To My First Love

Hi! You're birthday's coming up. Sometimes I wonder how things will be if you're still here. Maybe the world will be a much better place having you around. You were that nice guy. And trust me genuine nice guys in college is really difficult to come by. And I'm lucky to be friends with one, I'm lucky to be friends with you.

You were the type of person who attracts people. Maybe that's the reason why I was drawn into you. You flash that charismatic smile without a touch of arrogance. It was always reassuring.It feels like you're telling me that everything's going to be fine without really telling me at all. I miss the days when we just talk of our dreams--dreams that are beyond us but we still partake. I miss the nights when you walk me home beneath the endless  sky, I have loved the stars since then. But more than anything I miss you.

I miss everything about you. Your artistic side, your childish side, your every side. You always say that people thought of you as moody but I don't really get it. All I know is that your very presence makes people assured. At least that's the way I feel about you. You have that sense of presence that no matter how I dwell in loneliness I know that I will never be alone. Because I have you.

You were everything wonderful. I can't seem to find the right words that would fit in my picture of you.And I just wish we had more time because I'm scared. 

I'm scared that one day I can't freeze our moments in my mind. I'm scared that a time will come where your face will fade in my memory without a picture that will remind me of how we once were. I'm scared that soon you will disappear in oblivion like so many people who once walked the consciousness of this earth.

But I know you. You live not to leave a mark. You live with the very essence of how it is to be alive. But yes you have left a mark to me and many people like me. And I believe that mark, no matter how it hurts, was never a scar but a promise.It was a promise of you.

Thank you. I was happy that in this lifetime our lives have crossed, in that brief moment of forever.

 I never had the chance to tell you, but I hope that before you have left for the heavens, I hope you knew... that all along, I have loved you.

Ode to February

 I'm a big  Pablo Neruda fan and my ode to valentines day is a series of poems about love and lost from one of my most beloved poets of all time. <3

 

XVII (I do not love you...)

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

Absence

I have scarcely left you
When you go in me, crystalline,
Or trembling,
Or uneasy, wounded by me
Or overwhelmed with love, as
when your eyes
Close upon the gift of life
That without cease I give you.

My love,
We have found each other
Thirsty and we have
Drunk up all the water and the
Blood,
We found each other
Hungry
And we bit each other
As fire bites,
Leaving wounds in us.

But wait for me,
Keep for me your sweetness.
I will give you too
A rose.
 

Here I Love You

Here I love you.
In the dark pines the wind disentangles itself.
The moon glows like phosphorous on the vagrant waters.
Days, all one kind, go chasing each other.

The snow unfurls in dancing figures.
A silver gull slips down from the west.
Sometimes a sail. High, high stars.
Oh the black cross of a ship.
Alone.


Sometimes I get up early and even my soul is wet.
Far away the sea sounds and resounds.
This is a port.

Here I love you.
Here I love you and the horizon hides you in vain.
I love you still among these cold things.
Sometimes my kisses go on those heavy vessels
that cross the sea towards no arrival.
I see myself forgotten like those old anchors.

The piers sadden when the afternoon moors there.
My life grows tired, hungry to no purpose.
I love what I do not have. You are so far.
My loathing wrestles with the slow twilights.
But night comes and starts to sing to me.

The moon turns its clockwork dream.
The biggest stars look at me with your eyes.
And as I love you, the pines in the wind
want to sing your name with their leaves of wire.


 

a vow to the other

A Levinisian Reflection on Proximity

Can we live without tenderness? Yet to live without tenderness is to live without love. And to live without love is not to live at all.

And let me tell you I could not live without tenderness because I love you.

I love you not because of truth. My love exceeds the parameters of logic and cognition. It is outside the territory of reason, exterior to boundaries of themes and totalities. It is beyond my grasp, beyond my comprehension. It is more than what concepts in this world can ever convey.

I love you as I make contact with your absolute singularity. It is a contact transcending space, excluding representations and intentionality. My love does not require your physical closeness. I love you still even if we are million miles apart, for you are the basis of my being me. I could never be me without you. With our contact, our proximity, overflows this tenderness and responsibility saying you are my infinity and I am yours infinitely.

I love you with the pure approach of touch holding no intentions, no motives. In our caress lies proximity not on a par with the manifestation of things “in flesh and bones” or from the sense of existence and non-existence (p.118). In our proximity presents a primordial communication of tenderness found in the majesty of your face and the nudity of your skin.  It is “between the pure and troubled” (p.118), leaving an immediate tracebeyond the role of knowledge. In the tenderness of our contact is a kerygma, a proclamation that has no room for thought, a “departure with no return” (p.92), that I instantaneously hold myself ever morally responsible for you.

I love you with a love that escapes themes. My touch is beyond the data of reason and rationality. No science can ever explain the enigma and paradox of this feeling. For my love is without concepts, it can never be locked up with definitions and terminologies. My touch, my caress is outside thematic understanding that no prison of totality can ever capture.

I love you without need. To need is “the anxiety of the I for itself” (p. 94)and I’m not for a world that is for myself. In my love and responsibility for you, I am emptied of myself. The purest love lacks nothing. I desire you in your purest alterity with no needs, no demands. The nakedness of your face summons me—a summon I cannot escape. In your face I lost anything that can be manifested and comprehended. Your face awakens my obsession—“a responsibility without a choice, a communication without phrases or words” (p.120).

I love you with a love that is restless. Your summons to my very being speaks of immeasurable urgency to always answer, to always love. I love you not of intuition but of immediacy. However this immediacy is not aiming to be contemporaries with the triumph of our love,instead it is having no time for reflection. Consiousness with reflection is to return to the self. Yet without you, there will never be me. It is as if I’m always hungry for a responsibility towards you that can never be satisfied. Here I am, caught up willingly in my insatiable desire to make contact, to caress, to touch.

I love you as a genuine enigma. In your glorious face I rediscover the traces of my obsession, the traces that can never be concretized in the materiality and context of this world. It is a mystery thatdisturbs every order I ever know, showing me the generosity of sacrifice, the purity of love.Our love is not a phenomenon, but traces of a passing that was never present, for I love you with a love that disturbs order—a lovethat transcends this world.

I love you with infinite pardon and boundless compassion. The absolute force of your face proclaims the trace of an absence—the trace of infinity that gravitates me to be responsible for you, with your pain and sorrow, with your agony and misery. It is a love that seeks more than justice, but an intimacy that forgives endlessly.

I love you because my humanity depends on loving you. I love you because you are my salvation. It is a love that’s different from the deceptions of eros and delusions of narcissism. My love is a one-way movement towards you. It does not aim to be reciprocated. It does not require conditions, only absolute patience. For I love you in a liturgical orientation. It is a love without remuneration and compensation, assured in the indifference of my time and death. It is a pure transport without returning back to myself for I will still love you “in a time without me, in a time after my time” (p.92).

I love you because you are my meaning. My encounter with you is the sense of living. You are the command that calls me into question. And I welcome you to command me to be commanded byyou. This is mymoral responsibility for you, an inextinguishable fire of desire that extends to infinity.

I love you as an obsession. My obsession towards you embraces the responsibility that of proximity—“a bond prior to every chosen bond” (p.123). In this bond, in this relationship with you, I am your hostage. I surrender to you myself. I submit my whole being to you without asking anything in return. For that is how love should be, an absolute acceptance of our difference, of your inassimilable alterity. I do not have second thoughts, or any thoughts at all,for there is no other choice. The only truth I know is that you are my eternity.

I love you beyond my being. I love you beyond my world. I love you beyond my death. I love you this way because I don’t know any other way of loving, but only through this infinite tenderness and obsession.

*Alphonso Lingis trans., Collected PhilosophicalPapers: Emmanuel Levinas, (Martin Nijhoff Publishers: Dordrecht Netherlands, 1987).

anamnesis

A Levinisian Reflection on Love and Infinity

Have you ever loved someone so deep that sometimes it hurts? Have you ever loved someone so passionately that sometimes it consumes you? Have you ever loved someone with a love you can’t contain? There are times you question your pain.  On other times you question your love. But are there really different ways of loving that you put yourself into a category? Is love just a surge of emotions that overwhelms your being? Haven’t you asked the most important question ever formulated—the question that of love?

What is LOVE? How is it to truly love? I used to believe in destiny and fate and stories written in the stars.I used to think that among eight billion people in the planet, there would be this one person who would love me and I would love in return. Most of the times I question why this hasn’t happen yet.  And this is where I’m wrong.

You see, true love never questions. More often in our lives we linked the concept of love to romantic love. Maybe because it’s easier that way, it appeals to our emotions.But Eros deceives. It projects this image of being unconditional and selfless, when in truth; it lives in the world of needs existing for the self. It gives us finite experience of pleasure but not eternalizing joy.

Loving someone means wanting that love to last. It makes you want to believe in forever and eternity, for love can only exist in infinity. It’s very possiblity lies in the idea of the infinite (p.164). Love is beyond the fallacy of eros and delusions of narcissism. In fact, it is the very possibility of the beyond. To live beyond oneself is to live your life for others. In the words of the master of comedy:“these are the people who pass their whole lives together; yet they could not explain what they desire for one another” (p.164). For this desire is a genuine enigma,prior to anything that can be manifested and represented, prior to presence and truth. It is transcendent to this world, disinterested to immanence. For love is without concepts, it dwells into the obscure, into the shadow.

To love is without reasons. You just love. Period. It’s the most irrational thing. When you can conceptualize and rationalize every detail of loving someone, surely that is not love, for one can never finitize love through reasons. And this mystery of irrationality is beautiful in its own right. How can you represent something immemorial? You can’t. And that’s how love is. No context can ever wholy capture its meaning. It is outside the bounds of totality, it is infinity.

In such love you are awaken to proximity. In such love you are a hostage. The I is “under the accusation of the other, even though it be faultless...obeying a command before having heard it, faithful to the commitment it never made” (p.165).Through your contact with the other lies your responsibility. It’s tenderness more primordial than any words can ever convey.In this touch, this proximity is the absolute expression of freedom, of morality, of love.

To love someone is to accept that person, as he is, no assumptions, no correlations. You accept that you are different. When you accept his absolute individuality, his alterity, without reducing him to your notion of self, then you open yourself to infinity.The other cannot be assimilated, aslove cannot be totalized. It is exterior to thematization. In here, love is not ontological. It is beyond being. I no longer believe in “til death do us part”, for to love infinitely is to go beyond one’s death, to still love in a time after one’s time. To love is to go beyond the ego for the self is a limiting prison, for the I constrains in loving infinitely.

To feel infinitely for someone is not to judge that person. You do not see him as evil.  Though the other may indeed have some excess at some points of their lives, the challenge is how to tame that excess, how to transcend it. You do not judge him for the decisions he made. You will not give up on that person precisely because you love him. In your journey through life, you will encounter people that do not live perfect lives. For some of them, you’ll feel infinitely for. And in that situation, you just love with a love that don't demand. It’s a love that understands, that forgives endlessly.  And even in the point that you have to go separate ways, that infinite responsibility will never change, proximity is still there. In our relationships and encounters with the other we accept that it’s not a smooth sailing road. There are both good and bad things along the way. Still, take it because that’s how love is, pure submission. Every moment of taking that chance to love is a moment that endures infinitely.

To love is to not seek pleasure or the good. It is beyond hedonism and eudaimonia. It “does not fill me up with goods, but compels me to goodness, which is better than goods received” (p.165). This love is your infinite responsibility for the other, for your neighbor. This is the very impossibility of indifference. You can never ignore the misery felt by the other; you can never be deaf to his call. Your responsibility transcends limits. It is the ultimate meaning of immeasurable urgency to act for the other, to subject oneself to him. It is desire turned into action. No contract can ever fix the boundaries of this obligation. You are irreplaceable in this responsibility for no one can escape the force of a naked face calling you, choosing you. In the encounter with the other, infinity reveals itself.

Loving someone is like a covenant. You render yourself vulnerable for the other. In loving the other, you allow yourself to be transformed. You selflessly surrender yourself to the other without expectations of any renumeration. Infinity is in the naked face of the other; it is in his nude skin. You see in him a trace of something primordial. It’s a feeling of “permanent losing and finding again” (p.114), a rediscovery.

Again, if I was asked what is love? Maybe I’ll still answer this: I used to believe in destiny and fate and stories written in the stars. I used to think that among eight billion people in the planet, there would be this one person who would love me and I would love in return. Most of the times, I used to question why this hasn’t happen yet.  Yes, I used to. But now I choose to believe otherwise. Sometimes what we were waiting for is right here all along. It just took us a little while to rediscover the traces of a passing that never was—the traces of infinity.

*Alphonso Lingis trans., Collected Philosophical Papers: Emmanuel Levinas, (Martin Nijhoff Publishers: Dordrecht Netherlands, 1987).