Falling in love is the
ultimate act of revolution, of resistance to today’s tedious, socially
restrictive, culturally constrictive, humanly meaningless world.
Love transforms the world.
Where the lover formerly felt boredom, he now feels passion. Where she once was
complacent, she now is excited and compelled to self-asserting action. The
world which once seemed empty and tiresome becomes filled with meaning, filled
with risks and rewards, with majesty and danger. Life for the lover is a gift,
an adventure with the highest possible stakes; every moment is memorable,
heartbreaking in its fleeting beauty. When he falls in love, a man who once
felt disoriented, alienated, and confused will know exactly what he wants.
Suddenly his existence will make sense to him; suddenly it becomes valuable,
even glorious and noble, to him. Burning passion is an antidote that will cure
the worst cases of despair and resigned obedience.
Love makes it possible for
individuals to connect to others in a meaningful way — it impels them to leave
their shells and risk being honest and spontaneous together, to come to know
each other in profound ways. Thus love makes it possible for them to care about
each other genuinely, rather than at the end of the gun of Christian doctrine.
But at the same time, it plucks the lover out of the routines of everyday life
and separates her from other human beings. She will feel a million miles away
from the herd of humanity, living as she is in a world entirely different from
theirs.
In this sense love is
subversive, because it poses a threat to the established order of our modern
lives. The boring rituals of workday productivity and socialized etiquette will
no longer mean anything to a man who has fallen in love, for there are more
important forces guiding him than mere inertia and deference to tradition.
Marketing strategies that depend upon apathy or insecurity to sell the products
that keep the economy running as it does will have no effect upon him.
Entertainment designed for passive consumption, which depends upon exhaustion
or cynicism in the viewer, will not interest him.
There is no place for the passionate,
romantic lover in today’s world, business or private. For he can see that it
might be more worthwhile to hitchhike to Alaska (or to sit in the park and
watch the clouds sail by) with his sweetheart than to study for his calculus
exam or sell real estate, and if he decides that it is, he will have the
courage to do it rather than be tormented by unsatisfied longing. He knows that
breaking into a cemetery and making love under the stars will make for a much
more memorable night than watching television ever could. So love poses a
threat to our consumer-driven economy, which depends upon consumption of
(largely useless) products and the labor that this consumption necessitates to
perpetuate itself.
Similarly, love poses a threat to our
political system, for it is difficult to convince a man who has a lot to live
for in his personal relationships to be willing to fight and die for an
abstraction such as the state; for that matter, it may be difficult to convince
him to even pay taxes. It poses a threat to cultures of all kinds, for when
human beings are given wisdom and valor by true love they will not be held back
by traditions or customs which are irrelevant to the feelings that guide them.
Love even poses a threat to our society
itself. Passionate love is ignored and feared by the bourgeoisie, for it poses
a great danger to the stability and pretense they covet. Love permits no lies,
no falsehoods, not even any polite half-truths, but lays all emotions bare and
reveals secrets which domesticated men and women cannot bear. You cannot lie
with your emotional and sexual response; situations or ideas will excite or
repel you whether you like it or not, whether it is polite or not, whether it
is advisable or not. One cannot be a lover and a (dreadfully) responsible,
(dreadfully) respectable member of today’s society at the same time; for love
will impel you to do things which are not “responsible” or “respectable.” True
love is irresponsible, irrepressible, rebellious, scornful of cowardice,
dangerous to the lover and everyone around her, for it serves one master alone:
the passion that makes the human heart beat faster. It disdains anything else,
be it self-preservation, obedience, or shame. Love urges men and women to
heroism, and to antiheroism — to indefensible acts that need no defense for the
one who loves.
For the lover speaks a different moral and
emotional language than the typical bourgeois man does. The average bourgeois
man has no overwhelming, smoldering desires. Sadly, all he knows is the silent
despair that comes of spending his life pursuing goals set for him by his
family, his educators, his employers, his nation, and his culture, without ever
being able to even consider what needs and wants he might have of his own.
Without the burning fire of desire to guide him, he has no criteria upon which
to choose what is right and wrong for himself. Consequently he is forced to
adopt some dogma or doctrine to direct him through his life. There are a wide
variety of moralities to choose from in the marketplace of ideas, but which
morality a man buys into is immaterial so long as he chooses one because he is
at a loss otherwise as to what he should do with himself and his life. How many
men and women, having never realized that they had the option to choose their
own destinies, wander through life in a dull haze thinking and acting in
accordance with the laws that have been taught to them, merely because they no
longer have any other idea of what to do? But the lover needs no prefabricated
principles to direct her; her desires identify what is right and wrong for her,
for her heart guides her through life. She sees beauty and meaning in the
world, because her desires paint the world in these colors. She has no need for
dogmas, for moral systems, for commandments and imperatives, for she knows what
to do without instructions.
Thus she does indeed pose quite a threat
to our society. What if everyone decided right and wrong for themselves,
without any regard for conventional morality? What if everyone did whatever
they wanted to, with the courage to face any consequences? What if everyone
feared loveless, lifeless monotony more than they fear taking risks, more than
they fear being hungry or cold or in danger? What if everyone set down their
“responsibilities” and “common sense,” and dared to pursue their wildest
dreams, to set the stakes high and live each day as if it were the last? Think
what a place the world would be! Certainly it would be different than it is now
— and it is quite a truism that people from the “mainstream,” the simultaneous
keepers and victims of the status quo, fear change.
And so, despite the
stereotyped images used in the media to sell toothpaste and honeymoon suites,
genuine passionate love is discouraged in our culture. Being “carried away by
your emotions” is frowned upon; instead we are raised to always be on our guard
lest our hearts lead us astray. Rather than being encouraged to have the
courage to face the consequences of risks taken in pursuit of our hearts’
desires, we are counseled not to take risks at all, to be “responsible.” And
love itself is regulated. Men must not fall in love with other men, nor women
with other women, nor individuals from different ethnic backgrounds with each
other, or else the usual bigots who form the front-line offensive in the
assault of modern Western culture upon the individual will step in. Men and
women who have already entered into a legal/religious contract with each other
are not to fall in love with anyone else, even if they no longer feel any
passion for their marital partner. Love as most of us know it today is a
carefully prescribed and preordained ritual, something that happens on Friday
nights in expensive movie theaters and restaurants, something that fills the
pockets of the shareholders in the entertainment industries without preventing
workers from showing up to the office on time and ready to reroute phone calls
all day long. This regulated, commercial “love” is nothing like the passionate,
burning love that consumes the genuine lover. These restrictions, expectations,
and regulations smother true love; for love is a wild flower that can never
grow within the confines prepared for it but only appears where it is least
expected.
We must fight against
these cultural restraints that would cripple and smother our desires. For it is
love that gives meaning to life, desire that makes it possible for us to make
sense of our existence and find purpose in our lives. Without these, there is
no way for us to determine how to live our lives, except to submit to some
authority, to some god, master or doctrine that will tell us what to do and how
to do it without ever giving us the satisfaction that self-determination does.
So fall in love today, with men, with women, with music, with ambition, with
yourself… with life!
One might say that it is ridiculous to
implore others to fall in love — one either falls in love or one does not, it
is not a choice that can be made consciously. Emotions do not follow the
instructions of the rational mind. But the environment in which we must live
out our lives has a great influence on our emotions, and we can make rational
decisions that will affect this environment. It should be possible to work to
change an environment that is hostile to love into an environment that will
encourage it. Our task must be to engineer our world so that it is a world in
which people can and do fall in love, and thus to reconstitute human beings so
that we will be ready for the “revolution” spoken of in these pages — so that
we will be able to find meaning and happiness in our lives.
This text appears in the book Days of War,
Nights of Love.
