“Our greatest blessings come to us by way of madness” says Socrates in Plato’s Phaedrus. But as Dodds reminds us in the book The Greeks and the Irrational: “the father of Western rationalism is not represented as maintaining the general proposition that it is better to be mad than sane, sick, or sound. He qualifies his paradox with the words “provided the madness is given by divine gift”. For Plato there are four kinds of divine madness:
1. Prophetic madness (whose patron god is Apollo)
2. Telestic or Ritual madness (whose patron god is Dionysus)
3. Poetic madness (inspired by the Muses)
4. Erotic madness (inspired by Aphrodite and Eros)
The letters I am making available are my attempts to record what came through in moments of erotic madness and philosophical reflections upon that madness, times of being its recipient without sharing it, its different phases of death and rebirth, and the challenge to be touched by it or love in its absence. They are examples of what Roland Barthes called the lover’s discourse. They are expressions of gratitude, devotion, and desire to follow the ascent of Eros from the visceral to the transcendental, or vice versa, that some unique people in my life have inspired me to do, with a little bit of poetic license and editing for literary & privacy considerations.
Dodds, in the work already mentioned, maintains that “Eros supplies the dynamic impulse which drives the soul forward in its quest of a satisfaction transcending earthly experience.” The higher we ascend in our pursuit of Eros, the more we realize that Eros was never merely leading us to our loved one, but to the One itself through our beloveds. But what is the One, you may ask? It is a key notion introduced by the Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus; as the philosopher Edward Moore explains:
The “concept” of the One is not, properly speaking, a concept at all, since it is never explicitly defined by Plotinus, yet it is nevertheless the foundation and grandest expression of his philosophy. Plotinus does make it clear that no words can do justice to the power of the One; even the name, “the One,” is inadequate, for naming already implies discursive knowledge, and since discursive knowledge divides or separates its objects in order to make them intelligible, the One cannot be known through the process of discursive reasoning (Ennead VI.9.4). Knowledge of the One is achieved through the experience of its “power” (dunamis) and its nature, which is to provide a “foundation” (arkhe) and location (topos) for all existents (VI.9.6). The “power” of the One is not a power in the sense of physical or even mental action; the power of the One, as Plotinus speaks of it, is to be understood as the only adequate description of the “manifestation” of a supreme principle that, by its very nature, transcends all predication and discursive understanding.
Edward Moore, “Plotinus” at Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
It is to that place that I believe all love letters are ultimately addressed. When possessed by erotic madness, you become a receptacle of grace, and what you are recording on your love letter, is ultimately a love letter to the universe, as manifested in the form of your beloved. If you respect that grace, and the vessels we are for it, our love letters become a celebration of the cosmic attraction we enjoy and often deliciously tormented by.
For the primary gift of grace through the people we feel attracted to is the awakening of our erotic desire, “the instant revelation that this is what matters…without an argument or evidence but with an absolute certainty beyond cogito ergo sum, Eros arrives hidden in mortal vessels, an ancient god protecting mere humans from its original form so as not to drive them to irreversible madness” as I write in one panegyric you will find in these letters.
Just because we are made aware of what is important through erotic grace manifested in the human form, that in itself, does not give us the right to possess it nor the ability to do so, as love is only gifted, never taken. What makes one a lover is being grateful for desire over and above whether you are going to taste its object. That is why lovers always love the people who spur them to love, more than the return of their affections. You love the tree even if the fruit is forbidden, and you never shame or blame trees whose fruits you are not allowed to taste. For their gift was in making you feel desire, and desire is life dancing inside you, tempting you to live. That should be enough reason for gratitude instead of blaming and shaming those who helped you desire something they may not have been inclined to share with you. Be responsible for your own emotions, even if others had a role in arousing them. Just because they aroused them does not necessarily make them responsible for satisfying them. The smell of a beautiful meal does not obligate the cook to feed those who love its smell. You have to be invited to the feast…
What these letters have been are attempts to be worthy of an invitation, celebrations of the feast, and a deep reverence of the force that moves us to it and the source from which it comes.
It is for that reason that I’ve often spent countless hours even for a single sentence or phrase in a love letter. Even when I know I may never receive a response. For these letters are but a prayer to Love, expressed with deep gratitude to the often unaware hierophants through which it becomes manifest. It is for that reason that they can no longer be kept only for the eyes for which they were intended. I have of course hidden or changed all the personal details that are not conducive to reveal the universal message the world would do well to remember: that Love is the Way to the One. I could no longer keep these prayers in the hands of the few when they are in so much need by the hearts of the many. I hope they open your heart as much as I had to open mine to write them.
