Love and lovelessness: lessons in the love relationship, and opening the heart

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To think of the number of times I watched a woman whom I had fallen in love with walk away in the opposite direction as me, is enough to bend me over into the fetal position and never want to get up. Of all the sorrows which befell me over the years, those images of our souls parting ways are the ones which conjure up and hold the greatest grief.

Oh, I knew already by then how to instinctually float merrily along in the subtle realms of non-being, but what I needed was a bit of flesh to sink my teeth into; a small to medium-sized rump-roast, or breast of debutante, followed by a kiss and a hug and let us lay down and wake up together. I had learned early in life how to not-be, but I had never learned how to not-be and be, and therefore I continued to lose contact with existence, continued to hover above life, continued to suffer an agony I could not feel because I was numb from emotional paralysis. In pragmatic terms that meant, among other things, I had no female partner made of flesh and blood to share my fleshless, and bloodless passions with, only hellos and goodbyes, comings and goings, just like the rest of my life; an evanescent procession of delicious but fleeting samples which only led to more hunger.

            This type of thing went on until I ended up at the Ivanhoe Hotel and finally realized why I was there- why we were all there- because we had lost love, had the inability to love, or had pushed love away, and had forgotten or never known that our pain was this absence

            And so my time at the down-and-out Ivanhoe Hotel would come to be much more than a practical place to live out the itinerant life I was floating about in; it would come to be a great lesson, because it, like most things in life, was a manifest reflection of what was happening in my internal being, albeit unconsciously, and I needed to have it broadcast loud and clear in living and dying colour right out in front of me, in order to listen and hear. For it was the magnitude of the male spirits there, suspended above all life by their own excesses, transgressions, and unlove, which would eventually force me to recognize how I had injured, rejected, and lost the lovebond which life had benevolently allotted me earlier.

            I recall this awakening- as to the reasons behind my abject, loveless state- when again I had made my pilgrimage out to Flores Island, had again been stripped clean of all that had accumulated within me from the psychic fog of the city, and was sitting alone on a beach, staring out to sea, and I guess the unconscious, untouchable separation and agony I had been drinking away for so many years suddenly broke through the surface, and there in front of me lay a vision of the last woman I had been in a true relationship with, some years earlier; there she was, staring at me, a stare which I will never forget, a stare which was so soft and caring and intimate and hurt, and which instantly awoke in me the realization of what I had looked past and been missing unknowingly, and had flung away disrespectfully because I had not felt what it was, and what I had not felt was ...love.

            I knew then that I had been loved in the past, that I had not known it for the brute that I was at the time, and that I had turned away from it like a starving blind man passing within inches of an abundant banquet, and walking past, never knowing he could have been endlessly filled.

            I understood finally what this unbelievable thing was which I had been missing since the day I had unconsciously turned away from it- I knew that love was the only way to be a part of existence, the only way to belong to a life that no one belonged to, the only way to live upon this hardened earth without going mad because to live on this earth without love is hardly to live at all- it is to merely endure the timeless prison sentence of the mind detached from the heart; to be a phantom wandering about in a wasteland of other phantoms, none of whom can touch, or console, or embrace another.

            This is why women will always be more enduring and braver then men- because they were born with their hearts open, and therefore they learned from day one that, for the heart, there is no escape. But for men it is different; for men the mind has always been a way out, and even when the heart opens up the mind remains ready, like a hyperspace button on a video game, to help them instantly escape from the agony of existence. The heart cannot run away, only the mind can run; the mind runs and runs, abandoning the heart to the hell of separation which the mind creates by running away from what cannot run away.

            We are a weak and pathetic gender. Women may have their own faults- not the least of which is the unconscious witchcraft each one is born with and most unleash without the slightest idea of the confusion and woe they are causing- but they are far tougher, far more capable of living, and far more courageous when it comes down to loving or saying goodbye than any man I know. For unless a man’s heart is held open with an iron grip, he will forever choose the escape hatch in such painful situations, and therefore never truly face the world that he has made.

            And yet were it not for the escape hatch which leads into the unfeeling void, I would have remained stuck in many heart wrenching predicaments in the past, for I was quite often not very good at letting go. And the escape hatch allowed me to climb out of the torture of context for a bit, to take a look around, survey the situation, and then set down again where and when I was directed. It is this ability of the spirit which keeps it fit while dancing out the blood of the heart’s dominion.

            Had I not walked away from that love I had earlier in my life, few, if any, of the learning’s and adventures which would befall me over the next many years, would have ever taken place.

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These fragments and quotes are taken from the unpublished writings of Jack Haas, selected from the notebooks 1990-2005.