I randomly came across a quote from The Unbearable Lightness of Being which I found on my friend Luke's facebook. A trite way to start a new theory, however, it works.
I am not sure if any of you are familiar with Plato's myth from Symposium which deliberates the power of Love (depicted as a God here). Plato states that at the beginning of humankind there were three sexes, male, female and the hermaphrodites. These hermaphrodites were in a wholly circular form and had double the appendages as a regular human; four arms, four legs, two faces with one head, etc. They were contently together and could walk backwards or forwards, and could run at extreme speeds like doing cartwheels. They were the prestine race of the humans and were God-like in their happiness and beauty. It was believed that the men came from the sun, and were in a sense homosexual, only commuting with other men. The females were derived from the earth and as the males were, they were homosexual as well. The original men became the gays of today, the females became the lesbians, and the hermaphrodites, well they became the heterosexuals. God, who is Zeus here, wanted to make the hermaphrodites weaker and less God-like so he derived a plan which could continue the human race, he decided that he would disect the whole of the hermaphrodite right down the center, leaving only the belly button as a result of their togetherness and their fall. After they were torn apart, the two pieces of the whole were given external sexual organs so they could procreate like the already male and females. The pieces were not satsified ever by this and spent their lives searching for their missing part. Once they were found the two pieces never left each others side and asked God to conjoin them once again for all eternity. This is what Plato's myth believes love is, Love is the desire to be connected with someone spiritually and wholly for eternity.
So thus, in the contemporary age, it is believed that the notion of a soulmate is linked to the writings of Plato. The two halves that spend their lives looking for their lost piece have a torn soul which is inhabited in another body. Once the two are reconnected as partners in life, their soul and intellect work together to create Love and ascend above this world to the absolute. The way in which to do this is to focus on the beauty and the goodness of the world, to understand it first, and later form appreciation. In many of my writings I have stressed this point of locating the beauty, all types, and exploring your senses through the external world. Here, Plato agrees:
"The process of attaining to the highest goal is this: start observing beauty from the sensible world and use these examples as steps to ascend continually with that absolute beauty as one's aim–from physical beauty to moral beauty to beauty of knowledge to supreme knowledge of absolute beauty. "
I was having this thought the other day while driving down 75 on my way home from school. We as women feel that we can change men, that we have this supernatural cosmic power that we can shift their psyche into what we want them to be. This is a very trite statement, however, we all still believe it, even if we admit the fact and say, "well I accept them for who they are." The truth is we don't, and we never will. Just as men will try to mold us into the perfect supermodel, although they are more concerned with our physical apperance than our morals and ambitions as we are with them. Anyway, my point came to the conclusion that we feel that we are simply God's gift to man, and from this we derive the idea that we can change them. For those who do believe in Christianity, Genesis constructs man's fall when eatting the fruit from the tree of knowledge, however, what we were unsure of which Milton generously points out is that the fruit itself was not knowledge, but rather the human race learned from eating the fruit, disobedience. I'm straying again. Anyway, described in the story is how women were quite literaly God's gift to man. Eve was made from Adam as a gift so he would have a partner. I think from there we have this innate opinion that we really are their gift, and like Eve we try to change them, to be come independent and flee from oppression and submission. The fact of the matter is though, we cannot and we all fail miserably in our attempt. We hurt ourselves with the delusion that we will inevitably get what we want, but all we're really doing is setting ourself up for the fall, quite biblically here too. However, in keeping with this biblical referrence and Milton's position, Adam, or men make their own choices, they are not persuaded by evil, they are even more rational then women. (ha! so is the belief but I beg to differ, although women do tend to be more emotional) Regardless, the point is, women cannot change men into their ideals, and yet we can never accept them either, fully I guess, there are those parasite-like women who could care less of men's moral ambiguities and ambitions and just take what they can get, but I simply pity these women. Although I may never be completely content with the man I will later choose, I will simply not settle for less than I am. And that is a very real, very true, and very hard thing to say. Whilst, on the other hand, we have men, who make bad choices and later repent. Well heres a thought, think before you do, and build up your morale a bit before you go off into the world judging other people, I've done it, and its really not that hard. I just hope that I can rejoin my otherhalf, my missing piece, the reason we all don't feel whole.
future reading if you're interested:
http://dunelm.wordpress.com/2006/10/23/platos-the-symposium/
http://www.geocities.com/bjlandry_00/Otherwriters/platosymposium.html
No comments:
Post a Comment