Thursday, 21 April 2011

• Seriously, What IS Love?

  
  I'm not going to lie: I'm a bit of a nerd.

  I'm that lowly sort of geek that hauls around a slew of really bad puns involving famous literary figures and is way too eager to use them. (I was William Bawkner for Halloween - yes, half chicken, half American novelist.) In my time as a spectacle-toting, library-haunting dweeb, I've notice one thing for sure about me and my ill-fated kin: nerds have (strong) opinions on almost everything and want to learn (a lot) more about whatever it is.

  Sorta.

  You'd think that'd cover just about everything, and I could live the rest of my life in a smug, pretentious bubble big enough for me and my PS3. Well, here's the shocker: I legitimately don't know what love is. What's more dismaying is that my voracious appetite for knowledge, that same one that pushes me to look for phonological differences between variations in Anglo-Saxon Englishes (... on a Saturday), can't seem to inspire me to even give a damn to define it.

  In all fairness, how many definitions of love do we hear about these days?

  • Love is a chemical reaction.
  • Love is an evolutionary insurance policy.
  • Love is a mystical connection.
  • Love is a product of circumstance.
  • Love is a way to enjoy and improve quality of life.
  • Love is a gift from God.
  • Love is a tax break waiting to happen.

  It's patient, kind, doesn't envy or boast, &c. (Different "love"? Probably.) Whatever definition I hear, I cringe a little bit, because I just don't ever think it's comprehensive enough.

  "Ah, love is a voyage with water and a star,
  in drowning air and squalls of precipitate bran;
  love is a war of lights in the lightning flashes,
  two bodies blasted in a single burst of honey."

  (Pablo Neruda, "XII" from Cien sonetos de amor, trans. Ben Belitt) 

  If the human race has ever progressed at all, it's moved towards a certain style in its higher-echelon sort of thinking. It's all Ockham's Razor - that bit about getting down to the dirty as quick as possible. Perhaps that's my problem with all of this - that is, the theory of love, so to speak, is far from elegant. Instead of a neat bow to tie on top of an E=mc^2 love, we get some hideous mess of a thing. It's about financial dependence or dopamine receptors or meaningful sex or maybe it's a bad left-over from the Cro-Magnon days - or, hey, maybe it's the nexus to another dimension.

  I find, more or less, this confusion is characteristic of most things humans get ourselves into.

  A lot of people like to propose something factual about relationships, the human experience, blah-blah-blah. But, there's always some fringe left dangling. There's always something left behind, some amalgamation of fail left to net all of our contradictions and exceptions. We can't jive quantum mechanics with relativity. In creating laws that limit power, we open infinite loopholes.

  It goes on and on. All of our best efforts always seem to leave something unclosed, a nagging reminder that our hard work produced something great - but just not elegant enough. (As opposed to the Greeks, who had very elegant solutions, despite the fact that they were usually flat-out wrong. Except for Aristarchus. Way to go, buddy.)

  Well, maybe that's human nature.

  We carve up our relationships in these bizarre bloggish, web 2.0 biopsies, finding a splash of reason and meaningfulness here and there. But, ultimately, the corpus of love is a mystery. It's a language carried out in consonants and vowels we know by heart, but come jumbled together in lexicons stacked up higher than Babel's gobbledygook.

  So, to be fair, this is an opinion, and you can take it with however much salt you want. But don't let that horse of yours get all too high, and don't go thinking you've got this love thing in the bag. Science, religion, and personal finance may some day join hands and give us a definition of love that fits within a book or two - I suspect we'll get there with enough time. Until that point, though, always remember to keep your idea of love open enough for the unexpected. We tend to go into relationships knowing more or less what we want out of the connection - but that's no telling what we'll actually get (for better or worse). 

  I can say, "I love you" - I can say, "je t'aime" - I can even say, "tha gaol agam ort." I mean it, too, because I'll stand by it. But, really, I don't know exactly what I've just signed up for - and I think that's OK.

  Have you ever been surprised by a relationship and what it demanded of you? Do you like to keep a definite idea or more vague notion of love?

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