“…The language of ecstasy is only good for the speaker himself…if your ecstatic utterance yields no precise meaning, how can anyone tell what you are saying? You will be talking into the air. If I do not know the meaning of the sound the speaker makes, his words will be gibberish to me, and mine to him…I say, then, that the man who falls into ecstatic utterance should pray for the ability to interpret.”
Corinthians is a radical text. It’s all about love and doing right by love, doing right (as in ethics) by loving. Also it brings love back to thought. Which is what both Badiou and Adam Phillips call for. Thinking through frustration. How love, as my mother always says, requires real intelligence and thinking-through. Feelings alone are not what make love or a relation real. Feelings don’t know how to survive or endure on their own. That’s why they need thought. You don’t always have to like (enjoy) someone to love them. But thought brings us back to choosing love. Returns us again and again to the one we love.
Whenever I ask my mother why she is always there for me and my father, she always answers simply: “I just love you. That’s all. I just love him. That’s all.”
Of course that’s not all. But love is what makes the all possible. Infinity in finitude.
So to return to Adam Phillips’ passage on frustration in Missing Out that I posted and wrote about last week :
“Thought is what makes frustration bearable, and frustration makes thought possible. Thinking modifies frustration, rather than evading it, by being a means by which we can go from feeling frustrated to figuring out what to do about it, and doing it—what might be called imagination—leading to real action in reality. And the ability to think also means, and depends upon, the ability to have a conversation. It is, we should note, the gulf between wanting and actually doing something about it…For Freud and Wilfred Bion, satisfaction takes thought.”
If thought makes frustration bearable, thinking is what makes love possible, endurable. Thinking-love is what allows us to invent solutions to problems, which also takes courage.
A couple of nights ago, Isiah and I were texting about this:

Every “love” is not infinite, but every truth is. What is true always remains true. Corinthians: “Love will never come to an end.” This reminds me of what Isiah was texting the other night about Badiou, resurrection, and infinity; how when something is true it will always be true, eternally true. Which made me think about how Anne Carson once said in a Poets & Writer’s interview that when truth can easily slip into falsehood, it was never true. When someone suddenly stops-loving someone, it’s because they never loved them to begin with. How that often happens. No matter how much pain W caused me in the end, I never question the truth of that relationship. I never doubt it. I never break it apart in my mind. It never falls apart in my heart, even after all this time. That does not mean that I have not suffered its dissolution terribly, or been angry. But nevertheless that love remains true, even if its truth has been suspended. Love is the truth that endures, a truth that cannot be un-done. Cannot be made un-true. And that is how it endures even when it is over.
