Who Do You Love? What Is Love?

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Today is her birthday. I was researching Anthony Storr and her picture popped up. I used to have the same picture of her on a Guinness poster hanging in my kitchen. The local transit authority was using it on their commuter trains and my SIL who works for the TA got the poster for me because I loved it so much. Short story long - today when I saw the picture again I thought, "why not use if for my avatar. Didn't know until after it was installed that today is her birthday.

And who is the dead historical figure who is the object of your deep admiration, pray tell?

I enjoy the company of my mother but that is because she is essential to me. But besides that I don't know if I love. There is not really a consensus about love so it's impossible to know.

Yes, I would agree that she must have been a head turner. About the picture - I flipped it so she would be facing the forum instead of looking away from it. I've always felt an affinity to her, first to her physical appearance before reading any of her work or knowing anything about her, later, to her writings.

TekTek - The videos are hilarious and add wonderful comic relief to this subject. I love Jim Carrey, such a genius. It's odd isn't it, to think of all the thought we put into what we feel and what we don't feel and why, when it could possibly all boil down to chemicals. The lyrics to "Happiness is Just a Chemical" are wonderful and appropriate to this thread. I was especially attracted to the bolded lines.
......................
And you'd rather be sleeping in the paddock with the horses
While the stars cross the sky's on their prescribed courses
Can you take me with you when you go?
Because love is just a lazy generalisation that we use for 100 different
feelings and as many situations going through each others pockets is not like
us and flattery will get you somewhere and your happiness is just a chemical
A constant feeling you're being watched
All your good intentions so clumsily botched
A kiss sent down the telephone line can come out sounding like a bug getting squashed
And grasshoppers fling erratic parabolas
While you're drowning ants with your can of cola
Can you take me with you when you go?

The grasshopper lines and the going through each others pockets really caught my attention because I just wrote something along those lines a few days ago in another forum discussing social organization and mating habits among animals



What the bartender said:
Submitted by Mscosmiccat on Fri, 01/22/2010 - 19:49.

I've seen these two before, many times, in a suburb of Chicago. Yeah, it looks beautiful, but looks are deceiving. They appear to be the perfect couple, dancing the tango. He thinks they're dancing the tango, and technically they actually are dancing the tango, but, at the same time, she is picking his pocket. It's their act. You know, performance art. But the pick-pocket stuff is for real. He gets so wrapped up in his "art" and not stepping on her toes and all, that he never notices that his pocket has been picked until after the show when he stops at the local hangout and has no money to pay for his beer. He always looks at me with these big, sad eyes, scratches his head, and says the same thing, "What the hell happened to my money? I know I had fifty bucks in my pants before I left the house." I know all this because she is a friend of a friend of a friend and she talks a lot. And besides, I am the one who gives him his beer on the house.

Same here. And the thing is, she retained her special, ethereal beauty well into middle-age. I remember watching this movie based on her novel "Orlando", then reading it, devouring it, and reading her again, this time "Mrs Dalloway", "To the Lighthouse", etc. Didn't particularly like "The Waves" though.

You might also like the only preserved recording of her voice (1937): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8czs8v6PuI. Her voice is very "upper class", but also pleasant to listen to. And it fits her appearance quite well, I think.

By the way, as you seem interested in Anthony Storr, have you already read "Solitude, A Return to the Self"? I really like his analysis of (voluntary) solitude as a largely positive and creative concept. It's influenced my thought quite a bit lately, in addition to Thoreau.

Last edited by dddhgg on 26 Jan 2010, 1:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.

that is very creative, i like the imagery that it creates in my mind.

Yes, love is a lazy generalisation. Since writing my previous post I realise that I may be in love with someone else. This is mad, bear with me. Because I have trouble detecting how I feel and describing it, I sometimes am surprised by other people's reactions to how I behave.

I spent a bit of time with some friends at the weekend. Which is unusual for me and I enjoyed it immensely. But this guy I like actually took the time to speak to me. I enjoyed his company. Later I ran into someone I hadn't seen in a couple of months and he said, "you look happy." I said, "do I not usually?" He said, that wasn't what he meant and that I looked radiant. I may be in love. I may not. I dunno.

I feel a bit woozy. I don't like it.

I don't like to be touched either. I related to Thomas Covenant's "don't touch me". But I really don't mind this guy being in my space. I don't feel invaded.

But I like spending time with him. Now I don't know what to do because he is very shy and I'm not sure if he likes me back, but he looked unusually happy the other day too.

I don't understand love. I get to this point and start to flake out. I don't know how to handle situations like this. I have a sneaky suspicion he doesn't either as we are both in our late 20s, but neither of us have ever had a relationship with anyone.

I don't really have the words to say how I feel.

Quoting dddhgg

Wow! Thanks for that link. Never thought I'd ever get to hear her voice. I did something interesting with the transcript of that reading, interesting to me, at least. I substituted "love" for "words' (or speech, language) and I think the two are amazingly interchangeable, at least in this particular piece, The result becomes a very good insight into the nature of love, and helps me to stay on topic. I'll share a few paragraphs of Woolf's thoughts about words when transformed into thoughts about love.,

Love Fails Me
Thus to lay down any laws for such an irreclaimable vagabond is worse than useless. A few trifling rules of grammar and spelling is all the constraint we can put on words of love. All we can say about love, as we peer at it over the edge of that deep, dark and only fitfully illuminated cavern in which it lives – the mind – all we can say about it is that love seems to like people to think before they use love, and to feel before they use love, but to think and feel not about love, but about something different. Love is highly sensitive, easily made self-conscious. Love does not like to have its purity or its impurity discussed. If you start a Society for Pure Love, it will show its resentment by starting another for impure Love – hence the unnatural violence of much modern love; it is a protest against the puritans. Love is highly democratic, too; it believes that one love is as good as another; uneducated love is as good as educated love, uncultivated love as good as cultivated love, there are no ranks or titles in love’s society. Nor does the word love like being lifted out on the point of a pen and examined separately. Words of love hang together, in sentences, paragraphs, sometimes for whole pages at a time. Love hates being useful; love hates making money; love hates being lectured about in public. In short, love hates anything that stamps it with one meaning or confines it to one attitude, for it is love’s nature to change.

Perhaps that is love’s most striking peculiarity – the need of change. It is because the truth love tries to catch is many-sided, and love conveys it by being many-sided, flashing first this way, then that. Thus love means one thing to one person, another thing to another person; love is unintelligible to one generation, plain as a pikestaff to the next. And it is because of this complexity, this power to mean different things to different people, that love survives. Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow love its liberty. We pin it down to one meaning, the useful meaning, the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination…



I'm reading it now. He's got some amazing ideas, don't you think? (I left my computer at this point, went downstairs to get the mail, and found to my delight, that the second book of Storr's that I'd sent for had arrived, "Churchill's Black Dog, Kafka's Mice". ) What I find most interesting are his ideas about attachment and how if that is not possible, or hasn't happened for a variety of reasons, a child may and most often does, turn to solitude where he or she can create his own world of belonging, and that this seems to be the case with many of our most gifted artists, writers, musicians down through the ages. Kafka is a prime example of this, as pointed out by Storr. I turned to solitude at a very early age, at about 2 or 3 years, when I realized that I could not get what I needed from my mother, namely, security, the security of my mother's love. Whether or not this was actually true, or due to a glitch in my perception, doesn't alter the fact that I believed it to be true, and from that young age decided not to expect her to provide me with love and security, even though I endlessly continued to wish for it. I also decided at that point that I would have to provide those basic needs for myself, become my own mother, and eventually, or so it seems, a mother to everyone who, in my opinion, needed a mother. I even became known in my neigborhood as "Little Mother Hen" because I was always bringing home younger children who seemed lost and neglected, feeding them, giving them baths, putting clean clothes on them, teaching them. I wanted to become a pediatrician, but that never happened.

Quoting tektek

About the imagery. When I first saw that picture of the grasshoppers, it appeared to me that they were dancing face to face, and that the smaller of the two, which I assumed to be the female, was using her arm/leg (in the picture it's bent as a human arm would be) for some purpose which I visualized/imagined as picking his pocket. However, when I looked at that picture again this morning, I got to wondering which of those insects was male and female. Whose pocket was being picked and by whom? I at first thought the larger was the male and the smaller the female. So of course, I had to google "grasshoppers" to set the record straight. In all, or most, of the images of mating grasshoppers that I found, the female appeared to be larger in length and breadth. Then I went back to looking at the picture I posted and realized that my perception had been thrown off because the "couple" appeared to be in a vertical position, which I now see was an illusion. Flip it on its side and you can clearly see that they are horizontal and mating. Is any of this relevent to the thread? Probably not, but I feel much better somehow, knowing that she wasn't picking his pocket. But I wasn't far off when I imagined them doing the Tango. What better metaphor for mating? And one more little anecdote about that little piece of writing. I questioned myself, while writing it, why Chicago? Grasshoppers in Chicago? I tried to use the names of other cities, but none seemed or sounded right or better. In my google search I found:

"Grasshopper" is a term currently used in jest referencing a person who has much to learn. (this would be me )

The 1957 film Beginning of the End featured mutated giant grasshoppers attacking Chicago.


Grasshopper Suicide

Damn you Google!. You've side-tracked me again.

I am just so thrilled for you. It's as if I looked out my window and saw a flower blooming, suddenly, out of nowhere. I am in my 60s, and I don't know what love is either. Just go with it. Wow. How exciting.

I love all my animals. I love my family though it has always very strained. I love my two nephews and nieces more than I ever thought capable, it has been a new experience feeling this intense desire to protect and keep from harm that I have for them. I have romantic love for someone (unrequited) that I hope will eventually go away, that seems to be the most irrational emotion I am capable of experiencing.

My admiring mind topic

I am almost embarrassed. Weird. I have never told anyone before.

You would probably not have heard of him: Captain Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier, commander of The Terror, who died circa 1848 after the two ships (Erebus and Terror) were wrecked by ice in the Franklin Expedition of 1845 to force the Northwest Passage.
Like me, he was socially inept, shunned the limelight, and was sensible. Too bad he went against his better sense and listened to Sir John Franklin. All 129 officers and crew of the Erebus and Terror died of starvation, cold, botulism/lead poisoning (from poorly sealed cans of food), and Arctic scurvy.and cannibalsim (some crew were no doubt sacrificed for human meat. )

I hope Captain Crozier was not a cannibal, but one will never know. According to some, he was the most fit and "the last man standing" out of the 129.

Crozier had extensive Arctic and Antarctic experience, but, because of his being Irish, his accomplishments were overlooked for many years.

Polar exploration/Inuit anthropology is one of my special sub interests. In the news recently an Inuit hunter was rescued by the Canadian military from an ice flow in the Northwest Passage. He had been hunting seal when the ice he was standing on broke away from the shore. ( due global warming) He had a satellite phone and was able to contact help after 2 nights on the floe. Bad weather delayed earlier rescue, but helicopters were able to drop some survival supplies to him.

{As it was, the Norwegian Roald Amundsen in 1903-1906 who was the first person (with a smaller crew and ship than Franklin's) who successfully navigated the Northwest Passage. Amundsen was also the first person to successfully reach the South Pole and return with all his crew alive, unlike Sir Robert Falcon Scott, the second man {and crew of five) to reach that Pole but all perished on the way back. }

Happy birthday Virginia Woolf!

I have experienced similar things.

Do you ever wonder, imagine, or hope that he experienced a strong feeling for a yet unborn person from 162+ years in his future?

Sartesue wrote:

I hope so too. I can see how his resolve not to give in to cannibalism, (eat his men) under the ghastly circumstances of a death march, would heighten your admiration for him as a man and a leader. It's good that you can give him the recognition he deserves by taking a special interest in his life and accomplishments. It's a wonderful story, but one I would find very difficult to read about or watch on film. I found it touching, poignant (i googled) and tragic, that he was in a lovelorn condition when he left on that expedition after having his marriage proposal turned down.

Tears in my eyes topic

Absolutely. It would have been nice. (Not like me to be too sentimental, but I guess this is how this aspie experiences strong emotion.)

Sophia Cracroft the fool topic

I would have never turned Captain Crozier down. What a guy.