A lone balloon pirouettes high into the smog.
The exposed city shivers and shuffles amidst
the hostile air. A suspension bridge spans into
the gloom. A girl pants heavily as she stands
precariously on the green steel ledge. Her stilettos
clank on the metal. She clenches her fists as
she stares down at the tarmac road that lies
a dizzying distance below her feet. The police
flash to the scene and cordon off the area.
A kindly counsellor steps forward and opens
a dialogue with the girl. A tense hour passes.
Then another is woven into history as, with
sacred patience, she mulls her dilemma. She
crouches as if preparing to descend from her
perch. No one can tell which way she will step.
She
lowers herself to the safety of the bridge footpath. In a flash,
mere inches from the grasp of her would-be saviours,
she scrambles madly back onto the steel wall.
Horrified people rush towards her. They snatch
at her.
~
In a hospital, at two in the morning, tiny squeals
of an infant chime out into the world. Parents
gawp as a strange, blue-pink creature scrambles
into blinding reality. The mother's love is
unconditional. Nature has decreed that she love
her child as dearly than she loves her own sweet
life itself. Nature has forged the genes that
float within every cell of her body. Genes are
a cornerstone of the meaning of life: these
labyrinthine strands of twisted proteins enfold
the recipes for the machines we know as creatures.
Genes are not self-aware. Genes are not emotional.
Genes do not love. Genes
exist. They
exist because they are adept at self-replication.
Those genes that fail to replicate simply vanish
and are filtered out of Nature's chronicles,
whereas genes that
do procreate fulfil
the self-fulfilling destiny of life. Life begets
life. Only genes that self-replicate live on
for another generation, for another roll of
the die.
Our genes are the forges of love. That things
so minuscule and emotion-free as molecular entities
can cause love is bewildering. They may be tiny
but they are monumentally complex. The power
of genes is subtle but overarching and in humans
much of their power is wielded through love.
Love encourages us to reproduce - to "make
love" and love conduces parents to stick
together to raise their kids. The parents' love
for their kids makes them protect and care for
them. Only if they survive can their kids pass
on their genes in turn - proliferating the same
genes that generated the love in their parents.
Nature selects in favour of love. Genes are
the blueprint of life - and of love.
Our genes impart our potential for experiencing
and giving love, without those genes that encode
love there could be no love at all. Tragically,
that potential for love may be blocked - maybe
by mental illness or by a cruel upbringing.
And the potential for love those genes induce
can be realised by the good fortune of having
loving parents. Genes are to love as light to
vision. You can check the light with a blindfold;
you can turn away your eyes; others may eclipse
the light or disease may leave you sightless.
But if your universe is devoid of light then
vision is unknowable.
~
The girl steps gingerly along on the green ledge.
She teeters and corrects her balance with outstretched
arms. The heel of her stiletto snaps. Her arms
sway elegantly, as if in slow motion.
~
The baby suckles. She is "cute" with
her little apple cheeks and her huge eyes that
fasten her parents' love more deeply than all
the art, treasure and dreams in the world. Her
genes busily mould her appearance such that
no sin, neither screaming in the night nor erupting
ballistic puke over the new carpet, can exceed
a willing price for such a lovable creature.
Genes did not get where they are today without
affecting the nurture of others. There passes
a momentous time between birth and reproductive
maturity and even longer to achieve self-sufficiency.
Predators love to snack on the juveniles of
others. Millions of years of natural selection
have favoured parents who love their offspring
so profoundly that they ceaselessly work to
foil the sly tactics of all the hungry predators.
Love is nature's ruse to promote safety throughout
the perilous aeon of childhood.
~
The girl's ankle twists. She gasps and stumbles
and topples. In an awful, pathetic effort to
prevent her fall her outstretched hands grab
at the green ledge. They smack hard against
the metal and rebound like sticks.
~
The teenager is an absolute nightmare. Her parents
worry themselves sick about her. She claims
she hates them: she moans that they make her
miserable and it is
not fair! In her
resentful eyes all her parents' love transmutes
into a loathsome pathos. She hones her skills
of manipulation in her shameless quest to abuse
the affection that has served her so well throughout
her delicate years. Her devoted father suffers
untold anxieties over her welfare. She ruthlessly
exploits her hold over his emotions. The parental
love that nature provided to protect is used
against the giver so that the offspring may
learn to haggle for yet more resources. Such
haggling skills are necessary if a societal
creature is to prosper enough to procreate.
She must gain the lion's share of the available
resources, after all her rival siblings will
only embezzle what she does not. Her father
is strong and he stands up to her and she screams
at him and tells him she hates him and slams
her bedroom door.
~
Her wrists break against the cold steel of the
bridge. The agony of fear is intolerable. A
sickening cramp seizes her stomach. She falls
backwards to the hideous chorus of muted male
cries and female screams.
~
Walking home one night not long after her eighteenth
birthday the girl is attacked and raped. Genes
generate much love as a means to foster their
own propagation, but tragically that love
does not monopolise their reproductive strategy.
In her indifference, Nature has devised a parasitical
and brutal alternative. Many feminists, perhaps
out of their ignorance of evolution, make the
mistake of anthropomorphising the crime of rape.
They declare that rape is about men exerting
power over women. But the statistics of rape
tell different story. Rape is a crime that is
occasionally committed during a burglary. Research
into this terrible subject shows that burglars
rape fertile women in preference to older, richer,
higher status women. Fertility not domination
is the foremost motivation of rape. These well-intentioned
feminists are causing more harm than good: only
when the evolutionary aspect of rape is understood,
can rape be more fully prevented and counselling
be more effective. Genes are behind this instinct
of the rapist. So rape is not the political
crime the feminists obsess about, rather rape
is an abysmal crime of nature, a dire by-product
of natural selection.
Rape is ubiquitous amongst the species of the
animal kingdom because it is a strategy of genetic
reproduction that incurs relatively little cost
to the male. Rape is unthinkably cruel, but
nature does not care. The only factor that matters
to genes is their own proliferation. However
instinct driven by genes is no excuse for inflicting
indescribable physical and emotional harm. The
civilised world compels all people to be responsible
for their actions and that civilians should
be protected from crime. Punishments of rapists
must be harsh, not only to remove them from
society so they pose no further risk to others,
but also because a deterrent is necessary to
counter would-be rapists' instincts. Generally
and simplistically speaking, those who rape
are abhorrent and should be should be punished
more severely than they currently are. Conversely,
women who deliberately have consensual sex and
then cry rape are abhorrent and should be punished
more severely than they currently are.
~
The girl falls. Her mind and body thrashes in
pure, naked shock.
~
The girl marries. She loves her husband dearly.
However his dalliance with drugs gradually hardens
into dependence. A faithful lover, she subconsciously
buries the pain and the fear. She desperately
basks in the fading rays of his good nature,
believing that one day she will wake up and
all their troubles will be solved. Love could
not thrive nor be so enchanting if we were consistently
honest with ourselves about our loved ones.
It would be less easy for children exist in
a harmonious family environment if parents were
brutally frank about each other's deficits relative
to their ideals.
Imagine we are all identical. Imagine we all
possess the same physical and mental attributes.
Imagine we are mutually indistinguishable: we
look the same; we sound the same; we have the
same memories and experiences and upbringing
and personalities; we share the same desires,
we possess the same stuff and wealth, we sport
the same hang-ups, virtues and shortfalls. Then
could we still love knowing the other person's
charms and faults as surely as we know our own?
The answer is
effortlessly! We are not
rational and what we perceive is not reality.
Artefacts caused by mental illness aside, even
those of us who are deeply self-critical would
soon find a way of loving someone else who was
identical in every way. We would still find
ways to see ourselves as fundamentally different
to our identical fellows. This is down to the
ego effect. Our egos make it tough for us to
accept truth, to comprehend unfiltered reality.
The ego distorts the world we sense so that
it conforms to our own ideals of what the Universe
should be like. The ego of a religious
man convinces him that he is special in some
"Creator's" mind. He loves this Creator
like a child his imaginary friend and he imagines
his "Creator" loves him back. All
round the world each religious person truly
believes that his own imaginary Creator is real,
and all the other imaginary Creators are mythical.
Love dazzles people into wanton blindness.
This is the power of love, to cause people to
believe in anything in pursuit of a high. Our
love of ourselves makes us instinctively single
ourselves out as special in some way, even when
we live mediocre and pointless lives. And then
we ascribe imaginary traits to our beloved God,
spouse or partner and we imagine they think
we are special in turn and we love them all
the more for it.
The girl returns home to discover her husband
sprawled on the floor. She knows in an instant. Her agonising
grief and heart-rending guilt renders her unable
to deal with the sudden loneliness. Then the
shocking debts her late husband incurred are
discovered. Her parents are not well off yet
they willingly sell the house they lived in
for twenty years to help their beloved daughter.
Their own happiness is not built upon possessions
or wealth, it is linked to each other's and
to their daughter's. She feels yet more sickening
guilt for inducing her parents' anguish. In
her ragged state of mind she inadvertently transforms
her parents' love for her into yet another emotional
burden she must suffer. She is unable to bear
it.
~
The girl plummets through the air. In torture.
In terror. The banshee air wrenches her hair
upwards.
~
Some say that our beating hearts enslaved within
our ribcages are necessary for love. Strictly
speaking this is true! If the heart stops then
you cannot love.
Her will to live exhausted, the girl catches
a bus into the dangerous, uncaring city. The
bus crammed with carefree youngsters in awed expectation
of a bawdy night out. At the back of the
bus she watches two horny teenagers kiss and
grope. Their love is pure, mad love,
untainted by the comforts and tragedies of adulthood.
They do not know it, but in later years never
again will they feel the passion quite as hot. For their
love is debilitating, they can barely think
of anything nor imagine anything other than
their sweet, exalted lover. Their minds explode
with delight. Their feet hover above the ground.
Before long their ecstatic love will mature
into a finer, fuller, ultimately more rewarding
love. But never again will their love scold
their flesh.
~
The girl plunges in the river. Her legs shatter.
She is hauled from the water and ferried to
intensive care. Her parents suffer agonies,
despair and guilt. They have already fulfilled
their primary role when they raised their children.
Now they are periphery pawns in Nature's designs.
Miraculously the girl recovers. Delighted medics
report their astonishment. She meets a soldier.
They get acquainted and become great friends.
She thinks him wonderful.
~
Having your best friend become your lover is
the strangest of dilemmas. On the one hand it
may lead to utter bliss with lifelong love.
But should the love splutter and evaporate then
the time will come to mourn the double blow of
lost lover and lost dear friend. The loss of love and
friendship would be an abysmal fate, but life
is about experiencing and
bouncing back stronger and wiser. Just
as likely, life can be an endless stream of
painful misadventures and a sense of fulfillment
may elude us. In such times it is good to put
life into perspective. You may not be in love,
but if you are neither clinically depressed
nor dying nor starving nor imprisoned nor in
pain nor at the mercy of a tyrant's torturer
then be happy. The most golden utopias are but
mirages in the infertile sands of our greed.
~
The girl marries her soldier friend and they
spend the rest of their lives in a long and
blissful marriage. She loves him every smidgen
as much as it is possible to love. The first
of their three children is born. Her thrilled
parents help to raise and educate their kids.
~
Having passed to their grandchildren their wisdom
and knowledge of vast experience, grandparents,
as decreed by Nature, are superfluous to the
species. They are an overhead, competing with
their spawned gene receptacles - their descendants
- for resources. The very same genes that gave
them consciousness and health orchestrate the
decay that withers and destroys them. For death
is as natural and imperative as life and love.
And death wreaks the total destruction of the
mind. It is the strangest thing - to think about
thinking, and to go through life always thinking
about the act of thinking. The mind is a phenomenal
network: incomprehensible in might; mysterious
in function, it is cursed with making sense
of our unknowable Universe. Often fate
has us suffer the agonies of asking why the
ones we love don't love back and why those that
love us are not to our tastes. We take on board
guilt and unwittingly induce guilt in others.
Love makes the pain more acute and - immersed
in our forlorn contemplations - we neglect our
ambition to feel happiness - to
love.
Will the coveted love us?
Our first love did not last
Ideal love dwells in the future
Dead love haunts our past
But when we learn to love the now
Then love will find us anyhow
~
One frosty morning the girl receives the stinging
news that her mother has died suddenly and peacefully
in her sleep. Three days later her poor father
withers and perishes of a broken heart. Once
again the girl suffers the lonely agony that
is so often the companion of love. She kneels
and places two bouquets of dewy flowers side
by side over the fresh graves. Though unable
to stem her tears of sadness and loss and guilt
and regret and love, she smiles.
The Cosmos is unbelievably vast. Modern cosmology hints
that even though our observable Universe transcends our comprehension
in distance and age,
it is in fact an infinitesimally
tiny spec compared with The Whole. There are species of "Multiverse",
which are collections of universes, analogous (well, very weakly analogous)
to our observable Universe being a collection
of stars and planets. Multiverses may be
infinite
in extent. This means that in worlds buried in infinite space
and time, there are an infinite copies of you
and me, all living parallel lives. In some of
those universes we are lovers with people that
today we can only fantasise about. Indeed, if
you, dear reader, are female then you and I
are married somewhere out there in the Multiverse,
and we are deeply in love! Yes, it's a horrifying
notion is it not? >
Grins<
Ah yes,
love! For some, to love romantically
is to share one's life and soul (metaphorically speaking) without limit.
To love one that has the capacity to
love your thoughts and you their's is the euphoric ideal. If one's lover is unable to appreciate
your thoughts, that prevents you from sharing your deepest
ideas with them, and then love can only hobble towards
its highest fulfillment. But even a dented
love out-gleams a
trove of gold and gems.
Do not heed, as some unfortunates do, particularly
the more gullible of the fairer sex: do not
heed astrologers that write their bullshit about
love and the zodiac. There is no such thing
as one "star sign" being incompatible with another:
to say so is as absurd as to say that someone
called, say, "Mike", is incompatible with someone
called "Melissa". Yet such statistically disproved
nonsense can prevent true love by driving genuine
lovers apart or snuffing out their love before
it has time to form. These fraudster astrologers
are possibly as harmful to fulfilled love as
institutional religion.
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| From: |
lizzy | Subject: | 2002-12-28 14:25:44 |
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Natalie | Subject: | 2003-05-13 05:37:00 |
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Mike | Subject: | 2003-09-07 01:27:40 |
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Clayton Carter | Subject: | 2003-09-27 14:37:37 |
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kendy | Subject: | 2003-11-27 05:34:48 |
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Christopher | Subject: | 2004-03-04 15:08:32 |
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MadPole | Subject: | 2004-04-25 11:39:27 |
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Nescirian | Subject: | 2004-07-28 18:12:50 |
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Bowles, Mike | Subject: | 2004-09-11 20:15:25 |
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Kali | Subject: | 2005-03-23 02:08:22 |
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Raychel | Subject: | 2005-03-27 00:17:15 |
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Kali again | Subject: | 2005-05-06 23:08:52 |
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Daphne | Subject: | 2006-01-11 00:00:26 |
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monkey | Subject: | 2006-09-27 11:45:56 |
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The unwilling philosopher | Subject: | 2008-02-16 09:23:08 |
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