wounded self-assertion, the male forcing him-self on the female, entering her triumphantly, the female conquering by absorption, ingesting the male. In each other, we see the sign of our own self-transcendence, but no one can bear the sov-ereignty of another for long, nor bear the col-lapse of boundaries and the flooding inflow of the world. The instability and volatility of the love relation lies partly in this: the loved one as object opens us out, breaks through to us, re-deems us from the confinement of self through beauty - but as subject, it imprisons us in its view of us as a thing, with whatever pleasure, acceptance, and joy: in the ice of its gaze at us, its knowledge of us, its will over us. And we rebel: we are not a thing, even a beautiful one - we are selves, and know power.
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And so the game of love dwindles and atro-phies into a test of strength, and the beauty that freed us becomes a love that cages us.
What we respond to is the material object of beauty - the body - yet what comes out to greet us and eventually dominate us is the immaterial person, which we cannot see yet feel the effects of; an object not of the senses but an abstraction of growing complexity and ambiguity the longer we know it: something in the end unknown - behind the face an endless succession of masks in an ever-deepening darkness.
The beautiful face can cut us down with a look; the beautiful mouth speaks words that humiliate and torture us; we find ourselves
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