On love
At the outset, I'm tempted to ignore the obvious: it is difficult to consider how my daughter fits into the equation of what love is. I'm tempted to ignore it because I do not understand it. Perhaps a critical point to explaining the confusion is that, for twenty-nine years of my life, until her arrival, I had no known blood connection in the world. My blood parentage was some theoretical "out there", as I am adopted at birth.
So starting with the immediate consideration--family--it is interesting to say that love has always been an intellectualization of sorts. But my daughter ... right now she transcends expression. Maybe I will, in time, grasp enough of that sensation to put some suggestion of words to it, but I tell you that love
does have a tangible manifestation; the combination of brain sensations she set off was thitherto unknown to me.
"My family" has always included my closest and most trusted friends; I have as many behavioral conventions with them as I do my parents and brother. In a certain sense, my friends know me better than my family does, though this theory is being challenged of late; my daughter was like a tactical nuclear strike in my family.
Everybody has come out to play, so to speak.
In the beginning, my early intellectualizations of love held that it was a symptomatic manifestation of fear, that we love a person because they know us or
can know us better than anyone else, thus making us the
least lonely--love sprung from a fear of being alone. But this notion relies terribly on a hideously romantic idyll, it seems.
It is also from these early philosophical considerations that I came to realize the inherent problem introduced by recognition of a condition; once one is conscious of a condition, that condition affects judgment insofar as it remains relevant. To this day, I hedge over feeling and expressing love under certain circumstances--is this love real or is it a fear of being alone?
Certainly, my partner knows me well, and certainly she knows me uniquely in that nobody else knows me like she does. But it bothers her that she thinks other people still know me better (I can think of two where she might be right), but they're essentialists (not formal): they don't react directly to the me that they see, but the me that they know in relation to the person that they see. It's merely a matter of form, and my partner doesn't get that. And she's excruciatingly annoying because of that, but I love her nonetheless. Unfortunately, what love entails is perceived differently by the both of us. Love does not have anything to do with the picket-fence of post-Victorian deceptions I am occasionally obliged to maintain; it is merely a bargain with the devil for convenience presently in the best interests of my daughter. So there's that abstract and poetic love, again, that makes us do crazy things. Go figure.
Love
seems to involve a state of deep and abiding trust, but this is only rhetorical in the culture I'm most accustomed to. In the end, love seems to be, in the practical, tolerance of deception. Who else, but your family, will put up with you?
But
love is a notoriously vague word. How does one
love a nation? That's a dangerous delving, as I'm a fan of
Goldman's perspective on patriotism, but there are abstract things that people love.
Do you spend any time around sailors, specifically around the kind of people who live on forty-foot sailboats and pretty much live to be on the water? I cannot explain the
love that a man can have for his boat, and I haven't been around enough women on the water to get a similar sense, but it's curious and creepy; there's a reason men refer to their boats as mistresses. But I can't explain it.
Is there a genuine love of money, or is it such that greed seeks ennoblement through the idea?
But all of this only points to what love is not.
As to what love
is? I would be lying if I said I knew.
Anthropological/scientific: Love is a refined and specific compassion that may be attributed in some way to kin selection; hope in general seems to be the psychological manifestation of the evolutionary drive; hope focused becomes compassion - to hope for another; compassion focused is love.
Anthro-poetic: Love is the specific manifestation of the compassion and common-sense that draws individuals together to form societies. We are, as a species, stronger in numbers, and our numbers are stronger in harmony. Love becomes the binding agent in this formula. It is the grout between the tiles, the mortar between the bricks, the glue between the myriad veneers.
Poetic-literary: Love is at once the most rewarding and most destructive force in the known Universe. It is the essence and motivation of all human action.
Christian: Love is a commodity exchanged for salvation.
Communist: Love is generally an abstraction that gets in the way.
Love, however, is a bit like God in the Western interpretation in the sense that it is believed-but-not-known. Love is not to be defined or otherwise named; not all love has been discovered.
It is impossible to render the essence of love into simple language. Musical language does a better job, mathematical language worse. Human vocal language, though, is a flexible compromise, but not one which has yet achieved the means to define love.
But it does involve trust, hope, and a number of other shiny ideas that people generally loathe.
Sorry,
Truth Hurts, it's just that I'm running short on patience today. The answer might be the same on other days, but it would be a little more subtly put. Defining love is a little like seeking true objectivity; one should not undertake such a venture without preparing to sacrifice much.
:m:,
Tiassa