Love Zero Zero
You remove a young animal from its parent and it keens in fear and loss. Threaten an alpha males pack and it will fight to the death. Remove an ape or a meercat from its family or mate and it will lapse into despair.
I think love is a biological function. Something encoded into our flesh. It’s not divine or esoteric and certainly not aesthetic - though it can inspire creativity it is not born of it. It’s a survival trait - part of what makes us bond and breed - as much a natural part of the process of life as eating and sleeping.
Evidence that this function of our “hearts” is not a part of our personality or individuality can be seen every time a movie or a book tugs at us. We can be manipulated by the symbols of love into weeping or laughing.
A heartbroken person can be brought to tears by the sight of a happy couple advertising soap. Someone freshly in love can be entranced and see the sudden truth in most appalling pop-song. This is not a heightened state of enlightenment or profundity, these are buttons in our DNA being pushed. It’s the equivalent of showing a cardboard hawk shape to a newborn chick and watching them squeal. The cut-out hawk is no danger but the moment they are born their genes tell them to be afraid of the shape. People like romance in the media and art but not because it makes for a great story - they like it because it elicits much the same response as “real” romance. We know it’s just a cut out shape of a heart, but we still feel the fire.
You can see hints of this denial in our attitude to sex. It’s the big taboo - we don’t go naked, we have varying - mostly archaic - attitudes to seeing sex on film and we fuck in private - yet sex is the one hobby as a planet we all share and enjoy. We barely admit that it’s about procreation (men more than women for obvious reasons) in case that spoils the fun. As a race we assume we are so wise and advanced yet we still treat sex like our guilty secret. If we can’t be smart about something we understand so clearly how can we pretend we have a clue about something so diverse and confusing as love?
In much the same way as we look back at the seventeenth century and wonder how anyone could ever have believed that the body was made up of the four humours I think that later ages will look at our belief in love as an aberration born of an unsophisticated age. Once we can feel affection, desire and companionship for one another without evoking a mythical ideal then we will perhaps be on the verge of growing up.
I think love is a biological function. Something encoded into our flesh. It’s not divine or esoteric and certainly not aesthetic - though it can inspire creativity it is not born of it. It’s a survival trait - part of what makes us bond and breed - as much a natural part of the process of life as eating and sleeping.
Evidence that this function of our “hearts” is not a part of our personality or individuality can be seen every time a movie or a book tugs at us. We can be manipulated by the symbols of love into weeping or laughing.
A heartbroken person can be brought to tears by the sight of a happy couple advertising soap. Someone freshly in love can be entranced and see the sudden truth in most appalling pop-song. This is not a heightened state of enlightenment or profundity, these are buttons in our DNA being pushed. It’s the equivalent of showing a cardboard hawk shape to a newborn chick and watching them squeal. The cut-out hawk is no danger but the moment they are born their genes tell them to be afraid of the shape. People like romance in the media and art but not because it makes for a great story - they like it because it elicits much the same response as “real” romance. We know it’s just a cut out shape of a heart, but we still feel the fire.
You can see hints of this denial in our attitude to sex. It’s the big taboo - we don’t go naked, we have varying - mostly archaic - attitudes to seeing sex on film and we fuck in private - yet sex is the one hobby as a planet we all share and enjoy. We barely admit that it’s about procreation (men more than women for obvious reasons) in case that spoils the fun. As a race we assume we are so wise and advanced yet we still treat sex like our guilty secret. If we can’t be smart about something we understand so clearly how can we pretend we have a clue about something so diverse and confusing as love?
In much the same way as we look back at the seventeenth century and wonder how anyone could ever have believed that the body was made up of the four humours I think that later ages will look at our belief in love as an aberration born of an unsophisticated age. Once we can feel affection, desire and companionship for one another without evoking a mythical ideal then we will perhaps be on the verge of growing up.