It is known in chemistry that the discovery of the law of
constant proportions led to the atomic theory of matter and the
system of chemical elements - a truly grand achievement of
analytical thought. This law says that fixed quantitative
proportions exist in chemical compounds but not in mixtures. Only
mixtures in proportions precisely prepared to resemble those found
in chemical compounds can completely react with themselves. I
suppose that love is consists in attraction and bringing together
of such complex amalgams, but in differing proportions such that
they cannot completely react with each other. In an ordinary
mixture after a reaction with another mixture remains an excess of
one component while another component is entirely exhausted. Say, a
person is such an amalgam of aspirations, desires and gifts, which
he or she wishes to offer to others. Then she or he desires love as
a proportionate utilization of his/her gifts and satisfaction of
his/her hungers and appetites. A person wants to be whole in love.
However, because of chronic mismatch with what the person
encounters we get want, hunger and exhaustion. A fatal indeed
consequence of love. "Too much or too little" it's the effect of
the strive for being served or for serving another with one's being
in a complete and final manner that collides with a lack of
constant proportion of elements between the loving and loved. Not
only the giving "too little or too much" is an unfortunate
consequence of the love interaction, but also the receiving of "too
little, or too much", the remaining with a sad unutilized excess of
what one had too much of, or the shame of not possessing in an
apporpriate degree of what is desired.
Another bad effect of love is the dependency on the loved object
and the representation that he (or she or it) is the one who
satisfies all hungers and accepts all gifts, and without it life is
worth nothing. It is the essence of "being in love" - illusion and
chimera of fulfillment, while in fact it is the looming of both
saturation and exhaustion.
The opposite of love is hatred (known so for lack of better
name). Her forces are also one-sided, but repulsive. The repulsion
from oneself is known as scorn, disdain, the flight from another is
called regret and disenchantment.
The participation in the orgy is not a simple act. It requires preparation. While love often desires spontaneous perfection, an orgy does not expect perfection at all, but never leaves out the preparation. That's why the orgy is almost always successful.
Accordingly, one can get prepared for the orgy by renouncing the
sublimation of elementary components and by melding them into one
single quality, which, on the principle of arithmetic average, will
be approaching the quality generated by the other orgy
participants. A human person attempts to lose his/her identity in
order to enter the orgiastic ceremony. When the functional elements
of the person merge together into one, a question arises -- what is
the result? I dont have the answer: it may be energy, chaos,
source, the abyss of death, self-depredation. I don't know. In fact
such behavior was encouraged by many a divine or semi-divine
instructor.
Another preparation to the orgy is precisely the sublimation, separation, selection of the single element that is designated for the orgy. It means leaving the larger remainder of the elements of the person under protection. And thus here we encounter sophistication or refinement, sometimes slightly incorrectly termed as licentiousness. But this is exactly the Apollinian, artistic version of the orgy, where the participant controlling the proportions of his/her elements is supposed to intensify and utilize one of them. The version of merging the elements of a person together is the Dionysian approach.
The force of love still play a role in the orgy. By pursuing the
object of attraction (eros) or attracting this object to oneself
and making a gift of oneself (agape) the subject of orgiastic
activity is no longer viewed as a whole person, but as a
transformed agent who is either from the Dionysian chaos and
source, wherefrom he erased and canceled his traits and features,
or from the realm of Apollo as a sublimate artist - a proficient
master of a selected sphere of his person.
1. Narcotic drugs - those that separate one of the regions of
interaction and sensing.
2. Sports, physical effort and athletic achievement, e.g., running
or weight lifting.
3. Apollinian arts: poetry, literature, visual arts such as
painting and photography, where one strives after grasping
something attractive and holding it in an essentially static
form.
4. Physical debauchery - the separation of the sensuality and flesh
from the rest of the person.
5. Intellectual debauchery - utilizing solely the intellectual part
of the person.
6. Work or productive debauchery - also leads to the amplification
of some qualities and extinction of others.
Other are the Dionysian ways:
A. The benign ones: music, dance, theater or rock concert.
B. And horrible types of self-destruction:
-- in danger, as in mountain climbing, sailing across seas,
attempts at survival in the wild;
-- in death, i.e. in suicide, and perhaps also in homicide;
-- in surrendering to the power of unknown forces, as in agreeing
to work for a criminal organization;
-- in breaking the ties with the family and flight into unknown --
emigration in a foreign land, but such that it really becomes a
change of personal identity.
C. Prayerful ecstasy - or an attempt to approach a higher being and
losing in that contact one's personal identity.
"Lust drives him on - lust, desperate and wild,
Fate's sin contriving child -
And cure is none; beyond concealment clear,
Kindles sin's baleful glare."
So it is the desire, that is giving in to erotic pursuits is
the "fate's sin contriving child", this co-maker of fate leading
to the separation from God. Adopting this concept leads to the
following hypothesis of the nature of God's love that is in
agreement with the hypothesis of Jesus as the ideal lover. Namely,
God loves man ideally - without affecting his specific composition
- and wishes to transport him into the realm of eternal life whole
- the same way as he tranported Christ. What kind of does God
demand from man in exchange? In essence he demands
self-depredation, and with respect to the fellow man and the
oneself he demands charity. But self-depredation is characterized
above as a Dionysian method of orgy, and charity is an elementary
force of love consisting in giving of oneself to others. So man
loses himself in God and distributes himself to others. There is no
erotic force, whereby man pursues something that attracts him -
because that something may be something other than God. And God
requires exclusiveness. The erotic force is in fact already
embedded in the love of God, but is already built into the
framework of the orgy of self-doom in God. Eros outside of this
particular self-renunciation is sin, or a source of sin, as in
seeking love outside of God, treason.
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TJG
November 1998
Copyright © 1998, Tomasz Gil