Morteza Mardiha's Article 'The Death of Majnun: A Critique of Love'

Love is a relationship entirely of attraction and desire between a human and another human, an animal, or an object; wherein the desirer is generally called the lover, the desired the beloved, and the sought-after thing, union. And the sign of its truth is that the lover, in possessing the beloved, or in hoping for it, sees himself as possessing everything, even if he has nothing, and in lacking it, sees himself as possessing nothing, even if he has everything. And another is that he often does not see the beloved's faults, or sees them as virtues. And also that in this wanting, he considers himself justified and does not fear, does not heed advice, and does not accept partnership; and among these, the loving relationship between human and human, and of that, the relationship between man and woman, is more important, more famous, and more difficult. To the extent that a vast volume of what has been said, written, sung, drawn, built, and practiced about love has been the story of an attraction between a man and a woman in which sexuality has played a considerable part.

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The Death of Majnun: A Critique of Love

Dr. Morteza Mardiha

I try to avoid the obsession of defining love, but I fear that mutual understanding may fall into anxiety. So I am compelled to say that by this word I mean a relationship entirely of attraction and desire between a human and another human, an animal, or an object; wherein the desirer is generally called the lover, the desired the beloved, and the sought-after thing, union. And the sign of its truth is that the lover, in possessing the beloved, or in hoping for it, sees himself as possessing everything, even if he has nothing, and in lacking it, sees himself as possessing nothing, even if he has everything. And another is that he often does not see the beloved's faults, or sees them as virtues. And also that in this wanting, he considers himself justified and does not fear, does not heed advice, and does not accept partnership; and among these, the loving relationship between human and human, and of that, the relationship between man and woman, is more important, more famous, and more difficult. To the extent that a vast volume of what has been said, written, sung, drawn, built, and practiced about love has been the story of an attraction between a man and a woman in which sexuality has played a considerable part.

What has been said about love in the spiritual sense holds little meaning. Love is an excess of affection, longing, and passion; how can one be so toward something that cannot even be grasped in the clutches of imagination? Rumi, who was the chief of spiritual lovers, at least used people as a pretext and kindled his passion at their feet; from an illiterate goldsmith like Salah al-Din to a chosen disciple like Husam al-Din, or a vague and dubious elder like Shams al-Din. That spiritual meaning had to manifest physically for amorous ghazals to flow from it. Muhyi al-Din, too, who brought theoretical mysticism to its zenith, his Tarjuman al-Ashwaq consisted of ghazals for his beloved, a girl from Isfahan, and when union did not occur, the mirror of the morning draught became a nocturnal translation, and the spilled oil an offering to Shah Cheragh. They say that for these great figures, the body is a pretext for the soul, and why, for skeptics, should the reverse of the matter not be the matter?

So let us consider love in its most common manifestation, the buxom houris, and its most famous metaphor, which is burning: "A thousand efforts I made to conceal the secret of love / Yet atop the fire, I could not help but boil." Perhaps this single couplet of Sa'di would suffice as a defense for lovers; to cry out for their justice, if not to obtain it. Love is not a choice, it is an event; being besieged in a forest set ablaze, or drowning in the tumult of waves. Love is like a wild horse with a lasso around its neck, whose furious, stamping efforts to flee yield nothing but greater frenzy. It is from Nizami that "Love came and emptied the house / Raising the sword of recklessness." When someone's fervent affection conquers emotion, it casts everything out. Then sorrow and joy, poverty and wealth, fame and obscurity, all like a flock fleeing at the sight of a lion, have no power to resist before love. Love empties the house. Of everything, even reason; hence the raising of the sword of recklessness. Recklessness means I do not fear; I observe nothing; let whatever will be, be. Truly, why this utter indifference to counsel and advice? Because "My bond grew tighter from your advice / Your sage did not know love." Love must be known; it is a strange concoction: simple yet impossible. Its toe on the ground and its fingertip among the branches of the Tuba tree; a pendant between earth and heaven; suffering and pleasure intertwined, both profound; a vein of spirituality sublimated within sexuality. A strange transaction: the promise of houris in paradise, conditional upon shunning them on earth; and if you say roguishly, "I know not caution from love / I can never journey away from you," the threat is hell. Unless you do not take it seriously and join Attar's Shaykh San'an, who said, "If my path leads to hell, this path of mine / Seven hells shall burn from a single sigh of mine." Why all this fire? Why all this burning? Is it the dominance of black bile over the temperament? Or a vague and mysterious inclination that forces the heart's pump to vainly explore the closed circuit of veins: aroused emotion. It desires; that is all. What is in this color and gloss, in this twist and turn, that resistance against it is a desperate effort? So that our Hafiz warns us: "Sell not the strength of abstinence's arm to the beauties / For in this troop, a mere rider is taken as a knight." A rider not of those horsemen whose armored caparisons dazzle the eyes, but of those whose brilliance lies in their lack of armor: they blunt the sharp blade not with the hardness of a shield, but with their softness. What are these soft-bodied ones who force the hard-shelled into submission? What a strange war! Where your sword falls from your thick shoulder and your steady legs begin to tremble, and all this, from the freshness and delicacy of the one before you. It challenges you to battle; is it a winner? Not impossible. But often, all that mane and might avails you nothing. Like Sohrab, who hoisted Gordafarid onto his spear, but when she removed her helmet, revealing her hair and face, she forced Sohrab into submission.

The history of masculine love can be viewed in the form of a sea of ghazal collections. Nothing in this world has been described with such detail and repetition. The most beautiful poetic images from the masters of literature are crumbs from the table of the soft-bodied ones. The pleasures of this world are many: from eating and sleeping to promenading and recreation, and from these to pride and vanity. But among them, there is one that, single-handedly, washes the entire arena clean of any cheeky partner: love. Even epics, without a seasoning of it at their feast, become bitter and astringent. And mysticism, which is entirely about detachment from the world and its carnal "basenesses," has cloaked all the enigmatic allure of its "stay away" and "look away" regarding our share of them, beneath the skirt of these silver-shanked, jasmine-bosomed ones. Artistic beauties, too, are perhaps in part a product of frustration with these. The suppressed and swollen complexes in the heart, the result of the beloved's refusals to yield, find sublimation in solitude and dying of grief, and erupt in the form of poetry, painting, and story. Art is not always the product of unfulfilled individuals, but its essence, the historical product of unfulfillment, is not unlikely.

Romantic love is beautiful, but short-lived. At best, it may turn into lasting affection, and at worst, into lasting resentment. Inevitably, we see love more like the camel's thorn-eating: enduring pain for a state of intoxication. Beautiful mutual loves are pretty lies; and if they are true, they die young. Khosrow was not in love with Shirin; Shirin was in love with him. Shirin was not in love with Farhad; Farhad was in love with her. The world is ablaze with such one-sided loves. It is to escape this relentless burning that lovers resort to self-deception, telling themselves, "Though he said he would kill you with sorrow, I saw / that secretly he had a glance for me, the heart-burnt one." This is a balm, not very effective, yet inevitable, on a festering wound that, if it does not heal a little, eats away like a canker; and in the meantime, lamentation and curses are another balm, so that perhaps the lover might threaten the unattainable beloved with an illusory revenge and justice. But beloveds, always out of satiety, have either left the wailing, slavish pleas of lovers unanswered with a sneer or a frown (if not a stone and a curse), or have given, in Saadi's words, a class-based and of course logical response: "Why do you fall in my footsteps every moment? / Do you not know that I am not a bird for your snare?" And they have taken no account of their loneliness, sorrow, suffering, and even death. Even when you, a destitute lover, have not just appeared out of nowhere, but when the beloved has climbed the ladder of your fame and become the talk of the town, and without you there would have been no news of all this joy and eminence, still there will be no problem. Beloveds are in a perpetual auction, and often they will bestow the entirety of their affection on the one who makes the highest bid. So the wailing and anguish of Vahshi Bafqi, "I was the first one who became her buyer / I was the cause of the market's heat," leads nowhere and brings no commitment. The last person who has become the buyer pays a higher price, and fidelity in this market is a glory that seems to have been obsolete since eternity, and it is worth no more than an expression of dissatisfaction. Like a beggar who, when turned away empty-handed from a master's door, complains of the packing up of tolerance and chivalry.

It has been said that love is the only pretext for life; a world without love is a lifeless corpse. This is true. To the extent that one of the earliest Persian poems asks, how can the mountain gazelle live without a mate? If such a thought is held for an animal, the human condition is clear. But aside from the lover-like praises of love, how does love do this? What is the secret of this sorcery? Is it not that love, in the most elegant way, makes one forget the fundamental question? Reason, in principle, is the minister of the self and shows the way and the pitfall of pleasure. Love is a favored queen who herself commands the self. Until this favored one has entered the harem, the commander of the self might let go of reason's reins a little so it may wander idly. The fundamental question is one of the things that reason encounters in these wanderings: "From where have I come, what was the purpose of my coming?" ... Such strayings and questions are whispered in the commander's ear and sometimes disturb his pleasure. When the favored one appears on the horizon, reason must return to its primary duty; and if she enters the harem, reason goes on holiday, and in either case, inevitably, that unwritten margin of reason's diversions and the questions that trouble the commander also vanish. Love is the only pretext for life, because in its absence, reason shows a desert-like prospect, cold, black, and obscure, which is, simply, frightening and unpleasant. Hence the recommendation: "Speak of the minstrel and wine, and seek less the secret of the age / For no one has ever solved, nor will solve, this riddle with wisdom." Love, contrary to a host of claims on this matter, does not offer us a knowledge that could mend that rift; it merely eclipses reason under its warmth (and not its light) and constricts the path of its corrosive meddling. That is all!

Love is everything, because the human being is, first and foremost, not an epistemic agent but an instinctual one; not a seeker of understanding, but a seeker of pleasure; and what pleasure is greater than love-making. The highest pleasure for which we strive, body and soul, in a holy struggle, and in this, affection and sex are so intertwined in the bed of love that trying to determine the share of each, and to separate them, is difficult. And what necessity is there? “Rejoice, O love, our sweet passion / O physician of all our ailments.” Why is love the physician of all troubles, calamities, and pains? In part, because it so thickens the secretion of pleasure in the blood that the nerves, those prophets of pain, grow numb; and in part, because it is itself a pain so incurable and a suffering so soul-wearing that it leaves no room for any other suffering or pain; and it commandeers the six lanes of the widened arteries, with a host of red fugitives, in an endless race.

Love is, without reckoning, beautiful and desirable because our desire for beauty, and for desiring and being desired, is without reckoning. But this greatness, majesty, and even sanctity of love (which is the translation of desire being considered sacred), does not prevent the story of love from being the story of the seed and the snare. Classical romantic love is often a slipping into a wild river in a steep valley with a thousand rocky bends, where with every collision a part of the wall of the psyche’s body is scraped away, and ultimately, as in some action films, it ends at a high waterfall; with this difference, that our lover is not as shock-resistant as the hero of those films. Regarding this lack of shock-resistance in the lover, there are, of course, stories; like the story of the Baghdadi lover that Sana’i recounts in Hadiqat al-Haqiqa: the lover crosses the width of the Tigris every night in the winter season to reach union with his beloved on the other side of the river; and one night, when he notices a mole on his beloved’s face, he is advised by her not to swim the way back. The lover does not listen, comes, and dies; and the point is that because the fervor of love had subsided and the lover had emerged from the blindness caused by excessive rapture, he saw the beloved’s mole, and it became clear that what had made him invulnerable to the freezing cold of the Tigris was the dominant passion over him and the warmth resulting from the blood’s bewilderment in the veins, which, like a restless wild horse, was circling within the enclosure, and finding every way a dead end, it accelerated in a closed circuit, bringing foam to its mouth and sweat to its body; and this is the very warmth of love which, like wine, in Hedayat’s words, is a coat that is consumed. Have you ever thought about why wine and love are such close companions? Firstly, both disable reason and bring relief from the dispersion of thought and the evil of the world; secondly, love often leads to adventure and infidelity, and one cannot bear its pressures, and a painkiller is needed; love and wine are both old friends, after love comes the turn of wine. It is not without wisdom that the praise of love and the praise of wine have the highest frequency in lyric poetry.

Love is healing because, like Moses's magical staff, it becomes a dragon that swallows all cares, pains, hardships, and torments in a single onslaught, just as the conjuring tricks of Pharaoh's sorcerers, which were a handful of snakes and lizards, were swallowed. But how can one be pleased by the annihilation of sorrows and sufferings, through the departure of spiders and scorpions, when we are now faced with a dragon? A dragon whose closest, and perhaps exclusive, prey is the lover, whose bones it grinds to paste within the coils of its crushing embrace. Rumi speaks true: "Love was at first unruly and bloodthirsty / So that whoever is an outsider would flee." After all, what is the meaning of all this lamentation of pain and suffering, the supplication of need to the beloved, the endurance of the rival's cruelty, and finally, empty-handed, collapsing into one's own loneliness and failure? Hafez says: "A thousand blood drops would drip from the physicians' sleeves / If they were to experimentally lay a hand upon the wounded heart." Why? Because love is often merciless, unfair, torturous, and murderous; a lethal poison, but wrapped in a coating of honey. Hafez too (though apparently unlike Rumi), ultimately says the same thing: "When I fell in love, I said I have seized the pearl of purpose / I did not know what waves of blood this sea scatters." The love we are discussing, in most cases, is that very "femme fatale," whose languid, sickly glances, supported by a host of colors and patterns, softnesses and warmths, ironies and smiles, lows and highs, curves and heartbeats... like a powerful magnet, draws the lover with the greed for union, and often kills him. After all, Rumi himself elsewhere says something similar to Hafez's saying: that the dragon of the self (in our terms, the dragon of love) is not dead, but is dejected from the sorrow of lacking a tool; it needs a sun to shine upon it (and this sun is the coquetry, flirtation, scent, and face of the beloved) so that it may come to itself and show its true nature. After all, has not all this likening of love to madness been out of the perfection of reason? What else but the loss of reason could compel someone to engage in a transaction that the most audacious merchant would not undertake? For it is not a profitable trade; it is a gamble where loss is the most probable outcome; whether one stakes the entire capital on the very first throw and rises, or wins a few hands, a taste of delight blossoms within him, and when he is well warmed up, he may well leave the table with a negative capital.

There is nothing in this world more paradoxical than love; its appearance is self-sacrifice and its inner reality is monopoly. One face of it is sacrificing oneself for the other, and the other face is sacrificing the other for oneself. Outwardly, you wish to dissolve yourself in the other, and inwardly, you wish to dissolve the other in yourself. A story goes that a cupper wanted to bleed Majnun and was piercing him with the lancet, and Majnun could not bear it. They asked him, "You who are a lover and endure all this fever, why do you flee from a lancet?" He said: "I fear, O phlebotomist, if you bleed me / You might suddenly strike the lancet upon Layli." Why is Layli within Majnun? An unromantic answer is this: because the lover devours the beloved; he eats her and makes her a part of himself; that is why he becomes jealous. For every glance at the beloved is interpreted as nothing but ill intent towards the lover, towards the lover's property, towards the lover's life. This is like a 3D movie: although it seems exciting at first, it may often ultimately lead to dizziness, fear, and flight.

My love is an eruption to possess her. It wills, and in this willing there is a mysterious rapture that drives on, taking no account of obstacles, and like a bulldozer whose vast patience loses sight of every curve and turn, it drives straight ahead, choosing the shortest path, so that with its thunderous roars it may topple walls, sink its teeth into the earth to plow it, and then rest. Is this not why it has been said, "The love of the lover, with a hundred drums and blare / The love of the beloved is hidden and rare"? But this is not love. The hidden and concealed love is a mixture of fear and pride; from a being who is desired and does not desire, and who wants to be desired without desiring in return; and this, on the one hand, frightens her, and on the other, stirs an excitement in her heart: who is she, that she should be desired to this degree? With a glance in the mirror, she utters an "Allahu Akbar," and sometimes she pities the roaring giants who seek union with her, and sometimes she shows indifference and harshness, and because her preciousness, like any precious thing, breeds pride and fear, she becomes anxious. This relation, between male and female, is fundamentally two-sided, but it is well known that males have, in practice, been lovers far more often, longer, and more deeply than they have been beloveds. For this reason, the role of the beloved—which is, of course, not entirely imposed, accidental, or cultural, but is mostly natural and instinctive—is intertwined with women. Their weakness and beauty, and men's dominance and instinct, have made it so that beautiful women are bearers of a jewel box that highwaymen constantly covet, and the owner of the treasure, fearful and terrified, clutches the box to her side, glancing this way and that, seeking refuge in a safe place. This is why, in this arena, women are more often the oppressed and the wronged, while men are the humiliated; driven mad by failure. That apple which Adam and Eve bit into was not of a kind that they enjoyed equally. Eve, in a womanly way, scratched at it, and Adam, in a manly way, devoured it whole; and after the Fall, it was Adam who, in pursuit of Eve, scoured every corner, his thirst only growing with every drink. This is why women sought refuge in a corner and appeared less in the public sphere, to remain safer; and men, their powerful roars and virility were nothing but a translation of a powerful desire, which excess, on one hand, and failure, on the other, transformed into a pitiable weakness.

Majnun's love is much like turning off the lights and pressing one's foot on the pedal; or diving from a height into the depths of an ocean whose continuation is shrouded in ambiguity. There is a sweet fervor of heartbeats in it, but it is not accompanied by caution. Love, of course, is a fire that catches, not one whose hem you hold; for this very reason, it perhaps renders discussion and inquiry meaningless. "I was in my senses at first, that I would give my heart to none / I beheld your form, and neither sense nor reason remained." This, however, is the classical image of love. In the past, love was sometimes truly an illness, for which medicines were prescribed. Love and madness were often twins and housemates. But has it remained so? With the same wavelength and frequency? Perhaps not. The thick-skinned ones who, in the past, spent a lifetime in longing to hear a silvery tinkle that had passed through stubborn vocal cords, and in longing for the flash of a dark eye glancing coyly from a silvery visage, would rot in the acid of failure, sometimes, upon merely hearing such a sound or seeing such a face, their wild hearts would break their reins and cling to the shrine of that body. From this, Qays the Majnun would emerge. But now, the options are more numerous, and the black market has not wrapped beauty in the sack of monopoly; now that even the hijab gives a portion of the beauty, sufficient for the silver-limbed cupbearer, as alms to hungry eyes, there is less news of those "fables of the ancients." Also, developed reason sometimes firmly seizes the reins of the wild self, and the individual, fearing real and legal penalties, draws his feet more and more into the skirt of contentment. This, of course, is not ascetic contentment, but rational caution. Sometimes, before they stand on the edge of the precipice and it is too late, they exercise prudence and take refuge in a cold, dark corner of caution; they let the imagination, this light-footed substitute for the body, roam on its behalf, and without fear of retribution, enter every mansion, pour out whatever desire it has in its sack, and fill itself to the brim with pleasure; and in the meantime, men, in whose love the share of glands and complexes is perhaps greater, sometimes, by defaming priceless romantic love, go to the marketplace of love-sellers; a thing women have never done.

In my view, within the horizon of a liberal philosophy of history, although love remains the pretext for life, and although it is the Pleiades, so that the threatened skiff in the "dark night and fear of the wave and such a fearsome whirlpool" may, if not be guided (for what path is there, after all, for a skiff upon the ocean), be diverted by its beauty and splendor. Yet, gradually, the world distances itself from Majnun's love; for the contemporary world is caution-centered, and in this direction, the further it advances, the more seriously it takes safety recommendations (perhaps even just a little more), and perfect love is the perfect example of recklessness. It seems that the world, in every respect, tends toward a state where, although it is increasingly the seat of passionate relations, it also acknowledges their dangers and, inevitably, wishes to mend the temptation of the self with the scruple of reason a little more. The image of the future world, which is sometimes portrayed, due to forward-looking anxieties, as a cold and cannibalistic construct, I suspect partakes greatly of exaggeration; nevertheless, it appears we are moving toward an optimal combination of passion and reason, in which the principal loss is necessarily borne by love, in its classical narrative. It is for this reason, too, that the singular volcanoes of art may, perhaps, be on the verge of extinction, and in their place, we witness the proliferation of tiny, scattered embers. That is, of course, if we believe that art is, in a sense, the product of a libidinal swelling that cannot find immediate eruption.

I suspect that love belongs to the past and friendship to the present; love is more traditional and friendship more modern. Love, like any other adventure, is attractive but dangerous. It is monopolistic; for this very reason, it may not be entirely compatible with human rights. "Love is that flame which, when it blazes up, / Burns all else save the Beloved, every bit." This is not the lie of poets; it is the truth of lovers. Love creates courage, even audacity, and this makes it all the more dangerous. It suited the age of chivalry; a world in which, for the love of a woman, wars were waged, blood was spilled, and the seeds of enmity were sown. Now, however, is perhaps the era of friendship; or we like to think it is so. Not the end of love—that might be no more than an exaggeration. Perhaps the end of love would be the end of humanity. Nevertheless, it seems to me that friendship, or a softened love, will more and more fill the future; one can love several people at once, without being monopolistic, and without desiring them in one's absolute possession. A part of me belongs to my friend, and reciprocally. In this way, the margin of freedom for both of us remains sufficiently ample. The loves of adolescence show well that the love of Layla and Majnun belongs to the childhood of culture and civilization; the older and more youthful the love, the more forceful, illogical, monopolistic, and often more dangerous and inhumane.

Comparing love and friendship is like comparing Continental and Anglo-Saxon philosophy. Love, just like the writings of Nietzsche, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx, Sartre... is a complex amalgam of passion, lust, anger, resentment, ambition, sacrifice, domination, curiosity, creativity, depth, and ambiguity. The pleasure and excitement of losing oneself in its labyrinth is intensely seductive, but being lost, despair, self-harm or harming others, and suicide or homicide are ambushes lying in wait along the path, if indeed there is a path at all; in the forest and the ocean, the way is exactly the same as the trackless, and the trackless becomes the way; the way is made by walking. But friendship is like the writings of Mill, Russell, Popper, James, Quine, and others: more or less, a system of clarity, calm, precision, reasoning, moderation, distinction, and lucidity. That is why it does not quite capture the heart; it is not intoxicating. It is not utterly bewildered between being and nothingness. It does not suffer much from nausea or plague. Friendship, even if it plays with fire, keeps a safe distance from it. Logic and moderation, clarity and precision, are the safety recommendations in the second type of philosophical game; and these are things whose application sends German philosophy up in smoke; and love as well. Compare a marriage that is a kind of intelligent contract with marriages born of romantic love; a couple who marry in their maturity, fortified by reason, weigh many things: how much each benefits from the other; how much exchange of pleasure takes place; what the capital of each party is; capital that encompasses everything from social networks to cultural level, and from beauty to money and many other things, and is the solving of a multivariable equation. Consider a couple in whose youth, or even adolescence, a fire of love was kindled, and the lover and beloved, except for each other and wanting each other and reaching each other and dissolving into each other and practicing unknown experiences..., neither listen to anything, nor care, nor understand at all, nor consider this lack of understanding bad. The former is cold, ordinary, and mediocre; there is nothing to discover in it; nothing great, nothing unexpected is at hand; it resembles a transaction. The latter is beautiful and passion-inspiring; it is sacrifice, devotion, meaning-making, and art-creation. But it very much resembles gambling, and the gambling of gamblers who, due to inexperience, have a greater chance of losing than winning. Look at this couplet by Rumi: "Blessed is that gambler who lost all that he had / Nothing remained for him except the desire for another gamble." This is the art of love: fleeing from calculation; fleeing from caution, like gambling. The art of playing and losing. And this couplet by Khayyam: "I am in love with that moment when the cupbearer says / Take one more cup, and I cannot." That is, driving desire to its end, to the final point; to the absolute disabling of reason. That reason which, by posing the fundamental question, wears down the spirit. Love is an escape from reason; exactly like wine. It is also an escape from coldness; exactly like wine.

The goddess of love sits on the heights of Olympus; magnificent and dignified; with the beauty of Aphrodite. Perhaps only a courage, born of prehistoric man's ignorance, is capable of reaching out and touching that height. For that beauty and that magnetism, that allure, in comparison to the capacity and ability of this impossibly ambitious drop, is like amber for which toying with this straw is a pastime. Modern man, who considered forbidden love in the medieval era a conspiracy by the spoilsports of pleasure, for a time let loose the reins of the wild horse of love so it could graze and run as it wished across the vast plain of Romanticism. But the caution-centeredness born of rationality, which was blowing that classical courage of lovers to the winds of annihilation, gradually made contemporary man realize, through sagacity, that mounting a wild horse is magnificent but deadly; and love finds its truest manifestation in the face of the "femme fatale," or the ominous beauty. Just as simple principles of hygiene taught him that highly spiced, charred, and fatty foods, though delicious, are enemies of health, other simple principles also taught him that amorous adventuring and tying one's heart to the tail of a wild creature and then setting off to retrieve it, robs one of peace and tranquility and sickens the spirit.

Undoubtedly there are those who mock the advocates of tasteless health food and, contrary to the hero of Molière’s play, are certain that living is for the sake of eating, not the reverse. One must eat and take pleasure, even if illness, pain, stroke, and death lie in ambush, for the breadth of life is what matters, not its length; its quality, not its quantity. In that case, it is far more plausible that there are those who ridicule the rational prudence of contemporary man and regard a life centered on X’s as a kind of gradual dying, or the illusion of life for a dead man. I am not certain that such people are mistaken, but I suspect that their followers are becoming fewer by the day, though perhaps they will never vanish entirely or even become very few; at the very least, the world is gradually becoming a little more averse to the thrill of playing with danger, including the danger of classical-style love. It is then that, just as observing lions, tigers, rhinoceroses, and crocodiles is possible for contemporary man in the zoo, the pleasure of passionate, consuming loves must also, perhaps, be watched more through the medium and in the two-dimensional frames of cinema and television screens. Exactly as, for a citizen of the great industrial nations—a resident of Tokyo, Frankfurt, Vancouver...—the very thought of witnessing even one percent of what they routinely watch on television (including a car swerving among other cars, or the fistfights of hero and anti-hero, or the gunplay of rival gangs...) on the stage of home and street life is shocking.

This is how people engage in amorous and sexual diversions far more and more freely than in the past, yet are less committed; and contrary to what Sa‘di says, they do not equate the turn of love with the end of a good name. That fiery love which made disgrace worthless in the lover’s eyes, and if the beloved demanded the lives of those around as a bridal gift, the lover would not come to his senses, is gradually migrating to the realm of myths, and human beings strive to love a greater number to a lesser degree, because it is a kind of insurance; and this includes the love of men and women as well. I imagine a great effort is made so that repeated turns of love, at the same time, disturb one’s good name as little as possible. We have always heard that the concentration of wealth and power brings corruption; we have often seen that a kind of distribution has been considered the remedy for this problem. Why should the concentration of affection not be subject to the same rule? Distributing the concentration of love, exactly like distributing the concentration of wealth and power, carves away the grandeur of the mountain, and diminishes the wild richness of the sea at its deltas; and from the perspective of aesthetics and the praise of greatness, this is not likable, but for security, tranquility, and survival, it is inevitable.

To cure the madness of love, perhaps one must, like the adolescent in the film Malena, contrary to Hafez’s decree, seek out the Solomon’s ring upon which a demon occasionally lays its hand. In this way, the software and hardware components of love are separated from one another, and it becomes easier to bear. Love, in its totality and in its solitude, is thus imperious and unruly; the solution may be to burn its tradition of consuming others and to take partnership in its work so as to sap its strength. Let us dissect the complex that is a combination of physiological need and psychological need, and divide each among a multiplicity. So that the libido which, like a vast volume of water behind a dam, poses the danger of immense destruction, may exit through numerous outlets, so that, as Sa‘di says, it is no longer “a force greater than that which ten men could string his bow,” and, the mature know that this talk is not for the raw.

Love is adventure and the embrace of risk, and such a thing has been more prevalent among the upper and lower social classes. The lower class, especially its lowest strata, perhaps because it often has little to lose, and because it has grappled hand-to-hand with the harshness of nature and the monster of poverty and has at times grown audacious, is ready to take risks. The upper strata, conversely, because they are equipped with every kind of means, can fall in love, eliminate rivals backed by their aristocratic honor, conquer the beloved with power, and recite pure sonnets to her in the manner of nobles. Both of these types—one by great poverty and the other by great wealth—are raised to be capable, bold, and adventurous; and the custom of love is one of those matters requiring an adventurous spirit, which has been kept alive mostly by these two groups. It is for this reason that classic romances and novels are either Robin Hood, Ivanhoe, Great Expectations, and Germinal, or Pride and Prejudice, The Three Musketeers, Cousin Bette, and Anna Karenina; either in the lowest depths of misery or in the highest layers of fortune, or a combination of the two. Even now, compelling films are mostly set either in the moldy, demonic spaces of poverty and violence or in the colorful, enigmatic spaces of the bourgeois elite. Because it is in these spaces that the ground for adventure, terror, and anxiety-creation for the viewer is greater.

Even the prevailing geographical and spatial conditions for these two groups have been conducive to adventure, particularly of the amorous kind and even the enjoyment of force. Tribal tents, rural huts, or urban margins, with their privacies, solitudes, and very low culture, and the grand aristocratic houses and villas with another kind of privacy and solitude and a very high culture, both, to some extent, share common ground in setting the stage for the perpetually green traffic lights of sexual morality. Compare this with the space of the contemporary middle class, which is under pressure in every respect to lead a calm, relatively carefree, frozen, and sterilized life. Often, it neither has so little that it does not fear its loss, nor so much that adventure would not ruin it utterly. Often, it is neither so immoral that any act is permissible, nor does it possess an aristocratic morality to risk defending its honor even in forbidden love. The morality of reputation in the cramped environments of office work pressures it, lest it be pointed at by fingers. The dominant apartment-living lifestyle of this class, where father, mother, sister, and brother all crowd each other in a hundred square meters, is such that, compared to those two strata, it offers less opportunity for adventure.

Now, if we accept that the world is continually moving toward the expansion of the middle class, and from the top of the upper class and the bottom of the lower class, a population is constantly trickling into the middle class, it may be acceptable that the risk coefficient is perpetually decreasing, and classic love, which is a significant instance of risk-taking, cannot be exempt from this rule. The liberal-tempered middle class is inevitably caution-oriented, and just as it usually diversifies its capital and does not put all its eggs in one basket so that if it falls, everything is not lost, it dilutes and divides the concentrate of love, breaking and scattering from it shares of friendship and morsels of affection.

Forugh, at a time when perhaps her drunken twittering was, sang that "Life is perhaps / lighting a cigarette / in the languorous interval between two embraces" and at a time when perhaps she remembered her winter, sang "What have I to do with the long howl of wildness / in the sexual organ of an animal / What have I to do with the lowly movement of a worm in the void of flesh / A bloody lineage has committed me to living." That zenith also contains this nadir; and the middle way between these two is one that observes the majesty of love and strives, as far as choice and selection are involved, not to select its dangerous heights for recreation. Famous films such as Eyes Wide Shut, Unfaithful, Bitter Moon, in a different narrative, A Very Long Engagement, or stranger still, the film Damage, represent a viewpoint from whose height one can gaze upon the panorama of the zoo of love. In contrast, watching a film like The Bridges of Madison County is a successful depiction of how complex, agonizing, and yet inevitable the combination of love, caution, and friendship is; and for the minimization of the sum of pain or the pain of the sum of human beings, the resplendent bird of love, in all its glory, flutters and gradually sheds its feathers in the cage of reason, and opening its door, except perhaps occasionally for overflow, is rarely expedient; although in the grappling of reason and desire, choosing and being chosen, the outcome of the game is uncertain, it seems humanity is condemned to love wildly, but to domesticate it.

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Morteza Mardiha's Article 'The Death of Majnun: A Critique of Love'

Source: Madreseh Magazine, Issue 3 | Ordibehesht 1385

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