For those of you who have not yet read Norman Jones' short essay on the nature of love and its relationship to literature on the English Department website, be sure to check it out. He's raised some interesting points about the subject, just in time for Valentine's Day. Check out the whole thing below, and share your thoughts on one of the most 'ancient debates'...
This week, we commemorate a holiday associated with Saint Valentine, traditionally considered the patron saint of lovers. In honor of St. Valentine's Day, I have a question for you about love as represented in (you guessed it!) literature. Who could put such a question better than Shakespeare? So I'll take a break and let him ask you for me. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Theseus argues that the impulse to fall in love is like the impulse to create poetry--both are a form of madness:
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold:
That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic,
See Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt.
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination
That, if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy.
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear! (5.1.2-20)
Love and literature are created by the excesses of our imagination, and both are no more reasonable than a lunatic's ravings. They invent out of nothingness "a local habitation and a name" (one of my favorite lines from Shakespeare) and pretend it's a real place they've discovered. What do you think--does Theseus have a point here? (On a different note, what about his nasty disparagement of Egyptians? The sentiment contrasts provocatively with one of Shakespeare’s famous Dark Lady sonnets (130), "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun.")
Compare Theseus' argument with Plato's Symposium, which lauds the potential for love to carry our imaginations beyond the ordinary givens of everyday life: here, love is valuable precisely because it provides an intimation of the transcendent--an intimation of "the forms of things unknown," to borrow Shakespeare's phrase. In this regard, it's interesting that we often forget that Valentine's Day is named after a saint, since our culture generally makes an unofficial religion of romantic love (for evidence, just listen to any "top 40" radio station for an hour and figure the percentage of songs that portray romantic love as the end-all-be-all, the alpha and omega, in life). Popularly, we often seem to side strongly with Plato's Symposium: love gives a kind of "religious" meaning to life in that it suggests we are connected to a reality more meaningful than that of ordinary, everyday existence (to relate this back to Shakespeare, one might describe such ordinary existence as "sublunary"--does being "moonstruck," then, make us lunatics or prophets?).
This is one of the most ancient debates: what is the nature of love? I invite you to join the debate, using literature as your vehicle. Try to find a literary representation of love that best articulates your own personal view of the question. Are you a moonie? Or do you prefer to keep your feet on the ground? (By Theseus' argument, does being an English major mean you must be a moonie?) You will find this debate everywhere in the literature around you (whether in class, on the radio, on t.v., or elsewhere). Perhaps the English Club will start a thread on our blog so we can compare our choices of literary representations of love. Or perhaps we'll keep to ourselves, and some of us will wonder quietly whether there are others, too, who will choose one view this Tuesday, another on St. Valentine's holiday (a holy day?) itself, and then a third the day after when those little heart-shaped chocolates are all gone.
Posted by tlaughbaum at February 14, 2007 01:19 PMLove is a snowmobile ride across a frozen tundra which suddenly flips over, trapping you underneath. At night the ice weasels come.
Posted by: Groening/Robbins at February 14, 2007 08:33 PMJust a note re. the Egyptians. First, one of the neat things about this play is the way the mythological background of characters like Theseus and Hippolyta may or may not affect how we view them. Theseus, for instance, is perhaps the worst thing to happen to women in all Greek myth! His first love, Ariadne, helped him slay the minotaur, and Theseus then abandoned her on a rock in the middle of the ocean. Hippolyta, as we know from Shakespeare, was queen of the Amazons (not women who were generally looking for hubbies) and was primarily wooed by Theseus's "sword". He also married Phaedra, who fell in love with Theseus's son by Hippolyta -- Hippolytus. When Hippolytus didn't return her love, she told Theseus he had raped her, whereupon Theseus killed him. She then killed herself. All in all, not someone you want to marry! So, we might ask whether this affects how we respond to his pronouncements about love.
Back to the Egyptian, though -- worth remembering, I think, that one of the most famously beautiful women in world history, about whom Shakespeare later wrote a play, was Cleopatra. So, again, the line about lovers being "frantic" enough to see "Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt" is almost a riddle. It seems at first like a put-down of Egyptians, but is it? Julius Caesar, Mark Anthony, and (I think) Shakespeare himself saw Cleopatra as another Helen, so perhaps this kind of franticness isn't so bad? or is natural to us? And actually, muddling things up further, the love of Helen we read about in Homer was pretty frantic in its own right (Marlowe called her "the face that launched a thousand ships"). Is any woman (or man for that matter) worth the deaths of thousands and the destruction of an entire nation?
Sorry. I'll butt out now. I just wanted to add a few more questions to the excellent ones Norman already raised. Love on!
Posted by: HH at February 15, 2007 10:03 AMGood questions. Is the sort of agreed upon sense of a definition of love static over time? Top 40 radio sells what it can sell. Top 40 music is created to sell to Top 40 radio. Young adolescents, I'm guessing, are the biggest market for Top 40 music. Everybody selling anything wants that group to believe in love. It's just good business sense, not to mention good "values" sense. Today's emotional attachment to the notion of love which has been created over time, is it the same as Shakespeare's notion or to the collective notion of his time? And what is Theseus saying? I know people who don't understand why anyone would consider anything that isn't rational. It makes for some pretty dull conversation for an English major, but fathers-in-law will be what they are. Would Theseus, the myth, be pissed that Shakespeare put any poetic words coming out of his mouth? His rationalization of things irrational or things created solely from the mind is entertaining. But doesn't everything get interpreted by our minds or brains? Is something less real if it is created from imagination and translated into another's mind so that the receiver can see the creation as suredly as he can see something tangible that he is not touching? Are the devils not real to the madmen? Isn't love an accumulation of hormonal instincts, perceived signifiers, and other sensory wonders? Maybe he's not knocking imagination, but comong from Theseus, it would be odd. Once again I have no idea what I just said, so off to class I a go.
Posted by: Jim at February 15, 2007 03:25 PMIs "love" real or just a name we give to a whole array of fuzzy emotions for various things we desire? When we say "I love you" is it because we actually experience something called "love" or do we just feel that's the sort of thing we ought to say to someone we're with at certain moments (to put it most cynically -- moments when we're aroused)? And does "love" automatically (biologically?) produce certain behaviors or are these something we learn from books, poems, TV, movies, and people around us? Hmmmm.
Posted by: HH at February 15, 2007 05:36 PMI lurv you.
Posted by: woody at February 15, 2007 08:47 PM.....and do you think too much? or do you think too much in order to make others think that they are thinking to much? .....or are you just bored? Does the snow make you slow? or the muddy slush on city streets remind you that you are in a crappy place...a crappy (dead end) job....and crap....now I'm thinking too much for you. There becomes a point when it gets pathetic. Lighten up.
Posted by: too much already at February 16, 2007 01:27 AMNope, I just think too often. And when I'm not thinking, I like to write in here. Clouds in my coffee.
Posted by: Jim at February 16, 2007 08:33 AMGood to know I'm not the only one.
Posted by: Jim at February 16, 2007 11:23 AMI suppose I'll accept my own invitation (thank you, Trish, for creating this forum for it!) by posting a song lyric that expresses how I sometimes feel about love. It's one of my favorite songs by the Sundays, called "Summertime" (and of course, as with most songs, the meaning comes across more clearly if heard rather than merely read--but this is a start):
Do some people wind up with the one that they adore
In a heart-shaped hotel room it’s what a heart is for
The bubble floats so madly will it stay sky-high?
Hello partner, kiss your name bye-bye
Ooh sometimes...
Romantic piscean seeks angel in disguise
Chinese-speaking girlfriend big brown eyes
Liverpudlian lady, sophisticated male
Hello partner, tell me love can’t fail
& it’s you and me in the summertime
We’ll be hand in hand down in the park
With a squeeze & a sigh & that twinkle in your eye
& all the sunshine banishes the dark
Do some people wind up with the one that they abhor
In a distant hell-hole room, the third world war
But all I see is films where colourless despair
Meant angry young men with immaculate hair
Ooh sometimes...
Get up a voice inside says there’s no time for looking down
Only a pound a word & you’re talking to the town
But how do you coin the phrase though that will set your soul apart
Just to touch a lonely heart
& it’s you & me in the summertime
We’ll be hand down in the park
With a squeeze & a sigh & that twinkle in your eye
& all the sunshine banishes the dark
& it’s you I need in the summertime
As I turn my white skin red
Two peas from the same pod yes we are
Or have I read too much fiction?
Is this how it happens?
How does it happen?
Is this how it happens?
Now, right now
I like it simpler.
Something in the way she moves
Attracts me like no other lover
Something in the way she woos me
I don't want to leave her now
You know I believe and how
Somewhere in her smile she knows
That I don't need no other lover
Something in her style that shows me
I don't want to leave her now
You know I believe and how
You're asking me will my love grow
I don't know, I don't know
You stick around and it may show
I don't know, I don't know
Something in the way she knows
And all I have to do is think of her
Something in the things she shows me
I don't want to leave her now
You know I believe and how
love doesn't exist. only our ideas of love.
i can't remember where i heard this, but cleopatra was, well, not as beauteous as everyone has believed. a coin was just discovered that features her profile and it ain't exactly kind on the eyes. of course, it's a damn coin, and how good can someone look on a coin?
the point is that being beautiful isn't just a physical endeavor. it all comes down to charm and certain affectations that one impliments at "key" moments. it's being aware of what people want and what they don't yet know they want.
she was crafty.
oh, & that song by the sundays is great. it makes me happy.
Posted by: monica c. at February 19, 2007 01:01 AMCan you define love or ideas of love? And if it doesn't exist, how can we have ideas of it? I can't define it, but I know it when I feel it. Personally, I think something of it gets lost in the translation from feeling to idea. It is individual. What love is to an American 14 year old girl is not the same as what love is to a 14 year old boy. This can be problematic, until we learn to accept love in someone else's terms. Blah.
Posted by: jim at February 19, 2007 02:30 PMMaybe love is just a feeling and we perceive it as an idea, because of how strong the feeling is.
Posted by: Ashley at February 19, 2007 06:19 PMok jim, stay with me here.
love is a shared illusion (delusion?). k. now, picture a burple. you can't, can you? i however, can, because i have a picture in my mind of what a burple is. if you want to say that perception is reality, then love IS real. perception provokes something into being and there it is. real. so i guess i'm saying that what i said isn't a universal truth, thank god. that would be too much pressure.
whatever "love" may be (or not be), it kicks ass.
that was eloquent.
Posted by: monica c. at February 19, 2007 11:17 PMOK, Monica, so how then can TWO people fall in love? Is it just blind luck that their private conceptions of love (the burple theory) happen to more or less jibe? And why is it that there is such a vast amount written about love (scads of poems, songs, novels light and heavy, movies, Hallmark cards), if it's just a matter of individual impression? We wouldn't, I think, deny the existence of pain. It too is a matter of perception, yet it seems a universal human condition because of the fact that we all have bodies that work more or less in the same way. Maybe love is like that? You hit your thumb with a hammer and yell "OW!" You see someone you're attracted to and coo "I love you!"
I sowed the seeds of love,
And I sowed them in the spring,
I gathered them up in the morning so soon
While the small birds do sweetly sing.
My garden was planted well,
With flowers everywhere:
But I had not the liberty to choose for myself
Of the flowers that I love so dear.
The gardener was standing by
And I asked him to choose for me.
He chose for me the violet, the lily, and the pink,
Bu these I refused all three.
The violet I did not like
Because it bloomed so soon.
The lily and the pink I really overthink,
So I vowed I would wait till June.
In June there was a red rose bud,
And that is the flower for me.
I oftentimes have plucked that red rose bud,
Till I gained the willow tree.
The willow tree may twist,
And the willow tree may twine,
I oftentimes have wished I were in that young man's arms
That once had the heart of mine.
Come all you false young men,
Do not leave me here to complain,
For the grass that has oftentimes been trampled under foot,
Give it time, it will rise up again.
Beet gas, no wait, Barney gas. At least the burpleness of Barney gas allows for the song, "I love you, you love me"
Posted by: jim at February 20, 2007 12:52 PMthere's so much written about it because no one can put their finger on it! a formula doesn't exist that can explain it. no language can capture it. and yes, i do believe that when two people meet and fall in love it's because their ideas of love coincide. these ideas do change, and should. some ideas of love aren't so healthy.
maybe the word "love" is a cop out. it's way to abstract to mean anything. like "pain." what does it mean when something hurts, or the difference between physical and emotional pain? we need more words to explain what we mean. so the word alone is nearly pointless. like "love." it just isn't enough.
i propose throwing the word "love" out of the english language once and for all.
for the good of all mankind. teehee.