Writing Love

"I will now initiate you, she said, into the greater mysteries; for he who would proceed in due course should love first one fair form, and then many, and learn the connection of them; and from beautiful bodies he should proceed to beautiful minds, and the beauty of laws and institutions, until he perceives that all beauty is of one kindred; and from institutions he should go on to the sciences, until at last the vision is revealed to him of a single science of universal beauty, and then he will behold the everlasting nature which is the cause of all, and will be near the end. In the contemplation of that supreme being of love he will be purified of earthly leaven, and will behold beauty, not with the bodily eye, but with the eye of the mind, and will bring forth true creations of virtue and wisdom, and be the friend of God and heir of immortality."

-- Plato, The Symposium, Translated by Benjamin Jowett

Very well then

Love?

Explain yourself

Half of the humans I encounter are convinced that you are

A charming euphemism for the tyranny of biology

Over good sense, taste, or even the atavistic imperative

To survive—to abandon what is deleterious, even if you

Love

You cannot be mere lust

You have your own, peculiar and distinctive name

As words multiply, the set of thoughts that can be thought

And spoken and written about

Swells in kind, and that made room for

Love

Which has been around long enough to have offspring:

Philia, the love of the friend: that same soul that is yours

In another corporeal costume entirely, right there with you

Love

Prepared to say what you would have thought or felt or said or done, and thus showing you

Love

Knowing that just that sort of recognition, and affirmation by anticipation and imitation, is a real and powerful form of

Love

Makes bards sing like this:

“Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, /But bears it out even to the edge of doom.”

The edge, mark you: not over the brink and into the dark, but to the very threshold of annihilation

See above, for both good and ill

Love

Has another permutation that the same, Ancient Greeks who came up with philia called pragma, which is about as erotic as a fist bump, but shows that sometimes doing your chores to make life more bearable for everyone involved is really a legitimate and distinctive form of

Love

Not exactly like storge, which is a sort of solid, impregnable endurance, through a quiet conspiracy of reason and duty, of all the ignominies and absurdities involved in saying yes and amen to another fallible, dying primate for whom there is something that it is like to be a body—it takes guts to keep that up for good

Love

Which is also clad in the silk and spurs of eros—this is the one you usually have in mind when family are not in the room, and it’s a real beauty; it is also how most fools are parted from what little wealth they have, whether in pursuit of or having had—spice is nice but think twice

Love

Can also turn up in the guise of delightful play; you probably recognize this ludus straight away, insofar as what makes some of the time you spend with other humans glow with meaning is the laughter you share, whatever you are doing together: shoveling a sidewalk; preparing a lasagna; watching sport or something cinematic or fornicating with giggling abandon—regardless, ludic love generates situations in which you can joyfully play without being cynically played; it is an especially savory and nourishing form of

Love

Which can turn you into a frothing, deranged maniac--thus mania's name--is terribly dangerous but, of course, wildly popular in some circles—some are so impressed with this form of love as to see it as the only possible mode of expression for this idea, i.e., unless you are transformed into a gelatinous mass, quivering with obsessive lunacy, by the very thought of this person, place, thing or idea, your love for the object in question mustn’t be real; that seems a hazardous way to understand

Love

Which is much less zany and much more fruitful in the form of meraki, which is the kind of love we recognize when humans create things; we ought to be careful here, for strictly speaking, humans don’t create in the sense ordinarily reserved for the description of the behavior of divine beings: it’s all what Derrida called bricolage for us. The bricks are there, we just build the wall. You don’t invent the notes in order to write the song or the language in order to write the story or reality the better to represent it by any means you care to name

Love

Does allow you, however, to make things of your own with sparkling enthusiasm, ruthless attention to detail and an aspiration always to improve, whether you are baking or writing or joking or kissing or programming or building, you do it as if what you are doing is a person with whom you are in

Love

Who shouldn’t get too carried away when indulging in self-love, philautia; after all, you have got to carry on as if you are convinced that someone ought to recognize you as worthy of a sincere yes and amen, and do what you can to become such a person—days will come when you are the only person who could possibly say yes and amen sincerely to yourself, but if you can keep it up for a while and excel at it now and then, another person is bound to see you as someone worthy of

Love

Just please, don’t become a pathological narcissist and vanish up your own sphincter without a trace; feedback is extraordinarily valuable as an idea itself; it doesn’t matter if many, idiosyncratic responses to who you are and how are obtuse or insipid or merely lies or insults: you should pay attention to the feedback in aggregate because it will help you better to understand yourself and the nature of

Love

The most perfect and radiant form thereof being agape, (you pronounced it in a vulgar way in the privacy of your own mind, didn't you? A-GAH-PEE) which ignores all of the parts of you that you did not choose and concentrates on the fact that you are, like the one who loves you, a mind embodied and growing or withering in a decadent and corrupt culture in the beleaguered biosphere of a small, rather trivial planet in a vast and incomprehensible sea of sparks and shadows; you are aware of your awareness, so you can doubt and question the testimony of your own senses, or the burbling of demagogues, or the meaning of a poem, or the outrageous price of a plate of fries—we are in this together, and your contributions are as interesting and important as mine; I may never meet you, or even see your image, but simply by being awash in this tsunami of nonsense with me, as a being like me, you show that I ought to think of you with

Love

Perhaps you have other names for these forms of love, or for love itself

But you have a name or names, and therefore some ideas; we ought to talk them over

As we do so, we might become friends; who knows? We might want to see one another without pants at some point, but that’s rather creepy; it’s more likely that you will read what I have written and, because meraki is involved, you will respond in kind, and we will both become more avid and effective readers and writers, and that may be the most excellent way of doing this with others

Love

Is damaged and defiled by plague and war in all of its modalities, so we have much to do, ensuring that all have the opportunity to experience each of them, and in so doing, to become more excellently human and befriend immortality