Read Online All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion by Lisa Appignanesi - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Lisa Appignanesi
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reason of the stream of beauty entering in through his eyes there comes a warmth, whereby the soul’s plumage is fostered; and with that warmth the roots could grow.
Wonder and passion allow the soul to take wing and be moved through devotion to greater understanding. Enmeshed in emotions of tenderness and awe, the person in love is inspired. He recognizes from the other’s approval that certain acts are good. Our once higher state may be a distant memory, Plato seems to be saying, but passionate love for one who bears in beauty, wisdom and goodness a likeness to that original perfection allows us to grow closer to our once winged state.
In our sophisticated times, we tend to maintain an ironic distance from both this Platonic version of love and its romantic successor which bound passion, pain and loss into one. Munro’s own irony in ‘Carried Away’ is gentle. If her Madame Bovary of Carstairs is in some sense a martyr to her epistolary love for a man she has never met in the flesh, it nonetheless permits her to lead a full life and one which gains an added dimension from his existence. Through this love her inner life grows deeper, her powers of imagination more acute.
Crazy about You
Propelling us out of our ordinary everydayness, falling in love at whatever age shares not a little with a falling into madness. Passion is a fevered state, a divine delirium, as Plato called it, and it can mimic pathology. It acts upon the body engendering bliss or pain. Reason, which splits and divides, cannot capture its transports: nor, ultimately, can language, itself a commentary on experience–which may be why we resort to (or shun) the simple enunciative force of ‘I love you’, those words which link inside and outside, I with you, in a performance of love.
Passion makes us oblivious to the world and to responsibility. We are out of control. Our thoughts and our pulse race. Our consciousness is altered. All that matters is our desire and the other who is its object. Opposites are collapsed. Abjectly vulnerable to the other, we are also exalted–omnipotent. We take risks. We transgress. The sense of danger is part of the very charge of the erotic. Judgement vanishes. In its place comes a skewed sense not only of the configuration of the real, but also of the real of the other who floods our imagination. We idealize madly: all the best in the world rests in the object of our love. ‘You’re the top!’ Cole Porter’s lyrics sing–the Coliseum, the Louvre Museum, the tower of Pisa, the smile on the Mona Lisa –in short, everything that’s best.
And with the slightest twist, all the worst rests with him or her, too. Love metamorphoses into hate at the flicker of suspicion.
Our love fills our thoughts: they scurry round in obsessive circles–Will she? Won’t he? How? When? In the same way as for people suffering from paranoia, the lover’s world is charged with new meaning, magical: there are signs of our love everywhere, in the stars, in the weather, in the smile or scowl of a random passer-by. Everything signals ecstasy or rejection. If we try to focus on anything outside our love, random daydreams, hopes or fears invade. Blissful dreams of oneness run into terrors of rejection. Thoughts are uncontrollable, just as that initial act of falling was involuntary.
So there is good reason that the ‘lunatic, the lover and the poet’, as Shakespeare put it in the last act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream , are so often linked. The three are of ‘imagination all compact’, judicious Theseus tells us at the moment when the night of love’s unruly dream, lived out in the wildness of the forest and under the aegis of sprites and fairies, has given way to the daytime of reason and socially sanctioned nuptials.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
Under the sway of Eros–which, given its unreasonableness, might as well be
Wonder and passion allow the soul to take wing and be moved through devotion to greater understanding. Enmeshed in emotions of tenderness and awe, the person in love is inspired. He recognizes from the other’s approval that certain acts are good. Our once higher state may be a distant memory, Plato seems to be saying, but passionate love for one who bears in beauty, wisdom and goodness a likeness to that original perfection allows us to grow closer to our once winged state.
In our sophisticated times, we tend to maintain an ironic distance from both this Platonic version of love and its romantic successor which bound passion, pain and loss into one. Munro’s own irony in ‘Carried Away’ is gentle. If her Madame Bovary of Carstairs is in some sense a martyr to her epistolary love for a man she has never met in the flesh, it nonetheless permits her to lead a full life and one which gains an added dimension from his existence. Through this love her inner life grows deeper, her powers of imagination more acute.
Crazy about You
Propelling us out of our ordinary everydayness, falling in love at whatever age shares not a little with a falling into madness. Passion is a fevered state, a divine delirium, as Plato called it, and it can mimic pathology. It acts upon the body engendering bliss or pain. Reason, which splits and divides, cannot capture its transports: nor, ultimately, can language, itself a commentary on experience–which may be why we resort to (or shun) the simple enunciative force of ‘I love you’, those words which link inside and outside, I with you, in a performance of love.
Passion makes us oblivious to the world and to responsibility. We are out of control. Our thoughts and our pulse race. Our consciousness is altered. All that matters is our desire and the other who is its object. Opposites are collapsed. Abjectly vulnerable to the other, we are also exalted–omnipotent. We take risks. We transgress. The sense of danger is part of the very charge of the erotic. Judgement vanishes. In its place comes a skewed sense not only of the configuration of the real, but also of the real of the other who floods our imagination. We idealize madly: all the best in the world rests in the object of our love. ‘You’re the top!’ Cole Porter’s lyrics sing–the Coliseum, the Louvre Museum, the tower of Pisa, the smile on the Mona Lisa –in short, everything that’s best.
And with the slightest twist, all the worst rests with him or her, too. Love metamorphoses into hate at the flicker of suspicion.
Our love fills our thoughts: they scurry round in obsessive circles–Will she? Won’t he? How? When? In the same way as for people suffering from paranoia, the lover’s world is charged with new meaning, magical: there are signs of our love everywhere, in the stars, in the weather, in the smile or scowl of a random passer-by. Everything signals ecstasy or rejection. If we try to focus on anything outside our love, random daydreams, hopes or fears invade. Blissful dreams of oneness run into terrors of rejection. Thoughts are uncontrollable, just as that initial act of falling was involuntary.
So there is good reason that the ‘lunatic, the lover and the poet’, as Shakespeare put it in the last act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream , are so often linked. The three are of ‘imagination all compact’, judicious Theseus tells us at the moment when the night of love’s unruly dream, lived out in the wildness of the forest and under the aegis of sprites and fairies, has given way to the daytime of reason and socially sanctioned nuptials.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
Under the sway of Eros–which, given its unreasonableness, might as well be
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