On Being

December 14, 2006

The House is a Desert

Wanting dearly to add to this “love” dialogue, I pulled down both volumes of Peter Watson’s history of ideas, climbed onto my bed, and turned to the indices, looking for “love”. I found nothing. I tried “passion” and “sex” and sub-headings of “Christianity”. “Sex” was offered in the latter volume (1900-present), and treated Kinsey, pornography, equality—matters for the psychologist or anthropologist or activist, but nothing for the aspiring metaphysician. Desperate, I turned to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Again, nothing. Distracted, I read about Martin Luther and his theological dilemma (he solved it), and thumbed lazily through the voluminous “mammalian” section.

Aggrieved, I pulled down Josef Goebbels diaries (a mild act of perversion) and turned to the back—unsurprisingly the index listed places and names, and had no space for abstractions, and so I re-read Magda Goebbels’ final dispatch, an exercise in delusion and half-veiled doom, penned to her eldest son Harald, the only Goebbels’ child who had not spent his last days in Hitler’s bunker. It is written on the day Hitler married Eva Braun, and who then took their honeymoon in death, and terrifyingly, the missive makes tender reference to Harald’s four young siblings who would die by their mother’s hand later that day: “The children are wonderful. They make do in these primitive circumstances without any help”.
But in signing off, Magda does make reference to “love”, and in doing so makes a half useful distinction:

I embrace you with my warmest, most heartfelt and most maternal love.
My beloved son
Live for Germany!

Or die. And thus ended my ridiculous search for easily discoverable, objective treatises on love. Well… not quite.

My literalness not wholly abandoned, I turned to the OED, and noted multiple definitions of “love”. This one caught my eye:

1. a. That disposition or state of feeling with regard to a person which (arising from recognition of attractive qualities, from instincts of natural relationship, or from sympathy) manifests itself in solicitude for the welfare of the object, and usually also in delight in his or her presence and desire for his or her approval; warm affection, attachment.

This recalled for me Thomas Aquinas’ writings on the matter, when, in considering that “there is love in God” declared:

But love wills something for someone. For we are said to love that for which we will some good, as said above. Hence, those things which we want, we are, properly and absolutely, said to desire, but not love—rather to love ourselves for whom we want these things. And for this reason—accidentally and not properly—these things are said to be loved.

Aquinas’ declaration may touch on the OED’s consideration of welfare, and its implication of selflessness, but it conflicts with the OED’s reference to the pleasure the lover receives in loving. If we love someone, do we not want them? Do we not want to be pleased by love? Surely to do so is to desire the source of this pleasure? Yes, of course, and Aquinas is thrown from the tracks as our modern adventurer searches for that most difficult and pleasing of equilibriums: to will genuine good for someone, but to receive enormous profit for doing so.

This acknowledgment has been made in modern theology, most recently by Pope Benedict in his first encyclical delivered last year. The Pope moved to distinguish “Eros”—the erotic love between a man and a woman, and “agape”—unconditional love. Benedict says that “Eros” is fine, as long as it is contained within “agape”—basically an extension of marriage.

So where does this get us? Well, if our intellectual and moral movements are chained to the Church, then it seems you can have your erotic cake and eat it too. But I’m no closer to understanding just what “love” is.

***

Naturally, love is not amenable to one definition. We may ask religion to help us practice love, and science to instruct us of its chemistries. If we turn to literature we are introduced, with great intimacy, to others’ experience of it, but it is, of course, our own experience that proves the most instructive. If we accept the philosopher Bertrand Russell’s opinion, that love is an absolute value, not a relative one, then it cannot be articulated, rather only experienced, and so we have something like Wikipedia’s description: “…an ineffable feeling of affinity”.

This does not mean we cannot speak of love per se, but rather discuss what we recognise as being symptoms of love. In other words, how does this sense of affinity manifest itself? The answer is in every conceivable way.

For Nabokov, love was imprisonment, and unrequited love a nightmare, as felt in his great novel Lolita. Carson McCullers noted the resemblance of those in love with zombies, and John Fante’s hero Arturo Bandini experiences love as a ruinous pathology. Shakespeare wrote characters who, profoundly piqued by love, shuffle towards death, and “Othello syndrome” is now the popularised description of what psychologists call “pathological jealousy”.

But there are other rounder, kinder manifestations of love. HL Mencken, editor, journalist, and satirical attack-dog, a man who once described love as “the delusion that one woman differs from another” and said of his inclination to wed “if I ever marry, it will be on sudden impulse, as a man shoots himself” was himself married. In 1930 he wedded Sara Powell Hardt after a seven year courtship which yielded over 700 tender letters. 12 years after meeting the marriage ended when Hardt succumbed to tuberculosis. Sara received her last letter from Mencken whilst in hospital (her death was unexpected), and accompanying it was a record player he had sent to cheer her up. The letter, a tender instruction to the use of it, is as follows:

Darling—
This needs no special adjustment. Simply hook the end of the thin wire into the valve of the radiator, or to the radiator itself, and plug the power wire in on your light. You will then bathe in art.
The house is a desert.
M

Eleven years before, in 1925, Mencken had written this to his new sweet-heart:

Dear Sara—
I suspect that you were trying to flirt with me this afternoon; hence the hollowness of my conversation, against which you justly complained. Well, if you would have discourses worthy the ear of a lady savant, then you must not look so charming…

Marion Elizabeth Rodgers edited their correspondences, and concluded in the book’s lengthy introduction: “The sheer volume of letters and the repeated confidences they contain support the notion that Mencken had fallen deeply, irrevocably in love”. And so it seems.

Whilst aforementioned writers believed love was at best capricious, and at worst demonic, there is no doubt that love (maternal, romantic, platonic, whatever) can sponsor some of the nobler flourishes of human existence—courage, compassion, patience, tenderness. I’m reminded of the dangers invited by the people who secretly housed Anne Frank’s family, and I like to think that love played a part in that sad drama, but I also recall, with great fondness, the unspeakable details of assistance shown to a friend of mine by his girlfriend after a particularly violent bug tore through his digestive tract. It was a long night for both, and, while the details of the acts themselves will be censored, the good humouredness and compassion with which they were undertaken should be celebrated for as long as students study Romeo and Juliet.

Love, like laughter, can assuage sadness, lighten darkness. It may do this profoundly, by inviting a grand act of courage, or it may favour you subtly—a rub, a look, a smile. Even the subtle acts are much too important, and much too wise, to be caught by writers. Love most usually transcends the word, escaping the writer’s outflung net, leaving triteness and cliché in its wake. So be it.

There is another point to be made, and it is not popular. It is this: love may very well not be enough for us. I think of a number of marriages I know of that ended in sad disintegration after the sudden death of a child. In those cases, pain trumped love, and each went their own way, paler, uneasier, but half-grateful for leaving their mirror of anguish behind. Australian author Richard Flanagan writes:

The idea that love is not enough is a particularly painful one. In the face of truth, humanity has for centuries tried to discover in itself evidence that love is the greatest force on earth.
Jesus is an especially sad example of this unequal struggle. The innocent heart of Jesus could never have enough of human love. He demanded it, as Nietzsche observed, with hardness, with madness, and had to invent hell as punishment for those who withheld their love from him. In the end he created a god who was “wholly love” in order to excuse the hopelessness and failure of human love.

If you have read this far, you will not have learnt anything. The topic is too difficult, too chameleon, and this writer is not disciplined to meaningfully tackle it. But I would like, as way of a corrective farewell, to say this:

When The Beatles sung “All You Need is Love” it is unsure if they meant it. Beatles scholar Ian McDonald attributes the song’s birth to “drug-sodden laziness” and it’s hard to argue with him. Regardless, the ideal of the title is a stretch.

Love, if it is anything, is a catalyst for the greatest, noblest acts of humanity (Jesus) and also of the worst (Othello). It can cure and conquer deep darkness, but it can also excite its own—spite, jealousy, possessiveness, giddiness. In love’s unrequited form the shapes of psychological distress are grand and multiple.

To be sure, “All You Need is Love” is an oversimplification, but it also appears that my arrival at this platitude may be my only lucid thoughts on the matter. Except, perhaps, to say this: I am in love, and I am better for it. My love encourages me to look inwards, but with a better, braver light, and it encourages me to trace my movements to her heart, as so I become a little better at navigating cause and effect. I am also happier, braver, cleaner, and softer. I hate a little less, and I eat a little more. And more and more am I falling in love with the little things.

Posted by Marty at 7:24 PM