Love, love, love

Unwinding a word

There are too many words for love in Greek, so I won’t list them all here. The one English word, “love”, has too many connotations for me to list. Furthermore, I’m not your dictionary. But I’m sure we both want to know what love means. Obviously, we can’t just prescribe meaning to language. We must describe instead. So, the question is not what is love, but how is the word used?

Plato wrote a whole dialogue, the Symposium, about just one type of love: eros. This is the love that old ancient Greek men felt for beautiful ancient Greek boys and sometimes for women. In the Symposium, Socrates is called upon to eulogize love and instead philosophizes it. But Socrates is no expert on the subject. He defers to a woman: Diotima. The prophetess unties everything Socrates thinks he knows about love and introduces him to its mysteries. Socrates is no match for Diotima, it is delightful to see him finally bested in dialogue. Love, Diotima and Socrates agree, is desire for beautiful things and ultimately desire for immortality. To be a good lover is to learn to love beautiful mutable boys in the right way so that you can learn to love eternal beauty itself. And from this, with good thoughts and deeds, one can reach towards true immortality. But if love is the lack of something, what happens to me when I get the object of my desire? Well, Plato writes, I become happy. But Plato! It’s Valentine’s day, I am young and foolish. I don’t want to be happy. I want to be in love!

People quote 1 Corinthians 13 way too often, especially at weddings. Paul’s words come easily to mind: love is patient, kind, it keeps no record of wrongs, etc. Folks, just pull it up on biblegateway.com–you won’t be disappointed. I know Paul is played out, cliché, but I keep coming back to him. I have loved with an envious heart. I have neglected to be kind. To the apostle, love is a light which makes all it touches worthwhile. It has not an atom of desire. It is a way of being in the world that I am constantly failing to live up to. At the same time, Paul worries me. I have been too quick to forgive and too fast to forget. Maybe Paul would admire my little sacrifices, but I don’t. I don’t think I’ve done anybody any favours by them. And what does love get us? Well, we will know fully as we are fully known when completeness comes. I don’t think I can wait that long. I want to be known and loved right here and right now, in flesh and blood.

A sonnet is essentially the sixteenth century’s love song, almost always composed by a lover for a beloved. I don’t really like Shakespeare’s anymore because one of my exes has Sonnet 18 memorized. But I do like Philip Sidney and his sonnet masterwork, Astrophil and Stella. The first sonnet’s final couplet is eternally seared into my sunburned brain:

“Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite, / ‘Fool,’ said my Muse to me, ‘look in thy heart, and write.’”

Again, just Google this one. Ok, now that we’re on the same page, you should be suspicious. Isn’t this supposed to be about Stella, the beloved? Why is Astrophil talking about himself?

Stella is almost absent, disembodied. What we have is a poem about the depth of the sonneteer’s desire. Sidney/Astrophil’s love is disastrously Platonian. His verses will bring him immortality in the fact that I am discussing them here, but he will go straight through Stella, blowing out her spine and scattering her ashes to do so. And Astrophil, should love really be “the blackest face of woe?” If Astrophil and Stella were written for me, I would say, “You seem sad; consider writing about me next time.” There would be no second date.

Before he was a priest, John Donne wrote horny lyric poetry and he was the best at it. In The Canonization, he purports to give us a pattern of love that we might emulate. For the last time, you can just look this one up on Poetry Foundation. And you should. The love Donne’s couple share is joyously paradoxical. It is a sacred profanity that gives them the world in each other as they lose it forever. They die and rise, joined together forever in their urn and yet alive. We can have eternity and have each other all at once. Donne seems to have squared Plato’s circle, but not so fast. Must the world really contract and dive into one person’s eye for me to love? Is this what we should want? The world is so big, John Donne, I don’t think it will fit. I can’t be held in one touch or one gaze forever. My hands will get sweaty, my vision will waver.

I feel loved when I read Kai Cheng Thom, especially when I read her most recent book of essays, I Hope We Choose Love. The collection’s focus is on the queer community, the internal problems it faces, and how they might be addressed. Really, Kai Cheng spends little time describing love. She touches on it in the essay which shares the book’s title. She mentions an “ethics of love”. Her writing is clear, practical, and actionable, but at its root, informed by love. Love is part of no syllogism, no argument but always provides the direction of thought and of action. This, I think, is what she means by choosing love, again and again. And this is not a love like Paul’s. It is a love you will have to apologize to. It is a love which will hold you to account. I am reminded by her that it is one thing to love and quite another to live in a community which is actually informed by it.

Hisham Matar should really talk to his wife. He treats her like a sphinx in his memoir, A Month in Siena. Her subjectivity is an unbreachable mystery that Hisham can only get close to but never understand. He, like Plato, thinks that love is lacking; that he will never know his wife truly is the engine of his love for her. He will always desire and never have. To be in love forever, how nice. But, Hisham, would it kill you to just ask your wife a question? Like, dude, come on. She’s right there. Couldn’t the two of you just be honest? Wouldn’t that at least help? I think Hisham would say, in a frustratingly elegant way, that to do so would be to explode his love. But a love like that I am fine doing away with.

If I tried to sum up what T Fleischmann has to say about love in Time is the Thing a Body Moves Through, I would say, “Love is the meeting of desires.” I would look in your eyes with complete seriousness as I said this and then immediately doubt myself. Uppercase T’s (I’m lower, just t) essay whirls between times and places, relationships and histories and mythologies. They are aware, as am I, that desires often do not meet perfectly, and that love has inspired both clemency and violence. When we are ultimately isolated, as Hisham knows, and when no touch can last forever, as Plato worries, how can this meeting that is love even happen? I think T has an answer: “The best version of me isn’t the person who falls in love, but the person who takes love squarely for what it is.” Who am I to want a perfect, immutable thing? Well, I’d be John Donne, but that’s beside the point. Love, the word, is mutable too and heavy with meanings from use. I think T has opened up love as a space of possibility, from which “any story might begin”. Orpheus for Eurydice, Psyche for Cupid, Socrates for Alcibiades, Astrophil for Stella, T for Jackson, Christ for Paul, Mr. Matar for Mrs. Matar, me for mine. Aren’t these all beautiful dreams? And all of them can fit in love if we let the word open and breathe, accept it as it is, and so much more.