The sanctity of marriage, as proved by gamergate.

Choice letter's to a dear mutual and his reply

“Ad Uxorem

Uxor, vivamus quod viximus, et teneamus

Nomina, quae primo sumpsimus in thalamo;

Ner ferat ulla dies, ut commutemur in aevo;

Quin tibi sim iuventis tuque puella mihi.

…

Scire aevi meritum, non numerare decet”

-Auctor Ignotis (mihi, mea culpa, oblisco!)

“To my wife

Wife, let us live as we have lived, and let us hold our names which we first took in the wedding room; Neither let us endure any day that changes us in time; Why may I not still be to you but a boy, and you to me a girl? To know the time is worthy, to count it is indecent”

Hello my dear YW,

How are you? Over these few months I have thought of writing to you often, for prompted by every choice line read or pretty insight occasioned, the thought of you has sprung up. I can little overstate how astonished I am over the regularity of this impulse considering in all how little we have conferenced with each other, although perhaps it is for that very reason that you are thought of so often, for being more an idea than a man, you are conjured lightly and flexibly in my mind, like a god who is appropriate to any and all conditions of his particular tone. Let us not denounce such fruitful benefits merely because they are born of a partial knowledge, for who knows, perhaps the best goods can only be given with a kind of participatory ignorance, which may excuse or explain the wandering absences of our gods.

Today however, unlike those former times, I have the courage to speak up and send a thought, though hastily discovered mere hours ago, and jotted down indiscriminately and without order, under the influence of such little sleep that I’ll spare you the fright of knowing precise details - let us hope it wont be evident in my work. I suppose if I was to be plain and spare you artful presentation, I have again been thinking about play and art and men and the nature of the good - yet how could I not! What other thoughts are worthy of our time? What other thoughts do not incline to them in their ultimate purposes? If I was an arborist, and, to entertain, I sent you instead findings or discoveries regarding this tree or that, would not the implicit ends of these listicles be but the tacit good mutually striven for that gives the task it’s form yet stated? Why should these minor intrigues intrigue us more then than their greater aim which is the very condition of their being? So I excuse myself.

Play, like other sensibilities, has within it sentiments and colourings that are erased as they are modified, and like living dreams whose threshold condition for entry and return is the surrender of ourselves to their humours for the allotted time, so too once suspended does the waking consciousness that supercedes swallow and replace with others motions as prepossessing, leaving nothing left behind. So the sick man in his pang-throws sees without only that turmoil which stirs within, so do all our affections colour judgement that I confess, the notion of an objective neutrality seems a requisite judgement of a man himself deplorably detached. Judgements thus are not stated, but lived. Shaftesbury in his great work Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times etc, which I can only recommend to you, has on the cover of his second edition an image and explanation of the idea that I here poorly copy; the symbol adorning it was originally conceived by Epicurus, and goes thus, forgive me for quoting in full:

[The image is a still bowl of water being struck by a ray of light]

“As is the water dish, so is the soul; as is the ray which falls on the water, so are the appearances. When then the water is moved the ray too seems to be moved, yet is not. And when, accordingly, a man is giddy, it is not the arts and the virtues that are thrown into confusion, but the spirit to which they belong; and when he is recovered so are they.”

This is of course suggestive of an originary or superlative constitution that men should aspire to, and characteristically has the exemplar of the virtuous man as its expression, and I do not disagree. Nevertheless, in my thoughts of good and men and natures, prompted by my recent experiences and intimacies, I think that beyond virtue, or as the easiest and lightest expression of it, play is that still water bowl also, and holds within it a regenerative wisdom that I wish to promote as well as experience. Or rather, if it is not that still bowl fully in possession of itself, it is a wave, sometimes crashing, sometimes tenderly lapping, sometimes dancing, that moves with the light its adorned with so beautifully that it too, though stirred, has a purity at least equal to that mirror lake. So let us examine play and see.

Young schoolboys play in a kind of rapture, they are enthralled, absorbed and thrillingly unaware of themselves; and as one cannot be ironic with God, so too, here in action, I feel play proper cannot be ironic with itself. If it is it plays a different game, a demonic parody (to borrow Northrop Fry’s expression) that has the outward trappings with all of the meanings inverted, and this can be demonstrated simply in their distinct awarenesses of time. For schoolboys, when reminded of the coming close of their recess, do strive harder with each other, and summon with predictable regularity behaviours in spirit, though only for play and folly, nigh akin to an inspired final gun charge, and in this zealousness, they assume an exaggerated purity in expressing themselves, their loathings, aspirations, their alliances and manners that it would seem not injudicious to have these performances observed as the new grounds of oath taking over the old hand on a book! Ecce homo! Show me how a boy plays and you show me his soul, show me what he says and you show me what company fortune has thrown him amongst. Yet on the latter we seem to trust. Compare this to the ironist, who, upon being informed of the remaining time he has in what he too calls play, he will be sure to remind us, with a primed look of condescension, that he was well aware thank you very much and that there’s no need to remind a man such as he, in full possession of himself at all times, where he belongs; and true enough, he is always watching! All the time he lingers above himself like a hawk, and it is no wonder, that such destructive habits of spiritual egression, in the attempts to make oneself grand over a scene, make one feel very small indeed, for in the method of looking down on all others, those ironists have the unhappy corollary of growing habituated to looking down on themselves. Irony and insecurity are thus unhappily married, yet can have no divorce, whereas play keeps a happy romance with perspective, faithfully married even before the ceremony declares them so.

Little wonder then than men who play to a crowd neither play nor garner crowds, or rather, crowds worthy of being gathered. In fact, crowds can only gather around such men to see them suffer, such was the fame of the gladiator, whose renown, ever so commonly spread, was only a species of infamy. To be deplorably contemporary, yet so as to demonstrate the principle retained in the low as in the old, the game journalist too gathers crowds about him of his venom, and either cuts or is cut, for if he works his trade well, his greatest engagements come costing another’s shame, if poorly that same spirit is only now directed towards himself. Yet more than this, for even the proficient, though professional players, never truly play, which is why their reviews in time form a genus of their own further and further detached from the simplicity of gaming; and now we have it, as I shall show, or as you know, that players, to join the spectacle, play like these journalists, and watch themselves play rather than play, and know themselves not in playing, but by the type of applause they receive. To say again, the journalist is not bad at games because he lacks command over the game, though he does indeed lack this, but because the very manner of his gaming precludes the judgement proper to the object. Like that water bowl he stirs himself into a torrent, and can only come up with 6s. To the artist as well as to the child, no heed whatsoever is payed to the number or nature of the crowd, it is fun or it isn’t, it is art or it is not. The moment his heart is not in it, he ceases to play, the moment the artist falls from communion, his work degrades into a trade. When then do children look back to their parents and break the play? Why only for validation, to check that the world is still secure, that the immersion may safely remain, for by being in it, nothing may break outside. Here is the key to the ironist and the artist, to the happy child and to the sad. For the securest homes have the happiest play, and those wanting solid foundations look back too often, and neither relieve their parents nor themselves. It is either the strong or the broken that mind not others, for unlike the varying midst they are above or below the vicissitudes of men. The same vacant stare in the homeless who knows not the time is closer to the heroes who sees ages beyond than any dithering middle flatterers. Indeed, to need to pay no heed to the future or the past was once the dream of our heaven, Valhalla, and speaks to the soul of command. For he who must pay heed to what’s to come, becomes a means to it, and he who perforce remembers, must have to justify himself. Adult life is, I believe, primarily distinguished by thinking oneself dignified relative to the stated object one pursues, and the success one meets in pursuing it; it is intimately tied to reception, result, output and outcomes, and so is mean because it is a means. It is the wisdom of Odin to be more anxious for Munin than Hugin, it is the folly of man to work for either. Worse than this, as stated, we work when we play, we know ourselves but not as the Oracle commanded; and as what is external to ourselves is easier to criticise because it is more apparent, so we may garner approbation from many upbraiding without, what is for ourselves within. Thus it is a truism to say those who are payed to play and report cannot, yet it is held a grave mystery, lofty to inspect, to ask why we ourselves cannot play as we used to! How lowly is one beheld by the other highly performing the same motions!

But away from sickly specimens, they are only held up to foil the well, and praise be YW, I have found my play, she is my wife to be and has shown me that there is no liberty like security, there is no partiality without faith. By partiality I term poorly what may be intimated by the word immersion, yet this word has implications which outlast it, for built into the word is the expectation of its death; by partiality however I mean that perspective that does not even resist irony, and if it knows itself, it is always as an element within its own web of meaning that does not budge on the principle points of conception. So how wretched it is to find that by the religion that still holds the afterglow of its dying authority still adhered to in such matters, the name of faith is ineradicably entwined with solemnity, gravity, concern, even torments and always, worst of all temptations. This is not faith, for as an innocent man can never fear the just, but rather seeks them out, so to can no faithful man be stern of his condition. If a child broods on the pitch, he is out of the game, so too that faith that holds itself heavy is no belief at all. How so? Why fear must always be for the future, and effect of the conditional, but faith grounds the conditions of these mere relative accidents, allows them, contains them. If they are not regarded with invincible certainty, if it is not the pith, not the Rome that all roads lead to, if it is aware and not in that dream state of play, forgetful and timeless as the hero or the homeless, if it breathes its hours, counts its breaths, if it has measure or mark, or reputation, or gains; if it’s scores do not set to zero at the end of the day, it is not life, it is not love, it is not faith, it is no game. Be marriage grave, and let children be birthed as equipages to the self knowing strains of pride or duty, and you may see even a well working household business, a confraternity employed, but this guild shall function on margins, and are thus secondary, and they shall consume their meanings in sought signs and signifiers, rather than in the sacred moment they could have if they but trusted to the core. It is a revelation to me, perhaps after being raised in two households from the get go, that the walled garden, impenetrable, is no prison that ties man down, and to think so is just to confess that one is without. Man cannot know everything, information washes his brain if he attempts to keep pace with the infinite flow, which is the best method of brain washing. In all his stimulus there must be a shape, and people too often speak of him giving it. He does not give the shape, he marries it, as the child is married with belief to his game, and though the game may end and change to another, or one week may be strained and another exalted, that partial spirit, endowed with invincible immanence, is that holy spirit of childhood which can never fail to refresh the tired world in its eternal youth. This is why adolescence, with its spasmodic and unwelcome eruptions of sexuality, springs fourth from it contemporary jade. A child simply does not understand cynicism, he may ape it for approval among his elder peers, and curse this or that inconvenience, yet never can he feel in his deepest nature that aversion to the world that is the teenage curse of first knowing that one is not only received by the world, but judged. With sexuality comes the threat of existential rejection, and any conditional union, such as love is said to be, makes man loved as a means. If he does not meet them, he is not a man; if she does not meet him, she is no woman, and so on and so fourth. Little wonder then that adolescence, unlike that popular myth which is the exact opposite of the truth, is the age of radical conformity. Have we not realised that our youth rebel because they are told that’s what youths do? It is a rational fear and a more rational hatred for a man to loathe being his work, a woman her looks or fertility. For work does not make a man, and barely keeps him as one, often it precludes even that, and how unnatural yet biological is it to be the object of the worlds affection precisely for accumulating qualities that one never needed before to be loved. Without faith, chaos, without trust, judgement. To be free from judgement the world has made a refuge of the very thing that ensures its expulsion, for free love, cheap and easy, sells those who partake in it, for a night’s triumph, or succession of nights, a lifetimes worth of doubt. It is a perennial adolescence, for having many they have none. To know rather that no matter what, no matter what, a lover will stay with me, and I with her, for she is me and I am her, and that as two bodies made one flesh I could neither leave her so much as one can leave one’s own body, that security, that friendship, that trust, makes faith and play. Love is not blind, love lives, and the ironist may see and call out to Odin that he has depthless sight being partial and inward, but being blind he is made wise, and as Odin lovers see well enough with one eye. Contractual love is an imperative, and imperatives are the refuge of the dead. I cannot help but notice that pickup artists call it “the game” or “game” “the hunt” or “the chase”, yet they all curse it as they run. It is too like this with the monarch and his “great game”, or any such means for keeps.

To conclude, and to throw a bone to the Randy within, I have many quibbles with Christianity that are by no means trifling, but if there is one nub of mutual alignment between myself and these unfortunately overstern folk, it is that their master did not quibble over trifles, but wholeheartedly implored, perhaps too much, even to the detriment of his lesson, in their favour. That is the closest he came to a new master morality, but alas, he came not to be served but to serve. Over this I put the children he named, for only in this spirit one may sanctify the union that begets them. Better to think of Mary as so childlike that she copulated with an innocent spirit, earning the name virgin, than to copulate with children like Mohamet. Speaking of, I also believe this is the reason why predators and paedophiles attract the fervent ire that they do, for premature molestation is a double divorce, rending the pillars of the worlds protection from out under them while their own body catches up to the confusion that will mar their intimacy forever. The abused never truly recover and are sentenced to the curse of perpetual insecurity, and find no house is home. It also fits that the adult, in sexual unions of this kind, must always be ironic with the child, there is not another self, there is barely there an other, he is an ironist of the most devoted kind, pursuing carnally that which he has no relation with, nor ever can. He knows as much, and yet pursues it, even thinking others fools who settle for anything less but the newest car on the lot. It is mercantile, material, detached and the pinnacle of timid or utilitarian faithlessness. He may be compared to a sick boy in the playground who, instead of playing with his classmates, declares in the midst everything he does to them, thus when he runs he screams “I am running” as he runs, “I am kicking” as he kicks, and makes an irksome show of himself that he keeps no playmate and knows no friend. To find friendship one must give it, and what part of the paedophile does he give that can contain any part of himself that may be understood? If the ear that hears you speaks not your tongue and yet you insist to speak to the poor fellow, you have not an audience but a captive, even if your words are complimentary, and your meanings sweet. Yes! Let us not deny the paedophile even sweetness in his mistake, why mischaracterise evil, it is bad enough to be spared addendums. Aye, the ironist has his victories too, cuckholds feel their pleasure, which all aligned in common have this - the thrill of betrayal, of child, of others, of self, and the character of men clinging so much to regularity finds here the habit of even fallouts to be of some consolation. Beaurillard was coy in esteeming the hyperreal a novelty of our age, men have long loved signs more than whatever they signify, more than signifying anything at all, for Rome had imps who preferred to be seen in a room than to be in it, prophets preferred to been seen speaking God’s word than living it, and in all, that nightmare cheat, that feels every hour, every minute he tosses in his bed, that ever delaying consciousness who refuses to cede the day to wholesome restitution, who fails to submit to dreams, to play, to have faith in the night that takes hold of him and pays him with dreams and virility, let him never again take space in the forum of our souls. Perhaps that is what they mean, those cryptic Syriacs, perhaps pride is not presumption, nor hubris, nor unweildy overwilling, but this acid awareness that undoes its joy in knowing itself - perhaps that is the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, which is not to know what is good and evil, and what objects apply, but to apply good and evil as objects for objectives, for after all, men who care not for means do not truly care for ends… Perhaps! Perhaps I save them from themselves making more sense than they actually do using their symbols, which is often the case. It is the nature of pain anyway, to arrest us from ourselves, pain is a kind of irony, and misery loves company, and paedophiles love children in their parades. Ah! If like loves like why should not the abused abuse to make another for their company - or so they’d say, like a Prometheus who teaches or a Hephaestus who forges or a Daedalus who crafts that other Other that they may love, they fail at the outset and will only commune with the wounds they have, entrenching them deeper, hurting each-other more when things threaten to be torn apart so that only they can be quite alike in their malignant disfunctioning. Man has long been a sign without a signifier so, man has long since ceased to play and accost those fools who marry, who scowl at the children who play, who sneer at the devout peasant folk while all they believe is doubt. But do not doubt my YW the mastery of play and faith, it is what I have discovered these past hours, or this past year, and as it is nothing to the well bred, it was a revelation to me; so if none of this impresses then I am glad for you, for myself I never new pure water till I tasted trust, if you’ve known it, then celebrate me coming into your company, if not, believe me, inside the wall is a garden and not a husk. Little wonder then (I seem addicted to this transitional phrase) that love comes off most times so poorly in plays, as the ironist loves his sign, always in public, even when alone, so does the player out and about, find no sign that can express his love, nor tell a tale that can quite recapture his play. Love is private, play is too, for “the Dao that can be spoken of is not the eternal Dao”. It is easier to make statues of heroes than lovers, to decree statues of imperatives than conduct wholesome habits, but perhaps that is for the best.

Vale

—-

The Friend’s most excellent reply

“Married love knows better. Its movements are not outwards but inwards, and here it is soon aware that it has a wide world to itself, but also that every little constraint on its self has a quite other commensurability with the infinitude of love; and even if it feels pain because there is so much to fight against, so too it feels courage for this contest. Yes, it is daring enough to outdo you in paradoxes in practically taking pleasure in sin’s having entered the world; but it has the daring to outdo you in paradoxes in another sense too: it has the courage to resolve them. For marital love, like first love, knows all these obstacles are overcome in the infinite moment of love. But it also knows that the historical element in it is precisely the gaining of this victory, and that gaining it is not just a game but also a conflict, though also not just a conflict but also a game, as the conflict in Valhalla was a life-and-death struggle and yet still a game, since the contestants continually rose again rejuvenated from the dead. It also knows that this fencing is not an arbitrary duel but a conflict under divine patronage; and it feels no need to love more than one, yet feels a blessedness herein, and no need to love more than once, yet feels an eternity herein...”

- Kierkegaard, Either/Or

My dear friend Blank,

You began your letter with a metaphor. You compared love to play, to the earnest, serious play of young boys in the schoolyard; and yet serious does not seem the correct word. For the play of youth is a spirit that flies on winged sandals, it is light, exceptionally light, such that the slight shoulders of a young boy may bear it with ease. And yet the play of youths is serious, more serious than the most serious activity of adults. But doesn't serious mean - grave? solemn? held to the earth by gravity? The Christians would seem to teach us this – that serious means weight. Play is the most serious thing of all for a youth, for his play he is willing to live and die: who has not with disregard for life and limb thrown himself wholeheartedly into a tackle, off a tree, face first down a slide, and yet it is not stern faces and stony brows that mark the figures who run in the yard, it is smiling and laughter. It is laughter like a bolt from the heavens, so true it is. People often lament that this laughter is lost forever upon exiting childhood, that it cannot be regained; not only in the social situations requiring it, but in the private comfort of ones own home, from ones closest and most intimate friends, a false laughter is heard. You tell a joke, it lands flat on its face - and you receive from your friends a laughter of pity, certainly kind, but not *real*. At this thought one could well fall to despair - how long has it been since that laughter of childhood, pure as well water, brilliant, true laughter issued from ones own lips? Laughter that is proud, that shows itself unashamed in broad daylight, that must not hide itself behind an ironic veil. Whither has it gone? Can it be - recovered? Or is it lost, lost in the weighty seriousness of adult affairs, lost to that world weary dwarf that sits on the shoulders of every man, weighing him down, pressing him to the earth, whispering cynical things in his ear - until our laughter can only be that of the ironist, bitter like chokecherries, a caustic vinegar edge palpable in every sound? Is this our fate?

But -- enough! enough! Let us shake the dwarf from our shoulders, step out from the dark and look instead into the brilliant light of breaking day --

I bring up your metaphor of play because it is utterly correct. For love is play. Immersion, as you note, is the perfect term, except for that its own death is foretold in its very utterance. And yet this captures precisely what it is that marriage and love possess that mere infatuation does not. A man can be infatuated, he may take a lover for an evening, for a week, a month, even a year, and yet this is not love but merely the stirring of passion. And yet he is immersed - he is in love - his every thought orients around her, his mode of being is changed, the teleology that sustains him is predicated on her. Did not even the gods love like this? Though no lover is kept for long Zeus speaks highly of each, and Apollo wept as Hyacinthus died in his arms. And yet these loves must end. For the Gods eat of ambrosia and live forever - thus their love with mortals is doomed to tragedy in time.

I bring this up because I wish to show that aesthetic love, love not in eternity but bound in time to come to an end, is not to be denigrated, as the trads in their zealous housemaking are wont to do. The holy title of "lover of Zeus" is given even to the girl who spends but one night in the gods’ mighty arms. Aesthetic love can be noble, refined, beautiful to the highest degree. But there is a catch. Immersion by its very utterance sounds its own death knell - so too with romantic love. For passion fades. The recess bell rings, the children are called inside, the game ends - and thusly the lover is no longer immersed. The game no longer has meaning, but where children arise from their recess refreshed, ready to return to the work of the classroom, our once infatuated seducer arises from a superfluous love affair in despair. Romantic love, thus, follows the structure of a five act play, romantic love plays out in time - should that first act take a year or a minute, should our seducer spend his lifetime reaching the culmination, or only a few hour of seduction at a party, it makes no difference. The play reaches its third act, the climax (hehe) - and what then follows? Falling action (an ashamed walk home) and resolution (“I’m never drinking that much again”). The curtain drops, and whether comedy or tragedy has played our theatergoer and our seducer both exit having received a thoroughly enjoyable aesthetic performance, and nothing more. The play is over. I stress again that this can be beautiful in the highest degree, as any play can, show me an educated, sensitive man who has not wept before our poets and playwrights - but beauty is all that aesthetic love can provide.

With this assessment I believe the ancients would agree. I said in my dm to you that marriage is a fundamental problem for us, philhellenes, pagans, that is, *anti-Christians*, and I ask you look no further than the terrible reputation of marriage in Greece and Rome. Who did the Greeks look to for their model of marriage? I propose Agamemnon, whose wife cucked him and had him killed after he, the king of all Achaea, returned successful from the greatest expedition of all time. For the love of Christ, what more do women want? "I know he’s the most successful man in all the known world, but like -- his beard -- idk, it just gave me the ick. Like yuck. I want someone clean shaven, and younger too." How could the Greeks look otherwise on marriage then with revulsion, suspicion, as a material move to secure finances or a political move to secure power? As BAP correctly notes in Caribbean Rhythms, marriage existed solely to lock down rambunctious bachelors into service to the state - they would rather be off marauding and fucking prostitutes than taking care of that boring business venture that is hearth and home. Imagine the incredulous look of a Paches, of a Xenophon, of an Alcibiades: "You want to get married? By the Gods, it’s nearly campaigning season! Are the hetaera striking or something?" But our distrust for marriage too must lie in that solemnity you mention, that Christian aftertaste of marriage as a rite, as *institution*, as a solemn duty to be undertaken. As the trads tell us, to be a real man one must pump their broadshouldered sow of a wife full of children, and having named them Adolf, Rommel, and Romulus, return to tilling the fields (by hand, you understand - we are real men, and further we have read the opening pages of Kaczinsky – we will not use your libtard tractors).

Let me become serious again. What leg does marriage have to stand on for us? What is left but -- despair? Marriage for - what? Duty? State? Religion? Duty lies dead with Christendom and the state sees marriage merely as a business venture to be taxed. Two options tend to appear at this point to our contemporaries, our countrymen in rotten country, our fellow travellers in modernity. Inceldom, chosen or not, is the first - and the second is that misery of passion, hookup culture. With each new night in a different lovers arms the understanding of love as merely an aesthetic affair, a five act play, is further confirmed, and with each new victim the seducer heightens and refines his aesthetic armor until no possibility of love can exist, until all love is mere show, mere acting, beautiful and passionate and utterly empty. At his greatest development, the aesthetic man becomes, by necessity, an ironist. He understands the show he is putting on and begins to recognize how it is that he can create a more beautiful effect. No longer is he an actor in the play of love, but the director. It is at this point that immersion for him is lost. Our seducer, having mastered the game of seduction – no, not mastered, but *understood* the game – now stands above it, he is aware of it and his own position in the game and how best to play for the effect to be most pleasing. If every movement of a love affair is known, not natural, not dictated by passion but by cool intellect, preplanned and understood before it happens – can there be any meaning in such love? So he despairs, for his only joy, the aesthetic beauty of the play, is lost with his painful awareness as that child who loses his immersion and can no longer play.

Likewise for the incel. Eventually after a long career of hatred, he finds one gray morning that he cannot any longer hate, that he cannot be resentful, that the fiery rage against womankind is lost – and this being his only and secret joy – he too falls to despair. Here is where most sensitive young men stop, inceldom or pick up artistry, but nota bene in both cases one feels the same despair. These positions are the two endpoints of aesthetic refinement in regard to the woman question, and both end the same way. Yet it is precisely at this point of despair where a man must, absolutely and utterly must, continue. If he stops here, he is lost – and for the whole of his life not only will he suffer, but all those he tries to love will too. It is at this point that the aesthetic can take you no further, but all men who have come so far as this have come up against a threshold hitherto unknown to them. For any man who has lain next to a woman, and felt her soft arms across his chest, felt the warmth of her body, her light even breaths as she sleeps, holding on to *you*, every man who has lain in this way, even the greatest aesthete, the greatest and most nonchalant seducer, has realized with fear and trembling that in his very arms he bears her entire soul, that she has given herself up, given everything up, to you - it has occurred to every man like a bolt of lightning: "she is up to YOU, she is your responsibility, she belongs to YOU - and now you are, forever, responsible. She is in love - she is yours in all eternity. She is in love – and you must answer for this before God." This is the threshold; this is the gate through which the aesthetic can take you no further. For most this moment is met with terror, they look away, they cannot bear this demonic thought, this heaviest weight, they come up with Schopenhauerian theories, they retreat into their aesthetic armor, they deny the responsibility that they have brought upon themselves, and they run as far as they can. The girl doesn’t get a text back. She is dropped coldly. And the seducer despairs.

But what if -- what if you had this thought, this weightiest of all thoughts, that another person is utterly dependant on you, that there is no one else, there cannot be anyone else, all that happens henceforth with her belongs to you, in eternity, every failure and every triumph will be summed up in your name, every action counts, every action *matters* -- what if you had this weightiest of thoughts and - laughed? Imagine this thought has come to you in the midst of a sleepless night, at your loneliest lonesomeness. Imagine lying alone in your dark, empty bedroom, the clock strikes one in the morning and this terrifying thought occurs. You are brought to the threshold, like a lead weight the yoke of responsibility is dropped about your neck, a sentence forever against your freedom – and imagine that what issued from your tired lips was not a weary sigh but laughter, childlike laughter – imagine that instead of fleeing from this thought, you sat upright, you smiled, and aloud you spoke: "this thought for me is the greatest and most divine blessing, that this thought comes to me now is my greatest joy! for I choose it, I choose it absolutely!" Then, my dearest friend, I will tell you - you have exited the aesthetic, you have crossed the threshold, you have defeated temporality, you have defeated time and your love has entered into the ethical, that is, your love is married love, married love that belongs to the absolute, to God, to eternity.

This is what I mean when I say that those sensitive young men do not go far enough. For to choose their despair - to not vacillate before it weakly, to run from it into inceldom or into “game”, into PUA tricks – is to choose this responsibility. It is to choose yourself. For despair is recognition. One cannot despair, truly despair, if one does not know – despair is to know exactly what one is, and thus what one must become, and to stand before this monumental task in fear and trembling. The aesthete, incel or pick up artist, sees clearly this great cross that stands suddenly before him, each at the very end of the aesthetic comes upon this immense and shining citadel and know that they must scale the wall. The only possible means of survival before such knowledge is, as you say, to become an ironist, for it is the ironist that knows exactly his position, his awareness is his poison. One cannot be an ironist unless they know their position relative to the entire world, and this knowledge comes from despair.

But irony is cope. As you put it so precisely, you cannot be ironic with God. God belongs to the eternal, likewise with marriage, likewise with love, likewise with ethics. Even the highest form of romantic, aesthetic love can only remain in the state of genuine play, of immersion, for so long before the old awareness returns that puts one in one’s relative place. The ironist is aware, he knows of his position exactly, he looks upon himself, and like that child who refuses to play properly, who cannot become immersed in the game, his only choice is misery. It is his precise knowledge of his situation that leads to his despair, he knows what is required of him, he knows the rules of the game, but he cannot take the leap, he is paralyzed, he enters the pitch and finds his limbs turned to stone. The ironist sees his position: the absolute difference between the ironist and the ethicist is that the ethicist sees his position and *chooses* it.

You must by now realize that I steal everything here, utterly everything, from Kierkegaard, but I answer here that I do not steal at all for I have lived it, I have understood the ethical, I have been in love and love has perhaps been the greatest thing I have ever accomplished. What I learned first from Kierkegaard I later learned precisely in the flesh, and finally I understood what Christ meant when he said that the kingdom of heaven is to be found in the hearts of men. The infinite, the eternal, is to be found in the beauty of the finite, the eternal is above the finite and yet is contained within it. Tell a young boy “You know, the scores reset at the end of the game, and thus nothing you do here on the pitch matters” and he will laugh, laugh in your face. For he knows the secret, he is no ironist, he knows that the true game begins exactly where recess ends. For each game stands not alone, but in reference to one another, in reference to each week of play, each month, each year, to the progress of skills and the changing of relations among the players – the game has an internal history. How is the finite made eternal? The play is repeated, not acted through once, but again and again, recess recurs, not singular, isolated victories and defeats but repetitions, a campaign, and through this the game acquires a history. All possession is constant acquiring, and married love, which is a kind of possession, is the constant reacquiring of romantic, aesthetic love, it is the constant recapture of first love. But repetition is not mere rote for the game is worked out in time. Every relative element of the finite, every particularity, a miserable day, an exalted hour, a weekend flat and broad as a windless sea, each of these is compared to the whole and exists in relation to the internal history of the entirety. You intuit this exactly:

“He does not give the shape, he marries it, as the child is married with belief to his game, and though the game may end and change to another, or one week may be strained and another exalted, that partial spirit, endowed with invincible immanence, is that holy spirit of childhood which can never fail to refresh the tired world in its eternal youth.”

Thusly a single fight in a romantic love may sink the whole affair, but a fight or a bad day in married love means as little as a drop of foul water in an otherwise pure sea. Married love contains within it then a play that never truly ends, an immersion that never breaks but is refreshed each hour, each day, the married man is party to the immortal play of the gods.

Indulge me a long quotation for I cannot possibly say any better what Kierkegaard says in his immortal Either/Or, in a passage I come back to again and again for its power to refresh:

“Married love begins with the possession and acquires an internal history. It is faithful, so too is romantic love, but now see the difference: the faithful romantic lover can wait, say, for fifteen years, then comes the instant of his reward. Here, very rightly, poetry says that the fifteen years lend themselves superbly to concentration, then it hastens to the moment. A husband is faithful for fifteen years; yet for those fifteen years he has had possession. Accordingly, throughout that long lapse of time he has constantly acquired the faithfulness he possessed, since married love has first love within it and thereby its faithfulness. But an ideal husband of this kind cannot be represented, for the essential thing is time in its extension. At the end of the fifteen years he has apparently come no further than at the beginning, and yet he has lived aesthetically in a high degree. For him his possession has not been a dead property, his possession is something he has constantly acquired. He has fought, not with lions and ogres, but with that most dangerous enemy which is time. But here eternity does not come afterwards as it does for the knight; eternity is something he has had in time, preserved in time. Only he, therefore, has triumphed over time; for it can be said of the knight that he has killed time – as indeed a man always wants to kill time when it has no reality for him – but that is never the real victory. As a true victor, the husband has not killed time but saved and preserved it in eternity. The married man that does this, yes, the life of that man is truly poetical, he solves the great riddle: to live in eternity yet so to hear the parlour clock strike that its striking does not shorten but prolongs his eternity...”

Compare:

“To know the time is worthy, to count it is indecent” – this is precisely the very kernel, the very nucleus of married love – to have time, to have triumphed over time, to know the time and live in the present and yet to live also in eternity!

In married love, each individual bout refers to the entire history, each day refers to the whole affair, and thus the relative is grounded in the eternal, in the absolute, thus each moment acquires infinite meaning. It is not a conquering, as the seducer would have it, but possession that is required, for in possession an internal history is developed. It is akin to lifting, if I too may be forgiven for bringing so contemporary an example to our discussion. A single bout of intense exercise means nothing, utterly nothing, but weeks and months and years of continuous work, some weeks triumphant with PRs, other weeks despondent and miserable, sometimes fasting, sometimes bulking, sometimes lifting for strength, other times for endurance, other weeks merely getting by – and through all this, you fight with time, you fight with the exhaustion of the evening after work, you fight with winter snow or spring rain, you fight with relative conditions for the sake of the whole. It is consistency that is the key until the entire body is diffused with the choice to lift. A man who has lifted for a single day, and reached his physical limit believes he now knows himself, but he knows nothing. A man who has benchpressed twice a week for three years knows his body intimately. He knows exactly his strengths and weakness. He knows precisely the feeling of each muscle, exactly where he still needs work and where he has succeeded, he has seen every trembling tendon to its current perfection. Every press is related back to that first day, even that first time he looked in the mirror and thought to himself, I am weak, I am small – he remembers being nervous, beneath the bar, feeling as though the whole gym is staring at him, but also he remembers his greatest triumphs, he remembers the first time a girl looked at him and said “wow, you’ve been going to the gym, huh?” When we look on such a man it is an aesthetic experience; we see the final product, we see physical beauty, we are impressed with his strength. But when he looks upon himself it is not merely an aesthetic experience but an ethical one, for he has carved every muscle, he has formed every shape, he has *lived* it so that the gym is no chore, no agony to be endured, not a *means* but the end in and of itself. This is what Mishima discovered when he set himself to the steel: that the muscles, the relative conditions of the self, vanish:

“Away from the steel, however, my muscles seemed to lapse into absolute isolation, their bulging shapes no more than cogs created to mesh with the steel. The cool breeze passed, the sweat evaporated—and with them the existence of the muscles vanished into thin air. And yet, it was then that the muscles played their most essential function, grinding up with their sturdy, invisible teeth that ambiguous, relative sense of existence and substituting for it an unqualified sense of transparent, peerless power that required no object at all. Even the muscles themselves no longer existed. I was enveloped in a sense of power as transparent as light.”

The particular, the muscles, vanish, and instead the body is entirely diffused with power, a different kind of power than strength itself – for the body has become the universal. An aesthete is relative, he is particular, but a man who comes into married love becomes higher than himself, he becomes the universal man. A man outside the universal is like a man who has become fat or is overly thin, he is particular, he is defined by his difference, but the man who lifts does not make himself special but draws himself instead into that excellence that is possible for all men. This is what Kierkegaard means when he says that the for the Christian the task is always already there, the Christian man need never look around in confusion but only set to work – the universal is always present, it is, always, always, available to all men. At any point a man may lift himself into the universal; he may join that brotherhood of men that exists across all time, a brotherhood populated at once by artists, poets, generals, kings and emperors as well as street sweepers and washers of feet: it is the brotherhood of the husband, it is the brotherhood of the married man, it is the brotherhood of fathers. An Augustus and a peasant are equals on precisely a single point, on one singular point may their eyes meet: it is as fathers.

And so it is that I believe that marriage is the highest, the utter highest, that it is the universal condition of man. Others denote slavery or suffering or poverty as the universal for man – I disagree, I beg to differ. For those are inevitable. If there is one thing that you remember from my poor retelling of Kierkegaard (and I ask that you take any inconsistencies or paradoxes in this philosophy not as his, but as products of my recounting), I hope that it is this: the aesthetic life is accidental, inevitable, but what is great in man is what is chosen. One does not choose to be a slave or to suffer. The ethical is chosen, at every point it is chosen. To arrive at the ethical you must first despair, you know your position, and it is in that moment precisely that you must *choose* your position. Those who sneer at love, at marriage, who will quote statistics, who will discuss how modernity has made modern woman into a whore, I grant it to them, they are right, utterly right, I’ve been to the university bars, I’ve fought on the very front of that war – and yet – I choose to love, I choose marriage, I choose the ethical. From that everything follows.

(Though this is indeed a heartfelt passage, I cannot help but chuckle – imagine the smiling, norwood chudjak, a single, emotional tear on his trembling cheek, clutching a heart on which is written: “I choose love!”)

I cannot come to an agreement with the Christians. I cannot come into their fold. The Church service is monotony. The speeches of the pastors are weak, unlearned, and designed not to raise up but to level, to please. The faces of the old men and women in the congregation (for there are no youths) are not inspiring but like the faces of desperate beggars before the house of a once rich man who no longer has anything to give. They plead for meaning – but the churches stores have run dry. I feel at home in the church when it is empty, when I am the sole occupant. I feel at home in the graveyard, or staring up at the old wooden steeples, some built when my province was only just settled. But all the life of the church – it means nothing to me; it is no life but only palliative care before death.

But marriage lives. Married love lives. Though I am a philhellene to the very fiber of my being, I must admit it was the Christians who raised marriage from mere material and political affair to the noblest and most beautiful thing that a man can pursue. Whether there is some psychological disposition towards Christianity in the blood of every modern man or whether Roman Catholic elementary school merely pounded the bible into my poor developing brain with its rote repetition, and now it returns schizophrenically, I do not know. But I believe in marriage, and thus I congratulate you, genuinely, I congratulate you, I shake your hand and I drink to your health. I wish you strength and happiness and courage and know you and your wife will have all three and a great deal more too. God bless you and may your wife feed you delicious meals until you are stuffed!

Vale