Love
“Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won't adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice. Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet. That would mean that security is out of the question. The words "make" and "stay" become inappropriate. My love for you has no strings attached. I love you for free.”
― Tom Robbins, Still Life with the Woodpecker
“More in love with desire than the desired!”
Understandably so we have taken a long time to raise the matter of love. After all you can't really blame us, it has duped all of us since the beginning of time. People have tried all sorts of things on how to handle love, but somehow those who did maybe figured they will not share it with the rest of us and the others well , they never figured it out. So in the absence of that we keep searching. Nietszche, one who suffered greatly from love, gives us an interesting perspective about the source or object of love. Are we more in love with the idea of love than the lover? Do we just project all our fantasies on an innocent bystander and then get heart broken when that person falls short of that? Is the supply of love stored in ourselves or in the other that we are attracted to? If it is in us, then that means we can really fall in love with anybody we choose, meaning love doesn't choose us but we choose it. Of course from experience it doesn't feel at all that we have any choice in the matter. Usually we feel like victims of love, hence the manifestation of cupid and his bow, striking people randomly to his heart’s content . Most of the time we get taken in by love's web and struggle to find the way out. It doesn't feel at all that we are staring inside ourselves at our supply of love but on the contrary it feels like we are staring into the eyes of the other desperately seeking for his/her supply of love towards us. But of course I understand also that I, for one, love love, I love being in love , I love being loved, and living the ultimate love story is one I call my purpose in life.
xx
Salander
“It's quite an undertaking to start loving somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment right at the start where you have to jump across an abyss: if you think about it you don't do it.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre,
Every time I think of LOVE, I hear in the back of my mind “LOVE is the ultimate outlaw”. This comes into mind because the first time I was in love, (that first unforgettable time that you loose yourself in the other and you don’t care about self-preservation, you just live with the only purpose to please the beloved and be pleased by him/her), I was reading Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins. And in it I had read somewhere in the pages of that book that LOVE is the ultimate outlaw. In other words LOVE doesn’t obey any rules.
There were many other sentences in that book dedicated to LOVE and some of them stayed for me forever and some I forgot. But my first LOVE provided me with what exactly LOVE should provide each one of us: the promise that every time I am in love with another I become more capable of understanding myself better and at the same time I understand that other too. It’s through the beloved that I become capable of reaching myself, deeper, greater.
Of course there is no denying that LOVE is capable of raising us to the skies and breaking us into pieces too, but still at both ends LOVE remains intact, meaning the feeling of LOVE, the experience of LOVE is almost unchangeable each time we fall in love and that's the reason we shouldn't resist it.
xx
Alice
That moment, right at the beginning, where you have to jump across the abyss? I remember that feeling ,or more precisely I remember the feeling of falling, falling into the abyss. For the longest time I had never paid attention to the expression "falling in love". For me it was just a synonym with the word LOVE I guess, or perhaps I never bothered to ask the question why it was called “falling in love” as if there is a big hole called love and we fall inside it. But we don't just fall inside it and then it's done. We keep falling and falling like Alice in the rabbit hole. It's a long way down and it doesn't seem to have an end. There is no platform or ground that you hit, you just keep falling, as if it's a process not a destination; a journey.
I don't think we are aware when we start falling at first, we just realize at some point that we are falling and possibly have been falling for quiet some time. And funny enough there “really” is a physical sensation of actually falling. It's like you are loosing your balance, like your heart is falling down into your diaphragm and then into your intestines and it makes you feel slightly queasy and lightheaded. There is a thrill, an excitement tinged with a lot of fear and doubt and resistance but the road is slippery and you can't hold on to something and stop the momentum. For a tiny second you almost feel as if there is a moment where you can pull yourself up from it, if you wanted to you could pull yourself up with your own bootstraps and do the impossible, pull yourself out just like when you have a nightmare and know you are having a nightmare you super humanly wake yourself up from it somehow and it feels like you are pulling your soul out of one universe and bringing it back home. But it is a split second and in that moment there is a relishing of the illusion that you have a choice; that you are in control; and if you wanted to you could stop all this. And while you are lost in this thought the little window of opportunity closes and the moment passes, the mud slide has caught you and is rushing you downwards towards the great Niagara Falls, with no life vest, in a tiny kayak, just you against Nature, and then you are over.
xx
Salander