Erotically Correct Poem by gershon hepner

Love is a dream that’s dreamt midsummer nights,
but the bottom drops out when expression
of love is turned into a bill of rights
that claims the lover as one’s own possession.
It is a mythopoeic enterprise,
enabling people closely to cohere
by attaining in each other’s eyes
love traction from the virtues that appear
to bind them, so that they become involved,
believing that the love they now reflect
will cause their personal problems to be solved,
desire made erotically correct.

Inspired by thoughts of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream to which I am going later this afternoon (in Theatrum Botamicum, Topanga) and Roger Scruton’s observation in Sexual Desire: A Philosophic Investigation,241-2:

One may describe the course of love as a kind of ‘mutual self-building’, in something like the way that the course of desire is a ‘mutual desire’. I want you to be worthy of my love, behind which desire lies, always compelling me. And I too want to be lovable, so that you may reciprocate my affection. Hence we begin to enact a cooperative game of self-building. I identify you as something wholly free, wholly responsible, all of whose states, including your desire, express the unspoiled ‘self-identity’ that is yours. And I seek to attain in your eyes the same integrity that I attribute to you. By virtue of this mythopoeic enterprise, our focusing on the other gains a special kind of coherence. Everything you do you do for my eyes, seeking to acquire by reflection the unity, virtue and integrity which you attribute ineluctably to me. Thus, in a common metaphor, we become ‘involved’. I build myself upon a conception of your perspective, and its transcendental continuity, from which all that is spirit in you flows. I cannot do without the sight of you; I need the renewed experience of your embodiment. This perception is the food of a necessary myth, and anything which threatens it threatens my existence. (Hence Milton’s words, discussed earlier, ‘smiles from reason flow, and are of love the food’.)

9/1/08