…TO LOVE…

Stage 25 / Thursday 21 May / From Labastide-Murat to Cahors / 32 km

 

This word “love” which was the conclusion of my meditations on beauty yesterday will be today the core of my ambulating cogitations, like the stone of a cherry. Not that I want to dip the fruit in all kinds of sauces … This word “love” is such an overused word, one is afraid to put it in the limelight. So many disparate notions have kept it over time, either too green, too gallant, or on the contrary, too ripe, nearly rotten to make one nauseous!

 

While religion lifts it up as supreme virtue, poets glorify it. They make of it an idol whose image is sometimes pleasant, often glowing, but, alas, generally depressing as being too kitsch. Educators distrust it and speak of the trap love. Yes, whether we be child, parent, spouse, companion, partner or “faithful,” we know well that this word which evokes a natural sentiment can lead as much to sublime joy as to bitterness … Sweet cherry or bitter chokecherry?

 

It’s as if having tasted it by chance, and wanting to repeat the delicious experience, the more active search for this pleasant sentiment spoils the result fairly quickly. And the disappointment which follows more often unites in a vague brotherhood the dreary majority of those who have undergone “love-sickness,” while on the contrary “true love” should unite us all as radiant brothers! Go figure!   Iguaçu Falls, South America

 

But am I not mixing the effects of love with its source? For if one goes back up all these streams which seem to dry up in the desert as wadis do, can one not find again upstream the ramifications of more generously-flowing rivers? These rivers, could they not all flow from a unique and gigantic outlet, the single overflow of an immense reservoir whose depth is unfathomable?

 

The desert is this propensity to want to be self-sufficient, pumping all that might serve to accomplish this. Pumping so much that the living water disappears! Result: “A single being is missing and all is depopulated” [Un seul être vous manque et tout est dépeuplé] (Alphonse de Lamartine – L’isolement) [Isolation]. In mathematical terms, this lovely verse deploring the destruction of a perfect couple, can be expressed by:

 

“2 – 1 = 0” … which forces us to think that “2 = 1” … which must be exact …
because within a nice couple who are virtually one, each one of the two admits the other as being …
his / her better half! … “2 = ½ + ½”

 

Paradox! And even more than one would have believed at first. For in true love, one doesn’t count, one gives without needing recognition nor hope for a return. To the extent that the supreme example is to give one’s own life for the loved one. In the end, if one of the two lovers has disappeared, the one remaining says that life for him/her no longer exists: “1=0”! He / she remains one and alone, but he / she feels to be worth nothing. Tragic-comic logic worthy of the late Raymond Devos! [A Franco-Belgian stand-up comedian (1922-2006)] 

 

More seriously, a love founded on a basis of confidence, exchanges, and kept promises, makes human beings grow as it draws them together. In that, there is a force, a current which transports beyond oneself, and which can cause the desert to flower … In the image of the streams of love drying up in the desert, we can also see in their disappearance, not only the nostalgia of a lost love, but, on the contrary, the beauty of a wild love that fertilizes the moment it ceases to exists … Mad love, head-over-heels love, figuratively as well as literally speaking, if one thinks of the edifying examples of numerous innocent martyrs who saw in their decapitation the entryway toward Him with whom they wanted to spend eternity. For them, the force of attraction toward the Creator exceeded the fear of pain, and even death!

 

“Is such a great attraction”, I say to myself (with gravity, of course), “is there a deforming and spiritual curvature of space-time?” In any case, it is the “case” to be startled in reaching the end of this stage; such intense thoughts took me “out” of myself: “Cahors, here I am!” [play on word in French, as Cahors, the city, sounds like cas … hors … case out].