‘Wots left?’ Beginning with Love...

LEFT = Love, Equality, Freedom, Truth and Love comes first. So what might it mean?

A feeling for somebody or something. Need or desire for others, pleasure in their company. Seeking what’s best in and for them. Kinship and communion in a world we share. Love thy neighbour as thyself, do as you would be done by etc/

BUT what if we DON’T love ourselves, or cant count on others responding as we would?

Virtuous and vicious circles: given love, we learn to love; unloved, we don’t… Kinship, familiarity, goes with closeness, mutual understanding and sharing – looking after each other as we look after ourselves. Abused, we're inclined to abuse, but sometimes, mercifully, dont (a restorative mutation?)

Love’s not just a feeling, but a fact of life, a capacity built in. We are born dependent, survive only when cared for. Caring is at once physical and emotional. What we get becomes us, the feeling and responses along with the weight we gain from our mother’s milk.

From mothers and sons to sons and lovers, dependency mutualised. And daughters? More complicated perhaps... As sons become fathers and daughters mothers, we become each other as we become ourselves.*

We’re shaped by what's done to us and what we do. We understand each other – and the world - through our interactions. We’re formed, transformed, imprinted as we engage, reach out, take hold and register. Our hand takes the shape of what it can grasp and bears it to mind.

What we perceive, the image we recall, is not neutral or coincidental: we see what we’re looking for, what strikes or is shown to us. Five senses, plus one equals six. Seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, touching plus the stirrings inside ourselves - 'heart' or 'gut' feelings, an amorphous sixth sense, no less physical than the rest.

Infants depend on mothers and fathers, adults on a wider material world. As we grow up, we can no longer be rely on food and warmth being brought to us. But with our growing abilities, and a bit of luck, we can find more or less what we need. The world as we know it, need it and love it, is at once physical and human, economic and social and…

And what? Good? Beautiful? Loveable? I can neither dismiss those words, or know what to make of them, unless it’s a tautology – circular, with one leading to the other and back.

We don’t just see the world for ourselves, or as it is, but through the images and language of others. Some images are held up, over our heads as it were, for special reverence. Meanwhile we learn from each other and get to know each other as we make our living together. Our world-view, skills and circumstances, like our languages and landscapes, towns and villages, are common property.

Now we begin to realise that our world, like our parents, is not immortal. As we grow stronger, and our world in some ways weakaer, it too depends on us.... What am I saying? My parents are already dead, I am the endangered one! Which doesn't matter if people and places I love live on. My now, their then, if not quite interchangeable.

By nature and nurture, we have more in common than we have to set us apart. BUT that doesn’t make us identical. In our genes and upbringing, history and circumstances we are also, inevitably, different. Often we are encouraged to hide or ignore this difference – sometimes to exaggerate its importance, in ourselves or others. If familiarity breeds contempt, this is usually because we take each other, or the world, for granted, fail to register difference and change.

CONTRADICTION: I am me and you are you, a tree is a tree and a forest a forest. Although in fact none is the same, from one to another, or moment to moment, life is not long enough to mark the differences. We’re bound to label, class, prejudge, assume. We take what is to be as what has been, for granted...'til Birnam wood do come to Dunsinane.’ The unmoveable moves, or the worm turns, whatever that may mean, and we’re taken by surprise. For better or worse.

True love, like survival, treads a narrow and uncertain line between known and unknown, an act of faith or tentative presumption, between what we most fear and desire. Like driving at night, when what looks like a road ahead, a familiar pattern of light, could be almost anything.

Idolatry, Romantic love, and Hate. In romantic love, we idealise, imagine an other from afar. We may prefer a ready image to what we cannot, or will not face or handle in the flesh. Sometimes we carve up the world itself between imaginary Heaven and Hell, a higher Spirit and a load of material mechanics. Then, somewhere between these higher and lower orders, the baby is lost with the bathwater. As God is Good, Eveil - the devil as lived - becomes possesses some hapless neighbour. We tar and feather a class or race as Monsters, Beasts – anything to disguise the likeness to ourselves.

And sex? How could I have got so far without it? Sex is central to love, where two become one, then three: as single cells meet, combine and multiply to become someone else. But sex may also be at odds with love in its other forms. Sex tends to be exclusive, while Love - as in Christian love - is open to all. That's a contradiction I've tried and failed to solve at least once in my life.

*QUESTION ARISING:

Women can bear and feed babies, men cannot. Where does that leave our aspirations to freedom and equality? For all the gender overlaps and cross-overs, men and women are different. And the same may go for races!) The point is not to deny the statistical evidence, the norms of male and female body and mind, but to see that those norms dont confine or subordinate un-necessarily. Contrary to the scripture, we are not created free and equal. Some are bigger, stronger, cleverer than others, just as some are gentler, more patient or imaginative (it's not either/or, the combinations and permutations are infinite!) The point is to recognise that no statistical generalisation need apply to any individual: the fact that most men are more like this, most women more like that, must not be allowed to prevent any man or woman from breaking free, diverging, combining and crossing imaginary lines. Nor must a generalised difference be translated into assumptions of superiority and inferiority: we may say, in the most general terms, that one sex or other may be better at this or that, in this or that setting; but not that one set of abilities or qualities outranks another over all. With the future uncertain, we cant know which of all those abilities and qualities we will most need. We may need all our options to survive, recognised, understood and freely available between us.

It may not even be a question of yours or mine: the dividing lines may run across us, not between us. The bit of my mind that registers arm or leg, or fear or pleasure may register and assimilate a movement observed before it registers it as yours or mine. Empathy doesnt begin with the heady business of Me imagining I'm You. It's a reflex rooted in the nature of perception and physiology. If I see a footballer kicked in the balls, my body reacts before I know it. Even men have phantom pregnancies.

We're not created free and equal, but the freer and more equal the better - recognising and drawing on all we've got.