Letters from the Depths of Solitude. The Sixty-Second. On Repetitiveness
For explicit like an expletive knowledge of human nature it is quite enough to know oneself. Or, since the knowledge of oneself, according to Socrates, is unreachable, at least honesty with oneself would suffice.
My honesty would include the sad admittance that I loved not once. And that, however long and painful the dying of love might be, love dies.
Barthes compares dying love with a ship going into space, “lights no longer winking” (Barthes, 2002, 101); since he’s writing it in 1977, he already knows that one of the possible readings of the phrase is a cosmic vessel departing to space, rotating, a fragment of materiality falling into the endless abysmal starry night.
“Werther himself experienced it–shifting from “poor Leonora” to Charlotte; the impulse, of course, is checked; but if it had survived, Werther would have rewritten the same letters to another woman.“ (102)
Love, indeed, is a repetition. In all its uniqueness, love is not a writing, but rather re-writing, re-inscription on top of inscribed, the addition of another layer to a palimpsest which had never been a tabula rasa to begin with.
Writing arises from despair which springs from the impossibility of writing. Every new love powerfully demands to rewrite oneself, one’s own history, from the very beginning: no event was senseless but all that I lived through led mysteriously to you.
I am reborn, for the ten thousandth time, as the Phoenix, and, as Orpheus, I am forbidden to cast a glance back. I am leading a pale spirit, a fading shadow, out of the maze of nonexistence, but I am tempted to turn around just once, which I do and where I see myself, only a past myself, a myself who loved another, and in my willingness to liberate my own shadow I perform the only action which is verboten, I turn around for the last sight, to make sure that I am followed.
Lot’s wife, seduced by the same temptation, lost herself to a metamorphosis and became a salt pillar, and by turning around in Aides, Orpheus loses Eurydice.
Still, it is impossible not to look back and not to see a chain of loves which died a long painful death with cascading repercussions and echoing reverberations, or an amazingly quick and easy death, as if pierced by a rapier, guillotined, beheaded by a blinking heavy blade, bedecked with sprinkled blood patterns. The repetitiveness of it frightens me: I am alive, I could not think about you dying like that, but I know that we are both going to die for each other sooner or later, still alive, like monks dying for the world.
(Written on a bookmark with a yellow marker.)
