The Second Circle: Lust (Cantos IX-XII)

As in large troops
And multitudinous, when winter reigns,
The starlings on their wings are borne abroad;
So bears the tyrannous gust those evil souls.
On this side and on that, above, below,
It drives them: hope of rest to solace them
Is none, nor e'en of milder pang.

Canto IX

We have no tears for that sun

Hidden within the ever-present clouds 

Knowing naught but rain 

We hope not for warming 

By the rays of some mythic star 

How we would weep for our miserable state! 

Were we but aware of what is elsewhere 

Though this is our deepest despair 

We are without even a tear 

For this emptiness, felt vast 

For hope of fulfillment 

"Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer."

Voltaire

We each in our time have many loves. Just as every moment is definitive in the construction of our selves, so too do our experiences with love contribute to and shape the total narrative of our lives. We cannot predict whither we shall be shaped. Shall we become who we were meant to be? Shall we be dominate in the determination of our destiny? Or do we instead find ourselves drawn one way or the other by the tides of experience?

There is no love that is not unbound. Love is essentially freeing, expansive, and overfull. Though lacking compelling personal experience to the affirmative, I nevertheless wish to suggest that love is the highest and most noble mode of being to which a human can aspire. How exactly "noble" I remain unsure.

How can we hail so gloriously - love? Love, whose infinite essence exposes us to the unknown, distorts our perceptions and thoughts, and unpredictably undermines our sense of purpose? I do not know, but that I know. We cannot afford to turn our backs to love - the stakes are too high. We cannot risk that it may all be an elaborate illusion. If there is no love, then we are all existentially predestined to lives of misery and loneliness, cursed with an appetite our world cannot ever possibly quench. For if love did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it.

Canto X

"After a personal disagreement and quarrel between a woman and a man, the one party suffers most at the thought of having hurt the other; while that other party suffers most at the thought of not having hurt the first enough; for which reason it tries by tears, sobs, and contorted features, to weigh down the other person's heart, even afterwards."
Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

The ultimate social proof is whether you can make others happy (we are all here to be of "service" to others). Humans, as a social animal, manifest their will to be together in various ways, but whatever the form of the manifestation, the will to be together is always present, and so too a universal human trait, expressive of its essential being. What does this will to be together say about us, as humans?

The spirit at the heart of all willing to be together is love. The being of society is a manifestation of and an attempt to fulfill that will to love which lies innate to the human being. But mere love or the will to love is not enough to create a society. Happiness is the social proof that a love is founded, and well founded, in truth, and is therefore able to free itself and those whom it touches unto self-betterment and the affirmation of life.

True social value is no mere popular consensus. It is grounded in the promotion of love, its furtherance, and its fulfillment, expressed and proven in the manifestation of happiness. True social worth is determined by how many, and how well one manifests happiness in others. The multiplicity of occupations, methodologies, ideologies, and religions which humans occupy themselves with are only so many different attempts to fulfill this will to love, this will toward social proof.

But due to a combination of factors, our various wills to love seem only to make matters worse. It is imperative that we learn to look at these many wills to love as love. If we can peer into the heart of love, and so too open ourselves up to allow its own unveiling, then we may hope to know love. But first we must learn to see love rightly, before we venture to adjust the illusions of others.

We must seek the truth in lies

To look past the surfaces

Of the ugliness we see

To know the good heart

From whence they first sprang

Before their intentions perverted

Their true wills diverted

unto destruction,

suffering and pain.

Canto XI

"Le cœur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît point."
Pascal

What can I say but words?

How could I speak my heart

And not just from it?

They say the heart has its reasons

Which reason does not know

My heart knows nothing of words

It speaks to me

How I wish you could hear it!

That you might know

What you mean to me

Give me nothing

I have it already

You gave to me a sacred gift

You've reminded me what it feels like

Did you know?

I almost forgot

Love 

If I were only a poet, that I might have the powers to express how beautiful you are to me. How I feel about you breaches the limits of language, becoming at once unspeakable and perfect. I don't want to be trite. I know that we're all special but you are special, and precious. I could love you.

Your eyes are so beautiful. I think they are what I first noticed about you. I love your cynicism, your frankness, your self-comfort and understated confidence. I love your style, the way you dress and the way you move.

You are like a fury, or a faerie, with an otherworldly character, moving from an internal sense of necessity, insensitive of the demands of others and the strange worlds they occupy. You are an ethereal being, some wonderful will-o'-the-wisp that floats through my day every once and again, and I wish I could ensnare that wisp, just to bask in her recuperative aura for but a moment.

Perhaps it is infatuation and will fade, but just seeing you makes me glad. Perhaps you think me strange to say such things, but I must have you know, that at least you may be confirmed in the knowledge of your own perfection.

I don't want to tell you you're beautiful

Because you are 

I don't want to tell you you're special 

Because you are 

I don't want to call you perfect 

What would that mean? 

But you are, and should know 

If you must change, then change 

But please, don't 

Please don't

Canto XII

"Just as youth and childhood have value in and of themselves... so too do unfinished thoughts have their own value."

Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

She left two days ago

Or yesterday

I stood on her doorstop

Where we kissed

Countless whispers of hope

Just yesterday

"Come to Rome," she says.

What can I say, but do?

"If I thought we had a chance,

I would be there in an instant."

"Come home with me.

I want to take you to bed

To show you how much I want you

How much I always have."

Oh, but to disrupt what we already have!

Don't say no

I can't hear it again.

Forget your misgivings

Forget everything you think you know of me

Just let me love you.

I want her.

I need her.

I will never have her.