The Haves and the Havents Part 3
We can't explore this topic without touching on the its relationship with love. Let's try to describe this in a little scientific experiment.
Abstract
To love, to become a lover, this happened, I'll hazard, wholly by accident, and most likely, was invented by a poor man.
Situation
Several eligible men woo a desirable woman. Eligible here means indicating interest in the woman as mate, understanding and accepting certain obligations involved, and ready to follow through if proposal is accepted. Man is here implicated because let's face it, only a man can be desperate enough to think up something that outrageous.
Subjects
Our damsel is choice and choosy, having the luxury and the liberty to pick and dismiss at will courtship advances. She certainly has seen enough of the suitors to count on them ever coming, like from an inexhaustible spring, as up to the moment so it has been. Our damsel would needs be in her prime and of prime stock--with maxxed out stats come maxxed out potentials. Also, in the solid scientific principle of threes, the suitors under examination are three, distinguished by their different levels of endowment.
Observation
Our first suitor approaches with the offer, "I have big cassava", an implied assurance that she may never go hungry for tubers, as the breath of his wealth would be at her disposal. The second counters, "I have bigger cassava", a greater guarantee against deprivations of creature comforts. Both offers, from the foregoing, cannot be strange or outside the expectations of our damsel and would impress her simply in the way previous offers of that sort did.
The third, who is less endowed than his rivals, is stumped. Not only is he aware of his shortage compared to his peers, he also observes how even they fail to impress her. It is in the light of this hapless suitor in his empty-handed state that we can admire the bold and brilliant, reckless too, coup he fetches by declaring, "I love you!" Now, they are stumped.
What is this strange sorcery he introduces -- a complete revaluation of the stakes and a revision of the game. What was initially a simple and tidy transactional relationship, clearly defined, of providing material comfort for mating privileges is transformed into a wild, unreasonable, and totally strange venture.
The first two are taken aback, like one would be if a member of a conference he is participating in suddenly breaks into a foreign tongue. However, our damsel is stimulated in a way material assurances has not, in a way nothing else before has. A forbidden-fruit-like thrill comes over her, the hint of something new valued over heaps of the familiar good, and it isn't too incredible that she takes this offer -- after all we are familiar with versions of ourselves that have taken a similar offer at some time.
To catch a horse, use a lasso; a unicorn is best captured with empty hands. Our damsel asks, "Love--what's that?" How do I even begin to explain it? Exactly. How? "Two cassava? A whole barn of it?" That and much more "Yam? It's yam, isn't it? Or plantains? Tell me." I'll give you all that I am, and that's love; the quintessence of all that there is to give, and that's love. "What?" Come with me and I'll show you. Here is the silk of imagination he strings out into a web, out into the open air and hangs down from. He offers a wonder than interests her, and her interest is more silk that in their interactions they use to weave strands into a whole magic rug in air to ride their fantasy for a while. Maybe out of curiosity, maybe out of desire for the unceasing fountain that love hints at, she falls for him.
The rivals are entranced with the performance of love as the lady, but with irritated confusion. Like as not, our creative lover is bumped off to eliminate his nuisance rivalry, they not knowing how to deal with him. (Outside ideal experimental conditions, though, there are other ways of circumventing his threat without rubbing him out). They ask, "What is this mysterious 'love' he has that we can't match?" This is a terrible way of addressing their challenge and they always come up against a wall. When they ask, however, "What is this 'love' thing he has that we don't have?", that's when the poor guy loses his advantage and they make serious headway.
In offering love, the poor inventor of love is without guile, naive probably, but honest. If he is a master of illusions, he is carried halfway there under his own spell. In his love, he self-abnegates, gives himself up completely to her, is content to be, in appearance and in deed, merely an extension of her. And here is the bargain of love, that there's no boundary to the bounty promised by love because its source keeps generating as long as it loves--and to an abnormal factor. The man of love does not know measures; moderation is nonsense to him. In his invention, he destroys the metric, albeit imprecise, system under which the affair of matchmaking was conducted. He will not catch a grenade but there's a chance he'll wrestle a chimpanzee for bananas he would not taste. He piggybacks her so her sandalled feet does not touch water while he wades across, and she watches him pluck and squash crimson against a rock swollen leeches he picked up in the paddy. He puts her on a raft while he remains, poor Jack, in frigid waters.
The rich, demystifies this love, and laughs at it. He's so amused. He thinks it all cheesy, cheap, but he isn't above taking advantage of it. In the hand of the rich, love becomes corrupted, alloyed if you will. In fact, it is because if his introduction of impurity into love that love survives. He offers measured expressions of love with measured offers of materials, all calculated to tease and salve thirst, to conduct her imagination, senses and desires like an orchestra, each tension and release tightly controlled and precisely directed, leading her into his embrace. He denudes an arbor to present her a red carpet of roses to her bed, has a troupe serenading her all night till morning by the window of a candlelit scented bedroom, and delivers a sumptuous breakfast to wake her up. There's no seam between the fabric of reality and that of dreamland for her that both seem cut from a cloth and so he intends. He weaves his magic rug alright, but extending from its edge down is a rapunzel-rope of yam tendrils that stops at the door of his yam barn, so that fantasy above is sustained by substance below.
Conclusion
The poor catches the unicorn, and the rich mates his mare with the unicorn, spreading forth unicorn-horse hybrids, and both attempt to trap these by hand and lasso (or whatever passes for that the poor brings along). Every now and then, an empty-handed poor will grasp mane and horn and make a fairytale true. Occasionally, a rich will throw lasso instead of hands and miss, but the game shifts in favor of the rich.