Richard Jeffrey Newman

When I was in my twen­ties, a friend and I used to talk all the time about how impov­er­ished the Eng­lish vocab­u­lary for love is, not just in the sense that we use the word love to talk about our feel­ings for peo­ple, ani­mals, food, movies, song, sports, and more; but also, and more sig­nif­i­cantly, in the sense that we use this word, usu­ally with­out a mod­i­fier, to talk about very dif­fer­ent kinds of inti­mate rela­tion­ships between and among peo­ple. When I say I love my son, for exam­ple, is that the same love I refer to when I say I love my wife or my sis­ter, my friend, my men­tor, or my stu­dent? If not, this friend and I would ask our­selves, then shouldn’t each of those “loves” be sig­ni­fied by a dif­fer­ent word? The fact that you can mod­ify love with var­i­ous adjec­tives – sex­ual, roman­tic, fil­ial, pla­tonic, divine – didn’t sat­isfy us because, while it was clear that, say, my fil­ial love for my sis­ter ought to exclude sex­ual love, my love for a girl­friend ought just as clearly to exceed it. I think we might vaguely have been aware of the dis­tinc­tions between and among agape, eros, and philia, but since nei­ther I nor my friend were Chris­t­ian — and just about the only con­texts in which I had seen those terms dis­cussed were Chris­t­ian — we did not think of them as a frame­work for answer­ing our questions.

On the other hand, if love is love and noth­ing else, if it is not divis­i­ble into dif­fer­ent types depend­ing on its object and cir­cum­stance, then the ques­tion of what we mean when we say we love some­one becomes at once more straight­for­ward and more com­plex. What do my love for my par­ents, my friends, my lovers, my chil­dren all have in com­mon? As I said in Part 2 of this series, for me, love is an accep­tance in my life of their full exis­tence as peo­ple sep­a­rate from me. This is true even of my love for my son. Yes, he is depen­dent on me for room and board and many, many other mate­r­ial and non-material things; yes, I set lim­its on his life and expect from him cer­tain behav­iors as evi­dence of, say, his matu­rity, and I set con­se­quences when he doesn’t meet those expec­ta­tions. The fact, how­ever, that I have made a com­mit­ment to his phys­i­cal, emo­tional, psy­cho­log­i­cal, and socio-economic well being, and to his hap­pi­ness, is not the same thing as see­ing in him an exten­sion of myself, of liv­ing vic­ar­i­ously through him, of see­ing in him the ful­fill­ment (or not) of my own per­sonal aspirations.

I have come to this way of think­ing about love over the course of a lot of years, but I make no claim to its being any­thing other than my way of under­stand­ing what it means for me to love some­one. I find it use­ful, mean­ing­ful, ful­fill­ing, because it allows me to dis­tin­guish between how I act towards the peo­ple I love, which – no mat­ter how hard I may try to make it oth­er­wise – is not always lov­ing and can be moti­vated by an agenda that has more to do with me than with them, and my over­all com­mit­ment not to make them into/treat them as exten­sions of myself. In The Con­fer­ence of the Birds, Farid al-din Attar also wants to dis­tin­guish what we mean when use the word love to refer to this kind of per­sonal agenda and what love itself really is. One bird, for exam­ple, refuses to fol­low the hoopoe on the jour­ney to find the Simorgh, the jour­ney of enlight­en­ment, because he believes he already knows what love is, and he can­not bear to be sep­a­rated from what he loves:

“Great hoopoe,” said another bird, “my love
Has loaded me with chains, I can­not move.
This ban­dit, Love, con­fronted me and stole
My intel­lect, my heart, my inmost soul–
The image of her face is like a thief
Who fires the har­vest and leaves only grief.
With­out her I endure the pangs of hell,
Rav­ing and curs­ing like an infi­del;
How can I travel when my heart must stay
Lapped here in blood?” (110)

And then later:

 My pain exceeds all cure or rem­edy;
I’ve passed beyond both faith and blas­phemy–
My blas­phemy and faith are love for her;
My soul is her abject idol­ater–
And though com­pan­ion­less I weep and groan,
My friend is sor­row; I am not alone.
My love has brought me count­less mis­eries,
But in her hair lie count­less mys­ter­ies;
With­out her face, blood chokes me, I am drowned,
I’m dust blown aim­lessly across the ground. (110−111)

It’s not an uncom­mon feel­ing. You meet some­one and, for what­ever rea­son, you’re hooked; you do every­thing you can not to be away from her or him; and when you are away, it is a kind of mis­ery because the rest of your life pales in com­par­i­son. I don’t think any­one who’s older than a teenager, and who is hon­est with them­selves, mis­takes this feel­ing for love, though, and Attar’s hoopoe, at first glance, appears to be no different:

The hoopoe said: “You are the pris­oner of
Appear­ances, a super­fi­cial love;
This love is not divine; it is mere greed
For flesh — an ani­mal, instinc­tive need.
To love what is defi­cient, trapped in time,
Is more than fool­ish­ness, it is a crime–
And blas­phe­mous the strug­gle to evade
That per­fect beauty which can never fade. (111)

On the one hand, of course, yes. The bird who can­not bring him­self to leave his beloved, who has given over to her face the power to steal him from him­self, to the degree that he, metaphor­i­cally speak­ing, chokes and drowns on his own blood, is clearly more con­cerned with him­self, with his needs, than with her. Yet the hoopoe does not say this is not love, that it is, for exam­ple, lust. Rather, he says, sim­ply, that it is not a divine love and that, because it is directed at “what is deficient/trapped in time,” it is a love that has been reduced to “mere greed/for flesh.” The under­ly­ing impulse of this bird’s love/greed, in other words, is no dif­fer­ent than the impulse that dri­ves one towards “that per­fect beauty which can never fade.” Both are a desire for union, to be absolutely insep­a­ra­ble from the beloved, though the desire for one­ness with God is (accord­ing to Attar) the only prop­erly directed one, since its object is not some­thing trapped in time and there­fore never fully pos­sessed, but rather “the absent, unseen Friend” (111) who is beyond possession.

» Read the rest of this entry «