The muse of epic poetry’s father? Zeus.
We commonly think of sports as war by other means, and some even think of love as war, and the beleaguered, the poor, the clinically depressed among us, sadly feel life is war. And, of course, Darwinian nature is war.
Not only is war everywhere—in addition, we are faced with this sad truth: everybody is in it for themselves.
Well, here’s the good news—perhaps.
We love ourselves.
Our life, our heritage, our struggles, our beliefs, our experience, our friends, as it all connects with ourselves—we love ourselves, and even if we hate parts of ourselves, it is always the disappointment for someone we deeply love; who else, how else, do we find what we know in order to know the world, but through our own selves? We open our eyes and see the world, or close them—our eyes—and the whole world goes away. So the world, as amazing as it is, is ours in the most complete sense. Love exists—foremost and always—for ourselves.
So why is war better for us than love?
Because of what we just said.
The depressing reality of life: everybody is in it for themselves is a reality of love. Wrap that around your brain for a moment.
Can we blame people for loving themselves over everything else? Of course we cannot. Love is involuntary, as we all know. How can we not love ourselves? The unthinking will thump their umbrella on the ground, or thump their multicultural textbook on the desk and cry out, “selfish!”
No. Involuntary self-love is not selfish. Self-love is simply the greatest love there is. It may take a moment, but cancel your righteous indignation. Wrap. Your. Brain. Around it. Self-love is the greatest love. Not because we don’t love the world. But because—we, ourselves—do. We love the world. We love the world as ourselves, loving ourselves loving the world: loving what loves—ourselves—more than anything.
So love—happy, unhappy, all kinds—is actually lonely and individual.
Who knows Mozart’s music? Who knows and loves it? Who truly loves the most beautiful things worthy of our love?
A crowd?
Ha ha ha!
No, not the crowd.
The soloist. That rare, and gifted, and self-practiced, and devoted and unique, and monk-like human being who lives with Mozart—in their brain and in their heart and in their hands.
The audience at a concert hall may love the sounds of Mozart they are hearing, but where is the love (of Mozart) truly found?
In the individual—the master soloist playing Mozart.
Love lives in the individual, not the group.
Now, you might object—I know you will, if you are like most—“Mozart? That is a rather rare and elitist example! What about…table salt that a friendly crowd, eating together, are enjoying?”
Ha! I reply this way: how egalitarian and noble of you, to imagine people enjoying the taste of salt! I bet you think you are very community-minded and down-to-earth, but your example refutes nothing I am saying.
The taste of salt is a common thing, but we experience the taste in our own mouths, on our own tongue, and lick the granules from our own lips. Take salt away from any individual at that table and we will see immediately how that individual howls in protest, and cries out, bereft of all the apparent ” community” to which, moments ago, he apparently belonged.
The most irrational and indignant types are those who champion the entirely abstract reality of tribe and community.
They are very irrational and they are very indignant. Annoying, if we must say the truth.
Because they lack love. And they lack love because they think it is found in the “unselfish” love of community, when, as we have just demonstrated, it is not found there at all. It lives alone in the individual, who in the monk-like devotion of their cell (their self) they have practiced, with their own hands, for hours and hours and hours, Mozart, in an orgy of selfish passion and love—with breaks in-between, eating salt, that temporarily sticks to their lips.
So war is better—in general, and for most instances, and for most people—than love.
Because only with war are alliances necessary.
We would be terribly lonely without war.
And by war, we mean anything which materially advances a group, short of bombing and killing—though, as we know, it sometimes will come to that.
Friendship, then, belongs to war—not to the lonely intricacies of love.
She practiced for hours and hours her Mozart, and had no friends.
Only through war do people other than ourselves even exist.
You—truly alone and inviolate—belong to love—and its terrible loneliness.
War, if you hate the burden of love’s loneliness, is your salvation—because war belongs to the group.
The wars over the silk trade, the wars over tea and coffee and cotton and tobacco and sugar…all the alliances which war enforces…war is the terrible mother of friendship and sacrifice.
War is life. Love is you.
Most don’t even exist as “you,” but merely as a reactionary part of some war machine, indignantly defending their race, their group, their clique, their empire, their plot of woolly ground, their cold, salty, whistle of sea.
The others will defy you—ah, they will—for as others they all belong to war.
Even poetry is war.
Publishing, broadcasting, and reviewing is thick with alliances and conquest.
Mozart, the one you vaguely know, is war, an expanding empire—which is the goal of all written words and written music.
The drums, marked to be played just this way, the sound of them, fill the auditorium, the void, the world—and your neighbors stamp their feet.
This very essay is marching to war. War, here, is our aim.
In my poem you would hear the same.
Perhaps you love the soloist—(it depends on so many things!) as they exit the stage?
Are you conquered and alone?
If you are, let the rest applaud; you have gone into that happy dream: loving, helpless, unreachable.
