Erotic Love Alone Poem by gershon hepner

Only by erotic love alone
can we survive awareness of
depravity. We set the highest tone
for sensuality in love
not using reason, but rejoicing
in faults we don’t admit before
our love has died, when we start voicing
complaints we’d chosen to ignore.

Inspired by Roger Scruton’s Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson: 1994) ,234, and by my own poem “Silent the Interpretation, ” which was inspired by a quotation from a quotation from Proust and Signs, by Gilles Deleuze, cited by Rivka Galchen in the first page of her book Atmospheric Disturbances:

In one of the thin protestations against the human normality, Nietzsche exhorts us to despise our friends, so as the better to love them (Will to Power, ed. W. Kaufman, n.964) . The real meaning of such an exhortation is this: abolish the friendship of esteem and replace it with eros. For bonds of kinship apart, it is erotic love alone that can survive the awareness of another’s depravity, without declining into that weaker, more vacillating friendship, from which nothing serious can be built. At the same time, this is not the happiest form of love. To the extent that it is cherished, it is from an abundance of desire. Thus, when Genet’s anti-heroes wax tender over the vices of their paramours, the effect is of a supreme sensuality, outside the reach of normal human emotion. Interestingly enough, however, their sensuality is represented as a kind of moral virtue, which, through an inverted admiration for what others despise, becomes an act of defiance towards the moral norm…Erotic love seems, therefore, to defy the demands of reason only influence reason towards its own point of view…Love ‘moralises’ its object, so that it conforms to an ideal. When the object cannot be moralized according to the old ideal, love favors a new one––even an inverted one––in order that its object may seem worthy of its care. Love brings esteem within its orbit, often causing it to travel along unfamiliar paths.
© 2008 Gershon Hepner 8/29/08