There exists a creature
that is perfectly harmless;
when it passes before your eyes,
you hardly notice it and
immediately forget it again.
But as soon as it somehow,
invisibly, gets into your ears,
it begins to develop, it hatches,
and cases have been known
where it has penetrated
into the brain
and flourished there devastatingly,
like the pneumococci in dogs
which gain entrance through the nose.
This creature
is your neighbor.

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
By Ranier Maria Rilke (trans. Stephen Mitchell)

It is for this reason, finding yourself in the position of the beloved is a violent traumatic discovery: being in love makes me feel directly the gap between what I am as a determinate human being and the unfathomable X in me that causes love.

“Love is giving something one doesn’t have….to someone who doesn’t want it.”

excerpt How To Read Lacan by Slavoj Zizek. p46

These two quotations, juxtaposed are likely to cause intellectual whiplash.  The first, a few lines of text from one of Rilke’s notebooks highlights the surface appearance of normality, civil pacificity, in the faces and the demeanor of those around us.  From a vantage point in line to place my coffee order here at Starbucks, sit a half dozen patrons peering into their laptop or handheld screen.  They repose at a line of tables along the wall.  Are they, and am I not a civilized, well behaved, socially adept resident of the mid-west and citizen of the USA?

Such would be a woeful understatement, words which belie what lies within each one of us.  Certainly I am not the exception.  Is it not a good thing that we are separated by our neat homes and wide enough lawns, and rules of the road which we obey, stopping at a red light so that the anonymous other (the neighbor) in the vehicle opposite me can take her turn…  The coordinates of geography, laws & regulations, and by dint of luck, enough money — keep us sufficiently separated.  Otherwise we might be at each other’s throats.

Segue to the matter of falling in love.  It’s not just a matter of hormones, Nature’s trigger to reproduce encoded with youth.  That’s not the scary part of the matter.  Love is a “falling,” a forced gaze into an abyss.  In other words, I in all of my confusion, my uncertainty am being asked to make a durable commitment to someone who suffers from the same condition of unknowing, absence of self definition.  No wonder “love” spoken of seriously, without sentiment is terrifying.

Now on to current events.

Since the departure of the Obama administration there has been growing antipathy between our elected President and Iran.  On a global stage our elected leader has made a point of calling forth, evoking violent, war-like behavior from the Iranians.  You’d have to be blind and deaf to not recognize this is the case.  That a number of Iranian ballistic missiles fell onto two American military bases several days ago, without killing any who were asleep there, is nothing but the greatest strokes of good fortune.  I cross my fingers, and I breath a prayer. I pray to whatever gods there may be that our President will somehow back off from his usual schizoid-like oscillation between engagement and hostility toward the Iranian government.

There is nothing more terrifying, than the abyss of human nature, the abject ‘otherness’ when the mask is ripped off.

Hello neighbor.