court Eros

I don’t know if anyone else recognized you or not, but I saw you moving through our party the other night. Your presence was a scourge and a catalyst, touching those present with your flaming passion, helping them sear away what was no longer relevant in their lives, and they won’t even recognize the scars until hours (days) later.

You are beautiful, and you are terrible. I think the word for this in its purest sense is “sublime,” and experience of terrible beauty so far outside normal human functioning that it arrests the senses completely. I watched you moving among the guests, torching off the detritus of souls that burned in extraordinary passion in your name.

I see you as more than sexual passion for its own sake. I see you as the burning away of the irrelevant, so that what’s left shines through more clearly. I see you as a catalyst for growth, for change—I can see the catalyst applied, but what happens as a result I may not know for some time, except in my own life where you have been a regular and always welcome visitor…

You are invited back to our next event, of course—it should appeal to you. I look forward to seeing you there, and in my life until then.

Passionately yours,

Alesia

Sources range from ancient myth to modern, cutting edge philosophy, everything from a personalized, cherubic version down to the dry one I gave a few entries ago.

I realized I have never had much use for that cherubic, baby-faced version of Eros - never once has that image “rang true” for me. It was empty, without meaning - how could such passion and drive be contained in an infantile body? The “infant” is by definition one who has not yet evolved through the various forms and stages of life… and yet, as I think about it, the drive to do so is just as embodied in an infant as it is in me—it’s just unrealized… More to think about, there. :)

I realized that when I imagine Eros, I’m “seeing” a figure that looks a lot more like Hermes/Mercury—also known as “Hermes Trismagistus” (sp?).... I’ll get back to this one later. Young, winged heels/hat, cadeusus. I’ll have to explore this connection a bit to see where it leads.

The thought threads that come through about his “trickster” or mischief-making aspects make sense, in a way. Causing chaos in order to shake people out of their ruts (i.e., graves with the ends knocked out of them) is something I can see Eros doing—you can’t fly into the arms of your Beloved if your roots are clinging stubbornly to what you think is real… And Eros knows, he’s caused enough mischief in my life, to date.

So now, armed with this information and the intuitive responses that have come from it, I’m on the look-out for Eros in my daily life. I’ll be watching for people who embody the Eros principle (driven, passionate, transcending, trickster), no matter how briefly or obscured. I could use a dose of that pure energy in several aspects of my life just now.

a poem by Wilfred Owen.

To Eros

In that I loved you, Love, I worshipped you,
In that I worshipped well, I sacrificed
All of most worth. I bound and burnt and slew
Old peaceful lives; frail flowers; firm friends; and Christ.

I slew all falser loves; I slew all true,
That I might nothing love but your truth, Boy.
Fair fame I cast away as bridegrooms do
Their wedding garments in their haste of joy.

But when I fell upon your sandalled feet,
You laughed; you loosed away my lips; you rose.
I heard the singing of your wing’s retreat;
Far-flown, I watched you flush the Olympian snows
Beyond my hoping. Starkly I returned
To stare upon the ash of all I burned.

Eros: the morphogenetic(1) pull to greater depth, complexity, consciousness, and care.

Seems dry, doesn’t it? On the surface, yes. But with more careful examination… oh my.

To me, Eros is drive. It is the pull toward evoltion, the push to ascend, to transcend, to evolve continually. Eros is the passion, the motivation behind what I do. And I want to see him more clearly.

I sometimes personalize Eros, literalize “him” in order to relate - that’s the way I do things. But I’ll always understand that Eros transcends that - that I’ll always be addressing that transcendent truth beyond the literal face…

(1)-morphogenetic: the forming of structure in organisms. Also the differentiation shown during development (some cells become muscle, others bone, etc.)

I “completed” the goal I’d chosen about having sexual adventures (while opting to do it again, of course) so I could broaden it into this wider goal—a “meta” goal, I suppose.

I want to be able to explore Eros more, and not just from a sexual perspective. There is a whole philosophy of Eros, it is a concept that underpins so much of our waking and dreaming worlds. I want to dive into it headlong—mere “sexual adventures” don’t suffice anymore.

I also desire to court him, and that’s why I phrased it as I did. I’m making room for Eros in my life, in all aspects of my life. And I’ll be writing more about “Eros” as I do, and posting it here.

If you want to join me on a team effort, write a comment to let me know. Just be forewarned—Eros is passionate. And great passions, as Diderot said, elevate the soul to great things… :)