VIDE COR MEUM — See My Heart

Have you even been in love? Horrible, isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens your heart and it means someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up this whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life…

You give them a piece of you. They don’t ask for it. They do something dumb one day like kiss you, or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so a simple phrase like “maybe we should just be friends” or “how very perceptive” turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.

in Sandman: The Kindly Ones by Neil Gaiman

“An act of love that fails is just as much a part of the divine life as an act of love that succeeds, for love is measured by fullness, not by reception.”

Libera me, Domine, de amore æterno…

This war of silence waged between two ghosts
fought by proxy with shifting headlines
through shining masks and bitter tears
as thousands mistake what we are
while dead swallows sing a lament
of misunderstood smiles and mismanaged love
bound in crystalline tears wept for seven sorrows

If only those days had lasted forever
endless words spoken as we ate each others heart
through sweet hot nights with sweeter dreams
we protected each other ’til morning
with arms that stretched a thousand miles
delicate hands bathed in timid hope and awe
wrapped in a yarn spun from our hearts bled dry
made of miracles and sealed with a ribbon
soaked red with tender pin pricks

But dreams are just dreams

Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono
di quei sospiri ond’io nutriva ‘l core
in sul mio primo giovanile errore
quand’era in parte altr’uom da quel ch’i’ sono:

del vario stile in ch’io piango e ragiono,
fra le vane speranze e ‘l van dolore,
ove sia chi per prova intenda amore,
spero trovar pietà, non che perdono.

Ma ben veggio or sì come al popol tutto
favola fui gran tempo, onde sovente
di me medesimo meco mi vergogno;

e del mio vaneggiar vergogna è ‘l frutto
e ‘l pentersi, e ‘l conoscer chiaramente
che quando piace al mondo è breve sogno.

——–

You who hear the sound, in scattered rhymes,
of those sighs on which I fed my heart,
in my first vagrant youthfulness,
when I was partly other than I am,

I hope to find pity, and forgiveness,
for all the modes in which I talk and weep,
between vain hope and vain sadness,
in those who understand love through its trials.

Yet I see clearly now I have become
an old tale amongst all these people, so that
it often makes me ashamed of myself;

and shame is the fruit of my vanities,
and remorse, and the clearest knowledge
of how the world’s delight is a brief dream.

“No Muse-poet grows conscious of the Muse except by experience of a woman in whom the Goddess is to some degree resident; just as no Apollonian poet can perform his proper function unless he lives under a monarchy or a quasi-monarchy. A Muse-poet falls in love, absolutely, and his true love is for him the embodiment of the Muse…

But the real, perpetually obsessed Muse-poet distinguishes between the Goddess as manifest in the supreme power, glory, wisdom and love of woman, and the individual woman whom the Goddess may make her instrument…

The Goddess abides; and perhaps he will again have knowledge of her through his experience of another woman..

This slightly revised fragment of Tennyson’s In Memoriam was spoken by Dr. Casares in “El Espinazo del Diablo” to his unrequited love as she lay dying.  One of the most poignant and profound scenes ever.

Permanece a mi lado cuando se apague mi luz
y la sangre se arrastre
y mis nervios se alteren con punzadas dolientes
y el corazón enfermo
y las ruedas del ser giren lentamente

Permanece a mi lado
cuando a mi frágil cuerpo le atormentes dolores
y alcancen la verdad
y el tiempo maniaco siga esparciendo el polvo
y la vida furiosa sigua arrojándo llamas

Permanece a mi lado
cuando vaya a apagándome
y puedas señalarme el final de mi lucha
y el atardecer de los días eternos
en el bajo y oscuro borde de la vida

——-

Be near me when my light is low,
When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick
And tingle; and the heart is sick,
And all the wheels of Being slow.

Be near me when the sensuous frame
Is rack’d with pangs that conquer trust;
And Time, a maniac scattering dust,
And Life, a Fury slinging flame.

Be near me when I fade away,
To point the term of human strife,
And on the low dark verge of life
The twilight of eternal day.

Santo was great and all…