Reflections: On Love, Valentine's Day, Symbols, and D.H. Lawrence's Virile Rhetoric
2025-02-14
When you walk into a pharmacy in February (and even before then), you'll be inundated with a breadth of red paraphernalia (my favorite are the cheap, heart-shaped boxes of chocolate). The same decorations diffuse elsewhere, and I slowly notice more and more accumulate as we near its nexus. Like most events, Valentine's Day is a day of ceremonies and symbols, but it is also a chance to reflect on who (and what) is dear to you -- and what it means to love.
So-
What is Love?
Is it at first sight? In For Whom The Bell Tolls, Robert Jordan and Maria fall deeply, irrevocably in love when he first enters the Spanish camp -- sort of. He doubts the verity of their relationship as he doubts his mission. His two faiths become coupled, attraction and duty.
"I love thee as I love all that we have fought for. I love thee as I love liberty and dignity and the rights of all men to work and not be hungry. I love thee as I love Madrid that we have defended and as I love all my comrades that have died. And many have died. Many. Many. Thou canst not think how many. But I love thee as I love what I love most in the world and I love thee more. I love thee very much, rabbit. More than I can tell thee. But I say this now to tell thee a little. I have never had a wife and now I have thee for a wife and I am happy."
In Matter and Memory[1], Bergson says, "there is no perception that is not impregnated with memories" (33). That is to say that perception--at least this particular, core form of perception--is constantly mediated by memory. You cannot see something without recalling the past, however implicit it might feel. When Robert Jordan sees Maria, he does not only see and fall in love with his 'rabbit', but his inchoate idea of Maria, sense and memory coalesced.
So can we love at first sight? Or is that really loving ourself, our own memory? If perception is mediated by the past, and for Robert Jordan, his duty, can love be duty?
Perhaps we can look to Mary and her love for Jesus--a love originating with obedience and deference to God. Is hers the quintessence of duty?
When she saw the angel, she was troubled at his words. She thought about what had been said. The angel said to her, “Mary, do not be afraid. You have found favor with God. See! You are to become a mother and have a Son. You are to give Him the name Jesus.
...
Then Mary said, “I am willing to be used of the Lord. Let it happen to me as you have said.” Then the angel went away from her.Luke 1:29-31, 38, NLV
Love conceived by duty is preordained by devotion and faith. It is even marked with finality, the death of love coupled with the dissolution of its progenitor, duty. But love can also be untethered, an obsessive flame not constrained by creator but inhabiting a life of its own. The narrator of Fyodor Dostoevsky's White Nights embodies this obsessive love.
"I am a dreamer. I know so little of real life that I just can't help re-living such moments as these in my dreams, for such moments are something I have very rarely experienced. I am going to dream about you the whole night, the whole week, the whole year."
Can love be the banal? Or rather, a connection that exists in spite of one's immersion in the banal? Or can it be measured by the intensity of experience it engenders? Can we only articulate love in periods of intense emotion? Tatsuki Fujimoto's Look Back is a story about a pair of unlikely artist-friends, Fujino and Kyomoto. It is also a story about grief, passion, and memory. As the two grow up, they dedicate more of themselves to drawing and to each other. There is an excellent sequence where the two sit in Fujino's bedroom, enthralled with the paper before them and consumed by their labor; there is banality and duty, but that is not why I bring up the example. The two artists find their paths diverging, school and industry, and split in an emotional climax. Kyomoto dies, echoing the Kyoto Animation attack, and in her grief, Fujino looks back—returning to Kyomoto’s room, where she finds the very panel she once drew, the one that first connected them.
Tears stream from her eyes as she recants drawing all together. An artist moved with such tearful poignancy to forsake her own profession--love and regret constellate and memory becomes an unbearable mediation. Here, love exists quietly, only becoming legible with intense emotion.
Maybe love is not only generative but also intrinsic, as measured in the intensity of relation that subsists the union. Can we measure love by the resonance between two souls? The final performance in Your Lie in April shows this transcendent connection beautifully. So, is there a spatial element to love, where an islanded one breaks free of their isolation and becomes one of? Then love can be articulated through the proximity of two beings, and the "labors of love" that diminish the distance.
But love is sometimes shown to be not just devotion or admiration, but disgust and rejection. It is possible that love is so irrevocably polarized that one must first hate before they can truly love? Does love exist Between Love & Hate?
And my favorite ponderance--can you only love by leaving everything behind in true vulnerability and exertion? Is love expressed most purely during a fight? When two boxers enter a ring, do they briefly, fleetingly, become one? The Slushy Noobz fight is one surprisingly authentic example of this, but I believe that giving an opponent everything, even if it is framed as a competition, is one of the purest forms of love, precisely because it is unobserved and unarticulated. It is there, so nearly tangible, for an ephemeral breath, and then dissipates, never completely gone but also not actualized. It almost suggests that true love can only be made real for brief, intense moments, in fear of depletion or indicative of a deficiency in human physiology. It also makes love intrinsic and reflexive; as one breathes, one loves. A domineering will might incite love's actualization, but cannot truly love in isolation. It ratifies a contract between conscious and subconscious, steering the latter in accordance to its will, but never able to exert full control. Thus, love lingers in an immalleable purity, made tangible only in a clash between two souls with singular, shared purpose.
The human compendium seems to suggest that love is infinite, amorphous and abstract, but also pointedly singular. If we feel something and call it love, is it an association and not Love itself? Do recognize the existence of an abstract Form of Love and grasp in darkness, blinded by the heavens from which it resides, taking whatever handful we can and ratifying this piece as Love itself, unfaithfully? In approximating truths, maybe symbols are constraints when ratified but liberties when bemused.
Interlude
Does this bring us closer to understanding what Love is? To be perfectly clear, this reflection is not my attempt to define Love, either by its virtue or by negation. On a meta sense, this reflection is my love. A stream of conjunctions of the things I love and look to, and thus my consummation. But I shall stumble (hopefully forward, although as Women in Love's Birkin asserts, moving forward is also not moving in the other directions) and, of course, reflect.
This meditation was spurred about by my reading of D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love, a remarkably virile book, yet completely compelling in its provocations. I must forewarn you, for I have not finished reading it yet, but my contemplation of some of Rupert, Ursula, and Gerald's (sorry Gudrun) philosophies suffuse my writing here. While the homoerotic tension underpins the novel and, although I'm unsure, potentially undermines Rupert and Ursula's (seemingly) forthcoming union, I want to frame some of the ensuing discussion on the dialogue between Rupert and Ursula about love.
'There is,' he said, in a voice of pure abstraction; 'a final me which is stark and impersonal and beyond responsibility. So there is a final you. And it is there I would want to meet you—not in the emotional, loving plane—but there beyond, where there is no speech and no terms of agreement. There we are two stark, unknown beings, two utterly strange creatures, I would want to approach you, and you me. And there could be no obligation, because there is no standard for action there, because no understanding has been reaped from that plane. It is quite inhuman,—so there can be no calling to book, in any form whatsoever—because one is outside the pale of all that is accepted, and nothing known applies. One can only follow the impulse, taking that which lies in front, and responsible for nothing, asked for nothing, giving nothing, only each taking according to the primal desire.'
In "Mino", Ursula and Rupert recognize their mutual attraction and discuss their expectations for their "strange conjunction", if it is to be realized. Rupert rejects a traditional union, speaking of a transcendent promise that liberates from social convention. He recognizes that the concept of love--and particularly the traditional marriage narrative--is irrevocably coupled with social convention and society, both of which Rupert disdains. In "In the Train", he wishes for "mankind [to] pass away", being "time it did". He sees the consecrate 'love' as disparate from Love; rather than attempting to look outside convention in explicit search for a pure Love, he hopes to remove himself from social convention altogether, escaping the "emotional, loving plane" and moving to something greater, without human faculties--"no speech and no terms of agreement"--and thus untainted.
Where Rupert wants to escape, Ursula wants to immerse and submit. Both share a desire for a union that surpasses their own shallow oneness, but understand the means to achieve the twoness differently. Rupert is defeated by the perversion of the symbol of Love, Ursula wants to ratify their chapter uniquely.
What is a union?
On the whole, he hated sex, it was such a limitation. It was sex that turned a man into a broken half of a couple, the woman into the other broken half.
In "Man to Man", Birkin reflects on Ursula's love and what it means to be part of such a union. He is distrustful of women, associating their generative virtue with possession and degeneration, as he likened Aphrodite to a goddess of dissolution. What does consummation mean? Does trapping the carefree union of two souls in a house of symbols diminish the quality of the conjunction? Can we exist with another on a higher plane free from Symbolist impositions?--this is not love, it is.
Birkin's ideology can be dreary but its contrarian logos is quite generative. I think it circles an interesting idea: when we engage in these conventional ceremonies in which a "one" becomes "one of" are you lesser? The assimilation into the group diminishing the self as it exists atomically? In referring to sex, he refers more to a ceremony representing a union rather than an "appetite" or "functional process". He wants to reject muddying the mechanical and the real with symbols to approximate truths because mankind is a "dead tree". So how do we (if we even want to) disentangle the actual, the inescapable, the functions of a union with their symbols? Should we?[2]
It's an existential question that diffuses into any form of mediated perception, and thus our entire being. If I put my fingers on my pulse and understand the mechanical response not by the virtue of what is it but as proof that I am living, am I contaminating my faculties of sense?
It's an idea interesting to explore -- Birkin certainly has the luxury of time to do so -- but also so fragmented. Maybe we can look elsewhere to make it whole.
The street about me roared with a deafening sound.
Tall, slender, in heavy mourning, majestic grief,
A woman passed, with a glittering hand
Raising, swinging the hem and flounces of her skirt;
This is the first quatrain from Baudelaire's "À une passante)" from Fleurs du mal, the translation is sufficient enough for my point. Quickly, it's interesting to note that DHL likens the "fleurs du mal" to the "flowers of dissolution", rather than the flowers of evil. I'm not sure what to make of it yet, or if it even suggests some interplay between the texts. The flâneur almost seems to be consumed by the street, there's a spatial quality to "about me" and the intensity of "roared" and "deafening", but from the chaos of the collective emerges the stillness (however fleeting) of the singular. When I went over this poem in class, my professor mentioned that it is equally (and perhaps moreso) important to consider what is not present as what is when reading Baudelaire. A woman in mourning is to be veiled and dressed in black garb, her attire alone marking a striking visual difference from the crowd, a plural serving to emphasizing the singular. She engages in conventional ceremony--walking down the street and thus becoming part of the roaring street--but from her participation seems to become more rather than less. There is a multiplicity in this ceremony as opposed to the twoness of Birkin's coital one, but perhaps it serves to show that the plural can engender, not reduce.
But the collective and singular here is completely symbolic, irrevocably attached to the corresponding real functions. Birkin wouldn't be satisfied nor convinced (and neither am I). I think Birkin's dismal view of mankind is overstated, but it would be nice to understand how to disentangle this Symbolist hellscape; however, I'm not sure how to do this, or if I'm equipped to do so. With the fractals of possibility closing in front of me, I'll look to Baudelaire once more.
There are scents fresh like the skin of children,
Soft like the oboe, green like the praires,
--And others, corrupt, rich and triumphant,
Having the expansiveness of infinite things,
Like amber, musk, benjamin and incense,
Which sing the transports of the mind and the senses.
The two tercets of "Correspondences" demonstrate how symbols (everything is a symbol, unfortunately) break down and are ultimately insufficient. "Like" is used throughout the poem to compare two concepts -- "scents" to "skin" to "oboe" to "praires". It serves a singular purpose: to compare. The last 'like', the same literal symbol, is not confined to one role. It is simultaneously comparative and enumerative, acting on "things" or "others", respectively. It's twoness ratifies the poem's title, "Correspondences". Thus symbols are not absolute. Perhaps they constrain, but such a fate also encapsulates a multiplicity of possibility.
So what of Birkin? I have no choice to concede the apparent truth that symbols might suffocate and make perverse, but they are not ultimate - instead rather mutable. But the reduction of the atomic self when integrated into a collective (Baudelaire and) I reject. Whether in integration, separation, or dissolution, the plural mutates, but also highlights, the singular.
Consummation
Or conclusion.
The act of chasing an ideal Love is precisely the movement that loses it, means and end irrevocably polarized. Understanding physical functions to be Love is impossible, because we don't know Love, we know its approximation, a symbol. To apply this transitive approximation to our own impulses is to, ironically, further ourselves from Love. And to me, it seems as if we are closest to this true Love when it is unrecognized.
In the culmination of one of Blue Lock's matches, Isagi and Hiori exhibit a frightening (for their opponents) resonance that allows them to predict each other's moves without even looking at one another. No, they are not in love, but I believe this intuitive understanding of one another to be only possible with Love (which, as a necessary disclaimer, need not be romantic).
Okay, maybe I lost the script.
But, it seems that the pursuit of love is its death. To look back and proclaim something as Love, an anachronism, is to approximate the amorphous, primordial force with your own sensations. It constrains Love, and kills it. Something is Love because it is, not because it is Love.
Where does that leave us? Do we live an unobserved and unmediated life as to not muddy these Forms? Do we try to claw our way to a higher, more abstract plane of existence free from all symbols? At the very least, I fail, or withdraw from the impossibility preemptively, to define Love by the virtue of what it is. In fact, I feel love most profoundly when I am not searching or attempting to understand my feelings. I think Birkin's desire to transcend as very reasonable and one I would like to share, if not for its impossibility; instead of rising above, I like the idea of sinking below and immersing oneself in the immediacy of their feelings and functions. Unable to observe Love or its facets, it is thus one's responsibility to have faith in its existence and suffusion. When I feel my own heartbeat quicken, I do not think "this is Love" as to implicitly compare and liken to, but come away being reminded of its existence (which is perhaps a form of implicit comparison).
Is this the correct interpretation? I doubt it, and I reckon that my own understanding will evolve over time. However, it is also reassuring. It allows me to engage with symbols but not feel tainted by them. I can leverage their multiplicity without ratifying my feelings as the one truth. It allows me to have faith in the collective. I'm able to be reminded of Love everywhere--in life, literature, and media; sometimes, as might be clear, I feel it most profoundly when it is completely implicit.