a humanifesto in progress for the single
Being a subject who comes into becoming-- through language, thought, the materialization of innate (a priori) and experiential (a posteriori) synthesis-- love becomes intelligible in one of two ways. There is a consciousness I have about my experiences in loving as a historical subject. The history made in the present extricates whatever instances enumerate to form a genealogy of Agape, of Eros, of the unnamed and unnamable sensibilities between. We know it because we've known it. And we know it and name it love, not because it cannot be called by other names. These assignments we give to emotionality and feeling are arbitrary, if necessary signifiers we use to build meaning and inform communicability. We simply have to have something to call it so we hear it at all. So as cliché as words like love come to be, on Hallmark cards, out of mouths, in friendship, or when sexing... love is true to the feeling only inasmuch we have assigned it the four letter word. Damn! In those moments, love becomes the best filler to supplant inadequacies of language. Love itself is pre-linguistic. We kill it when we name it. Yes... love is dead. We would do better to call it what it is: cuddle, date, sex, disappointment, chance, boredom, in-waiting, nothing better to do than do you.
To not believe in love is to live in denial, for its comprehension is contemporaneous with our agility to conceptualize it. To say we do not know it is to suggest that we've never experienced it. One must surely feel its presence in the absence. It is the double bind of any (supposed) incapacity to understand. IN CAPACITY borrows from its antithesis. Said another way, it is to claim "I don't know what love is" when the statement contradicts the intention. The disclaimer becomes the claim. For the not knowing knows what it is not, and therefore knows. Love is never absent. It cannot be.
And why does any of this matter? It matters because I am writing about it...and you are still reading. And somewhere between the words you understand you are hoping to gain insight or figure something out... and because even beyond the words you think might be trite, verbose, or all too philosophical, you see yourself... reflected in the bodacious accusation that we all need LOVE. From an existential perspective the question becomes "Where is the Love?" (shout out: Donny Hathaway). Surely many a song has attempted to capture its vast dynamism. We sometimes understand it best by defining what it is not: The break up song, the longing song, the songs of death and dying and missing sometimes best elucidate love's location. We are myth makers: give it flesh with a bow and arrow. The irony of a naive baby with a precise aim and arrow says volumes. Pull back. Shoot. Really!? With arms too short to box with God, we stretch to give meaning to myth. And this isn't bad. It just is. Our scapegoating love to divinity or chance is no better. Those "matches made in heaven" that strike and burn, the love at first sight that blinds us to the truth... It's all such a mess! And how could love not be when we are? How could love be anything beyond whatever we project in our bold imaginations or calculated constant cravings.
Here's what I think we need to do; especially those of us who have resolved that we are safer not being in love than in love. Disremember love. Make dedicated attempts to forget the unforgettable so that the ways love has failed to stick DO NOT stick. Our fear forms in our remembrance. As surely as Descartes knew cogito ergo sum ("I think therefore I am") he could have infused the statement with "in love" and made as much sense: "i think i am in love, therefore I am in love". And is it ever any different? Has any amount of evidence to the contrary proved false against the stubborn determination of our hearts and passions? We pray for rain, for healing, for love... and the intention makes it possible. So love materializes for us in the longing-- in the tragic pronouncement that we don't need it or can live without it, we emerge as liars. This is why Teena Marie crooned that "cupid is a real straight shooter". His shooting is justified in the aftermath or the reward. Cupid is our scapegoat for not having to own our intentionality. We are quick to say "he got me" when the truth is "you got you". Human up!
For at a moments notice, that lil clumsy baby with an arrow could hover over in an instance when we forget to be conscious and protective. Chance may have it that somebody to our libidinal liking emerges... smiling on their good side on a good day. And all that shit we talked before about love being bullshit, fertilizes the rose that is the aroma of disremembrance. It is the fragrance of our most amorous imaginings. We give into it like floating cartoons having become hypnotized by an idealism WE OURSELVES shaped.
To be sure... there are the critics and jaded ones. They (re)iterate how horrible love is when they most desire it. I know this because I am one of them. Romantically agnostic...which means faith and doubt tango constantly with one another, because neither wants to lead. Iteration offers some direction; provides a modality for control. "No" too many times negates itself. It's the nature of iteration: desensitizes. Becomes boy crying wolf when the bear is a greater threat; yet the nature of the threat matters less than the impending doom. How many bad lovers do we replace with good lovers gone bad? I have a friend who I once loved more than a "friend". He reminded me of my fearlessness-- though interestingly defines himself as eternally single so much that he keeps it so. A few days in the year, however, he slips...falls just enough to reassert his position. Protection. We seek to outsmart love when love isn't smart to begin with. It's chance. The lucky bastards lucky enough to find the love they seek are just that: lucky. I wish to be one of them. And when love fails, rather than just seeing ourselves as unlucky bastards, we punish our choices. And to be sure... we do make choices. But choice does not guarantee accuracy. There are far too many variables to consider. Sometimes it just doesn't work.
Technology provides an futile disengagement in the service of engagement...if fun when you realize it is what it is. Social networking of the romantic or sexual sort further institutionalizes desire in order to avert chance. How do you sort? Does anyone not sort? Make a profile. Describe yourself (as if there is some continuity in what people value knowing...and even moreso their capacity to be honest...especially with themselves). In 2011 we can sit behind a computer and construct identities that are not our own to outsmart and manipulate the love deserved. Some of us sit on the otherside of the computer...believing ourselves to be transparent and honest when even our honesty is constructed. It's all really a game, right? One does better to go to the grocery store, or church, or a bar. Pray that love will enter...and make it so. Assume that if it didn't show up one needs to pray harder or that it isn't the right time. Or maybe we just need to leave it alone. Alone.
I was once one of the self-righteous ones, believing I got it right-- applauding and self-congratulating pure luck, attributing it to the calculus of their estimations and analysis. And then it fails. You think you've met the one. You are willing to give ALL for it. But there is no ONE. Love is a shot in the dark that hits...so we most often miss, turn the lights on, self-correct and claim whatever we've shot as the intended target. For these types, the end justifies the means...until the end comes to an end. Love always comes to an end. This is the only thing we can be certain of. Enjoy love in its life-cycle. Few are forever.
In summary, I propose that we learn to laugh a little about all this mess. That's why i advocate flirting. "Why so serious?" says the JOKER. Good question before the impending doom. So why not make of this experiment in-loving a capacity for being and becoming more fully self-actualized? Not through rationalizations of its delusions or unhappy attachments to the ways humans have constructed picture perfection. Redirect those energies with the carelessness of one who already knows that if love made sense, we'd find it boring as hell. Let's excite ourselves with its wonderment and lack of discipline. Ever fall in love with someone who didn't know? Is it any less a feeling of love than when they know? Is the feeling in your chest indebted to the assurance of reciprocity in order to feel feeling? Hell naw! You feel...so feel. Don't struggle against it. Do not apologize for the stumbles, but also do not blame...others or yourself. How productive is blame or shame? Our loving, in existentialist terms, is very much the outcome our self-making. We are fortunate if we find another interested in stumbling alongside us with grace and trust as the glue... and God if we believe in one.
What do I know about love? As much as any expert. As much as anyone who has attempted to compartmentalize and narrow a feeling coexistent with the universe and its energies and frequencies. When you think of it that way... when you accept that it sometimes doesn't work out because you don't know what you're doing... you can forgive yourself a little...slip a little and get back up a lot more. The last time I fell in love I swore I'd been touched by an angel. I would have given anything for it. I always do. And when the angel fell out of love with me, I realized he was just a molester with greedy, lonely, fingers...and a ego big enough to think that ambition would make up for whatever was lacking in ability. I have forgiven him, because it is part of the disremembrance I need in order to be a fool enough and try again. If there is a next time-- which I am sure there will be-- I hope to be bolder. I hope to subvert the tools to understand love that I have been given to other tools, understanding that love is not meant to be understood... only experienced. And while I can't see trying today, tomorrow, or the day after, I've got a feeling there's some mythical kid in oversized diapers and an arrow too weighty to carry but with the gift of probability on his side. He'll someday hit...on the right day... somebody cute...on their good side. And at that moment, everything I think I know about love won't do me much good at all. At best, I can only hope that I'm smiling back, on my good side, at someone who knows as much and as little as i do: nothing, everything. Love.
