I first started my formal study of Eros due to pain. Years ago, I had just gone through a breakup that devastated me, leaving me with desire and no place to put it. I took long drives to the edge of town. Turned on my favorite sad songs. Cried. I cried in parking garages and darkened movie theaters; in the couch in my backyard and in my room.
I guess my desire wasn’t solely homeless. I poured it into poetry and notes on my phone in between the tears:
Being exactly where I need to be and it
doesn’t exclude anguish
…
The art of letting myself leave
with all my shreds intact
and remembering autumn, my mother
driving me to harp lessons, eating
ethiopian food with my hands
A love triptych1
…
Have all this love to give must learn to give it to myself first (afraid of letting go of putting others first; the inner void that forms when I have no one else telling me a need is good)
But I needed someone else’s voice besides my own bouncing around my skull. So I turned to my favorite poet, Anne Carson, and her poems of loving and leaving:
“Dahlias, now. A raw yardful of dahlias—we are making our way through them toward the street. A morning. After the first night I slept at his house, which, as you know and he does not, is the first night I slept at any man’s house. Through the wet grass, walking behind him. All of a sudden he stops and bends aside. Snaps off a single dark red dahlia, my eyes going out of me like a cry. Lover, I thought. Now he keeps going and reaches his car and jumps in, placing the dahlia on the seat beside him, drives off. With a wave. My car is parked farther down the street.”2
Even while loving, the other is always leaving, especially if you are just a stop to their destination. With my former lover, all of my dreams of him were of the back of his head: him turning to leave the room or us getting on separate trains, missing each other by minutes. When he finally did leave, the gap was complete. Yet the reaching remained. Luckily, Carson, in her mercy, had a whole volume on Eros which she, pulling from Sappho, called bittersweet. She calls it such because before we are completed by our desires— whether that be for another person, a certain project or creation or object— we must first recognize our own lack. “Eros is an issue of boundaries,” she tells us. “He exists because certain boundaries do”. Though the reaching, grasping quality of desire gives it an inherent pain, even the fulfillment of the desire does not allay its bitterness.
In the process of desiring, we are robbed of our agency, even when we take on our desire gladly. It hurts to have our limbs loosened, our boundaries dissolved.
New depths to my understanding of “love is a sickness"; the days of not eating, sleeping, the days following leaving me dehydrated, lathargic, prone to fits, followed by rages and despair. But there is a nobility, an exaltation, in these symptoms.
Anne Carson also describes the “uniquely convincing” quality of “the perceptions that occur to you when you are in love" since they are “won from reality at personal cost”.3 There is a singular wisdom amongst this uncomfortable reaching, a sort of holy knowing that can take place if we open ourselves up to Eros fully. In exchange, we receive “a self never known before, which now strikes you as the true one…and for an instant a great many things look knowable, possible and present”. Carson says a city without desire is a city without imagination. Without movement, change, the upward lift towards godliness. Desire changes us.
This movement toward eros need not even involve a human lover. Thomas Merton, Trappist monk and celibate, spoke of the power of God’s love coming through to align us with our highest path: “to be in the sort of place where God wants one: that is certainly a marvelous thing. As soon as you get set in your groove, boy do things happen!”.4 Once again we see Eros as a movement, a sort of liftoff towards a quicker, easier path. Our own unique one forming, coming together when we let the desire for truth, for purpose, for divine work, move through us. There is a leap of faith involved in this loving. “To reach for something else than the facts,” as Carson puts it, is a risk, often involving much anguish and a chance of deep loss, but it “will carry you…beyond this world”.5
Eros lets us be bigger than ourselves, not despite the pain but because we accept along with the tantalizing pleasure of fulfillment. In Sappho’s words, it puts our heart on wings, reaching us not towards the messy, muddy earthiness of our desires but towards the gods.
I love writing about desire and being a mess when alone.
I love remembering holiness and melting in it.
Don’t forget how much it all means.
New Offering: The Lot of Eros with Kira Ryberg 🌹🦢
To love truly is so painful because you must accept your loving, knowing if it is returned it is out of your hands (it’s all a matter of tricking you into seeing the divine love pulling through at any moment).
I am proud to finally announce the release of a months-long passion project and collaboration with Kira Ryberg.
The Lot of Eros is one of the three primary lots used in traditional astrology and helps pinpoint where the unique contours of your desire coalesce in your chart. It can be used to understand your relationship to love, friendship, pleasure, art, spirituality and connection.
This collaborative lecture is 2 hours and 20 minutes long and provides a deep dive into the Lot of Eros. We take a look at the many meanings of love, the mythology of Eros and the myriad ways that the Lot of Eros can manifest in a life and astrological chart. We provide suggestions for how to delineate the Lot of Eros by looking at several example charts, along with giving you ideas around how to deepen and develop a relationship with Eros’ presence in your own life. We will explore delineating the Lot of Eros by planetary ruler, aspects, element and fixed star conjunction. This lecture is an extensive and comprehensive overview on the Lot of Eros and it explores significations of this hermetic lot that have never been discussed before. It takes us beyond the traditional texts and into the present moment so that you can gain a complete understanding of the many ways the Lot of Eros influences someone’s life.
This is the first in-depth treatment of this amorous, creative point of its kind. We make connections and go places you can’t find anywhere else. In addition to a video lecture, you also get a pdf of the lecture slides and a resource list for further Eros study.
This is for the lovers, the yearners, the artists, the mystics, the friends. This is for anyone with a deep interest in astrology or just knowing themselves more intimately.
Learn more and purchase via Kira’s website with the link below:
Drop any questions below!
Until next time lovers,
love,
Chloe
All the quotes in italics come from my personal notes
Anne Carson, “Plainwater,” p. 246
Anne Carson, “Eros the Bittersweet” p 41
Thomas Merton, “The Hidden Ground of Love: The Letters of Thomas Merton on Religious Experience and Social Concerns,” p. 40
Anne Caron, “Eros the Bittersweet,” p. 155