God's Indeed

musings on love

Everyone talks about heartbreak and its durable consequences. Smarting for years, adamantly proclaiming heartbreaks made them a masterpiece or are the cause of the wreckage they fashioned into a life. Heartbreak can confirm every worst fear and suspicion you have about yourself. Heartbreak a period oscillating between hope and hopelessness, torment and boundless yearning. Not enough people talk about happy love, the type of love that confirms every aspiration you have for yourself, the type of love that corroborates the vision you have of yourself. Skepticism about love is prevalent. Most people consider love only successful if there is a persistent and observable intensity of passion. Literature forms many of our ideas and expectations of love often has difficulty in depicting happy love. W.H. Auden pointed out, “Of the many (far too many) love poems written in the first person which I have read, the most convincing were, either the fa-la-las of a good natured sensibility which made no pretense at serious love, or howls of grief because the beloved had died and was no longer capable of love, or roars of disapproval because she loved another or nobody but herself; least convincing were those in which the poet claimed to be in earnest, yet had no complaint to make.” Envy also causes skepticism concerning love. Love prompts envy in others, the envious observer may try to disesteem love to quiet their feelings of envy and exclusion. Observers of love feel either fascination or abhorrence. James Salter captures this in his, A Sport and a Pastime. “What had happened? They had gone off and made love. That isn’t so rare. One must expect to encounter it. It’s nothing but a sweet accident, perhaps just the end of an illusion. In a sense one can say it’s harmless, but why, then, beneath everything does one feel so apart? Isolated. Murderous, even…..I prefer not to think about it, I turn away, but it’s impossible to control these dreams…..I cannot stop them even if I want to…My own life suddenly seems nothing, an old costume, a collection of rags, and I walk, I breath to the rhythm of his which is stronger than mine.” Skepticism of love is often believed to be an objective evaluation, in reality it is a derivative of their own imagination and bias. People talk about heartbreaks that cannot be gotten over. There is also love that can be so perfect and perfecting that regardless of how long it lasts, it can sustain you in this life and possibly into the next. To have your self image reflected to you in the exact manner and position in which you see yourself in the world is verifiable confirmation of who and what you think you are. There’s heartbreak hanging in the air around couples, the malignancy can be sensed by others. Watching, savoring the drama, casually thinking, ‘there but for the grace of God go I.” Others encouraging the heartbroken that it will make them a better person. There’s also love that is so refulgent it causes people to pause and stare, to approach with words of admiration. Love that when seen causes them to pull their own lover a little closer to them. A love of the finest texture that cannot be disturbed even by separation. Love that is so mutually attentive without verbal prompting. Everything you do with one another is an “I love you.” No burdens, regrets, pure intentions and nothing to be ashamed of. When your taste is painfully particular and things work in your favor it can infuse such beautiful and pure energy that it cannot easily be ignored or dampened by time, unforeseen occurrences. This type of love fulfills ones preexisting fantasies in the flesh, a coalescence of one’s dreams.

Being the object of a lover’s adoration causes one to contemplate new possibilities that cause one to experience a reciprocal imaginative process manifested as love. Being idealized by someone that you judge as valuable is an inducement of love. Your world amplifies, your uniqueness and value are verified, it confirms the reality of each other’s subjectivity. Platonic understanding of love defines it as a re-union, unfulfilled yearnings are transferred to the beloved who is experienced as the source of all that is definitively good. Love endeavors to undo disappointments of life, it is a correction of unsatisfying reality, recovery of lost omnipotence. Love undoes the deformities, losses, and debasements of the past. Theodore Reik stated that, “the zeal to regain paradise springs from the memory that men once possessed it and lost it.” this is the desire that love inspires, a void filled and a return to a state that still resonates with some people. Love allows a chance to discover self-fulfillment and self-validation, getting exactly what one feels they deserve in a partner is a heady ascertainment, an outer manifestation of one’s inner reality. To gratify and to be gratified simultaneously is a rapturous combination.

Love is a means of reparation. Transcendentally, love is a means by which one can surmount the pain of separateness. Merging with another implies a new interpretation and expansion of the self. On occasion passionate love cannot be sustained without the persistent hunger to reexperience such epiphanies such as that first ecstasy after experiencing the transcendental consolidation of merging with your beloved. Roland Barthes gives a description of the epiphany of love and merging, “Besides intercourse there is that other embrace which is a motionless cradling: we are enchanted, bewitched: we are in a realm of sleep, without sleeping; we are within the voluptuousness of sleepiness:  this is the moment for telling stories, everything is suspended:  time, law, prohibition: nothing is exhausted, nothing is wanted: all desires are abolished, for they seem definitively fulfilled.” Even if not sustained these feelings can be reimposed time and again to replenish the mind and spirit as needed. The fluidity of the ego enables one to surrender to the power of love and interpret the self in it’s primacy. To love and to be loved is a release from the burdens of the self it is immersion in something grander than the self, it’s a major organizing force in life.

Love allows for a flux in personality that supports creative synthesis by lowering defensiveness that allows rediscovery of encumbered parts of the self, a new range of possibilities is realized in love. Even if love ends, these changes persist, and the glorious state is regarded as a magical interlude. This phenomenon is often why a love affair enjoys a privileged status in memory. The memory of mutual love is preserved and continues to enrich the lover whether the love is sustained in external reality. The novelty, originality of love while in love is the core of passionate love. Being loved satisfies one’s vanity along with a host of other benefits, however it is loving that is often the greater pleasure. Per Carson McCullers loving is “a creative experience,” the lover benefits the most from loves pleasures. I prefer the more pointed remark by one of Goethe’s characters, “When I love you, what does that concern you?” Love as a creative achievement, synthesizes the real and illusory gratifications of wishes and desires. Even if the insistence that possession of the beloved will magically lead to eternal bliss is illusory, love is still in fact magical. The transcendence and metamorphosis that is experienced in love is like what is reported as accompanying mystical religious experiences.

Aristophanes myth of the separated halves that come together in love, fulfilling a desire to return to our original nature. This nature is expressed by the fulfillment found in releasing the energy that enables us to admit our deepest needs, there is a sense of relief and peace in finding one’s separated half. Whether love lasts a millennium is not of primary importance. As Theodore Reik stated, “Speeches to be immortal need not be eternal.” Passionate love is not only valuable when it is sustained. Love often matures into deeply gratifying bonds of duty and affection, for many it was always this and was never passionate love.

Realization of love can renew hope in life, at various points in life we may feel insufficient due to stagnation and an unconscious longing for something else, something new, which can be realized in love. Love is not diversion just a fulfillment of the desire to exercise our own creative prowess. Love liberates from the condemnation of habit reforming the previous inhibition and doubt. The narrative of our lives can be rewritten through the convincing force of love. It realigns, love is an explorative, imaginative transaction between two people, like good fiction love enables the reader to enter another’s consciousness. Love is a voyage, with a destination that is largely unknown. The danger of suffering in love is nothing compared to the danger of never having loved and therefore actually lived.

Love is by no means an absolute solution to problems, it’s a reaffirmation, a continual restatement in which we find no complete answer other than the ongoing pursuit to achieve perfection and goodness. Turn away from this pursuit and continue in incompleteness. Each of us comes to know ourselves, and to be ourselves through our choices in love. Love arises as an imaginative act, a creative synthesis, aiming, to fulfill our deepest longings and our oldest dreams.