Showing posts with label Love. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Love. Show all posts

Sunday, November 5, 2017

"Forever Changes" was released 50 years ago!

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Love

Love is one of our most compelling subjects because it seems to be a form of insanity--a state having everything with attraction and resulting behaviors that contradict any claims of human beings being rational creatures at all times. It goes against the Libertarian ideal that our minds are knowable and that self-interests , our gut-instinct for survival and sustaining our emotional/economic/spiritual niche. Love , whether one takes a biochemical approach or gives credence to providential intervention, quite handily makes most of us act like crazy people.

It's a beautiful thing, of course and indeed, and spreading the love is a hippie and Christian delight, but one cannot spread a feeling of well-being at will. Love , like accidents, like disease, like natural disaster, merely happens. It is not something that can be predicted, calibrated, inventoried on a spread sheet. And when it does happen, when someone becomes so afflicted--yes, afflicted-- the energy isn't likely to lend itself to something that will be the stuff of friendly contagion.

What's wrong with being crazy in love, to love with crazy abandon? Nothing, so long as no one gets hurt, no one dies, everyone lives happily ever after. The fact of the matter, though, is that too many black eyes, broken ribs, shattered arms and fatal knife and gunshot wounds are the result of people who were crazy in love to the point of permanently off-the-hook obsession. The downside of love is that in its most intense form it is the escalation of self-centeredness, the belief that one's gratification excludes the needs or desires of all others, even the rights of the object of one's affection--and too often the things that threaten an afflicted individual's cherished relationship is met with violence. Not a good thing.Love hurts, love kills, love nurtures, love sustains. As with anything that can inspire or make you deranged, one will often wonder after the fire and intensity have gone, after one surveys the consequences of their mad pursuit, whether such an ordeal was worth it. But self-knowledge often avails us not at all; we would all do it again, in a heart beat, in a heart beat/