Someone asked me once to define the word love as I understood it, personally. She understood I had neither the wisdom nor the sensitivity to explain it as it really is. Most of us have some clichéd notion of how the word can be applied in various situations, and many of us have self-serving ideas of how we expect it to be applied to us. But very few of us can actually pinpoint any a priori truth in the word. It’s sort of like being blind and playing whack-a-mole. Consequently, I understood her confusion and concern and her desire for a touchstone from which to avoid being lost in the labyrinth of meanings we conjure for this grouping of four specific letters—L O V E.
A young woman with the most open heart you can imagine, she finds herself often in personal predicaments because of the damn English language, particularly in its Puritanical American vernacular. People fuck and call it love, raise children and call it love, show loyalty to their neighbors and relatives and call it love, beg mercy for a criminal because of love and execute one for the same reason, start wars with other countries for love of one’s own, beat children to teach them love, give an addict drugs or refuse an addict drugs in a show of love, keep a brain dead family member on a ventilator and euthanize the family dog out of love. This list can be added to exponentially by simply passing it on to another person. That was and still is my friend’s problem and our problem as well. A whole spectrum of emotional activity is registered by the utterance of this simple word. It’s the collision of unlimited circumstance against the restraining wall of a language created largely as a connotative moral system rather than as a poetic means of expression.
Thankfully, every language is not blessed with this linguistic brevity. Consider the way the ancient Greeks spoke and wrote about love. They understood that, like an onion, love had layers and that one word could not cover every situation in which love may apply. They realized also that the human mind had almost unlimited capacity to divide, share, mix, and correlate these different layers, that one could feel love in one instance without necessarily reducing or damaging the quality of love one felt in another and that love may be both negative and positive forces in life. They saw the need to express the concept with more than one word or else how would it be possible for the language to truly represent it, and without the language to truly represent it, how would it be possible for love to even exist. Ezra Pound explained that “one moves a reader only by clarity.” The image created by the chosen word must be specific for the meaning to be clear. To the Greeks, who were by all accounts, the founders of western thought, at least in so far as we understand our Eurocentric thought processes, love had at least four definitive layers with all kinds of nuances to be derived from various divisions and combinations of said layers.
For example, if you were a prosperous Greek citizen you loved your wife because she bore your children and took care of your home. You loved your children because they were “of your blood” as were your cousins and uncles and aunts and brothers and sisters. The word relegated to this feeling of responsibility and contented affection was storge. On the other hand, if you were this same prosperous Greek who happened to be in the marketplace one day when Socrates came by with his current class of pretty young boy students and you developed a sensual desire, a libidinous longing that could not be contained as one particular boy swished by, this type of obsessive lust that could only be justified if it were love was called eros. Don’t get me wrong, eros is not restricted to same gender attraction. I myself have fallen in love at least three hundred and fifty-two times but always with women. Okay, always except that one time when I was in a play and everyone wore black leotards. A person may also feel eros at the same time and for the same person as one feels storge. Although, it’s better if that person is a wife and not a sister. A cousin will work also, if far enough past first cousin or if you are royalty and don’t mind the risk of reduced fertility and sperm viability, increased genetic disorders, fluctuating facial asymmetry, lower birth rate, higher infant mortality, smaller adult size, or loss of immune system function. I think paleness is a problem as well. I don’t much like paleness.
On rare occasions, you may feel as if helping an old woman across the street, protecting your neighbor’s property from vandals, or possibly donating a kidney to a complete stranger—the last being a onetime deal—would be the right thing to do. This kinship for your fellow humans translates into philia, which is Greek for brotherly love. It has nothing to do with family but reminds us of our responsibility to humanity. To be able to feel all warm and fuzzy toward fellow humans, this is a good thing. Our founding fathers thought this type of love held enough importance in the grand scheme of things to name a beautiful city after it—Philadelphia. As long as you don’t venture into North Philadelphia or most of Southwest Philadelphia, you can sense remnants of this original love without need of a firearm.
The compression of all this love came from the American need for emotional simplification. We simply adopted the fourth term, agape, as the most expedient form of that concept for us and not because the Greeks invented the word to describe a condition of love that holds someone or something in high regard. You know exactly what you mean when saying, “I agape that prime rib dinner” or “I agape my life (wife, kids, car, etc.).” This is a principled love, an intellectual understanding of the contentment and joy a particular person or thing brings you. It can also describe the feeling you get by giving a present to someone or doing a favor for someone with no expectations of getting something in return. Originally, it was a good word and rounded off the human love spectrum quite nicely in terms of descriptive language. However, as has been the case in other areas of human life, when people start having too much fun what always happens? Along come the fundamentalists, which in my realm of experience would be of the Puritanical Christian persuasion.
Oh, I don’t mean Jesus or the good honest people who try to really live by what he actually taught. You know who you are, but you’re too humble to brag about it. I’m talking about the rule makers that came after Jesus, beginning with Cotton Mather and those boys, the ones that spoke English and stole America from its indigenous people, Native Americans, who didn’t know it was possible, or even necessary, to own a continent. We call these early American settlers Puritans. They came to America to escape the religious persecution of their congregation by outside groups and ended up persecuting their own with a slight refining of the word agape. All of a sudden “turn the other cheek” and “do unto others…” became the need to “tough” love the unlovable. The unlovable were defined as sinners, or in other words, any person who disagreed with what current church leaders happened to think would best serve the institution and themselves. Eros was no longer love when considered in light of agape. It meant sin. In order to show “principled” love to a person feeling eros that person must be cast out of the community and walk around all day with a big red A sewn on her shirt pocket. Variations on that same theme of sinfulness became routine in early America. If you chose your family over the church in personal matters, if you showed loyalty to a friend instead of reporting his questionable standards of behavior (i.e. dancing, nipping ye olde corn whiskey, or spending some of the church’s tithe to feed a starving Indian), you and your friend both needed some good agape to save your soul, usually in the form of a pillory or a whip. On occasion, certain women required a severe form of agape known as fire. They were bound to a stake and stacked on a pile of kindling that was then set ablaze. Evidently, these women were able to help sick people get well or owned land the church elders wanted and that made them witches. The poor women had to be loved to death to save their souls.
Historically speaking, the Puritans brought so much agape to America that our society can still feel it four hundred years later. This one principle is sufficient to repress all natural (i.e. sinful) affection for each other in the modern world. Think what happens when a young mother tries to breastfeed her hungry child in the shoe aisle of a local Wal-Mart. There is no need for nuance or layers or multiple words. Love is, well, it’s just love and Christians know what that means, like protecting other good Christians from nakedness and escorting the sinful whore from the store. Better to starve a baby than expose a nipple. The joy doesn’t stop there. Lately it has become necessary to inspect genitalia before entering public bathrooms. Agape prevents people from standing up to pee in the Ladies.
Think how much zeal our Christian political leaders have when bringing principled love in the form of freedom to parts of the world that contain huge oil reserves. You didn’t know love could ride in on a Blackhawk helicopter with electric mini-guns, did you? Well, it does. Dead children are saved from the misery of growing up Muslim. We’ve improved on the sanguinary delivery of our love since the Crusades by leaps and bounds. As a matter of fact, it is now possible for us to rain it down with hellfire missiles and not even be flying the aircraft that deliver it.
Domestically, our elected officials in Washington are doing their Christian duty and saving all the money they can for our corporations to expand. It would be un-agape to waste that tax money on the poor for sinful things like food and education. Now that corporations are people too, Jesus doesn’t want them discriminated against. And, we all know that the poors in this country would spend any money they might have on storge (family), philia (non-profit community organizations), and eros (sex education and Planned Parenthood)—all sinful and all a waste.
The greatest thing about the merger of all those Greek qualities into a single American word—Love—is that the word has only four letters and can be replaced easily with other four letter words such as fear and hate in pamphlets, brochures, manifestos, AM radio sound bites, and cable news headlines. We can show we love America if we fear foreigners. We can acknowledge our love for Jesus if we hate gays. Even hope is a four-letter word. We get hope for our futures by eliminating taxes for the wealthy and making them richer. In return, they trickle down love to us in the form of low wages so we won’t have their anxieties about the stock market, or through loss of employment, healthcare, pensions, and dignity, and then fill our hearts with the American Dream that any poor person can be elevated to royal status through hard work.
I know this sounds a bit snarky, linguistically speaking, but I am nothing if not a cunning linguist. Consequently while some of you may read this as an indictment of our native tongue and its limitations, it is also a reminder that the actions generated by and reactions to what we say always speak much louder than words. A limited vocabulary will neither save nor end the world. Understanding the meaning of what is spoken might.
Jim McGarrah, Author 