Slow Havamal: 94

[kylec]

The 94th verse says not to mock others for falling in love. That love is strong enough to make a fool of a wise man.

This verse repeats the first three lines from the previous, and alters the last three. We still receive a caution that the wise are not much better than fools in the face of love, and can even change places. The wise are those who have many experiences and see the connections between them. I have argued that wisdom is a kind of structure, rather than facts or aphorisms—a context, which colors future experiences. Foolishness, then, would be disconnection. Everything is new. Nothing here has happened before. There is as much promise and danger in one thing as the next. A fool can’t predict. He can only stumble ahead and discover.

The desire we feel when we fall in love has the effect of overshadowing our carefully-constructed wisdom. We are unable to see the similarities between this person and all others. A thousand histories of romantic relationships have no bearing on this one. It’s different this time. We can ignore anything we want, and we must, if we’re to really fall in love. Imagine if we fell in the kind of love that an elderly couple has for one another on their 50th anniversary, already deeply-rutted with habit, laid out entirely in its benefits and drawbacks. Where’s the fun in that? A new love is like a birth. Anything, conceivably, can happen, and only as possibilities fall away one by one does a life take shape, until it runs out of everything new.

Being foolish is an important stage of wisdom. Our experiences give us a framework of understanding, but they always take things in light of that framework. So a wisdom becomes complex, but at the same time, begins to merely fill in details. We run through every variation of a melody within the rules of Western classical composition, for example, which is a rich tradition. But at some point, we have to let the entire thing go, and plunge into some strange system that perhaps has a 31-note octave instead of an 8-note octave. The nested spheres of Ptolemy are changed for the heliocentric heavens of Copernicus and Kepler.

Love is that letting go. We abandon good sense in the service of discovery. That said, not all new systems are superior to the old. We could just as easily be making a terrible mistake that leaves us retreating to familiar ground, scraped and battered. Few things in other realms of life—music, astronomy, or any of our deeply-held maps of reality—have the power to so draw a person so suddenly, frequently, and completely into a pattern of belief and action outside of their established wisdom. And in some cases, it is indeed the birth of a new understanding that matures over a lifetime. But we shouldn’t be so quick to make fun of fools. We’re all subject to the upheaval of desire. A wise man can have no other beginning.

Note: I will be on vacation for the next two weeks, so no posts until I return.