Recently in Eros Category

An impossible equation: the more I am seduced, the less I succeed in seducing; I am petrified by inhibition. In a very high-tension climate, I should be amusing, brilliant, thoroughly relaxed. Totally flummoxed, I am struck dumb, dulled by my desire to be inventive. To court someone is first of all to blow one’s own trumpet, to engage in self-embellishment. Even the most paralyzed lover has to pretend to be a lady-killer, to make use of the stratagems of flashiness. The adoring lover used to be a strutting beau who was able to shine and yield to the excitement of bidding at the risk of falling into virtuosity. But there is also a seductiveness in the refusal to seduce. There are strategies of silence and simplicity that captivate more than gratuitous volubility. Not to mention the figure of the charming, dazed lover who wins hearts by making one blunder after another. The really fine encounter is one that is unexpected and unaware of its value, and thus escapes the obligation to produce a result. If something happens, it is like the denouement of a story that was not premeditated. The obligation to proceed with verve is suspended for a freewheeling conversation that develops at its own pace because there is nothing at stake. A divine stroke of luck has held out a helping hand; it is up to us to seize it or forget it.

Pascal Bruckner
The Paradox of Love

To wit:

1. Romantic attraction is associated with focused attention on a specific, preferred other. Elevated concentrations of central dopamine and norepinephrine are associated with heightened and focused attention. These parallels suggest that elevated levels of central dopamine and norepinephrine contribute to the lover's focused attention on the beloved.
   
   
2. The lover tends to regard the beloved as novel and unique. Elevated concentrations of central dopamine are associated with exposure to novelty.
   
   
3. The lover tends to remember tiny details of the beloved and their time spent together. Elevated levels of central norepinephrine are associated with increased memory for new stimuli.
   
   
4. The lover becomes highly motivated to seek affiliation with the beloved and exhibits diverse goal-oriented behaviors designed to achieve  contact. Elevated levels of central dopamine are associated with motivation and goal directed behaviors.
   
   
5. Characteristic of the lover is emotional dependence on the relationship with the beloved and longing, even craving, for emotional union with the beloved. Emotional dependency and craving are aspects of addiction associated with dopamine and norepinephrine pathways in the brain.
   
   
6. When people are "in love," they characteristically express heightened energy, sleeplessness and often loss of appetite, as well as labile emotional states, predominated by euphoria. Elevated levels of dopamine and norepinephrine are associated with hyperactivity, sleeplessness, loss of appetite and feelings of euphoria.
   
   
7. Adversity intensifies feelings of attraction. Known as the "Romeo and Juliet Effect," this phenomenon is most likely also associated with elevated levels of dopamine. When a reward is delayed, dopamine-producing cells in the Ventral Tegmental Area of the midbrain increase their activity. (This neural mechanism probably evolved, in part, to drive birds and mammals to work even harder in times of adversity to acquire genetically desirable partners.)
   
   
8. The most prominent aspect of romantic attraction is obsessive thinking about the beloved. Obsessive thinking is commonly associated with low levels of central serotonin.

"The Neural Mechanisms of Mate Choice: A Hypothesis"
Helen Fisher, et al.
Neuroendocrinology Letters Special Issue
Suppl. 4, Vol. 23, December 2002
[Download .PDF]

Or, you might take those eight points and reduce them to this:

When I am with you, we stay up all night,
When you're not here, I can't get to sleep.
Praise God for these two insomnias!
And the difference between them.

Rumi

My preference for one over the other varies depending on my mood and whether I'm reveling, or seeking an explanation.

Although this is a bit cold:

Activation specific to the beloved occurred in the right ventral tegmental area and right caudate nucleus, dopamine-rich areas associated with mammalian reward and motivation. These and other results suggest that dopaminergic reward pathways contribute to the "general arousal" component of romantic love; romantic love is primarily a motivation system, rather than an emotion; this drive is distinct from the sex drive; romantic love changes across time; and romantic love shares biobehavioral similarities with mammalian attraction.

"Romantic Love: An fMRI Study of a Neural Mechanism for Mate Choice"
Helen Fisher, Arthur Aron, and Lucy L. Brown
The Journal of Comparative Neurology 493:58-62 (2005)
[Download .PDF]

...it has a lot going for it in terms of raw explanatory power, and I've discovered over the past several days that I'm not actually prepared to say that's its "soullessness" is inferior to this:

Falling in love is a thing that strikes like lightning and is, therefore, extremely analogous to the mystical vision ... We do not really know how people obtain [these experiences], and there is not as yet a very clear rationale as to why it happens. If you should be so fortunate as to encounter either of these experiences, it seems to me to be a total denial of life to refuse it.

Alan Watts

There are evolutionary, social, and psychoanalytic theories intended to explain all of this love business, and every one of them has something to offer. I don't think that any one of them, taken alone, provides a complete portrait of this thing that happens to people every day, all over the world, at once so common and so extraordinary.

However.

Having recently gained a series of insights into the psychological mechanisms that drive my own somewhat rare but potent infatuations, I'm now less inclined to sigh over the insights of Rumi or Byron than I am to examine the processes that they're actually describing though the lenses of psychology and neurochemistry. The academic work of Frank Tallis, Dorothy Tennov, and Helen Fisher provides excellent general introductions to and specific experimental data about just what it is that goes on in the brain and the mind during what is supposedly the ascension of the heart.

I'm not repudiating anything that I wrote here ["The Dance of Veils"], because I continue to maintain that the conscious process of relating to one another in ways that pierce illusion is one of the most, if not the most, important facets of being a human being. But there's a certain imprecision of language at work here, muddying up the waters. English speakers have one paltry word to account for a vast range of emotional experiences. I can "love" my ex, with whom I shared eight years of my life and with whom I am still in frequent and meaningful contact, and I can also "love" someone whose intoxicating presence has recently gone off in my psyche like a bomb. The former is companionate love, something the two of us deliberately worked on after our breakup, and because of our intentional efforts, we have managed to achieve more intimacy as friends than we did as lovers. The latter is infatuation, and is actually what many, many people mean when they speak of "being in love." That's the intoxicating love of the Romantics, that's the drunken metaphorical love of the Sufis. And, to keep up with my ongoing metaphor, that's a love that seems to have far more to do with veils than the dancers who spin behind them.

The commonalities of "falling in love," the head-over-heels, mad love of verse and fiction, stretch across cultures and back through history. We all know people who, time and time again, manage to fall in love with the same type of person, or whose relationships are all characterized by particular patterns. And if we're willing, we may recognize those same patterns in ourselves. With enough self-examination, these patterns are explicable. The courses of such infatuations can be predicted. I won't go so far as to say we can control who we fall in love with, but I do believe that we can gather enough information about ourselves and how we relate to others to raise the odds in favor of building satisfying and healthy intimate love relationships, instead of giving ourselves over to being randomly struck by lightning.

Some people treasure and pursue the uncontrollable nature of full-on romantic love--and it is such a rush, isn't it?--claiming that anything other than mad, passionate, extraordinary love is a waste of time, a sentiment well-disseminated through popular culture. And although there are always exceptions in the form of lifelong, impassioned love affairs, there is ample psychological, sociological, and neurological evidence which suggests that this particular kind of love, this sought-after madness, often follows an explicit and predictable course, and that it eventually ends, or becomes something else. This process is driven by hormones and neurotransmitters that have been arranged into artful patterns by millions of years' worth of evolution, all to encourage humans to produce more of themselves and stay together just long enough to get their progeny on its feet and toddling out of the cave. Our evolutionary heritage, combined with the relationship maps we develop for ourselves in childhood, suggests that many of us are repeatedly struck by certain bolts of lightning because we've unconsciously done the relational equivalent of picking a particular golf course, setting up an aluminum ladder, and standing atop it during a thunderstorm waving a sword. 

In love, in the middle of the street, and out of his mind, an impassioned Ronny Cammareri shouted, "We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and die!" Well, no, Ronny, we're not...at least, I'm not. You can do that if you want, but I'd like to try something a little different. For me, in my current understanding, the matter reduces to this: who's in charge, here? My right ventral tegmental area and my right caudate nucleus? My corticostriate system? Or me--whoever that is?

There actually are reasons for all of that supposedly reasonless, irrational, crazy love. If you have some idea if what those reasons are, you might have a better chance of not ruining yourself, not breaking your heart, and falling in love with the right people. But, having said that: the depth and strength of those reasons insure that that, in all likelihood, love can and will knock you on your ass anyway. And when it does, you'll probably be much more inclined to read Rumi than an fMRI display.

• Welcome to the snake farm, baby!
• Part Two: Friendship and Love
• Part Three: Fiction

Moving from the theoretical towards the practical is always interesting. First, you get to find out how terribly wrong you were about everything, and second, you get to refine the theory, so you can venture forth and be wrong some more.

And, of course, every so often, you're right, which is like having an orgasm in your constructs.

"What she and I have got is a failure to communicate." The martini glass didn't respond, so I peered into it and addressed the olive that rested in a tablespoon's worth of warm gin at its bottom. "You know what I'm saying, right?"

"I'm an olive," it said. "With a skewer through me."

"And?" I shifted my eyes, once in either direction, to see if anyone at the bar had noticed that I'd been talking to my drink. Either no one had, or they weren't being obvious about noticing.

"And? And no, I don't know what you're saying," the olive said. "Until six months ago I was growing on a fifteen-hundred-year-old tree on a nice hill just outside of Marina di Ostuni with a nice view of the Adriatic."

"How was that?"

"It was nice." Apparently olives weren't blessed with an abundance of adjectives.

"Not much opportunity to form opinions about human relationships, hanging off a tree." I contemplated eating the olive, but it didn't seem appropriate to eat something that was reminiscing.

"No, not really," said the olive. "Once a boy brought a girl up the hill and tried to seduce her beneath my tree. She bit his nose. That's all I know."

"I know a few things." The martini glass spoke up. "I've been here for three years, night in, night out, men, women, getting together, breaking apart..."

"Really."

"Oh yes," the glass said. "But I wanted to give my main olive here a chance to speak up first, seeing as how he's going to get eaten soon."

"This is true," I said.

"I don't blame you," the olive said. "Picked, brined, skewered, and eaten, that's my lot."

"So what's your take?" I asked the glass. "Keen and transparent observer of human nature that you are."

"My take?" If the martini glass could've picked up its own drink, leaned back in its chair, and taken a sip, it would have. It settled for conveying that action via a well-timed pause. "My take is that when it comes to love, people usually know what they don't want with far greater clarity than what they do want."

I thought about it for a small collection of moments to see if it made any sort of immediate sense, and although it didn't, the glass had gained my full attention. "Go on."

"This is because in amore, true knowledge of what you don't want is often acquired via experience, while true knowledge of what you do want is harder to come by, and based on hypotheticals."

"You're awfully abstract for a martini glass," I said. "Explain yourself." The olive was looking tastier, but--not wanting to deny it the chance to experience some kind of Oleaic epiphany before meeting its destiny--I decided to let it hear whatever it was the glass had to say.

"Say someone's been through a real meat-grinder of a relationship. Now, that's real knowledge there, experience, see? She knows in her bones that she doesn't ever want to go through that again. It's real, it's painful, it's immediate, right?"

"Granted."

"But what she does want--say, a successful pairing, or a marriage, even--she's never had that. It's uncharted territory. Like maybe she's got a map somebody drew for her on a cocktail napkin, but she's never really been there herself. So what she doesn't want, that's real clear, in the past. What she does want, that's in a hazy and unknowable future. Theoretical."

"All right, I'm with you so far." In the kitchen, visible through an opening in the wall at the far end of the bar, something sizzling and savory erupted into a squat ball of flames on the stove. The chef lifted the pan, flipping and searing its contents until the fire expended itself. I eyed the olive again.

"So, take your woman friend," the glass continued.

"I'd like to."

"Yes, that's been obvious," said the olive. "What with the brooding about her all night and all."

"You're looking pretty tasty right now," I told it.

The martini glass ignored the exchange. "She's already got a long list of 'don't wants,' doesn't she."

"Yeah. And I'm on it."

"Of course you are. And you'll stay there as long as you're a hypothetical."

"So what's your recommendation?"

"Get real!" the olive piped up.

"The olive has it," said the martini glass.

"Bite her on the nose!" the olive went on.

"Don't do that," said the martini glass. "The olive has limited experience."

"You say the olive's right, though?" I asked.

"In its own limited way, yes. As long as you're a hypothetical, you'll never possess the reality, the immediacy, the, dare I say it! Integrity of her past knowledge. Your challenge is to move away from the translucent realm of possibility and towards her sensual now."

I was impressed. "You say you've only been a martini glass here for three years?"

"Yes," said the glass. "But before that I was sand, which used to be stones, and those were once a mountain."

"I would like to be eaten now," the olive said. I cocked an eyebrow at it. "I'm pretty sure that's what I was supposed to hear, this go 'round. So I'm ready."

I picked the skewered fruit from the glass, slid it between my teeth, crunched the green and salty pulp against my tongue. I heard a small sigh of contentment at the back of my throat, just before I swallowed. "So...any ideas about how I'm supposed to make that move?"

"That, my smitten friend, is the province of poets, not glassware."

I thought about that for another small collection of moments, then caught the attention of the bartender with a raised finger. He lifted the glass from the bar, intending to drop it in the bin with the others for washing and bring me a new one, but I stopped him with a touch on his wrist. "Same drink, same glass, please." That glass and I had more to talk about. "And two olives."

Many Sufis speak of gnosis as being synonymous with love, but "love" in their vocabulary excludes the sentimental colorings usually associated with this term in current usage. The term love is employed by them because it indicates more clearly than any other word that in gnosis the whole of one's being "knows" the object and not just the mind; and because love is the most direct reflection in this world, or the truest "symbol" in the traditional sense, of the joy and beatitude of the spiritual world. Moreover, in Sufism, as in other traditions, the instrument of spiritual gnosis is the heart, the center of man's being; gnosis is "existential" rather than purely mental.

[...]

Rumi describes the spiritual transformation brought about by love as follows:

This is Love: to fly heavenwards,
To rend, every instant, a hundred veils

William C. Chittick

The Sufi Doctrine of Rumi

Before I wade out into the muck, here: I don't believe in God, or some gods, or any god. I'm not a religious person, but I'm fascinated by the human enterprise of religion. It's an enormously complex, millennia-long, collective project, the seminal goal of which is to describe the entire universe using human language. It's not the accuracy or inaccuracy of that description per se that draws me. The monumental existence of the effort is enough to sustain my interest. Thousands of very smart people over the centuries have expended considerable effort attempting to express ineffable things about reality using the comparatively clumsy tools provided by the various parts of speech. Many of them have died in defense of their particular collection of words, and others have been happy to kill them in defense of their collection, and whatever you think about the net harm or benefit of the endeavor, it seems to me to be the height of blinkered arrogance and intellectual paucity to dismiss it outright. That's like tossing out all of Aristotle because he thought that objects float by virtue of their shape. This dismissal is particularly characteristic of the newly fashionable Atheism, where too often it seems that reading a book or two by Dawkins or Hitchens is considered suitable engagement with the subject. I'm an atheist. And I earned that by studying religion, not by studying atheism. There's a difference.

Because of that difference, I continue to appreciate the creative panoply of human religious thought, and am intrigued by its complex metaphors, its manifold insights, and the poetry of its language, as well as its absurdities and its nonsense. So when I learn that the Sufis have appropriated the term "love" to describe the process of knowing the Divine, I want to see what they've said about it.

There is a Hermetic and somewhat fractal principle, which, simply stated, is "As above, so below." Less simply stated, as found on the so-called Emerald Tablet, this is rendered as, "That which is Below corresponds to that which is Above, and that which is Above, corresponds to that which is Below, to accomplish the miracles of the One Thing." To make it even more complicated, in Theosophist circles the idea is summarized as "Everything in the Universe follows analogy. 'As above, so below;' Man is the microcosm of the Universe. That which takes place on the spiritual plane repeats itself on the Cosmic plane. Concretion follows the lines of abstraction; corresponding to the highest must be the lowest; the material to the spiritual." The basic Hermetic concept--which can and has been worked absolutely to death by the sort of people who work such things to death--is that for every heavenly process, there is a corresponding earthly process; for every spiritual practice, there is a vulgar practice; and so on. It's about establishing balance and harmony, but it's also a necessary prerequisite for any sort of esoteric understanding, a way to approach the unseen by observing the world around us and the creatures that inhabit it.

The underlying metaphorical premise here is that realms and ideas can be divided into the "low," or earthly, and the "high," or spiritual. Treat that duality however you like, but at least accept for the moment that there are common and extraordinary understandings of the world around us and our place within it.¹

All of which is why I find it so very interesting that the Sufis in general, and Rumi in particular, chose the same word to describe gaining knowledge of the Divine as is used to describe the more intimate relationships shared between people. William Chittick, above, is careful to differentiate the Sufi use of the term from the "sentimental colorings" of ordinary usage, by which I take him to mean "romantic," and which can be even further reduced to "that peculiar set of behaviors that human beings often engage in as a prelude to mating."

However, there's a different way to look at this notion of love, which doesn't so readily dismiss it as unrelated to the search for the Divine. If "As above, so below" is acceptable as a premise--just go with me on this--we're presented with the possibility that the gnostic Sufi concept of love, the process of coming to know God, is mirrored in the earthly concept of love, the process of coming to know another person.

The veils that Rumi refers to, the ones that are rent as we fly heavenwards, trying to love God, are veils of illusion. They are diaphanous distractions that hide the essential, esoteric truth of Sufism: there is no separation from God. If you dig deep and long enough into the teachings, you'll eventually reach claims that this apparent dualism is in fact just that, apparent. It's all part of the same great ball of heavenly-demonic God-Devil wax: unity.

Now, I've got some thoughts about that that I'm not going to go into here, because they're long and involved and a little loopy. What I'm interested in at the moment is the process. There is an object of desire (God) which is surrounded by these illusory veils, whirling and soaring, and the only way to come to fully know the object of desire, to love God, is to find your way through those veils. It's easy, at first, to mistake that mass of flashing veils for God. A dancer obscured by a hundred veils is impressive, isn't she? All that sensual motion, all that swirling light. But a dancer is not her veils.

Similarly, when we meet someone, what we first experience is an outward shell, the body. It's easy enough--or should be, anyway--to acknowledge that a person is not their body.² But the body is not what forms the great collection of veils. It's our behavior. The way we posture that body. Our facial expressions. What we say, and how we say it. Each veil is one of a thousand subtle cues, actions, and reactions, some overt, some hidden, all fired by the complex neurological networks of our brains as they communicate with the chemistries of our sensory apparatuses and our memories. Past experience and present experience, mingling and interacting, former relationships continuing to affect current relationships. The various voices of our minds, conversing among themselves, a maelstrom of activity happening in outward silence, behind our eyes, every second of every day. When you meet someone, you don't actually meet some one: you meet a tumultuous rush, a multitude, moving so fast that it creates an illusion of solidity in the way that a rapid succession of still images creates the illusion of motion.

Whenever people meet, they dance, behind their veils.

And somewhere, in the center of all that, behind his shy glance, the laugh that she only laughs for you, that certain set of his mouth when he first sees you, the way she leans closer towards you from across the table...somewhere, hidden away behind those veils, is the dancer.

As anyone who's seen one knows, the apparent purpose of a veil dance is to drop the veils.³ But it's the dance itself, the process, that is so exquisite. When we're younger, we often mistake clothes for the veils. So when they're doffed, we think the dance is over. Sometimes, we settle for dropping just a few veils, then relate to the flashing blurs of the remaining fabric and call that love, even though the dancer remains mostly hidden. But every so often, when being naked isn't enough, when a half-dozen veils at our feet is no longer fulfilling, when there's just something about a person, something we've glimpsed ever-so-briefly through a deep and momentary gap in the spiraling, translucent shrouds: then, we grow patient. We appreciate the dance. The subtlety, the color. The skill and the finesse. The sensual give and take of movement, the flow of personality, the rhythmic expression. We enjoy the dance.

But we want the dancer.

I've been drawn to Sufism lately because it is, it seems to me, a corrective for the exoteric, fundamentalist Islam that has been the very public face of that faith for far too long. It is the partner to Christian Gnosticism and the Jewish Kaballah, sharing with them the notion that striving for direct knowledge of God is not only a worthwhile pursuit, but possible. As I said, I'm no believer. But within that desire for intimate knowledge of God I recognize the same desire that animates physicists, astronomers, biologists, chemists, and mathematicians: the desire to understand this universe in which we live.

All of the words I've written here are a clumsy first attempt at distilling a burst of what I'm choosing to call synthesis that exploded into my mind last weekend, shortly after dawn, as I sat on a hillside overlooking a valley.⁴ The root of that understanding is simply this: we're all dancers. We're not our veils. It is through the process of dancing with each other, and casting those veils aside, that we come to know each other, and it is through coming to know each other that we approach God.

Or "the universe."

Or whatever term you choose to use that indicates a greater understanding of life itself.

As above, so below: love is physics. It's astronomy. It's biology, and chemistry, and mathematics, and all of the other methods and languages that we clever, perceptive primates have devised to explain ourselves and the world.

To love is to seek meaning.

So dance! Dance with passion, with as many people as you can, for as long as you can.

Because while the dance isn't all there is, it's what matters most.



¹Well, you don't have to accept it. But all of this will make even less sense if you don't.

²Not entirely, anyway. Otherwise there'd be no difference between you and your corpse, and in general I find that people are much more interesting and easier to relate to when they're not corpses. QED.
 
³Sometimes the purpose is to get the head of a prophet lopped off, but that's comparatively rare.

⁴I know, I know. I'm embarrassed by the cliché. But that's exactly how it happened.

The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Rome
May 14th 1904

...when the mountains are looming just so, and the sun has vaulted itself up out of the eastern ocean and into the sky;
when the highway rolls north all the way past the city of sparkling sidewalks and into the deep wine country;
when enough veils have dropped;
when the music matches;
when the dance steps are synchronous:
then we'll see who's traveling where, and when.

Won't we.

So it's been a viral couple of days, although I seem to be over the worst of it now. My weekend of love and laughter was too short, or, to be more precise, Just Long Enough, which is a period of time that is only observable in retrospect. Said weekend doubtless contributed to my current raspy state: I read short stories, and engaged in provocative discourse for hours at a time into the wee bits of the morning, and all the while my immune system was mounting an assault upon a sneaking interloper. I spent most of yesterday nearly mute, my voice a croak, though it improved today, which is a good thing because I had to spend three hours on the telephone this evening doing secret business things.

Hey, look! Here's a bit of Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi (or مولانا جلال الدين محمد بلخى for those of you who speak th' lingo):

Suddenly the drunken sweetheart appeared out of my door.
She drank a cup of ruby wine and sat by my side.
Seeing and holding the lockets of her hair
My face became all eyes, and my eyes all hands.

Ah, the drunken sweetheart! What a find, what a find she is. I enjoy Rumi immensely, because I can take him in any of my moods: spiritual, the beloved is God; romantic, the beloved is whomever on earth I fancy; or--at the best of times, in the best of moods--the beloved is both and all. And this snippet in particular--which is to say, at this exact time, complementing my exact mood--is a delightful mixture of the sacred and the profane. "He was all hands!" she said. Of course he was, darling! You were his drunken sweetheart, he had no choice. Even if he never touched you, his gaze was a manifold and loving caress.

Moving on, before I say too much.

The hell with it, I'll continue.

If you'd asked me, a year ago, whether I believed in love, I would have said no. Isn't that sad? I had it all reduced to neurochemistry and evolution: the limbic system and dopamine, vasopressin and oxytocin, pheromones. These days, I still know all of that--I tend not to unlearn things once I've captured them--but it matters less. I've given up the myth of my objectivity in favor of a more subjective bent, or, if you prefer--and even if you don't--a somewhat bent subjectivity. I mean! You can prattle on all you like about the evolutionary adaptation of the human brain in clever ways that promote mating and the perpetuation of the species, but how do you get from that to, say, Byron? Give me the mild beam of the soul-breathing glance, indeed! It's not just for cryptic drunks in bars, you know. That man was on to something.

Now love is not a thing that happens to you, love--it seems to me--is a sure-footed place from which you move. No longer a state of cognitive obsession, or a trick of the neurons, but something else entirely. Not so much a happening or a doing, but a being. A verb instead of a noun. A kind of breathing flow, a daring dance with phantom partners that can at any moment resolve itself into a solid, rose-biting Tango.

The beauty of this particular dance, the energy that drives the music that moves the feet, is a complete non-attachment to an outcome. There is no outcome! There is only the dance, made up of small steps, grand spins and dips, and--if you're lucky--the close abrazo, the embrace. But even if that never comes to pass, or if it does, and then passes, you've still had the dance.

And now I've said just enough.

It wasn't the sort of phrasing I was used to hearing in a dim bar, and he certainly wasn't talking to me, or to anyone but his mostly-empty pint glass. He wasn't dressed in velvets, and wore no ruff around his neck: he looked to be an ordinary sort of fellow, who'd stopped off for one after work, which turned into three, or maybe six. His dark tie was undone, looped low against his chest, and the tailoring of his jacket was tight and trim, shoulders straight, with no sagging. But his head drooped, eyes down. "Tell me: can you be a true romantic if you believe in love but don't believe in transcendence?"

I had the sudden impression that he wasn't speaking to his glass any longer. He'd somehow felt my attention upon him from the end of the bar, from behind my own small wall of martini-shaped bricks, and was addressing me. His sidelong glance in my direction confirmed it. "Well," I said. Then my brain engaged and I thought a bit. It was slow going. My martini wall was three empty glasses thick, and another one squatted before me, well-olived. "It seems to me," I said, which was the equivalent of putting the clutch in, and jerking the neurological shifter into first, "that love without transcendence won't really take you anywhere." Not bad, I thought. No idea what I meant, but it sounded decent.

The fellow started upright and slapped at the bar. "Yes!" he said. "Without it you stay where you are. There is no transport of spirit. Love becomes a mental attitude, walled within your own skull." His eyes blazed, and not with beer. "That's the whole point, isn't it? If you stay within yourself, you can't possibly reach anyone else, can you? Not truly." He waved a finger at me. "Very fine."

"Okay," I said, nothing if not agreeable.

"Isn't it so!" he continued, as though I had contributed something. "Otherwise, none of it makes sense. 'Away with your fictions of flimsy romance, Those tissues of falsehood which Folly has wove; Give me the mild beam of the soul-breathing glance; Or the rapture which dwells in the first kiss of love.'" He peered over at me with something that looked much like admiration, though I had no idea why he should feel that way about me. "No transcendence, no rapture. No rapture, well then, what's the fucking point?"

I raised my glass. "Of course," I said. He matched me, raising his own glass, then tossed back the last of the beer it held. He hopped off his stool and strode over to me with such purpose that I recoiled, but his firm grip on my shoulder brought me close to him.

"I won't give in, then," he said, with quiet intention. "I'll stay the course. I'll believe. She'll see it too, I know she will."

"Right on," I said. For the barest moment--and I'll swear to this on any holy book you care to choose--the man's eyes glistened with incipient tears. Then, after another congenial squeeze of my shoulder and a determined nod, he spun in place and marched out into the evening, the door closing behind him like the curtain of a stage.

As far as I could tell, no one else in the place had noticed a thing.

I sat there, alone at the bar except for Akers the barkeep and the pair of seeming sisters at the far end of it who closed the place every Friday. The scattered tables behind them were half-filled with late-night noshers who'd gotten in before the kitchen closed. Overhead, the oversized wrought iron chandelier--too big for the space, really--cast burnt orange light from flame-shaped bulbs. For some reason I couldn't bring myself to finish the last of my martini, which meant that the third olive would have to remain uneaten. I grinned at it.

Some people can find inspiration anywhere.

What he wrote:

These locks, which fondly thus entwine,
In firmer chains our hearts confine
Than all th' unmeaning protestations
Which swell with nonsense love orations.
Our love is fix'd, I think we've proved it,
Nor time, nor place, nor art have moved it;
Then wherefore should we sigh and whine,
With groundless jealousy repine,
With silly whims and fancies frantic,
Merely to make our love romantic?
Why should you weep like Lydia Languish,
And fret with self-created anguish?
Or doom the lover you have chosen,
On winter to nights to sigh half frozen;
In leafless shades to sue for pardon,
Only because the scene's a garden?
For gardens seem, by one consent
(Since Shakespeare set the precedent,
Since Juliet first declared her passion),
To from the place of assignation.
Oh! would some modern muse inspire,
And seat her by a sea-coal fire;
Or had the bard at Christmas written,
And laid the scene of love in Britain,
He surely, in commiseration,
Had changed the place of declaration.
In Italy I've no objection,
Warm nights are proper for reflection;
But here our climate is so rigid,
That love itself is rather frigid:
Think on our chilly situation,
And curb this rage for imitation.
Then let us meet, as oft we've done,
Beneath the influence of the sun;
Or, if at midnight I must meet you,
Within your mansion let me greet you:
There we can love for hours together,
Much better, in such snowy weather,
Than placed in all th' Arcadian groves
That ever witness'd rural loves;
Then, if my passion fail to please,
Next night I'll be content to freeze;
No more I'll give a loose to laughter,
But curse my fate for ever after.

What he meant:

The braided hair is a nice gesture,
but it's really cold out,
and if we can't meet in daylight,
let's at least meet indoors
so I can bang you.

I see them with my mental eye, a fine and sharp thing of great utility and acuity that's fairly wide and whitely open these days:

The arc of her bare shoulder catches the light that stripes through the hotel's vertical blinds and into the darkness of the room. Vegas light, sodium arc edged with red. The white sheet clings to her back, curving upwards at her hip, and the curve rises even higher because her knees are drawn up towards her chest. Red hair flows onto the pillow.

And I can smell it: the conditioned air of the room, dry and colored with that ever-so-slightly freon tinge of plastic, the scent of commercial carpeting, recent paint a penumbra around the olfactory package of the scene. Having recently reread Jitterbug Perfume, scent and its mnemonic powers are fresh in my mind.

"It was good, wasn't it?" she says.

"Yeah. Yeah, it was good."

"But it's over now." It wasn't a question. "Isn't it." That wasn't a question, either.

Feeling it as well, now, as expressed in his posture and in hers, both equivalent, she on her side, folded in on herself, he on the edge of the bed, naked in the dark, his shoulders lowered with something like defeat, the gulf of the mattress between them. The two of them exist for me, their interactions within these precise moments of truth and realization illuminating the potentialities of the familiar. There are notes here, notes forming melodies that we all know.

"Yeah," he said. "I think so."

"You mean you don't know?"

"No, I know."

"So why'd you say that?"

"I don't know."

He does know, of course he knows: sometimes, even when it should be over, even when it is over, the bare fact of connection remains, that pure mammalian contact that we're loathe to give up, because once it's gone, there's never any certainty that it'll ever come again. Other times, that last little thread becomes a lifeline to the future, but it's easy to miss, and he's missing it now. It's drifting right past him. So I look in on them, with my wide mental eye, and I feel for them.

He stands up in the dark, and shuffles to the end of the bed, finding his pants with his feet, the belt clanking as he pulls them on. Behind him, she remains motionless on the bed, curled and thinly-sheltered. The sheet moves as she breathes. He can still feel her. "We had a good run," he says, and bends down to retrieve his shirt. He puts it on inside out, and buttons two buttons before he realizes it. "We don't hate each other."

"No, we don't."

"Lots of people don't get that. We're ahead of the game." He turns the shirt right side out, finishes buttoning it, sits on the end of the bed to pull on his socks and shoes.

"I didn't think we were playing a game."

She's beautiful, in all sorts of ways.

And he's being an idiot. I'd tell him if I could.

He doesn't say anything else before he leaves the room, not looking back, letting a wide wedge of light from the hallway spill across her bare shoulders, her red hair. The wedge narrows, becoming a thin beam just before the door closes and latches behind him. He's left his cardkey on the dresser, next to her purse, and when he has that final moment of doubt, and turns back, his hand on the door handle, it's too late: he could knock, but the effort of it is somehow too much. She might not answer. The flow has been interrupted. For a moment, he remains frozen in place, as though his hand has melted into the polished brass. Then it drops to his side, and he turns away.

It's a funny thing, really, because I know what he doesn't: if he had left his cardkey in his pocket after they'd entered the room earlier that evening, in that instant, with the door handle still in his grasp, he would have remembered it, and before he was fully aware of his actions he'd have slipped it in. The light on the lock would have flickered green. He would've opened the door, and gone back inside, nudged by the narrative.

But he didn't, and he doesn't, and so I watch him walk down the hall, towards the elevator, away from the room, and away from her.