These lyrics from Antestor keep repeating in my head, tonight. Chiefly because I've been premeditating on what to post. This blog is becoming less of a Eulogium chronicle exclusively and more of a personal journal, but maybe that's inevitable. Eulogium is the vehicle for my utmost passion, and it would only seem appropriate that those moments in which passion is its highest would be deemed important enough to talk about here.
Love is absolutely not a topic explored in black metal. It could be largely said that black metal is in direct opposition of love, even an inversion of love into hate, for God is love. Curiously, talk about love is also somewhat unpopular in unblack metal, principally because unblack metal wrestles with a perceived black metal ethos while clutching onto a uniquely Christian hope, refusing to let go until black metal blesses it. Unblack simultaneously struggles with God through the arduous task of faith, and with man by walking down the valley of the shadow of death without fear, by being a stranger in a strange land.
But I am not talking about black metal nor unblack metal here, nor philosophy nor theology, nor theory nor exegesis. I am talking about love; I am talking about the image of God in which I, my beloved, and all of humanity was made. Two nights ago my girlfriend, whom I love ardently, was filled with disappointment at the loss of an academic opportunity, to to the point of tears. I laid with her in my arms as she cried and vented all the frustrations this lost opportunity gave birth to or resurrected; and I was powerless to do anything to solve the problem. I could only hold her and kiss her hair, regretting deeply that I could do nothing to retrieve the opportunity to her. I too shed tears, because her hurt became my hurt, her sense of hopelessness became my sense of hopelessness. I wanted to join her in that dark place of despair, because her gravity seemed to affect me too, and I know how lonely despair can be when faced alone.
But I realized that neither of us are helpful to each other at all if we are in the same sorry predicament. I needed to divorce my being from hers (a challenging task, to be sure), in order that the holy magnetism that brought our souls together in the first place would draw her out of that hole to where I was - a state of relative contentedness only maximized to eudaimonia when one joins one's beloved. So to compel her to resurrection from sorrow (a grave that we all must frequent) to happiness, I waited for her on the outside the next morning, with breakfast that I cooked as the media via, that she may venture to good spirits of her own accord. And praised be God, she did. I saw her beautiful and brave smile that morning and again that afternoon, the kind with radiant mettle, her finger beds dirtied with the sullen soil of the hole she climbed out of. And I was filled with joy when I saw her walking towards me after class, because I saw her trademark strength that stirs up in me an admiration that bolsters the mystery of love.
"Where love is lost, only hate remains," says Antestor. "He who cannot love is unhappiest of all," says Kierkegaard. Unhappiness leads directly to hate, and when one has tasted the sweetness of love (that is, the sweetness of God) one does not ever wish to have the taste stricken from his mouth. One only flies to hate through bitterness, through weakness and cowardice to scale the highest mountains for fear of the deepest pitfalls natural to our imperfection.
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