How do you capture what love means?
"Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres."- the first letter of Paul to the Corinthians, chapter 13
This epistle of Paul that he writes oh so poetically represents something that goes beyond Christian truth. I believe that it even goes beyond religious truth and I even lift it to a level of a metaphysics- that love reflects a truth that cuts across particularities and reveals something essential to the human person.
Love has the most powerful capacity to make any person regardless of all status, esteem, age, or wisdom feel like a kid looking through a peephole. Though what's different with love's peephole is that one needs to really plug in one's head to REALLY SEE. Simply "looking" or "glancing" is not enough and it fells dubious in its being worthy of being called "love." Why not? Because love makes the world seem so beautiful and one has but no choice but to DESIRE to be one with the "other". Though the desire is there, you'll never know if you're really "in love." Love is only made a reality in one's own choosing to love more. To go deeper and deeper and deeper into it, there love reveals itself to you.
I speak of the Greeks' "eros" and how passionate it gets. In more contemporary language, the word "eros" evolved into "erotic" in English that depicts sex and serves to just be a potent analogy to love. One is really drawn to plunge into the world of the "other" and at the same time the "other" is allowed to plunge into one's world. Ultimately, a bond is built between the "I" and the "other" and somehow the distinctions start to be irrelevant-- not blur, but become irrelevant.
What I will call the phallic aspect of love which is seen in one's plunge into the world of the other is the actualization of the very hopes of love. That in love, one finds happiness which Aristotle depicts as the "ultimate end" of one's life. That in risking all for love, one finds the confirmation of every article of one's self in its tendering to the other. Love in this sense constructs the other and its world as if it is a receptacle of meaning and as a being exclusive to hope.
Though this plunging is not always one that is joyous. As Sartre so powerfully depicts, "hell is the other."
Neil Gaiman couldn't get it any better:
“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.”
This is the yonic aspect of love. The aspect of love that deprives one of all self-meaning and removes one from all that is worthwhile. Happiness doesn't even seem to be a legitimate word because it ceases to be a reality and becomes only a romantic ideal. With any reality like love, there are just some things one needs to swallow up even if it seems to be such a jagged little pill (quoting Alanis Morisette).
Well, how do you capture what love means?
It's like the union of the phallic and yonic aspects of love. Though they run contrary to each other, they are both necessary to qualify love. As much as sex is both phallic and yonic, so is love. Essentially, love can only occur under that specific condition of eternal irony.
Ultimately, it will form something beautiful and as Paul said: "Love never fails." Because in the end, it's not about who or what you loved, but that you loved at all. To choose to be connected to something beyond one's self will prove a richer and more meaningful experience than just perpetuating one's survival to eventually die. Because...
Love makes immortal.
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