We must bring to the table of doubts our need for love, politics, technology, mathematics, science and education. This is not to stop there, but it’s a good start. Because while we may feel that we need the Brain we really don’t need Brain, and so we must bring into question the existence of the things that Brain has nurtured within us. Education seems most disposable so why not also love, specifically romantic love, we may not yet know a genuine love, though knowing the name “love” is a start; and while religion has brought unto itself enough inquisitions why not bring it in for reexamination too. There are many things that are not required for our being but we seem to feel, stretched through time and by absence of comparison, are necessary. For instance, people lived without science for eons and lived more or less similar lives to the ones we live today only at a much more natural pace and without the cumbersome needs to know so much and to be so efficient, it is then doubtful that, say, something like a physicist is a requirement in the universe and or on earth. Some scientists, never ones to not find a way to take credit for everything, seem to think that science began when the first caveman started the first fire, I doubt that qualifies as science, however it is fair to note that science is mostly the product of intuition and not, as largely supposed., the product of experiment. If such a highly educated and sophisticated and complex thing as a physicist is not a requirement then what else is at risk, of being non-essential and if non-essential happens to be common as we might rightly suspect, what is the criteria that brings non-essentials into being even as a luxury item?
I am not here to tell you that I have the answer to what needs to be defined as a mandatory or desired item for existence, it might be a tough question to answer, it might not have an answer and it could also be the wrong question. Partly the problem here is that we seem to be ruled by a need for eternal life and a hungry need to infest the universe with everything that is us. First, when you are searching for eternal life that is bound to bind you into many thought or/and action loops that may lead to dead ends of repetitive behavior which won’t make any sense, as well they might not, for being subjects of this same escape clause. Eternal life may be a quest, but the cosmic may have a better alternative than you for eternal life, one could not imagine that the universe would want us to be so short lived if we were as important as we suspect ourselves to be. Neutrinos live what might seem infinite lives compared to ours, even neutrons easily out perform us, why is the universe willing to tolerate the ever immediate finality of our lives while catering to neutrinos and neutrons? It would be wrong to conclude that the universe needs us more, we seem to be far more expendable and certainly needed in far fewer quantities, our essential nature seems to be less essential, the universe does not need humans like it needs neutrinos, electrons and photons. Though this is not to say that we are not unique, we might be one of the more exotically unique forms in the universe, and in this particular case, uniqueness might imply that we are not needed and are indeed highly expendable.
I am not going to defend our need for immortality, I am not going to find a solution to that very problem, nor do I phantom it warranted, I prefer to die and never to come back here, nice place, but I am over it, I was over it by the time I was twelve years old, seems hard to imagine that, but life can only be interesting when you are looking at something else other than immediate life. Still I will make a case for the infesting of the universe; damn it, if we are going to live, and we can’t have eternal life, and the universe is ok with that, I am not ok with that, I stick by any humanity that wants to make more humanity, though this is a highly reactionary stance, and probably criminal at a cosmic level, even so I am not sure that the universe is going to take us seriously if we don’t invade it. Something in me tells me that we are the suicidal nature of the universe, but for now we are only the fleas in a dogged universe.
Which is probably why we have embarked on creating all of these useless needed irrelevancies. For example, I would like to take on the idea of romantic love. People are always dying for this idea, something really poetic about it, something really heart and blood affirming, people feel that they are able to tolerate life if they are romantically involved, when they romanticize day and night about their lover, when they have translucent flirtations and conquer cynical apparitions everything is delicious. But delicious can be delusional, and if it is that there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Hundreds of millions of people have some basic criteria for romanticism, a death and life struggle, “can’t live without you.” A romantic dinner, wine and a song; a Shakespearian poetic tragedy. Shakespeare was certainly a romantic which is precisely why I suspect him of being a bit of a fool.
But Byron and Holderlin and Blake and Rimbaud and Shelly and all of those wonderful saps of romanticism could not have been utterly delusional, though to write as they did they were in fact in a delusional trance. I am not a lover of reality, nor do I much care for it, a good fantasy is certainly better than any reality or truth and more worthy of fanatical pursuit; (as well shown by this book,) this is because reality is what it is, there is not much beyond that, hence the reason why I don’t much enjoy the empirical, but here there is greater issue: If romanticism is a delusion then is it the delusion of delusions, in which case it would be wonderful, or is it merely a petty delusion hinting at a more gorgeous delusion which at this moment, from our perspective it is not obtainable?
If the romantics were merely tracing the outline of something more profound, and one certainly hopes that was the case, then they failed to meet the nature of their romanticism and this invalidates their sentiments and truncates the nurturing quality of their ideas. Yes the stars are so beautiful, the sky so blue, the perfumed roses so fragrant, and my lover so sweet as the wine; only if I can not have her I shall kill myself, but for that little bit all works out like a charm. But there is a clue to how shallow romanticism really is, and it is in its infinite idealism of unrequited love. The lover that succumbs to loving another that will never correspond those same feelings, the lover that lingers in the darkness, from afar listening to every breath of the untouchable adoration. Benign, idiotic, absurd, and yet it is one of the most dramatic symbolisms of the romantics. Holderlin being the master lover of what he could not obtain. The romantics have always demonstrated that they WANT but CAN’T fuck innocence. The virgin Mary is a romantic ideal, and innocence is a romantic ideal, the romantics were and are always looking for the unspoiled child that will never be contaminated by reality. Here is the damning evidence, the romantics don’t want to get dirty with life, and if you don’t want to get dirty then you are not going to be the most important of all emotional aspirations: Passionate! The romantics can not endure the ravages of the passions, when they are passionate they are clean, they are morally correct, they tend to not trespass, they want to walk in the shadow of their lover rather than cause discomfort, they want to dream, dream their lover rather than taste farts in her pubic hairs. Passionate people don’t commit suicide, they don’t harbor melodramas and drink poisons and take on personalized dagger formations, passionate people don’t give a fuck about what puta-madre thing they have to do in order to obtain their lovers, or to reach their metaphorical objective, passionate people just get what they want or die trying; but the romantics kill themselves and others in desperation, and the only thing that they leave us with are their poems and sorrows and humid warm bleeding hearts.
Without meaning to be very cruel to the romantics, they really don’t need much more cruelty than the one they already inflict upon themselves, I just want to claim here and now that romanticism is a psychotic delusion which hints at a greater emotion than the one that can be obtained by the psychotic romantic! The romantic never really marries, a romantic can never enter into commitment, a romantic never touches his lover, but the arrested desires from deprivation consumes all romantics. The fantasy eats you, and a good fantasy ought to at least please, only the romantics perceive that an unquenched thirst, an unfulfilled magnificent desire is worthy of incessant pursuit. Will someone please stand up and tell them that they got it wrong! They got it wrong, but they can’t change their minds, because their brains fell in love with an idea that could not be concretized. Nothing wrong with that, I have enjoyed the romantics much, there is something pleasing in watching them go insane or to jump to their death with pills, guns and ropes. The romantics are the perfect alcoholics, a charming group, and their poetry has certainly put a blemish on the aesthetic, a tremendous accomplishment, even if temporary.
There is a passionate element here that is being hinted at, something which tells us of the ability that we have to blindly believe and have faith in something mundane that does not reciprocate our belief structure. It is possible to then conclude that romanticism is the product of desired energy that has been misconstrued and that will not be able to manifest itself, hence the reason why it is most likely to implode upon the self. The romantic is not so much saying “I love life” or “I love you” as much as they are saying “I don’t belong here and I can’t get out, please help me out.” Which is why they find an impossible object to fixate upon. But behind that is the constrained desire, the love desire, the genuine essence of something which can not be penetrated with poems but with actions, and with losses and gains and struggles that lead to endless flowering consequences; this is what romantics hint at and this is where they can not go. If they can not go there do we need them? Do we need romanticism? Bloody hell no! We don’t need constipation and that is what romanticism is, constipation of the heart. Romanticism is an incessant, obsessive preoccupation; and as long as we remain immune to the passionately profound essence of love, romanticism will let us touch it, without commitment.
