Footnote on passion

Occasion: Listening to Kate Bush in "Wuthering Heights": This sopranissimo voice so ethereal, unreal, the figure of an impossible desire, which is of course to say a figure of romantic longing. I guess the unreality is part of the point.

At least since some medieval poets in southern France started taking seriously the notion in the Song of Songs that "love is strong as death," it's been known that there is the absolute that is revealed as a desire that must will itself to go to the limit of what it is capable of, and to ignore or abolish all that blocks its way, even though that limit is like a pane of glass that if you shatter it to move through it, you could find yourself in a nothingness where you cannot find anything. All of the poetry and beauty of life rests the intensity that can give it meaning or enjoyment on the utter smallness of the bit of seemingly endless time that we occupy and the utter improbability of any existence and every joy. We are granted this intensity in exchange for securely possessing nothing. Most people of necessity are existential cowards, but sometimes one can taste something too delicious for it to remain credible to die of not dying. We then stake our satisfactions on a refusal to be instructed in the paths of mere wisdom by the limits that frame what we see within them.

His friends went to the revolution and all he got was a guillotine.
But when others went to the house of those who petition the boss of it all,
The lovers found themselves in that strange world they call art.
Wondering, could we live here?
Yes, at the price merely of staking our faith in a particularity,
that the waves of a divine and stupid universality will glorify but itself in abolishing.
For that prayer, I will not be there.
Though I hope you remember some of us actors;
the spectators, we shall not know.
We don't seize the night in the light,
but the light in the night.