Symposium project-part 1!

What I am currently working on is based on “The Symposium” by Plato. I read this text for the first time back in high school and have always found it a great piece. The Past year I have been playing with the idea to transform it into seven short films; each one representing one of the seven speeches in the book.

For those who are not familiar with the Symposium: In short it is a Symposium where great thinkers of the ancient Greece Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, Aristophanes, Agathon, Socrates, and Alcibiades) comes together to have a drinking party, but because of festivities the night before everyone is tired and they decide instead to each make a speech in praise of Eros (the God of love).

The first speech I decided to deal with is the speech of Pausanias. He talks about how there is an earthly and a heavenly love (Pandemos/Eros).

Eros has no female element. It is the love between men, which exist out of the noble thought of gaining or giving knowledge.  Pandemos on the other hand is the heterosexual love; a love between mortals where the desire of the body is the essential part. What I found interesting about this speech was that he talks about how the lover stemming from Pandemos is never stable because the desire of his object is never stable.

“…And therefore when the bloom of youth which he was desiring is over he takes wings and flies away in spite of all his words and promises; whereas the love of the noble disposition is life-long for it becomes one with the everlasting”.

A promise made out of love is not a promise. As soon as the love will die the promise will no longer exist and neither Gods nor humans will condemn a lover for his transgression. It is this temporary state of love that I used as outpoint for my research.

I started reading “Works of Love” by Søren Kierkegaard. It feels quite nice for once to read philosophy in my mother tongue that is not a translation.

Until now what struck me the most is that he in relation to love between humans writes this:

“Love only blooms”

Whether it is one hour or seventy years it only blooms. I find this statement to be very true and it relates to the Symposium project in the sense that I have chosen to deal with the temporality of love and relationships.

Everything that blooms also has the potential to die. Flowers bloom but always die, and the plant may get new flowers but they will not be the same. So to say that love only blooms, is to say that love will die.

In relation to this I will be looking at post break-up emotions. Those promises that we give and the things we do together while we are in a love relation; things that are easy to say and actions that seems natural, which we don’t even consider because we are in love; how heavy do they weigh when a relationship is over and how long does it keep having an effect in our lives? What are the things we remember and why, and where is the lack?