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"Love is universally acknowledged to be among the oldest of things. In addition to this, Love is the author of our greatest advantages. ...Love seems to me a divinity most beautiful and best of all. ...Love dwells within, and treads on the softest of existing things; wherever he chances to find a hard rugged disposition, there he will not inhabit, but only where it is most soft and tender. For he is the most delicate of all things, who touches lightly with his feet only the softest parts of those things which are the softest of all." Plato- Symposium
"Love conquers all things: let us too give in to love."
Virgil -The Eclogues
"I may speak in tongues of men or of angels, but if I am without love, I am a sounding gong or a clanging cymbal. I may have the gift of prophecy, and know every hidden truth; I may have faith strong enough to move mountains; but if I have no love, I am nothing. I may dole out all I possess, or give my body to be burnt, but if I have no love, I am none the better. ...Love will never come to an end. Are there prophets? Their work will be over. Are their tongues of ecstasy? They will cease. Is there knowledge? It will vanish away; for our knowledge and our prophecy alike are partial, and the partial vanishes when wholeness comes."
St. Paul -1 Cor. 13
"Being a part, man cannot grasp the whole. He is at its mercy. He may assent to it, or rebel against it; but he is always caught up by it and enclosed within light and his darkness, whose end he cannot see. ...Man can try to name love, showering upon it all the names at his command, and still he will involve himself in endless self-deceptions. If he possesses a grain of wisdom, he will lay down his arms and name the unknown by the more unknown, ignotum per ignotius—that is, by the name of God. That is a confession of his subjection, his imperfection, and his dependence; but at the same time a testimony to his freedom to choose between truth and error."
C. G. Jung -Memories, Dreams, Reflections
LOOKING FOR LOVE...
Go out of the house at the hour when dusk seeps into your little local sky, wading carefully through your domestic sprawl so as not to break anything you would have to stay behind for to repair, and take your heart along for the outing, and go air all your almost-expired unrequited wants. Go as if with a flow, leap as if with faith, follow every idyllic cliché you can summon as if it were your compass, hurdle, hop, fly, climb, tread or crawl, but keep away from any familiar diversion and do only what you think a pilgrim would on the ultimate journey. And should the impulse strike you to quake and tremor with abstract longings, to spew and spill stored up emotions until you feel love springing up from your navel, give yourself to it as to a rapacious God. And if you wish for a sky swept clear of premonitions, pressures, bad surprises, know you'll find it in the guise of a lover. You'll know his smell even before you smell him, and you'll know only one name for him: Fate. You will open your body as if it were a vast dog-eared novel for him to read; and you will let him lead you, as he led many before, through the aphrodisiac melodrama of faith and persistence.
If you could put your heart on a platter and leave it outside the house till nightfall, watching it for hours quiver in a combined terror of freedom and thrill of loss, watching it exist, like the swollen moon about to rise in the blue sky, off borrowed light, you would recognize, as in a mirror, your own content, deeply disengaged existence. You'd know it wouldn't bask in its lone nudity and that you might find it curled up in the open, dead on exposure, and you'd run to clutch it to your bosom and senselessly moisten it with resumed possessiveness, knowing that this was the end of your doubts, you could be heartless now, free, invulnerable. And as you imagine this, as you persist on your nebulous loveseeking journey, you feel your heart trying to wiggle away from you deep inside, and you think that if you could let it free and follow it at a crawl to the source of your affections and desires, your life would be crystal clear and truly exhilarating, like a flashflood.
So you have left the house, where cowardice and common sense and ennui take up all the space. You're looking for a moral rod, or for an anchor or harbor unlike those you've embraced so far, both faithfully and lazily, or for a miracle of revelation, or even a lifesucking God?anything you can trust and can't control. In short, you're looking for love. You've been out and about for a good amount of time already, it's getting dark or cold or muted, you've seen cars and animals and fellow humans and natural elements galore, but the great outdoors stays for your purposes silent. You don't know if you even know how to read it, or how to trace his traces without creating them out of your secret desires like dreams which would defeat your goal which is to remain an objective traveler. You know he is out there, right here, you suspect, but you don't know if he is there because you so want him to be there, if he is he or you, if he is the one you'll think he is when you do or if in your hurry you'll adorn any old rod with those lovely attributes you think you know should be his, if you're in the process of summoning him up out of thin air so you can have someone distinct to love and cherish and protect and hide in. You know your doubts are pulling you backward, homeward bound, so you try to forget your drab self, because your doubts are yourself, to be nothing but pure desire. Pure stems from pyre and pyromania, you remind yourself, again and again, as you cross asphalt after asphalt, highway shoulder after underpass, ravine after valley after beach after whatever you choose to cross on your tiny impulsive expedition. You tell yourself: It's a start. It's nothing unique. This happens to everyone. It won't kill me.
You search without going back for a nap or better shoes or a customary snack and chat, feeling that a little bit of discomfort and distress and suffering is like money in the bank you'll get interest on, necessary if you are to deserve some serious reward. You also know, from having read enough basic mythology and paperback romances, that persistence and determination is what at length explains miracles, transmogrifications, metamorphoses, holy unions and the like.
As you proceed, you pretend, for the benefit of your doubts, that this (love?) has happened to you and your heart. You feel that you belong, you are complete, hermaphroditic. ..You will go on top of the ramparts, you will open your arms like wings, and you will wait.
You feel him though you don't see him, passing you by with a rush of vibrating excitement and your undeniable arousal, objectless as it still remains, spurs you on. You feel that soon enough you'll come upon a sense of lifelong delight spawned by his mere unintentional presence, and you will be washed in a fountain of personal joy you will not be able to explain to anyone or need to; that you will feel foolish in all that happiness and uncomfortable and you won't know what to do with it, except bask in it, or how to bring it back home with you, except dressed up in the duds of domesticity, or how to ever go back home, or even how to sustain it, except by refusing to accept it
But you will accept it. It's your job now. It's what you set out to do. Above you, billions of billions of stars and invisible singularities burn, pulse, fall, reminding you of your gravity. But you, skeptical, stare at them bleary-eyed and shout: I don't even really believe in fate!
You'll ask: What have I done to deserve this much anxiety, this much uncertainty, this much powerlessness? You ask yourself, again and again: Is this my punishment, or my reward?
You'll ask yourself, even: Is this my hubris, or my humility? How can I tell? Is my guiding myth Oedipus or Odysseus, for instance? If only you knew anything but your ambivalence and how to give pleasant head to strangers. You fear that when the time comes, you won't be up to it.
You see him staring at you up and down. He is standing casually at the red light, not impatient. You decide, in the heat of the moment, to flee to this stranger and pretend that he's been waiting for you, hands outstretched, since the beginning of time. You ignore the urge to laugh at yourself, or feel desperate. You could love him, and another him, simply. You could love love.
Grown people ought to be explorers. You might as well take his hand, an easy thing to do, and lift it to your mouth, as if it were your priest's hand extending the Eucharist and lick it tenderly as you bestow a flighty kiss on it through the hairs and sniff the hairs imperceptibly to teach your body this smell that may from now on belong to you like the smell of your beloved dog does for instance. Imagine yourself, as you walk in silence hand in hand, too incredulous to look at each other face to face, sitting on his lap while he poops on the toilet, kissing him with the greatest affection. That too may come to pass. Imagine yourself, as you feel vaguely comforted by his rhythmic walking presence by your side as you squeeze through families of tourists and speeding rollerbladers on the narrow pavement, lying on all fours, feeling his eyelashes batting against your labia so intimately it feels as if you're being flayed. That too is probably in the cards. Imagine yourself, as his hand sweats in your own and becomes uncomfortable and yet you hate to let it fall so you can wipe off your palm and let it hang by your side in its usual, now suddenly self-conscious position, loving his used underwear, his overgrown toenails, his slouching hairy back, the stale odor of his gray beard, the mustiness of his asshole, the sooty residue of cigarette smoke in his mouth, his many scars. Keep on walking in his proximity, taking in the sights, and you may never again be surprised.
At the first major intersection, he waves you on to join him in turning left, looking to you like Hermes Trismegistus luring the dead past the river Lethe, of forgetfulness, and ignoring all that is impossible, you nod and try not to think and go on. He crosses a parking lot and stops by a car. He asks you where you are going. You recognize instantly that this is a determining moment and of course you freeze. You don't want to seem desperate, you want to stay cool, you don't want to lose him so soon. Your feet feel bare, you fight off a mood-breaking sneeze. You sneeze. The windows fog with the steam from your bodies, and still there is nothing really you can tell him, even though you try to recall some small talk to derail the question temporarily. Your moans become palpable like a heathenish dream made incarnate by the chance of your encounter, your organs of love are your wishes made corpulent, your lust feels immemorial. And somehow, even though you have only just met him and do not know him and do not know what you want, you know that everything will be fine. You are not sure what is the meaning of this encounter, and how it will affect your journey, and if the journey is all there is for you, but you already feel you have succeeded. You know now that you will endure. You will not dry up. You'll put up a fight.
And then you'll think, as many others have thought: I am nothing; I am nothing special. This could happen to anyone. This happens to anyone. I won't look back. And you'll feel really lucky. For you, here, now, there is only trying. The rest is not your business. You'll fantasize and through that you will persist till the epiphany of orgasm. For in your end is your beginning.
A LOVE SPELL FOR THE SEEKER
This is the composition for a love potion to be drunk by all those who wish to find their heart's mate; it will instantly reveal to you the face, the voice, the name of your beloved; the phone will ring ; this is not, however, a guarantee that your predestined other will instantly love you and unite his or her fate with yours for ever; if that is your ultimate goal, you need a different spell.
Take the finely crushed powder of a pound of unadulterated sweet musk, of 50 pieces of coral and 100 pearls, of 150 chopped gold leaves, a pound of ivory scrapings, a pound of unicorn scrapings, and a pound of blue lapis lazuli, all of which have been washed nine times over nine dawns by a virgin named Mary. Do not use the ground spices the apothecaries have for sale. Then use a marble mortar to mix into a paste an ounce of bone or gristle found in a stag's heart and half an ounce each of violet preserves, of wild-olive cinnamon, of candied lemon peel, of old occidental amber and of preserved leopard semen. Put everything into seven ounces of delicate white silk which has never been used and boil it together in an earthen jar in the full moonlight until you see that the ingredients have all turned red. Before taking it off the fire, add 8 ounces of monastic port and stir thrice repeating the words: 'Appear before me, love of my life, fill me, give me, take me, make me, blithe. ' Do not speak at any other time in this ritual. After removing the jar from the fire, empty the contents out of the silk cloth, which you burn down to the slightest ash. Filter them carefully through a wooden strainer, squeezing the liquid out as strongly as you can. Return the filtered juice to the jar, add as much alkanet-root sugar as needed to make a syrup, and boil it on a low flame for 2 hours, stirring well, then take it off the fire and add grey amber to it. If the mixture is correct, it will dissolve. When the syrup cools down, spit into it twice, pour it in a tightly closed gold or silver or glass dish, and leave it outdoors for the night. Drink the next morning upon awakening on an empty stomach, before you wash your body or brush your teeth, with your eyes shut, sitting in lotus position. Wait as long as it is necessary until you feel a surge of epiphany and certainty wash you from within.What there is for you to conquer by means of strength and submission will be revealed to you lucidly, and any undisciplined squads of emotion you've suffered from will be experienced as constant propitious coincidences and signs. This is one of your journey's ends.
...IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES (loving a ghost)
His name is Zachary. You found out yesterday, when his or your neighbors took you aside to warn you about him. 'Zachary,' they said with immeasurable fright; 'you can read about him in the library, under history, our town, our street name, date 1902.' They are a preppy, shy, very loving couple, and they have nothing to gain from telling you this that you can divine.
The next day you are approached by another young couple in the same building. He is Irish-American, she is Korean, they design wedding gowns for a famous atelier. They take you to the library after tea. They show you some clippings from 200 years ago that mention Zachary O and some hideous tragedy and they tell you he used to haunt them. They shiver and whisper that you will only know when he tries to kill you. And with you he will succeed.
The good news is, if they are right, he and you have all the time in the world. If they are right, your love will live longer than you will, and completely independently of the temporal, real, vulgar, needy, boring, and bored world. Still, now you can't rest at all.
You knew you should have kept moving, you think to yourself, no doubts can get to you while in perpetual motion. You could be struck by lightning or a meteorite, but that's instantaneous and majestic and possibly even a relief. And if they are right, it would bring you closer than ever to him. You could haunt the world as a couple, like those busybodying couples who have haunted you so.
You first meet him one day unexpectedly, as you're going up the old rickety steep stairs to your apartment. You don't see anyone there when you start climbing up, familiar step after step, but by the fifth one you sense a prying presence and lift your gaze from the treacherous steps for a moment and face, at eye level, a pair of intensely shined men's black leather shoes. For a flickering instant, you see your reflection on his toes, wide-eyed and buffered, and then it vanishes leaving no trace. You lift your head further up, as if in slow motion, and track the long reedy body that extends from those shoes to the sky. He stands there like a Roman statue, as if death had made him marble, utterly expressionless and open to inspection, and yet somehow he looks thoroughly ethereal, innocent and transparent?the perfect object of love, if love is really nothing more than our desire to become transparent and clean. 'Come,' he says abruptly, without moving his lips perceptibly, adding to the inconceivable tumult inside you, and, after a thoughtful-like silence, he adds, 'with me now.'
You cannot bring yourself to believe that you love this singular stranger, but your heart flutters dazzled and brims with mingled and conflicting emotions and vibrations, the principal of which is a desire to say, 'Take me now, and never leave me, whoever you may be.' You glance about the place, hoping to give yourself time to reclaim your reason, you follow the trodden paths, but in the end there is nothing to do but reconcile yourself to the felicity of his presence. If love is an enchantment, a sudden loss of boredom, a convolute surrender of the senses, bliss apropos of nothing, you think, then you are in love.
I see,' he says, motioning you toward the garden, perceiving perhaps that you cannot immediately give in to the shock of bliss.
There is a time for loving, as there is a time for dying and for not dying for real. There is a time for reality, and a time for dreams.
FINDING LOVE...
I use my mouth a lot. It is my dominant characteristic. People say it gives people ideas. It's like watching a bellydancer's belly or a stripper's butt. And I'm convinced that's what he, the odd and unscrupulous and unprompted man of my dreams, first liked about me. My whorish mouth.
I gesture with my lips, twaddle them in my fingers, lick them, chew them, pucker them, puppeteer them, stuff them with things like fingernails, fingers, pens, edibles. My lips are always busy. I've always thought my mouth was too agile and wet and sloppy, and I always mean to keep it shut. I never do. When I have it closed that mouth is very small; but when I smile it's a huge beaming something else. I don't use it like that when I'm alone at home in front of the mirror, so I'm not sure of the impression I project. I can keep it shut and sexily pouting in front of the mirror.
It is late afternoon, the beach is crowded, the pavement exudes heat and the air humidity, and men in the street come toward me shouting flatteries and lovely obscenities. I try to look away. One is ..A boy ..A slave.. Others.. And then I meet him. He apologizes for his gender and offers to marry me on the spot, I think in cold blood. He is a doctor at my building and he walks with me out the front door, saying 'What a day,' so I suggest he needs some coffee. He invites me to keep him company at the coffeeshop and I uncharacteristically overcome my fear of being misjudged and follow him there. We talk about nothing. I'm thinking of sex. The next day he takes me to dinner, I am cautious and paranoid. I keep wondering: What does he want? He talks about cutting up people and going inside them all the way, the intimacy of surgery, the ultimate penetration. He takes me for a ride and I squeeze against the passenger door to preempt any pushy desires, mostly mine, but he makes no move. He drives and talks. He shows me this and that picturesque item. He says he knows I'll be very easy to love, and I'm not sure that's a compliment. He offers me a ring that belonged to his Mommy. I refuse it, adamantly, thinking he should be locked away. He says: When I see, or think of, your mouth, I only feel the sheerest of joys. I've never felt joy before. Isn't that reason enough?
Next thing I know I'm biting wantonly at his fingers, taking out all my anger at his unreasonableness, his inaccessibility because of his extremism, his unseemly arrogance, his greed, his great need. I want him, I don't want him to know I want him, I want him to want me to want him and I want him to want me and so on. I don't want him to be desperate, just to want me desperately, every moment. He says, If I could die now, I'd die a happy man. I shudder at his illogic, happily.
Your mouth, he says, is so naked, like a gap. I don't think of nudity as a gap. I don't think of my legs as gaping open, like the mouth of a cliff. I think nudity is nothing in and of itself. Nudity is simple, and simple things aren't very enticing. Shocking things, like a man proposing marriage without ever having felt how it is inside of me, are. I undress my body a lot, in a lot of different ways. Going in and out of minuscule clothes is like sex, I like to watch them curl on the floor, drape on chairs and hang lazily from places, like spent body parts. I like my clothes like companions. They always feel good to the touch. They have only one function—to embrace my body, tightly or softly or both—and otherwise shrink and fold and hang listless, useless. I dress in front of the mirror out of necessity but I don't like it: all surfaces are predisposed to be boring. If we avoid need, a d by need I guess I mean memory, we merely deal with reflection, and that creates mere comings, mere goings, and between them the river, I think the name is Styx. My mouth, he says, is unlike any other mouth he's ever seen. You can't fall, or stay, in love with a mouth, I protest, and only shame keeps me from adding, Listen, you, I have a soul. Too. It may even be whorish, big soul, I'm not sure.
I know he can't fathom the logic of my refusing his proposal, just as I can't fathom his proposal to me, a virtual stranger, an actual stranger if virtual love. He repeats that he is willing to offer me anything I may want—time away from him to do what I please, open marriage, no strings attached, children or no children, my extended family to reside under his roof, or not, plus a good shelter, good food, first-class transportation, warm and cool and pretty clothing and jewels and free time and a fully equipped gym. It is a conflict of logics. The more he loves me and the more he offers me, the more I mistrust him and suspect his motives because I know, as far as my body goes, that there is no foundation for his love, that he doesn't know, has no interest to know,me, and as for the rest, of me, the soul and history and dreams, he considers it irrelevant, so when he says I am the woman of his dreams, it sounds offensive: I can't help feeling like a possession. Worse yet, an immaterial possession.
To this he objects vehemently and calls me by my name so lovingly my heart skips a beat, though I know his intention is to show that knowing my name is proof of how well he knows and understands and sympathizes with all of me. I've told him nothing of myself, as a test of his reason, and he has asked me practically nothing—except what movies I like, which sports, my favorite color, my favorite ethnic food, my favorite designer sort of thing. If he were vacuous, as I believe he is, he shouldn't be capable of such a great passion as the one he has exhaustingly conceived for me. If he were as dim or delusional as I suspect he is, he shouldn't be capable of building such a successful business from scrap and satisfying clients and public alike, as I know for a fact he does, very competently, every working day. This romance defies my logic. If I were to give in to it, I would clearly lose myself, my entire understanding of the world, my ability to go through life in a somewhat civilized, sane, and unembarrassed manner, as I have to date. So I tell him I am wrong for him, or I am not ready for commitment, or it's not him, it's me, or I have problems to work out in my psyche before I can think of romance, or, more strongly, I am not attracted to him, or I am a dyke, or I am frigid, I've tried everything. He says he'll wait for me, he'll cure me, he'll change me, he'll ask for very little in return, he can live with it all, whatever I say it is. I finally explode and say, I don't want to, I don't want you, you're crazy, you're nuts, I've given you not the slightest sign of romantic interest, I don't even know you or care to know you, you should be locked up. He says, I wouldn't mind it if you were my jailer. He says, What is it that you want that I can't give you? I say, cornily, Myself. That passes him by. It's too abstract. If I had said an executive jet, a blond blue-eyed muscleman, a Zimbabwean, he might understand, perhaps.
So I think it over and I finally tell him my parents, to whom I am extremely close, have forbidden me to marry an American. I even get caught in the adornment of my tale and go a bit overboard, telling him it's an old family curse or maybe it's a very bad omen and anyway I'd never disobey, so I keep myself away from any romantic entanglements with Americans. He says most of his money is in the Bahamas anyway, his banker lives there too, and he'll be happy to renounce his citizenship if that will solve my problem. Problem in singular.
I run into him again, this time in my building. I think he's been loitering about, looking both purposeful and important and also casual and inconspicuous, hoping to run into me. I don't know how long he'd been there for or how often he's tried it before.
I've stopped answering the phone. I am a prisoner in my own home, kept behind locked doors by the insanity of love, not love, desire, not desire, objectification. I sit in front of the TV watching old movies, loving being an object of desire, and thinking that love is a form of gangrene, or herpes of the mouth, that eats you up from inside long before you know it's there.
A LOVE SPELL FOR THE DISINTERESTED:
Take 900 or up to 999 of the most beautiful flesh-colored roses, the buds of which are half-open and which still have all their leaves. Clean the buds in the most careful possible manner, rub the buds between your hands so that in case one were still whole it would open and the hot water would be able to penetrate it all the better. Put the roses into a large new glazed earthenware flesh-colored pitcher and boil them in spring water until they are edible. Stir the roses well with a wooden knife so that they are all mixed up and covered in water, and leave them to steep for 24 hours. Then put everything into an old favorite kettle that preferably has been in your family for many, happy, generations, and boil it three times. Strain off the broth and save it, compress the roses as hard as you can in a press or between two flat pie ces of wood until nothing remains that is recognizable except dry white powder. The broth will look like sticky red wine or animal blood and will smell like rosewater. Pour everything into a Venetian glass container, also flesh-colored and especially procured for the purpose. Next take a further 500 stripped red roses and do as before. Put them in the pitcher, take the said broth, heat it until it is almost boiling, and let the mixture steep for another 24 hours. Then strain the mixture, jopin it with the first rosewater, add eighteen ounces of raw sugar (without cleaning it first) into all the strained liquid, and boil it uintil it has the consistency of syrup. If you take an ounce of this every morning on an empty stomach, you will see a wonderful love effect. This is a purgative suitable for stubborn love.)
..IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES (being loved as a ghost)
My mouth can't help me now. Nothing I can say, or eat, or suck and kiss, can shake him off. He's here to stay, like a voracious appendix.
So by now his whole life has been spent and wasted for the sake of this love, lost in the ignoble cause of true romance. Therapists call it limerence. He calls it persistence, knowing what you want and going after it, knowing your limits and the signs you get from life, knowing people. He says he knows me, and more to the point he had the unprecedented sense that he'd always known me, from the very first moment he laid eyes on me.
DECLARING LOVE...
I'm thinking of you. Of how much faster feeling goes than thinking, especially when it comes to feeling that predestined surge of hope that is love and the love that guards hope, feeling the quickened flesh stiffen and relax like a distinct being apart of myself, feeling even when I think I am thinking, thinking, I have known her two months. Two months. Not so long, or so short, that I should have to catch my breath like I almost forgot it was my own every time I see her.
It's not words I want to give you but something complete and unalterable I wish I could just lift in my hands and carry to you, 'here, this is for you,' something that now feels cramped and lonely inside myself but in your presence suddenly it's not a burden but a big smile, your smile or the chant of your orgasm, and though it would be invisible you'd know exactly what it was and you'd probably lay it next to you on your bed and spread it to the shape you'd want and then consume it, slowly and daintily, 'here, this is yours,' I'm grunting now, my breath suspires of trust and love and alcohol and cigarettes and that damp mansmell that reminds me of old leaves and rich compounded earth and socks and trousers which only you bring out of me, a smell that surprises me by being my own, born by you, like a conviction not understood, not known to me, which I feel in my heart somber and loud and true to a pitch, like my pleasure in saying 'I love you.'
Still, writing to you does my heart good. It is reinvigorating and peaceful to know this paper will be in your hands soon, under your eyes, mouth, breath, and various parts of my body become warm and lively as I type away, chewing nuts over my keyboard, trying to block off the party sounds overhead that remind me of a cavalry in a whorehouse, and I'm more excited than lonely knowing you'll be holding this page my hands now perform on so restlessly.
Darling, my hands only perform little things and, alas, are not murderers. If wishes were horses, I'd be cracking the whip, I'd ride by your house on them and pick you up on my back and take you some place warm and sunny where we'd neck and frolic like horny seals, I'd nibble your earlobe, sniff your hair, run my tongue around your waist and pull you against me tighter and pick up sand in my toes and drop it in your toes, etc. and tell you again, oh Baby I love you, ad nauseam
If I were a true God, I would kill off and sweep away and drown the obstacles between us and become powerful things like a monsoon and make your life easier, but, limited man that I am, I've got you in my arms where I want you and that for me must be enough. I know you love me and I will, by God, use the long arms of fate to prove the persistence of my desire, to demonstrate my loyalty to you, to convince you I've never been with a woman whom I can love and desire and enjoy and respect as much as I do you. So: I'm not going to run away or give up or do anything drastic to change our present relationship. Patience is very difficult since I want you so badly and trust is difficult too since I can't have you in my terms and life has taught me not to trust. But our relationship is an exercise in these things for me. So I'll exercise, I'll fight out the disappointment and frustration and what seems to me the unnaturalness of our situation, I'll stave off the urges to act like an adolescent or a mule when I don't see my wishes fulfilled, and I'll wait for you, oh I love you so much, but oh you so much justify waiting and hoping. I will, oh God, give her more time for sleep, for deadlines, appointments, phonecalls, faxes ad crapeum, schmoozing, more time alone, and I'll bring any comfort that I can to her, and happiness and tenderness ever after, amen.
A LOVE SPELL FOR THE LOVELORN:
Take two ounces of the purest labdanum gum, one ounce each of gum storax and the aromatic gum we call benzoin, two ounces of rose trotches, one ounce of violet root powder and half a drachm each of musk, dragon's blood, and amber. Beat everything into a fine powder, knead it together with the said mixture of roses for a whole hour, and you will have a pleasant-smelling, exquisite love-aid, which you can put into any dish you will serve to the one you love in order to become irresistible. Some have been known to add menstrual blood or vaginal juices or red sandalwood into it for potency, a practice which has no merit and rather functions as a distraction to the target. However you should know that the labdanum must be unadulterated and obtained directly from goats' beards who live in the lands of Arabia, about which Herodotus wrote in his third book. Then your success is full.
...IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES (loving an ideal, or a corpse)
I've known her two decades. Two years. Two seconds.
COMMITTING LOVE...
He likes to eat my poop. He likes it when I poop on a newspaper and let him watch and talk dirty and rub her clit until I come. Then we wrap it up in the day's paper and take it out to the trash. Then we make love or dinner. When he is not there, I wash myself compulsively.
A LOVE SPELL FOR THE COMMITEED
Beware if love takes over your mind and soul. To regain your strength, cut a lock of your hair and bury it at the foot of a willow tree during the New Moon. To keep your love solid and everlasting, with both partners faithful to, and burning for, one another, perform this ritual on the Friday of the full moon, using a three-foot long red silk ribbon. Burn red LOVE incense in your cauldron, dab red LOVE oil on your chakras, sage and start. Tie the first knot in the middle of your ribbon and say, 'With this first knot we start our eternal love.' ______________X_____________
Tie the second knot at the left end and say, 'With this second knot we pledge our true love.' X____________X______________
Tie the third knot between the middle and right end and say, 'With this third knot we promise to be forever excited and devoted, passionate and committed.' X____________X______________X
Tie the fourth knot between the middle and left knot and say, 'With this fourth knot we entwine our hearts.' X_____X______X_____________ X
Tie the fifth knot between the center and the right knot and say, 'With this fifth knot we cling our bodies and genitals together.' X_____X______X______X______X
Tie the sixth knot between the left end knot and the one next to it and say, 'With this sixth knot we support each other in every way every day.' X__X__X______X______X______X
Tie the seventh knot between the end right knot and the one next to it and say, 'With this seventh knot we join our souls.' X__X__X______X______X__X__X
Tie the eighth knot between the center knot and the one left of it and say, 'With this eighth knot we protect one another from all ills.' X__X__X__X__X______X___X__X
Tie the ninth knot between the center and the one right of it and say, 'With this ninth knot we now become as one.' X__X__X__X__X__X__X__X__X Put the ribbon away in a very safe place.
?If both lovers perform this together, the spell will be unbreakable. In this case, the woman ties the first knot, the man the second, the woman the third, and so on for nine knots, and both partners say each spell together. You may substitute the word 'marriage' for 'love.'
?If the woman alone performs this knotting to ensure her lover remains hot and faithful only to her, she must use a length of red silk ribbon the same length as his erect penis. She must place the ribbon under her pillow while they make love, and then, while he sleeps, take it out and tie seven knots in it, each for every day of the week, following the words and order explained above.
—If the man alone performs this magic, he must first bury the three-foot red silk ribbon in a love blend for the three nights before the full moon. To prepare this love mixture, combine equal quantities of geranium leaves, rose petals, and lemon verbena leaves. For every pound of this mixture, add a half ounce each of cinnamon, cloves, ground orris root, gum storax and gum benzoin, 4 oz Barbados sugar, and 4 oz coarse seasalt. Store in an open clay jar under a hawthorne tree, stirring the mix every night, turning the jar every day. Then follow the instructions above.
So long as you keep the ribbon safe, its knots intact, your love will blossom and burn and last.
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...IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES
