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Love in the Time of Cholera
by Honora Foah
Creative Director — Mythic Imagination Institute
Love in the Time of Cholera is the title of one of Gabriel Garcia Marquez' books. It is a phrase that I often find popping
into my mind, ever since the book came out years ago, 1988. Love in the time of cholera. He's good with titles, the latest
one being, Memories of My Melancholy Whores. I digress. I'm not sure exactly why these words always pop up, but I think
it has to do with the fact that it is always the time of cholera. Love is always bruised and hurried and encouraged and
discouraged by circumstance. And circumstances are altered by love, but not necessarily predictably.
What is the difference between Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, and her son, Eros? And she's always ordering
him around, and getting him up to trouble, but he sort of bites a lot of her schemes in the butt, and then they go funky. The
lack of coordination between Mother and Son causes many of our woes. Then there's the story of his great disobedience, when
he fell in love himself with Psyche, when he was supposed to be punishing her. Love is the lover of Soul.
Aphrodite, who was known to spread her favors around, had her own great love, and by god who was that? Ares, god of
Terror, War, Aggression. This is a pairing we need to take very, very seriously. What's up with that?
When death stalks the land, whether war or disease, love follows him. As more mysteriously does beauty. When we are
terrified, we need to keep our eye out for her. In fact, apparently, this is the moment that so many of us finally throw ourselves
into her arms with abandon, as, weirdly, she throws herself to Ares. What's up with that?
I have some ideas about it, as you probably do, too, but I'm not sure it's important to try to see why. I think it's important
to try to keep seeing it, to keep seeing that these two are together and will remain together. It isn't the family portrait that we
like, so keeping it alive and present is a deed in itself.
One of the great savants of the postwar era, John von Neumann, liked to say, mischievously, that "in mathematics you don't
understand things, you just get used to them." Mathematics is a symbolic system that describes the world as it is, whether you
like it or not. There are other systems that describe the world as it is.
It's time to get used to Ares and Aphrodite as an eternal coupling. Doing so is not an excuse for killing and whoring together,
or anything else, it's a warning and a way. It is a picture to keep in mind when you are passionately in love and it is a picture to keep
in mind when you, or the rest of your country, is terrified. Beauty stands beside him as you live through the time of cholera, or war.
In her arms, he is tamed. In his arms, she is--? This is the place where we turn away. She is what? Why does she love him,
why is he the one she needs? Ares is her great love. Her husband, however, is Hephaestus. Ugly, maimed Hephaestus. Creator
of magical technologies, tools of all sorts, but--hey what's this about? --mostly armaments. Whose purposes does this serve? What
kind of a bizarre ménage a trois is this?
There are profound and ecstatic ways to see all of these couplings, and as with all great mythologies, it is good to see as many
understandings as possible, but it is important not to turn away from the simplest base image: of terror and beauty rapt, of technology
furiously cuckolded, but providing weapons for his own wife's lover. Keep this knowledge of human nature close to you, or you will
be susceptible to liars who want to feed your sons to the great fire.
But also, be wise. When you are terrified, bury your face in beauty. There may not be comfort, but there will be life. That's the
best you can do in the time of cholera.
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