THE LAST TESTAMENT
What exactly is romantic love? Is it a tangible thing, something to really grasp? Some say that love never existed until the Greeks said it did. Love! They were good at that kind of conceptual stuff. Love and democracy -- the Greeks were dreamers.
Democracy's got its points. But love?
Some say we’ve been misled in our quest to make life more interesting than its daily hum-drum operation. Didn’t Freud suggest that ‘romantic love’ is really just a cute disguise for about six months of mental illness? And if one gets hooked during this contagious period, the subsequent period that follows can deliver a lifetime of shock treatments courtesy of the addicted sharer of the initial insanity.
George Bernard Shaw (in "Man and Superman") said that there are two great tragedies in life: One tragedy is not to obtain your heart’s desire; the other is to obtain it. Perhaps that is why he never slept with his wife.
Some say it’s a theater of the absurd. Is looking for love the ultimate 'godot' -- that unreachable pot of happiness hovering on the horizon? Because outside of the fact that love is a word lodged between lout and low in the dictionary, all we can concretely state about love is that it is a zero score in tennis. Love - 15, love - 30, love - 40, game, set, match. You lose.
Yet, love is also projecting positiveness into the world whether the world deserves it or not. This is confusing. Some say that our most primal instinct of self-preservation makes us seek out the faults in others. Something to enhance our own feeble stature. However, in love that aspect is skipped altogether -- and what we end up seeing, and are blinded by, are his or her good points.
Is looking at clouds and seeing pillows, or looking at pillows and seeing clouds any way to operate in this day and age? When our imagination takes hold of our senses and then addicts us with beauty, desire, feeling, and loss of sleep we despair when few can share such musings. Such amusings.
At times we can be overburdened with too much feeling. Some people in such a condition have tried to release it through their wrists; others have tried to drown it in a bottle or in the sea; others have accompanied it off a bridge or a cliff; others have tried to calm it with drugs or even cure it with a vial of pills. Recently you may have even heard the rumor about a man who volunteered to have love surgically removed.
Yes.
Well, it was more than a rumor. It was the first exploratory, experimental amputation of its kind. A group of specialists gave him a deceptively simple general anesthetic: they patronized him, humiliated him, betrayed him, and in general, dictated to him. This, the specialists theorized put love into a frozen, suspended state yet activated the symptomatic pains and made the operation more feasible.
They carved him open from head to toe checking the sunken eyes, the silent lips, the throbbing heart, the open yet clinging arms, the surreal sex, the wobbly knees, the cold feet. But nothing. So the pioneering mercenaries flipped him over and stabbed him in the back. Then they cut in along his spiraling backbone in a frantic and fascinating search to find the source for the rumored pains in the neck and the ass.
Of course, failure again. By the time these esoteric experts realized they were incapable of finding love the operation had just about sent this mumbling, misguided, sacrificial lamb through death's door.
"C'est la vie!" the chief surgeon concludes, conceding defeat.
"a - ah -ah - amour..." the patient mumbles, much disoriented.
"What's that?" asks Doctor A. Clarity is everything.
" amor..." he murmurs toward the nurse's sapphire eyes.
"What the hell is he saying?"
"He says he wants more," says the nurse.
The whole room bursts into side-splitting mocking laughter.
"No!" he flails his arms, "amor, amor... but, but...amour..."
"May I, " Doctor B-- comes over, interpreting, " arm or butt, what he's saying is 'arms or butt."
The patient goes flailing again and wiggling crazily.
"Both?" asks the surgeon. The wild-eyed patient hears this and passes out. "I'll take that as a yes."
They quickly chop off his arms and slice off his butt. The patient at last rests quietly, peacefully.
According to the transcripts, his final words recorded in what would normally be the recovery room, except in this case:
“It's getting darker... life is light is beautiful... despite this traumatic experience,
despite these set backs, despite these scars, despite despite despite
… I have to admit in this last dying breath, all you need is L …”
End of transcript.
More inquiries to follow.
Last Testament, © 2000 by John Kirkmire, © 2013 Kirkworkshop. All rights reserved.
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