A Great Love

poem by Jack Carney

The title below tells where and when this letter-poem was finished and mailed (before the Internet). This is a testament to the wholenership that Katharine, my Other Half, and I achieved in the short time we had together. She died in my arms from terminal cancer in 1996. Readers, whoever you may be, I wish this Great Love may be established in your life. February 21, 1993 From Austin, Texas to Brisbane, Queensland For Katharine, My Life, Soon To Be My Wife My Dearest Sunshine, My Beautiful Fact of How the World Works, This is my letter of love to you, for you, of you. If I die before you, you will have these words to come to as my world and while I am alive may they refresh you about my intentions. I am speaking to you now and for the length of my life about our love for each other and for this life which is now ours together. When I decided to marry you, when I finally acknowledged the supreme value you are to me, I chose then as I choose every moment I think of you now, to live my life as yours. That you are for me, that you are me, I am certain. This is the fact of my love for you. This is my pledge of commitment. Surely as the sun drives all life and motivates every molecule, you, as our relationship, are to me the

essential force and law of my life. The rational response to such a fact is to recognise and enact it. This I intend to do with you. And what joy this brings me! Here is a bouquet of thoughts and feelings that emanated from the source of my life I know as you. ** I am thinking about my commitment to you as one that is made to the best of myself. And I want to develop that commitment even as I develop our relationship which I am committed to. * I must watch myself that I really attend to and work at our relationship as much or more than anything else I do. This is the opportunity of my lifetime to come into my prime by using the discipline of my other self, you, to draw out the best in me. * I want to use you to become more me. You are my beautiful tool. When I come to you I pass myself and when I go through you I surpass myself. We build upon each other, each other. What we sum is exactly ourselves.

The world is large with us. You are my mind, naked or clothed with thought. You are wholly there in every part. I am equal to more than me with you. You are my marketplace, the even challenge of equal exchange. There is nothing of you I want to change. I only want to exchange everything for you and you for everything. You are happiness engendered, pleasures truth. You apply all the laws of physics into the proof of yourself. Your every why is a how. Each star knows what to do with you. Undeterred, my inertia continues along the straight line of our joy. When I take you in my arms the world follows and enfolds. * The wonder of it is why it took me so long to act on the obvious with you. You were always there waiting for me to realise what you must have already known that I knew. You were the maturity I had to acknowledge and grow into. *

As I nod toward sleep suddenly I see your face nearer than mine could possibly be in any mirror, and it is filled with a smile of shining tenderness, and then you are in my arms and we are awake with the knowledge of lifeand it is as if we have just met as I stepped off the world of my habits into sheer time intense with you. * I want to pay particular attention to you as my vision of what is, was and will be. To actually see you fully in all tenses, see your loveliness changing in the time I can be in part responsible for. * You called again yesterday morning, and I woke to a dialogue of joy, our loves insouciance, a sprig of sunlight, a sheen of spring. * I remember your nipples tutoring the Big Dipper here and the Southern Cross there, pointing to the brilliance of the constellations of meaning, ours, as my penis points too, to be at home in you. * Our joy is contagious. We mirror the future. We are planning our fate together, laughing with it. We hold, easily, our lives in each others hands. We are learning what to do with each other. *

I am so interested in you, what lies between your past and its future with me, as I summon the moment into a monument of your presence which is my commitment to the furthering of our lives to come, together. * I think, therefore, I love you. The futureso full of you that it encompasses my past. I have the sheen of you on the fingertips of my every thought. The particular you, locus of my effortless love, that clear flow under the bridge of my desire to know the world as us. Always I have known your touch, the world that aches behind your fingertips asking me to be true to its law, the mutual exchange of life for love. When I speak your pure name the sun dissolves on my tongue. When I die I will make my due and it will be you. And what I was will hive in your eyes as the light still coming from that no longer sun now alive as your sight of what is. The work of my world is the effortless love of you. Our music as the score of stars tonight, Sirius, Betelgeuse, Polaris, all clearly moving to the law of identity in my mind moving in yours. Only now as I stand outside myself found in the love of you do I know how little I knew of me.

* You are how the world works, A factual audacity. Fresh Smile, sunny metaphor of understanding. Freedom is your comeliness Which truth uses as your proof. May this marriage be realitys mirror, The apt expression we opt for, Agape spanning the synaptic gap. The mind we share is our market Founded on the economy of care And your supply demands more than me. You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, You make me happy when the skies are blue, So the old song goes that nourished my youth. Now the song is you. My seed Turns to your light and death learns the lesson of life. Finally, I want to see you as you are For your truth is so beautiful, whether Particle or wave, reality caught collapsing Into a choice which I now want to make. You and I, exchange of joy for joy, Your light bends around my mind And between the flow of your thigh and breast I settle into the universe as my part Comes into your whole and I play At being completely me. The flutter of the small yellow butterfly Fans the summer in your brown eyes. You are the fragrance of the future, Assay of the flash when our flesh meets,

And I love you so, history of the instant, Beautiful thermodynamic climb of desire, Life understood as sweet reversal of the Second Law. * That our marriage may become the marketplace of joy. Freedom is our sovereign State and we obey The law of identity through each other. We have found ourselves equal to our exchange, We trade in love. You are my vital principle, And we share the mind emerging from our matter. * May we always attend to each others end As our first means and final meaning. My Sunshine, my life, my wife soon to be, I love you so, for the good of our whole.

Katharine and Jack, Brisbane, Australia, 1993

My Great Love, Katharines, Paintings: Three Windows of Life

My Great Love, Katharines, Paintings: Four Rooms of Love

QUOTES ON LOVE (numbered so you can refer to them)

1. "We are always trying to be relieved of our incompleteness and to bridge the gulf between one human being and another. Are we not like those pieces of coins broken in half for keepsakes with each of us forever seeking our missing part? May we be among the happy few to whom it is given to meet our other halves and be made complete." Plato, The Symposium 2. How are you going to love unless you are afraid not to love. Tertullian 3. Love comes when manipulation stops; when you think more about the other person than about his or her reactions to you. When you dare to reveal yourself fully. When you dare to be vulnerable. Dr. Joyce Brothers 4. For us how difficult to become whole, a part is always left out and that is the part we have to choose. Pope John Paul II 5. Somebody once said to me that it was a tragedy not to be loved. Surely the real tragedy is not to love? Mark to Suyin, in the novel, Han Suyin, A Many-Splendoured Thing 6. There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings. I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by loving. Life shrinks or expands according to one's courage. Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live. Anais Nin 7. While we are alive, therefore, what we have to give to each other is at one and the same time the simplest yet most sublime giftourselves. James J. Lynch, The Broken Heart 8. All the following is from Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

"Our deepest need is to overcome our separateness, to leave our prison of aloneness. Humanity has emerged from the animal's instinctive adaptation, from our original oneness with nature. Once torn away from nature, we cannot return to it. We can only go forward by developing our reason, by finding a new harmony, a human one. We are life being aware of itself. This awareness of the self as a separate entity, the awareness of our own short life span, of our aloneness and separateness...would drive us insane could we not liberate ourselves from this prison and reach out, unite ourselves with others and the world outside. "Each of us is confronted with the solution of the one and the same question: how to overcome separateness, how to transcend one's own individual life. Our Western culture offers many routines to relieve the anxiety of separateness. When the routine of work does not succeed...we overcome our despair by the routine of amusement and the satisfaction of buying new things. Our happiness today consists of 'having fun'. But such routines are only partial answers to the problem of existence. The full answer only lies in the achievement of interpersonal union, in love. "Love is an active power which unites the separate person with others; love overcomes the sense of isolation and separateness yet permits us to be ourselves. The male-female polarity is the basis for interpersonal creativity. In the love between man and woman, each of them is reborn. In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one yet remain two. Love is the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love. The affirmation of one's own life, happiness, growth, freedom, is rooted in one's capacity to love. Immature love says: 'I love because I am loved. I love you because I need you.' Mature love says: 'I am loved because I love. I need you because I love you.' Love implies care, responsibility, respect and knowledge. "Love is an orientation of character, an activity, not an attachment to an object. People think that to love is simple, but that to find the right object to love - or be loved by - is difficult. Our whole culture is based on the importance of the object...on the appetite for buying or exchanging objects. For the man an attractive girl - and

for the woman an attractive man - are the prizes they are after. Two persons thus fall in love when they feel they have found the best object available on the market. This attitude - that nothing is easier than to love - has continued to be the prevalent idea about love in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. There is hardly any activity which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet, which fails so regularly, as love. "Love is an art - and like any art it must be learned. When you want to paint beautiful pictures you do not wait for just the right object to paint beautifully, you learn the art first. So for love, we must master theory and practice first. Most importantly, the mastery of the art must be a matter of ultimate concern. Yet in spite of the deep-seated craving for love, almost everything else in our culture is considered to be more important than love: success, prestige, money, power - almost all our energy is used to learn how to achieve these aims, and almost none to learn the art of loving." End of quote 9. All of the following is from: The Primacy of Love, Paul Wadell Morality begins in the awareness of our incompleteness. Humans are seekers of completion. Our lives are strategic endeavors to be united to what we think will bring us to completion, to our ultimate end. It is the one thing we seek for its own sake. We establish ourselves as persons through the purposes we have that shape our actions and who we are. To what are you most consistently turned because you believe it is the best for you? Happiness is the nurturing in us of the best and most promising desires, the richest and noblest love. What is required for wholeness stands outside of us. Our restoration is not something we can provide ourselves; thus, it is not so much a question of self-development but of being developed by another. To say that love is the key to our moral deliverance, and to identify it as a passion, is to know that our perfection comes by receiving a good we not only lack, but by nature are incapable of giving to ourselves. As human beings we stand in absolute need: we come to

wholeness only by suffering a good other than our own. We are restored by someone other working on us; we are healed through an agency other than our own. The distance between who we are now and who we are called to be is the work of one whose love provides for us what we could never provide ourselves. End of quote 10. All of the following is from: The Psychology of Romantic Love, Nathaniel Brandon "[in highest love]we are admired for the things we wish to be admired for, and in a way and from a perspective that is in accord with our own view of life. We are drawn to consciousnesses like our own. Romantic love entails a profound and shared sense of life. "A sense of life is the emotional form in which we experience our deepest view of existence...it is the emotional corollary of a metaphysics...reflecting the subconsciously held sum of our broadest and deepest attitudes and conclusions concerning the world, life and ourselves. A 'soulmate' is one who shares, in important respects, our sense of life. "When we encounter another human being, we feel the presence of that music within him or her. We sense how that individual experiences him- or herself...we sense the level of excitement or the level of deadness. In romantic relationships, the affirmative response of each party to the sense of life of the other is crucial to the projection of mutual visibility. "Two people discover their affinity by learning of each other's values and disvalues. But mere abstract, intellectual agreement on particular subjects is not sufficient by itself to establish an authentic sense-of-life affinity. And without a significant sense-of-life affinity, no broad, fundamental, and intimate experience of visibility is possible. "But it is not a literal mirror-image of ourselves we are seeking. The foundation of a relationship lies in basic similarities. The excitement of a relationship lies in complementary differences. The two together constitute the context in which romantic love is born. If the [loved one's perception] of us is consonant with our deepest

vision of who we are, and if their view is transmitted by their behavior, we feel perceived, we feel psychologically visible. We perceive the reflection of our self in their behavior. "Also, when we encounter a person who thinks as we do...who values the things we value [then] we can experience our self through our perception of that person. This is another form of experiencing psychological visibility. The pleasure and excitement we feel in the presence of such a person underscores the importance of the need that is being satisfied. We may experience a greater or lesser degree of visibility...of our total personality depending on the nature of the person with whom we are dealing and the nature of our interaction End of quote. 11. All of the following is from: Sex and Society, Kenneth Walker and Peter Fletcher The Platonic myth of the severed halves seeking for each other has this great advantage that it emphasizes a fact which is often forgotten, that sexuality is something which enters as a factor into every aspect of the emotional life; it is not concerned with reproduction alone. Love at its best extends far beyond the narrow confines of the reproductive actthe highest function of sexuality is to assist the spiritual growth of the individual. Berdyaev in The Destiny of Man, wrote The meaning and purpose of the union between man and woman is to be found, not in the continuation of the species, or in its social import, but in personality, in its striving for the completeness and fullness of life. Sexuality is an impulse, which has spread far beyond its original [lower animal species] boundaries, so that it colors the whole of our emotional life. This explains why the individual who has never managed to come to terms with his own sexuality is usually one who has failed to come to terms with life in general. Love is an expressive emotion, not a possessive one. It can be satisfied only by an active response, never by a passive one. We speak to an object and it is silent; we speak to a friend and he answers back; and our loving is fulfilled or frustrated according to his response. The need for love is a need, not for strength in the

self but for strength in the bond between selves. It is a need to discover our personal reality in the only possible way, by discovering the personal reality of another being of our own kind in a relationship that is reciprocal. Love is the desire for contact or communication with another being like ourselves who makes his presence felt in a manner that reveals his essential nature to us and by so doing reveals our essential nature to ourselves. So the search for love is a search for recognition and our desire to be loved is a desire to be recognized, not for what we do but for what we are. Love is what remains when desire is satisfied and passion spent: the need to see ones own reality attested in the reality of another human being. End of quote

Katharine and Jack, Brisbane, Australia, 1993