Love

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Love

April 27th, 2007

You only Love Twice

A young American woman gave us this description of love and Love. I think no man could write as poignantly and truly about the difference:

When I fell “in love” I felt like I was totally mentally and physically obsessed with the other person. I was inspired and energized. I felt that I must be the perfect foil to them. I must have my hair right so that they might want to touch it, my make-up must be perfect so that they don’t see my flaws, my conversation worthy of their smiles, my clothes worthy to walk next to them at a party. I imagined my perfect future with them and how it would be just right. So what if they were obsessed with football and I hated it? I would become reknowned for my patient acceptance of their silly little diversions. So what if they were boring sometimes in conversation? What did that matter when they had such a wonderful smile? What did it matter if they kissed me so hard they bruised my lip and didn’t notice? It was a sign of their passion that I should be grateful for. I would never disagree, we would never fight. And by the very nature of my feeling this way, it must be “love”. It was like a gorgeous fireworks display. I would have beautiful children, I would be happy, his family would love me, I would belong.

Then I fell “IN LOVE”. I was inspired and energized and connected to the larger world. My eyes were never tired of looking at his. My ears ached if I didn’t hear his voice. My need was like a great thirst. Even in sleep we had to touch. When we kissed I wanted to crush my body into his till we were one fused being. His smell was in my nose. I would lie next to him and twine our hair together through my fingers so that it became one lock of hair. We would fight and cry and make up and cry again. I did not care where we went, whether his family liked me or not, where we lived, as long as I could be with him. It was like the sea. We would have beautiful children, we would be happy together and cry together, we were complete.

I was so young and yet,

With my parents we were on a vacation at the Social Center of the Swedish Company employing my father.

The Center was in what can only be described as the place nearest to Paradise. As you know Stockholm is inside a bay of 50 kilometres of length, in the old days if you wanted to invade Stockholm by sea you were more likely to suffer sea havoc than ever reaching Stockholm as you have to fight your way in the treacherous winds around ten thousand islands, some visible, some submerged. In the sixties the Russian navy used these caters to train the crew of the Russian submarines, with variable success, one ending up on a rock, and as the submarine belonged to the whisky class of the NATO classification it was called by the Swedish press, “Whisky on the Rocks”.

We had been at the Centre for some days and I was wondering how my fathers boss, whose power was equal to his ugliness, could have given birth to two women of such beauty; They were women in their full right, must have been around twenty and a few months. One was dark haired and put to shame the women you see in the “famous people gossip columns”, the other one fair headed and of the sound and balanced beauty of a true sport professional.

My father was the Production director for the French branch, at the Centre was also one of the Directors of the Finland Branch; I do not really remember him. Their daughter accompanied them.

I was seventeen and some month, she was eighteen and some month, which at that time of life is a distance greater than the distance between America and Europe.

Compared to the Super boss daughters, she was not much. She was just a good looking fair teenager without any excessive fertility attributes.

The age gap, or was it the timidity, was such that I would never speak to her. Anyway those were other days; to speak to a girl to whom you had not been properly introduced would have been as vulgar as saying:

“Hey you, I want to fuck you, can you spare me five minutes?”

It was late, I was coming back from a trip with the rowing boat, indeed in those days one could move a boat by rowing without the assistance of an engine.

I walked up the path to the narrow sand beach, she was walking down the same path, we would have passed by each other, then she stopped and said:

“We are the only youngsters here, my name is Kerstin”.

You have all read books and listened to music and laughed at authors speaking of the sky opening, of celestial music coming from heaven, of the Earth Parting and pearls and diamonds coming out.

Did it take one minute, five seconds, how would I remember, I was in love;

Not the kind of love where you sort of love a girl or a woman.

No I was totally in love.

You have read these stupid sentences, like “I would have given my life for her”.

I did not need that sentence, it was so obvious.

That is the only happy part of the story so you had better get your Kleenex.

I was nearly eighteen; she was a bit above eighteen, which in those days meant that in her eyes I was not a fucking engine.

I was nearly eighteen; she was a bit above eighteen, which in my eyes meant that she was a goodness come from heaven, the mere thought that any part of my body could inadvertently touch her body would have been worse that considering entering the Holy Arch.

I was in love.

So OK, everybody laughs, we have all been teenagers, we have all loved, we have all put the loved one on a pedestal higher than the highest sky.

But this was not the case, I was in Love.

She was one of these women you can read about in literature, some of these women which have been the inspiration for Wagner, Schumann, Schubert, Mahler, Rodin, Rilke.

These women are strange. When you look at pictures, they a re no different from any other woman, in a competition they would rather tend to be the loser. Yet in the Real World, the world of art, music, writing, they are total incarnation of something that man cannot resist as they will never have it, “Creation”.

Whether for her it was a blessing or a curse to the incarnation of the myth of Eve, difficult to say.

She would be loved by many men, she would find it as difficult as any other women to understand the difference between what she was and the image she was carrying.

She carried three beautiful daughters to a very bright and intelligent and courageous Jewish man/boy. The first time I saw her first born daughter, I was stuck again, she had inherited the same total burning fire that lived in her mother.

These women carrying Love are like a bonfire.

A bonfire burns with a kind of perfection, giving light, giving warmth, giving laughter, giving smooth sadness, giving life, but giving it to those that assemble around it. What does the bonfire receive in return and who cares for the burned out bonfire?

Years would pass, she would make the same usual mess we all make with our lives, responding to the love of men and seeking in their love something she carried for all but herself.

One day I was back from Africa, probably in one of these periods of job hunting.

What could never happen, what had been so totally impossible, happened, she may have offered herself to me, and I am rather ashamed that I did not do a good job of not accepting her offer, but it must be said in my defence that I was little prepared for that event.

You must understand that she was Swedish; she had been brought up in a hygienic attitude towards sex. Sex was, as for all other youngsters, a pleasurable sporting event and a way to communicate through the barrier of loneliness;

I was a young Frenchman, love was something that had little relationship to sex, if anything, sex was the dirty opposite of love. It is so difficult to explain it, the world has changed so much. How should I explain it? If you prepare a very nice culinary dish, you will enjoy it before and during and afterwards even if you know that in the end in will become excrements. So was our understanding of Love and its corollary, sex.

Sounds stupid does it not?

We are fifty years later, my love for her has not decreased;

I thank God or fate, or statistical luck, call it whatever you like, that once in my life I was entitled to look at heaven.

I thought that all humans experienced the same chock; it was much later that I was to discover that so many humans are running and running looking here and there for this thing they have heard about and never finding it.

So many humans will experience love, a reasonable love, attraction, passion, but they will experience it without Heaven opening be it just for an instant.

Of course, fifty years later I have read all the explanations, I know that what happened had not reality, it was at that place, and at that time that lightening stuck me.

There are days when I wonder whether being stuck by lightening was not the curse of my life, you are not supposed to see heaven, and you are only supposed to long for it.

I saw heaven.

Notes

It would take more than thirty years, one day I saw a portrait of my grand mother who died around 1918; Then I understood that even before being in Love I was in Love and I was lucky that the Love I was prepared for happened.

Being young I often thought that loving and not being loved, not even being entered into the race form book, was very deceitful of Fate; If would take me twenty years to understand that I got the best part of the deal. She, the loved one, did not quite understand the love men had for her and in her heart she must have wondered why she could not feel anything similar.

Having experienced the Total Idiotic Love, opened a door to heaven and closed it as fast as it had opened it. I am not quite sure whether live on Earth is more or less endurable because you have been given a peep at Heaven.

Quite often I have wondered if Men and Women mean the same feeling when they speak of Love. I have never been convinced that Romeo loved Juliet the way Juliet loved Romeo. Had they lived, he would never have remained faithful would he?

When in total Love there is one sentence which can destroy all happiness and future in a few seconds: That sentence is

“Tell me that you love me more than anything else.”

In the fifties, French authors, marked and branded by the Hitler years, often came back to an analysis of what it meant to “choose”. They were rather unanimous in stating that being forced to “choose” was hell. Few of us are clear enough in our analysis to understand and admit that whatever happens, whatever we proclaim, whatever we wish, there is absolutely no way we can act in any other way than the way that profits us most. To which the listener immediately objects:

“But look at the mother giving her life for her children, look at the soldier giving his life to save his comrades,”

And they do not understand that they have just stated the obvious cases where a human act according to what makes his image the most glowing.

In philosophy there is a rule, but I cannot remember how far back it dates:

“There is no way a human being can act in any other way than the way which enhances him”.

While at first reading it sounds objectionable, it is because the reader is not used to make the difference between the “I am” made of flesh and brain and blood, and the image the “I am” has of itself. The image the “I am” has of itself is far more precious to it than its life and blood. Whatever a human does it always acts to the profit of its image.

We are in the third millennium and it is difficult to explain a world, a world without television, without films, a world where a young hesitant teenager had very vague ideas about the anatomy of a woman, would not even consider having ideas about the differential anatomy of a woman, and would have rather perplexing ideas about what sex could be and how it could be performed.

Young students:

When you are lucky enough as a teacher to have young students who have not yet been exposed to the grammatical games of psychology, it is interesting to see how massively they reject the following game:

I Love	you
You Love	Me
I love Loved	being	Loved	by you
You Love.	being	loved	by me
I love loving	you	being loved	by me
You love	me	loving to.	be loved	by you
Then you can introduce some Booleans variations
I love	you	only
I love	you	now
I love	you	as	never before
I love	you	forever
I love	you	more than”
I love	you	and.	my mother
I love you.	“more	than	my mother
I love you.	more	than	my life
I love	you	unique
I love	you	if.	you love me
And you can combine the Boolean factors.
I love you	only	if.	you love me

And so on.

To which the students revolt very strongly.

For them Love is not a stock that can be traded. The students cannot accept that Love should be analysed the way you analyse the pork belly market at the Commodity Exchange in Chicago.

And things are not going to get any better when you introduce them to the old Transactional Analysis which tries to analyse Love in terms of gain and profit.

Transactional analysis gives the gloomiest view of our most beloved ideas. Have your seen the film "The Queen Titanic". Here is a short summary

He loves her more than his life. She loves him more than her life.

Through their love they are no longer She and He, but “We Love”.

We have the classical trilogy:

He Loves her

She Loves him

Their Love, which at first is a feeling, an emotion, becomes incarnated. In other simpler words, a child is born.

He and she want to celebrate the first anniversary of the birth of the incarnation of their love and they go on a cruise on a marvellous ship called “The Queen Titanic”.

They are cruising peacefully in the Mediterranean basin, one night the Queen Titanic hits a floating mine and starts sinking.

They wake up in terror, it is already very late. He runs around the sinking devastated ship looking for some survival mean while she holds the baby in her arms.

He finds a survival jacket.

He finds one survival jacket.

What should they do?

I suppose that as a play writer I have no option. Tradition demands that the camera captures the dramatic scene where, with tears in his eyes he forces his beloved wife to put on the survival jacket, attaches the baby best he can, and kisses her a long long time while the camera turns around the couple, the spectators seeing in the background the (the word inferno is compulsory in such a script) burning ship and the waves breaking onto the deck.

She does not want to leave him, but he forces her to the side railing and pushes her over board, then he jumps after them without any life jacket.

They start swimming towards the lights they can see far far away, are they lights, they cannot really say.

It is summer time, the air is warm, the sea is warm, but even when the water is nearly twenty degree, the human body gets cold and tired.

They get more and more exhausted, she cannot really swim, both the jacket and the baby are hindering any efficient movement, she is more pushed forward by her husband than swimming while she tries to keep the babies head over the water.

Both realize that they will not make it, that they will drown long before they reach the cost.

Both know that there only survival chance is to drop the baby, to let the husband push her a last time and to let her try to swim to the shore, to let her husband try and swim as long as he can.

What a dramatic film. It was called “Total Love”.

Due to the conventions of Hollywood, as they are about to take the dramatic decision, they are spotted by a helicopter and a ship is called to their rescue.

In real life, the helicopter passes by and sees nothing,

In real life, both He and She cannot accept that their animal survival is superior to the survival of the image of themselves;

Therefore stupidly they continue and die all three of them

In transactional analysis, she should drop the baby, try and save herself, she is “Life”, a baby is dead, a husband is dead, but more babies are possible, more husbands are possible.

But transactional analysis also tells us that she may save her animal life, at the cost of drowning in her mind the fire that sustained her life, her love for Him and for their Child.

She may survive; if she will survive then it will be as a dead Love human, a promising junkie.

You can soon see this film. You will cry a lot.

I should not tell you, but she will meet another man. She will not love her with the total Love she gave to her husband, but she will love him with respect and courage.

A child will be born.

And in the last sequence we shall see the image of the new child and the drowned loved father superimposing.

If we make less than 200 million dollars, then it means that we have had a very bad film maker.

In the follow-up, called “Love II”, we shall see the son growing up to become and adult and fighting all his life with the compulsion he does not understand of becoming a sea rescuer and fighting his total dread of sea and oceans.

In Love II, He flies day and night; his co-pilot is also his faithful friend (we could try a bit of a hint of homosexuality, depending on the mood at that time of the public). He is tormented by recurring nightmares of crashing and drowning. One night as they try to save a sinking life boat, the helicopter crashes.

They jump out of the helicopter just before the crash, both the pilot and the co-pilot are in the sea, but the co-pilot has broken his legs and cannot swim, he can just hold on to the survival lifebuoy, but it is obvious that he will not make it.

The wounded co-pilot then turn to the hero Pilot and tell him that there is only one thing he can do to save them, to save their friendship (love?), is to save himself. The Hero pilot after a long long tearful scene hands over his Glock to his friend who shots himself.

One idiotic scenario writer suggested that when the Hero hands over the Glock to the wounded co-pilot, this one then shoots the Hero!!! We fired the script writer immediately, who then went on to make his own film which became a huge success.

In our story the Hero, using the lifebuoy is able to reach the coast. When interviewed he claims that his co-pilot died as a hero, staying in the helicopter to make it possible for him to jump and save himself.

His girl friend breaks down in tears, and a few months later they are married, they get a baby and never can she understand why her husband is sinking deeper and deeper into depression.

Here we had a couple of scripts, the black one where he swallows his gun, the pink one where he dies giving his live to save a baby in a burning house.

The film was a financial disaster and the producers lost all the money they had gained with Love I

To come back to transactional analysis, it says:

I Love you because it enhances my value.

You love me because it enhances your value

I love you because I gain ????

You love me because you gain ???????

Then it goes on during two hundred pages in the Book called “A simple introduction to Transactional Analysis applied to Love”

You are not going to get any more popular with the students if you ask them to reflect about the concept of "ownership" of Love.

You can lighten the lecture by running the last act of Carmen when Don José kills Carmen because he Loves her. does it make sense?

If it does not make sense why does it happen at least once every hour in this world?

And then you can get yourself really disliked by the students if you introduce them to Biological Analysis.

I love you because this is the way to produce a new living form

(there you cannot confine yourself to 200 pages, let us say 2000 as a starter”

And then if you have not disgusted the students enough you can introduce them to Love and Programming:

Your picture has started the biological program called love aiming at continuing the existence of life.

(how many pages?)

And which one of us, even if we know that this is true) likes to remember that inside his genes, programs are either running or waiting to be triggered;

When my dog sees another dog, his preparatory program inspects whether it is a female or a male.

If the program detest a male it calls up the subroutine “fly or fight”.

And so on.

Do we like to be reminded that we are programmed the same way?

Long before programming was invented and understood, the philosopher had considered that any human being was prepared for one specific love, which probably would have been the love of his mother, her face, her smell, her voice, her eyes, her movements.

The image of lock and key has been much used with a drunken snare.

The image used is that Love is the finding by a key of the locks it fits.

However that is too reductive:

Each one of us is both a lock and a key, Love, the huge love, will be the reciprocal finding of the keys that fits the locks.

Immediately one sees how dangerous the situation is. If there is a lock, then it must be that either that a treasure is buried their or a raving madman is locked inside there. Unlocking it can open the door to all the diamonds in the World but it can as well release all the maddest monsters of the Universe.

As for anyone knows for having come home a dark night when the bulb over the entry door has blown out, having the key that fits the lock does not mean that the key will find its way into the lock. And should this be repeated too often, the key and the lock will wear down until they just fit one another approximately; Worse the lock can be so damaged that it will fit a lot of keys. Or the key can be so damaged that it cannot fit any lock. Or the meeting of the lock and the key can be so brutal that the key brakes into the lock, with the result that this lock can only be thrown away, that the lock will never open again or never close again.

Is it not unfair to forget our Grand Father Darwin?

Darwin shares with Freud the chance of being catalogued as a Total Supreme Genius, evaluation based on their proposed theories, which cannot be proved or unproved. Take a true genius like Newton or Einstein, we can prove that they where nearly right in their descriptions of events and partially right in their proposed explanations and where very much more right than their predecessors, but they also make Science proud as there is no shame in proving that their observations were partial and their explanations a better way to describe the world we live in, but not the ultimate way to describe it.

Let us look at Grand Father Darwin.

What opinion would he have had about Love? Probably a very unromantic opinion.

Romeo is the strongest and most potent amongst the young boys, Juliet offers the highest fertility signs, so it was unavoidable that Romeo should bang Juliet.

As to what happens after the Big Bang, in the Darwin World, really nobody cares.

What would Wagner have thought about Love?

First of all he was very much in favor of it. It is more than likely that he spent his life being in Love, and rereading that sentence I cannot see that it makes him any different from any other man.

Most probably Wagner loved only one woman in his life and tried to find her again and again.

Why it that Wagner is nearly the only one who openly stresses the link between Love and death and instead of being rebuked, his libretti are not sent the waste heap, instead are greatly acclaimed? Is it because we all realize that being in Love is the first step we take in accepting that we will be in Death?

Is it because we all realize than once you enter into the World of Music you exit the Norma Trivial World of dish washing and tax returns or could it be that music triggers what is the best in us, that through music God and humans are now reunited?

Wagner, Mahler, for them separating Love from Death would have made no sense. Death is really the only award which has a measure that dignifies Love. To be in total Love and find yourself in the last act of the opera, washing the dishes and arguing about who is going to go to the Quick Sale shop to get new diapers, it that a worthy end to such a beautiful and sublime story?

Foremost of all creators, God has never separated Love from Death. If death is not the reward of Love, then the creature just go on pushing its life from one miserable day to another even more miserable day.

Even animals while coupling do not appear to realize that this is the moment when they are the most vulnerable to predators. How often have my dogs only avoided death by a miraculous change in the Time Space fabric as they madly in love and in pursuit of the beloved bitch are absolutely unaware when crossing the street of the huge lorry which should have crushed them?

Love has been analyzed and dissected and our beloved Scientists have remarked that the effects of being in Love are strangely similar to the rush of cocaine intake. When in Love the outside world disappears and most of all the fears and dangers of the outside world disappear.

What about Love?

Why skip the theological view of Love:

He Loves Her

She Loves Him

Before He was alone

Before She was Alone

Suddenly they are not alone, not even two

But three

She He Love

And it is this jumping from the state of solitude to the state of Humanity that we call Love that first creates a virtual entity called Love, which is then incarnated into a very real Baby.

Is it not strange then than the theological view is the one that most rejects the idea of Love?

In my country, the letter of Paul to the Corinthians is often quoted. But is it not sad that we have to explain what it means to Love;

Is it not even sadder that Love is reduced to a set of duties? And again we are stuck, if I am a good father, a good mother, a good neighbor, a good worker, a good citizen, but if I do all these things without Love then I am trickily nothing.

Rather depressing.

1 Corinthians 13

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.

If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.

It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.

Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.

It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.

For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears.

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.

Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love

If you have devoted your live to LOVE

Then LOVE is not a teenage feeling

But a set of duty as to the “do” and “don't” that you have respect so as to survive in a community.

And to this set of do and don't they attach a rider that carries you right down to hell:

“Even if you are able to observe the entire “do” and the “don't” perfectly, if you do not have in your heart LOVE, then you are doomed.”

So we have gone the full circle.

Love is what you are supposed to do and not to do.

But I you do and don't do without LOVE, you are doomed.

Love is like a candle

So white, so smooth, so perfect, reaching towards the Sky, anchored on Earth, the candle has only a meaning in the future.

You look at a candle and you love it and you lit it.

The candle burns, you love the light of the candle, you stop the burning of the candle.

When you look now at the candle you have in your eyes the perfection of the candle that was, the flame will never be quite the same, never have quite the same purity.

And you can only light the candle so many times.

Until it is, but a memory.

And you buy a new candle.

Did you notice that the caption is a bit James Bondish,

“You only live twice”

And yet we have been speaking of the only single love we shall have in our life.

So why twice?

You will have guessed;

You always live twice, it does not matter how good and altruist you are, the one you love most and foremost is the image of yourself. If it was not like this, you could never love that woman.

My worry?

When the Universe ends, will my Love end?