what is love?

i wondered that tonight as i sipped a glass of wine at my open window, staring out at the twinkling crisp of night, listening to an album from last summer, on the speakers from an old computer, glancing over the books and movies cluttered on a rickety old shelf i scrounged up in my Chicago apartment, an old black n white film playing silently in the corner of my mind.

i don't think about love a lot these days. there's enough in trying to keep up with the daily realities and physical burdens of life at Miami to fret about love. i'd say i'm a non-believer, i distrust it, hate its power, would rather look than touch it.

the only reason i think about it now is b/c my literary theory professor defined love as "free will" and that has been troubling me ever since. it seems that were love to be defined that way, it would make for a lot of ppl in unrequited love, quite possibly the most ripping agony imaginable. i would know, i'm quite the expert on unrequited love. but aren't we all? how often do 2 ppl fall in love equally with one another at precisely the same time, to say that they are both freely in love with one another? it's hardly probable that love happens that way, more likely it's a game of courtship rituals played out until one side dominates over the other and the losing side relinquishes and gives in.

thus finding this "free will" definition rather odd, i searched the dictionary, and found this:
-an intense feeling of deep affection
-a deep romantic or sexual attachment to someone
-a formula for ending an affectionate letter

it was the latter i was most intrigued by. apparently, love can be reduced to no more than the word on the page, a courtesy extended out of formality or social pressure. yet, at the same time, an intense feeling. deep affection. the most intimate of physical contacts. one and the same, it seems...

somewhere in here i could insert some Foucauldian analysis of devotion conventions, the culturally structured conception of love that gives it such irreducible power, its dominance of the individual and the recurrent agony suffered by those who refuse or fail to explode this system of thought. i could employ a Derridean deconstruction of the words and expectations surrounding "love."

but instead, i will leave you with the words of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who said that love is the thing we don't have that we are trying to give to someone who doesn't exist. in other words, a null set between the self and a nonexistent other....so sad...but canonical post-freudian psychology!

i think i like the Taoist phraseing better, when Lao Tzu wrote that "tao called tao is not tao."

love,
stephan!e