We Love Ergo We Live
           Ubi Sunt

Poets love. Everybody loves. The greatest of the three Christian Virtues, the other two being Faith and Hope, Love is at once patient and kind. A continuation of our mother’s affection love flows naturally from our hearts the same spiritual love endowed upon humankind since the dawn of light, repeated eons over, made sure is seeded firmly in our souls before the umbilical cord is severed.

One of many meanings and shades of it but one that is commonly known the dictionary defines love as a feeling of strong attraction and deep attachment to someone sexually or otherwise. That someone usually is taken as the  “object”, a desire, one’s wish, a goal. Not anything inanimate like a stone but a live person, someone  s/he  wishes to share love with, the “object” of an affectation without the overtones or undertones of guilt. Someone to touch who reciprocates in kind, to make love with sans permission being granted but is felt as consensual - not having a lawyer or a priest present in the bedroom.

Objectified

Love reciprocated is the most exciting feeling anyone can experience
sexually or otherwise. How can someone get excited if the “object” is other than in the form of a persona, an image and character that is likable? “Object” maybe is not the right word.  But certainly one is not thinking to get sensually aroused  from a stone or a brain when making love.  I feel the use of the word “object” in this case is strongly related to love by definition at the very least, a romance in the making, a desire to make love and be loved in return, a truly deep feeling of affection wanted to be expressed with the one you love. Lest I be misconstrued, this is not an attempt to justify objectification of a beloved person. Maybe a better word is “inspiration”. Like in “S/he is the inspiration of my love.”  We need to use a word that does not connote objectification when we express our love to someone.

On the other hand sex for sex’s sake is entirely a different matter. Between two or more consenting adults it could really be entirely a different thing, even devoid of love, purely for pleasure. Done with the sex act the couple(s) can call it a day and have a nice dinner - “see you next time”, perhaps never - depends.

I can see how the word “love” or “object” is now taken as one more additional sense or synonym for “harassment” as it all depends on how the act of love was conducted or consummated. Not being insensitive to sexual harassment, a despicable non-consensual sex act, the current front and center state of affairs in the news– now seemingly becoming a watershed– begs the question about asking a permission to make love, by sex, between two persons who love each other, married or not. In fact many believe this should be the case all along, in marriage or any relationship. But the romance, the spontaneity, the surprises, the “many splendored thing” of love–  things that make it mysterious and tantalizing– where have all they gone? Or do these matter anymore? Traditions change I admit. After all this is the 21st Century– the Neo-Enlightenment or the Neo-Age of Reason some say  but definitely “the robotic century”.

Love has always been complicated and elusive and misunderstood for the most part. It is like a color wheel. The colors as you may well know have different shades and meanings that easily could get involved. Equated with sex love gets more complex and sensitive. Small wonder the slightest friendly nonchalant pat on the shoulder or a friendly eye contact could now be anything but - a lust hidden behind, a dirty old man trick, a cheap thrill. In other words, a harassment. Love has now come out of the closet so to speak and revealed its darker shade, the ugly rough texture, the other side of the moon that’s always there but never seen. It’s been covered up for as long as Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden. We all know about the bad apple and the serpent but we ignored them. After all love is inherent to mankind, evil by nature is not thus mankind is incapable of wrongdoing. This we hold as a guiding precept. We kept saying “love is all we need”. And we praise love with beautiful prose and poetry, romantic rhymed and metered verses, songs of eternal devotions. We have love tragedies and operas too. We have Venuses, gods and goddesses of love. Drunk we are with love like Priapus. Innocent we remain for eternity until today when “love” came out naked in droves without a doubt will continue to come out, likely more painful and humiliating.  Were the chivalrous social conducts in fact only pretexts to an end which is sex? Wrongdoing truly is not inherent to humankind?

The other side of the NewMoon is Full Moon

I still maintain my naïveté. I still say “Love is all we need.” Transitive and intransitive, love acted and felt, for better and for worse. Better to have loved and lost than not loved at all, Alfred Tennyson. “Take a chance in telling the truth up front and learn the lessons for a better life and love relationship.”, (read somewhere). This is not a new concept. Judging from the current number of people on Earth this is what most people do. We continue to make love, we continue to need one another to survive. We ask, we get and give consent. Thus Poetry, from single word lines to full epic narratives for ages, objectified feelings, the whole spectrum of emotions, warts and all, metaphors, similes, meters, free forms, etc., because we continue to need one another - we continue to make love, to love life. To live with hope, with faith. To know and accept that the other side of the dark moon is a lovely bright silver full moon.

Ah... ubi sunt... where have all the romance gone? The Knight in the Shining Armor? The Dream Princess? Don Quixote? The Girl from Ipanema? The Femme Fatale? Were they all a waste? Best kept as nostalgia?

Poets love. Everybody loves. Love flows naturally from our hearts.
We love... we dream... ergo we live.

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(C)NDR11.18.2017
Photo: The KISS, from the Gates of Hell, Rodin public domain