The Weird Elixir of the Unconscious Mind

Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 begins: "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun." He goes on to point out that in ordinary terms, the woman he loves does not compare to traditional hyperbolic descriptions of one's beloved. Nonetheless, he ends with the following lovely couplet: "And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare / As any she belied with false compare."

Skip forward a few hundred years, to (according to Wikipedia) 1937 and the songwriting team Rodgers and Hart, speaking of "My Funny Valentine:" "Your looks are laughable, un-photographable / Yet, you're my favorite work of art."

Or yet again, there is a phrase that has stuck with me from Isaiah (if it isn't inappropriate to use it in this context): "he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him." And yet . . .

In my own life, I have met one individual that I wanted to marry. And it wasn't traditional physical beauty that caught me: it was that individual's combination of intelligence, character, and some indefinable quality of life that hooked me (and keeps me hooked to this day). Not that conventional physical attraction was absent, but rather that it was made to grow and strengthen by the other, intangible characteristics of my desired spouse.

Physical desire, in this context, was transformed. It was like Mahler taking up a simple folk song -- weaving that simple musical element into a larger and more complex tapestry of sound. Gradually the senses became almost overwhelmed, until one was close to drowning in the sea of music. Yet in that music, the original folk theme is recognizable, transfigured through the composer's genius.

In the same way, I found myself surprised at how the intangible beauty of an entire personality could transform another person from ordinary acquaintance into the central figure around which many of my desires, hopes and dreams seemed to coalesce. And this happened without conscious effort on my part.

The tragedy (?) for me, so far, is that timing and the interpersonal situation have remained in a state where most of what I feel remains internal to me. (And a dry, cynical part of my mind questions whether much of this tranformative internal experience would actually survive being shared fully with another person -- or whether it is so beautiful because it is internal to me alone.)

I am feeling compelled to write (and share -- however obliquely -- the experience), because recently I met another potential transformative person. The experience shared enough characteristics with "the first" experience -- and was so far beyond my other interactions with potential spouses -- that I realized something in my unconscious might be stirring again. If that is the case, I want to be able to document and better examine what happens, in hopes of better understanding both myself and the emotional phenomenon I am (might be?) experiencing.