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“With all the war, strife and bloodshed taking hold all around us it would be easy to dismiss love as merely a dream, or the pulp fiction we read to sweeten the harsh realities of life. But although we frequently dream of love, does this mean, too, that love is nothing but a dream?”
— Mickie Kent
A quote I like to use often is one that Shakespeare wrote, where he said that we are sometime masters of our fate, and our faults lie not in our stars, but in ourselves. When we look at that thesis, it seems that what spoke to Shakespeare in his day, shouts back at us today.
At the publication of this post in the year 2014, the modern world is on the brink of yet more bloodshed. While vast swathes of the Middle East are embroiled in conflict, and Ukraine teeters on the brink, many others believe the real flashpoint for war is between China and Japan. It seems we live in a world where we prefer to speak softly and carry a big stick.
But hasn't it always been thus? We are a species that loves to aggrandise themselves. Insignificant things arouse the greatest passions, and the passion of a zealot is the hardest to tame. Even though it brings misconduct and misdemeanour, power and status matter. Of course they don't really in the grander scheme of things, but we make them matter. And so we ignore our truly greatest power. The ability to make power and status NOT matter.
Differences in belief, the colour of our skin, and who we love should NOT matter, either. Yet, all too frequently, it does. And lest justice be mistaken for fairness, injustice is not nature's invention, but ours. This was clearly highlighted at the 86th Academy Awards this year.
When Jared Leto won the first Oscar of the night, for best supporting actor as a transgender woman in Dallas Buyers Club, he thanked his mother for "teaching him to dream" - even though not everyone was thrilled at his win as he was. He dedicated his award to those who have ever felt injustice because of who they are, or who they love, as a nod to the character he played.
Possibly the strongest message about injustice on Oscar night, however, came from Steve McQueen, the British director of 12 Years a Slave, who dedicated the best picture Oscar to the overriding legacy of slavery in America. "Everyone deserves not just to survive, but to live," McQueen said. A poignant remark that hits home ever more deeply, as across the world those with power still continue to quash self-determination.
And even if that philosophy is true, are there some problems we have caused that we no longer have to the power to put right? Have we been a little too reckless, for too long? For example, an ancient virus has "come back to life" after lying dormant for at least 30,000 years, scientists say, when thawed in a deep layer of the Siberian permafrost. Meanwhile largely ascribed to global warming, average temperatures are increasing in places like Australia leading to a rise in bush fires.
Pockets of fires rage across our world threatening to engulf us all in the flames, and do we even care? Global media coverage has become so much the norm, that even though it may feel like Australia is on our own Twitter doorstep - we don't quite notice until the crisis lands physically on our front lawn.
But there is so much cyber-vom now, many of us shy from even noticing world events. We just don't want to invite that negativity into our homes. I know many people who are restricting their news feeds to personal stories of inspiration or the mind-numbing sexy and salacious gossip threads. We've had our fill of disaster, and yet we allow disaster to dictate how we see our world.
Often it's disasters that tend to remind us how small a place our world really is. In 1883, the gigantic volcanic explosion of Krakatoa was one of the loudest sounds that ever has ever existed according to human reckoning (it was 13 times greater than the Hiroshima bomb) which was heard 3,000 miles away. The ripples of this massive destruction reverberated around the world seven times, and was acknowledged to be the first global media event reported around the world. One of the first Cinerama type of disaster-flick movies was the 1969 effort Krakatoa: East of Java (though it's really west of Java), coming somewhat earlier than the cinematic disaster craze which hit the seventies of the last century.
When I peruse the news reports today, I sometimes feel as though we are in some surreal disaster movie. Sensationalism having taken over, life has begun to imitate our art. It feels kitsch and tacky, so we look away, or ignore it. Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning - a champion for the oppressed who vigorously campaigned for child labour reforms and the abolition of slavery - said that Earth was "crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God: But only he who sees takes off his shoes, the rest sit down and pluck blackberries".
And what do we see? The world stands on the brink of major military confrontations, Amnesty International issues yet another report accusing Israel of indictable crimes against humanity, but many of us still prefer to read headlines that begin with "sex" or "celebrity". Rather than "take off our shoes" or "roll up our sleeves", we choose to "pluck blackberries" or push our heads into the sand. When looked at from this perspective, it seems that Shakespeare was indeed right. This destiny was prepared not by the stars, but by ourselves.
Nevertheless, is it naive of me to say that as we navigate the highs and lows of life, all we need is a little more faith, a little more hope, a little more love to push us through the challenges that face us today? One columnist who would seem to think me naive is Martin LeFevre of the Costa Rican Times. Indeed, he goes the opposite way to say we have love to blame for this global disillusionment.
LeFevre differentiates between love and romantic love, however, to single out the latter as the film villain of his piece. He says:
Romantic love is the illusory sensation of wholeness through the union with another person. Evolution apparently appropriated the existential alienation generated by the emergence of symbolic thought, and used it as a driving force to match couples of roughly equal capacities. Being in love gave the individual the vital feeling of wholeness through union with another, and gave evolution a driving force in propagating the species.
This "illusory sensation" LeFevre believes has degenerated into something destructive. Without romanticising a bygone era of romantic love, he writes that romantic love is probably the single greatest cause of spiritual erosion in North America in past two decades. So, what as to his claim? Does he have a point?
When we talk of karmic relationships - ones that are seemingly destructive - we often say these can be an opportunity for us to figure out exactly what it is we don't want in a partner. Many believe that you can't appreciate real love until you've been burned. However, a lot of young men and women who have been terribly hurt, consciously or subconsciously go out and hurt someone else as a perverse kind of payback, LeFevre believes.
With people changing partners a few times a year on average, a lot of broken hearts lay in the wake. It's true that there is no better way to kill the spirit than to break the heart, but if we don't have a strong inner spiritual love of self to react at such times from a divine perspective, how will we heal? And because most people don't heal, learn and become stronger, romantic love - LeFevre writes - has come to serve the spreading darkness in human consciousness very well.
I have argued before that I believe this is not the cause of love itself, but in actuality the very absence of it. Moreover, more people are seeing that, first and last, a person has to be whole within their self first before they can commit to a healthy relationship. But, LeFevre asks, being whole in oneself, does one feel a need to "fall in love"? I would say, yes. Not only will we still feel the need to fall in love, we are ONLY able to carry out healthy relationships as "whole" people. It's imperative we first find the love in ourselves, before we can share it with that special someone. And when we are filled with a deep sense of spiritual love, we will want to share it with another.
LeFevre concludes in summation that given the present crisis in the East and West, only two things are clear: Neither America nor Russia will lead humanity out of its morass, and romantic love will play little or no part in the transmutation of the human species, whenever it occurs. He adds that although radical upheaval is imperative if we are going to survive and flourish as a species, romantic love, being partial and personal, will not be a catalyst for it. Falling in love may be an inevitable part of being human, he says, but "it has little or no importance in a serious life."
Whether romantic love will play a part in the current upheavals of "serious life" is yet to be seen, but, I ask myself, what drive can be greater than love to push us to progress? To push us to examine ourselves? Should our soul searching offer profound ruminations on the meaning of life, the value of faith and our concept of reality, or should our efforts be a soulless, derivative knock off of others? This is the question I ask when I think of the meaning of love - in all its forms.
It's said that to live completely, we need to love completely, and dream passionately. I believe that love is a major drive for us to dream, too, and dreaming is no bad thing. Academy award winner Leto thanked his mother for teaching him to dream as he picked up his Oscar, and I think that teaching our children to dream is a worthwhile cause.
Without dreaming, without imagination, can we create? And what has been the greatest driving force of poets and writers and artists but romantic love? LeFevre rightly takes pains to differentiate between romantic love and love in general, but he also forgets that for many of us romantic love is the route in to love as a whole. And for many who have found true love in their relationships - rather than the absence of it - know that it offers the greatest immunity from the negativity of global events. It also gives us a reason to go on despite it all.
For example, in archaeology we find things from ancient times that we simply don't know what they're for, or how they were made. On the plains of Laos there are giant human-made jar-shapes made out of granite. There are 90 sites each containing up to 400 of these jars. No one knows how they were made, or for what purpose.
But I believe you always have to allow for the soul of even very early people. There is often a functional fallacy, the assumption that things are done for a very specific, practical reason, which isn't always true. The granite jars of Laos may have had no functional purpose as we know it, but simply the creation of some individual's desire to build it for a spiritual reason lost to us. I think we must always allow for the dream element.
The same is true for modern human beings, don't you think? Even with all the strife and conflict, we need to allow for the dream element. We need to allow ourselves to put our faith in love. Else why go on? We live longer when we have a purpose in life. Else why progress? How bright can enlightenment shine without the spark of love? Without the dream of love, what other alternative will we have against the diktats of disaster that skew our perception of this beautiful planet we live on?
So, is it just a useless dream for me to pin my hopes on love - romantic or otherwise? For when we love, doesn't the world seem smaller, and larger, at the same time? Aren't the fires we burn for love worth the effort? I would rather I lost in love than lost to war. I would rather I felt the burning of my soul, than the burning of the planet.
That's what my heart says to me. Listen to your heart, as the world rages around you. What does yours say? In its every beat it says "live". And arguably in life, if we listened more to what we loved, then we would have less a propensity to destroy.
And if this dream is a wish the heart makes, then shouldn't we at least try to make it come true? For isn't it the attempt that matters? We might discover that dreaming of love doesn't mean love has to be a dream, after all.
Yours in love,
