Sunday, May 27, 2012

Poison Love

Love is, perhaps, the most dangerous thing in the world. It comes softly, easily - as though a complex chemical cocktail planted in your pocket by a ragman on the street. The ragman hasn't stolen from you but he's planted something loaded on you, like the seven year death touch. 

Love opens your heart. The ragman exposes you. He soils your soul's sterility with "the dirtiest of all dirty words....promising." It's overpowering. It's too strong for any of us. Humans in love are like toddlers playing with matches and sticks of dynamite. The cosmic farce seems to be this: to open your heart to love and to be loved is to risk serious pain and suffering, but to shut your heart off from that same love is to choose immediate impotent death. We seem to be stuck between a rock and a hard place. 

Sweet Poison,  Jose Schmersen, Jakarta
Waking echoes of daydreams of the wide oceans of waterfall love that my soul knows it needs to stand beneath to be whole, brings me the nearest thing to what might rightly be called "alive" that I think a person can now be. Returning to reality to find the distinct lack of the same - as if waking to find the quite real protrusion of an arrow's feathered tail coming from my chest and being greeted by the one I'd loved to say they'd put it there, and weren't the feathers beautiful- strangles the same within an inch of being "alive." I do not mean to say that I have been uniquely accosted by this arrow- we all have, and have all been the marveling idiot of an archer as well, which is worse. The point is that we need love but cannot handle it, as starving east african children need food, but cannot digest it.

C.S. Lewis suggests that really, what we call love is most of the time just the longing to be loved, and that loves which we are left to manage alone become malevolent gods, and actually exist as complicated forms of obsessive hatred. 

I think you can look at most tragedies in the world, whether widespread political-economic tragedies, or simple domestic ones, and rightly say, "They didn't manage their love well." Or, "I wish we could have loved each other better." We all came to know love before we understood it. We were born here, giving and receiving love before we knew what it meant. Before we knew how it would devastate us.


This is the miracle. That for every shattering of our hearts, for every bodily gasp that can't bear to abstain from touching the beloved even one more moment, for every instinct to to scrap it all and start over- to run away with the wind and "to do it right this time" like my dad used to say- we've already known love. By contrast every memory of a sweet giving smile from a mother, every rushing into a place we called home- elated to embrace people we called family, every soaring butterfly of romantic love in which you though you might somehow BE the other person because you were so connected, the sound of raucous deeply knowing laughter shared with a friend, is an unthinkable miracle. The fact that we have any ability to see, welcome, understand, and bless each other in any capacity is otherworldly. It is not from us, but it is through us and for us. I fear it and long for it more than any other thing.

Love, affinity and affection present as a sweet glowing child, and left to us, almost always morph into a pandemic titan. Nothing, save omnipotence can subdue it to fruitfulness- but it must be done. Love upsets me. It makes my pride into a disgusting feeding baby bird, and saves me. Love does not suffer sterility. It agitates my personal space.   Love is poison, but it's an antidote. Without it, I am dead already. With it, I am out of control - at the mercy of another. In danger. In love.


This is the first in a series of posts about love. Read the next post, "Medicinal Love" here.

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