{"id":661,"date":"2012-05-10T09:00:16","date_gmt":"2012-05-10T09:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/juliannedavidow.com\/demonew\/?p=661"},"modified":"2012-05-10T09:00:16","modified_gmt":"2012-05-10T09:00:16","slug":"pothos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/juliannedavidow.com\/demonew\/blog\/2012\/05\/10\/pothos\/","title":{"rendered":"Pothos"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\tAn enchanted life has many moments when the heart is overwhelmed by beauty and the imagination is electrified by some haunting quality in the world or by a spirit or voice speaking from deep within a thing, a place, or a person.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/em>From The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life<\/em>\u00a0 by Thomas Moore<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>I recently returned to Venice, a place I\u2019ve been visiting for many years and where I lived from 2007-2010.\u00a0 But even before I first went to Italy in 1990, or began to study the language, I used to dream of Italian words and places.<\/p>\n

When\u00a0 I moved there, I believed I would stay for good. But then I realized the difficulties inherent in living away from my own country and knew I had to return to New York. When I went to Venice this time, the old longing was there with me. It felt like an ache.\u00a0 I thought I had gained a measure of knowledge and wisdom; thought I had learned that no place can be an answer to that longing that is forever in me, no matter where I go. But whatever I thought I knew intellectually, how I felt was an entirely different matter.<\/p>\n

About a month ago, I attended a workshop given by Thomas Moore at the New York Open Center on the topic of Eros.<\/em>\u00a0 And, as often happens in a synchronistic way, I immediately became immersed in Eros<\/em>; or rather one part of Eros\u2014pothos.<\/em>\u00a0 Being in Venice always awakens it in me.\u00a0 Thomas Moore said that the Greeks honored pothos<\/em>, the longing aspect of love, as a daimon<\/em>, a kind of guiding spirit, and erected places of honor for it.\u00a0 He said that this kind of yearning makes us feel alive and gives us a sense of the future.\u00a0 Nostalgia, too, can evoke this feeling of yearning.\u00a0 I feel both in Venice\u2014a desire for something I can\u2019t even name, a reaching forward, and at the same time a desire to return to the past\u2014the distant past, when Venice was an international center of art, commerce, music, scholarship, writing and publishing\u2014when ritual and ceremony were a part of daily life.<\/p>\n

In James Hillman\u2019s essay \u201cPothos:<\/em> the Nostalgia of the Puer Eternus,\u201d (from the book Loose Ends)<\/em> he speaks of pothos<\/em> as being \u201cthe spiritual component of love or the erotic component of spirit,\u201d and that it is \u201cthe longing towards the unattainable, the ungraspable, the incomprehensible.\u201d<\/p>\n

Plato said that Eros <\/em>can lead us on a \u2018ladder of love,\u2019 in which divine ideas are awakened in us through partaking of physical beauty.\u00a0 But many times we become attached to the thing of beauty itself.\u00a0 The answer, however, is not to be found there. The longing points us towards something ineffable.<\/p>\n

Even while I was in Venice, I sensed a lack.\u00a0 I attributed it to the fact that I would be leaving again soon. Then why didn\u2019t I stay before? Was it pleasure or pain I felt-and feel, when I think of it now?\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0Walking around Venice at night, it was as if my very pores wanted to drink in the antiquity: the old bricks, stones, and monuments felt like lovers to me.<\/p>\n

My last night in Venice I had a dream of being in a house where I once lived. I needed to pack up and leave.\u00a0 There were a lot of objects lying around.\u00a0 I picked up a few things and then realized that among them was a painting of Dante and Beatrice.\u00a0 Dante, the great 14th<\/sup> century Italian writer, saw the beautiful Beatrice only a few times; but he loved her from a distance. When she died at an early age, she remained a powerful force in his life; and in Dante\u2019s Divine Comedy<\/em>, she is his guide through heaven.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 \t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An enchanted life has many moments when the heart is overwhelmed by beauty and the imagination is electrified by some haunting quality in the world or by a spirit or voice speaking from deep within a thing, a place, or a person. From The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life\u00a0 by Thomas Moore I recently returned to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ocean_post_layout":"","ocean_both_sidebars_style":"","ocean_both_sidebars_content_width":0,"ocean_both_sidebars_sidebars_width":0,"ocean_sidebar":"","ocean_second_sidebar":"","ocean_disable_margins":"enable","ocean_add_body_class":"","ocean_shortcode_before_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_after_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_before_header":"","ocean_shortcode_after_header":"","ocean_has_shortcode":"","ocean_shortcode_after_title":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_bottom":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_bottom":"","ocean_display_top_bar":"default","ocean_display_header":"default","ocean_header_style":"","ocean_center_header_left_menu":"","ocean_custom_header_template":"","ocean_custom_logo":0,"ocean_custom_retina_logo":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_height":0,"ocean_header_custom_menu":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_family":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_subset":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_size":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_unit":"px","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_line_height":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_unit":"","ocean_menu_typo_spacing":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_unit":"","ocean_menu_link_color":"","ocean_menu_link_color_hover":"","ocean_menu_link_color_active":"","ocean_menu_link_background":"","ocean_menu_link_hover_background":"","ocean_menu_link_active_background":"","ocean_menu_social_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_links_color":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_color":"","ocean_disable_title":"default","ocean_disable_heading":"default","ocean_post_title":"","ocean_post_subheading":"","ocean_post_title_style":"","ocean_post_title_background_color":"","ocean_post_title_background":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_image_position":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_attachment":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_repeat":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_size":"","ocean_post_title_height":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay":0.5,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay_color":"","ocean_disable_breadcrumbs":"default","ocean_breadcrumbs_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_separator_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_hover_color":"","ocean_display_footer_widgets":"default","ocean_display_footer_bottom":"default","ocean_custom_footer_template":"","ocean_post_oembed":"","ocean_post_self_hosted_media":"","ocean_post_video_embed":"","ocean_link_format":"","ocean_link_format_target":"self","ocean_quote_format":"","ocean_quote_format_link":"post","ocean_gallery_link_images":"on","ocean_gallery_id":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[195,196,197,198,199],"class_list":["post-661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-eros","tag-eros-2","tag-italy","tag-pothos","tag-venice","tag-yearning","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/juliannedavidow.com\/demonew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/juliannedavidow.com\/demonew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/juliannedavidow.com\/demonew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juliannedavidow.com\/demonew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juliannedavidow.com\/demonew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=661"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/juliannedavidow.com\/demonew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/661\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/juliannedavidow.com\/demonew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juliannedavidow.com\/demonew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juliannedavidow.com\/demonew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}