About Love You Can Say Anything

About love you can say anything, but you don’t know what to say. Love exists, and that’s about it. You love your mother, God, nature, a woman, little birds and flowers: the term, become the leitmotif of our deeply sentimental culture, is the most strongly emotional one in our language, but also the most diffuse, vague, and unintelligible. Compared to the crystalline state of seduction, love is a liquid, even a gaseous solution. Everything is soluble in love, by love. The resolution, the dissolution of all things into a passionate harmony or a subconjugal libido, love is a kind of universal answer, the hope of an ideal conviviality, the virtuality of a world of relations in fusion. Hate separates; love unites. Eros is what binds, couples, conjugates, foments associations, projections, identifications.
- Jean Baudrillard

A long time ago I moved into my grandfather’s house and in the back of his closet I found a box of letters that he had written to my grandmother while he was overseas during World War II and the Korean war.

The thing you have to know about my grandparents is that their outward relationship seemed cold. They slept in separate rooms and other than dinner rarely spoke with each other so finding these letters was something I didn’t expect. It showed me a side of my grandparents that I didn’t know existed. The care that they had been collected and the time span they covered was one of the most interesting things. The letters themselves were actually rather simple, sweet at times, but definitely hopeful.

Some of them were written while my grandfather was stationed in Korea in sub zero temperatures cut off from reinforcements with most of his unit slowly freezing to death around him. The letters didn’t mention this, he didn’t want to scare my grandmother, but from reading the history of the war and his unit’s involvement I know he likely thought he was going to die.

Letters seem to be a lost art, and emotions and feelings have been distorted, blown up large by the TV’s and Movies we watch and commodified by the memes we post on social media. Our communication has become based on small atomic units, with none of the connection that is supposed to underpin our lives and emotions.

Growing up in a world where attention spans have become shorter and emotions have been broken down into small hits of dopamine, is it any wonder that the meaning of romantic love has been replaced by a macabre facsimile. Instead of measuring its depth by quiet devotion and common purpose, we measure it now by the intensity of our collective orgasms.

Love might be something different for everyone, but the letters I found buried in that closet showed me a glimpse at what love was between my grandparents. At the time I read them I didn’t really understand, I remember thinking they were boring. No flowery language, only a terse report of how his day had been and when he hoped to be home, some questions about the house and how my grandmother was doing. As time went on and my grandfather went through multiple deployments the letters seemed practiced, but always sincere.

It wasn’t until later I realized that a good number of these letters were written while my grandfather was lying in a ditch fighting for his life from both enemy gunfire and sub-zero temperatures. The battle of Chosin during the Korean war after 120,000 Chinese communist forces poured into North Korea and, in terrifying nighttime attacks, encircled 30,000 allied soldiers and Marines, whom they outnumbered four-to-one. Nearly 2,500 in the U.S. forces died—some froze to death—the wounded tallied 5,000, and, tellingly, 8,000 suffered frostbite. The battle lasted 17 days and ended on Dec. 13, 1950.

The letter my grandfather wrote during that time mentioned none of it. Instead, he asked how my mother was doing, she was a toddler at the time, and how the men’s group at the local Epworth United Methodist Church was getting along without him. He wrote about his next leave, and asked how things were for my grandmother. Nothing indicated the death and misery all around him.

Maybe it’s just my mind trying to make sense of the misery he must have been feeling, but I can’t help but imagine that what sustained him was the love he felt, and the connection between him and my grandmother.

It’s a beautiful thought, but when I look at my own life and many of those around me. It’s clear that love isn’t the only thing that can create a connection between two people. Maybe it’s an evolutionary, chemical disposition for humans to exist in a state where they are intimately connected to another person, or maybe it’s the sum of our Karma. Whatever it is, we as humans are often easily fooled into believing that the connection we have found is love when in fact it’s just a effect of our biology.

What I’ve come to believe is that the way you know true love is by its effects, not how it makes us feel. True love creates its own reality, a pocket universe where the spiritual is projected into the physical universe. Distinct individuals combining to create a reality. It is the ultimate act of creation, and it’s not hard to imagine that this is part of our drive for survival, to perpetuate our existence beyond our own lives.

That is not to say that all procreation is the result of this process. As is often the case, the spiritual imperative to create this union has become encoded into our biology, and as with most of our reality the process exists as a simulation of what once was a purely spiritual process.

Baudrillard sums up the effects of this pretender to love, “Seduction is not linked to affects but to the fragility of appearance; it has no model and seeks no form of salvation—it is therefore perverse. It obeys no morality of exchange; it is based rather on the pact, the challenge and the alliance, which are not universal and natural forms, but artificial and initiatory ones.”

Seduction has its place, but mistaking for love is a long ride to misery. Personally, understanding the difference between the two has led me out of some very dark places and my heart breaks when I see others suffering along the side of the path. Some are caught hopelessly unaware in a cacophony of deceptive dreams.

Love’s model is to create, not to destroy. It’s a sober spiritual journey away from darkness. While many of us will sometimes walk other paths, our happiness ultimately depends on recognizing which path we are on and when meeting others at the crossroads learning to avoid walking with them towards darkness.

To learn more about Jean Baudrillard, Visit Here.