What does spring do to cherry trees?
It makes them bloom. This is what love does with us.
What is the power of love?
It floods you with exuberance, color and magic, like spring does with cherry trees.
It alludes to Neruda's verses.
"I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees": poem 14 of Twenty love poems...
...and a desperate song.
Neruda was a poetic genius and a bad person.
so much
He abandoned his daughter, despised his wives, raped...
Did he pay for all this?
No, and he should have been jailed.
And canceled his work?
No, but we could have deprived him of rights to his work. Let's reprimand the author... without depriving ourselves of the beauty of his work.
The human being is not perfect.
Focus on Picasso: brilliant as an artist and perverse as a man with successive wives. He was putting out cigarettes on the skin of a...
But we admire his work.
Like that of Oscar Wilde, once canceled because of his homosexuality: he was imprisoned and prevented from publishing.
His work, however, persists today.
Like Lewis Carroll's Alice, photographer of prepubescent girls... He didn't touch them.
We were talking about love...
Let's talk about beauty like Friné's. Beautiful woman from Athens in the 4th century BC, model of Praxiteles' Aphrodite.
How beautiful!
Accused of impiety for assuming herself to be more beautiful than the goddesses, Phryne was judged by the Areopagus, the supreme court. And he was saved...
With?
He dropped his robe. The naked body, so beautiful, could only be the work of gods: to execute it would be to face them! She was acquitted.
Very good taste, the Areopagus.
We identify beauty with goodness. The handsome has a lot to gain, therefore.
Aesthetics can...
And we understand love today as Sappho of Lesbos postulated it in the sixth century BC.
From Sappho comes the so-called sapphic love?
Woman and poet, she created the house of the servants of the muses: she taught literature, song and dance to her disciples. I loved them. And the beautiful Faó. Sappho loved the person, male or female. His desire did not discriminate against people based on their sex.
Fluid sexuality, we call it today.
She was also the matriarch of lesbianism.
The opposite of Hemingway, right?
Classic male prototype, fan of boxing, hunting, fishing, bulls, wars... and women. Hemingway was testing his manhood with a women's thong.
did you try Did I need to try it on?
His mother, as a child, dressed him as a girl. Being hypermasculine was his way of bending the sadness of feeling feminine at times... Deaborn, his great biographer, says so.
Promising insecure, I get it.
Even more promiscuous were previously Lope de Vega, Galdós, D'Annunzio... and Hedy Lamarr, actress and engineer.
And Simenon, I read...
He was with 10,000 women, he said... All because he wasn't loved by his mother. Simenon sought love in prostitutes.
And he wrote with equal fury.
It was a need for approval, in both cases. Look at the writer Philip K. Dick, with one woman after another: he tries to dominate them... and they always leave him.
Meanwhile, he wrote brilliant texts.
Prodigious and delirious, between panics, agoraphobia, paranoia... and pills.
At least he didn't murder his own wife, like William Burroughs.
By accident: drugged, he shot her William Tell-style and killed her. I loved him He became deranged: that made him a writer.
Which writer's love do you fall in love with the most?
The connection between James Joyce and Norah Barnacle, ever so passionate. "You are my portable Ireland!", he said of her.
There have also been misogynist writers.
We have Quevedo, the great poet. He loved love, but not women. And that he wrote the most sublime love sonnet!
"Love more powerful than death."
"... They will be dust, but I am dust in love". I suspect that Quevedo didn't even get to have sex. Unlike Lope de Vega, who had eleven successive wives.
Which pair of writers do you think has been the most liberal?
Allen Ginsberg, homosexual poet, and Peter Orlovsky, heterosexual nurse: each having their respective sexual encounters, the two of them loved each other deeply until the last day.
Admirable.
I find it unusual to see so much frankness and understanding, so much love.
