Plato.
(For Paul... if he ever reads this... I was wrong. I've only been blogging for three years. Since April of 2002. Oh well, feels like forever.)
Odessa (the little bugger that I nanny) has gotten to the age (15 months) where she likes to copy people's behaviors. So I was sitting on the couch while she was playing and I was reading Plato's Symposium for Aesthetics class. She decided she wanted to sit next to me and steal Plato and "read" it herself. Keeping her entertained is always more of a priority than homework, so she sat for the last ten minutes I was there just pretending to be me. What a life.
Later in the day, during Aesthetics, we started discussing the speeches in Plato's Symposium. They are all on love - or what the men giving them concieved of love to be. The speech we did in class today I've heard before... the speaker tells a myth to explain love. So here's my best rememberance of the myth:
When the earth was created there was a different kind of human being. This being had four arms and four legs, and two heads... and it's body was perfectly spherical. (Perfect because a sphere in ancient Greece was the symbol of perfection... if that makes sense... cause it doesnt.) Anyway, these round creatures attempted (thinking with the male's head I'm sure) to take over Mount Zion, so Zeus had to punish them. So Zeus cut them in half, making a man and a woman. The story goes on... but in the end the man and women feel incomplete, and are always searching for completion (to make their perfect circle again,) so they search out their "other half." And when they find that "other half" they stay with them for the rest of their lives.
My professor raised these questions in class - "Do we think this is love? Do we believe that there is just one person for us?" I answered that in today's society we would call it finding our soul mate... that one person that is "meant to be" for us. Take for example all of the modern internet dating advertisements that advertise taking a personality profile... to find a connection with another person on the deepest level possible... in our culture, even though we might be hesitant to admit it, finding a "soul mate" is still an ideal.
I finished with my answer and was a bit taken aback when she said that I sounded skeptical. "I might be reading your tone incorrectly," she said, "but I've picked up on a touch of sarcasm in your voice. Do you believe that there is one person for each of us?"
At this moment I had just stuffed a large piece of Milky Way in my mouth (great lunch, Milky Way should take over the Snicker's commercials... if you get my joke...) and all I could mumble was "mmmhm." Not, yes of course. Not no. Not I don't know, because I think I do.
No, I don't think I believe anymore. Love's been boxed up in a closet with the Santa costume and Easter baskets.
When did I become disillusioned with love? When did I stop believing my Prince Charming would one day enter my life and whisk me away on his golden steed? (Or even Richard Gere who would climb the fire-ladder with roses in his teeth to save me from a life of prostitution.)
Yes, there are many stories, commercials, movies, trash romance out there that tries to sell the idea of finding our "true love."
What made us stop wistfully believing and instead quietly jeering?
When we see a "perfect" couple are we jealous because we want that some day, or because we fear we will never have that someday?
2 Comments:
Hey Mary-Beth, I was bored and decided to check out your blog. I hadn't done so in almost a year. I noticed your remarks on your disillusionment with love, and they struck a nerve, resounded a chord, in my heart.
We all want to be loved, liked, accepted. But life's paradox is the more that we can FREELY give affection and love without caring as much for a return, the more love seems to find us. The trick for me was to learn how to be loving without being loved back. Without feeling a sense of rejection.
and lastly in realizing that I was wounded, and those I sought to love were also wounded too.
I hate the way our society wounds men and women, and poisons what should be naturaly, and healthy, relationships with each other with myths and lies fostered by communications media whose primary function, it seems, is simple social control. Manipulate our desires and dreams, keep us buying as happy (or unhappy) consumers, we chase ghosts and wraiths and will-o-wisps and seek out externally things we must first find internally.
This is my disgust with the dating, singles, scene. The *neediness* for a mythical storybook ending, for mena nd women. Even the biggest cads are often cads, in my personal experience, out of our wounding and inability to satisfy some high flung nonsense dream. Love should be more natural.
You see I experienced a similar sense of disillusionment (does it show?) about a year ago. Disillusionment with what our culture calls "romantic love", furthermore a dense of dispair and anguish concerning my prospects at finding this mythical thing. Life, it seemed to me, destined me for a case of singleitis.
Most of the women I met were either utterly disinterested in anything beyond a casual buddy, or friend.
Of course there were other women right under my nose who were willing to offer me their love, but out of my fear of rejection, or utter blindness in some cases, I refused to reach out for what was at arms' length. Pathetic, isn't it?
And in the case of the very few women who were interested in me beyond casual buddy nothing ever seemed to work out.
Of course they whined to me without cease about the boys they ended up hooking up with.
This changed, of course, as every phase of our lives changes. Primarly what happened was that I matured. I become so disgusted with dating, singles scenes, and indeed most of the women I met in general, that I simply ceased to care.
Oddly once I stopped caring I received female attention in strange amounts. And sure enough I met a woman several months ago who very quickly infiltrated my life :-) We naturally and spontaniously found a deep connection with each other and it is still deepening to this day.
Before I had set my ideals and dreams of romance on fire I wouldn't have recognized the feelings I have for her as love, but they are, not a storybook romance type of passion, but something that seems more tender, more solid, and more quiet. For me, at least.
I'd looked for love in so many places and rarely stopped to ask myself, was the person I sought deserving of me, of my gift? You see, each of us, I believe, is gifted by God with unique traits that make us who and what we are.
We wonder do we deserve love. then we wonder, well if I do deserve love, why isn't it coming to me?
Only when I became utterly ruthless concerning my desires, and what I would tolerate in their fulfillment, and asked myself, "does such and such a person merit my company", did I find the satisfaction in companionship I once sought.
This is not selfish, it is a realization of our worth as people. In truth I may give my companionship as a gift to one who doesn't deserve it, or whose company doesn't benefit me. I do it frequently. But this must be a freely given gift out of generosity, not a need on my part to be love, or to be accepted. I can only give from a position of abundance, not from a position of want or privation.
Only when I stopped caring about, and only when I stopped seeking, the affection of women did I find the affection of a gifted and talented intelligent woman thrown at my feet. Only when I stopped caring about my friends accepting me did they come to seek out my company rather than mine having to constantly seek theres.
At work, once I stopped caring about my customers every need, did I find them. Seeking me out.
Once I stopped under selling myself on the marketplace, when I set a REASONABLE price on myself, not overly high price nor overly low, but a just estimation of my merits, did I get what I wanted.
After a few months of the Dubliner I grew fed up with it. They pretty much let me go in mid summer after I asked them to cut my hours drastically, to make room for my other jobs. I didn't mind this at all, the reason why is that during the interview for the next job I sought I was asked what salery I expected. I told my interviewer $23.00 an hour, boldly, and I was hired at $23.00 an hour.
Only once one stops to care about the world, or meaningless tokens of success, does the world seek one out, it seems. I don't understand it, it baffles me, but it seems to be a law of sorts.
Kierkegard argued that true purity of heart was to will a single thing, and to pursue it utterly.
Only once we unify our aims and goals, we can pursue them without undue distraction. Once we cease to overly care for the results of a process it frees us to pursue that process impeccibly, I think, for its own sake. If I don't care about being accepted or rejected I can be free to share my love for its sake alone, for love's sake, and if accepted fine, if rejected then I simply realise the rejector has tastes differing from my own, and frankly WHY WOULD I desire the company of someone whose taste is company do not include me? FREEDOM, Mary-Beth, simply in the words "I care not"
You once mentioned how different we were. Actually my experience is that people are more alike than different. Perhaps you might find value in my words, perhaps they might be relevant to you?
Holy shit. That was the longest comment ever. I think the correct thing to do is to write that in your own blog, then put a link to it here.
In this case, it should be done with a disclaimer that you're a torturous windbag.
Perhaps I'm talking to nobody at this point, but please don't bother to respond. I would die if I had to read another sentence from you.
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