Ben Wills: A Fitness Log

We stumbled on in the darkness, over big stones and through large puddles, along the one road leading from the camp. The accompanying guards kept shouting at us and driving us with the butts of their rifles. Anyone with very sore feet supported himself on his neighbor’s arm. Hardly a word was spoken; the icy wind did not encourage talk. Hiding his mouth behind his upturned collar, the man marching next to me whispered suddenly: “If our wives could see us now! I do hope they are better off in their camps and don’t know what is happening to us.”

That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind. As we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another up and onward, nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking of his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.

A though transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth - that love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way - an honorable way - in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, “The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.”

…

My mind still clung to the image of my wife. A thought crossed my mind: I didn’t even know if she were still alive. I knew only one thing - which I have learned well by now: Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance.

 - Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

I read this the other night in Robert Johnson’s We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love. Totally awesome book that seems to uproot a lot of the fundamental discord we had about romance and how Westerners incorporate romance into their lives.

(And, if it’s in here, I’ve obviously found it relevant to my own life.)

Some reference points:

• Iseult of the White Hands symbolizes an earthly, physical opportunity for love.
• Iseult of the Fair symbolizes a divine, spiritual, passionate love that is unattainable through someone else.
• Anima and Animus

When Tristan refuses Iseult of the White Hands he shows us the standard attitude of Western men. A Western man unconsciously believes that it is right for him to use his marriage to try to connect with his anima, to use a woman to carry his projected soul-image, and that he need not ever take a woman seriously in her own right, as a physical, individual being with her own complex structure and consciousness. A man believes that he must always search for Iseult the Fair (a fantasy/passionate femininity) and always reject Iseult of the White Hands (an earthly/physical femininity); he must always seek the divine world that he projects on a woman but never relate to that woman as an individual person.

…

In Tristan’s vow, and in his refusal of his marriage, we find the basic flaw in romanticism: its partialness. It attempts to balance the one-sidedness of our Western psyche by restoring the experience of the gods, the inner world, the mysteries, and the divine love. But, like all collective attempts at balancing, it has become one-sided in the opposite direction. It embraces the opposite polarity, it idealizes the divine and ecstatic world but leaves no room for ordinary humanness. Ordinary human life, with its obligations, its ties, its commitments, its duties, its limitations, and its focus on ordinary human beings, is too earthbound, too dull and sordid for our romantic prejudices.

…

This is exactly what the myth was predicting for our culture, and this is exactly what we see as the normal pattern. People make the marriage in form but refuse it in fact. They refuse to make a real commitment to a human being, because they will only commit themselves to their inner vision, their inner ideal, their search for the perfect manifestation of the anima (in short, a man’s femininity) or animus (in short, a woman’s masculinity), their search for the divine love. Since they have not learned that this is an inner task, they imagine that they must always keep their options open, they must always reserve the right to follow wherever the inner ideal is projected. In our romantic fog, we think this is very noble, very “liberated,” but in fact it is just a misunderstanding of reality. It is our way of obliterating the human side of the equation, our way of refusing to be committed to Iseult of the White Hands.

The tragedy is that Tristan, in full possession of a life of relatedness, surrounded with human warmth, refuses to enjoy it or appropriate it. Curiously, there is nothing he need do: He only needs to open his eyes, wake up to the riches that surround him, and live. But that fog of romantic idealism, that denigration of the human world, cuts him off from the very love for which he starves. He rejects Iseult of the White Hands: He renews his pact with death.

This pattern in romantic love replays itself constantly in the lives of modern people. A man in a relationship or marriage feels vaguely dissatisfied: Life doesn’t have enough meaning, or he misses the ecstasy and the “rush” that he used to feel. Instead of realizing that he is longing for the divine love, for the inner experience of anima that is his own responsibility, he finds fault with woman. She is not making him happy; she is not good enough; she does not fulfill his dreams. Although she gives him everything that a mortal woman could provide, he rejects her and goes looking for Iseult the Fair. He always assumes that somewhere, in some woman or in some adventure, he is going to find Iseult the Fair and be able to possess her physically and find there his meaning and fulfillment. Thus we denigrate human love; thus we reject Iseult of the White Hands; thus we renew our collective vow to “serve a single love.”

…

The cult of romance teaches us that ordinary people are not enough, that we must seek a god or goddess, a Hollywood star, a dream-woman or dream-man, a beauty queen: an embodied anima or animus. So long as a man is caught in this mentality, he will never accept anything except his anima; he relates to a woman only if she reflects his dream of Iseult the Fair.

The tale of Iseult of the White Hands is the tale of Tristan’s lost opportunity. Tristan misses his chance to discover that there are two loves and two relationships: one with anima within and one with woman in the physical world. Each is distinct, and each has its own validity. But, if Tristan, like us, had a second chance, he could learn from Iseult of the White Hands rather than reject her. He could learn that the meaning of life is not found only in seeking his inner ideal; it is also found in the physical woman with whom him he lives in the castle of Carhaix.