Some Thoughts on Love

I’ve been avoiding writing about love for a couple days now. It’s time.

A while back I wrote a poem called “On Tap.” It was about several things, but one of the things it was about was a longing to pour myself out like beer from a tap. To give myself away, free of charge, “on the house,” as they say.

Bit of a bizarre image, you might say. But I was drinking five, six nights a week at that time, so it’s a wonder I managed to produce anything semi-coherent, anyway. And anyway, I was going for some Eucharistic imagery at the time — you know, where the bread and the wine become the body and blood of Christ and everybody lines up to eat it while the choir sings the longest song in the hymnal. Can’t say whether the metaphor came through or not, but it was the intent.

So, a lapsed Catholic writes a poem with some Eucharistic undertones. How original…

(I promise this is going to come back to the subject of love. Just wait for the payoff, my darling.)

But the basic desire I was expressing in the poem wasn’t necessarily bad. Sure, the imagery of pouring myself into beer glasses and having people drink me is a little weird. (But hey, if it’s good enough for Jesus it’s good enough for me, right?) But that’s only the surface level of the longing, which goes much deeper than I think I expressed in the poem.

You could say it’s a desire to become one with the community. Because pouring yourself out in that way literally means each member of the community is consuming you. Catholicism is hardly the first religion to make a ritual of the eating of the body of the god. But by that same act of consumption, the god enters into every member of the community — in a very literal and very physical way.

You could say it’s a desire to sacrifice myself for the sake of the community. After all, if everybody drinks me I’m hardly going to survive the process! So there’s a yearning to give up my energy, my force, my life itself even, for the good of the whole and for their enjoyment. Probably with some kind of mystical union with the whole while the community undergoes some ecstatic vision or ritual.

You could say it’s a desire to die — and let’s be honest here, that was part of it.

Of the three, it’s the theme of sacrifice that has most to do with love. In its own deeply confused way, the yearning I voiced in the poem expressed a love for the community.

Let me state one thing right out. I’m not here to talk about Valentine’s Day card clichés about love. Two or three days ago I was calling love an abyss and talking about how terrifying it is.

I stand by what I said.

Love always means sacrifice. A mother sacrifices for her child — in many ways, but often quite literally giving of her own body in the form of milk. A young man sacrifices his life in battle for the sake of his brothers in arms. God himself, so some say, sacrifices his only son in order to redeem the iniquities of the human race.

Without sacrifice, love is just words. Just a pretty little ideal for poets to moon about. But with love, you give up something important to you for the sake of something even more important to you.

Ideally, you’re sacrificing for the sake of something you believe is worthy of your sacrifice. A woman sacrificing for the sake of a child she resents will inevitably act out that resentment in tens of thousands of tiny ways, often making the situation worse by hating herself for her own resentment and spite. A young man dying for a country that’s not worth dying for is the worst kind of mockery and robbery imaginable. A god sacrificing his son for a human race that isn’t worth saving — well, it would literally be a cosmic horror.

But if that doesn’t set the bar high enough, let’s complicate things.

Ideally, love is a sacrifice undertaken for something or someone you consider worthy of the sacrifice, and which is, in fact, worthy of the sacrifice.

And that last thing, the question of actual worthiness… there’s no knowing that in advance. You can believe it, you can choose to gamble on it, you can act on your love by making all the appropriate sacrifices — and you can still lose.

That’s why I said love is terrifying. That’s why I cut myself off from it, for years. Avoided it like it was the scent of death itself.

There is no guarantee in love. No matter how smart you play, you’re always making a gamble. You could be betrayed, you could be lied about, you could be cast into the city streets and left a ghost of what you were. You could be a perfect mother and have your son grow up to be Hitler. Any horror you can imagine could tumble in to crush you.

Those are all awful possibilities.

But.

Maybe the only guaranteed defense is worse.

Because the only guaranteed defense is never to love. Which really isn’t even a possibility — it’s woven into our humanity to give ourselves away to something. Maybe work, or drugs, or sex, or habits, or obsessions. I don’t think there really exists any such thing as self-love the way people popularly talk about it these days. There’s always something external we give ourselves up to.

For me it was alcohol, tobacco, and pornography, to name a few. Things that gave me very little compared to what I put into them.

(I talk in the past tense, but the drinking is the only one I’ve quit completely, at this point.)

So, I have to love, really. As the poet says, “A kelson of the creation is love.”

But I’ll tell you this: I fear to. Oh yes, I fear to.