Medusa was an ancient Greek semi-goddess with a vampire essence, like combining a living body with a corpse, and with snakes in place of hairs.
Whoever looked at her head turned into stone.
Love in some of its present forms seems to want to evolve into a Medusa “persona”.
It can ultimately have lethal effects.
One of the worst distortions of reality is the misunderstanding of sex as a goal.
Sex is merely our means of reproduction.
Nature sees no other purpose in sex.
On the other hand, sex has been inextricably blended with eroticism, which is its instinctive inducement into the pleasure bait of the reproductive sexual copulation.
Pleasure and its enticements do the trick. It is so powerful that no normal healthy male can escape the overpowering attraction of a "sexy" female.
Our cultural sophistication and morality are needed to contain it within controllable limits.
It is intended to drive especially the male of
the species.
The female primarily welcomes it, for her main drive is reproduction
and nurturing.
In the humans, its tempting medium is primarily sight, then touch. Judging from our simian relatives and some remnants in humans, it must have been also smell in the primordial times.
These primordial remnants are no more embarrassing than the realization that the males bypass the much more numerous less "sexy" (because of weight, shape of legs, or face, etc.) females who would make remarkably better companions, mothers, life partners and (believe it or not) lovers than the gorgeous "irresistible" ones.
Next, eroticism has been mutated by civilization into romantic love.
In this, I wish I could compose madrigals to womanhood.
The
Crusaders learned them almost 900 years ago from Moslem troubadours who sang to
the unreachable beauties that the rich requisitioned out of circulation.
This is one of the unrecognized but radical improvements we
owe to the Arabs.
The subject of today's
veiled "enslaved" Moslem women has nothing to do with
it, and no place in this superficial dissertation.
Romantic love itself (with its discretely covered eroticism) has then been sublimed to substitute for the profound affection which is the basis of family, children and connected relationships.
This last sublimation, however, is comparable
with substituting granite for dried mud.
And it lasts hardly longer than mud.
The trouble stems from the anthropomorphic
legacy we inherited from of the Greeks, especially from Athens and Sparta.
When
there were many gods, as in the Greek, Roman and other "pagan" religions (the
Hindu gods being the most numerous), the divine anthropomorphism was accepted as
a natural occurrence.
Not, however, with the monotheistic god.
This
one had to be either man or woman, although the gender was an unnecessary and
embarrassing attribute.
Already in older times, the Greek anthropomorphism was loathed by the Persians, for whom God was the whole blue sky, not just human shaped.
If the Persians had won and conquered Europe, probably we wouldn’t be saturated with the Greek deification of the human body through their sculptures and other figurative arts.
The Islamic, Jewish and other religions have a similar aversion (shared by early Christians) against deification of human images.
Those who take the bait of concentrating on the human body as the main pleasure goal end up being diverted from the reproduction and evolution purposes of life.
That is where the lethal Medusa comes in.
Those who are to be destroyed after looking at Medusa’s face are trapped and eliminated in sterile and deadly pleasures.
The happiness of reproduction and continuity is only available to those who go beyond pleasure.
Procreation and nurturing the family and
progeny continue without end.
It is life itself. Anything different is unnatural
and worse.
Nurturing productive life has the task of separating sex and eroticism when the resulting new life and continuity take place.
There is where happiness can be found and continuously renewed.
Hostility or desperation are generated if man
and woman cannot go beyond pleasure, instead of proceeding on a parallel path
toward their common growth, family and their unending future.
They can turn
toward each other only
like crossing paths.
They call pleasure love, but that repeats the legend of the shepherd Narcissus, who fell in love with his own image in the river and drowned in reaching for it.
Endless repetitions of this drama are glaringly exhibited in the marriages and “live together” of today’s popular Hollywood and other “beautiful” people.
The more they mirror today’s ideals of erotic charm, beauty (focused on body aesthetics), or any form of sexuality, the more volatile and prone to destructive unhappiness they become.
The worship of the human body cannot avoid the confrontation with the abstract canons of beauty.
The irresistible attraction of erotic beauty ends beyond the veil that hides its fleshy and intestinal morphology.
For those who have no adequate spiritual or
mental resources, that
is the moment many experience after erotic pleasure and before an expected
happiness that vanishes without warning.
That is where the lovers’ paths cross
and pleasure mutates into helpless, resentful frustration.
Since the “rational” attributes are a basic human characteristic, the objects of our love are ultimately measured beyond crotch cavities and protuberances.
Thus, we find ourselves lost in the surprise of disliking what had irresistibly attracted us before.
Something happens that we did not think of before the genital gratification.
Then, when the hormones are regenerated, the
cycle starts again…and again.
And recriminations take over again and again… for
those who have no sufficient mental and emotional resources.
And the divorce lawyers salivate (their “no fault divorce” was a stroke of genius “pro bono advocatorum”).
Our incredibly high divorce rate is only one of the symptoms.
The remarkably greater success of marriages
that were not based uniquely on love and physical beauty is overwhelming
evidence in favor of marriages "arranged" on the basis of family, psychological,
cultural and other important consideration, as dominant in many cultures.
The problem becomes hopeless also when the
“losers”, or “minorities,” or unfit people unite in classes or similar
organizations.
Such groups eliminate “a priori” all solutions that don’t
completely surrender to the organization’s dogmatic goals.
These goals were inflexibly defined before it
was found out what the needed solution was.
In many cases, they still follow
opinions which refuse to consider the facts.
Politicians make the problems incurable when they support destructive goals of militant organizations, in order to obtain the organization’s votes.
What about the crippling long-range damages thus perpetrated against the organized victims?
That is what originated the definition “political prostitution”.
How many of our politicians are free of that prostitution?
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