Loving As It Is
At times its good to have a disclosure, to provide for an openness with the people you relate to...its is quite pleasant on both ends. Being at one with myself, amongst people I love, is the greatest moment of wholeness in my life.
Of course "to love" denies knowing, anyone who thinks they have "known love" has at once not known a thing, and, what is infinitely worse, has not felt love. Knowing, in a specialized sense, is the most distant thing from feeling. Knowing moves across particularity with the ease of a leaf lifted by the breeze (Socrates was fond of equating thought with "wind," which tells you what perhaps history's greatest "thinker" thought about the corporeality of "thinking"). Knowing dresses itself rather elegantly in universality.
Loving is much more humble, real, and at once more powerful than knowing simply because it is incapable of universalization. Loving only exists in particularity...in this sense it has the peculiar feature of paralyzing knowing, which relies on a conceptual schemata for its fluidity. Loving, so unique and particular in its every incantation, is accompanied by the most intense feelings, feelings of abysmal anxiety...sometimes fear and alienation, yet at the same time the highest pleasure and sense of oneness.
One may object, "how can a oneness and pleasantness arrive with anxiety, fear, and often pain?" One ought not reduce loving to the rules of logic, why should it not be the greatest contradiction we ever experience? Loving, as dynamic particularity, stands in great defiance against mindfulness, it dances brilliantly upon "non-contradiction," it asks itself to be joined by the "excluded middle."
We are not accustomed to confronting particularity or dynamicism...we ask that things stop moving, and that they reappear to Mind as absence, that they become static images for mind to behold, to possess, apprehend, re-cognize (I will spare the etymology that accompanies the significance of the graspingness of cognition, but, put simply, the mind must possess, and nothing is so defiant of the urge to possess than the aesthetic feeling generated by the dynamic particularity of love).
Why are we so often frustrated, deceived, hurt, and disappointed by love? Because we refuse to soak ourselves in lovingness on its own terms. It will always defy categorization, it will never identify with a preconception, and it will certainly not stand still or universalize...the two great demands, and contributions, of knowing (I say "contribution" because nowhere in the world as it is will we ever find stillness or universality...these are things Mind contributes to the world as phenomena for its apprehension).
In short, to love will never be known so long as it exists...I warn desperately that it is we who create love and are well capable of destroying it.
I used to think love did not exist, I was partly correct and mostly wrong. Love will never appear before my mind so it is not part of the "intelligible world" as metaphysicians say, but love carries us along from time to time...it is perhaps what helps us cross the spaces of being that can be confronted so tragically, if confronted at all.
Well, I must end this stream of consciousness essay on loving before it gets "carried away," as only a meditation on love can.
Of course "to love" denies knowing, anyone who thinks they have "known love" has at once not known a thing, and, what is infinitely worse, has not felt love. Knowing, in a specialized sense, is the most distant thing from feeling. Knowing moves across particularity with the ease of a leaf lifted by the breeze (Socrates was fond of equating thought with "wind," which tells you what perhaps history's greatest "thinker" thought about the corporeality of "thinking"). Knowing dresses itself rather elegantly in universality.
Loving is much more humble, real, and at once more powerful than knowing simply because it is incapable of universalization. Loving only exists in particularity...in this sense it has the peculiar feature of paralyzing knowing, which relies on a conceptual schemata for its fluidity. Loving, so unique and particular in its every incantation, is accompanied by the most intense feelings, feelings of abysmal anxiety...sometimes fear and alienation, yet at the same time the highest pleasure and sense of oneness.
One may object, "how can a oneness and pleasantness arrive with anxiety, fear, and often pain?" One ought not reduce loving to the rules of logic, why should it not be the greatest contradiction we ever experience? Loving, as dynamic particularity, stands in great defiance against mindfulness, it dances brilliantly upon "non-contradiction," it asks itself to be joined by the "excluded middle."
We are not accustomed to confronting particularity or dynamicism...we ask that things stop moving, and that they reappear to Mind as absence, that they become static images for mind to behold, to possess, apprehend, re-cognize (I will spare the etymology that accompanies the significance of the graspingness of cognition, but, put simply, the mind must possess, and nothing is so defiant of the urge to possess than the aesthetic feeling generated by the dynamic particularity of love).
Why are we so often frustrated, deceived, hurt, and disappointed by love? Because we refuse to soak ourselves in lovingness on its own terms. It will always defy categorization, it will never identify with a preconception, and it will certainly not stand still or universalize...the two great demands, and contributions, of knowing (I say "contribution" because nowhere in the world as it is will we ever find stillness or universality...these are things Mind contributes to the world as phenomena for its apprehension).
In short, to love will never be known so long as it exists...I warn desperately that it is we who create love and are well capable of destroying it.
I used to think love did not exist, I was partly correct and mostly wrong. Love will never appear before my mind so it is not part of the "intelligible world" as metaphysicians say, but love carries us along from time to time...it is perhaps what helps us cross the spaces of being that can be confronted so tragically, if confronted at all.
Well, I must end this stream of consciousness essay on loving before it gets "carried away," as only a meditation on love can.
3 Comments:
Good distinction between love and feelings and love and "knowing". But do we need love to carry us along. I think we do. And what carries us seems to be feelings and knowing. The inexplicable feelings is an emotional component that completes the knowing of love. (or so I think...)
Still, I often wonder whether one feels she can carry on if the only human she / he loves is herself... Many people have , but I question how many "know" love.
Maybe some research on love and lonliness, completeness... any thoughts for authors?
I've never read him, but the philosopher Levinas I believe has a lot to say about love and the "Other." Roland Barthes also has a book about love that is supposed to be good. I'm sure lots of religious philosophers (of which Levinas is one) have a lot to say about this in general--love is kind of similar to the mystery of faith in a way. It is often been my suspicion that Christianity in fact invented the idea of love as we know it now, and as Lenin (but not that Lenin damnit!) shows above, as an experience of particularity.
Thanks for the LOVE references... and good thought about Christianity...
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