The Western concept of love is contradictory and needs to be replaced, since it has no meaning.

This is how I see love presented: sometimes you love people, sometimes you don't. it just happens, you don't try or get better at making it happen, except in very superficial ways (he's just not that into you, miss congeniality). Love is an outside force, present only sometimes.

This doesn't make any sense. Way create a concept we can never understand?

If some acts are loving and some things are not loving, who decided what was and was not love? Why can radically other configurations not be possible? In the Bible, God monopolizes love. Satan hates love. How can we say some people are incapable, or do not feel love? Having a narrow definition of such a central concept in the understanding of human life makes a part of humanity exclusive. Agreeing love sometimes happens means thinking that some, or all people, do not know how to love, or what love is. And if they do it, they do it by accident. Only some lovers are agents. Really?

I propose, in opposition, that both everything and nothing is love. And everything in between, too. Love is its own existence, as a concept, phenomenon, experience, field of study, topic of poetry, songs, theater, movies, paintings, sculptures, drawings, pornography, religion, and endless other things; the smallest gestures can be love, perhaps all gestures. At the same time, this pleasure exists only because it is agreed upon. Like any other aspect of society, it is negotiated and not a simple "active/passive" dichotomy.

"I love you" is really a terrible expression, since it implies that there is a subject and object of love. I propose in contra that love creates a higher creature, the living thing that is the relationship. Animal Magnetism. We have no way of expressing the idea I'm trying to, so use your imagination. Something is brought into existence that doesn't exist, the thoughts of the other person when they're not around, the polymerization of perspectives that occurs, similarly but differently in each person. This adds up to a much more mysterious conception of love, one which is like a ghost which haunts us, always present but only visible sometimes, when it sends a shiver up our spine.

1 comment:

  1. Adam - I don't know if I agree with everything you say but I'm not sure. Maybe we are affected by love the say we are affected by wind. We cannot possess the wind. So then, is love completely human? because wind affects also trees that are swayed and animals whose fur ruffles. so Love is innately human? or innately living? or innately... nothing. Does it have to be innate, does it have to exist?

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