The Double Flame by Octavio Paz

Author:Octavio Paz
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Random House

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Obstacle/transgression is intimately associated with another element that is also double: domination/submission. The model for courtly love was the feudal relationship: the ties that united vassal and master. But putting a real relationship of domination into the sphere of love – a privileged realm of the imaginary – was more than a transposition or reproduction. The vassal was bound to his lord by an obligation that began at the moment of his birth and was symbolically manifested by the formal public rendering of his vows of homage, fealty and service. The relationship between sovereign and subject was reciprocal and a given; that is to say, it was not by explicit agreement where free choice played a part but, rather, the result of two fateful circumstances: birth and the soil on which one was born. The love relationship, on the other hand, is based on a fiction: the code of courtesy. By copying the relationship between feudal lord and vassal, the lover transforms the givens of blood and soil into an act of freedom: he voluntarily chooses his lady, and by this choice chooses also his servitude. The code of courtly love contains, moreover, another transgression against the aristocratic world: the noble lady voluntarily forgets her rank and parts with her sovereignty.

Love has been and is still the great act of subversion in the West. As with eroticism, the agent of the transformation is imagination. Except that in the case of love the transformation results in an opposite relationship: it does not deny the Other or reduce the Other to a shadow but is instead the negation of one’s own sovereignty. This self-negation has a counterpart: the acceptance of the Other. The image, contrary to what happens in the realm of eroticism, takes on substance; the Other, male or female, is now not a shadow but a carnal and spiritual reality. I can not only touch it but talk to it as well. And I can hear it – and drink in its words. Transubstantiation once again: the body becomes a voice, a meaning, a soul. Every love, then, is eucharistic.

The eagerness of all those in love and the subject of our great poets and novelists has always been the same: the recognition of the beloved. Recognition in the sense of acknowledging, as the dictionary states, the subordinate position in which one finds oneself. The paradox lies in the fact that the recognition is voluntary, freely given. Recognition also in the sense of confessing that we are in the presence of a mystery in the flesh: a person. Recognition aspires to reciprocity but is independent of it. It is a wager no one is certain of winning because its outcome depends on the freedom of the Other. Vassalage is the given, reciprocal obligation of overlord and tenant; love is the search for a freely granted reciprocity. But here is another mystery: the transformation of the erotic object into a person immediately makes that person a subject who possesses free will.

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