I went out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

 

When I had laid it on the floor

I went to blow the fire a-flame,

But something rustled on the floor,

And someone called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

 

Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done,

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

 

~ William Butler Yeats (1899)

 

* * *

Passion has split history.

Man has historically guarded against his passions, peering at them suspiciously through his distant, rational eye. Yet for good or for ill, certain subsets of fools and firebrands in almost every society have embraced passions, allowed life’s manifold passions to have their way with them, and have burned or delighted in passion’s aftermaths.

Of all the passions I could speak to, one that I venture to discuss with a sliver of authority is the passion that sparks a man’s journey toward the initiation of his Soul. From some unseen dimension — or via a dangerous book or friend — the hunger for a personal myth, or a yearning for a more connected life, burrows into our skin, sautées our worldview, and comes to rule over our days until we’re crippled by said passion. Our former life, we soon discover, is now too small to wear, and we’re left with no other but to offer ourselves up to a life transformed, to set sail, and wander ablaze into the earth’s sculpting hands.

Passion for beauty is the positive mirage that teases and taunts us out unto odyssey. Yet sometimes we’re forced by a more negative passion to flee the horrifying mediocrity of our everyday existence, and search for more meaning in how we do life. Now while the skeptics and the rationalticians have thrown puer aeternus at me over the years, I hereby declare that from the soul’s perspective, both carrot and stick motivations for leaving the shire are healthy responses to the passion-void malaise that is, all too often, contemporary life.

I’ve come to see there being two enormous initiatory adventures at the centre of the Amorati’s story — two separate and blinding passions that must be felt, breathed, and explored until evaporation:

The first is the initiation of belonging, where the seeker’s passion leads us, consciously or unconsciously, toward acceptance, connection, and intimacy, both with women, as well as with any social group that we admire, and that truly and actually inspires us. The passion that drives the initiation of belonging has us want to be seen and loved while being wildly authentic, hiding nothing, everything embraced, masks surrendered to the wind. To succeed in this initiation means to claim your “free pass” to the land of women. It might mean a lifetime of sex in a universe of positions. But more to the point, it’s about no longer feeling alone unless you choose to.

Every time I looked into a beautiful woman’s eyes and she told me, unashamedly and unequivocally, that she saw and adored every facet of my being, it felt like a divine, holy experience; a fire of emotions often too large to feel. By the grace of Goddess, I knew I belonged. I showed up and I showed up, and for life to prove that I surely belonged, my passion was no longer baseless and fluttery. My passion rooted itself to the earth.

The second enormous initiatory journey, however, is the initiation of a strange and terrifying passion. It is the thing you always wanted more than anything else, but no sooner does it rise upon the horizon, you want to turn away. There is no care for honesty or acceptance within this passion, for these are already won. This second initiation starts with dissolution, and you will certainly, and irrevocably, question your sanity.

So one day you’re standing, broad-shouldered and satisfied in your kitchen, surrounded by every success you might ever have wanted for your life: the business, the girl, the body, the car, the imported, enscripted Italian espresso maker, the cellar of wines, the McMansion. That exact moment as you’re done celebrating the accomplishment of your every young-man passion is right when the trapdoor opens. With beckoning clarity you begin to perceive how the entire reality you’ve constructed for yourself is a house of paper, and an insufferable burning for something more arrests your lungs, aggrieves your heart, and, as Rilke put it, silently disdains to destroy you. At this point you’ve been gripped by a second influenza, which is not the cozy daydream-influenza of the dozen smiling mulatas in the Medellín nightclub, nor the visceral craving for the European philosopher-hipster who finally “gets you”, nor even for the passion of those long summer nights of Europe with the drinking, the carousing, the camaraderie. No, this second initiation calls you unto the odyssey for your destiny, your place-in-the-world, your mountain, chasm, abyss. Your mythopoetic home in all there is.

You are far beyond your need for loving acceptance now, or the tender caress of your girlfriend’s hand. Your eyes are on the horizon, the moon, the stars, the planets, the dead. Planted in this frozen, soundless, galactic passion, as good as life got, one can renounce it all.

If I don’t get to give this before I die, you silently say to yourself, I may as well end things now.

Any lust and gluttony on this second journey is reserved for the numinous, and at this point the odyssey plunges your face fully into what Rumi called “Passion, Passion, Passion, Passion, Passion, Passion.” It’s such a furnace you will care nothing for what the little girls might say: you will find yourself skewered in both ends by an adventure so large, so gripping, such a holy roasting you might say, that all voices of conventional reason are nothing more than faint crackling on a distant and broken receiver. To be seduced by this form of journey is the Passion beyond all Passions: the ultimate calamity to befall the rational, suspicious man! It is the eternal plight of reaching, and trying to capture for no justifiable reason, your personal something of the great… wide… beyond…

… and attempting, failing, and attempting once more, to offer that something as a gift to the next.

Yes, it is my belief, my hushed yet unyielding conviction, that only by burning through this second initiation — by going so far beyond belonging that you’re unmade by the one true Passion — that this, and only this, is what maketh man in this world: a man truly capable of restoring Beauty into the air and the ether around him.

But yes, this does all come through the mouth of a fool and a bandit. So I hope you paid due diligence, and peered at the above through your lens of suspicion and rationality.

 

* * *