[Below is a sample from the first chapter to my forthcoming book]

The Erotic Code of Men
Reflections on the Erotic Discipline and the Blessing of Gender

Chapter One:  Being Undone 

“Sita invades my entire being and my love is entirely centered on her; Without that lady of lovely eyelashes, beautiful looks, and gentle speech, I cannot survive, O Saumitri.”
-Ramayama

There is no story worth telling if your blood and confusion are not in it.  A conversation on Love has to be personal, thus this begins with an intoxication, my intoxication for a woman as it should, like all good things, like all good stories. She was the “wrong” woman, of course, too troubled, too beautiful, too young, too interested in me. Let’s call her Eve. However, this will not be a story about her or us. It will be more about her absence, the longing she unleashed and a God who took a fancy to me.

Eros is the only God who has not deserted us for some distant Olympus. He is still here with us, we can still feel and worship him with the body, in the vast intimacy of the body. His commands, mostly whispered, often silent, are unequivocal; catastrophic for our ego, the rational mind, and a deep medicine to the soul of the world. And a catastrophe it was.

I moved cautiously with Eve, obeying hard-won shreds of wisdom in these matters gained through the years of my Love battles. I actually avoided her, fearing falling into the chaos that I could sense swirling about her. But she appeared to me in a dream. The Italian poet Dante (1265-1321) uses this word - appear- a lot as he speaks of Beatrice. She is always an apparition, a vision from the world beyond. My dream as well pointed out in no uncertain terms to a majesty inherent in her, and potentially to us both. Eve ‘appeared’ wearing the most beautiful dress I had ever seen, a wedding gown of great simplicity and grace, white and luminous. She herself emanated light. I chose the dream against my common sense as I always do; yes, I am not smart that way.  

It was a brief affair, a scattering of days. Yet the brevity was profound and intense. I never felt so fully received by a woman. And that feeling expanded me, stretched my sense of self. I was on fire and I felt like there was nothing I could not do. I wrote more about it in chapter seven. I hope you will get there.  For now, suffice it to say she dumped me suddenly like I had always known she would. No surprise there. The surprise was my reaction.

I was utterly devastated. I went down a rabbit hole of despair, self pity. I became possessed with immense grief. I cried profusely. You know the symptoms: you can’t sleep or eat and you start to worry about your own sanity. Your friends are concerned as well, yet you are immune to their sensible counsel. You are taken by something, it is overwhelming you. The Greeks had a name for falling in Love, “Katoke” meaning a possession. I think they were right. I was not in control. I was ruled.

I found solace in nightly furious fast hikes, trying to stay a step ahead of my grief and so that people could not see the tears often streaming down my cheeks, utterly lost. Teenager behavior in a fully grown man! I did not recognize myself. It was not my first love. Far from it. I had been rejected before, a few times, actually, and I had known fully that it would not have “worked out” before “getting in.” I accepted her invitation clear-headed. There was even a small part of me that remained lucid after the break-up. I knew I had chosen to be wounded. Yet owning it would not stop the bleeding. The pain far exceeded the economy of an unrequited affair: it had been so short, I hardly got to know her. My grief and sense of profound loss was out of proportion. There was something bigger than me “not getting the girl.” It was a kind of a spell. What was it? 

At the beginning of the Vita Nova, Dante’s book chronicling his relationship with Beatrice, when she appears to Dante for the first time, he hears a voice inside saying: “Ecce deum fortiori tuum appareunt” which in English translates to, “Here a God stronger than me has appeared.” Beatrice conjures the presence of a god. We humans are poorly equipped for such encounters, yet they happen all the time… Later in the same paragraph, the same voice will add, “Oh poor me, I shall be greatly affected”. Soon after, Dante becomes physically ill. 

I knew what he meant. I wasn’t feeling well, at all. In the Symposium, Socrates describes the erotic experience as a ladder that allows you, through your beloved, to reach a place of eternal beauty. More than climbing a ladder, I felt I was riding a jet elevator to the terrace at the top of a skyscraper where immense vistas and possibilities opened up to me suddenly. I was up there when she pulled the rug out from under my feet and yes, indeed, I fell and fell and fell yet more. I could not control the descent and fell straight into a whirlpool, a cosmic washing machine on a fast cycle, without light, exit. I did not know what was up or down, left or right. It felt as if I was being disassembled, deconstructed, undone. That is how the domination of this god felt like: horrible if you resisted. 

In my early days while living in India, my teacher spoke often about growing up in a village on the bank of a river.  He soon learned while trying to swim in its treacherous waters, that there are two ways to extricate oneself from a whirlpool: either fight or surrender. To choose to fight invites the risk of exhaustion and certain death by drowning. If you choose surrender, the vortex will take you down, but eventually it will spit you out at the very bottom.      

The way out
is  
the way through.
 

Ibn Azim- the Andalus poet of the 11th century - writes wisely “… I may tell you I never drank of the water of union without increasing in me the ardent thirst for more: this is the verdict of one who seeks remedy in his own illness…..” ( The Ring of the Dove)

“To seek remedy in my own illness….” There was an invitation  to embrace the Chaos until it could become a Cosmos. So I chose to endure until the spiral spat me out.  These pages are the result. 

We proud modern people, trained to be always in control, we cannot conceive “...a god stronger than me who has come to dominate me…” but if you reflect, if you have ever been in love, it is quite an accurate way to interpret this holy folly. It took me a long time to understand and accept that my turmoil had nothing to do with the young woman and everything to do with a god. Again, the Greeks referred to falling in Love as “katoke,” a possession by Eros. That is what you might find if you hold your breath underwater long enough: I was alone with Love. At least I knew who held my head down.   I later learned this is a condition deeply studied by Sufi teachers like Ibn Arabi, Italian poets like Dante and Cavalcanti and thousands more but I sure did not know it then. 

Love stranded in modernity.