Reflections
Love in its timelessness
The question "What is love?" still intrigues those who have experienced love and those who are yet to experience it. Poets, novelists, dramatists, philosophers, psychologists and educators have tried to discover the meaning of love. It seems no word is more misused or overused than love and leadership. If love is a partnership, then who is the lover and who is the beloved ? A vegetarian might, in a tone of advocacy, say, "I love vegetables." Again, an Indian trainee-civil servant suddenly turns emotional and declares to a Bangladeshi lady training coordinator, "I love you very deeply." The lady reacts inwardly, using again the same word: "Does he love my flesh or my mind?" "My mother loves me very much," claims a child. Desmond Morris claims we love our children because we know that our children carry our genes, in the same way our parents loved us because we inherit genes from them. It is actually the urge for biological continuance that induces the exercise of this emotion. A good citizen may exclaim: "I love my neighbors!" A brilliant student of English literature joins the customs service, and after his induction, confirms: "I love my profession". The rector of a church might say, "I love God". The Bible says: "Let love be your greatest aim." According to Rick Warren, a pastor, life minus love is equal to zero. To Mother Theresa, love "is not what you do, but how much love you put into it that matters." Life can be best used by loving people, and there is no specific time to begin loving. It is 'now'. But this delicate human impulse has been ignored by most scientists. Abraham Maslow, a social psychologist, states: "It is amazing how little the empirical sciences have to offer on the subject of love." Why is love ignored by scientists? Sorokin answers that love appears to scientists to be "unconvincing, certainly unscientific, prejudicial, and superstitious." Love is condemned by some as out-and-out pathological. Many tend to dismiss it as both a naive and an insane passion. Others glorify it by saying, "Love is all". Some again turn dogmatic and declare :"God is love". To some, love is a synonym for sex. Sigmund Freud, "the dirty old man," John Donne, the metaphysical poet, and D H Lawrence, the novelist advocate of bodily love, commonly believe sensual gratification is a part of love. To Lawrence, to deny sex is to deny love, and to deny love is to deny life itself. Sex is the basis of man-woman love. Sex, as he says, "means the whole of the relationship between man and woman". De-linking sex from love is a kind of hypocrisy, which Lawrence hated. For Donne and Lawrence, love is not only listening to each other but also touching each other. They believe it is through body that one can enter the soul. They, perhaps in a paraphrasing of Descartes, seek to say, " We touch, therefore we are." Hinting at the bodily need as the basis of love, American journalist Ambrose Bierce considers love as "a temporary insanity curable by marriage." Often a child is the culmination of the expression of love between the male and the female. When a woman feels a sense of love for her partner, she tends to say, "If he truly loves me, I'll give him a child." When the child is born, it craves to say : " I just want to be loved." Browning, after years of epistolary dialogue with his admiring reader Elizabeth Barrett, falls in love with her and then experiences it as a power that creates a world of beauty and harmony. To Browning, "Love is duty." Shakespeare considers love as a window that opens for lovers "a brave new world." Bacon condemns love as "weak passion", a "child of folly" and admonishes us to keep our hearts "well-fortified" so that love does not enter our hearts and ruin us altogether. According to George Bernard Shaw, "Love is a cigarette which begins with fire and ends with ashes." Shaw believes that through genuine and pure love one can derive undiluted pleasure and create the superman. Love is the life force through which humankind can be transformed into super-humankind. This implies that when genuine lovers as sexual partners unite out of pure emotion, a brilliant child is supposed to be born. As Jean-Paul Sartre noted, "Long before birth, even before we were conceived, our parents have decided who we shall be." To Kahlil Jibran, the noted Egyptian poet, love is "the union of two fragrant flowers; and the mingling of their fragrance the creation of the third soul." Thoughts on love are not confined to poets and philosophers only. As Leo Buscaglia says, when it comes to love, each person is his or her own philosopher. People equate love with sex, a state of joy, pain, truth, mutual attraction, security, fraternity, filial affection, fantasy, a state of ecstasy and a condition of disillusionment. In fact, love is not to be pondered; it is to be experienced. Love has a language of its own. Love should always articulate positive words, words that are pleasant, joyful and reinforcing. True lovers will always say, in the words or Lord Tennyson, "For us there is waiting and waiting; rest is not our business." An immature lover will say, " I love you because I need you", whereas a mature lover will say, "I need you because I love you." After all, to give love one must possess love. Love tends to disappear when lovers use callous, depressing, dull, unpleasant, and non-reinforcing negative words. The most favourite word for the growth and sustenance of love is "yes". "Yes" works as an elixir when love turns sick. A genuine lover pronounces "yes" to joy, "yes" to rediscovery, "yes" to even differences. James Joyce concludes his classic novel Ulysses with great affirmation: "Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes." "Yes" brings two lovers closer and closer. "No" is a word unknown to true lovers. Only a frigid or insipid lover can afford to say "no." Thus words spoken by lovers reflect what they are, what they feel, what they seek, and what they learn. The discussion signifies thatthe word 'love' still remains problematic, vague and nebulous. When so much is about love, the question that again silently creeps into our minds unawares is: What is love? The easiest and perhaps the best answer is: Love is love".
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel.
Comments