Love—bold, irrational romantic love—has always been the province of musicians knacking in the streets and at the crossroads, the wandering bards, the surveyors of the moon and stars. Love defeats death. Love transcends time. Love is the fundamental emotion of creativity. Love is a transformative choice to embrace a higher connection. Love and creativity exist outside the box.
Society favors the box—the degree obtained by regurgitating the known facts back to the professors who confer the diploma that provides entry-way and salary into a world of revealed rules that seeks preserving the status quo. Society attempts to reduce relationships to a contract, to what is fair, to who gets what, to equality, to discussion of power, to something pedantic and pedestrian that can be predicted to work.
In contrast, love embraces irrational risk. Our reaction to the experience can be full of fear, reeling with doubt, uncertain of reality, falling through darkness, the stuff of song. Song has always celebrated this journey through the unknown with its losses, fears of loss and perilous uncertainty.
The test of love lies not in a battle for survival or control but in the arc we draw through the sky, the water as we hold hands. Love moves us not beyond ourselves but beyond the world’s limitations as we have seen them.
The device that love offers against the grinding maw of necessity is vague hope and the delight when we give ourselves over to connection. In the wake of transcendence, it is tempting to tie that connection down, torture it for proofs of our personal survival, escape from its grip. However, the proofs of love lie in the heartbeat of our days, the rhythm of our conversation, the coming together and going apart and the journeys we make together beyond the world we know.
Love has always been there—a net that seeks to capture in the waters. Love song is a revenge against necessity, a celebration of the impossible, a journey through the waters beyond the box. The song of love is the great discovery of modern civilization–made by culture in spite of civilization. Capitalism seems to inevitably devolve into caged contest between sides where skills, fact and form disappear. (See my essay: The Decline Of Skills, Facts and Form.) Yet, love remains primitive in its execution—today, in love’s discovery era, the lore of romance seems to end after the kiss as the couple rides off into the sunset to some future.
Yet, the potential for love remains shared exploration. It thrives in the duty to oneself to be both faithful and moving forward.