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July 24, 2007What is this thingcalled love?THIS FUNNY THING CALLED LOVE?One of my favorite quotes has long been:Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît pas.It’s from Blaise Pascal, “The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of.” We all know reason is usually the last ingredient in the recipe of love. Just a pinch. For garnish.Just who can solve its mystery? And why should it make a fool of me?Zöe Heller, in Notes on a Scandal, likened being in love to depression; when you’re underwater, talk of dry land is irrelevant. Have you ever tried to reason with someone in love? This guy’s no good for you, he cheats on you, he doesn’t care about you, he’s using you, he’s a druggie, you’re too good for him, cut him loose, you’ll find someone else, someone who’ll know your worth and treat you right. BUT I LOVE HIM!Ever get that one? But I love you! Like it justifies all behavior, answers all arguments, redeems all sins, salves all wounds. Say you are ending a relationship, and no matter what you say you get this auto-pilot response. As the object of this sentiment, you want to be patient and kind, I would hope, but you probably are also just waiting to get away and forget about him/her to pursue whatever new path you’re on. Once love is good and gone, you can’t will it back. JUST CAN’TTry reasoning with someone in deep depression. Say you haven’t gotten out of bed in a week. You just can’t. Your friend comes unannounced to check on you because you haven’t been answering your phone. You just can’t. The doorbell doesn’t stop, so you finally haul the monumental weight of your ass out of bed to let him in, and get right back in bed. You have a million reasons to live. People who love you. People who care how you are and what happens to you. You’re smart, you’re talented, you have so much going for you. Come on. It’s a beautiful day. I’ll open the shades. You need some fresh air. Why don’t you take a shower and go for a walk with me? RAVE ON, FRIENDThese words are just sound waves in the air. You hear them as part of the “room tone,” as they call it in radio, the ambient sounds of whatever’s going on, like a fan whirring, a voice in the hall penetrating the wall, a car passing. They don’t impact you. You can’t move. Of course you appreciate your friend’s attention, but you can’t speak. You manage to verbalize, “Just can’t.” YOU CAN’T “SNAP OUT”of love any more than you can snap out of depression. It’s just going to take time, something shifting in your mind and turning the tide. Eventually, you’ll feel better. A NEW DAY DAWNSI know that when I myself have finally managed to emerge from either state, depression or troublesome love, it is hard to take my own former suffering self completely seriously, perhaps because the relief is such a stark contrast. I’m just glad I’m back with the living. Yes, it is a beautiful day. I can see that now. I could see it then—it just didn’t mean anything to me. There are other men in the world. I knew that—it was just irrelevant. I was depressed. I was in love. Or I was in love and depressed about it. You can’t have expected me to be reasonable about it. WHY DO WE LOVE ONE AND NOT ANOTHER?>em>Le coeur a ses raisons. There are no doubt plenty of people whom you are compatible enough to be with. Similar interests, education, priorities, lifestyle, perhaps they fancy you; makes all the sense in the world to hook up with them. Not in love with them. Then someone you don’t know a thing about enters the room and at that moment you begin to love him. Go figure. Love is a mystery with an eternal element of not knowing, not being in control, of seduction and surrender. It’s a whammy wrapped in magic sprinkled in stardust. WHY DO WE CONTINUE TO LOVE SOMEONEwho no longer loves us? I have to ask—are we talking, per Abraham Maslow, B-love or D-love? Or both? B-love, as he termed it, is “love for the Being of a person, unneeding love, unselfish love,” whereas D-love is “deficiency-love, love need, selfish love.” Being-love for each other—love that feeds and nourishes the other—is the ultimate goal of partnership, but I imagine many of us have both healthy and unhealthy elements in our love relationships. You’d have to be the most well adjusted person in the genital stage of psychosexual development the world has known to not have some D-love elements in your makeup. B-love brings the joy of love, D-love the pain. Probably one of the two outweighs the other. It’s the winning half that makes a relationship happy or miserable, or co-dependent, or hard to let go of. SORRISO DE LUZ“Smile of Light,” a Portuguese song on a CD I brought home from Brazil, was playing in my Berkeley living room as I stood in the doorway kissing, kissing and kissing Mark M. for the first time, for the entire soulful 5:35 minutes of the song. I can’t hear it without going back in time to 1998, to that doorway and that kiss. WHAT DO I DO WITH THIS?You can’t go home again. Nor to the Korean corner market that closed. “When the market closed, I found myself thinking, ‘Now what do I do with this?’” wrote Verlyn Klinkenborg in The New York Times of July 17, 2007. “This” was [his] “mental map of the place. I know just where the seltzer is in a store that no longer exists. I can walk straight to the dried pineapple, but only in the past.…We carry with us these footprints of vanished places: apartments we moved out of years ago, dry cleaners that went out of business, restaurants that stopped serving, neighborhoods where only the street names remain the same. This is the long-gone geography” as he put it, of “remembered spaces.” And remembered faces. I STILL KNOWwhere the harmonic pitch master I haven’t seen since, was in my Portland house (on the piano), I still think maybe it’s upstairs when there is no upstairs in my flat, I still move to light up the fireplace I left behind in my Berkeley bungalow. I can keenly remember the warmth and promise of that kiss that night, but it’s all in my mental geography, just a personal instance of nostalgia brought on by a song. Though Mark and I remained friends over the years since we were together, he ultimately became a Korean market that closed its doors to me. Where does love go when there’s nowhere to put it? It rolls echoing through the heart like a ball bearing in a maze there’s no way out of. I saw you there, one wonderful day / But you took my heart and you threw my heart away / That’s why I ask the Lord up in heaven above / Just what is this thing called love? An enigma trapped in a riddle wrapped in a trick question you can never answer right…
The author’s cat wonders if she should explore the mystery. What else is there to do? ------------------------------------------------------------ I've cried a claw foot tub o' tears
May a smile of light shine on you ... copyright Alexandra Jones 2007 |
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