Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth:
and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to
pronounce it right. (Judges 12:6)
What an odd way to begin a blog on love, you may think. Now, pay attention, you. When T.S. Eliot used epigraphs at the beginning of such great poetry as the "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", "The Portrait of a Lady", and "The Hollow Men", no one who understood the connection and the added dimensions provided by those excerpts complained. Neither should you.
I am aware that such a subject, on my part, is something of a departure from normality. (What am I saying? This is only my fourth entry on my blog; I haven't been doing this long enough to establish any sort of normality) However, I am, at this point, allowed to dabble in a metaphysical concept as broad as love. I know it is not even close to Valentine's Day, but since when should we wait until February to talk about the subject?
Now, I know that should there be made a piece of paper as long as the world, it would not be enough to contain all of the sonnets and essays ever written on the subject; however, I will try my hand at polishing a particular facet of the diamond called Love because, let's be realistic, who will ever be able to scratch its surface?
The subject, as I said before has been touched upon by many different people. However, some of them have had more substantial things to say about it than others. A couple of them include the theorists Martin Buber and Roland Barthes, who agree on the fact that the concept of love does not exist in a vacuum; it needs not only someone who loves but also someone to love (what do you know, Freddie Mercury knew it all along). To paraphrase Barthes, the infinitive form of the word "love" (i.e. "to love") makes absolutely no sense except as a lexical convenience (or "metalinguistic artifice" as Barthes calls it) because it has no subject ("I love you") and no object ("I love you") to give it meaning (see Roland Barthes A Lover's Discourse).
However, I am not content to stop there with the words "I love you." Words do not have innate meaning; that is they receive meaning as we give it to them, which meaning is derived not only from the particular words we choose to put together ("I+LOVE+YOU") but how we are able to express them. The men of Gilead slew 42,000 Ephraimites because they could not say the word Shibboleth in just the right way; by analogy, we might say that "I love you" is a multidimensional shibboleth which must said in exactly the right way. Shakespeare could write as many sonnets as he desired, but if the subject of his affection were Helen Keller, he would need to do better than shouting "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" ("Sonnet 18") from the neighboring rooftop if he wanted her to notice him, let alone reciprocate.
In Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac, we may find ourselves irritated with Roxanne who wished her lover Christian to "speak of love in [his] own words--Improvise! Rhapsodize! Be eloquent!" and treated him coldly when he was unable to do so. But perhaps we should not judge to harshly. Is it too much to ask that people push themselves in their attempts at loving, to go beyond the boundaries of "This is how I feel loved, so I will do this thing" to discover the essence of "this is how he or she feels loved, so I will do that thing"?
Love is a touch, a song, a compliment, an hour spent doing nothing together. We shall never understand it fully in all of its grandeur, its glory, its encompassing omnipotence, and we don't necessarily have to worry about that right now. But we do need to do figure out "what is love to me?" and "what is love to you?"
In conclusion though, I would like to share an excerpt from a letter from John Keats to his fiancee Fanny Brawne. I discovered this letter while preparing for an in-class presentation on John Keats my junior year in college. I found it to be one of the most genuine love letters I think I have ever read. It does not portray the agonies of love in quite the way that Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther does (thank goodness), but it does show a certain genuineness and sincerity as searches for a way to communicate to his love to Fanny.
"I have been astonished that Men could die Martyrs for religion - I have shudder'd at it -
I shudder no more - I could be martyr'd for my Religion - Love is my religion - I could die for that -
I could die for you. My Creed is Love and you are its only tenet." (13 October 1819 "Letter to Fanny Brawne")
(By the way, some of you may recognize the words "Love Is My Religion" from a Ziggy Marley song.)
The words "I love you", if we want them to have real meaning and significance in our lives, we must write them in something besides water or blowing sands. "I love you" is not a one-size-fits-all phrase. The medium for expressing love is often just as important as the thought itself, so make love understood and make it last.
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