LOVE, BASIC AND VARIOUS

The physical substrate of love is a simple one: skin and brain.  In a real pinch, brain only.  Love is a learned (I say, LEARNED) response to a sensory understanding of another entity, hopefully a friendly human being.  It can be on a continuum, it can be as an interaction, it can be temporary, it can be as close to eternal as humans can get.  It can be consummated, but not if the other entity is imaginary, which it might be.  It can be blissful or painful or just contented.  

The media keep trying to drive it into commodified categories, but they are too dumb to see the variousness of it, so only exploit M and F or maybe GBLTQ in niche markets, and leave the long tail just dangling.  They have XO minds and need a little SM to wake them up.  Oh, nevermind, they exploit SM all the time.  Once you realize what it looks like in diluted form, it’s everywhere.   I really dislike this BLT idea of what sex is because yearning is not the same as identity.  A mouse can yearn for a lion.  (See imaginary above.)  Even vice versa, though most people seem to want to trade “up.”

A person can be located who is exactly a perfect match: their gender, their economic status, their looks, their ethnic background, their fav movie/color/sport/food and all that other Facebook trivia, etc. etc.  and simply stir no brain cells.  While along comes the bearded old scissors-sharpener with his cart and bell, totally inappropriate, and an MRI of the brain would explode from the heat.  No one knows why this is, but it makes a lot of good stories.

Some people blame pheromones, a molecular perfume that might not even be detectable consciously  but that keys somehow into a memory or a need.  (That’s the way smells work: they literally and physically stick a molecular key into a receptor in the nose -- how sexual!)  The back of the U of Chicago Alumni mag always has an advertisement for a lab-made pheromone that comes in a bottle.  It’s kind of half-consciously based on the image of a guy who spent his summer baiting moths with pheromones and could never really get the smell off him, so he had to give up baseball bleachers for the summer or anything else that couldn’t be accompanied by a cloud of moths.

I have an “ugly dog theory.”  If an old dirty ugly dog shows up at your doorstep and refuses to leave but doesn’t really make trouble and you feed him and get used to him and maybe even finally take the garden hose to him, so that a million tiny transactions of “gaze” and feeding and stepping around each other gradually weaves a web of relationship that begins to approach some kind of bonding.  A recognition at a deeper level.  Affection shading into something more.

I was reading about one of those cultures where a man is assigned a wife chosen by the patriarchs of the family and never meets her, even at the legal ceremony.  On the wedding night -- and confinement has guaranteed she is a virgin -- he goes to her in a dark room and inseminates her.  At least that’s the goal.  He may never really know what she looks like -- just what she smells and feels like, her shape, her body temperature, the taste of her mouth if he thinks to kiss her.  And that’s what she learns about him.  Seemingly.  That way it’s easier to kill her if she breaks the code.  Otherwise, they might actually fall in love.  If she’s Scherazade, she begins to tell a story, whispering in the dark, so he learns her voice.  Better than kisses.

My chaplaincy was at a big midwest hospital where one of the specialties was creating a sex life for seriously disabled or mutilated people.  What I always remember was a story about a man who had been burned so badly that only the back of one arm still had feeling.  By stroking it, his wife could bring him to climax.  She was using memory and imagination.  I’m talking about love here, not just sex.  (Didn’t Jane Fonda make that movie?)

I have two touchstone sci-fi stories.  One is about a woman who died and so her husband had her recreated as gold rings cleverly shaped and magnetized to stay together in her shape and house her brain.  When she died, the rings fell chiming to the floor, no longer held together by identity.  The other one is about pure sex.  On a planet far far away a seductive woman in a turban would pick up space pilots in one of those Star Wars bars.  She took them to her “crib” and as soon as they were fairly besotted with her, she took off her turban.  She was not exactly Medusa: these were not snakes but something like worms or tentacles that slid and slipped and were faintly electrical and perfumed and long enough to wind around the man, penetrate all orifices, (I suppose maybe women, too, but this is an old sexist story) and send him into such an ecstasy that he went into overload and died.  Then she ate him.  Some people love like that.

If you sat in the village cafe and drank coffee while observing the locals, you would see no examples of either of these stories -- at least not obviously -- though people often arrive in pairs.  Comfortable, accommodating, conventional and faithful.  Is that love?  One definition of home is that if you go there, they will take you in.  One definition of love is if your partner needs you, you will go.  In the last ten years I’ve seen some of these local people lose their partner, wait a while, then remarry and go on unchanged.  I’ve seen others lose a partner and follow them into death soon, refusing the world.    It has nothing to do with how thin, cheerful, ethical they are.  Maybe money or number and kinds of kids matter.  Rarely is there a whole new phenomenon, a relationship no one has seen before.

I see no need to prioritize love, to say one kind is more valid than another.  I see situational relationships.  I see the cosmos and the culture pressing in on the individual, insisting, removing options, blasting down gateways to meadows unsuspected.  I see an individual finding a way to take the hand of another individual.

A THEORY OF LOVE -- VERY LONG, INVOLVED, CONTINGENT

This is my theory of sexuality in terms of my figure of the circle with the dot in the middle  and a line running vertical through the dot.  NO it is NOT that explicit!  What do you think I’m doing here, the biological symbols for male and female?  Absolutely not, because my main premise is that every human being is unique because we are animals and products of meiosis.  “Uniqueness” is the whole point of the process.  

These uniquenesses are generally thought of as two entirely separated circles representing sexual identities X and Y, which is a total distortion, but I can admit the idea that they are distributed in a kind of U-shape or upside-down Bell curve, with male on one end and female on the other with -- in the middle-- a few people who are both, mixed some way.  (I don’t know where to put “neither.”)  If you’re looking at anatomies.  But this is also deceptive, because it turns out that people move back and forth on the continuum, depending on their internal chemistry which varies with stage of life or circumstances.  In fact, the key to my schema is that the dot in the middle is the upwelling (the well is the bottom half of the vertical) from the immanence of existence, pure vitality coming from the molten core synergies of life itself.   The circumference, the circle, then represents the context pushing in to confine and shape identity.

Individuals live on cultural continuums about what X and Y qualities and roles are.  Clearly the Y is supposed to inseminate the X and the X is supposed to carry the baby to term, then nurse it.  Everything else is negotiable.  If the individual’s personal qualities aside from these are a good fit with what the culture expects, everything is copacetic.  If not, cacophony.

The culture messes around with a lot of variables.  In some, sterile women are discarded.  In others, indiscriminate inseminators might be killed.  In a more exotic tribe, a man might believe that an ejaculation is the same thing as a nipple exuding milk.  In a very sophisticated tribe, nursing a baby through a human nipple might be replaced by a glass bottle.  In an EXTREMELY sophisticated and scientific tribe the baby might be conceived in a glass Petri dish.  They’re working on a glass uterus, a la Huxley.

In the middle, that dot where the cosmos is upwelling (Is it nursing us in some sense?  It is our Axis Mundi and our Umbilicus.) forms an identity that is self-conscious.  It (we) can think about the cosmos, so let’s do.  The cosmos is the everything we know of: eternal, edgeless, sourceless, goal-less, sometimes perceptible and sometimes not.  It has been a shock to discover that it’s not about us.  It cares not about us: neither hate nor love, just a fabulous paisley of dynamic implacable pattern.  Now go read the books of Howard Bloom who starts with this stuff and brings it up to the present.

Back to me again.  While everything happened by mitosis there was no sex except fusion and separation because there was no change in identity -- only in boundaries.  But once there was a genome, the possibility of swapping gene formulas was fulfilled in meiosis, the first sex.  Again a matter of boundaries opening and closing, but this time with a resulting “new being.”    Around the individual cells with their commotion is an environment that stretches out to the boundary around “my” circle.  This set of conditions, pressing against the creature, eliminated those examples that didn’t fit but encouraged those who fit a little better than their predecessors.  The conditions are climate, other creatures, geology, available foods, and all sorts of other things.  The creature (let’s promote him or her to person) does not determine fittingness: it is forced by the boundary where everything else presses in.  Evolution is not something a person does -- it happens to them.  They can’t go to the gym to get fitter in this sense.  That pressing in is what some people feel as “fate” or even “god.”  But it is impersonal.  It simply exists and if we fit into it well-enough we also keep existing.

Culture is a boundary inside the boundary above.  It is a human-constructed and negotiated boundary based on the desire to survive.  It can push out against environment.  This extends forward in time through one’s meiotic creations, one’s children, and by sharing the children of one’s tribe who carry this culture through memes much like genes.  If the memes fit the larger environment and the genetic characteristics of the children well enough, the culture will survive, the species will survive, the individuals will survive.

“Love” is a meme that enables genes.  (Okay, you can have lust, if you’d rather.)  It’s partly conscious and partly in a “black box.”  If one person finds a way to bond with another person and if it fits the culture memes, great.  All is well.   Unless the particular variations on the culture memes are out-of-sync with each other or the larger culture frowns on them, or when love causes them to breach their boundaries, so they get lost in each other and can’t form a new shared identity, or are alarmed and slam the boundary shut -- I’m talking metaphors here -- love ends.  “Smart” (surviving) cultures leave some room for variation because, here’s the ugly truth:  the physical environment is always changing.  The premises on which food, shelter and other predictabilities are based will not stay the same.  Every time they begin to vary, individuals will freak, form groups, try to preserve the status quo by killing others so they can claim their resources and territory.  The ethic will shift from “protection of the minorities” (compassion aside, because they might carry the qualities that fit tomorrow) to “winner take all.”  This is why poverty makes people so unreasonable.  They will not survive and their children will not survive until they take action, culture or no culture.  (So far the trump card of the status quo is drugs, both the mental health kind and the street kind.)

Assuming all is well and calm and there is enough for everyone, the gestating fetus learns that the status quo is warm chemical soup full of nutrients with a heartbeat for a drum.  Gradually fetuses find their own heartbeat rhythm.  Then the shock of birth and the transfer to arms and nipples.  The infant unfolds, partly according to the physical environment and partly according to its inner gene plan and partly according to the awakening emotions of human interaction.  Not the mother but the primary care-giver, as they say.  Your lover is always, from then on, your primary care-giver.  Emotionally anyway.   This is your first evoker of up-welling.

(to be continued) 

THE HANDS OF THE COUNTER-PHOBE

This is one of my earnest and probably uninformed little attempts to figure out stuff I know little or nothing about but have formed theories about, mostly through reading. One thing I’ve figured out is that most people know even less than I do.

I’m trying to find a little piece about male/female that I wrote at Seabeck one summer, maybe the one (1987) when I was the Great Guru presenting a lecture series called “Unfolding the Ordinary” which has been my mantra for a long time. I’m rereading the whole set -- might type it into this blog. (Maybe you’ll notice that the main thing I use my blog for is what the fellow who had no sex life called “taking things into my own hands.” That is, if no one will publish this stuff, I’ll do it.) At one point I was addressing sex differences, trying to make the point that we are human beings first and the rest is negotiable. I said, “I can’t believe that a little dangly tag of flesh makes much difference.”

Suddenly, an irrepressible man sprang up from my audience and yelled, “I object!”

Uh-oh.

“In the first place,” he objected, “It’s not LITTLE! In the second place, it’s not always dangly! Sometimes it is a spear, a cannon, a weapon of mass destruction!”

“Exactly,” a woman yelled back. “What can it do that’s constructive? All it can do is rape, start babies it refuses to protect, and displace the brain in your head!”

“Hey,” the man shot back. “You’re using synecdoche in a bad way! I’m the whole, not the part! I’m proud of my parts, but PLEASE I try to use them responsibly! What about YOU?”

“If you could keep the Pope out of it, I might be able to manage quite nicely. Or you could pay me the same as you for doing the same work!”

Actually, this dialogue never happened (it’s a hoax) except for that first one-liner demanding respect for penises. We all knew the rest without anyone bringing it up. After all, we were sophisticated Unitarians who had college degrees. We all met at the flagpole (!) at least once every Seabeck session so that a professional expert on sexual equipment could answer questions (submitted secretly on paper) for FUN! We already knew all that stuff.

What we were still experimenting with, and would all our lives, was where our personal boundaries were, how we could comfort ourselves when things went wrong, and -- oddly -- how to celebrate when things went very well indeed, esp. when there was no expectation of it. We were disconcerted by being out of control. We had been taught to always stay in control. No wonder that when we climbed into a chalice represented by a retreat and lecture series, some people’s wine never caught on fire and others exploded. How to maintain a nice even flame? We search through the books and films and theories.

The event itself was educational for me. I believe in reflexivity, watching myself, analyzing myself. It seems more fair than always watching and analyzing other people, which is a boundary violation and usually useless anyway. I learned that being tired and taking risks is part of falling in love. But when the situation closes, and everyone drives home, the love part might be only a memory. Is that any reason not to fall in love?

One might fall in love with an entirely inappropriate and unavailable person. That’s been my life plan. I don’t want someone just like me rummaging around in me, do I? So I’m careful to be in situations where people just like me are scarce. Luckily, that’s not very hard. I’m a parlicoot, a chimera, an accident of the times. More than that, I’m counter-phobic. Not many people are counter-phobic, which means that if something is really scary, a counter-phobe is attracted, goes towards it, maybe goes too close. The reason not many are around is that it’s an approach to life that’s likely to kill you.

That’s part of the reason that when you tell what you’ve learned, people say you’re just making it up. I tell about things that happened on the rez and even the young ‘uns there now just don’t believe it. They’re more willing to believe bad stuff, because that justifies caution, prudence, safe-guards. Their strategy is to stick together, do what the others do.

I love the little natural history blurbs on NPR. Yesterday they talked about trying out a new instrument, a kind of sonar that can see for a great distance under the water. They fired it up and saw herring coming from the depths and faraway until they were grouped into a huge school -- incredibly twenty-five miles across. That’s almost from here to the nearest shopping town. The herrings came together, got in synch the way schools of fish do (each fish watching the wiggler on the right or the left), then took off en masse for warmer waters to the south where they could reproduce. Just like college kids are spring break, except the fish didn’t get drunk. They just came back and dispersed to whereever the food was. A counter-phobic fish -- a counter-phobic college kid -- might do something quite different. And be weeded out of the gene pool.

So the lesson is that a counter-phobe should be very cautious and probably has a high level of stress hormones. I had mine tested -- I do. So a counter-phobe can’t afford to listen to that constant barrage of health news about 2% more likelihood of bad stuff and six months taken off your life if you do this or that. (Anyway they change their minds all the time.) But a counter-phobe needs a good strong chalice. Not the kind that money can buy, but the kind that you hammer out for yourself. They won’t be the same anyway.

But I prefer to take Flaubert’s approach (I used to have the exact quote taped to my computer, but I took it off and can’t find it today.) which is to be conventional, regular, modest in all one’s daily ways so as to be totally outrageous and unexpected in one’s thinking -- and thus writing. And maybe loving. Though the boundary is crossed if I don’t write. That’s the scariest thing, writing. Therefore, I go towards it. My own hands are on the keyboard.