What love wants is to be wise.
Dad has cancer, he told me two weeks ago, as casually as someone saying, “pass the salt, please.” I decided to dance his dance, to give him the comfort of following his tone. So, just like someone passing the salt, I answered: “Hm, and how are you feeling?” He told me about the radiotherapy treatment that will start soon, that he isn’t afraid of death. I joked and said: the last time I visited you at ICU (that was in 2017, when he had a heart attack) I brought you some books to keep you entertained in the room, since they wouldn’t let you have access to anything. After bringing you a pile of books, I asked: “Dad, anything else you want?” and you answered, “Yes, I want to be cremated.” We both laughed.
And then I told him I was reading The Symposium by Plato. That in 380 b.C, the greek philosophers got together to discuss what is love. And what love wants.
The conclusion from Plato is, what love wants is to be wise.
Saturn, by castrating his father (Uranus), who is the sky and the time (which makes a lot of sense, because the sky is the imprint of time, literally), creates a cave with his semen, and inside it he keeps humans. The cave is an allegory for our system of beliefs. We're constantly moving in life from one cave to the other. We start life in the mother uterus, then we move to the family uterus, the friend's uterus, the university uterus, the work uterus, and finally the final uterus, which is the grave.
Saturn is fundamentally this force that tries to control things. Tries to keep us inside the cave, as if that it could prevent us of being devoured by Uranus (time). But there is no way to escape. Thinking of other traditions, like the jewish one, what greeks call “Saturn” I understand in Kabbalah being represented as “Binah”.
Binah is the feminine, the great uterus that gives shape to this infinite masculine energy flow known as Gevurah (in greek mithology, “Mars”). Without the vessel (Binah), this flow is nothing but infinite potential. The irony is: what limits, what contains, is also what gives shape and forms life. Creating does not exist without the two elements.
He told me he still hasn’t shared the news with my older sister, his daughter from his first marriage, because he wasn’t sure how she might react and she had already her other concerns in life. Then he asked me what I thought. I answered: “Well, you clearly think I am on vacation, right?” And he laughed a bit more. I suggested he might wait another week, start the radiotherapy and see how it goes, and then give her a call, since she deserves to know. The cave is always destroyed, but it is nice to have some time to process things. He thought it was indeed a good idea. And then he said he knew he should talk to me from the very beginning, not because he thinks I am in permanent vacation (haha), but because he knew I could hold it. And I think in that moment my dad did more for our connection than he has done in a long time, because he trusted me. And that's all I actually need from him.
/May26