To Love Truly Is To Want The Other Free

LOCKS representing true love forever on Paris bridges

From l'mmoraliste

At the heart of love à la française lies the idea of 

freedom. To love truly is to want the other free, and this 

includes the freedom to walk away. Love is not about 

possession or property. Love is no prison where two 

people are each other’s slaves. Love is not a commodity, 

either. Love is not capitalist, it is revolutionary. If 

anything, true love shows you the way to selflessness.

 The entire article here

So please tell me where is the grey, boring, monotonous 

thought of "cheating" coming from?

The French Know

 Yet, instead of sharing the naïve joy of the world’s 

Romeos and Juliets, some Parisians have felt 

increasingly irritated. Walking on those bridges 

has become almost insufferable for them. The pain 

doesn’t come only from the fact that some bridges, 

like Pont de l’Archevêché and Pont des Arts, now 

feel as if they could collapse under the weight of 

tourists’ undying love but also from the idea 

that a lock could represent love. Such an 

idea is abhorrent to many French people.

“The fools! They haven’t understood a thing about love, have they?” 

.......Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir famously never married and 

never lived together and, although a couple in the absolute sense of the term, 

they had lasting and meaningful relationships with strings of brilliant minds 

and pretty faces. They deemed jealousy bourgeois and 

banal.

In his recent book, “In Praise of Love,” the French 

philosopher Alain Badiou 

reminds us that love implies 

constant risk. There is no safe, 

everlasting love. The idea 

that you can lock two people’s 

love once and for all, and toss 

the key, is a puerile fantasy. 

For Mr. Badiou, love is 

inherently hazardous, always 

on the brink of failure and 

above all vulnerable. Embrace its fragility, wish your 

beloved 

to be free and you might just, only just, have a chance to 

retain his or her undying gratitude, and love. But don’t 

ever 

dream of locks and throwing keys overboard, 

especially not 

in Paris.

DeLillo's Elise in Cosmopolis:

No he (Cronenberg) didn't keep the relationship between Elise and Packer the same as in the book:

What is money to a poet, she says, love the world and trace it in a line of verse. Without Elise there's no love of the world. No Elise makes the movie as detached as Eric is in it. Cosmopolis the book is a verse. Cosmopolis the movie is not, it's a movie.

Instead of words from the book, Cronenberg says he gives an actor's face.
This post is for Elise's face missing in the movie when Eric realizes he loves her and she slips away.

For Elise, the face of love. The kind of love which sprungs out mysteriously in unexpected places; which enables, is not selfish, makes one do foolish things and wear turbans, which supports and understands without asking, which gives and makes one free to be a gull at dawn, anything and everything one can be. Which makes one an overman. Even if everything and anything one is, is dead in the end. Precisely because that which one ultimately is in the end is dead .

Amor fati, nothing altered, nothing alterable.

Cronenberg thought this part was a fantasy because Cronenberg thinks love is a fantasy.

“Love is not a state, a feeling, a disposition, but an exchange, uneven, fraught with history, with ghosts, with longings that are more or less legible to those who try to see one another with their own faulty vision.” - Judith Butler

In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison writes (and I have quoted this many times), “Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love.”

In Mourning Diary, Roland Barthes writes (he is speaking of emotional intelligence), “…intelligence is everything that permits us to live superlatively with another person.”

This is where knowing how to treat someone well and wanting to treat someone well converge.

From Masha Tupitsyn: 

http://mashatupitsyn.tumblr.com/post/36858226254/untitled-28

And So The Lion Fell In Love With The Lamb - Isaiah, Twilight

The Lion In Love - Aesop

And it was all those mediocre untalented directors who pulled your fangs Rob.

That you traded your body thrusting, thrusting, thrusting for so they could ride on your back to the box office NOT as it turned out.

Just as you have conspired - knowingly or not - with Cronenberg to defang DeLillo by ringing that fucking NYSE bell this morning.

Occupy do not ever forgive him for this. Do not ever forgive either one of them for this. 

Cronenberg will get his "30 pieces of silver" in financing for his next film for this.

Rob will get maybe some acting acclaim.

THE USUAL for bending over to take it up the ass. 

An Open Letter To Rob Pattinson

Love and Humiliation

are words that do not belong in the same sentence.

Unless you are denying Love

Blindly, that is the only elegant way to love. What reproach could there be for someone who discreetly and totally devotes himself to another; what reproach could there be for someone who is the object of such devotion? Blind destination: that is the direction dreams go, in ideas and love. (Baudrillard - Cool Memories 1980-85 p. 105)

So far as existence is concerned, as Ajar (Romain Gary's alter ego) would say, it needs to be taken in charge by someone. No one can be expected to bear the responsibility for their own life. This Christian and modern idea is a vain and arrogant proposition.  Moreover, it is a groundless utopian notion....It is so much more human to put one's fate, one's desire, one's will into the hands of another. Circulation of responsibilities, declension of wills, perpetual transfer of forms. Apart from this subtle path, which is attested to by a great many cultures, there is only the totalitarian path of a collective assumption. (Baudrillard - Cool Memories 1980-85 p. 119)

BTW This is what Eric Packer does whenever he leaves the limo. He is letting the "world will him". Too bad Cronenberg didn't know that in his misreading of DeLillo's novel.

Since it is impossible to own someone, it is impossible for that someone to "cheat" on you. 

Someone can cheat you in a transaction which occurs in the Order of Production.

They cannot "cheat" on you sexually in the Symbolic Order of Seduction since you do not and cannot own them.

CHEAT is a word now almost universally used that is a sound-bite, a ready-made that deprives you of the ability to think, the language necessary to think in, about this situation, and as long as you have not torn it out of your mind, you are trapped, your freedom has been stolen from you by the use of this stupid word. CHEAT is creating your reality for you via an illusion.

You can enter an institutional marriage contract, that as Kant said, "is a legal contract giving each person the ownership of the other's sexual organs."

Someone can be a slave but slaves retain their own individual freedom. Only a slave can be liberated, but only an individual can give up, deny, disregard, be unaware of, ignore, exert, choose to practice their own freedom to any extent they choose. They may be dominated, but they are still free. 

Working, performing, living under an authoritarian system, the individual may be dominated, ruled, whatever, but the individual is still free. 

Take Cronenberg directing Cosmopolis. An authoritarian director he masks his authoritarianism with - in this case - a requirement that the lines spoken by the actor must be exactly as written. No changes. The actor is still free in the sense that the face, the body, the movement the eyes, the voice, are still the actor's own. The actor is free to express.

Take Rupert Sanders, the permissive parent model. His actors are encouraged to express their own opinions about the performance of the scene. To freely express their perceptions and interpretations on how to play it. The director inputs, discusses, persuades, encourages, strengthens, weakens, whatever, and in doing this exerts the aura of his dominance. 

When the camera roles the director directs the scene. 

This all seems very democratic eh. Very respectful of the actors.

What the director has done is to take the thoughts, feelings, perceptions, interpretations of the actors and usurped them under his direction of the scene. Yes the actor still retains his/her own freedom, but that has been compromised in this situation. It has been stolen in homeopathic doses so the actor is not even aware that it no longer belongs to him, but to the director who is calling the shots on the scene. 

The director controls and dominates on a meta level. An invisible level.

This is a subtle difference. Do you see it?  The Jesuits have known this subtle way of "spinning" someone's mind for centuries. They are masters at it. Eric Maddox learned to be a master at it, which is why he got Saddam against all odds.  A Jesuit education will give you this because it will have been done to you, giving you the opportunity to "identify with the aggressor" as Freud would say it.

Kristen Stewart has been carefully aided in a performance of Snow White by a subtle director. Her first physical role as an "action hero". Her fears have been alleviated, she has mastered riding (always a sexual challenge with females) and has assumed an active rather than a passive Snow White persona. Her director has helped her as a therapist might, but used his dominance to enter into a seductive relationship with her. 

Not with Charlize who would know exactly how to handle this situation. No, with the young very inexperienced Stewart, her vulnerability an erotic attraction for him, and in the past for you BTW.

Stewart has been subtly dominated by Sanders, without her awareness, on the shooting set of Snow White. This has led to her insecurity as to how to handle his advances on THAT AFTERNOON! She has handed a certain quality/amount of her freedom of action to him on the set without knowing that she has done so. She didn't know, so she couldn't take it back. This is why there are acting coaches BTW.

This is something two people in a relationship discuss, argue about, confront, threaten, weep over, endlessly because this situation is interfaced in the minds of individuals just as surely as the screens in Eric Packer's life are interfaced with his mind, his perceptions, his thinking and reasoning abilities, his emotions, and tearing it out during the OMITTED naked bodies scene in the novel is excruciatingly painful to him; to deliver himself from its total influence. 

But how can you deliver yourself from this kind of influence if you don't know it exists?

An object does not exist until and unless it is observed. - William Burroughs

Stewart has been thrown to the lions and wolves, meat for the tabloids, entertainment for empty lives, vulnerable primarily for her unknowing. 

Unprotected and Abandoned 

Twihards: Why You Didn't Get the Meadow Scene You Wanted

Benjamin's 1936 The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction on Dadaism:

Illuminations

One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could not be fully satisfied only later.... The Dadaists attached much less importance to the sales value of their work than to its uselessness for contemplative immersion. (Illuminations 237)

.... Dadaists became an instrument of ballistics. It hit the spectator like a bullet, it happened to him, thus acquiring a tactile quality. It promoted a demand for the film, the distracting element of which is also primarily tactile, being based on changes of place and focus which periodically assail the spectator. Let us compare the screen on which a film unfolds with the canvas of a painting. The painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon himself to his associations. Before the movie frame he cannot do so. No sooner has his eye grasped a scene than it is already changed. It cannot be arrested. Duhamel, who detests the film and knows nothing of its significance, though something of its structure, notes this circumstance as follows: "I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images." (Duhamel, Scenes la vie future, 1930 p. 52) The spectator's process of association in view of these images is indeed interrupted by their constant, sudden change. This constitutes the shock effect of the film, which, like all shocks, should be cushioned by heightened presence of mind. (I p. 238)

Benjamin does not note here that the destruction of memory is a consequence. Memory requires time for contemplation, a quality of time not too slow and not too fast. Just right as Goldilocks would say.

In the decline of middle class society, contemplation became a school for asocial behavior; it was countered by distraction as a variant of social conduct. (I p. 238)

New Moon

Distraction and contemplation form polar opposites. (I p.239) And we are aware how Meyer has used the concept distraction any number of times in Twilight. Vampires are easily distracted. Bella is not. Until she is a vampire.

What might all this have to say about ADHD or ADD if there is a difference? Are we reinforcing and provoking shifting attention spans?

The Tree of Life by Terrence Malick is pure contemplation. It is also true that his films have not been blockbusters, although they all have been critical successes in one way or another. Malick is an artist first. He makes the films he wants to make.

He is far more than an auteur director. He is a consummate artist of film in our time. He is preserving contemplation as a way of thinking and he is introducing it to those who have not experienced it before: The distractible ones, the ones who tend to walk out on this film. The ones who find it excruciatingly

The Tree of Life Terrence Malick

boring. The ones who hate it. The ones who would have hated the Meadow Scene as Meyer wrote it. The ones who have probably never watched a Bergman film. And what Rob Pattinson's fans love about him without knowing is his intensity in contemplation, his way of gazing at a person and really seeing them, not a distracted flicking of the eyes. And by consuming every single banal image floating globally the fans are destroying their ability to contemplate him. They are just flicking their eyes down and across a myriad of images on a screen.

Here's DeLillo:

He stood a while longer, watching a single gull lift and ripple in a furl of air, admiring the bird, thinking into it, trying to know the bird, feeling the sturdy earnest beat of its scavenger's ravenous heart. (C p. 7)

Didi: Don't you see yourself in every picture you love? You feel a radiance wash through you. It's something you can't analyze or speak about clearly. What are you doing at that moment? You're looking at a picture on a wall. That's all. But it makes you feel alive in the world. It tells you yes, you're here. And yes, you have a range of being that's deeper and sweeter than you knew. ( p.30)

He watched her. He didn't think he wanted to be surprised, even by a woman, this woman, who'd taught him how to look, how to feel enchantment damp on his face, the melt of pleasure inside a brushstroke or band of color. (C p. 3)

Rob Pattinson as Eric Packer

My mood shifts and bends. But when I'm alive and heightened, I'm super-acute. Do you know what I see when I look at you? I see a woman who wants to live shamelessly in her body. Tell me this is not the truth. You want to follow your body into idleness and fleshiness. .... Tell me I'm making it up. You can't do that. It's there in your face, all of it, the way it rarely shows in any face.  (C 49)

Jane Melman:Pull back. I am advising you in this matter not only as your chief of finance but as a woman who would still be married to her husbands if they had looked at her the way you have looked at me here today. (C 34)

Rob Pattinson as Eric Packer

Stephenie Meyer Dreamtime: Dreaming Edward Cullen Into Existence and Robert Pattinson

In discussing the feminine and outraging PC feminists Jean Baudrillard says that the femme fatale was hallucinated into existence from male hysteria. But now there are no men for her. Madonna keeps changing herself in the hopes of finding one but there is no one there. Perhaps the situation can be saved by female hysteria inventing a male counterpart of the femme fatale?

 Possible Solution - hystericization of the masculine by women as quid pro quo of masculine
hysteria of the feminine, (Baudrillard - Screened Out p 53)

This is what Stephenie Meyer did by creating the character of Edward Cullen played by Rob Pattinson

It would seem that Stephenie Meyer has responded to the challenge by dreaming Edward Cullen, a vampire who falls in love with a human girl. Upon waking from this dream Meyer began writing instead of getting her kids off to school with breakfast and their packed lunches.

Against the 'objective' analysis of an 'objective' state of affairs (the stupidity of sociology!) it must be seen that we think and speak well only of what we have not experienced - that is to say, of what  we have not exhausted the imagining of by lived experience - just as one truly loves a woman only if one has not exhausted one's imagining of her in physical pleasure. (Baudrillard Fragments 145)

Stephenie has said  - on Oprah? - that she never knew an Edward. Ah, that truly is a loss for her but a gift to the world's women. For in imagining Edward Cullen, she has brought Robert Pattinson into existence. Yes, I know, he says he is not like Edward at all, but he contradicts himself all the time by the way he behaves with Kristen. He is loving, affectionate, considerate, protective, sensitive, honorable, all those things modern men have no idea how to be because the originals are gone in their lives. 

The subject/object cannot be separated. In experimental research the experiment must be designed as a double-blind experiment. As the experimenter, or even the lab assistant giving the dose, pill, treatment situation, the assistant cannot be allowed to know whether it is the real one or the placebo, nor can the recipient know either. When one or the other or both know, the results are contaminated. Almost all behavioral research before the 1960's is contaminated. A mathematical correction has been applied to the previous data, but the raw data is gone now, so we are stuck with what we have in all its contamination.

At the micro-particle level it is the same. A particle cannot be observed without being affected. Can anyone expect that Robert Pattinson was completely separate and unaffected by the character of Edward Cullen? Or Edward Cullen unaffected by Robert Pattinson? Who is the subject? Who is the object? I have no idea.

Toby McGuire

I only know that now there is a new type of masculine seduction out there. And I have noticed that male actors are imitating certain of Rob Pattinson's habitual gestures. Like biting his lower lip. You will see the abandoned bridegroom in The Adjustment Bureau doing this as he stands against the wall - doorway - smoldering. And Toby McGuire in his new Prada ad seems to be creating a new look for himself. Smoldering.

"Psychoanalysis overturned. Instead of the dream being the fulfillment of desires unsatisfied in real life, real life would be the site where desires born of dreams were fulfilled. Instead of being the dumping ground of the unconscious, dreams would be the matrices of real events - thus becoming like the 'dream' of the Aborigines, for whom a child has to be dreamt before he can be begotten, 'real' paternity being merely the fulfillment of the dream." (Cool Memories IV 105)

Bella dreams her child into existence, does she not? (Breaking Dawn)

Dreamtime

Herzog's film Where the Green Ants Dream follows a group of Aborigines in Australia following the Songlines of the Green Ants. They believe that the world was dreamt into existence. The mountains, the hills, the valleys, Rocks, rivers,and they make pilgrimages to these places dreamt into existence. They know where to go because the Songlines are an orally remembered song map of where these places are. The Whites have built over many of them, or there is a store where they sit in the corner and hum because that's where the Green Ants are. These pilgrimages last months and they walk all the way with their babies and children teaching them the songs and places. The first toys of the babies are leaves, pieces of grass, flowers, and so they learn to love the earth this way.

Songlines

Bruce Chatwin's Songlines is Chatwin's walking tour of Australia. He used to be a very successful antiquities specialist for Sothebys. He bagan going blind and his doctor advised him to quit and go traveling. As Chatwin walked across the tarmac to his plane, his vision returned. His books are a marvel to read.