~~ramblings on love. yes, -again-.

[reenka]

perhaps one just could never explain what attracts you to a concept, and maybe reality and likelihood and sanity have nothing to do with it. there is that strange alchemy in the brain-- mine, anyway-- where a very abstract ideal of unity that really has nothing to do with "real life" can manifest itself in terms of people. of course, the truth is, people are just people. they're not representations of ideals (or ideas, for that matter) of love, and they're not some sort of case study in philosophical predestination and the symmetries of the universe. i mean, or are they?

well, in the obvious way, they're not. if you think ideas do manifest themselves in reality, merely by the transferrence between all things-- ie, that there's a certain interchange between what we think and what we are, and what the world is-- then maybe.

i like to think of love as a triumph of imagination. as a story we tell ourselves. because in the end, how we see other people is simply a reflection of how we see ourselves. and how we see ourselves is an outgrowth of all sorts of things we've been told about the world and how we're supposed to be within it, and who we're supposed to act like and think like. some people love narrowly-- merely within the tightest circle of what they can see around them. and in fact, if you go outside of yourself far enough, if you go as far as you can and try to reach your opposing ends-- really, you just come back to yourself from the other side. so, there's no escaping, really, but perhaps there is an imagining of the cessation of the attempt. perhaps we can be at peace, merely by accepting everything we are as belonging to everything we're not.

am i making any sense? probably not.


i hesitate to say i like what i like because it corresponds to my self-created ideals. perhaps my ideals grew out of what i like, instead. i like to see the world in a certain way-- and sometimes people act in ways, and feel in ways, that validate what i want out of existence, and it seems to me that they're riding the wave, cresting the nexus point of what it might mean to be human as i see it. and it's not that i love it because it fits, but perhaps it fits because i love it.

right now, i'm taking an undeserved break from my philosophy class readings to tell you this, which is rather pointless and probably even annoying to someone or other. to me, it's a fascinating idea, that we create our world based on our desires, our impulses, that we color things in within the borders delineated by love.
    it's an interesting idea, that love can be "fucked up and wrong". that one can be attracted to the rightness of the wrong thing-- and yet obviously, this happens to me all the time. on the other hand, i would deny it. love can never be wrong, i want to say. it is only the barriers against love that are wrong. because love's function is to unify, to make the boundaries between one and Other fuzzy. love makes us squint and see ourselves in the Other, and also the Other as separate from ourselves, and not separate, all at once.

am i attracted to things, to people, to pairings, because they're fucked up and wrong? yes. but this is only another way to say they're right.

i think i've been going about it the wrong way. i've been saying, but how can i justify this particular love, how can i make a wrong into a right, whereas i never could. it is love itself that creates right out of wrong, and it is sourceless as existence itself-- ie, its source is everywhere and nowhere, both at once. and this isn't something that's related to any particular two people, or ten people, or thousand people-- i think it has to be true for all of them, if indeed we feel the same emotion when we say "love".

in terms of a story, you want to set up motivations, create a convincing set of circumstances to show how people could come to feel the things they feel, because obviously there's a strong belief in cause and effect when it comes to feelings. and indeed psychology and philosophy and rational thinking in general tell you that cause and effect are operative in (almost) every aspect of the workings of the universe. love should be no different. and yet it is.

people know this from their own experience, don't they?
    there is no, "i love you because". and, "i love you even though". there is just, in the end, "i love you."

while my own attraction to a particular love between particular people can have reasons-- surface reasons, things i enjoy about it-- one shouldn't confuse my own feelings with the feelings of the characters. i love harry & draco's love for conscious and unconscious reasons. i love it not because it's "wrong", most certainly-- it is simply a pleasant contrast, knowing it would look a certain way, while it -is- another way. i enjoy the contrast, the contradiction, the paradox. there is nothing to say for -them- it would be like that, as well. most people (especially young, not-very-introspective people), simply -are-. and then they are another way. and then they wake up, and they realize that the world is different today-- but not really. it's all rather strange.

i enjoy the idea that opposites belong to each other, contain each other. i enjoy it separately from my enjoyment of them, and yet also it is contained-- but only for me. in the end, two people, separately and together, will always constitute a mystery. it is not an equation you can solve, it isn't a thread you can untangle. no story can really -explain- people-- it can only hope to show us the essential mystery of being human and alive and even worse, in love with someone you never imagined you could be in love with. and then you couldn't imagine you could be in love with anyone else.

and this unimaginable quality-- this battle of the imagined and the unimagined-- is true, as far as i know, for everyone who truly sees another person. sometimes, we look at them and we cannot believe we are here with them. they are monstrous, so different, so not -us-, it is frightening, disheartening. they can never truly understand us, and we can never even hope to understand -them-. sometimes. and then it flings back again, and maybe we can't understand ourselves, or the world, or the first thing about anything, but we know -everything- about them, even if we've only seen them that second-- or seen them for the first time, even though we've known them for years. this happens.

it is not that -draco- is so different from harry. it is that we are -all- so different from each other, and so similar. and love just twists that on its ends, and sends it spinning. and it just -happens-. like air condensation happens, clouds and ionic particles and all that jazz, and then it rains.

we cannot bring our morals into discussions of love. we can't say, "but this is impossible", and "this is against their character". because love doesn't care. love likes to torture us and to make us want the worst possible person-- but really, they're the best possible person, because of that desire, because that's what the desire makes them be. it is always torturous, and always ecstatic. it is merely the measure of the openness of one's heart, rather than the nature of the person we are loving. the love is within the person who loves, and is a function of their own desire and need and imagination. it has little to do with the worth of the person they're directing the emotion at, and little to do with whether this is something that can amount to anything, as time passes. it doesn't matter, because its reality is centered in the moment.
    while we love -with- ourselves-- with our past, with our present, with our future-- we can only love -now-, in the present. there is no future here, no past. we can remember past love-- but if we feel it as we remember it, it ceases to be the past, and inevitably becomes the present.

anyway. i suppose this is just my opinion, and so doesn't lend itself to discussion or debate, so in a way, i suppose all this was pointless. in a way, existence and love and desire-- they're all transient and pointless expressions of being. i don't think, really, that communication is pointless-- and insofar as love is communicated, i believe it achieves its true function and finds itself, becomes right.

and yes. toooo much dead white male philosophers and i'm not even half done yet. well, back to work for me.
~~

EDIT - addictedkitten? ahahaha. i finally found a harry/draco snogging pic i don't think you have~! (i know. sad. sad. that i'm so excited, yes). but still! yesssss! :D
    and another! hee. also. squeeeee~! *snerks*

Comments

[addictedkitten.livejournal.com]

*is mollified, for the moment*

good luck on the work, man! *feels your pain*