What is Love?

Love.  What is it?  Is it rational? Controllable? Unrealistic? Desirable? Definable?  These are the questions posed during class discussion.  When I ask myself what love is, I think of Bo Burnham's song, "Love Is..."  He lists a series of--admittedly kooky--love analogies.  So I've decided to try defining love as demonstrated by my own experience and beliefs, Poe's short stories, and The Shining.

Love is…hoping that your second dead wife will be resurrected as your first dead wife.

Love is…ransacking your beloved’s grave and pulling her teeth from her “still breathing—still palpitating—still alive!” body so as to still have a piece (or thirty-two) of her with you (20).

Love is...an immeasurable unit of measure.  I refer here, of course, to the RENT song “Seasons of Love,” wherein we are told to measure our lives in love.  But how do we measure that love?  In the number of people we love or who love us? In how often we have sex, or how good that sex is on a scale of “Is it over yet?” to “Oh, God YES”?  In how long our relationships last?  In how willing we are to die for someone?  In how likely that dying is to save that someone from the Killing Curse?  In how willing we are to feign interest in the other person’s obsessions?  In what that love creates: children, new families, poems, songs, art, friendships?

Love is…safety and danger.  Putting your heart out there, at the risk of getting broken, until it finds somebody, full of bubble wrap and packing peanuts, where it will be treasured forever. 

Love is…staying with your abusive husband because your son loves him.  *screeeech!* Wait, what?   Alright, Wendy.  So Danny loves Daddy.  And you love Danny.  And you want Danny to be happy and a divorce would not make Danny happy.  But did you not notice the bit where Danny is not happy with the threat of divorce looming over his tiny little head?  And did you not notice that having a broken arm is not mountains of smiles and rainbows?  So yeah, a divorce would upset Danny for a while. Probably a long while.  But eventually, he’d get better.  And seeing Daddy try to kill Mommy takes a lot more visits to the shrink than a simple divorce does.   So love yourself, Wendy.  Love yourself enough to choose something better.  And love Danny.   Love Danny enough to put his safety before his happiness, and trust that the happiness will work itself out.  And love Jack enough to say that alcohol and anger have no place in your family, that he can be better if he really tries.

Love is...upsetting your son to save him from your abusive husband.

Love is...a study of contradictions.

Love is…comfort and tears and backrubs and post-it notes and bedtime stories and hugs. 

Love is…the most powerful thing in the world.              

Love is…moving to a creepy sentient hotel so your husband can get his shit together.

And yes, “love is getting really comfortable and peeing in the pool” (Burnham).

I do not like Edgar Allan Poe.  I do not like his poems, I do not like his short stories, and I do not like him. I never have.

 “The Bells” always annoyed me; the rhythm, the rhyming (oh, God, the rhyming), the endless repetitions (“From the bells, bells, bells, bells, / bells, bells, bells –” (12-13) Shut up about the bloody bells, already!).  I’ve always thought that if Poe wasn’t insane before he wrote it, and he must have been, then he was certainly insane after.  Just reading it is enough to drive me up a wall, and I didn’t have to write the bloody thing. 

“The Raven” always reminds me of a guy I went to high school with.  He was a big Poe fan.  He used to sneak up on people and start reciting The Raven all creepy like in their ears.  Every time I’m forced to read this poem, I can hear him whispering to me, and I have to check to be sure he’s not lurking somewhere in the room.  I try to avoid it at all costs. 

“The Tell-Tale Heart” gives me the heebie-jeebies.  I mean, the narrator killed the old man he loved just because he had a cataract.  “I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him,” he says (193).  Well, at least no one can say they saw him quarrel with his charge prior to the murder.  I think part of my discontent with this tale is his own uncertainty in his motive.  “It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain,” he says (193).  But then he theorizes, “I think it was his eye!” (193)  Initially, he does not know what his motive was.  Then, he puts forth the eye as a possibility.  Then, he proceeds to use the eye as his obvious and definitive reason for killing the old man.  “It was not the old man who vexed me, but this Evil Eye” (193).  This story is told in past tense, in retrospect.  If he knew this during the act of stalking and destroying the eye, why is he showing uncertainty of motive in the exposition?  This, perhaps more than the insanity, leads me to distrust the narrator. 

            As for Poe himself, I have always found it disturbing that he married his thirteen year old first cousin when he was twice her age.  Add to that that for many years they thought of each other as siblings.  He referred to his aunt as “our Mother” and Virginia as “Sis” or “Sissy” (Wagenknecht 183).

            Yet I have learned that Virginia and Edgar loved each other dearly.  I have also learned that Maria Clemm, Poe’s aunt/mother-in-law, was “absolutely devoted” to him and “cared for him with a maternal solicitude” deeper than any he had experienced before.  In return for Maria’s regard, Poe “was closer to Maria than to anyone else he ever knew” and held an “intense emotional attachment” for her (Meyers 60).  In light of such knowledge, I must amend my opinion of his character.  He may have married a child, he may have married his cousin, he may have been a drunkard and a louse, but he had to have had some redeeming qualities for such deep affection to be shared.

            I went home the weekend before the Poe discussions.  While there, I argued with my mother about the dress I will have to wear for my sister’s upcoming wedding.  I stormed away from her, claiming that I had homework to do, though I had no intention of being productive.  But I sat in my room, picked up my Poe book, flipped to “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and read the entire thing out loud, and with élan, to boot.   I poured myself into the reading; “why will you say that I am mad?” I sobbed, feeling every moment of betrayal with the narrator (193).  “‘Villains!’ I shrieked, ‘dissemble no more!  I admit the deed!—tear up the planks!—here, here!—it is the beating of his hideous heart!’” (197) Why, I just felt the stress melt away. 

It was this that showed me that Poe is actually quite likeable in all of his madness.  He grants us the catharsis we cannot reach in our own lives.  As I lived through the experience of killing the old man, my own urges to strangle my mum—or more satisfactorily, my sister—drifted away.

I might even give “The Bells” another read.  Who knows, maybe I’ll come away sane.

Meyers, Jeffrey. Edgar Allan Poe: His Live and Legacy. First. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000. Print.

Wagenknecht, Edward. Edgar Allan Poe: The Man Behind the Legend. New York: Oxford University Press, 1963. Print.

In the movie Fight Club, Tyler asks the narrator, “How much can you know about yourself, you've never been in a fight?”  This question reminded me of a Firefly quote from the episode “War Stories.”  In this episode, Shepherd Book is talking to Simon about a dictator named Shan Yu.  Book quotes Shan Yu as saying, "Live with a man 40 years. Share his house, his meals. Speak on every subject. Then tie him up, and hold him over the volcano's edge. And on that day, you will finally meet the man."   

So I ask myself: When do we really meet our true selves? How do we know we’ve done so?  And is it different when we are trying to meet someone else?  Do we meet ourselves when we’re in a fight? When we’re hanging over a volcano, about to die?  Or can we meet our true selves when we are kind to others? When we work to decrease world suck and increase awesome?

Fight Club’s narrator lives in a haze of insomnia.  He is alive, but not living.  When he gets into a fight, his inner self, Tyler, comes out.  (As I understand it, Tyler is Jack’s “imaginary friend” who says and does all the things Jack wishes he could do.  I could be wrong here, though, as I haven’t seen the end of the movie.)  So when we have a surge of adrenalin, as when we are in a life-or-death situation like hanging over a volcano, our true selves come out.  

Quotes, Quotes, Quotes

In class, Suzanne asked us to write down several quotations from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance.  These are mine.

“The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried” (80).  This reminds me of the Maryanne Williamson quote, which I think someone mentioned in class, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us most. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and famous?' Actually, who are you not to be?” 

“Do not think the youth has no force because he cannot speak to you and me” (80).  I think this one ties in really well with the first, in that both speak of underestimations.  Here, they are particularly dangerous because they carry hints of the low opinion of society.  When people are assumed to have “no force” because they are young, gay, black, poor, female, disabled...their force, their voice is stolen.  We can often achieve great things in the face of adversity, but sometimes adversity becomes too oppressive to overcome.  It could be argued that Emerson is wrong here, that the “youth” truly has no force when he cannot speak.  How can anyone have any power if eir voice has been stolen by eir oppressors?

“No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.  Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it” (81).  I agree that good and bad are subjective terms, and that having wavering definitions of good and bad can get messy.  If something is good one day but bad the next, then how can we know if what we are doing is right?  I’m not sure how I feel about using our selves as standards of law, though. 

“Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love” (81).  I absolutely love this one because of all of the force contained in those eight words.  

"Why can't we talk like we used to?"



“It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude” (81).  I often have trouble with this quote.  I care too much what other people think of me, which often leads to my compromising my true self.  I am like a chameleon in that my speech patterns, vocabulary, mannerisms, and even statements of opinion change depending on whom I am with.  One of the hardest things for me to do is talk to my cousin Neil.  I admire him greatly for his unabashed quirkiness and thorough knowledge on his wide range of interests.  I can happily sit for hours and listen to him talk about Chinese politics, walking around Chicago alone at night, or which Harry Potter actors have improved the most over the course of the movies.  But there always comes a point when he stops, looks me square in the eyes, and asks “what do you think?” And then my mind goes blank.  It is always at this moment when I realize that I don’t know what I think.  I could agree with him, or repeat a snippet of conversation from discussing the same topic with some friends, but I know he will always see right through me and peel back all the layers of bullshit until he is content that the thoughts I am putting forth are truly my own.  So instead I change the subject and ponder the question on my own until I can find the words to express myself. 

“speak what you think to-day in words as hard as cannon balls, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day” (82).  This quote always makes me think of politicians, and politicians always make me think of this quote.  I find it annoying that people rail against politicians for voting one way on a particular bill, but voting the other way when a similar bill comes up some months later.  Do these people not realize that politicians are human,  not robots, that opinions can—in a moment or gradually—be swayed, that minds can change?  I would rather the Powers That Be speak, vote, and act according to what they believe to be in the best interests of the people they represent, even if those beliefs change, rather than continuing to support ideas they no longer believe to be right or good.