In Search of the Woman Inside Me
The goddess inside every man
It’s funny that I cannot think of her very much at any one time. So I think about her often, but little at a time. It’s like the inhalation of my breath grounds me to reality, making me worry about all the mundane stuff of life. But with every exhale, her remembrance hits me. I feel the existence of a void inside me, the void that I didn’t know existed, just like her memory whose realness I cannot prove.
These memories of her are like the thoughts of a former existence to a reincarnated spirit. Faded when I’m awake, but grips me tight while I’m asleep. Just as Eve was created from a rib of Adam, so would she come into existence from the limbs of my soul. All the while I’m completely asleep.
Dante’s Beatrice
Her beauty is something that doesn’t belong to this world. It’s something transcendent, something beyond this realm. This reminds me of my fellow comrade Dante. As he followed Beatrice through the gates of heaven and onto the throne of God, there she was, together with the Trinity and the angelic forms. God manifested as love, love manifested as beauty, beauty manifested as Beatrice. Now I become Dante, and she is the alluring Beatrice. Guiding me up the steps of heaven while Jacob holds the ladder at the bottom. Now I know that it’s all love. All must be love. Nothing must interfere: love conquers all.
If you haven’t met her yet, I cannot introduce her to you with mere words. As Heinrich Zimmer once said:
The best things can’t be told. They are transcendent, inexpressible truths. The second-best are misunderstood: myths, which are metaphoric attempts to point the way toward the first. And the third-best have to do with history, science, biography, and so on. The only kind of talking that can be understood is this last kind. When you want to talk about the first kind, that which can’t be said, you use the third kind as communication to the first. But people read it as referring to the third directly; the image is no longer transparent to the transcendent.
Her Eternal Presence
But still, I shall try to be of some use. With these vulgar words, I will tell you how it feels to be in her presence. She gives me the gratification of being alive. Her warmth permeates through my unconscious body lying in that dark room. And my conscious body, which I am in my dreams, longs to become one with her. Everything else seems remote and insignificant in comparison with this woman. She is the eternal manifested. And before her, all other affairs in existence is just a blip in a negligible space of endless time.
If somehow she had the appearance of any particular woman I had known in waking hours, I would abandon myself altogether to the sole quest of her; just like a soldier in search of his home where his beloved awaits his return. But alas! she isn’t a particular woman. Rather, I see fractions of her in almost all women I’ve known in my life. And the greatest of her soul, I see in my mother.
My words won’t be able to carry the weight of the feeling I have towards my mother. So here I quote a passage by Marcel Proust:
My sole consolation when I went upstairs for the night was that Mamma would come in and kiss me after I was in bed. But this good night lasted for so short a time: she went down again so soon that the moment in which I heard her climb the stairs, and then caught the sound of her garden dress of blue muslin, from which hung little tassels of plaited straw, rustling along the double-doored corridor, was for me a moment of the keenest sorrow. So much did I love that good night that I reached the stage of hoping that it would come as late as possible, so as to prolong the time of respite during which Mamma would not yet have appeared. Sometimes when, after kissing me, she opened the door to go, I longed to call her back, to say to her “Kiss me just once again,” but I knew that then she would at once look displeased, for the concession which she made to my wretchedness and agitation in coming up to me with this kiss of peace always annoyed my father, who thought such ceremonies absurd, and she would have liked to try to induce me to outgrow the need, the custom of having her there at all, which was a very different thing from letting the custom grow up of my asking her for an additional kiss when she was already crossing the threshold.
Now I must part ways with you. I will leave you here feeling incomplete. Feeling the sense of wanting more. I envy you. I envy you all who haven’t seen her in your dreams or waking hours. I envy you because you are spared from longingness and desperation. I envy you for being oblivious of her.
Yet, I also pity you. I pity all you men who haven’t met your inner goddess. Those who have met her once have taken a bite of the apple from the forbidden tree and now they are expelled from the garden. But those who are oblivious of her, haven’t even had a glimpse of the tree yet.
Ignorance is truly blissful. But knowing her is something beyond that.
I would say: transcendently blissful.
