The Three Grace
Wang Xuan Ru
The moment when I saw The Three Grace (Charites) carved by Canova Antonio, I always imagined that one day. We could embrace each other like this. It would be God's grace, or a curse? In divine grace, the statue emerged, flawless. God says, "That You Love One Another As I Have Loved You". They love each other, they are the truth, the goodness, the beauty. They are joyful, fertile and fruitful.
Look at us, looks like we've caught a disease. Is it really possible for three people to love each other in an affair? In our story, Aglaea loved Thalia, Thalia loved Aglaea, Thalia loved Euphrosyne, Euphrosyne loved Thalia, but no one knows if Aglaea and
Euphrosyne were in love.We will never be able to answer that, because the affair has ended.
In the early Middle Ages, Andreas Capellanus provided an apparently spurious etymology for the word love itself, deriving amor, the Latin for love, from amus, meaning hook: “He who is in love is captured in the chains of desire and wishes to capture someone else with his hook.” 1 Sandro Botticelli was well aware of this hook of love and desire. The three grace in Promavera love more triste. Hand inlace hand, flesh intertwine flesh, to build a strong cage.
It's getting dark. Do you enjoy the trio of parallel lilies on the circular table? Have a seat. Shouldn't we talk passionately? Please allow me to light the candles and take up the wine. I hold your hand and you hold hers. She sharing her hand to me. Should I accept it? I looked at you and looked into her eyes. There was something so familiar in her eyes, this unidentifiable thing so familiar. “Perhaps if I study her carefully and get to know all about her, I can fathom her secret, plumbing simultaneously the secret cause of this unsuspected desire in my beloved.”2 If you fallen in love with this familiarity, then I can also suffer for you from Hysteria.
“If I sleep with somebody else, you’d make my bed for me?”
“Perhaps.”3
It was the only time that we had ended sex halfway, in the room I'll never ever go back to, on the wooden bed you grew up on. Your head was buried into my legs and buried me into wet warmth. I closed my eyes and let out the ghostly, “Have you ever sucked her?” A long silence answered me. I deflated thoroughly.
You said love is good, love is really, really good. So when love encounters love shouldnot call out a evil thing. In the world of dark violet and dark green, I feel relieved, the distilling flask boiling our eros. As long as the fire keeps burning, it will finally burn out all the impurities.
If I do not accept the partitioning out of love, I deny love's perfection, for it is proper to perfection to be shared…Thus I suffer twice over: from the division itself, and from my incapacity to endure its nobility.4
It's natural to me that she loves you, because I love you too. She and I have the possibility to deal a friendship, at least. But you love her?
“Do you love her?” I crucified you with a deadpan stare.
“I don't know.”
A gust blew me to pieces, and you chanted a spell of exorcism on me. I have awoken out of my dream. Everything is collapsing, decaying and hidden. But I wanted to stay in the promised land bitterly.
“No, you love her. You can't deny that.” I gave an order to you.
She had been there too. In front of these linen curtains drowning in the pale yellow moonlight, she felt relived. Inside of the new quilts clung with your smell, she felt lost and delirious. She had jealous when the white lilies bloomed on the desk, and wept when they withered. Please love this miserable pallor body. I will show my forgiveness to you as to her.
Forgiveness, as a gesture of assertion and inscription of meaning, carries within itself, as a lining, erosion of meaning, melancholia, and abjection. By including them it displaces them; by absorbing them it transforms them and binds them for someone else. “There is a meaning: this is an eminently transferential gesture that causes a third party to exist for
and through an other.“5
I finally understood where the indescribable familiarity in her eyes came from. You have to love her.
Tonight the moonlight is tangled up with the black clouds and everything is in transit, isn't it? Why London's sky so shallow? Unlike our small country, where the blue-green sky is so deep and the violet black ground is so thick. Since I was banished and disinherited out of there, the black sun rise in my world. But you say the sun always black in our country.
Jealousy causes less suffering, for at least the other remains vivid and alive. In the fade-out, the other seems to lose all desire, invaded by the Night. I am abandoned by the other, but this abandonment is intensified by the abandonment the other him self suffers; his image is thereby washed out, liquidated;6
From whence it came? Health was explicitly banned. Little by little you began to stray, to stray from leanness, from tenderness, from fondness, from indulgence in the outside world. I began to pause little by little, and I paused to ask many many questions. Why stop making love? Why leave? Why forget?
That night you lay beside me falling ill again. You cried, I drank tears. You turned on your side, I turned on my side. Were you thinking of suicide again? Must it be by my side? May I stop you? I can't. Because it's too much for you. May I turn around? May I pat you on the back? May I ask you to look at me? I can't. Because it's too much for you. May I pretend to be asleep? I can't. Because I was too much to love you. That night, I created God from love. Calling to her, " Help my beloved."
" Save her, save me ". What can I do to save you, my hopeless love.
That night, I experienced the two systems of despair(gentle despair and active resignation) written by Roland Barthes, ‘I see, in a sharp, cold flash, the destruction to which I am doomed.’7 Because I love you, and because love cannot cure any disease. I have started to have dreams. In the dream I dug with my bare hands into the lower part of my belly until the moment when I was hollowed out and hollowed through, my hands transformed into your bodies, and you thus eternally pierced me
and castrated my womb.
Even though a woman has no penis to lose, it is her entire being—body and especially soul—that she feels is threatened by castration. As if her phallus were her psyche, the loss of the erotic object breaks up and threatens to empty her whole psychic life. The outer loss is immediately and depressively experienced as an inner void.8
The day I got that depression diagnosis case sheet, I was so happy. Finally, I was in the world of mental illness stigma with you. Finally, I am beginning to be able to demand justice. Finally, my health no longer stings you. I finally shared your fate. It's just that since that day, there's been a lot of shameful things in my life.
My mother smashed the diagnosis into pieces and threw it in my face, cursing angrily, “ You do not have right to get this disease. In that moment, I was in a state of great sadness and great rejoicing. I became the lover of Maurice who is unspeakable.
She is fond of the death she believes she bears within herself. Even more so, such a complicity with death gives her the feeling that she is beyond death: a woman neither gives nor undergoes death because she is part of it and because she imposes it.9
The longing for death flowed through me, and I was finally no longer the one who feared death. I'm with you willingly. Is that a morality of loving you? But, please, just let the two of us to die.
My desire is wipes the floor in your room. When will you understand? The moment when my legs are folded over your neck is a plea for you to kiss my lips. The moment when my breasts are held and suckled by you is my fantasy of breastfeeding you, the paroxysms I fall in love with you.
In Dr. Sears’s The Baby Book there’s a little sidebar (written by Martha?) called “Sexual Feelings While Breastfeeding,” which attempts to reassure you that such feelings don’t mean you’re a pedophile freak. It says that you’re basically hormonal soup, and because the hormones unleashed by breast-feeding are the same as those unleashed by sex, you could be forgiven for the mix-up. But how can it be a mix-up, if it’s the same hormones? How does one go about partitioning one sexual feeling o from another, presumably more “real” sexual feeling? Or, more to the point, why the partition? It isn’t like a love a air. It is a love a air.10
When your mother agreed that you would fall from her womb for the first time. She then agreed, your every, endless fall from then on. I would love to be your mother if I could. Perhaps we had already begun to play on it by default, when we embrace, I gave you an entity of your mother, and you gave me a phantom of my mother. What caused us to share this body so poor and the fate so infertile.
But first she emphasizes the character of divine generation in any union between man and woman, the presence of immortality in the living mortal. All love is seen as creation and potentially divine, a path between the condition of the mortal and that of the immortal.11
Human beings can reproduce by love. One day in the afternoon with perfect sunlight, we had just made love and were lying naked together. Why is there such great happiness in the world? My body jumped up into this boundless bliss, a translucent bright yellow right there, and I was inseminated. Glittering apertures flashed on and off in my eyes as I smiled and faced you and I called out your name, "I love you so much, I want to give you a baby.”
You sank with your face ashen, and suddenly I sank with you. Then we both shut up about that afternoon, forgetting my humiliation and confession for you.
In fact, I don't know why I would say something like that to you. Until one day, a casual conversation with a friend led to, "Do you know how heterosexual women express their deepest love to each other?"
" No idea."
"It's that I would be willing to have your children."
Before the appearance of the son, the beloved's fulfillment tells him, shows him, the mystery of fecundity. Looking again at the woman he has loved, the lover may contemplate the work of fecundation. And, if the surrender of the beloved woman-and of the female lover-means a childlike trust, an animal exuberance, it illuminates the aesthetics and ethics of the amorous gesture, for those who take the time to reopen their eyes.12
How is a lesbian to deal with this ethics of love? Obviously, you and I have the ability to conceive. We will not have children, so when I hold you, you are the infant I have given birth to. Like all the infants of this world, stripped from my body, sucking me up, proclaiming my eternity and decay.
Human beings can reproduce by love. Humans can reproduce with love. In my infertile womb, you were inseminated. But you, my love, you have only the inevitable fate of the darkness that dominates you, the dead foetus. Like the mother who died inside me, only to wake up in the midnight and chant for me, "The wind is clear, the moon is bright, the leaves cover the window pane.”
Coeur/heart. This word refers to all kinds of movements and desires, but what is constant is that the heart is constituted into a gift-abject-whether ignored or rejected.13
My heart is just a puddle of soft meat that you have cut with a knife, and after it has been drenched in blood, it has begun to stink. Our love is untimely and becomes obscene.
Why am I going to paint? Because your figure is dying. You're fading into obscurity, your beauty is going to perish. But my love, it's not born, it's not dying, it's not increasing, it's not decreasing. It's really just a big phantom dissolving, and after the hazy, thin disillusionment, there's a big white patch of emptiness. Before it completely disappears, I need to recreate a bigger phantom.
The act of love is neither an explosion nor an implosion but an indwelling. Dwelling with the self, and with the other-while letting the other go. Remembering while letting the other be, and with the world. Remembering the act not as a simple discharge of energy but for its characteristic intensity, sensation, color, and rhythm. The intensity would be or would constitute the dimensions of the dwelling, which is always in process. Never completed. Unfolding itself during and between the schedule of encounters.14
From now on, every pale canvas of mine will be your seventeen-year-old body. I am truly sorry that I am the only one who has been raped by love, but you are forced to prostitute yourself with me. You've remained in my world for too long and too long, let me kill you, as for my sake and for you. You gone and I will always bathe in love.
So far, offer all my sorrows.
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1 Fink, Bruce, Lacan on Love: An Exploration of Lacan’s Seminar VIII, Transference (Polity Press, 2016) p. viii.
2 Ibid., p. 11.
3 Greene, Graham, and Monica Ali, The End of the Affair, Vintage Classics (Vintage Books, 2004) p. 62.
4 Roland, Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (Hill & Wang, 1979) p. 145.
5 Kristeva, Julia, and Leon S. Roudiez, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, European Perspectives (Columbia University Press, 2024) p. 158.
6 Roland, Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (Hill & Wang, 1979) p. 133.
7 Ibid., p. 48.
8 Kristeva, Julia, and Leon S. Roudiez, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, European Perspectives (Columbia University Press, 2024) p. 62.
9 Ibid., p. 188.
10 Nelson, Maggie, The Argonauts (Graywolf Press, 2015) p. 48.
11 Irigaray, Luce, An Ethics of Sexual Difference (Cornell University Press, 1993) p. 25.
12 Ibid., p. 190.
13 Roland, Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (Hill & Wang, 1979) p. 52.
14 Irigaray, Luce, An Ethics of Sexual Difference (Cornell University Press, 1993) p. 212.