Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Love perspectives or kaleidoscopes of sense - Part ...

How do you change your perspective? By moving to another place. Love is that movement to another place, to another point of view. But it has nothing to do with empathy. It is not pretending to be in the place of someone. Love is never "as if". It is there. It is real. It fills the atmosphere around so that you can dive into the "other". The impossible distance between becomes a sea to dive in. It necessarily connects you and it is just because of the fact that you are in the same waters. The invisible waters becomes palpable in love. You feel you are connected. You feel the existence in the most intense way possible.

When this atmosphere constitutes the relationship of a group of people, living becomes something kaleidoscopic. Constantly changing perspectives from one person to the other goes out into the open and becomes visible in the common place. The connection itself starts to shape people who are connected. In the palpability of love when everything touches everything in every way possible, identity understood as something inner to defend, dissolves. Identity becomes the movement style to the other, the very coreography of particular movements towards one another.

Love, therefore, changes, shapes, constitutes identity of those who are in love. Identity is not a given through which love is lived. On the contrary, identity is shaped through the invisible atmosphere of love which surrounds people. It affords certain kind of approaches and not others. You have to trust the other for example, not because you have to but because it is impossible to do otherwise if you are in love. To conceive this and act accordingly, you need to be able to recognize the "sense" which is always there, inside and outside at the same time, or better put always in the middle. Always generating itself with the movement of the relations and in multiple places simultaneously.

Love expresses sense as it is. That's why it is common but not always easy to call love an illusion when you fall out of it. When fallen out of love, you are fixated and imprisoned in just one perspective again: yours. That spontaneity, that undeniable presence of multiple could only be remembered in a dim light which makes it look blurry, vague and less detailed than it actually was. It is impossible to see the past experience as it is. The world around you changes because you lose the connection to the invisible, to the very relationality of the world. Then, treating the experience of love as an illusion is a sad preference. Nobody ever can talk of this subject without having the expression of melancholy in their face. There was something before that they don't have now. Calling love an illusion is a lie which people tell themselves without believing it. If they are to survive they have no other choice than to "hide behind the coward explanation of cause and effect" (L. Cohen). Retrospective corrections -such as finding reasons to justify the actions of love- are made to adjust after-love-life. It is never easy since one cannot easily deny her own experience. This is the reason of the obvious and mostly rigid changes in lifestyles or perspectives. You have to change yourself after losing that sensation of multiple in such a way that this new self would itself be a denial of the big truth, of the sense of universe which is always multiple. The logic is to justify the loss. Such a justification is very dangerous aside from being sad, because it creates resistance to the experience of multiple in the future too. Thus, weak souls once in love, become numb for now and forever.

But this is just a stupid option that most people choose without even knowing what it is. It is just like ignoring the reality because it looks ugly or it makes you feel bad. You can always be honest and say: "I have lost the big truth but I still have hope to gain it back anew". You can always choose to repeat your "mistakes" because it makes perfect sense. You can always try to be strong enough to be the living example of the absurdity of life like Kierkegaard says even if you cannot manage to do it like "knight of faith" does in such a natural way. (For more from Kierkegaard on this subject, check out Fear and Tremble.)

Love is a glimpse to the order of universe for human beings. To be able to love is an ontological decision without the deciding subject.

Finally, I want to say that love is THE will to grasp the world as it is.

Love is the real philosophy...