By Michael Stone
Love and war are both marked by obsession, brutality, jealousy and pride, mirroring each other indefinitely. You wonder what I mean by love, you must have a better definition, some definition which transcends all bounds and isn’t actually a definition, some idea of self-sacrifice or the giving up of one’s life for others. Let’s protract that idea outwards until we have war. Self-sacrifice for the good of others; is this not how we are supposed to view the troops? Love and war are synonymous and well from a burning passion which does not have a source. The sourceless confusion of our days runs into our emotions. The great confrontation of otherness blinds us. In love and war there is no logic.
People are not rational at base. Our decisions stem from anxiety, an ancient urge which pulses forth into action from necessity and for survival. As our brains have developed our survival has heightened existentially. We’ve developed logic to justify our continuation. Love and war are two unjustifiable mysteries.
Why would a person feel oppressed, boxed-in, upset, excluded? Not from any logic, and no logic could encode this. The emotional life behaves according to some unearthly code. Tracing the puzzles of the brain only compounds the mystery of the push forward, the continuation, of us who are insignificant as sand yet massive as planets.
We can call war the domination of others through hate and violence. We can call love the domination of others through infatuation and affection.
Should we dissociate from our connection to others? Or should we develop acceptance and a broader understanding of our interdependence? Which one ends the struggle against violence we undergo every time we meet a new person, culture, language or belief? Why are we xenophobes who seek to make the world in our image? One stray meteor could end it all. We are at the whim of the universe, God, the scientific laws which are beyond our capacity to fully grasp. Nothing can hold us in place, least of all our minds.
Why is our continuation, our struggle for extension, marked by drastic retaliation and obsession? What about humanity tries so hard to live higher and better? We are animals. But most of us have peace and are not tortured beyond what we can bear. We understand our limits though the imagination takes flight into the unattainable. We codify these leaps in art, science, religion. We’ve created books, video games, YouTube videos, friendships, cocktails, sports, churches and beliefs. Even our collective imagination is beyond our capacity to justify.
The undoing of us is in love and war, these two unchecked violations of nature. Love justifies war, war justifies love, violence becomes care and care takes violent turns. How can we tell the difference between them? Are they so far apart? Are they separate at all? How are we to respond when atrocity spreads in another country? How are we to respond when our children make mistakes? Swooping in as saviors? Passive smirking at the irony of suffering? Thoughts and prayers? Who are we to decide, arbitrarily, between one way and the other? Our consciences are always under assault. Every decision we make is wrong.
And so we return to innocence and naivety, which is ours at the center. We can’t possibly know everything in order to make the best decisions. Clear your conscience, feel your way to truth. Understand goodness. Love and war may be justified in their turn over the course of human events. But you know you can justify neither of them. They are just going to happen and life is going to continue because the universe is stubborn and unchanging. We fly around like seeds for soil, earnestly doing the best we can. And, like it or not, the best we can is all we have.
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss. For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
~ from “East Coker” by T.S. Eliot
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