Love - Democratic Underground

ForrestGump

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Sat May-13-06 07:11 PM
Original message

Love

Edited on Sat May-13-06 07:16 PM by ForrestGump

Love is the best thing that there is. I've most of my life been on the flipside of romantic love, and know full well that the intensity of its promise is mirrored by the intensity of its absence or souring, but even then I could not deny that love is the best of life, or that the best of life is found in love.

Because, for all its suckiness -- that is the technical term -- when you're feeling alone and unloved in that way, who can deny the brilliance of love that shines between a mother and her baby, or between parents and their children (well, ideally), or even among people together engaged in a mission that promotes esprit de corps and self-sacrificing behavior whether on some far-flung battlefield, within squad cars in a domestic battleground, or on the playing field? And you'd have to have been totally oblivious to miss the love of humanity that kept altruistic rescuers searching for survivors amidst the televised aftermath of disasters such as the Indonesian tsunami and Katrina's attack on the US Gulf States.

Romantic love is different. It may intersect with or pull a yin-yang with other love, but it's different even if it remains similar at its core. Love is pain. Love is bliss. Love is contentment. Love is discontent -- wanting more, whether for our higher good or in detriment to it. Love hurts, immeasurably, when it is one-sided, or becomes so. It is the most powerful of all feelings, perhaps. It is, as Charles Dickens should have said, the best of emotions, the worst of emotions. Well, bad enough, anyway -- hate not only mirrors love, like it was its evil twin, but some hate may actually be a side-effect of love, or the result of love for other things or people. Regardless, love's power cannot be denied by anyone who has felt it or even witnessed it in action.

In the grand scheme of things, romantic love -- for want of a more inclusive word (eros is fine, I guess, but it's not all there is to the story and, frankly, agape kind of puts me in mind of a landed fish fighting for its life) -- is small potatoes. It's the unconditional kind of love -- and its counterpart, conditional hatred -- that really makes the world go around.

But when you are honestly in love, or even tasting the feeling through infatuation, it's like nothing else you'll ever experience. If the whole world felt that initial euphoria, and was patient enough and tolerant enough to allow it to morph into something substantial and enduring, we'd have far fewer social and geopolitical problems than we do now. And, yes, neocons and the kind of bigots that too often fill the ranks of the Republican Party and similar groups around the world simply would not exist.

It's not going to happen. John, Yoko, and all the other bagists and bed-sitters had the right goal in mind, but humans are a self-destructive lot, too many of us in positions of major influence driven by greed and petty jealousies and hatreds. My hope that the good of humankind will finally overcome our destructive bent -- a hope reflected in the direction in which I took my primary career before taking a hiatus from it -- is quite possibly futile in the face of the reality of human behavior.

But still we hope. We have to try. And still I salute love. I salute love in all its forms, and if nothing else I pray that our lives can be blessed by the kinds of love that connect people on the most personal, intimate levels of all, the level at which we ultimately live and from which perhaps may even make a difference in the world. I salute it as one who once long lacked the kind he wanted but who knew, all along, that he moved through shimmering curtains of love in his every day. I salute it as one who has found the kind he craved, right when he gave up hoping for its presence in his life. I hope that all of us have it, will have it, or at least still retain good memories of it that remain tangible, whether the love was hard-won through life's struggles or came as easily as the Spring's dawn. Love will take us home, to ourselves, and onward from there...and no longer alone, not that we ever really were.

"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further... And one fine morning ---

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

-- The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald