“Dan: You think love is simple. You think the heart is like a diagram.
Larry: Have you ever seen a human heart? It looks like a fist, wrapped in blood! Go fuck yourself! You writer! You liar!” – From the movie Closer
“Love is a shameless banner unfurled
Love's an explosion,
Love is the fire of the world
Love is a violent star
A tide of destruction
Love is an angry scar
We see them everywhere. Beautiful hearts, expressing the idea of love. Beautiful, symmetric representations of an uneven, unequal force. What if love is not neat and beautiful? What if love is a war in which all men are losers? What if love is an evil game that is not rigged in your favor? Or, what if love is knowledge, awareness, and truth, the beauty that burst forth from pain….
I’m taking an ethics class… we talked about love… According to the professor, the philosopher is the ultimate erotic. That sounds hot, huh? It means that, since the philosopher is hungry for truth, above all things, and true love is the ultimate truth, then the philosopher is the kinkiest, sexiest, most erotic mofo out there.
And it means everybody else is faking. They are not sexy and they are not romantic. We are not sexy or hot or romantic if we are not looking for truth. We are not erotic if we are not searching for the real. We are not lovers if our hearts are not frolicking after The Grail.
This does not presume that love exists, or that you (or I) will ever find it. But it is a less perverted way to think about the often diluted idea of love. How we are looking for it? Where we are searching?
Love may not exist. It may be the joke of intellectually lazy screenwriters too negligent to wrestle with true questions of humanity so they invent pretty little lies. Or it may be the idea of schizophrenics, the creative matter of manic depressives and the truth of compulsive liars. Love may be requesting a bailout. Love may be premodern. Love may be before our time. Love may be outdated. Love may be sold after 12 on the Home shopping net work for 9.99 in a city near you. (Shipping and handling 1,000,000,000). I guess it’s for those lovers of wisdom to figure out.
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