Reflections on Art & Love
Introduction - What is Love?
When I met the love of my life, and the woman who I now proudly call my wife, she took an immediate interest in my poetry. I was happy to share and receive some feedback on my musings, but almost immediately, rather boldly, she asked me when I was going to write about love. I was taken aback by it and told her I’ve written plenty of love poems, to which she simply replied: You’ve written about heartache, about loneliness and about a lot of beautiful things, but never about love. It would take me a couple of years before realising she was right.
I have written about a lot of things, but like many others mistook love for a great number of different things, which it’s not. One might be inclined to think that would’ve changed since meeting her, and while it’s true, I now find myself finally having a deeper understanding of what love truly is, I haven’t written more love poems because of it.
Poetry can be many things, but I think for a lot of people they’re often written from a place of desire, and as someone smarter than me recently said: desire is emotionally synonymous with desperation. We desire what we do not have. If we’re lonely, we desire company; if we’re hungry, we desire food and so on. A lot of poetry is written out of that desperation, a desperation to be perceived a certain way, a desperation to perceive oneself and a desperation to let out the emotional turmoil within. We often write what we lack, and I haven’t written any poetry in a few years. Before we get into that, however, we first need to understand what love actually is.
Love is many things, and people will give you a wide set of answers, and the romantics might opt for the easy way out: saying love is everything. Others might have an image as clear as the picture Hollywood sells, and others might even say that love does not exist, and that the emotional state we assume to be love can be reduced down to hormonal, chemical or electrical reactions in the blob of meat we call a brain. While we can understand love in many different ways, it’s also important to note that we often refer to different kinds of love.
The love we have for our friends, family, things, hobbies, passions and partner are all different on some level, but also the same in essence. That essence is the affection, emotional attachment and care for the recipient, and this makes love the most sublime of virtues because it puts the other above the self.
The lack of love poems in my arsenal isn’t due to a lack of love, but rather it is the abundance of it in my life that makes it seem unnecessary or even a waste of time. It feels ultimately pointless to me because I can’t find any words that capture it fully, and every sentence is an injustice to love. We often create what we lack - authors filling boring days with magical adventures, painters filling drab, lonely evenings with life and colours, or poets writing pining poetry about someone they miss.
In the present, when we have all we need, we don’t think about creating anything about it. We take a photo because we want to remember the moment, because we know we’re going to miss it. We think about the conversations we have with friends when we miss them, and we think about the sun on rainy days. When we’re present in the sunshine or with our friends, we don’t really think about them or write about them unless we intend to remember them, but when you’re in the presence of eternity, there is no such worry, and to be in the presence of eternity is to be in the presence of love.
The Presence of Love
One of the most blissful and lovely things I can imagine is a nap on a sofa on a sunny summer's day, drifting away, looking at the blue sky through the window. That sleep drifting is a state of pure unconditional love for everything. It’s a rest unburdened by musts and do’s. It’s filled with quiet, and it makes for a very dull poem in my opinion. More importantly, why would I disturb that state to write about it? As soon as you begin to analyse that moment creatively, or you start pondering about how to capture it in art, the magic is gone. That moment is best enjoyed as it is and, later in the restless night, when your body is weary, and your mind is eager for novelty, then you may revisit it and write about it.
It’s easy as a creative person to lose the presence of the moment because you’re thinking about art. Sometimes you just have to be in it and not think too much about it. Being present is that love, and the reason I love art is because of that immersion into it. My love for art isn’t writing or painting about love, but being immersed in the work so much that you lose yourself in it, and you pour your entire being into something else. I love good chocolate, but I find the experience of writing a description about the sensation as tasteful as paper.
I love to get lost in patterns and emerging stories on the canvas, to summon mountain tops and to follow the winds of the colours. I love to get lost in writing, and I love spending time with my wife, but it’s all mundane affairs and moments that I want to be present in, present without analysing them and thinking about how they make good stories. While I mistook love for many things, I’ve found that it’s calmer and more tranquil than the storms poets brew up.
Love is a very peaceful thing, and if you don’t realise that or you seek thrills, then it’s easy to be agitated or overlook that calm. We think that love should have our hearts racing, give us anxiety or sweaty palms, but those are all signs of our instinct to fight or flee, and we mistake it for love because we don’t know better, or we haven’t found that love within. If you’re at war with yourself, then your inside is in turmoil, and if the external is quiet, then it gets really loud inside. It’s only once you’ve managed to quiet the inside that you can really sit in external quiet as well, and I can’t imagine something more lovely than just sitting quietly together with the person you love, because that’s full presence.
In that moment, you’re not present in any conversation about distant lands, you’re not flying away with your thoughts in the clouds, and you’re not daydreaming an escape from where you are; you’re just in a moment in time and in the complete presence of love.
Final Words
Love is the fundamental essence of everything, and we can’t be without it, but we can lack awareness of it. We can’t be outside of love’s presence; it’s like a light room where we only find ourselves in darkness if we cover ourselves up. We can, at any time, remove that veil of shadows and reenter the Light. The separation we experience is us removing ourselves from it, because that presence is eternal and doesn’t ever go away. A genuine desire to reconnect with love is the basis and fundamental groundwork for the practice required for reaching that state of awareness. Understanding this sentiment, and replacing the word love with God is the theological basis for my worldview; they are synonymous despite self-caused misunderstandings.
It felt necessary to state that because I think one of the most accurate and beautiful depictions in writing of love is found in the Bible.
“If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonour others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.” 1 Corinthians 13:1-8
Love is present in my work, and I might not have written any true love poems using words, but I have shifted my awareness to the presence of that love, and I’m not going to spend my time dreaming up lines of poetry out of desire or despair and missing out on that moment.
To create art, you have to be present, and that means you have to leave your art to the side for some time, and then, when the time is to create, you have to be fully immersed in that process. Love may be a difficult thing to grasp, and in that way, it’s like the wind, but you don’t have to grasp it to have it fill your lungs with life.
Perhaps one day I will give it another go and try to write a true love poem, and it will probably be the most boring thing you will ever read, and maybe then you will understand.
