We learn from Freud, as from novelists and poets, if we learn anything at all, that we can never “know ourselves.” We fool ourselves in too many ways, and what we are, our Truth, is never fixed, but always moving, always becoming, becoming something else. How much more the difficulty, when the object of our knowledge is at a great distance.

Or is it the other way around? –the closer to the center (should I say, the heart of our being?) –the less we understand, the less we can claim to know?

Closest to one we love, our knowledge approaches a zero point–though knowledge (always imperfect though it is) circles all the while like stars in a galaxy around the black hole of love, of self–around that center–with ts power to draw toward its eventual horizon–all that we believe we know: self & beloved,  & love itself– & yet, remain untouched by mind–untouched, above all, by language, even while, in ways beyond our power to know–there from that dark, unfathomable pool, emanates the forces that shape language, all that we know, think–or think we know.

Is that how philosophy came to be captured in a word for love? And how, all the arts, all that has power to bring us to the end of knowing–are of the annihilating & generative power of love?

Love, the word we give to that manifold desire that can’t be named, or tamed–destroyer and creator of good & evil, end & beginning of all that we make & do, fusion of Vishnu and Shiva… Harihara.