Carmelo Bene – Four Moments on the Whole Nothing – 3°: Eros
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Sad. Sad, ain’t it?, this mythological postulate on the misery of the displeased restlessness of love.
Groddeck asserts that copulation is a surrogate of masturbation, and not vice versa. And elsewhere – I quote, like, from memory: what is a pleasure if not an excitement of the sense of power through an obstacle, which in this way makes it swell? Therefore every pleasure also contains pain.
Schopenhauer is easy when he says: the sigh of lovers is nothing but the sigh of the species; the wail of the species. The lovers, very young and decrepit, garland their woven hands, very stupidly, staring at each other – at the closed windows of their eyes, and suffering, eager, they seem to complain that they’re the only ones who are drifting through that place. And they emit sounds which, if they were sane, they would certainly not ascribe to their phonatory emission. Not at all: possessed and bewitched by a sort of arrogant irresponsible duality, they do not investigate thoroughly the quality of timbre and even less the extraneousness of those “outer” (indeed) voices, which certainly cannot really belong to the rutting nothingness that claims – it’s absurd – its urgency to be brought into the world.
These wails, sounds, are “gone with the wind” and nothing else. These come from those who already suffer in advance the rottenness of procreation to which they are condemned: birth pangs and stupid fathers in excruciating clinics. Relishes the third who’s not (ed. the one who’s not yet born, the child who has the good fortune not to be conceived, enjoys himself); and it’s not really god, who certainly doesn’t feel like existing expressly for this, for planning aborted affairs, busy if anything to regenerate himself out of himself, in his eternity of the off-topic.
Poor, poor… Poor lovers! They undergo the fate of the two terms in the grammatical clause, joined by a copula, overturning this clause in the life lived. Every male in love, upon closer inspection, should deserve the castration inflicted on Abelard, reduced from his linguistic furor to erotic singer, from medieval Modist to Farinelli.
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