very drop of desire from life,
for he is building into a higher condition, one self-willed,
self-responsible, the discipline of which comes from joy, not fear.

Sex, therefore, is an animal function, one admits, one insists; it may
be only that. But also in the bewildering and humorous and tragic
duality of all life's energies, it is the bridge to every eternity which
is not merely a spectral condition of earth disembowelled of its lusts.
For sex holds the substance of the image. But we must remember with
Heine that Aristophanes is the God of this ironic earth, and that all
argument is apparently vitiated from the start by the simple fact that
Wagner and a rooster are given an analogous method of making love. And
therefore it seems impeccable logic to say that all that is most unlike
the rooster is the most spiritual part of love. All will agree on that,
schisms only arise when one tries to decide what does go farthest from
the bird's automatic mechanism. Certainly not a Dante-Beatrice affair
which is only the negation of the rooster in terms of the swooning
bombast of adolescence, the first onslaught of a force which the
sufferer cannot control or inhabit with all the potentialities of his
body and soul. But the rooster is troubled by no dreams of a divine
orgy, no carnival-loves like Beethoven's _Fourth Symphony_, no heroic
and shining lust gathering and swinging into a merry embrace like the
third act of _Siegfried_. It is desire in this sense that goes farthest
from the animal.

Consciously, no one can achieve the act of love on earth as a completed
thing of grace, with whatever delirium of delight, with whatever
ingenious preciosity, we go through its process. Only as an image of
beauty mated in some strange hermaphroditic ecstasy is that possible. I
mean only as a dream projected into a hypothetical, a real heaven. But
on earth we cannot complete the cycle in consciousness that would give
us the freedom of an image in which two identities mysteriously realize
their separate unities by the absorption of a third thing, the
constructive rhythm of a work of art. It is thus that Tristan and Isolde
become wholly distinct individuals, yet wholly submerged in the unity
that is Wagner; and so reconcile life's duality by balancing its
opposing laughters in a definite form--thereby sending out into life a
profounder duality than existed before. A Platonic equipoise,
Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence--the only real philosophic