Oh yeah! Love. Let me tell you about love.
I know all about it, because I've been with my wife
Longer than you've been alive.
So, first, love
is a state of ignorance. We are not
being fancisophical, groovy spiritchool here.
Love means not knowing the answer.
So you ask.
And then you ask again. And you listen, and ask again.
So when do you know you're not in love any more?
That's easy. It's when you stop asking.
Whether it's chickens asking after eggs,
or eggs after chickens, I don't know, doesn't matter.
People say it's about not listening but it's not really that:
of course you're not listening if you don't want to know.
It was small wonder, then, that he suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said 'Bother!' and 'O blow!' and also 'Hang spring-cleaning!' and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat.
------------ Kenneth Grahame
Showing posts with label Love. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Love. Show all posts
Sunday, February 14, 2016
Friday, February 13, 2015
Valentine
I know the walkways of your heart's garden: the little benches,
and the compost heap. I know where the flies cluster thick,
and I know the interlace of briars and the tracery
of bachelor-button stalks;
I know the spiderwebs against the white sky. I know
just how the soil streaks your temple
when you push your hair back; how you wield a trowel
like Clytemnestra, overhand, putting paid to old King Ag --
but there are places, dear, where the paths climb up
and vanish under hedges, where the fenceposts stand
drunk and disorderly, and the wires are twisted,
tourniquet-wise, for ease of trespass.
What goes in and out of this garden? It's not for me to know.
I sit prim on a bench by the ordered path,
glad for a rest.
and the compost heap. I know where the flies cluster thick,
and I know the interlace of briars and the tracery
of bachelor-button stalks;
I know the spiderwebs against the white sky. I know
just how the soil streaks your temple
when you push your hair back; how you wield a trowel
like Clytemnestra, overhand, putting paid to old King Ag --
but there are places, dear, where the paths climb up
and vanish under hedges, where the fenceposts stand
drunk and disorderly, and the wires are twisted,
tourniquet-wise, for ease of trespass.
What goes in and out of this garden? It's not for me to know.
I sit prim on a bench by the ordered path,
glad for a rest.
Saturday, January 31, 2015
Winter Things
Everything of summer slips smooth into its grave,
but after a hard frost
we winter things move still: we limp grimly down
to check our traps along the creek.
Oh my dear
you are ugly like the ugliness of winter;
shatter-iced; broken like a windshield. You are fat
as a she-bear, glutted with huckleberries,
when the sun slants at four. You are old as
those knobbly inconvenient hills, bruising
to the knees and hips; you have tarnished
the cold blue of long-neglected silver, and
you are as fierce and deft as any cruel hawk.
You must have a body of winter
to fuck with the gods: their secret ink flows only
when rough parchment rubs against the nib.
but after a hard frost
we winter things move still: we limp grimly down
to check our traps along the creek.
Oh my dear
you are ugly like the ugliness of winter;
shatter-iced; broken like a windshield. You are fat
as a she-bear, glutted with huckleberries,
when the sun slants at four. You are old as
those knobbly inconvenient hills, bruising
to the knees and hips; you have tarnished
the cold blue of long-neglected silver, and
you are as fierce and deft as any cruel hawk.
You must have a body of winter
to fuck with the gods: their secret ink flows only
when rough parchment rubs against the nib.
Saturday, August 23, 2014
An Essay on Love
Joy
comes toppling from the crest:
it starts at the full, and by the time you realize,
it is different, dispersing, differentiating,
falling. It is not the more
or the less real for that.
If we are careful
we will not confuse
recollection with collection,
but we need not be persnickety.
It is by design that most of love
is caught in the nets of memory,
shaped, formed, reformed
by the pressure of the mesh.
Don't fuss too much.
Don't insist on priority
or authenticity. It's all real:
just real in different ways
at different times
for different purposes.
comes toppling from the crest:
it starts at the full, and by the time you realize,
it is different, dispersing, differentiating,
falling. It is not the more
or the less real for that.
If we are careful
we will not confuse
recollection with collection,
but we need not be persnickety.
It is by design that most of love
is caught in the nets of memory,
shaped, formed, reformed
by the pressure of the mesh.
Don't fuss too much.
Don't insist on priority
or authenticity. It's all real:
just real in different ways
at different times
for different purposes.
Tuesday, October 08, 2013
Moue
Gestures are not love, but what is love
without gesture? Once an almost imperceptible moue
told me you'd thought of kissing me:
that
was enough.
without gesture? Once an almost imperceptible moue
told me you'd thought of kissing me:
that
was enough.
Saturday, December 15, 2012
New Moon
You, love, you, all
countenanced in the white
circumference,
and within
the earthshine
between the horns, the lemmas of Dis:
you, I love you still, you know. You,
who you said would remember, are
forgetting:
I, whom you said would forget,
remember. So it is,
So it goes on, like a net dragging the
dewy hillside:
memory is neither clean nor dry. Only
in poems
do you get to say “I told you so.”
Silk ears swivel and twitch,
muzzles lift, eyes widen,
lips lift and show the needle fangs.
Love is still alive and feral,
it still roams under the new moon,
trotting on ancient cinder paths:
and kindness, still there, whines
like a young dog longing for a walk.
I told you so. I know a bit about love:
I've served in this house a long time,
taking abuse and kindness as it comes.
The crescent silvers the scars,
The new blood holds the old blood in
its arms,
and the thump of a dish on the kitchen
floor
gets even an old dog to his feet.
Thursday, March 01, 2012
Overstaying at the Window of Tom's Cafe
A wind beats the fluttery awning
as a householder beats a rug:
silver nightgowns of water fall
down to the darkened walk.
A cripple with bowed head
limps to the door:
his humped spine lifts
his collar so high
that it opens a mouth
for the rain to run down.
Tell me, winter: has she
forgotten already how she trusted me?
as a householder beats a rug:
silver nightgowns of water fall
down to the darkened walk.
A cripple with bowed head
limps to the door:
his humped spine lifts
his collar so high
that it opens a mouth
for the rain to run down.
Tell me, winter: has she
forgotten already how she trusted me?
Tuesday, February 07, 2012
Roof, Part II
Oh, yes, I knew. How could I not? Who better
to detect the small motions of intimacy, the gaiety?
I wasn't born yesterday. And across
the long green surge of water, the treachery
of cold pilings gulping, the uncertain sky –
I discover only what was always there: it was only
ever love. So I was right, after all.
And if it twinges, what of that? I never expected
a life free of twinges. I never expected a life at all.
I recover the hammer from the muddy ground,
recover the heft and sway of it. No notion
of what to build. That comes later.
I would take back only one thing. I said
I would never be happy, and that's true enough,
but I said it in bitterness, as if it were your fault.
I wonder if I can say, now, that I'm sorry?
I have more wilderness to wander in,
but that is not your fault; it never was.
But this happiness is one piece
I can hammer into place. This joy
need no longer be denied or idolized.
It's paid for, done, sealed, and still.
And the warm beating in my hand
of some strange fruit takes life again,
fledges in one flowering moment
and wheels toward a country still unknown.
to detect the small motions of intimacy, the gaiety?
I wasn't born yesterday. And across
the long green surge of water, the treachery
of cold pilings gulping, the uncertain sky –
I discover only what was always there: it was only
ever love. So I was right, after all.
And if it twinges, what of that? I never expected
a life free of twinges. I never expected a life at all.
I recover the hammer from the muddy ground,
recover the heft and sway of it. No notion
of what to build. That comes later.
I would take back only one thing. I said
I would never be happy, and that's true enough,
but I said it in bitterness, as if it were your fault.
I wonder if I can say, now, that I'm sorry?
I have more wilderness to wander in,
but that is not your fault; it never was.
But this happiness is one piece
I can hammer into place. This joy
need no longer be denied or idolized.
It's paid for, done, sealed, and still.
And the warm beating in my hand
of some strange fruit takes life again,
fledges in one flowering moment
and wheels toward a country still unknown.
Friday, December 02, 2011
Pictures
What strikes me immediately, viewing his photo, is that, at even seven years old, he is already irredeemable. He sits under the Christmas tree, having wrapped himself up – swaddled himself, really – in a red bathrobe. He is hunched over his crossed legs and studying something. The openness and wide eyes expected of a child at Christmas are conspicuously absent. He is disappointing everyone by his inwardness. He has already had too much, and wants to hide: he hides inside his robe, inside his pajamas, inside his body. The way he hunches includes whatever he is poring over – it's almost certainly a book – decisively excludes everything else. He will spend his life finding, or building, protected spaces to inhabit.
And yet, on the contrary, as a corrective, or a corollary, he loves the wind and the open spaces, at least when he's alone. He doesn't learn to be afraid of heights until young adulthood. He turns around, having climbed up to a ledge on Oregon's Mt Washington, and the land hundreds of feet below swoops and turns bizarrely. He is fascinated and horrified. Now he knows what ordinary people feel like, why they're so silly and cautious on cliffs and bridges and rooftops. But he also knows that he'll never be fearless again: and he never is.
He is in the first grade, and he is in love with a little blonde girl named Susan. He watches her gravely. He never bothers her. He looks her up in the phone book and finds her address. Then he looks up the address on the city map and thinks he could find it, maybe. He sets out one afternoon. No plan in mind: he just wants to see her house. He is so normally unenterprising that when his father, driving home from work, discovers him, a few blocks from home, he's astonished. He pulls over. The boy climbs into the car, defeated.
“What are you doing here?” asks his father.
“Walking,” says the boy. He never says more than that. His father drives him home, and he never tries it again. But he longs for Susan, with an intensity that never really makes sense. He never tries to make it make sense. He's learned, by now, that all the really important things can't be made sense of and can't be spoken.
Not aloud. But there's one secret exception: there are books and maps. No living person can tell him anything he wants to know. There's no way to talk about Susan, or about the wind, so that anyone will understand it. But there are hints, sometimes, in books. And there are maps of places he has never been, with names he can read, but can't say. He searches maps obsessively, preparing as best he can for the voyages he may have to make, and any book in a language he can't read transfixes him. When he finally gets to take a language class – it's not till he's eight or nine – he devours it. The truth about Susan and the wind might be written down in Spanish: there's no telling. Wherever it is, it will be in someplace odd and neglected. He studies codes and ciphers and secret writing.
Susan has vanished: she's replaced by Julie in the second grade, and then Dottie in the third. He and Dottie actually sit on the swings together and talk, talk about all the things they read about. He wants to give Dottie a ring. He wants to write to her in some secret writing, some cipher. But she vanishes too, when he moves to Springfield, and acquires a no-nonsense stepfather. Everything is a jumble and a mess, after that. Some orderly progression was interrupted there, and never resumed.
He stands at the freeway entrance from Moses Lake, Washington, his patched jeans faded to a pale blue, his long blond hair blowing in the desert wind. Billy sits dejectedly among the packs. When a car goes by, they both stick their arms out, thumbs poking up. Billy thinks it doesn't matter if they stand up or not, and they've been there four hours already. But Dale will only sit down if there's no car in sight.
A knock on the door of the Mexican hotel room. They both giggle. It's her friend, the dancer, the one who reportedly goes on to make blue movies a few years later.
“Are you guys okay in there?”
“We're fine,” chirrups the girl.
“We don't want any pregnancies here,” warns her friend, who believes in getting down to brass tacks.
“We're being careful,” says the girl. And they are. They're just touching each other. He's amazed and grateful. He's far too young for her. His heart is skidding like a jet ski over choppy water. It's twilight.
She knows Spanish. When the Mexican guys croon dirty things to the tourist girl who won't understand it, she spits, “chinga tu madre,” and they veer off, startled. He knows she won't want to know him when they get back to the States. And anyway, she'll be hundreds of miles away. She's tipsy now: and she's just had a soft spot for the chuckleheaded little brother of her friend's friend from the start, and she's been amused by his obvious, undemanding crush on her. And they're leaving Guadalajara tomorrow, going their separate ways. What the hell.
The wallpaper is a dim blue-green, and he'll remember the deep peace of that room, the peace of being accepted, the pulsing warmth welcoming his fingers, forever.
Up on the ridge, where we are now, at least a few stars win out over the ambient light of Portland: Vega has been appearing in the early evening, against all odds, falling westward, telling me that I have not blown all my chances, that I'm still, somehow, blessed; that it's still my job to carry the chalice to the stone. This business of bearing sacred blood becomes more mysterious, not less, as time goes on. Whatever it depends on, it's not anything I'm accustomed to calling “me.”
And yet, on the contrary, as a corrective, or a corollary, he loves the wind and the open spaces, at least when he's alone. He doesn't learn to be afraid of heights until young adulthood. He turns around, having climbed up to a ledge on Oregon's Mt Washington, and the land hundreds of feet below swoops and turns bizarrely. He is fascinated and horrified. Now he knows what ordinary people feel like, why they're so silly and cautious on cliffs and bridges and rooftops. But he also knows that he'll never be fearless again: and he never is.
He is in the first grade, and he is in love with a little blonde girl named Susan. He watches her gravely. He never bothers her. He looks her up in the phone book and finds her address. Then he looks up the address on the city map and thinks he could find it, maybe. He sets out one afternoon. No plan in mind: he just wants to see her house. He is so normally unenterprising that when his father, driving home from work, discovers him, a few blocks from home, he's astonished. He pulls over. The boy climbs into the car, defeated.
“What are you doing here?” asks his father.
“Walking,” says the boy. He never says more than that. His father drives him home, and he never tries it again. But he longs for Susan, with an intensity that never really makes sense. He never tries to make it make sense. He's learned, by now, that all the really important things can't be made sense of and can't be spoken.
Not aloud. But there's one secret exception: there are books and maps. No living person can tell him anything he wants to know. There's no way to talk about Susan, or about the wind, so that anyone will understand it. But there are hints, sometimes, in books. And there are maps of places he has never been, with names he can read, but can't say. He searches maps obsessively, preparing as best he can for the voyages he may have to make, and any book in a language he can't read transfixes him. When he finally gets to take a language class – it's not till he's eight or nine – he devours it. The truth about Susan and the wind might be written down in Spanish: there's no telling. Wherever it is, it will be in someplace odd and neglected. He studies codes and ciphers and secret writing.
Susan has vanished: she's replaced by Julie in the second grade, and then Dottie in the third. He and Dottie actually sit on the swings together and talk, talk about all the things they read about. He wants to give Dottie a ring. He wants to write to her in some secret writing, some cipher. But she vanishes too, when he moves to Springfield, and acquires a no-nonsense stepfather. Everything is a jumble and a mess, after that. Some orderly progression was interrupted there, and never resumed.
He stands at the freeway entrance from Moses Lake, Washington, his patched jeans faded to a pale blue, his long blond hair blowing in the desert wind. Billy sits dejectedly among the packs. When a car goes by, they both stick their arms out, thumbs poking up. Billy thinks it doesn't matter if they stand up or not, and they've been there four hours already. But Dale will only sit down if there's no car in sight.
A knock on the door of the Mexican hotel room. They both giggle. It's her friend, the dancer, the one who reportedly goes on to make blue movies a few years later.
“Are you guys okay in there?”
“We're fine,” chirrups the girl.
“We don't want any pregnancies here,” warns her friend, who believes in getting down to brass tacks.
“We're being careful,” says the girl. And they are. They're just touching each other. He's amazed and grateful. He's far too young for her. His heart is skidding like a jet ski over choppy water. It's twilight.
She knows Spanish. When the Mexican guys croon dirty things to the tourist girl who won't understand it, she spits, “chinga tu madre,” and they veer off, startled. He knows she won't want to know him when they get back to the States. And anyway, she'll be hundreds of miles away. She's tipsy now: and she's just had a soft spot for the chuckleheaded little brother of her friend's friend from the start, and she's been amused by his obvious, undemanding crush on her. And they're leaving Guadalajara tomorrow, going their separate ways. What the hell.
The wallpaper is a dim blue-green, and he'll remember the deep peace of that room, the peace of being accepted, the pulsing warmth welcoming his fingers, forever.
Up on the ridge, where we are now, at least a few stars win out over the ambient light of Portland: Vega has been appearing in the early evening, against all odds, falling westward, telling me that I have not blown all my chances, that I'm still, somehow, blessed; that it's still my job to carry the chalice to the stone. This business of bearing sacred blood becomes more mysterious, not less, as time goes on. Whatever it depends on, it's not anything I'm accustomed to calling “me.”
Thursday, March 03, 2011
In The Game
Does the eagle know what is in the pit?
Or wilt thou go ask the mole
Can wisdom be put in a silver rod
Or love in a golden bowl?
A long, long time ago, the colors blurred, the voices unsteady, and yet, little in the present can compete with it. What are we playing for, here? The ante alone could break us. You know what they say: if you've been playing for twenty minutes and you still don't know who the patsy is, you're the patsy.
Walk naked down the long cool halls, the polished butter-yellow fir wood warm under your feet, the light bending around corners, slanting across your thighs, motes rippling away from your turned hands. What did they tell us? Oh, story after story, none of them true. The bedclothes still rucked up and smelling of sweetness and almonds and sex. If one still smoked afterwards, this would be the time for it.
We thought, if all the stories were lies, we'd get to make up our own stories: but it doesn't work that way either. The stories run the show, true or false: they set the ante. They make the rules.
The part you really loved was rolling the cigarettes afterwards. Thin brown nimble fingers, and the smell of unlit tobacco. Then the spurt of a match, and the faint blue spiral rising up, climbing up through the bars of the the sunlight, until your breath catches it and it's all confusion and turbulence, light and smoke tumbling together like dancers, like lovers.
Well. You can't wish love never happened. You pay the debts you can, you rub sweaty hands over your hair, you hope for rain, and you walk, walk right out of the past into the future, where the colors are even more fragile
So far, here in the future, the imagination collapses as soon as it tries to rise. But we're still in. They ante for you, in this house: you're in the game whether you mean to be or not.
Does the eagle know what is in the pit?
Or wilt thou go ask the mole
Can wisdom be put in a silver rod
Or love in a golden bowl?
A long, long time ago, the colors blurred, the voices unsteady, and yet, little in the present can compete with it. What are we playing for, here? The ante alone could break us. You know what they say: if you've been playing for twenty minutes and you still don't know who the patsy is, you're the patsy.
Walk naked down the long cool halls, the polished butter-yellow fir wood warm under your feet, the light bending around corners, slanting across your thighs, motes rippling away from your turned hands. What did they tell us? Oh, story after story, none of them true. The bedclothes still rucked up and smelling of sweetness and almonds and sex. If one still smoked afterwards, this would be the time for it.
We thought, if all the stories were lies, we'd get to make up our own stories: but it doesn't work that way either. The stories run the show, true or false: they set the ante. They make the rules.
The part you really loved was rolling the cigarettes afterwards. Thin brown nimble fingers, and the smell of unlit tobacco. Then the spurt of a match, and the faint blue spiral rising up, climbing up through the bars of the the sunlight, until your breath catches it and it's all confusion and turbulence, light and smoke tumbling together like dancers, like lovers.
Well. You can't wish love never happened. You pay the debts you can, you rub sweaty hands over your hair, you hope for rain, and you walk, walk right out of the past into the future, where the colors are even more fragile
So far, here in the future, the imagination collapses as soon as it tries to rise. But we're still in. They ante for you, in this house: you're in the game whether you mean to be or not.
Monday, February 21, 2011
Non Credo
Because I'm afraid, I start to write by saying “I don't believe” -- oh, there are so many things I don't believe! -- but the point is, I don't want to construct an identity out of a laundry list of things I don't believe, it's just the reverse of the medal, it's no different than pounding your chest and bellowing “I believe in the Lord Jesus Christ!” and thinking that's going to get you a little Jesus juju to curse your enemies with, and finally get the girls to eye you with a bit of respect. No, sir. Bellowing believers, bellowing unbelievers alike, you hurry by them on the sidewalk and avoid their eyes. Subadult orangutans, that's what they are, and everybody knows it. Nobody wants to mate with them.
Which brings me neatly to the first thing I don't believe, which is anybody's story about love. The other day a Facebook Friend (not someone I know at all well), the mother of a one year old, announced in a single sentence that she was now a single mother, because she'd found out her husband was cheating on her. People responded with a bit of shock and jaw-dropping, but mostly by furious imprecations and extravagant personal denunciations of her husband. This was from a wide enough collection of people that you could be reasonably sure that some among their number were adulterers. What stories had they made up for themselves? How did justify themselves? How might they have responded to being pilloried? And then a bit later my Friend posted a semi-retraction saying maybe this was only a flirtation after all. Which made for a somewhat awkward pause.
An odd thing to post about, surely, and I don't think I'd handle it that way myself -- not out of goodness, but out of vanity -- but I don't blame anyone for doing anything, really, under the stress of that sort of revelation. That's not my point. My point is that, for a large circle round about, everyone went nuts. I'm interested in when, and how, people go nuts like that. It signals cracks in the structure, weaknesses, places where people aren't really sure that what they purport to believe is in fact what they believe, or else places where they're determined to believe something no matter what evidence may arise: the weaker the shriller.
Now, when I say I don't believe anybody, that's exactly what I mean. I have never heard a story about sex and love that appears to me to “save the appearances,” to account for the variety of phenomena it produces. It's an absorbing topic to me, so I've read a great deal “about it and about,” as Omar says, and every book I've read seems to run inevitably to some central point at which I find myself bristling, shaking my head, muttering, “that's just not the way it is, though. That's just not the way it is.” There's that swerve where people start talking about what love should be, and they describe some wholly admirable frame of mind, some exquisitely laudable kind of relationship, something that makes deep and perfect sense, which is very nice, except that the question you come to after that is, why don't any of these relationships exist? And why is it that, if you're a betting man, you'd lay odds on precisely the people who present as if they were in these ideal relationships to be posting on Facebook next week that they've achieved single parenthood?
And then there are the various reducers: love is really only this, or only that, it's not so important, our culture magnifies it absurdly, erotic love was regarded as simply a joke among (whatever culture the speaker is not very well-versed in), it's actually friendship that matters, or Buddhist compassion, or Christian agape, and I bristle even more, because it doesn't really work that way, either. Not here and now in this culture, not in my heart. Love is the only thing that's real, to me. If I have a path to God, it runs exactly as Dante's did, right through Eros. Nothing else matters, not really.
I'm not saying this is good. I don't think it is. I think the Buddhist compassion and Christian agape people have the right of it, we should value that love most highly, and all the other loves should be subservient to that, which is, really, the love of God. I think the arguments are knockdown, water tight. That's how it should be.
But it's not how it is. I can't cram my heart into that jar. And I'm not sure how useful a theory is, if it accounts for everything but the facts. Useful if you need to trot out mottoes and slogans, yes. But what if you want to live a human life?
Because I'm afraid, I start to write by saying “I don't believe” -- oh, there are so many things I don't believe! -- but the point is, I don't want to construct an identity out of a laundry list of things I don't believe, it's just the reverse of the medal, it's no different than pounding your chest and bellowing “I believe in the Lord Jesus Christ!” and thinking that's going to get you a little Jesus juju to curse your enemies with, and finally get the girls to eye you with a bit of respect. No, sir. Bellowing believers, bellowing unbelievers alike, you hurry by them on the sidewalk and avoid their eyes. Subadult orangutans, that's what they are, and everybody knows it. Nobody wants to mate with them.
Which brings me neatly to the first thing I don't believe, which is anybody's story about love. The other day a Facebook Friend (not someone I know at all well), the mother of a one year old, announced in a single sentence that she was now a single mother, because she'd found out her husband was cheating on her. People responded with a bit of shock and jaw-dropping, but mostly by furious imprecations and extravagant personal denunciations of her husband. This was from a wide enough collection of people that you could be reasonably sure that some among their number were adulterers. What stories had they made up for themselves? How did justify themselves? How might they have responded to being pilloried? And then a bit later my Friend posted a semi-retraction saying maybe this was only a flirtation after all. Which made for a somewhat awkward pause.
An odd thing to post about, surely, and I don't think I'd handle it that way myself -- not out of goodness, but out of vanity -- but I don't blame anyone for doing anything, really, under the stress of that sort of revelation. That's not my point. My point is that, for a large circle round about, everyone went nuts. I'm interested in when, and how, people go nuts like that. It signals cracks in the structure, weaknesses, places where people aren't really sure that what they purport to believe is in fact what they believe, or else places where they're determined to believe something no matter what evidence may arise: the weaker the shriller.
Now, when I say I don't believe anybody, that's exactly what I mean. I have never heard a story about sex and love that appears to me to “save the appearances,” to account for the variety of phenomena it produces. It's an absorbing topic to me, so I've read a great deal “about it and about,” as Omar says, and every book I've read seems to run inevitably to some central point at which I find myself bristling, shaking my head, muttering, “that's just not the way it is, though. That's just not the way it is.” There's that swerve where people start talking about what love should be, and they describe some wholly admirable frame of mind, some exquisitely laudable kind of relationship, something that makes deep and perfect sense, which is very nice, except that the question you come to after that is, why don't any of these relationships exist? And why is it that, if you're a betting man, you'd lay odds on precisely the people who present as if they were in these ideal relationships to be posting on Facebook next week that they've achieved single parenthood?
And then there are the various reducers: love is really only this, or only that, it's not so important, our culture magnifies it absurdly, erotic love was regarded as simply a joke among (whatever culture the speaker is not very well-versed in), it's actually friendship that matters, or Buddhist compassion, or Christian agape, and I bristle even more, because it doesn't really work that way, either. Not here and now in this culture, not in my heart. Love is the only thing that's real, to me. If I have a path to God, it runs exactly as Dante's did, right through Eros. Nothing else matters, not really.
I'm not saying this is good. I don't think it is. I think the Buddhist compassion and Christian agape people have the right of it, we should value that love most highly, and all the other loves should be subservient to that, which is, really, the love of God. I think the arguments are knockdown, water tight. That's how it should be.
But it's not how it is. I can't cram my heart into that jar. And I'm not sure how useful a theory is, if it accounts for everything but the facts. Useful if you need to trot out mottoes and slogans, yes. But what if you want to live a human life?
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