The Journey and the Guide A Practical Course in Enlightenment
Maitreyabandhu
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Week 4 – The man.d.ala of positive emotion
Spiritual receptivity 4: ‘The more loving one’ The more loving one by W.H. Auden Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell, But on earth indifference is the least We have to dread from man or beast. How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me. Admirer as I think I am Of stars that do not give a damn, I cannot, now I see them, say I missed one terribly all day. Were all stars to disappear or die, I should learn to look at an empty sky And feel its total dark sublime, Though this might take me a little time.28
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The Journey and The Guide ‘The more loving one’ is an apparently light-hearted poem about a serious subject. Auden defined poetry as ‘memorable speech’ and this poem is certainly memorable. On one level – and poetry can work on many levels at the same time – ‘The more loving one’ is an antisentimental poem. He’s saying all this nature-loving business is guff: I’d like to believe I love the stars, but ‘I cannot, now I see them, say / I missed one terribly all day.’ On a deeper level, Auden’s poem is about unrequited love. He knows quite well that love is really something between people, and that other kinds of love – a love of literature, say, or horses – is ‘love’ only by analogy. Auden was in a long-term relationship with Chester Kallman, the love of Auden’s life. But Kallman was not willing to be monogamous, which Auden at times found excruciatingly painful. He even felt close to strangling Kallman at one point. In another poem, Auden wrote Inform my hot heart straight away Its treasure loves another.29 Auden, in their relationship, was the more loving one. The break-up of a sexual relationship or the discovery that our partner is having an affair can be incredibly painful. And yet spiritually speaking there’s an opportunity here – if only we could attend to it deeply enough. Every time we experience loss, we glimpse the nature of reality: nothing can ever be ours, nothing can ever be had or fixed. Life is betraying us all the time: what we thought was stable and permanent slips away – our ‘treasure loves another’. If we could only stay with that and let go of our painful, fruitless holding on, we’d discover freedom. But usually we can’t – we rush into fixing things. So this is a poem that asks us to love even when our partner goes off with someone else. It asks us to feel the pain, which is our pain of holding on, and carry on loving. In fact we could say that this is the true test of love: whether we can let our partner go – rather than feeling he/
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Week 4 – The man.d.ala of positive emotion she belongs to us, or that we have rights to his/her body (and that no one else has). This would be real love, a love that wants nothing in return, a love that’s free, that’s not mixed up with egoistic feelings of entitlement and ownership. The poem goes so far as to imaginatively sympathize with Kallman, with what it’s like to be loved ‘with a passion ... we could not return’. This is a tall order, but this is what Auden is saying and what positive emotion is pointing towards: that we learn to love others even when they’re indifferent to us or don’t love us back; that we love others more than they love us; that we rise above indifference, even animosity and love without expectation of return. This great love would require a kind of death – a letting go of egotism, a profound seeing into the heart of things, and a relinquishment of envy. We fall in love, just a little, a lot of the time – glimpsing a pretty face on the train, pausing at the photocopier to talk to a new work colleague. Loving only one person is impossible and unhealthy. The degree to which we enter into genuine communication with a friend is the degree to which we enter into their lives – this has nothing to do with sex necessarily, but it does have an element of erotic engagement, an awakening of energy. Friendships can’t just be about catch-ups and information sharing. Real friendship often has an erotic tinge – not in the smutty sense but in the sense of emotional arousal. This is why fear of homosexuality is so damaging; it prevents men from allowing themselves to love other men or women other women. We’re conditioned to think that any sense of attraction is necessarily sexual (in the crude sense), but there’s much more to it than that. We need to broaden our sympathies and this means not allowing all our erotic energies to be cordoned off for the couple. We may decide to be monogamous (or we may not), but we need to make sure enough emotional engagement is going into our friendships – if only to prevent putting too much weight of expectancy on our partner.
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The Journey and The Guide The emotional heart of the poem – a heart protected by the light comedy either side of it – is the wonderful couplet: ‘If equal affection cannot be, / Let the more loving one be me.’ Auden’s playfulness has allowed him to say what he really means – a wish, almost a prayer to be the more loving one. We could extrapolate this into a universal aspiration – at home with our infuriating teenage son, at work with our micromanaging boss, helping our aged mother to the loo, discovering our wife’s affair – never mind who’s to blame or who’s at fault, we could be the more loving one. Of course, this wouldn’t mean being a doormat or a pushover, but it would mean committing ourselves to staying in relationship and renouncing blame. Being ‘the more loving one’ would demand trying, in every situation, to contribute to that situation – to help it move on, to see what’s best for all concerned (including oneself). We could go further and make ‘being the more loving one’ our response to life: the stars may ‘not give a damn’ but we’ll appreciate them anyway; the dog might bite the hand that feeds it but we’ll put out food anyway; the shopkeeper might look through us but we’ll be friendly anyway; the cold-caller might be pushy but we’ll be polite anyway, and so on. This could be a simple but far-reaching practice. To what extent have we been ‘the more loving one’ today? If we could do this, even to a limited extent, day in and day out, we would transform our life. Perhaps we could memorize ‘If equal affection cannot be / Let the more loving one be me’? We could use it as a kind of mantra (mantra means ‘that which protects the mind’) in those difficult situations when we want to close in on ourselves – when we feel tired or stressed or unappreciated. We could say it to ourselves as we get home from work and our partner wants us to look after the children when we’d been hoping for a bit of TLC ourselves! We could bring it to mind when a colleague is being exasperating. We could repeat it when our flatmate has left a sink full of washing up. Just those two lines of poetry could sum up the entire stage of positive emotion.
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