Love’s Mimicry

Part Two of a Two-Part Essay on Emotion (Part One is available here).

If there is a God, and if that God is indeed a creator, I think It would have forgotten everything long ago, it would have left us behind so as to go on and create something else. This God would be nothing else but envy expressing itself as love; this is because it would do nothing but covet its beloved as though it didn’t already have it, it would look upon its creation as both itself and as not itself, and it would eventually drive it away in a fit of suspicion and hatred; and being a God it would have no choice but to create once more––and once more enter upon its destructive cycle. Whether or not such a God exists, the idea of it would have found a suitably formed imitation in my infected capacity to love, a capacity slit open and inflated with the energy and cunning of envy.

• — — — — — — —

To carry on with the thread we started with before, my good will and enthusiasm for others came — when it finally did — at the expense of my ability to love; and to be more precise now, it came at the price of my always being self-deceived in love. As global envy was reigned in, it took up local residence in my heart, and so whole heartedly I would love, would love to love, but my heart would simultaneously be taken in by forces deeper than I thought I had to be made aware of, emotional currents that at once made me believe that I loved that which I hated, and that I hated that which I loved––and in both cases the object was the same.

This is because, if envy on its own seeks out what another has, envy — when it imbues love — tends to make it seem that the beloved is never had; at every stage in every relationship I ever found myself in, I believed both that I had what I desired and that I didn’t, that it was always in the process of leaving, that I was in danger of abandonment; I believed both that loyalty was there and that it wasn’t, that only contempt, trickery, and concealed betrayal were to be found. I often found myself questioning assumptions. Suspicious and sad, years would pass and always I held on to my insecurities as though they weren’t little more than delusions brought on by a misunderstanding, the false belief that what I loved was not actually mine.

The bliss of love — most obvious at its earliest stages, but also later on as strong love grows — is that one feels desired come what may; it is when the lover sees in the beloved, not only a requited dedication or a steadfast commitment, but beyond that an endless fund of it, a well that could be drunk from eternally, would biological life not cut it short some day. I glimpsed this early on and it changed me: nothing was more important than to find love; and ever since I have had the capacity to love a person, to love what they are, what they do; I have had the capacity to nurture them, to be glad for their joys and saddened by their failures––but this love has all been tainted by a resentfulness equal in size and doubtlessly more potent. In a word, my love could be nothing but a betrayal since it saw nothing but betrayal in what it loved, and what I put forth as an endless well of sustenance was nothing more than a flat counterfeit coin, one whose worth I foolishly believed in and sought to make others believe in as well.

It was always as though someone placed flowers in a room, a room bare of life and colour, mainly grey and empty — the type of room, in other words, that I would have sought to occupy, to love, to decorate, to fill endlessly and to leave my mark in. This room is not the other person: it is the place of our encounter, a disused chamber finally occupied. The flowers would be there from the start, bringing a touch of life and colour, beating back the grey and the void. So desolate is everything else that whoever enters this room is naturally drawn toward them, and in time that person notices that not only do they bring this touch of vitality to the room, but that this touch is always increasing, that the flowers themselves are growing, spawning leafs and roses where before there were none; the flowers would expand drawing its water from the love brought to it by its observer, from their well, their fund of love and commitment. Thus the flowers would grow, taking everything into themselves––but always afraid that it would lose its source of water, its origin of life; so perfidious do these flowers become: both grateful and shameless, loving and poisonous. Thus these flowers would plunge their roots more deeply, and grow more wildly, monstrously, these flowers would love and decimate, trust and distrust, find comfort and locate in that comfort a continual source of irritation and insecurity––until finally, the room is filled––packed as though with stone. Thus its flowers always die.

How can a thing be both genuine and false at the same time? How can a person love but also hate, be truthful but also lie — at the same time? My loves have been like those multi-dimensional cardboard holograms you divert children with or that you advertise to adults with, the ones that shift form and colour depending on where you stand. Time and again, my loves have been nothing more than a person moving from one side of me to another, first taking in what was promised, only later — with the passage of time — finding that not only was the promise false, but that a perfectly opposed and depraved creature was waiting below.

• — — — — — — —

And if that God, that creator, really was, and if he — as would be his nature — already moved on; what of the frozen images of his innocence? For there always was and always will be a moment, etched in eternity, when the creator loved, and still loves, and does nothing else beside. Time was the culprit and this God an unwitting victim of his commandeered desire: his creations nothing but a string of stone-filled rooms.