8. Grown infinitely wise through suffering, I could forgive, pity, and patronize her for her lack of judgement - and to do so gave me infinite relief. I could lie in a lilac-and-green hotel room and be filled with a sense of my own virtue and greatness. I pitied Chloe for everything she could not understand, the infinitely wise seer who watches the ways of men and women with a melancholic, knowing grin.
9- Why was my complex, the perverse psychological trick that turned every defeat and humiliation into its opposite, to be named after Jesus? I might have identified my suffering with that of Young Werther or Madame Bovary or Swann, but none of these bruised lovers could compete with Jesus's untainted virtue and his unquestionable goodness beside the evil of those he tried to love. It was not just the weepy eyes and sallow face attributed to him by Renaissance artists that made him such an attractive figure, it was that Jesus was a man who was kind, completely just, and betrayed. The pathos of the New Testament, as much as of my own love story, arose out of the sad tale of a virtuous but misrepresented man, who preached the love of everyone for their neighbour, only to see the generosity of his message thrown back in his face.
It is hard to imagine Christianity having achieved such success without a martyr at its head. If Jesus had simply led a quiet life in Galilee making commodes and dining tables and at the end of his life published a slim volume entitled My Philosophy of life before dying of a heart attack, he would not have acquired the status he did. The agonizing death on the Cross, the corruption and cruelty of the Roman authorities, the betrayal by his friends, all these were indispensable ingredients for proof (more psychological than historical) that the man had God on his side.
Feelings of virtue breed spontaneously in the fertile soil of suffering. The more one suffers, the more virtuous one must be. The Jesus complex was entangled in feelings of superiority, the superiority of the underdog who considers himself above his oppressors, with their tyranny and blindness. Ditched by the woman I loved, I exalted my suffering into a sign of greatness (lying collapsed on a bed at three in the afternoon), and hence protected myself from experiencing my grief as the outcome of what was at best a mundane romantic break-up. Chloe's departure may have killed me, but it had at least left me in glorious possession of the moral high ground. I was a martyr.
The Jesus complex lay at opposite ends of the spectrum from Marxism. Born out of self-hatred, Marxism prevented me from becoming a member of any club that would have me. The Jesus complex still left me outside the club gates but, because it was the result of ample self-love, declared that I was not accepted into the club only because I was so special. Most clubs, being rather crude affairs, naturally could not appreciate the great, the wise, and the sensitive, who were to be left at the gates or dropped by their girlfriends. My superiority was revealed primarily on the basis of my isolation and suffering: I suffer, therefore I am special. I am not understood, but for precisely that reason, I am worthy of greater understanding.
In so far as it avoids self-hatred, one must have sympathy for the alchemy by which a weakness is turned into virtue - and the evolution of my pain towards a Jesus complex certainly implied a degree of mental good health. It showed that in the delicate internal balance between self-hatred and self-love, self-love was now winning. My initial response to Chloe's rejection had been a self-hating one, where I had continued to love Chloe while hating myself for failing to make the relationship work. But my Jesus complex had turned the equation on its head, now interpreting rejection as a sign that Chloe was worthy of contempt or at best pity
(that paragon of Christian virtues). The Jesus complex was nothing more than a self-defence mechanism, I had not wanted Chloe to leave me, I had loved her more than I had ever loved a woman, but now that she had flown to California, my way of accepting the unbearable loss was to reinvent how valuable she had been in the first place. It was clearly a lie, but honesty is sometimes more than we have strength for when, abandoned and desperate, we spend Christmas alone in a hotel room listening to the sound of orgasmic beatitude from next door.
23
Ellipsis
There is an Arabic saying that the soul travels at the pace of a camel. While most of us are led by the strict demands of timetables and diaries, our soul, the seat of the heart, trails nostalgically behind, burdened by the weight of memory. If every love affair adds a certain weight to the camel's load, then we can expect the soul to slow according to the significance of love's burden. By the time it was finally able to shrug off the crushing weight of her memory, Chloe had nearly killed my camel.
With her departure had gone all desire to keep up with the present. I lived nostalgically, that is, with constant reference to my life as it had been with her. My eyes were never really open, they looked backwards and inwards to memory. I would have wished to spend the rest of my days following the camel, meandering through the dunes of yesteryear, stopping at charming oases to leaf through images of happier days. The present held nothing for me, the past had become the only inhabitable tense. What could the present be next to it but a mocking reminder of the one
who was missing? What could the future hold beside yet more wretched absence?
When I was able to drown myself in memory, I would sometimes lose sight of the present without Chloe, hallucinating that the break-up had never occurred and that we were still together, as though I could have called her up at any time and suggested a film at the Odeon or a walk through the park. I would choose to ignore that she had decided to settle with Will in a small town in southern California, the mind would slip from factual reporting into a fantasy of the idyllic days of elation and laughter. Then, all of a sudden, something would throw me violently back into the Chloe-less present. The phone would ring and on my way to pick it up I would notice (as if for the first time, and with all the pain of that initial realization) that the place in the bathroom where Chloe used to leave her hairbrush was now empty. And the absence of that hairbrush would be like a stab in the heart, an unbearable reminder that she had left.
The difficulty of forgetting her was compounded by the survival of so much of the external world that we had shared together, and in which she was still entwined. Standing in my kitchen, the kettle might suddenly release the memory of Chloe filling it up, a tube of tomato paste on a supermarket shelf might by a form of bizarre association remind me of a similar shopping trip months before. Driving across the Hammersmith flyover late one evening, I recalled driving down the same road on an equally rainy night but with Chloe next to me in the car. The arrangement of pillows on my sofa evoked the way she placed her head down on them when she was tired, the dictionary on my bookshelf was a reminder of her passion for looking up words she did not know. At certain times of the week when we had traditionally done things together, there was an agonizing parallel between the past and present: Saturday mornings would bring back our gallery expeditions, Friday nights certain clubs, Monday evenings certain television programmes . . .
The physical world refused to let me forget. Life is crueller than art, for the latter usually assures that physical surroundings reflect characters' mental states. If someone in a Garcia Lorca play remarks on how the sky has turned low, dark, and grey, this is no longer an innocent meteorological observation, but a symbol of a psychological state. Life gives us no such handy markers – a storm comes, and far from this being a harbinger of death and collapse, during its course, a person discovers love and truth, beauty and happiness, the rain lashing at the windows all the while. Similarly, in the course of a beautiful warm summer day, a car momentarily loses control on a winding road and crashes into a tree fatally injuring its passengers.