All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion

by Lisa Appignanesi

  The very force of the emotions and sexual cravings attending first love, the risks it runs, the meanings it gathers into itself and finds in the world, mark it out as a unique experience amongst the many that life will offer. Its inevitable attendant anguish deepens our sense of inwardness and enriches our experience, in the process making us more aware of others and their fragility. Filled with ‘deep devotion’ and the ‘heavenly touch’ of an embrace that sings of ‘only you’ and ‘for ever’, it sweeps time past and future away, rolls up the world ‘into one ball’, and sites its centre in the here and now of rapturous embrace. ‘Many-splendored thing’ that it is, it even overwhelms our ironies. Yvaine, that heavenly emanation in that most romantic of modern tales, the film made from writer Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel Stardust, puts it admirably as she addresses her sleeping earthly beloved, Tristan:

  I know a lot about love. I’ve seen it, centuries and centuries of it, and it was the only thing that made watching your world bearable. All those wars. Pain, lies, hate… it made me want to turn away and never look down again. But when I see the way mankind loves… you could search the furthest reaches of the universe and never find anything more beautiful. So yes, I know that love is unconditional. But I also know it can be unpredictable, unexpected, uncontrollable, unbearable and strangely easy to mistake for loathing, and… what I’m trying to say, Tristan, is, I think I love you… My heart… it feels like my chest can barely contain it. Like it’s trying to escape because it doesn’t belong to me anymore. It belongs to you.

  The sense of young lovers being destined eternally for one another walks arm in arm with a generalized knowledge that the word ‘first’ inevitably marks the first of a series. Statistics, never altogether accurate in this area, suggest that at the very most, 25 per cent of people actually marry their first loves–though other statistics suggest it is only 3 per cent. The lower figure may, indeed, be a good: experience teaches us to temper our hopes and desires of the other, to live with inevitable frustration and still love. But it also means that passion and loss are powerfully bound up with one another. The very power of first love, imprinted in us, can serve as a template for later loves. The lover may seek a new incarnation of the first beloved or a replay of that first intensity. An attempt to repair what went awry may also feed the search for later editions. So, too, may an obsessional need to repeat the precise experience, which reality, ever obstinate and in flux, impedes.

  Lost or dead loves, enshrined in an aura of imaginary perfection, seem to hover over all our loves. This may be why yearning, that longing forwards as well as backwards, is such a potent emotion and shadows our lives, as well as enlarging them. Sometimes that yearning can be stronger than lived love itself: humans are nothing if not perverse creatures, ever alert to the lacks of their present–compelled to look back, like Orpheus on Eurydice, even if it brings down the gates of hell and those sufferings propelled by absence.

  Many feel the anguish of anticipated loss with each parting. Indeed, absence in love often looms as potently as presence. This may be because it is absence that in part ignites the capacity for worship: we worship our dead, our distant gods, our ancestors, our lost loves, sometimes, by a romantic slippage, even our present ones. Within the imagination, they take on a magical and healing power. We idealize their attributes, make them the bearers of all our good and wholeness, the healers of our wounds. Sometimes we reinvest these emotions in our children, making them the vehicles of our hopes, our aspirations, all our losses and failings, the carriers of both our dented narcissism and our ego ideals, our transcendent dreams. Buried in our passionate love is a redemptive structure borrowed from Christian theology (or perhaps it was the other way round): love, anguish and salvation are bound into one. ‘Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place,’ as the Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston once put it.

  In Love Again…

  Why is it that passionate love and loss seem to be so bound up with one another?

  Psychoanalysts, our contemporary experts on the inner life alongside novelists, poets and the occasional philosopher or priest, might tell us that first love is never altogether first. It is but the first and conscious reawakening of earlier forgotten loves: that utterly dependent yet omnipotent love, blissful in its plenitude, of the avid child at mother’s breast, an early symbiosis which, willy-nilly, must end, leaving in its trail a bodily sense of lack for an enchanting object ever after slightly out of reach. The sheer intensity of the infant’s initial encounter with a world that isn’t yet conceived as ‘other’ may have not a little to do with the fact that the babe inhabits a preverbal and pre-narrative state, in which a thinking being, an ‘I’ who defines and delimits, hasn’t yet been constituted. Freud’s famous ‘oceanic feeling’–‘a sensation of eternity, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded’–springs from this early state and is re-enacted in love, as it can be in faith. Here the boundaries between I and you, self and world, inner time and clock time melt away. We enter that other dimension to which some have given the name, ‘spiritual’.

  But earthly time moves us on. The babe hurtles onward from that first symbiotic love. Rupture is built into our raptures. The pain of loss, torments of grief are already written into our passions. Learning to love seems also to be about learning how to accommodate the passage away from that brief, excited, blissful glimpse of plenitude.

  The incestuous bundle of contradictory feelings the child has for its godlike parents or carers, and indeed its siblings, as it grows, also powerfully finds its way into first love outside the family. These early experiences mark first love with a particular sense of transgression and extremes of both attraction and vulnerability. All the psychological positions that love takes on find their crucible in our childhood relations. Gender is no necessary determinant. Male or female can be devoted, serving, self-abnegating, worshipping or possessively allconsuming, like a possible mother. Either can also be distant, unapproachable, a height to be scaled, or calling out for rescue… and so on in countless permutations.

  Through these early moments, a barely grasped, some would say unconscious, narrative of love is shaped within us. It takes on accretions from the stories that circulate in our culture–romantic tales of transfiguration, worldly tales of pleasure, conflict-laden tales of power and submission, spiritual tales of ecstasy and self-abnegation. We reinvent these and they’re reignited as we move through life. If shades of the past may be put to rest, they also recur in unexpected moments. Each time we fall in love, even when we’re old, the experience feels new, freshly transfigurative. It both is and isn’t. There can be an uncanny familiarity in our love choices. They feel like soulmates, twins, as if we’ve known them all our lives. The structure of our relational story is there, too, within us. And our initial loves, like revenants, continue to lend their contours to later ones, while later ones take up the tune composed by earlier ones–and fill in all the necessary notes in our repertoire.

  Edmund White in A Boy’s Own Story puts it like this: ‘People say young love or love of the moment isn’t real, but I think the only love is the first. Later we hear its fleeting recapitulations throughout our lives, brief echoes of the original theme in a work that increasingly becomes all development.’

  Casting this reflection in a more worldly idiom for his middle-aged hero, Swann, Proust observes how we elaborate on our loves to make them fit an original template:

  At this time of life one has already been wounded more than once by the darts of love; it no longer evolves by itself, obeying its own incomprehensible and fatal laws, before our passive and astonished hearts. We come to its aid, we falsify it by memory and by suggestion. Recognising one of its symptoms, we remember and recreate the rest. Since we know its song, which is engraved on our hearts in its entirety, there is no need for a woman to repeat the opening strains… for us to remember what follows. And if she begins in the middle–where hearts are joined and where it sings of our existing, henceforward, for one an
other only–we are well enough attuned to that music to be able to take it up and follow our partner without hesitation at the appropriate passage.

  Turgenev’s First Love begins not with Voldemar’s first passion for Zinaida but with a telling conversation between older men who are challenged by their host to narrate the story of their first loves. This sets the frame within which the main story of the novella, the youth’s and his father’s love for the same woman, is told. But the first respondent, plump, light-complexioned Sergei Nikolaevitch, declares:

  ‘I had no first love… I began with the second.’

  ‘How was that?’

  ‘It’s very simple. I was eighteen when I had my first flirtation with a charming young lady, but I courted her just as though it were nothing new to me; just as I courted others later on. To speak accurately, the first and last time I was in love was with my nurse when I was six years old; but that’s in the remote past. The details of our relations have slipped out of my memory, and even if I remembered them, whom could they interest?’

  This dialogue seems startlingly Freudian, until we remember that Freud learned from novelists and poets. The simple fact that we grow up means that early shaping attachments, remembered or shrouded, are always ruptured and lost. Yet, since the inner child never altogether vanishes, the yearning, the repeated desire, the sense of lack which often enough attends our lives harks back to these earliest loves, as irretrievably dead and gone as those years themselves, yet with the power still to haunt and to trigger how and where and with whom we fall in love.

  John Updike reflects on it with his usual brilliance. ‘What is nostalgia,’ he asks, ‘but love for that part of ourselves which is in Heaven, forever removed from change and corruption?’ A loved woman, he suggests, ‘eases the pain of time by localizing nostalgia: the vague and irrecoverable objects of nostalgic longing are assimilated, under the pressure of libidinous desire, into the details of her person.’ Inanimate details and images, hoarded from the past, also lie in wait to come together in the object of our desire: ‘a certain slant of sunshine… a kind of rasping tune that is reborn in her voice; they are nameless, these elusive glints of original goodness that a man’s memory stores towards an erotic commitment. Perhaps it is to the degree that the beloved crystallizes the lover’s past that she presents herself to him, alpha and omega, as his Fate.’

  So our deepest and earliest sensations and experiences shape the patterns of our love lives, and the figure fuzzily buried in their depths wears the aura of mother.

  It is hardly surprising that the ever wisely wry Nabokov in introducing his Humbert Humbert gives him a mother who died in a freak accident when he was only three. He remembers her as ‘a pocket of warmth in the darkest path’, as a furry, animal warmth which he likens to a ‘haze’ of golden midges above a hedge in bloom at the end of a summer’s day. Though Humbert apologizes for his overblown prose, it serves to heighten the sensuous atmosphere that mother is, a warm blur in distant memory–as much a place as a separate being. Place, too, recurs and plays its part in the arousal both of his first conscious love with Annabel and of his second with Lolita. The warm summer days, the sea and the greenery of the Annabel days become the pool of sun in the garden where Lolita is first seen, the ‘haze’ that is also her family name.

  Both of Humbert’s first loves are dead and for a long time it is as if he has died with them. The end of love is indeed like death, a wrenching away from the coupled self that was, which catapults the lover into that half-life of melancholy. When Humbert is woken, like Sleeping Beauty or a character from the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, it is by Annabel’s reincarnation, Lolita.

  Poe himself offers an early punning double for Annabel Leigh in his poem ‘Annabel Lee’, which intertwines love and death. Poe, like Humbert Humbert, was the child of a mother who died when he was very young. And he was also the lover of a girl-child. In that play of allusiveness that Lolita provides, it is fitting that Nabokov’s ironic romance with America and obsessive romantic love should refer back to the early master of American gothic.

  It was many and many a year ago,

  In a kingdom by the sea,

  That a maiden there lived whom you may know

  By the name of ANNABEL LEE;

  And this maiden she lived with no other thought

  Than to love and be loved by me.

  Envied by the heavens for its perfection, this lovers’ union of body and soul can only end in death:

  The angels, not half so happy in heaven,

  Went envying her and me–

  Yes!–that was the reason (as all men know,

  In this kingdom by the sea)

  That the wind came out of the cloud by night,

  Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

  Like the paradises lost of childhood, lost first loves populate literature and life. But then all love, it seems, takes on some of its force from being a return: a return to a primal sense of oneness where lover and beloved merge, like mother and child–or brother and sister–and there is no demarcation between inside and outside. We are recognized, known by, and know the other. Everything is shared. In the loving gaze of the other, we also love ourselves: our best self comes into being, one filled with new potential. Existential fractures are healed. That abiding loneliness, that emptiness that human beings are prone to, recedes, at least momentarily. A sense of pastoral at-homeness reigns. If and when the rupture comes, whether through death or abandonment, the suffering can be as searing, as transcendent as the initial rapture.

  Part of the popular force of a film like Slumdog Millionaire hinges on the way its embedded love narrative, despite early loss, allows a happy, redemptive end. No sooner does the child hero Jamal’s mother die, murdered in an anti-Muslim riot, than the girl, Latika, appears in a mist of rain, to take her emotional place. Separated from Latika by the callous rivalry of his older brother, agonized, lonely Jamal spends much of the film trying to find her, then win her once more–an act which entails killing off his rivals and jumping the hurdles of the quiz show that makes him an adult millionaire. In the film’s final scene, when the two meet again, a sequence of images from the past, showing his veiled mother and the child Latika forlorn in the rain, coalesce into an image of the adult Latika waiting for him on a railway platform. They embrace and kiss: loss and loneliness are made good in this double return.

  Twin Souls

  In the elaborations we give to our cravings at whatever age, certain templates and themes recur.

  However much our social and cultural mores change, however acutely we may know–emphatically so in our times–that in humdrum reality, sentimental happy ends are rare or at least rarely outlast the euphoria of a time-stopped moment, the sense of love as a meeting with the long-sought lost half of ourselves persists. Individuals are fragments seeking to be made whole. ‘Love,’ Coleridge wrote, ‘is a desire of the whole being to be united to some thing, or some being, felt necessary to its completeness.’ People may find that sense of completeness in God, in a political party, in a nation or place. Many will find it, certainly dream of it, first of all in another.

  The idea of twin souls comes to us wrapped in a romantic idiom. We may read it as propelled by sexual desire, but it is also more than that, reaches beyond it to a sense of visionary identification. As Catherine Earnshaw says in Wuthering Heights, ‘I am Heathcliff… He’s more myself than I am.’ She tries to explain this sense of being repeated in another to Nelly Dean: ‘What were the use of my creation, if I were contained here?’ she asks. ‘My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff’s miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself… He’s always, always in my mind, not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.’ Brought up as brother and sister, this transcendental love has an incestuous core. It is based on sameness and proximity, not on the difference and distance which more usually fuel desire for the young as they wrench themselves
away from their families. Soulmates are not always and ever sexmates. For Catherine, her love for Heathcliff, forged in childhood, is not the love of men and women, which is ‘like the foliage in the woods: time will change it’. Rather, her love for Heathcliff resembles ‘the eternal rocks beneath’.

  In her Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, published when she was fifty and hardly a young romantic, Simone de Beauvoir evokes her twenty-one-year-old self and her encounter with Jean-Paul Sartre in terms of twin souls destined for each other: ‘Sartre corresponded exactly to the dream-companion I had longed for since I was fifteen: he was the double in whom I found all my burning aspiration raised to the pitch of incandescence. I should always be able to share everything with him… I knew that he would never go out of my life again.’

  Love as twinning or doubling is as old as Western culture, already there in Plato’s myth of the origin of love. In The Symposium Aristophanes, his emphasis in part satirical, tells us that humans were originally rounded creatures of three sexes–some of them double males, some double females, some one of each and androgynous. They had four hands and feet and a single head with two faces, and were so strong and ‘the thoughts of their hearts’ were so great that they attempted to scale the realm of the gods and assault them. To prevent this, Zeus cut them in two. As a result, human life is fuelled by a yearning to make good our fractured, lonely incompleteness, to find the ‘lost’ half of whichever gender, with whom we can fuse. The desire and pursuit of that other who will make us whole, restore us to our original nature and make us happy and blessed, is one aspect of what The Symposium calls love.