Every love story is a boiling lesson in illicit biology. The pulsing, blood-singed votive passion works against the ethical priesthood, strips away its collar and runs a wet tongue against the trembling concave of the throat. There are rules in war, at least in retrospect. In love, there are none and so it plays out with much broader carnage and suffering. The stories play down love’s worst acts with hormonal justification in order to perpetuate the race and the lie. The comedy of it demands far-sightedness.

The craftworks of our gray ancestors are fossils set in stone, containing their light and hiding from ours. Those exposed bits which remain as clues are tales of madness and devotion that form walls in a maze fabricated through allegory. The novel is not dead; none ever existed except each in a single mind. Myths and legends are myths to one another. The poem is a beautiful prison; the landscape splayed in oil on canvas impenetrable. Realism in presentation is false truth. Post-realism is the untruth explained. Exposition is a marriage of necessity and pain, self-inflicted, self-absorbing and self-absolving. It is the lover seeking something, anything to love. It is we who find that ennobling.

The artist suffers for the art and the art suffers us. Love binds the wounds that it causes, and then infects the scars. Our art is fiction; when life reflects something within our fictions, it is only slightly done. We pose as minor gods, staring into the mouth of minor creation, ignore the absence of depth and heap praise upon weakness as we would a child’s first step. Not for the child is this done, but for the child of the child, anticipating beyond the beyond, fabricating an imaginary future and laying new traps.

The madness of gods is their right and their power over lower forms of life as we. There is no love in madness, just so a jealous Venus sent her son Cupid to fool beautiful Psyche into worthless romance, only to see his own pointed self-infliction fool Cupid into standing as Psyche’s suitor. Love, ever the punch line....