On Love

The Ancient Greeks are considered to be the experts on love in the Western world, though you would be hard pressed to find experts on anything that aren’t Roman or Greek.

I think it has something to do with the words. 

Five words for love. Five different types of love. It’s not that terribly uncommon. Think about all the English words for death, all the Inuit words for snow. The more real something is, the more words it has. It’s a simple math problem.

 (exposure to reality to y) x (taboo of talking about y)

—----------------------------------------------------------      = words for y

sounds in a language

What makes these five words interesting is that the Greeks didn’t have a word for blue. A maritime culture didn’t have a word for the color of clear skies and peaceful waters. The geography of Greece is so blue, that the modern day flag is blue and white. Only blue and white. And the blue and white could represent the sea and/or the sky. That’s how much blue there is. 

But love is infinitesimally more real than the color blue. More real than the sky and the sea that surrounded them. 

Should it be noted, then, what the Greeks thought of love? 

Aphrodite. Embodiment of love. Played off as generally a sex-crazed, selfish brat. But maybe the Greeks were onto something. Maybe we’ve all been fed this to hide the deeper messages that the Greeks planted long ago.

All is fair in love and war. 

Aphrodite, queen of love, seems always to draw towards Ares, master of war. Together, they breed fear and panic, strife and chaos. Even the gods knew to keep them apart. Even the gods failed.

This is not a smart war, it is brutality and cruelty, anger and hate, pumping blood and ringing ears, feeling nothing and everything. It is the war of animals.

This is not a careful love, it is envy and lust, need and want, clawing and biting, feeling everything and nothing. It is the love of animals. 

Where is the difference between these two? Where does the war stop and the love begin? When all you see is red, all you feel is heat, all you hear is singing blood, who has possessed you? Aphrodite or Ares?

We study history. It is who we are. We study to honor and remember and protect and prevent. Before farms and tools, civilization and conflict, history was recorded in paintings and stories. It goes so much deeper than safety and natural instincts. So and so died when they ate that fruit. Such and such died when they were bitten by that animal. Yes, those stories and histories exist too, but those are not the ones we remember.

We remember the heroes who saved us, the villains they defeated. We remember our history in a tapestry interwoven over hundreds of years, thousands of lives. We remember them because we love them, their struggle, their victory. It is said that gods need love to survive. They need attention to prosper. 

We give power to that which we love, we give it immortality. 

Is that what makes us human? These stories? That love? All animals know love, in a strictly physical sense. The more ‘intelligent’ feel love for one another. But what other animal has learned to love the imaginary?

A grasshopper does not love freedom because a grasshopper has not imagined it. We, humans, have imagined freedom. It does not exist, except as a belief. Freedom. Honor. Fate. All these things are merely pretend.

We dream up gods and worship them and love them. We dream up countries and defend them and love them. We dream up ideas and debate them and love them. 

What other animal would fight and kill and die, would send others to fight and kill and die, for something that doesn’t exist? What other animal would love the imaginary so much that it would destroy everything for that thing?

This is humanity. 

War and love are not partners, they are the same. 

Show me a war and I will show you love. Every fight, every struggle, every atrocity was committed when someone loved something too much. Perhaps the Greeks were right, there is more than one love. 

We fall in love with everything, so helplessly, hopelessly in love. Our countries, our beliefs, our religions, our people, our power. Everything that has ever happened, everything that has ever been done, has been done in the name of love.

This is humanity.

We do not know how to love without struggle.

Show me love and I will show you war. I will show you fists flying and words slicing. It is said that everyone has a love language. Touch, words, aid. Each of us expresses differently. But maybe every species has a language as well. For who else would start a war to prove their love? Animals fight and compete, but do they round up their animal friends and fight for years and generations for a concept?

There is a hierarchy of evolutionary instincts. There is a hierarchy to everything, that is the human belief, anyway. First comes the survival of the self. Then the survival of the species. Beyond that, there is nothing. And even within that, there may be only one. 

Survival. 

A drowning man will step on the shoulders of another to reach air. A common maxim. But a drowning man will do that because the animal in his mind, whispering faintly through thousands of generations, tells him that he must survive to continue the species. He will not think about it at the time, but he will feel the fear. The brain, the organism, the species must survive. 

By all calculations of evolution, those who put themselves first, survive. Those who survive, breed. Those who breed, determine the fate of their species. We are bred to put ourselves first. We are bred to survive and pass on our own selfish instincts to our children and their children and their children on and on and on. 

And yet, here we are, humans, self-proclaimed top of the food chain, killing each other by the thousands. Yes, we want to survive, so we defend. But we also start wars. We fight and kill and decrease the chance of our species survival.

Because human hierarchy is different. Wedged somewhere in there, or maybe on another list all to itself, lives love. We love our homes, we love our families, we love our beliefs and ideas and faiths. And the only way we know how to love is through hate.

We hate what doesn’t share our love. They are wrong. They are not us. They are not our species. And we must stop them from killing our species. Because that is what animals do. They destroy the competition.

That is love. That is war. 

That is humanity.