V-Day special

I've been reading a lot of Baroque poetry lately. In an article on the devices of the genre, specifically the conceit (something I may be appropriating extensively these days, ahem), I came across something I probably already knew intuitively but had never thought about in so many word. The author was arguing that the sonnet was the perfect Baroque poetic form because the profession of love carries with it the favorite Baroque antithesis: sensual, near-ecstatic earthly pleasure on the one hand, and, on the other, the realization that this pleasure is transient, brief, destined to wither and die.

This isn't just a Judeo-Christian concept, of course. Buddhism relies almost exclusively on this feature of mortality, but it seems to have found a much healthier coping mechanism in its mantra of cheerful self-abnegation. Christianity, though, is obsessed to the point of neurosis with desire, and, in fact, often tends to whip up the ecstatic frenzy factor while trying, very nominally, to curtail it. In that sense, my own relationship to desire is a very Christian one. In moments of pleasure, I find myself reacting with a weird ecstatic-melancholic hybrid, already lamenting the inevitable loss of happiness that the ravages of time will enact. And the impulse to write, in catalog form, the chronicle of my life is yet another manifestation of this antithesis -- trying desperately to fix a memory within a static frame, but at the same time mourning the imperfection of that fixture, the irretrievable loss of experience and visceral pleasure.

Thing is, seeing as how the melancholic factor is tied so intimately to my experience of happiness, pain becomes contaminated with pleasure. Not to put too sadomasochistic a point on it, but it's the awareness of transience that, paradoxically, brings significance (weight, as Kundera would say) to events. The hug, the kiss, the.... well. A desperately sweet kind of immobilization -- like trying to pin a live butterfly.