“Dance me to the end of L❤️ve”
🎶Hand In Glove🎶 As a lifelong romantic - is there any other kind? - I never want(ed) to interrogate love. I only want(ed) to fall in, headfirst; any semblance of thinking already drowning so that the body might thoroughly enjoy plunging into its azure, glistening pool without question. A liquid sensation that encases every cell of our outer shell. The perfect (g)love. Why dare to roll back the hand hugging sheath and risk exposing our most dextrous extremes to the icy air? To pull apart the four letters that promise an answer to it all? That would be a crazy thing to do - wouldn’t it? The trouble is, we must come up for air. Above the surface we witness the ripples and disturbance to the world without. We must pull these letters apart so that love can live and breathe with others rather than remain submerged. Underwater. We do not have gills.
Yet the Western world insists on promoting L-in-OVE as the ultimate higher state to be sought after and sustained. It is fixated on love’s azure pool and disinterested in what happens to love when we heave ourselves onto the poolside to take a look around. It preys on how good it feels to be underwater, in another world without language and words. Only bubbles. In this state we cannot do, we only are. We are powerless to love. We cannot think or speak and love rules rather than connects. We do not need more dictators on our planet.
🎶Crazy Little Thing Called Love🎶 My other lifelong obsession, pop music, has done little to dissuade me that love is the answer, its snake-charming hypnosis oft suspending me in love’s grip. It seems I forgot to remember (sorry Freddie, see repression) all the songs telling me love is in fact the thing that is crazy, not questioning it. You might forgive me this oversight, for the songwriter’s lovewashing is intense! A cursory look at Spotify reveals an astonishing number of albums entitled ‘Love is the Answer’. Great! says me and contemporary Western society, enthral to the idea of answers, especially one as pacifying and powerful as romantic love. Music to my ears! swoons capitalism as the conflation of love and sex, under the rubric of romance, sings its sweet serenade to structural inequality whilst its grubby patriarchal paws are deep in the ylang-ylang oil, massaging the blissful inaction. But scratch the surface and playlists begin to read like a hopeless DSM inspired, never-ending list of love’s afflictions. ‘Love is the Devil’, ‘Love is Blindness’, ‘Love is Hell’, ‘Love is Dead’, ‘Love is a Drug’, ‘Love is Not Enough’ and a particular favourite from this short piece of research ‘Love is a Waste of Time’, which is one way of avoiding love’s complexity by throwing the baby out with the bath water. Or should I say, the person out with the pool.
🎶Words of Love🎶 If there is one word that endlessly ails us in failing to get close enough, it is love. So entrenched in its own disappointment we have ascribed it five different languages, yet why not ten or a thousand? Spotify uploads sixty thousand songs a day (almost) all about love. It seems we can no more say everything than anything or nothing about love. Perhaps Derrida was right. There will never be enough words of love to fill the gaping hole.
When we are L-in-OVE this hOle appears whOle, a perfect bubble. Blown from a child’s party toy, its rainbow tinted walls oscillate in the breeze, leaving anything other than the satiated state of love obscured by its willowy walls. We cannot step inside this floating place. We must fall and be caught there. Suspended. Inside the bubble, the world appears incandescent. We are turned inwards, caught in an embryonic singularity, with all the narcissism that might imply.
This deeply pleasurable state is bound very tightly with the word in western culture. The four letters even look good together. Flanked by fixed, straight lines, the curvy O sits proudly at its centre, apparently holding all meaning in its reinforced spherical bubble, pulsing with potential. To produce its sound (/ˈəʊ/) a rolling tongue glides gently across the roof of a barely parted mouth, as its breathy vowel is conjured forth to the lips and met with a soft, barely-there finish. It is a seduction. Yet we destroy love’s potential by fusing it with sex and pleasure. We must not be so seduced if we want to harness love’s power rather than float weightless in its elixir of bliss. For love to be a force for connection this inert, merged state needs air. The bubble must settle on earthly ground where its walls give way to the world’s nitrous complexity.
When the bubble bursts, we find a hOle at the heart of lOve. We do not find holes in words so satisfying as bodily orifices. They are unsettling. But we need unsettling. We do not love very well in 2024.
We try to plug l ❤️ve’s hole with symb 💍ls. Pictures do not lack so fiercely as words, and in the space of one letter we have an indexical litany of meaning for the illusive iconicity of love. But these meanings collapse in watery, concentric circles or are gathered up under social structures commandeered by patriarchal capital. Marriage for the Romans was not connected with romantic love but their (incorrect) anatomical link between the fourth finger of the left hand and the heart, formed the first stars in our contemporary constellation of the family and normative ideas of sexuality and kinship, which are used as forms of control and oppression. Love is ringfenced. That does not mean marriage is not valid. But it must not be used to ringfence love when one or another person, or groups of people, or alternative societal structures and forms of love can be pushed outside or trapped within. Violently negated. There is nothing with such power to destroy as disappointed love. Nothing breaks like a heart. It is a luminous hatred.
🎶‘…like a heartbeat drives you mad’🎶 Since the early Greeks the heart has been considered the affective centre of the body and is a universal symbol of love. Sappho’s fragment 31 describes her heart’s fluttering response and a simultaneous ‘broken tongue’ when overwhelmed by love. In this collapse of language, confusion of senses and destabilised heartbeat ‘I seem nearly to have died’ she chants.
The heart is integral to life and death. It is a pulsating (in)glorious mess of electrical energy and tangled muscle that ceaselessly pushes on regardless until life ends / death comes. Over and over and over. It takes no prisoners. Love has the power to mess with its rhythms. It pushes and pulls, it arrests and flutters, it skips in gaiety and anxiety. It misses beats and destabilises patterns… duDum duDum duDum, DuDUdum DUM DUUDum, DUDum, duDum duDum duDum… Bigeminy. Trigeminy. The disruptions take our breath away.
🎶Let’s Dance🎶 How do we weather this bodily storm and find a new beat in its wake? One that dances with others to the complex warped aphexian rhythms of the world around us. One that does not obliterate an interest in anything or anyone else, consumed with hanging on to its own limp beat, oblivious to the tempo of others and planet earth. We must find ways to transition from the primacy of our silent disco love bubbles to an altogether more communal and global rave.
🎶Both Sides Now🎶 Like the power of love, the power of music is not one dimensional. It does not only offer a suspended inertia but can be a transforming force. Joni Mitchell wrote her songs to ask questions. Her unique guitar tunings became known as ‘chords of enquiry’. The beauty of her work is not in pinning love down but in opening it up. Offering new partial perspectives. In her seminal song ‘Both Sides Now’ Joni sings ‘I really don’t know love at all’. Her not knowing about love is a relief. A different kind of musical contentment from the lost-in-love enjoyment she so often describes ‘where pleasure moves on too early and trouble leaves too slow’. ‘Help me I think I’m falling in love again’ she pleads on the 1974 album Court and Spark; though she resists his accusation, I wonder if Joni partly agrees with Richard’s perspective that ‘all romantics meet the same fate someday. Cynical and drunk and boring someone in some dark café’.
🎶Dance Me To The End Of Love🎶 Leonard Cohen’s somewhat sinister elegy ‘Dance Me To The End Of Love’ fell into my thoughts as a chord of enquiry one rainy drive home from therapy. I have often wondered what happens to the post-session bodymind when wrapped in music’s swaddling blanket. Like love, music can be an anaesthetic, but this does not necessarily preclude the effects of the cut. Sometimes an anaesthetic is required for an operation to be possible. Is transference not an anaesthetic of sorts? The thing that makes pain and loss bearable. Listening to the first song that comes to mind in the liminal space of the drive home has sometimes been fertile ground for me. It might be one lyric or a vague feeling that inspires the song. It is sometimes a song I know very well and sometimes a distant fragment of musical memory I am compelled to seek out. I have no idea why Leonard Cohen’s song came to mind. I had not heard it in a few years and did not know it well, yet the words and mood of this deathly ode to love resonated wildly and I drank it in with a desperate thirst. Sometimes we need something to wash down the bitter pill of words in order they be metabolised. Analysis is not about understanding or even believing what is said. The words must find a place in the body, be taken up into a state of being. Immersed in this song, I became subtly aware that my idea of love was being danced to a kind of death. Not set fire to in a burning blaze of glory as Cohen (and Jon Bon Jovi… and come to think of it, me) might romanticise, but worn out somehow. Danced into some new kind of relation.
When Freud cites psychoanalysis as a cure effected by love in his 1906 letter to Jung is this what he was alluding to? The transferential dance that uses the exceptional energy of the LO-in-VE state to inflate a bubble until it fills the room, a balloon fit to bursting, so that it might be let down gently, the escaping air danced out, transmuted through the rhythms of speech, where the power of love is used to transform both love itself and our relation to others concomitantly.
Is it in using the unparalleled power of love to transform love where psychoanalysis might find its unique place in the difficulties we face in the world? How might we persuade ourselves that in executing our dominant ideals of love, not holding on to love so tightly, not leaping to ‘love is the answer’ without letting it breathe, we might unleash a love that holds an unthinkable power to intervene and transform. Where we are failing to make changes at the level of language and law, we need new forms of activism. Do we need a new kind of love song? A new kind of protest song? A love song activism? One that anesthetises us to the pain of coming up for air so we might let the bubble burst and give love new ground.
“No childish expectation. Love is not the answer, but the line that marks the start”
🎶For You🎶 Laura Marling (2020)
Cover, artwork: I never asked to fall in love, Tracey Emin (2020)