Upon A Star

Wish Upon a Star
Peter woke in the morning with a start. There had been football players charging around the field. They were wielding baseball bats and machetes. They heads of their opponents littered the field, slowly getting ground into the soft, dark earth. Blood was pooling around the sprinkler heads. His own face was a mask of pain; blood flowed freely from several wounds and scab hung loosely over sores. “What can be done?” he had thought. “Nothing” came the reply. “Nothing.”

Then Peter awoke with a start. The rest of the day passed without incident. Peter prepared for bed. This was the part he hated. Lying down, feeling the cool touch of the pillow and knowing that the morning would bring no rest. Knowing that there is no escape from dreams that do not terrify. They do not fill him with fear or doubt or disgust. He hates the feeling of enjoying these dreams.

He was sitting with his family around the dinner table. There was a large salad on the table. People began to eat. Just below the outer surface of lettuce flowed a river of pale flesh. He and his family fell to with gusto. They ate and ate. It soon became apparent that this meat, this flesh, was in fact human leg. He stopped eating, but his family and friends kept at it. They voracious appetites would not be checked by so mean a thing as cannibalism. It was an orgy of consumption. The blood soon began to flow. First from the corners of their mouths, then from the chandelier and the walls. The pictures on the wall stared out with hungry eyes and licked their monochromatic lips. Peter sat in a corner in a ball.

He awoke in a ball. Curled up with the blankets stripped from the bed. The yellow glow of the sun brought little comfort to his cold and clammy skin. Even his shower did not warm him. He stepped out into another sunny, tiresome day.

Once again, nighttime approached.

As soon as his head hit the pillow, he vanished. He walked slowly along a busy street until he saw what he was looking for. A little girl, perhaps 12 years old was playing with a yo-yo. He waited until he heard her name, then approached.

‘Camille. I’m your uncle Francis visiting from out of town. Your mother told me I could come pick you up and we could get some ice cream.’

Peter was horrified at what he was saying, but he could not stop. And what he was saying was nothing compared to what he did. He again awoke terrified and shocked by the depravity he had witnessed.

Makes No Difference Who You Are…

Peter emerged from his house and stared up at the sky. The infinite blueness stared right back at him. Overwhelmed by what he saw and felt, he fell. He lay on the grass as the sun arched overhead and paused directly overhead. He wished. He looked deep into the closest, most brilliant star and he wished to never have such dreams again. He kept staring. He felt a warm glow on the back of his eyeballs. The scorching, purifying heat propagated outward, cleansing his eyes of the pollution of sight. He felt free somehow. The burden of knowledge was lifted from him. His phone rang somewhere off in another world.

Peter staggered to his feet, felt himself tilt wildly and landed back on the grass. He crawled to the door of his house. It was locked. He fumbled for the keys. He couldn’t tell which one would open the door. It was just a jumble of metal in his hand. He tried them one after another and finally made it inside. The message machine was talking.

“… So I think Gerald will be able to pick you up around eight and we’ll finally have the whole family together. It’ll be good to see you.”

Peter fumbled for the phone. He couldn’t find it. The whole room was different in the dark.

“Alright. Well I hope everything is going well. Wee you then.”

Peter found the couch and crawled up onto it. He curled up and did not dream.

There was a knock on the door. Peter awoke with a start. His cousin Gerald’s voice said something Peter couldn’t understand. He opened his eyes and could make out some small patches of light off in the distance. He found his feet and maneuvered toward the door. He opened it and felt a tingle on his eyeballs as the excess light flooded around his damaged retinas. Gerald grabbed him in a bear hug and escorted him toward the car.

“Are you okay? What’s up man? You’re stumbling all over yourself.”

“I’m fine… I just woke up so I’m a little groggy.”

“Okay. Hey, did you catch the game last night? I got us tickets to the playoffs. My boss had some family emergency so he can’t go. He gave me the tickets.”

Peter felt trapped. The car moved inexorably closer to the feast and somehow Peter knew it wasn’t going to be fun seeing his family.

By the time they got the the house, Peter could distinguish light and dark spots and even had a bit of depth perception returning.

He managed to make it up the stairs with a minimum of fumbling. The family was already gathered around the table.

“Peter! Come here, sit next to Aunt Marie. She made this fabulous brisket… Or whatever this is. It’s simply marvelous. You must try it.”
It felt like deja vous, but worse. He sat at the table and could only faintly make out the shape of the leg on the table. It would have been rude not to try it. He hate a bite. Everyone was watching him. He chewed and tried to smile. Suddenly everyone was eating. There was the usual conversation… smidgens of family gossip. New jobs and adventures. And a human femur protruding ominously from carefully sliced and marinated leg flesh.
The time passes like a blur. Nothing was real. It took fifteen years for the food to disappear and the crows to begin to dissipate. Gerald gave him a lift home. His vision wasn’t much better.
“I’ll pick you up at nine. Kickoff is at noon.”
A bolt of terror struck through Peter. He found himself speaking.
“I’m looking forward to it. I’ll see you at nine.”
“Alright! And hey… I don’t know what’s wrong, but whatever it is, I hope you feel better. “
Peter closed the door and wandered vaguely in the direction of his room. He fell on the bed and dreamed of nothing. Blessed nothing.
His alarm woke Peter at eight. He got dressed and hate a light breakfast. Gerald, true to his word, showed up at nine ready and raring to go. They made it to the stadium without incident. The game started and proceeded normally.
“What inspired your boss to give you these tickets?”
“Apparently his daughter is mission. He’s talking with police and running a search and stuff. No time for the game, obviously.”
Peter felt the world shrink. He felt the sky grow closer, more blue. Blasts of electricity in his brain released images. Walking down the street, seeing her, the conversation, the brief walk to his house. Her…
Halftime.
The band came out and played. Then they yielded… Yielded isn’t the right word. They fled. One team charged the field with helmets and baseball bats. The other team had knives and cruel smiles. Some people in the crowd started cheering. Gerald stood up and threw some peanuts a the field. One of the players, now combatants, turned and charged them. Peter ducked the bat swing but wound up crawling on the ground around the stands as the crowd rushed to their feet and surged around. He tried to make it to his feet, but with his blurred vision, the noise, confusion and people around him, he only managed to roll onto the grass. He saw someone’s face next to his, empty eyes staring out. Nothing below the bridge of the nose. No body. Peter vomited. He staggered to his feet. He limped out of the stadium away from the cheering crowd and made it to Gerald’s car. He didn’t have the keys. He found north and headed toward his home, terrified of what he might find there.
He made it shortly after nightfall and collapsed into bead. He dreamed of nothing.

Your Dreams Come True.

Awakening, his vision was again clear. Somehow his retinas healed themselves. He walked to the closet. He opened the door and rummaged around.
He pulled out a gym bag. He knew what was inside, though he’d never seen it before. He could feel her small soft body inside. He put it on the front porch, then went inside and called the police. He walked out the back door and lay down on the grass. He stared up at the sky again, feeling the sun rise higher. He stared deep into the bright corona and made a wish. Nothing. That’s what he wished for. A deep and overwhelming nothing.

My Love For You is Like That Scene in Alien

When we met, it was dark. I was in a strange place,
but you saw me, and soon we were wrapped together.
I felt something inside me then. And now.
I’m back in my world, but my love for you grows
inside me.
Time passes, and it becomes unbearable.
I have to let the love burst forth for the world
to see. And things will never be the same.

Good Faith Love Relations: A Crack in Sartre’s Concrete Relations With Others.

Sartre’s work “Being and Nothingness”is a thorough description of humans’ place in the world, both relative to objects and relative to his relations with other humans, as viewed through the existentialist looking-glass. In his account, Sartre describes criteria for existence, shows how beings come to be for themselves and how they interact with others. Specifically, he writes on relations between lovers in a section entitled “Concrete relations with others.” It is here that he appears either to deny or omit an important part of love relations. He asserts, essentially, that the relationship between lovers can only exist in bad faith. That is, he describes only the failed or deficient modes of loving. It is the goal of this work to provide a description for that which is lacking in his account.

The goal of this analysis is not an attempt to deny that bad faith love relations exist or even that such relations are uncommon. This analysis is an attempt to provide a framework in which good-faith love relations can be viewed as possible. Sartre himself identifies three factors that permit the destructibility of love:

In the first place, [love] is, in essence, a deception and a reference to infinity since to love is to wish to be loved, hence to wish that the other wish that I love him. … The amorous intuition is, as a fundamental-intuition, an ideal out of reach. The more I am loved, the more I lose my being, the more I am thrown back on my own responsibilities, on my own power to be. In the second place the Other’s awakening is always possible; at any moment he can make me appear as an object: hence the lover’s perpetual insecurity. In the third place love is an absolute which is perpetually made relative by others. One would have to be alone in the world with the beloved in order for love to preserve its character as an absolute axis of reference, hence the lover’s perpetual shame(or pride, which here amounts to the same thing). [B&N p491]

The goal then, is to attempt to resolve these issues without sacrificing the nature of the lovers as human beings-for-themselves or by denying any of the essential characteristics of Sartre’s framework for the development of love.

Sartre’s conception of love is as a flaw. He begins with an analogy to Hegel’s master-slave dialog and ends with neither lover satisfied with the situation. They find themselves ungrounded and wanting. Each lover wants the other to love (give Hegelian recognition to) him, and thus ground him in his or her facticity. Because this is a dynamic system, with both parties attempting this simultaneously, both end up failing. One can only be grounded by a being-for-itself, not by an object, a being in-itself. Attempts to regain the objectivity granted ideally, but not specifically, by the lover result in the adoption of an attitude of masochism or sadism. The lover is playing at either being an object or denying his objectivity, and thus is in bad faith. Love for Sartre can only exist as these deficient modes.

Essentially, we are going to attempt to fill a hole in Sartre’s philosophy of love relations through an extension of his analysis. The primary feature of this resolution is the determination that love must be viewed not as a feature of consciousness, but as a being-for-itself. It must be a consciousness granted many of the same features as human consciousness, which it is, in that it is constituted by human consciousness. But we are getting ahead of ourselves here. Let us start with a look at how love comes to be, and proceed from there.

Love grows in a similar fashion to care. Care manifests a hermeneutic circle, or, more accurately, a spiral toward itself. That is, care begins at a point and grows toward further caring, adding to itself to the extent that the being-for-itself remains interested. When one catches sight of an interesting object, a beetle, perhaps, while on a walk in the woods, one initially has only a passing curiosity that one might satisfy by moving closer and getting a closer look. If the beetle resolves itself to ones consciousness as a normal black beetle, ones interest fades and one continues on the walk. If it resolves itself, however, as a complex biological machine, composed of myriad components, one’s interest may grow, and one may desire to know more. The walk grows less important as one’s interest in the beetle grows. One learns a little bit about the beetle, and that little bit reveals a large area of unknown knowledge. Perhaps the limit of this example would be that one becomes an entomologist and never finishes one’s walk in the woods. The initial interest toward the beetle leads to more interest. It is a spiraling toward itself.

Love grows in a similar fashion, but not from a single individual. It is a cooperative effort by both lovers. Both individuals manifest some interest or care in the other and this leads to further interaction with the other and so on in a spiraling toward love. This is the foundation upon which love as consciousness, as for-itself, is born. How is it that a consciousness, a for-itself, can grow from two individuals: According to Sartre, “Consciousness is born supported by a being which is not itself.”[B&N p23] For humans, the beings which support consciousness are beings in-themselves. “Consciousness is Consciousness of something.”[B&N p23] The rocks, trees and all other beings-in-themselves that constitute the world are impressed upon consciousness by the senses and we become conscious-of them. In the instance of love, the beings that are not love, that is, which have some distance from love, are the lovers. They alone are the being on which love is born. It is not, however, the case that they are separate from it. There is not, in Sartre’s words, “a for-itself on the one hand and a world [the lovers] on the other as two closed entities for which we must subsequently seek some explanation as to how they communicate. The for-itself is a relation to the world.”[B&N p405] In the case of love, the world is constituted by the lovers.

There are several features of a for-itself that are essential. We can gain some insight into the nature of love by taking a closer look at how these factors are manifest. The being of a consciousness, of a for-itself, is defined by its distance from itself. A being in-itself simply is. Its existence is of infinite density. “The distinguishing characteristic of consciousness, on the other hand, is that it is a decompression of being.”[B&N p121] There is some space within a consciousness. For a human consciousness, that room is for introspection, the room to doubt ones existence and gain perspective on the self. For love, the room is distance between the lovers and their ability to critically examine their relationship. It is critical that a for-itself be able to question itself. “The being of consciousness is a being such that in its being, its being is in question.”[B&N p120] The space granted by the distance of the lovers from the love is what permits it being-for-itself, that is, consciousness.

What, however, is it conscious of? Sartre makes it abundantly clear that a consciousness is only a consciousness of something, and that a consciousness with nothing present to it is not a true consciousness. A consciousness can only be present to things in the world, and love’s world consists of the lovers. Therefore love must be a consciousness of the lovers as such. The contents of love are the lovers.

One might ask when the love came to be. A being-for-itself does exist temporally. The for-itself grows from (and beyond) a past. “There is not first one universal time where a for-itself suddenly appears not yet having a past. … [Rather, ] for-itself rises to being beyond an unalterable which is … the Past.” [B&N p199] This past may be represented as a friendship spanning years which gradually grew into love, or it may represent a whirlwind weekend romance that blossomed overnight into a fully formed love. Regardless, this past relationship is not the love. The “for-itself can in no case be reduced to this being [the past], [and] represents an absolute newness in relation to it.”[B&N p198] There is therefore some time, some event, which birthed love from its past existence as a simple content of consciousness to a consciousness proper.

The event that leads to the birth of love is best understood in the context of the master-slave dialectic, as modified by Sartre into a dialectic relating two lovers.

In the standard master-slave dialectic, there is a fight (potentially to the death) between two beings over recognition. Of the possible results of this conflict, one yields particularly juicy philosophical fruit. In the case where one of the beings is willing to fight to the death and the other yields before death, the one willing to fight all the way becomes master over the other. Unfortunately for him, this means that he has reached the limits of his potential. His goal was to achieve recognition, and he has destroyed that possibility by turning a man capable of granting recognition into a slave. The recognition granted by the slave is unfulfilling because it is forced, not given. Furthermore, because he ‘won’ the fight, the master has no incentive to change or attempt to become anything other than what he is.

The slave, however, can overcome/transcend his nature, and does, thanks to work. He has impetus to transform his conditions. The slave, in doing work for another, is performing an unnatural act. It is ‘natural’ only to work sufficiently for ones own life. The slave works to change the world, and thus, as a content of the world, he changes himself. The master changes only as a result of the slave’s work.

To understand the modified dialectic, one must understand Sartre’s Look. One of the examples Sartre gives will work well enough as a description of the effects of the Look. Imagine walking in a park. One can perceive the trees, bushes, benches and other objects as simply physical instances at particular locations with particular characteristics. The light post is twenty feet away and about fifteen feet high. The trash can is ten yards distant and just to the left of the path. It is painted brown. One can also perceive these objects intentionally. The light post is there to give me light on my path. The trash can is there for me to discard my candy wrapper or cigarette butt. However, if a man sitting on the bench looks at me, the world is suddenly thrust into disarray. The light post must be seen as not just for my illumination. The trash can is not my personal waste receptacle. He forces upon my world a reintentionalization. These things are for him. Furthermore, he has transformed me from a subjective being to an object. He interprets me not as a being-for-itself, but as a being in the world, that is, a being-in-itself. This is the power of the Look. It grounds a being-for-itself in its objectivity. This can either shame or exalt the one Looked at. One can be made to be ‘only’ an object, or one can be made a fantastic being in the world, a superfluity of amazingness.

The Look is perceived as being given by an Other. That Other need not be physically present. A video camera can represent the Other. Even a creaking in the branches might represent an Other hiding there, watching. The Look is real in both cases, as a reinterpretation of the world in the context of the other is immediately forced upon one, even if one eventually smashes the camera, or sees that it was simply a cat in the tree.

According to Sartre, when one person loves another, what they desire is nothing less than the desire of the other. All of it. They desire the freedom of the other, freely given. They want the other to desire them and to fill their world with that desire. They want to be desired as an object by the other. If their desire is granted, the other will Look at them, and ground their being in the world by exalting them. Unfortunately, this cannot truly come to pass. As soon as the other loves them back, the other desires to be grounded, to be exalted as an object in the world. This can only be done by an intentional consciousness, a for-itself, not by a being-in-itself. There is a struggle between the lovers, a fight to determine who will ground the other. As one possible result, one lover might attempt to “project causing myself to be absorbed by the other and losing myself in his subjectivity in order to get rid of my own.”[B&N p491] The goal is to be engaged solely as an being-in-itself. By forcing his facticity to be the only aspect visible, the masochist hopes the other will not attempt to be grounded by him, but rather to ground him.

This is not a healthy love relationship. The ‘lovers’ are struggling over the aspects of their existence to each other. Unable to both ground and be grounded, the lovers are apparently at an impasse. There is something missing. Love. If, rather than thinking of themselves as objects needing grounding, they consider themselves the grounding for their love, a resolution to this problem is possible.

In the context of the master-slave dialog, the fight for recognition between two beings breaks down when looking at the being of love and the beings of the individual lovers. Love is constituted by the individuals in it. There can be no fight for recognition, as the lovers have already given their recognition to love. Love comes to exist only in the recognition granted by the lovers. Love accepts their recognition as it is defined by it. Love has reached the limits of its potential in simple existence. It does not have a chance to become a Hegelian slave to another master. It is defined by its mastery. Further, since the recognition given to love is given freely by the lovers, love can be satisfied by their recognition, unlike the master who forces recognition from the slave.

What happens to the lovers in this situation? Firstly, they are both conscious of having granted recognition to their love. They therefore both see themselves as part of something greater than, or beyond, themselves, which grounds them in themselves. They do not need the other to provide their grounding. They can be given the Look by love, rather than their beloved. This essentially resolves the first element that Sartre described as destroying love, namely the reference to the infinite regression of loving required of the lovers. It takes the amorous intuition and draws it from the infinite to the immediately present. The ideal of love is replaced by its actualization in a specific context. The lover becomes capable of looking at the beloved not as someone from whom to gain recognition or grounding, but as another lover, another constituent element of the love they share.

Both lovers, in their presence to love, are made immediately aware of their subjectivity. They are the subject of the love they have made/been. There is no apprehension regarding whether they will suddenly be reduced to an object by the other, as their subjectivity is grounded not only in themselves, but also in their love. They doubt and are apprehensive regarding their subjectivity only to the extent that they doubt love. The second element of Sartre’s destruction of love, the apprehension of objectification, has therefore been resolved.

The third element requiring resolution is that love is constantly being made relative by others. One would have to be “alone in the world with the beloved in order for love to preserve its character as an absolute axis of reference.”[B&N p491] Love as a being-for-itself constituted by the lovers satisfies this criteria as well. The lover and beloved are the total contents of the world for love. There are no others directly perceivable. Love can see others only indirectly in their effects upon the objects within its world, namely the lovers. Similarly, others can see (this particular instance of) love in their world only as its indirect effects upon the lovers. The lover can at any time look to love for guidance, secure in the knowledge that it is immutable in its essence so long as its constituent being is unchanged, that is, so long as the lover and beloved still love.

Sartre dismisses good-faith love relations for what seem to him to be good reasons and proceeds to give a thorough examination of bad-faith love relations. Having shown that it is possible to avoid the traps that lead to bad faith love relations, the question naturally arises as to what the features are of good faith love relations.

Fortunately we are not forging into completely unknown territory. Hegel wrote a description of love in “Theologische Judenschriften” that parallels the description herein. Specifically, he writes (translated by Kojeve):

Lovers can distinguish themselves from one another only in the sense that they are mortal, that is, in the sense that they think this possibility of separation, and not in the sense that something may really be separated, not in the sense that a possibility joined to an existing being (sein) is a reality (Wirkliches). There is no raw or given matter in Lovers as Lovers, they are a living [or spiritual] Whole; that lovers have an independence or autonomy, a proper or autonomous vital-principle, means only that they can die. A plant has salts and earthy parts, which bring with them their own or autonomous laws for their action; a plant is the reflection of a foreign entity and one can only say: a plant can be corrupted or rot. But love tends to overcome dialectically even this possibility taken as pure possibility, and to give unity to mortality itself, to make it immortal… This results in the following stages: a single independent unit, beings that are separated from one another, and those that are again made into a unit.[ITTRH p242]

Hegel certainly seems to be describing a synthesis of the lovers and the love similar to the one proposed above. Unfortunately Kojeve then embarks on a discussion of death and mortality in Hegel, rather than focusing on the love that is left so tantalizingly undescribed. Hegel apparently explored the concept of love as recognition early in his work, but abandoned it in favor of the master-slave dialectic. He had a different project than the one currently embarked upon.

What does it mean for love relations to be in good faith? First we must really understand what it means for love relations to be in bad faith. Bad faith is a flight from the authentic present into the facticity of the past or the transcendence of the future. A criminal, that is, a person who has committed crimes, is in bad faith to the extent that he relies on his transcendence to negate his facticity as criminal. That is, a criminal who says “Well, I may have held up that convenience store, but that’s not the real me. I’m a painter and a father. I just need to get some brushes and paint and get married and have some kids. Then the true me will emerge,” is in bad faith through a flight into transcendence. He denies his being-as-object, that is, his existence as a being with a past and factual aspects. It may be true that he can be a painter and a father, but to deny his criminal past in preference to an unfulfilled future is in bad faith.

On the other hand, a criminal who acts as such, denying his transcendence, is also in bad faith. A criminal who says “What’s the point in getting a job? I’m a criminal… I hold up convenience stores. What more do you want?” is denying his ability to reform, to change. He is denying the mutability of the future in preference to the unalterable facticity of his past. He flees his transcendence for his facticity and ends up distant from his self as for-itself. He sees himself as an object in the world, incapable of changing. This leaves him in bad faith.

In love relations, the flight into facticity can be viewed as the attitude masochism, and the flight into transcendence can be viewed as sadism. For the masochist, the struggle in love relations results in the loss of grounding. The masochist’s desire to be grounded in objectivity leads him to adopt the attitude of an object. He denies his transcendence and attempts to force the other to view him as object. Sartre writes that masochism is “a perpetual effort to annihilate the subject’s subjectivity by causing it to be assimilated by the Other.”[B&N p493] This may be made concrete by the masochist paying another to view him as object though physical abuse, which emphasizes his manifestation as object and denies his status as a being-for-itself, his subjectivity.

The bad-faith flight into transcendence in love relations can be viewed as sadism. For the sadist, the failure of love relations leads to giving the other the Look. That is, asserting transcendence over the others objectivity. The goal of this interaction, according to Sartre, would be “to bring into the open the struggle of two freedoms confronted as freedoms.”[B&N p494] This goal is immediately disappointed because by giving the other the look, the sadist is viewing them as already transcended. They cannot have any meaning as a free being-for-itself. The sadist has obliterated for himself their subjectivity; their objectivity is all that remains. Afflicted by this blindness to the other-as-subject, the sadist has abandoned, by a flight into his transcendence, any possibility of being grounded by the other in his objectivity. He views others only as objects, which is manifest in his physical abuse of others. They have no transcendence for him, and he cannot understand them as being other than objects in the world. To do so would be to grant them the ability to Look at him, and thus push him back into his objectivity, which is intolerable for the sadist, as he defines himself in subjectivity.

These modes of flight lose meaning when the lovers are in love. They are no longer understood in their relations to each other, but to their love. They are not fighting to be grounded, they are understood as being ground to their love. They are its constituent essence and can best be understood as such.

A being-in-itself in the world is irrelevant as it’s in-itself when compared to its being viewed as the contents of a consciousness. The door is not just a piece of wood, it is a mechanism to beings-for-themselves for coming and going. The ball is not just a lump of rubber, it is a plaything. This is not a denial of the existence of the objects, it is a recontextualization of them relative to an intentional consciousness. Similarly, the lovers in love may indeed individually flee into bad faith on occasion, but love keeps them in context. A graphical representation of this recontextualization may aid understanding. We initially view the lovers as independent entities, capable of manifesting their natures as subjective or objective. That is, they are capable of viewing themselves as subject or object. The natural give and take of their relationship may cause one or the other to assume a more subjective or objective role at any given time.

After they enter a love relationship, however, their distinctions become irrelevant. As Hegel said above, “Lovers can distinguish themselves from each other only in the sense that they are mortal.”‘ Their instantiation in the world is unique, but it is irrelevant to view them as separable entities. Graphically, this would be represented by replacing the two lovers with a single unity of being.

The lovers themselves assume this identity. We are all familiar with the lamentations of ‘the guys’ who essentially lost their friend when he got ‘whipped’ by love. Their friend re prioritized his life in the context of the being he saw and became, that is, in the context of love. Similarly, we can see the unity of action and thought when a member of a couple speaks in the plural. “We’re very excited to be able to attend your party,” one of them might say. This human individual is speaking of another’s excitement as his own. He can be excited for another, in the way that he might dig a hole for another or pick up groceries for another. This emotional and psychological for-other-ness is one of the key aspects of good-faith love relations, and it is completely absent in bad-faith relations. A masochist has lost his subjectivity to the point that there is no way for him to be emotionally for-other. A sadist has lost his objectivity so much that he is incapable of viewing others as subjects that might want someone to be emotionally for them.

Good-faith love resolves many of issues regarding freedom in love relations. The masochist and sadist find themselves desiring constantly freedom of some sort. The masochist desires to have the other’s freedom made manifest in its for-itself, and for that freedom to choose him. He wants to be witness to the other’s freedom and for that freedom to ground him as an object. The sadist desires to appropriate the other’s freedom, to enslave it. He desires that the freedom freely associate itself with the possessed objective flesh of the other. Of course, these attempts are in bad faith and are doomed from the outset. For a lover in love, there is no struggle for freedom. Love has already been freed to choose its objects, and they are it. A lover cannot desire the freedom of his beloved be given to him from her, as he is conscious of it already having been given to love. He himself cannot even desire it, as his freedom to select the object of desire has been freely given to love. The love itself constitutes the free choice of the lovers, and their distance from it is what permits it to desire them. That is, the lover is free only to choose whether to constitute love or not. Once the decision to be in love, that is, to grant recognition to love, its freedom is the lovers’.

Suppose that, for some reason, a lover is dissatisfied with love (or that love is dissatisfied with a lover, which is the same thing). Is it possible to break good-faith love relations? Because the lovers are granted the same distance from love that they are granted from themselves, that is, at least enough distance to permit internal reflection and critical self-analysis, we must conclude that the answer is yes. Lovers can doubt love, and work to destroy it. Leaving love by simply denying it, revoking recognition, constitutes a sort of suicide, as it destroys the lover as lover, leaving him as a for-itself thrown into the world. It also destroys the love by destroying the world that constituted it, namely the two lovers.

Another attempt to change or leave love might be constituted by an attempt to involve another in love relations. That is, if a lover attempted to love one other than his beloved. This would bring into being another love with him as a constituent element. Because the primary love was defined by the two beings to the exclusion of all others, this attempt to bring another into love constitutes a change in the nature of that love, that is, a destruction of it and, potentially, a recreation of a different love in its place.

Ultimately the greatest benefit granted by good-faith love relations is temporal. Bad-faith love relations are frustrating in their constant failure. They represent vice and are generally viewed as being socially reprehensible. With these factors against them, they seldom endure between two specific individuals for any substantial time. Good-faith love relations, however, are satisfying. They permit the lovers a degree of control over the nature of their relationship while maintaining balance. This allows the love to endure through time and despite hardships. The end result is embodied by the grandparents who smile at each other over a cup of tea, or those who somehow manage to keep the ’spice’ in their relationship while celebrating their 50′th anniversary together. Clearly there are many benefits from an analytic point of view to granting love being. It permits the analysis of ideal love relations formerly denied by Sartre and provides a practical goal in love. While this analysis does not constitute a complete description of all possible modes of good-faith love relations, it is hoped that it provides a substantial enough platform to permit the reader to stand apart from Sartre’s existential cynicism toward love. It may permit the reader to view his or her own relationships not only as either masochistic or sadistic, but potentially as a genuine love created mutually and providing grounding in the world. Essentially, it is hoped that this work provides a patch over the holes left by Sartre in his ‘concrete relations with others.’

Norris Electronics

The sign on the door read “Norris Electronics.” Inside was a small, comfortable, wood paneled room. There were a half dozen televisions on one wall, antennae probing upward, seeking signals that were few and far between. A turntable squatted against the wall, a selection of records below it on the shelf. Mr Norris, 68, was sitting at a workbench, hopeful. There was a soldering iron and a dozen pairs of pliers and wire cutters. There were spools of wire, covered in dust. In the cluttered backrooms of Mr. Norris’ memories were hundreds of blueprints, vacuum tubes, switches and dials. Patience and hope kept Mr Norris behind the counter from 8 am until 5 PM. He ate a lunch around noon: an apple, bottle of juice and bologna sandwich.

He carried a briefcase to work. It was sharp. Light brown leather with a combination lock kept his clients important documents safe. Except it was empty. He had his business cards in there. Printed two hundred in 1984 and he still had some. And the paper, of course. The daily paper. Have to keep up with all the new things going on. The new televisions that nobody wants repaired and the new videogame systems that don’t need vacuum tubes or solder or anything else when they break. They just get replaced.

Then 5:00 comes around and Mr Norris gets up from the bench, walks over to the door and takes a brief look around to see if anyone is just running up at the last minute before flipping the sign over to “closed.” Today he knows this will be the last time. He walks home.

On the way to the shop in the morning Mr Norris enters the pawnshop he’s walked by every morning for close to 30 years now. After a few minutes he walks out without his briefcase and with a bulge in his pocket. He walks to his shop. He opens the door, walks in, closes and locks the door behind him. Mr Norris walks slowly into the backroom. He paces up and down the rows of shelves, touching dusty cardboard boxes of ancient capacitors and replacement resistors. He takes a seat on a 100 pound variable transformer that should by all rights be in a radio cabinet, picking up strains of ancient forgotten music. Then Mr Norris takes the gun out of his pocket and shoots himself in the head.

A few hours later a young man knocks on the door. He’s got a sharp briefcase, light brown leather with a combination lock. He wants to build a turntable to play videogames. He knows Mr Norris is his man. But nobody answers the door. Well, maybe there’s someone else out there who can do it. The world doesn’t stop turning.

Long Walk

So I was walking down a road. A long mountain pass. The sun was beating down and the sandstone walls stood towering over me and somehow cast no shadows. I came to a bridge. The chasm was broad and there wasn’t much room on the road. I started jogging. As I proceeded along the bridge, the sweat which had before been dripping slowly down my brow began to flow in harsh rivers. Then I heard a truck in the distance. Approaching. I was nearly halfway across. Suddenly the bridge seemed terribly narrow. My body, which all through this journey had seemed a machine, moving me along invincibly wherever I might command it, suddenly seemed soft and weak, a pale fleshy pulp without form or vigor. Not compared to the monstrous machine beast of steel and fire that would be rounding the corner any second now. My legs were sliding smoothly along the road, spinning my feet over the surface with a speed not before seen. And the beast was bearing down on me. I could feel its hot breath on my back, the deep bass of its growl rumbled deep in my breast. I was nearly there. I could hear the whine of its tires screaming along the black tar. And I was across. The walls here were sheer and vertical. There was no room. The hideous beast chasing me would win. I could see it running me down, crushing me to the ground. I looked back and saw the twin somekestacks belching fire and smoke. I saw the polished metal grill with other unfortunates stuck in its gleaming jaws: dragonflies and butterflies and wasps. I flattened myself against the wall of the canyon. I felt a cool breeze as it blew by me, inches from my nose. I could have reached out and touched it, felt the brushed aluminum siding slip beneath my fingers, felt the raw unflinching power of the beast. And then it was gone. There were many miles left on the road, yet. I was walking down a road.

My Love For You is Like That Scene in Terminator Two

I stand transfixed. Frozen in time. Movement slowing.
Around me thunder fire and ice, a maelstrom of activity.
I am shattered and frozen and melted all at once. My mind
fixed on the goal. You. The world fades to irrelevance.
I die for you and am reborn. Like glass I break apart.
And pull myself back together.

Blisters

I was working on a part last night and I had a small nut gripped in some needle nose pliers. I went to twist, and the pliers came off. I reached up with my other hand to steady them while I tried again. This time when they slipped off the nut they clamped on my thumb hard. It hurt like hell and I could see that I would soon have a blood blister. While the pain adrenaline was still pumping, I thought quick and bit off the tip of my thumb, just where the blister was starting to form. I knew that a normal wound wouldn’t hurt half as much as a blood blister, and might heal faster. I spat out the nubbin of skin and looked down at my thumb. It was bleeding a bit, and now the adrenaline was starting to wear off. I went to the first aid kit and got an antiseptic wipe and bandage and stuff… cleaned it up.

I started thinking about that guy who cut off his leg when it wastrapped under the boulder. When your body is put in extraordinary circumstances, it really is capable of doing things you wouldn’t think possible. When I woke up that morning I never thought I would be spitting out a piece of my thumb that evening. I can clearly remember the adrenaline pain rush… time slowing down so I could consider how to best deal with the injury… the pinched flesh slowly reddening in the creases left behind by the pliers… knowing that blood blisters form quickly and painfully and that I wouldn’t have much time before it would swell…. pulling my hand up to my lips, tasting the oil and dirt on my hand… feeling my teeth grip the small lump on my thumb and cleanly slicing through it with my incisors…. and then the metalic rush of blood. Then the crisis was over.

But what if it had lasted longer? What if I’d been stuck there with the rock on my leg, continuously in that slow moving zero-memory-moment with the focus so intense, but no time for recall? I can see myself pulling hard on the leg, but not getting it to give, tearing first at the flesh with my hands and fingernails, then mustering the mental energy to remember the knife. Remembering the knife is more difficult than using it. Using it is the natural part… the instinctual part. The part when we were foxes hunted and chewed off our own legs to prevent the hunter from getting more than a bite. The part when we were lizards and we let the birds take our tails so we could get away with our legs and innards. The part when we were starfish and let ourselves get cut and chewed and half eaten so we could regrow our missing limbs at a more opportune time.

And like that the leg is gone, just a lump of flesh under a rock. Scarcely identifiable. Like the small flake of skin that’s somewhere on the floor of the shop, dried up now, like a booger or dandruff. Discarded and unnecessary, having performed its job.

Then the tough part comes, because suddenly and without warning, perspective returns. The normal way that things were done is gone. For the thumb, it’s just getting used to typing with a bandaid on the finger. But a leg? The horror of what was committed finally begins to penetrate and you wish that you’d just pushed the rock off, that you’d found a piece of wood to lever it with or that a passerby had used his walkingstick to help you. But it’s not coming back. And that’s the painful part of the wound.

Wakeup

I fell asleep in my bunkbed around 1:30 AM. I had to be up and out the door to catch the 7:30 bus to school so I could work on a project. My alarm went off at 7:00.
I performed my usual routine for turning off the alarm clock. I hooked my feet around the edge of the mattress and leaned over the edge of the bed. Stretching, I touched the snooze button briefly.
I tried to pull myself back up onto the bed, but I found that my left arm was tangled in the blankets and I couldn’t use it to help pull myself back up. I was stuck hanging there for about 5 seconds. Then I felt the mattress start to shift. I had enough time to think “goddamit!” before I tumbled off the bed. I collided with my desk, scraping myself along the side and bruising my hip.
I wound up in a pile of pain on the floor with a mattress on top of me. I sat and winced for a bit, then got up, put the mattress back on the bed and went back to sleep for my 8 minute snooze.

Downtown Man

He’s an older gentleman, with short cut hair that is nearly vertical, a gangly walk, like a cowboy, and deeply creased lines on his once ruggedly handsome face. His speech is slurred and the imagery he uses in description is outdated but relevant. He gave me some advice once, unsolicited.

“When a woman tries to cross your rainbow, you’ve got to step with both feet forward, because that’s the only way to show what you mean.”

He’s either slightly brain damaged, or a poetic genius. He walked into the store once, approached the cashier, and opened his shirt to reveal a number of bruises on his chest.

“If I hadn’t tried to defend what I thought was my favorite car [note: he's very poor, and has no car] then they might have traveled all over the hills without me. I couldn’t stand for it.”

She was a little taken aback, and retreated to the back room. The manager came forward and told him to put his shirt back on and asked if he wanted anything. He slowly buttoned the plaid shirt back up while protesting.

“This country has some figures at its feet and if we all tried to be like Ghandi because he was so simple you know, and nobody I bet traveled his hills without him in the back seat.”

His point made, he slowly meandered away. I can’t imagine him running.

He drank tea. And coffee, occasionally. He often brought his own cup. One day I passed him on the street. He was wheeling an older woman around in her wheelchair. I nodded at him and smiled. He ignored me and walked straight on by. I think that was the woman who tried to cross his rainbow.

It’s hard to imagine where he came from. Where he�s going to go. Was he in a war? Probably. He strikes me as sort of the military type. That’s probably how he gets by, too. Veterans benefits and social security.

I know I’ll see him again. Blue jeans and clean shirt. Unshaven. Boots. He can wear any fashion, but he�s got his own style.

Feast

There’s a salad on the table. It appears to be intricately composed. My aunt selects a portion of the salad and begins to pick at it with her fork. Portions fall away, revealing that underneath the leafy green lettuce skin flows a veritable river of pink tuna. I am hungry, so I begin to eat the tuna. I can tell that there is some white material beneath the tuna, but I’m not interested. It’s all about the flakey, salty and yet soft dead fish flavor.

Now the white material is clearly a human femur. Nobody’s appetite is diminished. We don’t even bother to try to rationalize what we’re doing. There’s not room for rationalization when you’ve got food this good in front of you.

I’m feeling full but I really want to keep eating. The other people at the table are ravenous. I have to compete to get my fill. Some of them are shitting right there so they don’t have to stop eating. One of them is masturbating with her hand down her pants while she chews up what used to be an eyeball. Her eyes are closed in extacy. There is blood dripping from somewhere. It’s getting on the good china. I’ve left now, and I’m watching from a corner of the room. The top left corner.

There’s a cabinet that houses the napkins and tea trays. I can see that it’s open. I crawl inside behind the backs of some of the orgiers. The door closes behind me and it’s dark. I’m still not scared or angry, just a little tired. I wish I had a book to read.