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i want to look inside your head

2/14/2011

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love 
noun, verb, loved, lov·ing.–noun
1.a profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person.

here it is... the day we "love"... it's a good thing there is a holiday in place so we don't forget- i've done a little research and turns out there's all kinds of things you need to know about loving if you wanna do it by the book: HOW TO LOVE  

In Diane Ackerman's "A Natural History of Love" she writes:  

"As a society, we are embarrassed by love. We treat it as if it were an obscenity. We reluctantly admit to it...After all, love requires the utmost vulnerability. We equip someone with freshly sharpened knives; strip naked; then invite she him to stand close. What could be scarier?" 

and she describes Proust's relationship with love and time.

"... Every face reminds him of hers. Every object is a trip wire to an explosively painful memory. She is perpetually present in her absence. And that really is Proust's point about love, that it doesn't exist in real time, only in anticipated time or remembered time. The only paradise is the one that's been lost. Love requires absence, obstacles, infidelities, jealousy, manipulation, outright lies, pretend reconciliations, tantrums, and betrayals. Meanwhile, the lovers fret, hope, agonize, and dream. Torment whips them to a higher level of feeling, and from that mental froth comes love. Love is not a biological instinct, not an evolutionary imperative, but a feat of the imagination which thrives on difficulty."

Much of the book concerns the evolution of love... it wasn't until the middle ages that: 

" They honored pairs who felt passionate love for each other. Until then, love between men and women was thought to be sinful and vulgar. As often as not, it led to madness. And it was always degrading. To portray love as majestic, an ideal to be searched for, was truly shocking. To accept that sexual desire might be a natural part of love, but that the total feeling was more spiritual, an intense one-ness, didn't jibe with classical teachings. After all, in Greek tragedy, love was an affliction, a horror that led to cruelty and death. For theologians, human love was a poor reflection of the real thing, which could be found only in spiritual rapture. 

... and the ways in which we as a society like to pretend we are and aren't in control of our love and lust. 

The love-potion is an alibi for passion. It enables each of the two unhappy lovers to say: "You see, I am not in the least to blame; you see, it's more than I can help." 
I don't think we will ever understand "love" relationships because to do so would require us to understand the inner workings of the human brain... and if one can go so far the "soul" ... it seems that it's always just out of reach... like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow... like the "light" people see in near death experiences... the existence of aliens... there's just too many unknowns to explain why we collectively act like lunatics in search of "love"- But, wouldn't this whole dance we're doing be kinda boring if we understood it. Love is strange... and I like it that way.

"The course of true love never did run smooth." ~Shakespeare

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