Across the Great Divide: from Point 4 to Point 5

Across the Great Divide: from Point 4 to Point 5

Points 4 and 5 both lie within the personal domain of the relationship process. The process of relating involves us personally. The changes that it demands we make are changes in ourselves. But in order to make these changes, we have to look beyond our own personal points of view.

This is shown by the inner lines. At Point 4, we have to consider how our families of origin and the communities from which we come have shaped our expectations and behaviors in individual ways – the 1 – 4 line. The willingness and the strength to adapt our own habits to those of another individual comes from the memory of falling in love and the bond this has created – the 4 – 2 line. Points 1 and 2 are in the social domain, where the rules are often quite explicit or at least easily described in ordinary language. The experience of falling in love is a transcendent vision, but it is often recalled as a specific event (remember that time we…?) The habits and rituals that we need to adapt to the shared relationship are things that we do.

Point 5 is completely different. The 5 -7 line looks toward the premise, the purpose, the mission of the relationship itself, which both partners need to serve and attempt to complete. The 8 – 5 line again brings us in contact with the experience of unconditional love, but it tends to highlight the conditions that we as limited, imperfect, incomplete people place on the love we are able to give: thus Contact With Impossibility.

Points 7 and 8 are within the domain I’ve chosen to call Transpersonal, because that’s the most neutral, connotation-free term I could find. Whatever you choose to call it, this dimension of reality does not lend itself to easy description. My teacher J. G. Bennett called it the domain of Value. His term for the other side of the Great Divide is the domain of Fact.

When we reach point 5, our personal world begins to connect with this transpersonal world of values. At point 4 the relationship process asks us to change what we do and how we do it. At point 5 the process demands that what we see and how we see it undergo a profound shift.

One of the main difficulties with this transmutation of experience is that we don’t have a useful way to talk or think about it. The language(s) we learned as children are fine for talking about facts, for explaining how to do things. They’re almost totally useless for understanding values, for explaining how we see things: in fact, we don’t “see” things at all – values are not things. A chair is a chair, a table is a table, a fork is not a spoon. But even relatively simple qualitative statements like “the color of the sea is…” become ambiguous: is it green, blue, grey, or something in between?

Writers, particularly poets, can attempt to convey a particular experience, a unique seeing (every true seeing is unique, after all) in words. Homer’s “wine-dark sea” is a famous example. Something “comes across,” but what is it? Can you point to a patch of ocean and say “There - there it is: that’s the ‘wine-dark sea? I think not.

Talking Around It, Not About It

Points 1, 2, 3 and 4 are very much connected to the world of things, the phenomenal. Beginning with point 5, we are moving into the noumenal, the world of Plato’s ideas, of Bennett’s values. As I’m not a poet, I don’t think it’s going to be of much use for me to talk about these points at great length. Mr. Bennett would frequently preface a talk with his students at Sherborne House by saying something along the lines of “we’re going to have to talk about things that can’t be talked about.” Then he would go on at some length about those things. But Bennett had, not only a profound understanding, but a powerful command of language and an unusual, even unique ability to maintain a focus on the things that can’t be talked about themselves, rather than getting caught up in the words that were being used.

As a poor substitute, I’ve selected quotes from literature, by authors known and almost unknown, that happen to be in the public domain. My hope is that by letting these voices talk around the topic, I can convey some diffuse sense of what it is we’re talking about – a way in for your own explorations.

Point 5: Contact with Impossibility. Is that all there is? Not if you can keep faith with one another.

I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

Bible

Ephesians

I loathe that I did love,
In youth that I thought sweet;

Thomas Vaux

1510-1556

All Love is dead, infected
With plague of deep disdain:

Sir Philip Sidney

1554-1586

Do you not love me? do you not indeed?
Well, do not then, for since you love me not,
I will not love myself.

William Shakespeare

1564-1616

Henry IV, Part 1

If there be no great love in the beginning, yet heaven may decrease it upon better acquaintance, when we are married and have more occasion to know one another: I hope, upon familiarity will grow more contempt.

William Shakespeare

1564-1616

The Merry Wives of Windsor

This is the monstruosity in love, lady—that the will is infinite and the execution confined; that the desire is boundless and the act a slave to limit.

William Shakespeare

1564-1616

Troilus & Cressida

Love me little, love me long,
Is the burden of my song:

Robert Herrick

1591-1674

We must in tears
Unwind a love knit up in many years.
In this last kiss I here surrender thee
Back to thyself, so thou again art free;
Thou in another, sad as that, resend
The truest heart that lover e’er did lend.

Henry King

1592-1669

The Surrender

There are few people who would not be ashamed of being loved when they love no longer.

François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld

1613-1680

Sentences et Maximes Morales

We lov’d, and we lov’d, as long as we could,
Till our love was lov’d out in us both;
But our marriage is dead, when the pleasure is fled:
‘Twas pleasure first made it an oath.

John Dryden

1631-1700

Marriage à la Mode

Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

1749-1832

Bring me an axe and spade,
Bring me a winding-sheet;
When I my grave have made
Let winds and tempests beat:
Then down I’ll lie as cold as clay.
True love doth pass away!

William Blake

1757-1827

Song

Alas! how light a cause may move
Dissension between hearts that love!
Hearts that the world in vain had tried,
And sorrow but more closely tied;
That stood the storm when waves were rough,
Yet in a sunny hour fall off,
Like ships that have gone down at sea
When heaven was all tranquility.

Thomas Moore

1779-1852

The Light of the Harem

For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast.
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.

George Gordon Noel Byron, Lord Byron

1788-1824

So We’ll Go No More A-Roving

Not always can flowers, pearls, poetry, protestations, nor even home in another heart, content the awful soul that dwells in clay.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1803-1882

Love

For I say this is death and the sole death,—
When a man’s loss comes to him from his gain,
Darkness from light, from knowledge ignorance,
And lack of love from love made manifest.

Robert Browning

1812-1889

A Death in the Desert

They who aspire to love worthily, subject themselves to an ordeal more rigid than any other.

Henry David Thoreau

1817-1862

The world, unfathomably fair,
Is duller than a witling’s jest.
Love wakes men, once a lifetime each;
They lift their heavy lids, and look;
And, lo, what one sweet page can teach,
They read with joy, then shut the book.

Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore

1823-1896

Years of love have been forgot
In the hatred of a minute.

Richard Henry Stoddard

1825-1903

Nature admits of no permanence in the relation between man and woman.... It is only man’s egoism that wants to keep woman like some buried treasure. All endeavors to introduce permanence in love, the most changeable thing in this changeable human existence, have gone shipwreck in spite of religious ceremonies, vows, and legalities.

Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

1835-1895

Venus in Furs

When first we met we did not guess
That Love would prove so hard a master.

Robert Bridges

1844-1930

The Night has a thousand eyes,
And the Day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies
With the dying sun.
The mind has a thousand eyes,
And the heart but one;
Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done.

Francis William Bourdillon

1852- ?

Light

It’s what you do, unthinking,
That makes the quick tear start;
The tear may be forgotten—
But the hurt stays in the heart.

Ella Higginson

1862-1940

Wearing Out Love

For it is the suffering flesh, it is suffering, it is death, that lovers perpetuate upon the earth. Love is at once the brother, son, and father of death, which is its sister, mother, and daughter. And thus it is that in the depth of love there is a depth of eternal despair, out of which springs hope and consolation.

Miguel de Unamuno

1864-1936

The Tragic Sense of Life

“... Or how should love be worth its pains were it not
That when he has fallen asleep within my arms,
Being wearied out, I love in man the child?
What can they know of love that do not know
She builds her nest upon a narrow ledge
Above a windy precipice?”

William Butler Yeats

1865-1939

“Although our love is waning, let us stand
By the lone border of the lake once more,
Together in that hour of gentleness
When the poor tired child, Passion, falls asleep....”

William Butler Yeats

1865-1939

A pity beyond all telling
Is hid in the heart of love.

William Butler Yeats

1865-1939

Earth in beauty dressed
Awaits returning spring.
All true love must die,
Alter at the best
Into some lesser thing.
Prove that I lie.

William Butler Yeats

1865-1939

I had a thought for no one’s but your ears:
That you were beautiful, and that I strove
To love you in the old high way of love;
That it had all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown
As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.

William Butler Yeats

1865-1939

Adam’s Curse