LOVE’S DARK SIDE

LOVE’S DARK SIDE

Sometimes it’s not what’s said but how it’s said and when that grabs your attention. And while perusing an article on Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie Marsh, I read the hero asking, “What use was war without also love?” Pressing issues of pointlessness and futility a critic responds,” this must count as one of the most affirmative … sentences ever set down.”

But I read this, perhaps, differently. The criminal commits an act of violence, the ballplayer competes to win, the minister pontificates and scolds, the attorney/politician defends malfeasance, lovers fight, and nations go to war. On the other side of the ledger – lovers make love, people give to charity, couples hold hands, and love songs dominate C&W radio. – What do these two sides have in common? And what do they need most of all in order to simply exist?

These are dark twins which meet in the darkest hour of the night to reaffirm themselves. They embrace, laugh together about triumphs and failures, and devise new techniques on how to fool the human mind the next time the crusades of “love & hate” go hunting. It’s an alliance we seldom if ever want to associate. We want to see love as pure and virtuous without subversive ties to some ne’er-do-well cousin. We want it surrounded with trumpet-blowing cherubs, angelic clouds, and hearts. We want it to be the penultimate awakening to the eternal heavens where nothing but restful bliss awaits us. It is, so they say, what life is supposed to be all about and what we all strive for in the very end.

And yet, on its day off, or even worse in between encore performances, love sits in its basement dressing room smoking a cigarette with his sibling from birth. We speak of three different branches of love to help justify its rather “multiple personalitied” behavior: first, eros (raw animal sex); amour (courtly love); and agape (unconditional-Christly love). We place the onus on ourselves to figure out how love can be so angelic and pure and so artfully cunning at the same time. “Well,” we say, “there’s love, and then there’s real love!” We defend its “alters” (dissociative sides) in hopes of saving it from humiliating ruin. We enable it and rescue it.

But look again. Which of these three Faces of Eve do we actually see sitting and sharing space with its twin? And which twin by the way (it too has a multiple personality)? – It’s a Manichean universe, whether that fits with our absolutist notions of heaven and hell, or not. There’s no getting around it, unless of course we give up our dualistic notions of ourselves, our own multiple sides which, ironically, we celebrate. And by the way, we do not follow these rules as if they were axiomatic. They follow us, our own multiple sides, just as religion does. We make the rules.

The problem with love is the same problem that resides with evil. There are gradations and shades. Hence the very thin red line between both. Eventually the “gray” between both begin to intersect and overlap. This is why I believe we obsess so about evil characters and ask “how could he do what he did?” This has plagued nervous theologians since the beginning of the Common Era. Where do people who commit horrible acts come from who have the ability to love and have loved others? Where do the Uni-Bombers, Sons of Sam, and Jeffrey Dahmers come from?

Hitler is the most obvious and contemporary spokesman for them all. We can’t even speak of him without reducing him to a caricature, a dull, cruel, insipid man with no personality. To not do so, and worse yet to say anything “respectful” about him, almost anoints them with power all over again. This is the power he still wields today. Is it verboten to admit that his early art work wasn’t all that bad, as landscapes go; that I might have even purchased one of his paintings in the 1920s had I been there? Does that say something about me? Did I cross a line somewhere?

Seventy years later and he’s still in our thoughts, like it was just yesterday. Why? If he was so wrong about everything, why can’t we just “finally” dismiss him just as we have with every other evil dictator in history? Hitler is much more to us than we dare to allow in conversation. The issue speaks to processes working in ways which clash with our notions of good and evil, love and hate.

It’s about how goodness-love has the capacity to become its twin so swiftly. Here was a decorated young corporal, fiercely loyal to the fatherland, coming from a meager and distraught family, and who claimed to defend reason and justice. His prejudices were minor rants to those who heard them. “I argued til finally one day they applied the one means that wins the easiest victory over reason: terror and force.” He advocated for “nation and decency.” His understanding of love actually required exclusion and banishment. Amidst certain “dark” elements, love was impossible.

Hitler was also not just a hypochondriac who hated “germs,” he was also a vegetarian, hated smoking and excessive drinking, hated lewd barroom jokes, shied away from sex, and was health-oriented. His favorite American actress (allegedly) was Shirley Temple, and his favorite American film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. He also loved John Ford westerns (white man always defeats heathen savage). – It would seem that such a figure would be easy to reduce to an common philistine. But it wasn’t – and still isn’t. All attempts fail. He comes back to us, reminds us that the most impressive demonstrations of goodness and purity mean nothing. If our understanding of evil were accurate (that he simply “lied”), this man would simply drift out our consciousness. But we keep retrieving him, over and over. He continues to speak to us; hence, his posthumous power.

We seem obsessed by the association of love with “order” – even more so the “restoration” of love as it allegedly was, as it should be. Thus, we keep Hitler warm. We incubate him and resurrect him to reconcile our own obsessions of psychological order. But then he betrays this. He’s the only voice speaking honestly about the fraudulence around agape. That is, love without its twin. He’s Jiminy Crickett (another cocaine-induced Disney dream) sitting on our shoulders whispering the truth of who and what we are. We are all capable of “that,” and love will not always stop it. Love also stabs us in the back. It requires deluded fantasies sometimes for its own promotion, all the while promising purity and virtue.

Indeed, we use Hitler to ferret out evil so we can ferret out love. We want to keep them separate. But he was/is unbearably “human,” telling us that such a disjunction is impossible. Whenever we try to understand Hitler we seem to go into a fog about ourselves; when we understand ourselves we go into a fog about Hitler. This is why.

Sometimes in the name of love we appeal to the lowest common denominator. Most Germans, including German officers, actually hated Hitler. But it didn’t matter. They needed an insurance policy against Communism and a puppet-leader to effectively jump-start an economy in ruins. His military and business supporters didn’t give a damn about the Jews or his personal views on Marx. They were opportunists and capitalists and knew they had hired a marionette to do their bidding. Their mistake was, as Christopher Hitchens pointed out, they “nationalized … the lowest common denominator.”

To reach their goals, his political operative Franz von Papen said “We’ve hired him,” and Erich Ludendorff said “You have delivered up our holy German Fatherland to one of the greatest demagogues of all time. I solemnly prophesy that this accursed man will cast our Reich into the abyss and bring our nation to inconceivable misery. Future generations will damn you in your grave for what you have done.”

And speaking of enablers, Churchill, Chamberlain, and FDR all had more laudatory things to say about Hitler in the beginning than they ever did about each other. Chamberlain “appeased” Hitler to the very end, and his fellow secretaries even refused to meet with German officers imploring their help to overthrow their resident madman. – The fact was, Hitler “spoke” to them in subliminal ways which have rarely been, if ever, analyzed enough. He was everyone’s obsession, and he knew it. And by knowing this he he was also in a hurry about it, afraid he wouldn’t make it to the end. He was afraid he would be “found out,” afraid that we’d learn about the playing out of light and dark on the world stage – that the brighter the light, the darker its shadow.

Apropos of light and dark, it’s ironic that we can switch so easily to another subject where the same dynamics are in play. War and peace (for me) instantly congers the horrible ambivalence most feel around holy wedlock? We commonly agree that real love is about accepting all the flaws and weaknesses in a person. Okay, fine. But a person’s “other side” is not the same as love’s “other side.” These are two different animals. Loving someone for his flaws is one thing, but “living love” as a many-faced phenomenon is another.

For years I was cynical over the very legitimacy of marriage as an institution (still averaging a 65% divorce rate). I was always baffled at the ritual taking place at the altar which seemed to explain the failure rate very well. On average, while our three players (bride, groom, cleric) were all speaking “the word of love,” each had her/his own understanding of what that meant – assuming the other two shared and same understanding, hence the issue never coming up – until it was too late. Recall our three sides of love above mentioned: generally speaking, the man thought eros, the woman amour, and the cleric agape – and (65% of the time) the cleaved never met.

At last, we must consider that love actually has a sinister side (as oxymoronic as it sounds) which trumps even eros, amour, and agape. Clerics aren’t even aware of it but seriously should be. There’s no such thing as “purity” or “virtue” per se, not inside a Gnostic-Manichean universe. There are not only eternal oppositions but many shades of each intimately connected. As one shifts in meaning, so does the other simultaneously. One “listens” to the other without pause and responds to every subtlety negotiated between “lover and loved.” – I think this is something we all sense intuitively and unconsciously – and “the deal” (conspiracy) is to keep it unconscious. Hence, we go into marriage “accepting the other unconditionally,” but not really. Not the part we don’t even accept, or understand, about ourselves.

This whole discussion glissades into other seemingly unrelated areas as well, for which there is no space here. For example, Nietzsche’s “master-slave” relationships not only between people but nations (of which Churchill, Chamberlain, and FDR were players), the temptations of servility to a greater power, and so forth. This too must pay its debt to our confusion over good and evil, love and hate.

Is all this just another way of saying everything is negotiable? Everything has its price? When we say love is a “death and rebirth,” are we going even deeper than we thought when “in love?” Are we grappling with that Iranian-Persian, Mani himself? – Gibran’s famous line: “Love is sufficient unto love… Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.” Be always aware, and wary, of Cupid’s arrow “said to be a child, because in choice he is so oft beguiled.”

© 2019 Richard Hiatt