Monday, June 2, 2008

NO LIQUOR STRONGER



“Sewn through the fabric of friendship are the inevitable threads of inconsolable loss.” So wrote Tuhija Repo, Finland’s infamous poète maudit. He goes on to write in his famous essay “The New Magnetic Fields,” that, “intimacy is to betrayal as scotch is to bourbon. Like the belted kingfisher whose predatory rattle signals life and death in one loud cry, we smugly roar through life’s uncertainties, using the language of conviction to express the hesitant disquiet of irreconcilable doubt.”

Repo’s words come to mind as I ruminate upon the current state of my kinship with Currado Malaspina. My love for him has made me vulnerable to his fickle conceits. And yet, he stands alone as my equal and to lose him would mean the loss of my only true interlocutor.

Homo homini lupus perhaps sums it all up, however glibly. Freud, in “Civilization and its Discontents” observed that, "It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.”

In Currado Malaspina, I have found both needs bundled into one onerous receptacle.

Je suis coupable.

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