Love Needed

I keep getting distracted from today's goals, I think maybe there is something to be learned from these digressions. I know what it was like to have purpose without meaning.

Here is the latest, from Aeon Weekly: The enchanted vision.

Put another way, love was considered a universal force and a matter for knowledge, integral to the warp and weft of reality, not just a beneficent feeling or costly duty, practised at a personal level in acts of compassion or charity. When someone received love or gave it, they aligned themselves with the fundamental vitality pulsing through them and everything else. Sun and moon, mountains and seas, plants and birds, beasts of water and land. Everything participated in a common movement of love that would eventually return them to their source and sustainer.

Human beings could intentionally attend to this dynamic and collaborate with it. But, if not, if love is demoted from this role it becomes, at best, a moral ideal or emotion, exapted from evolution and sustained by the brain. Metaphysical agnosticism has replaced ‘ontological rootedness’, to borrow from the philosopher Simon May. Little wonder people feel disorientated or worse. To misquote R D Laing: someone who describes love as an epiphenomenon might be a great scientist, but someone who lives as if love is so will need a good psychiatrist.

But might the older notion of love be returning, as Weil and others have hoped? Might we be moving past the Romantics, who strove to comfort modern minds disturbed by what William Wordsworth called the ‘still, sad music of humanity’ because we are coming to know once more of that ‘holier love’? Might love be not just all you need, but something precisely required to account for who we are and all that is?

Yeah, here I am in the middle of Lent with my bad temper aroused and this is a reminder of what is feeding my anger: being dragged down to the level of those who suckle on the bitterness of hate.

sch