Love (in the Negative)

Love in the contemporary idiom evokes semantic constellations few words can match; not just for its breadth, whether in users or in connotation, but so for the depth of meaning its adherents grant. Aye, the first sense that comes to mind is that deep reservoir of feeling, the romantic sense:

All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
All are but ministers of Love,
And feed his sacred flame.

And we, children of the romantics, cannot help but be swayed by these lofty sentiments. Unless, of course, we turn against the sentiment with the sharp sword of irony, but let us be naive.

Perhaps its unfair to Coleridge, for whom thoughts, passions, and delights equally minister, to derive from him Love as an emotion, Love as a feeling, if the highest thereof. For this is what we say, no? He loves me, he loves me not: a question whether all impulses of soul and sense have thrilled the guileless knight. Love is the language of the immediate, Eros who sways one's soul without the burden of hesitation. No space to will or think.

Love here is the chaste sister of Lust and Power, though I fear she has consumed them both.

At one time (so we tell ourselves), Love was not of the body but of the soul. But then the soul died, and man became psychosomatic. And in that golden age, even unrequited love was mediated through the rituals of courtship. But we're free men and women now--liberté, égalité, fraternité--and so deprived the protection of propriety, all relations have become the domain of master and slave.

Love is Lust and Love is Power, and what is all existence but the will thereto?

When Love is all, Love is nothing. So easily does it become a meaningless signifier. And we speak of all our hyperbolized likes as loves. And we pretense to say "I love you" as an ephemeral sign of social commitment.

This is not to play the cynic, to deny a true Love as the words may go. Rather, 't is a negative attempt to restore love to its proper virtues by first turning it away from the vices to which it has fallen.

The goal is, namely, to rediscover a Love that's rooted in charity with its handmaids of faith and hope: confident, joyful, and emancipating. I turn to the specious romantic, William Blake:

Love to faults is always blind

Always is to joy inclind

Lawless wingd & unconfind

And breaks all chains from every mind

Love (in the positive) deserves, I think, it's own explicative post. Forthcoming, surely.

Troubled Spirits

When the heart wanders fitfully

What love is there to find

With credence giv'n to every start

Heart's patience turns to mind

To know the path of least resist

To know the greater will

Contemplating hazard's course

What truer dreams could kill

In silence whispers tragedy

In solace refuge lust

A tempted fate to try the date

An end to surely bust

And wither console comfort us

As thither shame us might

Where virtue is its own reward

Beside what guiding light

When troubled spirits turn, my love

What jaded tresses want

In consort to a sullen need

Beheld to treach'rous cant

As turns, as spurns a wounded heart

And spreads the vile ill

Remove me from this fate, my love

Submit mine to your will