13. I had called Chloe evil because she 'displeasethed' me, not because she was in herself inherently evil. My value system was a justification of a situation rather than an explanation of Chloe's offence according to an absolute standard. I had made the classic moralist's error, traced so succinctly by Nietzsche:
First of all, one calls individual actions good or bad quite irrespective of their motives but solely on account of their useful or harmful consequences. Soon, however, one forgets the origin of these designations and believes that the quality good and evil is inherent in the actions themselves, irrespective of their consequences . . .*
* Human, all too Human, Friedrich Nietzsche (University of Nebraska Press, 1986).
What gave me pleasure and pain determined the moral labels I chose to affix to Chloe. I was an egocentric moralizer, judging the world and her duties within it according to my own interests. My moral code was a mere sublimation of my desires.
14. At the summit of self-righteous despair, I asked, ‘Is it not my right to be loved and her duty to love me?' Chloe's love was indispensable, her presence in the bed beside me as important as freedom or the right to life. If the government assured me these two, why could it not assure me the right to love? Why did it place such an emphasis on the right to life and free speech when I didn't give a damn about either, without someone to lend that life meaning? What use was it to live if it was without love and without being heard? What was freedom if it meant the freedom to be abandoned?
But how could one possibly extend the language of rights to love, to force people to love out of duty? Was this not simply another manifestation of romantic terrorism, of romantic fascism? Morality must have its boundaries. It is the stuff of High Courts, not of salty midnight tears and the heart-wrenching separations of well-fed, well-housed, over-read sentimentalists. I had only ever loved selfishly, spontaneously, like a utilitarian. And if utilitarianism states an action is right only when it produces the greatest happiness for the greatest number, then the pain now involved both in loving Chloe and hers in being loved was the surest sign that our relationship had not simply grown amoral, but immoral.
It was unfortunate that anger could not be wedded to blame. Pain mobilized me to seek an offender, but responsibility could not be pinned on Chloe. I learnt that humans stood in a relation of negative liberty towards one another, duty-bound not to hurt others, but certainly not forced to love one another if they did not wish. A primitive belief made me feel that my anger entitled me to blame someone else, but I recognized that blame can only be linked to choice. One does not get angry with a donkey for not being able to sing, for the donkey's constitution never gave it a chance to do anything but snort. Similarly, one cannot blame a lover for loving or not loving, for it is a matter beyond their choice and hence responsibility - though what makes rejection in love harder to bear than donkeys who can never sing is that one did once see the lover loving. One finds it easier not to blame the donkey for not singing because it never sang, but the lover loved, perhaps only a short while ago, which makes the reality of the claim I cannot love you any more all the harder to digest.
17. The arrogance of wanting to be loved had emerged only now it was unreciprocated – I was left alone with my desire, defenceless, beyond the law, shockingly crude in my demands: Love me! And for what reason? I had only the usual paltry, insufficient excuse: Because I love you . . .
20
Psycho-Fatalism
Whenever something calamitous happens to us, we are led to look beyond everyday causal explanations in order to understand why we have been singled out to receive such terrible, intolerable punishment. And the more devastating the event, the more inclined we are to imbue it with a significance it does not objectively have, the more likely we are to slip into a brand of psychological fatalism. Bewildered and exhausted by grief, I suffocated on question marks: 'Why me? Why this? Why now?' I scoured the past to look for origins, omens, offences, anything that might count as an explanation for the wound I had sustained.
I was forced to abandon the optimism of everyday life. I gave up television and the daily papers. I took time off work. I became obsessed by millennial disasters: the risks of earthquakes, floods, and avian flus. I felt the transience of everything, the illusions upon which civilizations are built. I saw in happiness a violent denial of reality. I looked commuters in the face and wondered why they were unbothered by their own meaninglessness. I understood the pain of history, a record of carnage enveloped in nauseous nostalgia. I felt the arrogance of scientists and politicians, newscasters and petrol-station attendants, the smugness of accountants and gardeners. I linked myself to the great outcasts, I became a follower of Caliban and Dionysus, and all who had been reviled for looking pus-filled truth in the face. In short, I briefly lost my mind.
But did I have a choice? Chloe's departure had rocked my confidence in just about everything. I felt that I had lost the ability to control my own destiny and had witnessed a childish, petulant demon take charge of me, make me smile, encourage me to feel safe, and then smash me onto the rocks. I was a character in a narrative whose grander design I was helpless to alter. I repented for the arrogance of my previous faith in free will.
Once more I thought of destiny, once more I felt the almost divine nature of love. Both its arrival and departure, the first so beautiful, the second gruesome, reminded me that I was but a plaything for the games of Cupid and Aphrodite. Unbearably punished, I sought out my guilt. Unsure of quite what I had done, I confessed to everything. I tore myself apart looking for reasons: every insolence returned to haunt me, acts of ordinary cruelty and thoughtlessness – none of these had been missed by the gods, who had now chosen to wreak their terrible revenge on me.
The ancient myths were dead, of course. We don't tend to believe that gods direct our lives. Yet we have replaced them with a strong belief that there are comparably mysterious inner forces which govern what happens to us: I had been psychologically cursed to be unhappy in love.
It was psychoanalysis that provided names for my demons. It explained that life often unfolds in ways that defy self-awareness. In the Freudian world, a man may consciously try to love a woman, but unconsciously he may be doing everything to drive her into another's arms. Now Chloe had left, a new interpretation of our love story came to mind. It was a story that had been doomed to fail, that had been chosen because it would fail, and because in its failure, it would repeat a classic and perversely satisfying pattern of family neurosis. When my own parents had divorced, I recalled my mother warning me that I should be careful not to fall into an unhappy relationship, because her mother had fallen into one, and her mother before that. Was this not a hereditary psychological curse? The curse of Freud was upon me.
The essence of a curse is that the person labouring under it cannot know of its existence. It is a secret code within the individual writing itself over a lifetime. Oedipus is warned by the Oracle that he will kill his father and marry his mother – but conscious warnings serve no purpose, they cannot defuse the ominous prognosis. Oedipus is cast out from home in order to avoid the Oracle's prediction, but nevertheless ends up marrying Jocasta. His story is told for him, not by him. The curse defies the will.