, 2022

`Table of contents

PART 1: NATURE

PART 2: JUSTNESS

PART 3: MIRRORS

🪟 24 - The frame of love

Dear Reader,

If you could lend me your imagination for a moment, picture this.

…

You are sitting in a doctor’s office. It is as if time has stopped, with your mind in a state of frenzy, and your face unable to manage much of an expression.

You have just been diagnosed with an extremely rare illness.

The doctor clarifies that death shall come no sooner because of it, but that its effects are expected to stay with you for the rest of your life. He reassures you that there has been a hard push in search of a cure, but it is clear he can do no better. You see it as if he were offering hope on a fishhook, a gesture you appreciate, but one that evokes no more than an inanimate nod. You see right through it, knowing that you have little choice other than to resign to your new state.

But look now — your loved ones have heard the news and are beginning to gather in the room! Here comes family. They are putting on a hopeful and optimistic front, but they are evidently torn with worry and grief in their own hearts. Still, they present a worthy distraction from the shock of the uppercut punch that came in the form of the doctor’s delivery. The latent shock also seems to land more properly when processed in their accompaniment. After a few hours, your closest friends strut in, energetically but also solemnly, bearing gifts in hand. Ah! One has brought with them a packet of your favourite food. Of all the gifts they deliver, you are most appreciative of the gift of laughter.

Days and nights come and go, as you try to get accustomed to your new state. Time seems to have generally lost its meaning. But something fine always takes place in the accompaniment of a dear other. It is as if dull time adorns itself with splendour in an instant. Messages have also been coming in droves from your co-workers and acquaintances, lending you ample “thoughts” and “prayers”.

But amidst all this, something still feels amiss. Unattended to. There remains a mental weight like that of a heavy cloud, a sort of misery that whispers, that is and has been since the birth of this new state. It seems to make itself guest most prominently in moments of solitude, but at last, always seeming to crouch in the shadows, refusing to make itself properly acquainted. It is a matter of mystery, this misery, as unaccounted for as it is unexplainable. But though it is vague, it does reveal inklings of a particular cause. You ruminate… and ruminate… until you gain the realisation — that the compassionate love of your loved ones has kept you alive, but will never quite be sufficient in its comforting, no matter how well-meaning. Actually, perhaps it is in part because of how well-meaning it is. Such active compassion serves a constant reminder of your relative ill fortune, and a part of you has clutched upon how you have been forsaken. Just look at you! You were misfortunate down to the most minute of a percentile. Are you not now a symbol of tragedy within the community you had toiled your whole life to serve? Are you not now an eternal burden to those you love and who love you? You are now an anomaly, you see, whether you like it or not. Your life has been pulled unwittingly into a tragic centre. This condition, pain and all, has really been yours and yours alone to bear.

Weeks and months come and go, as you continue to suffer your afflictions. You are fortunate that love persists, but so too has sorrow, which, although remaining like a mist, has become a familiar aura. Now, fast forward to this moment, you lay on your couch deep in contemplation, as you sometimes do, ruminating aimlessly about life. Your eyes wander, till it catches a piece of paper lying on the table, shifting your attention. It looks like it had been brought in and left by someone else, presumably to be looked at later. Why, I have nothing better to do right now, you think, and so you walk up to it. Reading it in your mind’s voice, a strange-looking word in its titling immediately provokes your curiosity. It is the cursed name of that illness you suffer! With now-fully attentive eyes, you read on. It appears, very much to your surprise, that there is an active support community of fellow sufferers right here in your neighbourhood!

Would something within you not be moved, perhaps even leap for joy, knowing that you were not so alone in your ill fortune as you thought? Sure, the pain itself does not diminish, but it is as if the mist of sorrow has been touched for the very first time. You realise that you are not the only one cursed — that there are others who know your pain and whose pain you know!

As you join a meet-up, you immediately find it mesmerising, being merely one sufferer among many. It appears the low point of your ruler has been extended. You no longer wallow in the clutch of misfortune, as the moment you met your fellow sufferers, it took on the new median. It had pained you to think you were special — to think that you were especially forsaken, that you were a singled-out anomaly, and now it has comforted you to know you were not. Perhaps then there would arise a soft but certain murmur in the soul: thank Fortune for having my back for once! It is she who has revealed it to you, she who has motioned this gift of new framing, and now you feel more at ease.

…

Inquirer, is this not precisely the case with the condition of the human soul? You suffer a cursed condition like the rest of us, my fellow, and it is a lifelong disease born of nature. It is the outpouring of this condition of life in all its ephemerality, feebleness and apparent futility — that leads to all that you deem vice and virtue. Had you only realised earlier that you were surrounded by a community in which your condition was by no means special, but really, the deepest and purest common denominator! Nothing unites us more deeply than the pain we suffer. It is this pain that is the most real, for it is that which is the least instrumental, and thus, a truth that is most deeply concealed. It is one that does not discriminate, between peasant and king, artists and politicians, woman and man, young and old. You would be moved then, had you unearthed the secret of this condition that came prescribed with humanness, and thereby accessed the solace that came with knowing your tragedy to be universal. That came with knowing the personal to be transpersonal. And what would follow from it? Compassion, gratitude, mutual affirmation — love — would be the frame in which you saw people.

Is that not what one could call true love? True love is a frame that reveals itself in the practice of affirming others, within and in spite of their condition. Inquirer, it is well worth examining the frame in which you view the other. You would be kind and forgiving to a baby and say “of course, he is only a baby!” but you would not do the same to your brother and say “of course, he is only a man!” This is because you presume to know his nature, and so you assume the right to judge his motives. But had you seen to your own nature for long enough, you would certainly see yourself in him, for you would find your own nature to be unquestionably ill, and then you would be able to see him through a compassionate frame. To resent is therefore a problem of shortsightedness, since it fails to glimpse beyond the apparent. Indeed, resentment itself is a force that obstructs your sensitivity to the dance of the inward.

Now to complete my analogy of mirrors — if the communal world is a realm of mirrors, then it is as if every mirror came with a defect that led to distorted reflections. But had you first seen to the defect in your own mirror (the log in your eye), you would be able to begin adjusting for it. You would be able to see others as the fellow defective entities they are. Then, you would be able to love them.

Even the philosopher-pessimist Schopenhauer concludes his wailing with this sort of antidote, as he writes in his essay On the Suffering of the World: “The correct standard for judging any man is to remember that he is really a being … who is atoning for his existence through many different forms of suffering and through death. What can we expect from such a being? We atone for our birth first by living and secondly by dying… In fact from this point of view, it might occur to us that the really proper address between one man and another should be, instead of Sir, Monsieur and so on, Leidensgefahrte, socci molorum, compagnon de misères, my fellow sufferer. However strange this may sound, it accords with the facts, puts the other man in the most correct light, and reminds us of the most necessary thing, tolerance, patience, forbearance, and love of one’s neighbour, which everyone needs and each of us, therefore, owes to another.”

I think this is true love. True love is not so much the romance of the fervent heart, the aesthetic-lustful love that the free man loves to propagate. That sort of love, as hyperbolised in the cinematic sensuality of Don Juan, is a mere caricature of this love, for it is an acquisitive, aping force of that which in maturation is spiritually profound and total in its affirmation. You achieve this true love when it is moved from shallow waters into the deep seas, when it pierces through the erratic waves, and when it is anchored on the deepest depths — into the essence of Being itself. Now, this requires more than any layman’s effort, and so perhaps then it is not only about simply reshaping the world into a certain frame, but also about pursuing (and falling consistently short of) a divine ideal. Indeed, the Bible does not call love a "gift", a thing bestowed, but "a more excellent way"

, a thing to be pursued. Perhaps it is fair to say then that, as with every divine ideal, you do not truly love until Love has possessed your soul. Or you do not truly love until you serve the Spirit of love. To love in order to serve a divine Spirit and to love to acquire, even for the infinite prize of eros, is hardly the same orientation. Perhaps they are even diametrically opposed in some sense. I should much rather humble myself toward the divine Spirit of love, than stoop down to the level of Don Juan’s soulful conquests (not that I have his prolificity). Kierkegaard writes in Works of Love, it is not “about finding the perfect person … to love”, as it is “about being the perfect person who limitlessly loves the person he sees”.

Thus I am in agreement with the Christian conception that the ardent bonds of love ought to be centred by God

, for there the immediate aesthetic forces are hinged on the "more excellent way" of the Eternal. There, one satiates the soul with the other, but not merely for its own sake, for it is anchored to the divine Spirit. And it is a fully-edifying Spirit! In it, the most necessary things — tolerance, patience, forbearance, the love of one’s neighbour — take root in solid ground. Interestingly, in this juxtaposition the most elementary of antidotes, take be kind, is revealed to be a pinprick of the Eternal. After all, how many great men of intelligence such as Schopenhauer have battled ultimate concerns over a lifetime only to arrive at variations of this same antidote? All in all… at the end of the day… all things considered… more than anything… the final law is simply to love (or other instantiations of this). The author Huxley had a similar sentiment, writing: “it is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than try to be a little kinder.” Was this not also the great moral revolution brought about by Christ? It was said by the Apostle Paul in one sweeping aphorism: “love is the fulfilling of the law.”

This is to say, the divine love is the fulfilling of the ethical impulse, and the perfection of the aesthetic impulse.

Certainly, once you have adjusted for the defects of nature, it would be sensible to see others not in the dark but in the brightest possible light, in order that you might perceive them as the astonishingly intricate individuals they are. And why wouldn’t you want that? Indeed, this is how you affirm others, by first positioning yourself such that you see them in the brightest possible light. And this light is a permeation that fills every ounce of perceptible space, a permeation of Spirit, that does not deny but affirms all Being — so long as you do not negate it by having your back towards it. To always have the other positioned in light — that is true love. To truly love is to love from God’s point of view. Was it not also said, “God is Love”? This proposition is so symbolically rich, it cannot be overstated. To know God’s point of view, then, is to know and revere the Spirit of Love.

Now, consider this last thing. If you had a neighbour who said she loved flowers, but her flowers are all wilted from neglect, she is not believable. In fact, her absurd stance is worth mocking. She truly loves only what she affirms in practice. She affirms in practice in accordance with the frame in which she views the other. Christ said: “If anyone says, "I love God," yet hates his brother, he is a liar.” Perhaps this statement may be understood by picturing your neighbour saying “I love Love,” while being negligent with the garden she so dearly loved, and hating her brother. How can she say she loves, if no one bears witness? In this sense, there is a duty — an engagement of the Actor — that comes with the claim to love. You truly love only what you affirm in practice. And you affirm in practice in accordance with the frame in which you view the other. The frame of love is as an ocean, and works of love are the streams from which the ocean flows.

I for one cannot speak any more highly of this ideal and the works through which it is witnessed! Every time I have made practice of edifying, as inspired by the divine Spirit, my own life has been edified in return. And it is a revelation owed entirely to the model of Christ. I am most surprised rather, that so few have really unearthed this secret. When Love possesses you, reality will take on a dress of multi-coloured profoundness. Within it, your inner Actor will find itself sailing on a limitless ocean, charting a million treasures as illuminated by the lighthouse of Love, that shall be worth every measure of its pursuit. I believe, here lies the secret to communal living — an engagement of the Narrator and Actor of the highest and deepest order — that which is regarded by justness as a matter of ultimate concern, and that which will face the greatest scrutiny in the court of reality.

But certainly, as long as we pursue this divine ideal, we will fall gracefully or violently short of it; such is the impossible relation of man to his ideals! But as long as we fall in sincerity, curse ourselves in our hypocrisies, and hold our face up toward the Light — we will maintain our good standing in reality’s courts. The hour of Judgement attests to the ultimacy of this matter, and the time is always near. Let us pass this test with flying colours.

God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world.

— 1 John 4:16-18 (ESV)

Till next time,

Euwyn

1 Corinthians 12:31 (ESV): “But earnestly desire the higher gifts. And I will show you a still more excellent way.”

Mark 10:9 (ESV): “What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

Romans 13:10 (ESV): “Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.”