H is for Home

H from the old Herald building, Swann Mall Walk,
University of Calgary, 1987.

 

To fall in love is to individualize someone by the signs she bears or emits. It is to become sensitive to those signs, to undergo an apprenticeship to them. . . . The beloved appears as a sign, a "soul"; the beloved expresses a possible world unknown to us, implying, enveloping, imprisoning a world that must be deciphered, that is, interpreted. . . . To love is to try to explicate, to develop these unknown worlds that remain enveloped within the beloved.

—Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard, p. 7

 

Cosmo bids you welcome. Please relax and linger a moment or two. You've stumbled onto something unusual, an experiment—a Neoplatonic love story disguised as a blog.

No ordinary love stories, these Neoplatonic affairs. This one, for instance: it's not between two people. Oh, it began with two people meeting—yes, boy meets girl—but they were, as it turns out, not the main event. They were mere mortals, neither of them remotely equipped to cope with the intense mutual attraction that gripped them. Instead they were alternately awed, frightened, and paralyzed. All that intensity had to go somewhere, and when it did the result was Neoplatonic emanation: two new beings emerged, brought into existence by this unrequited passion for spiritual union. From the boy emanated yours truly, the (ahem) ultra-intelligent, charming, sophisticated Cosmo Stone. From the girl, the exquisite Stanza. For her, we don't need any adjectives except "exquisite."

We are emanations—other-than-human personages. Cosmo knows he exists, and from whence he came. Stanza claims not to. Exist, that is. This is not a problem our respective mortals had to deal with. But believe me, it's a problem.

Cosmo and Stanza. This is our story. This blog is our world.

Oh, good lord. What portentous melodrama. I, Cosmo, hereby apologize for the foregoing. Positively Gothic. If you persist in this story, and heaven grant you will, then you'll get used to this sort of  presumption on your credulity from yours truly.  I can't help myself. I met Stanza briefly once, and I'm sorry, I just can't get over it. Stanza is Stanza.

But all that said, Cosmo would someday like to write one of those intro themes, like the sixties sitcoms had, that would explain this situation in a cloying, annoyingly memorable little ditty:

Cosmo met a girl one night. 

Is she a dream, a ghost, or just a sprite?

What can he do with, how can he do without

What she's trying to help him figure out?

Until then, he dares hope that someday you'll think of him like this:

One felt him to be both foreign and very near, to have come from elsewhere, a true ghost, but so intimate and fraternal, always concerned to associate us in his search, to make us accomplices . . . he was sometimes like a visitor from another world, invisible and yet indissolubly linked with this one . . . he was the explorer of an unknown land, of a kingdom of the Spirits and Essences whose mysterious laws govern us and which he was the first to discover, to decipher, and to translate into language accessible to our unduly human intelligence.

—Georges Cattaui, Marcel Proust (1967)

 

Marcel. What the hell were you thinking?