Love is the Law (6): Baby Love

Librarian & Son

He is here.

It is hard to put into words the love one feels for their own newborn child, not least due to the exhaustion (lack of sleep is not something I cope well with), but also because there is a well established general description that, much like romantic love or other human feelings, is a fictionalised narrative of one's actual emotions. It can give someone else, an outsider, an idea of what it 'would be like' but what the real experience of it all is like for me, will always be a deeply individual and personal account. Potentially one that does not chime with our standard descriptions, but is no less an experience of love for all that and also because of that the language to describe this state is found wanting.

I've spoke before (links forthcoming) about how our different connections with animals, friends, art and so forth are all different 'types' of love (under one way of thinking) but are all examples of our care-for others. Other persons, other beings, other things, etc.

My love for my partner is not my love for my friends, or my love for my dog (deceased). How I might approach these relationships are different, but they are not weighed against each other, one is not greater than another, they are different but also the same. They are all love.

Sitting quietly at night with my son resting peacefully on my lap, fills my heart with such utter joy, peace but also fear. Such contradictory feelings, so potently felt, much like variations of other 'loves' that are my other connections that I care-for. Similar components in different combination, acting on the same being and bringing differing results, dependent on circumstance.

This love, like my love for JJ, is one that will develop as we grow together. We will change together as father and son. There is a (hopefully) long road ahead of us and I can't wait to get started.

26.03.19

Love is the Law (5): Infinite Rewards

Yesterday, I spoke about the inherent withering of any structure, system, or substance.

The thing is, it's not true of everything.

Love requires constant rejuvenation to exist.

In Loving I am constantly seeing again, reconfiguring, aligning myself with another.

My Love for/with JJ continues. It is not static. As that beautiful immortal Ursula Le Guin wrote:

Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.

When I see her now, I do not see our relationship of the past, I do not look with nostalgia, I see anew.

Each day refreshes, each exchange deepens our connection.

Yes, these human relationships can falter, can weaken, can fall into entropy.

It requires work on our part; to take responsibility, to show weakness, to open one's self.

But, the effort isn't harder, the rewards aren't lessened.

Love is not the atrophying of some past peak, now slowly spiralling down.

It springs eternal.

Love is the forever we were promised.

'Time defeated by Hope and Beauty' by Simon Vouet (1627)

Love is the Law (4): Love as illness

Love as illness.

Understanding is not a cure, but this defines the apparent problem (the problem of love as illness). We are ill with love in that we don't or cannot understand how we are experiencing the strong overpowering love we do feel towards an other. This still relates to the passive idea of love, however, in this mode our passivity means we are under its thrall. Love controls us and is therefore an illness in that we normally control our lives in a direct rational manner. However, we might also disagree with this description absolutely. The activity of reason, loves dulling or numbing of the action. Reason as controller.

Most emotions/feelings can be understood and expresed as an individualised perspective, however, love that is mutually expressed, shared and recipricated is therefore something quite other going on. In this sense it is the most philosophically important expression of an emotion, hence the image of a test, if this is what Wittgenstein meant. Perhaps we could think of the individual's love (non-reciprical for another also as a test, if so, the fuller kind (shared) is then a public inquiry.

Love is the Law (3): Surety of love

That's right, I made a Hamlet meme. What of it?

Surety of love.

Am I sure of my love for JJ? Does the questioning of the fact admit to some weakness or inherent failure? If we believe the modern lies about love, i.e. love as the ideal state that one finds oneself either in or not in, this might indeed be the case.

Take this example of the recurrent discussion about when one should tell their partner that they love them. Most advice seems to revolve around this coming about only after a gradual build up of contact. Love is not to be questioned, just felt, like an endless divine moment. A perfection that cannot be denied or inquired into.

“Too much thinking” or “don't overthink” comes the cry. However, we shouldn't just passively accept our emotional state, at least this emotional state, but it requires one to work at it. Love as a developing 'thing' – isn't this reification of love simply as dangerous as the simple acceptance?

Something like a private determination, as Murdoch describes it in 'Sovereignty', but it can't be just this because it isn't just a private feeling (as in the feeling of repentance) but instead it is the 'something shared' with a specific other.

How can I be sure of JJ's love for me? Is this a totally different question? Can I be more sure of my own love for JJ?

What are we looking for in this surety, if we find it answered with an instance of love won't we later require yet another? Surety wants something final, but if it is an ongoing 'test' (a test of who you are; how honest you are about yourself, both to others and yourself) then it can never be totally sure.

The surety cannot be held onto as it also involves this specific other, whose mind you cannot directly influence and if you begin to try and subtly influence them then this is manipulation and control, which is surely not an act of love.

Love is the Law (2): Love is a test

“Love is not a feeling, it is a test.”

- Wittgenstein

That is to say, there is nothing passive at play here. It doesn't just happen to you and then pass on. Even if we say that it happens unexpectedly, it creeps up, still it involves some work. Something is to be done. Put into a real situation, this is how we tell that it is love. Not that it can exist in the quiet ideal separtion from the world, but that it exists alongside one, through one's life in the functioning natural world. It becomes part of who we are. We are not a love sufferer, but a love dweller, we fight for love, fight for this change in who we are. A change in our priorities, in who and what we care about.

Love is the Law (1): Poetry of Love

Here's something a foolish boy once wrote about Love:

Poetry comes from love, not from despair or darkness, this is only self-indulgence.
Love makes everyone a poet. Love of another person makes for a short lived career, unless one keeps their larder constantly stocked, as some poets do. This view is rather narrow. It is the love of the world that is the poet's life force, the mystical love that powers the greatest poets and their greatest works.
Despair looks at a point, eyes downcast, a view inward.
Love looks all around and into eternity.

Now, although we shouldn't be too critical of the young in case it puts them off from doing some serious thinking in the future, I would say this about the above aphorism... 

And before we get too critical it could be pointed out in their defence that this is about love as it relates to poetry and not people.

However...

Love of another person... is rather narrow.

The author of this aphorism seems to find (or, more likely, imagine) that loving other individuals is lesser to the love of the world, in a mystical sense. The idea might start, as follows, that one's love of an other is always derivative to the love of the wider world as we begin with our world-love and people come later. On the other hand, maybe they want to say that people are just 'smaller' than the world and so the love for other people must always be a fraction of the mystical love for the world (so, it doesn't matter that it has primacy in order of loves but that it is greater).

Two points.

1. Mystical? Why might this be the appropriate place for the poet? Surely a poet (a lover, a human being) should be based on the experience of the world and not a transcendental experience of entirety. Well, we might say that this is part of the experience of being human (the mystical) or at least a fuller experience, or weaker, a poetic experience. At any rate there seems no strong reason for the mystical world-love to be greater than the love one might have for another human. Indeed, more positively, we might say that the love for another being is so different from the mystical world-love that one need not destroy the other. They are so remote from each other.

2. People, lesser? The strongest argument for the mystical world-love seems to reside in its ontological primacy. That is, one must begin with this to experience the lesser love for human individuals. However, why would it be logically (or emotionally, or physically) appropriate to count world-love as the first and greatest love. We learn about the world from those we love and who love and care for us as we grow. That is, from our parents and from those adults that care for us as children. We simply begin with the love of others or special individuals and only then, from them, do we learn the possibility of world-love. The mystic's world-love is derivative from the love of a child for a parent, for a person or another person. That is, if we are saying that they are related.

At least, this is true of the religious mystic. As they start with this, seemingly, world denying world-love (a paradox that drives the spirit of religious mysticism). How might one be a mystic without be religious? More about this godless mysticism later, but this mysticism need not deny the importance of the love of individuals.