Love (Or, Systematically Murdering Something Pretty)

What is love? 'Pends on your preference.

Love can be reduced to its neurological-somatological (brain-body) processes. The flighty feelings that make y'heart feel all fluttery 'n such. Etc.

Or, it can be a form of seeing -- seeing the whole person without particulars, beyond the particulars (hands, smile, hair, temper, distaste, etc.).

Or, will-to-good (or bene-volence).

Fundamentally, however, love is founded in relation.

I'll take all four, personally. The second is a requisite; the third is its fulfillment; the first is its result; the fourth is the entire process.

"I love you," that is, "I see you, will the best for you, and am rewarded biologically because of this." Willing the best, oftentimes, means nothing more than seeing -- and seeing entails the language expressed by the one seen.

Of course, love often doesn't mean this. Love as affection can mean the simple affective responses associated with external stimulii. A boy who watches a man work on his garden every sunday may feel affection for him without even having relation with him. This form of love can quite often be based on a particular, partciularly behavioristically: the person doesn't always love the person in his or her entirety, but an aspect of them (their smile, something in their history). Or, love may mean friendship, in which case two individuals come together unintentionally through their intersecting points of interest: they both like bowling -- and so they spend time together by virtue of this shared interest. Erotic love is the love people "fall" in, the love that breaks hearts, inspires poetry (and bitchiness). There is a higher form, though, that I consider unconditional.

Most of these loves overlap. Erotic love necessarily entails affection, and oftentimes friendship (but think of marriages centuries ago wherein both partners were planned together; their roles in marriage were more functional than affectively related). Friendship doesn't always have to involve affection (which is typically why we care less for our friends than for our families). The interesting thing is that the highest love -- which I can think only in the religious form of agapas -- can live without any of the other three forms. This form of love is love constituted and sustained through the nakedness of one's will. That is to say, agapas is the will in the will-to-good of benevolence. Without it, love limits itself to spontaneity; the person loves because his inclinations force these feelings on him. His love is limited to his mood, in short.

So, love has typically one of four forms at least, though oftentimes these forms can overlap. These forms differ in their makeup: affection and erotic love are often primarily based in neurological-somatological processes; they are the loves that "grab" you before you think of grabbing them. Friendship is more spiritual, if you will; it can and often does exist without an affective base, mostly because friendship is a byproduct of shared interests. The highest love, unconditional love, love with a will, agapas, is, yes, what keeps these three lower loves alive. Spontaneous love is determined love; determined love can just as easily turn to hatred -- unless a will is present. And not just any will -- a will that wills a the paradox of selflessness: resigning oneself for the sake of another, only after which one gains the happiness through the sustained being of these other three lower loves.

--

Yes, there are times where I can soak up nothing, where even the quintessence of beauty standing before me seems like Jupiter, foreign, remote; where the presence of other human beings is too exhausting, and keeping up a conversation is nothing less than self-torture. Instances have pain -- downright physical pain; a sort of crushing against my temples, but far too light to be a headache, yet still infinitely heavier. All self-written words, like these here, are considered worthless, rubbish, evidence of ineptitude that the world has never seen. Books clutter around, auspicious titles, tantalizing subjects, but my mind is so strung out with intertia that after ten lines I'm ready to die. All that is left is a dark, ur-meditative, nihilistic stare where everything frowns at me with emptiness, and weakness pours through my veins, and all I want to do is sleep.

What is this?

No, the situations are rare, thankfully. Yet in this exact situation, or even on a pathway towards it, still lightyears away, most anyone seduced by the dark manna of the world would do anything to escape it. I don't want to escape it. It makes me sick to think of escaping it; yet I still know that I am free, terribly free, to do so. At times I find myself personifying this disease by literally verbally speaking to it and the open air: "you will not win; I am stronger; try your best". Suddenly the air seems a little lighter, and a fighting smile paints my lips. But soon things return. I do have the choice, don't I? I can channel this negation onto the outer world. I can hate, or feign impatience, manipulate others, lose myself in substances, ad infinitum. Better, I can perpetuate the lie of appearance by throwing myself into a crowd of dead souls, garnering their attention, living in the shelter of a facade. I can do all this. But I don't. I hold it in.

Listen. I am completely powerless. I have sway over nothing. Everything passes me by, and like a foot-locked near-stowaway I can't make the minimal leap onto the slow-moving train of the world. Absolutely nothing heals. Nothing. But I still have a choice. I can suffer, or destroy. A single drop of malevolence microscopically curses the entire cosmic net, and God knows it is too often the breaking point for other breaking selves. So, perhaps half-madly, I ask -- without even knowing what I am asking, here, this moment -- one thing. Appreciate me. No, I can live well enough without you; I am not seeking your admiration. But am I not, through my voluntary suffering, keeping the world a little brighter than it could be, and are you not a member of this rusty little world?

Can you do the same?

Alone

To be alone is far greater than to be surrounded by a cloud of everything and still feel loneliness. God hides behind both the solitary and the multifarious. But one distracts. Damnation is a will-to-distraction.

Two Points

One: the room congregationally shared with collegiate cognitive landmines. Professors. Six or seven, mingled in with our sitting lackadaisical class, for the most part observing, for one doctor's part analytically crucifying, a potential, a candidate to fill the shoes of one of the four of our department's retiring souls, who spoke with a disappointing southern lisp that I knew would be the straw that broke the camel's back of her acceptance. How tall and terrifying a feeling, and how revelatory, to share the ground with these intelligentsia, these profound looking men and women who seem to have forgotten, some in their selfless childish fascination with the world, others in the vice that comes with proportionate knowledge, that they too are flesh and blood, potential suicides, potential saints. I held myself and observed, and travailed the demonic desires that shuffled my bones: at intervals to run away, at others to laugh, at others to sleep, at others to be.

Two: verging on a solitary warm midnight at the apex of a four hour reading marathon, composed of the lofty, unattainable gorgeousness of Nabokov in the form of his immortal Lolita, and the hard-knit, still poetic, nearing-insanity quips of William Burroughs regarding the seventeen million cats he's owned in his lifetime. Suddenly, the muse resurrects, reverberates; my brain is tickled with that especial stimulation that can only be sustained through creativity. The eternal walk to the computer. The exorcising and expunging of a legion of demons that had accumulated for the last two months in my just previously stale-stuffed soul. Word after word after word. The warmth that grazed my heart. The smile I felt coming, that I supressed, hurriedly grabbing my near-dead pipe, to an outdoor wonderland tranfixed under the moonless sky. The smile that I set free, cascading my body with pinpricks of angelic joy. The smoke specters that emanated from my mouth. The festive relaxation of gods.