Death in Love.

"Love is what drives and sustains us!' I translate: we don't know what drives and sustains us, only that we are most miserably driven and, imperfectly, sustained. Love is how we call our ignorance of what whips us."

[. . .]

"I am not deceived. This new emotion is Her doing; the desire that possesses me is Her bewitchment. Lucidity passes from me; in a moment I'll cry 'Love!' bury myself in Her side, and be 'transfigured.' Which is to say, I die already; this fellow transported by passion is not I; I am he who abjures and rejects the night-sea journey! I....
"I am all love. 'Come!' She whispers, and I have no will."
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After class today, I thought I'd do a little more research on Sexson's reference to "Night Sea Journey" by John Barth which I found in its entirety in what I think is a Japanese blog of some sort. Still, the story is in English. At first, I was a little skeptical as to the literary genius behind a story told from the perspective of a sperm, but I was proven wrong within the first few paragraphs. What an odd perspective to find myself listening to! I thought it an absurdity at the very least, yet...this is a very literate sperm who uses words like "beset", "abhorrent", and "tautological" and who theorizes over the goal and nature of his very existence. His nameless character becomes a synecdoche for mankind as a whole. He struggles "Onward, Upward", as he says, with only the vaguest notion as to his ultimat epurpose in the tormenting darkness which he finds himself. At the end of his tortured journey, he can only hope that he leaves a legacy, something we, ourselves, strive to achieve every day of our lives. The difference between his story and our own is that we supposedly end in death, the sperm ends in love. The very last line of the story itself is an esctatic, horrified, "Love! Love! Love!" which can only echo Kurtz's last words in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness: "The horror, the horror."

This character fears love because it represents the ending of self. He knows not what he will be, if anything, after he becomes a part of something, someone, else....after he loses any concrete definition as he plunges into the unknown. He fears the death of himself as as separate entity. Could that be what is proposed in one aspect by the Homeric Hymn of Demeter? Persephone plunges into the Underworld, into death itself by her marriage to Aidoneus. Perhaps the fear we often associate with marriage is but the deathly fear of the extermination of our preconditioned, circumstantially bound definitions of who we are. After all, what are we...really...when we cease to be completely disconnected from another...when we become something more than our individual selves? Do we still exist? Or are we lost within that single living organism existing in two seperate entities?

Though the entire short story presents some interesting concepts, the lines quoted above struck me most of all. Ignoring for a moment the fact that they are written almost as poetry itself, the word choice compells further analysis. The sperm uses the word "bewitchment" to describe his driving need to be "in" love. He says he has already died, for he has lost all reason. "I am all love" he says. A simple whisper converts his most ardent analysis, his antagonistic convictions; all of it is lost, destroyed, in a single word. this power of the female race to compel and liquefy defies definition just as the mother-daughter connection remains a mystery or "mustes" to the entire male race. There is a power in that silent communication, in love as well, something that cannot be combated through physical or mental force, that is terrifying. Our greatest fears stem from a fear of the unknown, for we know not how to face something we cannot begin to comprehend rationally. How then do we arm ourselves for the battlefield? What defences are left to us when we know not what we face or when we'll face it? Without question, death is one inarguable truth of life... inescapable. Love is another. And we have no will to fight it.