Anatomy of Falling Love Redux

The topic of love always turns even the most mundane of us into philosophers. I feel like I've written this post before, so forgive me if my ideas have overlapped.

How many times have you sat and pondered love?
     If you are anything like me, it is enough to make you into a veritable Plato when you are feeling romantic, or at the death knell of a failed relationship, a nauseous Jean-Paul Sartre. It is the high point of happiness to love someone and they in turn seem to love you, too.
     Maybe you have your moment of doubt that their love does not ring true, but inevitably, if it is true love, you receive a sign: like a note or a word or an affirmation. It is an entirely different matter, though, when you love someone, or you think you love someone, but they do not seem to love you in return.

This is quite a nasty affair. 
     Isn’t this what they called unrequited love? To me, it is like having the person you love next to you in the same room but separated by a wall of glass. You can see but you cannot touch it. Unfortunately, it is always the case of inequalities in this kind of love. Unrequited love seems to always spring from one person expecting too much (the lover) and the other person (the unrequited) not capable of offering what the lover needs. The end result is always sorrow for the lover because you cannot make someone love you the way you desire in your heart.
     Added to the torment of unrequited love is the obsession that incontrovertibly couples such a fated love. Even though you know they will never love you in the way you desire you pursue them nonetheless. Even though you know it is no fault of their own that they do not love you, you still harbor resentment which also fuels your lust and everything else. In your rational moments, you tell yourself that they simply cannot love you in the way that you love them. You attempt to console yourself with the law of inequalities. But then, you scan the heavens for a sign and you hopelessly translate their hellos as acts of devotion. Yes, they really love me, you say, foolishly.

This game repeats itself again and again in ever more torturous debacles. 
     The desire becomes so great you are convinced you can will this love into being, or to make the fates change their course. It is the sort of psychic energy that comes from the depth of a person and can also destroy us. When desire turns into fantasy you have the perfect cocktail for insanity. It is as if I have left my own self to pursue you. It is a harrowing feeling. The more you yearn for them the more you lose yourself in the process.

If you have ever experienced this then you know from whence I speak.

PDF Copy for Printing

Poem + Image: "Lane"

girls in a gay bar
hold his hand
on the dance floor

image credit: detail of Rembrandt's painting, The Jewish Bride snapped by koe2moe


PDF Copy for Printing

Poem: "Heart Surgery"

After heart surgery, he appeared

at supper smiling, though hunched over,

as if his soul had trouble holding him

up

as if he were floating among the worn

tables and ragged cushions despite

himself, despite a ragged slit 

down his shaven chest,

once opened and bared

so intimately touched, so visceral  —

PDF Copy for Printing

Poem: Four Loves

The shrink’s nose told me to read The Four Loves

so i did

i read the whole book in two sittings,
even the bibliography,

well,
sorta −

and pondered the book’s message,
you know,

how there are four loves,
according to the greeks,

those sexy helens

and

like how i used to love diecast cars and bowling
and now i mainly instant message.

how i used to love you in some other symbol,

how i used to gaze on you and blush.

how you ran away and closed the book.

how i came to sit and read

wonderin’ where it all went,

me,

stitching together a story

PDF Copy for Printing

A Few Stray Observations On William Shakespeare's Sonnet 116 (With a Copy of the Poem)

Shakespeare wrote "the marriage of true minds admits no impediments" and true love remains constant even in a tempest, a fixed star in love's night sky; even though Time rages; rosy lips fade; love never dies - at least spiritual love.
     An astute observer, by the way, as an aside, would notice that the stars are not truly fixed in the sky. Every atom in the universe, stars included, are moving outward at a quickening pace. Where's my astrophysicist when I need him?
     And I don't recommend remaining unshaken in a storm. King Lear barely pulled it off on the heath and you're bound to get hit by a renegade umbrella to the head. 
But, I digress.     The sonnet reminds readers of everyone who has ever loved: Heloise and Abelard, among them. They never tasted physical love, but their eternal love lives on forever in their passionate letters.
     I think of love that inhabits a lifespan. Love that lives on even after the first love.
     I think of Cupid and Psyche: the marriage of Eros and Mind.
     The poem is fresh in my memory for we did a close read of it on Friday last (N.B. I am a high school English teacher).
     I like the sonnet's solution: it is a typical Shakespearean jest. I would rephrase it thus: if you can't agree with me on love, then I could never have written these words and this sonnet could never exist.

Sonnet CXVI (116) by William Shakespeare
Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

PDF Copy for Printing

Poem: "je t'aime"

he wants it all in a large package,

as if love can be given in one moment,
but I am not angry
at his infantile gestures,
rather
amused
that he could believe that love could be
so whole.
yet,
i believe in his tenacity,
somewhat envious, actually
of his certitude
so
i am able to say back to him,
without too much guilt and
little temptation to retract my words,

i love you too

PDF Copy for Printing

Modern Love Notes: Anatomy of Falling in Love

"Gauzy Love" Stained Glass Window

What exactly is falling in love?
I mean, I know what falling in love is, because it has happened to me before, but I am still at a loss to put together cohesively just what falling in love is.

It is perhaps the philosopher in me that wants to continue revising the question even though practically I should be satisfied with a simple answer: "it's when you get butterflies in your stomach" or "you just know."

What Is The Origin of the Spark?
Maybe my question has to do more now with not "how do you fall in love" or "what is love" but rather "what is the origin or spark that brings two otherwise separate bodies together in a dance of mind and emotion?"

What is at the heart of human interaction?
For instance, what brings us into the closeness that we call love?

What must be triggered?
If some of us, as we often hear, do not have the capacity to fall in love, what then, grants those of us who do, the ability to have these emotions?

Perhaps it is really a re-iteration of the mind/body problem, anyway. It is the problem of two coming together.

It is the paradox of one fantasy meeting another.
The fantasy leads to destruction when the other does not respond. We call this unrequited love. This love is one-sided. I can understand this kind of love because it is obviously built on a fantasy structure unable to hold weight in reality. We pity the unrequited lover but also identify with him.

But in the encounter where two come together and something sparks, what makes this happen?
And even in the spark, if I can be so facile to say this, there is still a reluctance to go forward with love's dance. Love begins as an emotion, an idea, but it eventually builds toward wanting to become one with someone else.

Love is Scary
Let us face it. This scares us. The frightening desire to become one with another is both a fantasy and a horrible rupture of order: it is the breaking through of the skin or lamella that separates the body from the ravages of an unconcerned earth.

Love promises oneness.
We are frightened by this oneness because it hearkens a destruction of self.

But, we circle back to love's promise, feeding on the hope that we can handle this self-annihilation.
In the end, we regress, falling away from the lover, only to cycle back into the promise of oneness again. This we call love's course that never did run smooth. Thank you, William Shakespeare.

PDF Copy for Printing

Poem: "On the steps of my porch"

    Never imagined to what extent love could take me,

    to which crevice it would find a home
    in my body
    and dwell there ...

    a place love could harbor and
    somehow blossom,
    take root in a wound −
    this mixed up home of sinew and blood,
    love has discovered a smile −

    an embrace that I did not expect,
    actually,
    in the form of you,
    at the steps,
    smiling.

PDF Copy for Printing

Image Source: © 2004 Greig Roselli