love

You are not your hands. Neither are you your arms or your feet or your toes. Not even your face. That’s all just flesh, bone, joints. It will grow regardless of what happens. Tell your arm to lift and signals will be sent shooting through the body and the arm will hear them and lift itself. But this is still separate from you. In a way, you’re not even your brain. The brain is chemicals, bubbling and changing like a witch’s cauldron, creating feelings and emotions and actions. Not even your thoughts are the real you. You can sit back and watch your thoughts (well, your brain’s thoughts) like an outside observer. Whether you put effort into thinking them or not, your mind will work them into existence regardless. No, you’re something else. A being inside your head, a consciousness that is looking out at everything else. Something that not even scientists can understand. What some people call a “soul”. From this perspective you are a small being inside (and controlling) a giant body, issuing orders like it’s a piece of machinery. To the soul, all other people are giants. Bodies are mammoth creatures and the world around them even bigger still. Picture a man and his wife in bed. The bodies take up most of the bed they lie on but who they are, inside their heads, is tiny. From one lover to the other, across the bed, is a great journey. Two lovers finding each other in this world of giants is like two aliens manning small spaceships to explore the infinite cosmos and managing to bump into each other. The man looks at his wife, the spaceship, the vessel, in which his love is inside. Then he looks around the bedroom at the chair and the desk and the wardrobe and the comfy duvet, all of it is just matter, gangs of particles which have formed into materials, all bodies themselves. Bodies that are empty. But inside his wife is that unknowable thing, the same unknowable thing that he is.

*  *  *

Love has no opposite. Happiness is the opposite of sadness. Anger the opposite of peace. But love isn’t the opposite of hate. The opposite of hate is indifference. Love is something else. It isn’t an emotion, which are fleeting and temporary. It isn’t a relationship because love can be held in a single heart. The word “love” is a complex one, it covers many different things. People count infatuation, unrequited feelings, acceptance, even pity under the blanket term of love. But what about in a traditional setting of love, in the married couple? Even this is hard to define. It’s an animal urge, when you feel it you feel. Yet it is complex enough to change and adapt over years. It’s strong enough to make rational men do crazy things. It’s enigmatic enough to avoid definition, whether from poets or scientists. The answer to the opposite of love is everything. All feelings, emotions, actions, motives on one side, love on the other. It is a big enough force to oppose them all. It is the solution and the problem to all things. The answer and the antithesis. The snake that eats itself. It is a mystery we are happy never to have solved.