Once, when I was reading the work of Alexandros Papadiamantis The Merchants of Nations, I found myself mentally standing among many fictional characters. Fake characters, yes, but complex, with living thoughts, feelings and passions that gave them flesh and blood. Characters from the past, with inner worlds and universes cut and sewn from the same cloth our own are woven from.
With some of them I looked like a drop of water. Some I turned away from the first page, and others surprised me. It's strange how different we humans are when you put us in orbit with someone else. Suddenly your center of gravity changes. You stop being your own boss.
Augusta, the protagonist of Papadiamantis for example. A woman who, when she meets the Venetian adventurer, Marco Sanuto, seems to be possessed by a divine, Dionysian rage and gives in to every temptation, which until recently she kept buried in the abyss of her subconscious.
I wonder at times like this... is it really man's destiny to spend a lifetime building himself up so that a man comes, he the one, and turn him back to zero?
Not to the zero of non-existence and stagnation. At the "ground zero" of rediscovering who he is, of who he could become for this one.
Sometimes I think that maybe we fall in love because we feel boringly "perfect" in the boring calm of a world where everything works like well-tuned cogs in a machine.
And even then, when we find Love, the most surprising thing happens: we retreat.
Why are we afraid?
And we fear in an indescribably ironic way, where we tend to turn our fear into hatred. Hate because someone dared to break into the bubble that has so far surrounded our world, and dared to love us.
Because love is chaotic. She is not easy, she is not tame. It has teeth and tears the flesh of lovers like a wild beast.
That is why many consciously choose to become the Mouchras of history. Because turning away from romance, love, and any kind of emotion that threatens your self-control, is the easy choice.
Papadiamantis' Augusta made the mistake of falling in love. Maybe Markos fell in love with her too. Maybe he just lusted after her and wanted to lick her, and when the excitement of grabbing Augusta faded, so did his feelings for her.
I'll never know.
I remember, we had approached this work in terms of Modern Psychoanalytic Science. Something that has strongly remained with me from the analyzes is the term "sadomasochistic bipolar". Essentially it was used to describe the situation where the Subjects Augusta - Markos alternated in the Sadist - Masochist positions.
It made a great impression on me that a story of a stormy love revolved around these two words. Two words that stood there playfully taunting me on the paper.
In short, this term described what I called "stormy love". That is, the fierce tragedy of two people, completely unsuitable for each other, who made the mistake of falling in love. Unsuitable because they became entangled in an endless attempt to manipulate and dominate each other when love was no longer enough.
Tragic, because love inevitably led them to crash.
*Cover photo: “Bathing right requires being able to stay guilt-free, hang out, and/or do nothing.” – Leonard Koren (Udesigning the Bath, 1996) / hellogoodland