This entry is disjoint, as I would revisit it and consider it more. This sloppiness I’m growing accustomed to is a mild concern, but maybe you’ll permit this, seeing as this is pseudonymous. Even so, I know I do myself a disservice meandering, and for that I’ll take in some consideration.
Although I said there’s no more permission to ask, I hope you’ll permit me this one last doubt before I turn it into my own.
What terribly confuses me is what love is — some say it is so obvious, but is it not delirium which obstructs a proper definition? It seems to me to be pure madness, madness that’s almost vile, for reality hemorrhages under its imposed weight and you’re now almost dead. I’ve witnessed many broken hearts, I guess.
Maybe I don’t know love because I’ve never been fully immersed into it before, but I think I may have. If you ask me to peer in the hearts of men I must say I think most conflate love for lust, and sure, I can understand that but I don’t think we ought to mar the idol of Love with base desires. We at least want Love to mean something more… right? Why else do people die for it, crave it so strongly?
In either case it frustrated me that I couldn’t find good reason on love, and that as I live longer the more I’m convinced it is wrapped in so many delusions; it is the chief angel people call upon before atrocities. It is what we use as masks, lather in our words, love stapled in the advertisements, and now I find myself led astray.
If you ask me what I love, I can cite some characters, I could say with unfeeling those I may know, but my conception of love has been so scrambled that I feel saying such things would only be a feign and a disservice to the word so idolized. Maybe I love the portrayal of innocence as the same as our God once did, once loved, our utopia now tarnished and I can’t help but feel like a microcosm of paradise lost — in this penultimate moment, this small sliver before I erect new borders, better streams. This post is an old bone, my obituary.
Love seems so obvious to people that they fail to deny its imposters. There’s no line of questions. And believe me, I’m well aware of how flushed you may feel and seized at the thought of whatever fantasy holds you to go on; but is this a distraction? To what benefit does this hold? Why do people do so many stupid things and cite Love as their cheerleader? Why have we ruined it, or I suppose I have, to where I can no longer define love. I see the intellectualized definition of it, a wellbeing regard toward all things, and maybe this is integrated into who I am to where I know no respite so therefore cannot observe it, but nevertheless I cannot understand.
For a good while I written off love entirely as a delusion and readied myself for the void ahead. And I would be dishonest if I didn’t admit a part of me operates in this fashion, still. To bathe in that void for years. I expect no one to offer me words or comfort, and that may be horrifying for you, but it just seems obvious now. Still, I suspect there’s something hidden here, and so I still wonder about it. Who created this aegis for all fairy-tales?
It seems to me love is a sock-puppet that you fill your imaginative force with. Hand it off and invoke something new out of the world, from your internal treasure trove. Yet of fondness for things I rarely know. If anything there’s a hesitancy to sink into .current. reality even for a moment. I’d rather make my own. My fondness feels inadequate for the aegis of the ages.
Why is this, this single word, this dominant word, the purveyor of your existence at times, why is it so hard to understand? And I suspect that because it has been so perverted, defiled, wretched, immortalized, crucified, that it has lost all its meaning between us. I’ll try to blend together my own personal meaning, but until then I have no modern love in me. If someone says “I love you” I will feel slighted and empty at best.
Reading around I think I once saw love as the wish to understand. Or that you can only understand with love as your force. But it still feels so vague, elusive, a little frustrating. It’s funny to see how people say the word and kill it in the next breath. And I don’t think a lot of people know and have love in them either, but this could be projection. Or because it’s a delusion; it doesn’t exist.
Reading around I also saw love as that strange pulling toward wholeness and to this I can agree. In fact this makes the most sense. But I would’ve never found such definition within modern life: Love as this binding force that’ll clump us as cells and reach higher bounds. If we didn’t find wholeness agreeable, then our cells would rebel in turn and we wouldn’t be any longer. Yet a cell is complete alone; a hypothesis of singled-cell life! Wholeness is not so great when you’re integrating their sickness while hiding yours.
A singled-cell life seems preferable, for whatever modern love is, I find a harbinger of later pain, of insanity and of cruelty convulsing upon what was once simple and honest. This isn’t to say I’ve turned fully Machiavellian. I am only slightly weary, but I see the strength in compassion as the days go on. Misguided at times.
Once I considered that Love is reason, in its ultimate form. Which finds some similarity as a force of wholeness: reason is the means through which we integrate our understanding of the world. Where it collapses all confusions, mazes, and so truth incarnates. Wouldn’t the most pristine acts of love fall under gentle consideration for the other? To know what they are, how they like, and what they’ll want to be. To help work through their confusion. You know it is fondness when you seek to understand above all else, for through that understanding you can reason your way to a calmer state. And a refreshing smile you get in return.
I’m reminded of St Augustine.
Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.
— Augustine of Hippo, Confessions
Call me blasphemous, but you may find rest elsewhere. To find your sanctuary, the place you can let down your arms, relieve your tensions, lay and cleanse. Such a rare moment to lay down your arms and let go. But I find it better for it to be rare, for otherwise would we bother to savor? Rejuvenated, love a healing pond, I know not what comes next but we’ll prepare. Perhaps I find rest in you, dear reader :-). In truth, I rest with myself.
Yet this idea of rest along restlessness, although it could fall under the definition of love, don’t you see how it is just my sock puppet? The same with wholeness, understanding, anything else. By and large love is the trojan horse. You fill the word up with whatever delusions you got and you go from there. Why do I need the word “love” when referring to wholeness, or understanding, or something else altogether? And maybe we could reserve the word to just a general pleasing feelings, fondness or whatever, but still, using the word love only misleads. Heinous.
Love is a vacuous word which continues to rattle but distracts from fundamental truths. And the truth is that Love is not going to save you, nor any sort of derivative. All of the fairies that hold it together render it out of this world, nonexistent, dead (in my eyes). May you have ease in cultivating some sanctuaries in your life, but be weary of the mischief lurking within such casual words, love and friendship and matrimony and a good few more to hum you into false security.
This isn’t to say you can’t think highly of things, or stamp some stuff as divine. Maybe it’s time to open up the dictionary and find a new source to pin your dreams on. I would suggest fortitude, omnipresence, or transcendence for some inspiration.