Sunday, December 25, 2005

Christmas Day 2005 Discourse

Introduction

What is love?  Not a question, I admit, the average person bothers asking.  More often they ask whether it's love, or if that love is true, or they talk about how you should love, could love, whether or not it's important... all of that nonsense.  Well, perhaps it's not nonsense: but it's frivolous and ultimately meaningless because they are unable to tell you what it is.

In my tenth year of schooling, this is exacty the quandary I was faced with.  I thought I was in love.  But then again, was I?  I couldn't tell.  And my breakthrough realization, you might say, was realizing that the only way to be sure of whether or not I was in love was to decide what love is.

A definition.

Since then, I've been treated to a slew of discouragements, the most relevant of which is the assertion that some things do not need to be defined.  I disagree with this notion, on the basis that the very nature of a word implies the presence of a definition, if you seek it out.  Its heart, you could say, lies at the overlap of everyone's personal definition.  But what if no such overlap exists?  There are two possibilities: either the word is meaningless, or someone is wrong.

To this end, I have sought to define what love is.  When we can agree on its meaning, we can agree on the question of whether or not someone is in love, whether or not you should love a spouse forced upon you, whether or not friendship is isolated from love, etc.  Many questions become answered, when the fundamental one is sure.

The Definition Proposed

So let's throw it at you straight up; the conclusion at the start.

Love, v.t.: to completely understand, include, and grow with.

Love, n.: the process of loving something.

The Definition Explained: Overview

Because there may be some initial confusion, let me hasten to address the easiest and most obvious reactions.

First, the issue of emotion.  There appears to be no emotion in the definition.  There is no joy, no tingly feelings, no melting knees, no breathless awe.  This is because while many instances of love are associated with various emotions, the central act of loving is not inextricably tied to these, and can be separated and applied elsewhere with no dilution.  Consider the act of kicking: you can feel joy, or anger, or satisfaction, but regardless of the emotion, it is still a kick.

Second, the issue of object.  I do not restrict it to people, though I restrict its actor to people.  This means that you can love a – let's be broad here – lamppost, but a lamppost may not love you.

Third, the issue of verb.  To tackle this, we go to Josh Fredman's Noun Typology, which is an alternative to the weaker primary school categorization of “person, place, or thing”.  The work cited herein should not be considered a perfect reflection of Fredman's typology.  Fredman offers four types of noun: object, process, condition, and concept.  By and large, emotions are considered conditions: you're either sad, or you're not sad.  In the recent traditional framing of love as an emotion, it is considered much the same way.  A person is either “in love” or not.  I argue that this is untrue.

I argue that love is more properly classified as a process.  This means that I say that love begins, ends, and continues for a period of time.  It is not turned on or off; it is started and stopped.  So what we have here is a noun, “love”, that is a process.  The process is a verb, also “love”.  The real question, therefore, is no longer so much what love is, but how it starts, what it does, and how it ends.

The Definition Explained: Compassion

Why does a person love?  What motivates them down the path?  Broadly speaking, you could theoretically assume that all human beings are not merely capable of love, but have begun to love.  And while I am unconvinced that anyone has ever reached the end of the path, it certainly could happen.  But I was speaking of beginnings.

I use the word Compassion for the motivator of love.  When we kick a ball, the motivator is an intricate chain reaction of cerebral activity, synapse firings, and muscle tensions.  In this way, you could say that the motivator is not differentiated from the action itself, but rather a part of process: it simply marks the beginning.

To understand compassion, we must take a journey into the concepts of identity and self.

The self is a convenient mental device that encapsulates everything that you consider you.  It contains your identity, without which you are not you, and everything that you identify with.  Perhaps as a child, you had what is called a security blanket: an object you refused to be parted with.  The reason for this is because you identified with this object: in your eyes, to be parted with it was to tear away a piece of yourself.  In the same way, you have heard the tales of lovers feeling torn apart at the departure of their beloved, of parents feeling bereft when the nest empties, of a once-rich man deprived in poverty, of a celebrity fallen from fame utterly frazzled.  Why?

Compassion.

When you have compassion for something, someone, you include it in your sense of self.  It becomes as much a part of you as your heart is to your body.  This identification brings you a sense of self that is larger than your identity.  Compassion is what drives friendship, what drives community, that sense of national, ethnic, cultural identity.  Your sense of self expands to include something besides just you.

The Definition Explained: Comprehension

The workhorse of the definition is comprehension.  You might find this both strange and validating at the same time.  Most people understand comprehension to be an intellectual feat; after reading an academic paper, if you know the concepts and can re-express them and argue for or against them, you've comprehended it.  Of course, there's more to it than that.  Comprehension has a sister word derived from the same root – comprehensive – which suggests more than mere summarization: it suggests holism, a big picture outlook.

There are three stages in comprehension, and these stages are, unfortunately, recursive.  By recursive I mean that although the stages go 1-2-3, it's more accurately 1a-1b-1c-2a-2b-2c-3a-3b-3c, except even deeper.  It's a headache to even imagine it.  And I don't have the words to describe the nuances of different objects, and how they are embedded in each other (a planet is a part of the whole universe, and a person is part of a planet, and an individual is a specific person), and how it interrelates.  I can only feebly protest that it is complicated beyond even my long-winded ken and beg off.

The first is the stage of ignorance, where you know nothing.  On the highest level, this stage typically extends, in a typical person, from the first spark of sentience to roughly somewhere between the teenage years and fifty years.  Whoa! you say, that's a long time.  And yes, it is.  And to make it even more complicated, remember that love is a transitive verb, which means you love something.  You do not just understand; you understand something.  In the first dawn of your life, that something is the manifestation of total compassion: it is everything.

But there are smaller scales, like your boyfriend, or your parent, or a pet.  This is where the waters get murky, because you started on the journey towards understanding these things long before you were aware of them: those first few seconds as an infant.  And thus, as your sentient mind reaches out into the universe, you form for the first years of your life deep-seeded and powerful assumptions, and the older you get, the more assumptions you carry.  And the ignorance necessarily fades.

The second is the stage of sophistication, where you know stuff but you don't understand it.  It's knowing that dropping a rock into a puddle of water causes ripples, but you have no idea why.  You know that calling your girlfriend a bitch will make her back off, but you don't understand that you're simultaneously alienating her.  The nature of the transitive verb is obvious here: obviously, if you're more sophisticated, you know more about something, even if it's everything in general.

Sophistication fuels ego; ego expands, and when unchecked, becomes cancerous; a cancerous ego leads to arrogance; arrogance leads to stagnation; stagnation leads to death.  Someone who stays in the second stage ultimately dies; someone who loves only halfway will inevitably fall away (unless they physically die first; we have time limits here).  So sophistication is an alright thing as long as you keep a check on your ego and shy away from unjustified pride (which I term, above, arrogance).

But sophistication has a second fatal flaw, which has victimized a large proportion of the go-geters of the 21^st century.  And the term for this is information overload.  Though it pains me to phrase it this way, the simple fact is that they know too much.  But remember what it means to be in the stage of sophistication: to know without understanding.  And that's just what the problem is.

The third is the stage of spontaneity, where your knowledge is internalized and instinctual.  I also call it the stage of expertise, but the word must be used with caution.  In the classroom setting, it means you're no longer hauling out the cheat sheet and looking for the right equation; it means you snap your fingers and go, I can use this principle and those laws and *fiddle fiddle fiddle* that's the answer!  I must caution, here that spontaneity is not the same as random.  Spontaneity is an intuitive process, essentially mimicking a conscious, rational process happening a thousand times faster.  To achieve spontaneity, called “improv” in the arts, is essentially the pinnacle of understanding.  It is a holistic breakdown, a complete view from the very large to the very small.  If you would believe it, that is the essence of what the physicists are pursuing: a grand unified theory of everything.

But here, I must make a caution.  Spontaneity and sophistication are capable of coexistence, as is ignorance.  This should be an obvious statement: you can know a hundred theorems of mathematics and be at a total loss to explain why a photograph is beautiful.  You can dance given just a floor and some music, but when playing the piano, you have to painstakingly pick out individual keys.  No one has even really dived in deep into the sophistication stage of Everything, not Steven Hawking, not anyone.  There really is, simply, too much.  But step by step, component by component, we're getting there, standing on the shoulders of giants.

The Definition Explained: Creation

This section is probably the most philosophical, most abstract, and weirdest section out of all of them.  But the best way to explain it is by the simple device of a story: a beginning, a middle, and an end.  That is how I've been describing love, defining the base conditions for it as compassion, its processes as comprehension, and its end conditions as creation.

Creation is, in fact, slightly more general.  It requires that you look again at the iterative process mentioned briefly in the previous section.  Imagine, in your mind, a filmstrip.  Say this film is just a picture of you, walking along a sidewalk.  The film begins with an infant, sitting.  The infant grows, crawls, gets on its knees, and becomes a toddler.  The toddler learns to stand up right, walks, and expands upward with growing confidence.  The adolescent strides along, with increasing certainty and fixation, until slowing as the aches and pains of body enter.  The elder walks slowly, perhaps aided by a cane, and the film ends.

Now, if we take this film and look at the filmstrip itself, we will see perhaps a few thousand rectangular shapes, called frames.  And this is what I am saying: creation occurs in each frame.  If you have ever seen a flipbook, every page is creation.  Creation is a constant process.  Unlike love, which is characterized by its beginnings, creation is characterized by its endings, its final products.  However, creation is a process, too, and love is but one type of creation.

For every instant of your life, you are a different person.  The chemical makeup, the position of various particles, the stages of reproduction your cells are going through, the thoughts going through your head, even the simple counter of how many seconds have passed since you were born: all these things have changed since the last instant.  This is why the birthday is typically surprisingly unremarkable, when you look back a day later.  The change is so constant that it is unnoticeable; but, once upon a time, you crawled on your hands and knees and even standing straight up, you wouldn't have reached three feet.

The key revelation is not that your identity is meaningless; it's not.  But rather that every instant has its own importance.  The instant a bit of pollen is inhaled is the critical instant in which the allergic processes will eventually be set into motion, triggering the aching and sneezing and scattering your mind, causing you to do too poorly on one critical exam, flunking the class, graduating late, viewed as unqualified for jobs, etc.  A different instant, a different event: a musician is inspired to write a song, a record label likes it, sells it, a child buys it, their parent listens to it, shares it with a friend, who writes a story, a publisher likes it, sells it, a teenager reads it, hears it, and decides not to give up one more day.

I call these event cascades, or more poetically, ripples in the sea of people (an analogy derived from watching ripples from stones dropped in water), but they don't need a special name.  In the same way music can be produced by strings vibrating in harmony, and orchestral music may include hundreds of strings vibrating in harmony, so too do events produce sums greater than the parts that made them.  But more importantly, these events have causes, and these causes are of no small part the action of human beings.

Actions have consequences, and consequences have outcomes.  A process is synonymous with an action, and so you see that creation is an action with far-ranging, even unintended effects.  And love is such a thing, and while its outcomes are not guaranteed to be positive, its pursuit necessarily results in nothing less.  How do I know?

The Definition Explained: Courage

The core difficulty of anything is that you don't know what you don't know.  Because this is ultimately the original intent behind my investigation: how do I know if this is love?  We have a definition.  We have a reasonably thorough explanation.  But it's a difficult animal to tame.

Courage is my word for the measure by which you can determine how well you are doing.  A kick can be measured by the velocity and angle of the ball, the accuracy of the shot, how well you recover from it, and so on.  Courage, put simply, is the reduction of fear.  Some people say that it's the ability to continue to strive despite fear, but as a measure of the extent of love, the extent to which one understands, it is the complete reduction of fear, not simply suppressing it.

Fear ultimately derives from ignorance.  Fear is what you have when you don't know what will happen.  Love, you should recall now, is to completely understand.  It means that, at the point where you complete the process, you are effectively omniscient regarding the object.  There are no surprises.  Ignorance is absolutely absent.  And thus, there is no fear.  At all.

It's not a perfect measure, because there are ways to suppress fear and ways to reduce is through other means.  The term “recklessness” comes to mind.  On the other hand, love is a sure way to reduce fear: the better you understand, the less you fear.  In the real world, such a blanket statement is not as simply applicable, but it is not untrue.  But there are no shortage of incentives to reduce fear.  Fear sets the preconditions for many ill things in the world, from simple stage fright to potentially world-devastating nuclear stockpiles.  Understand your enemy totally, and what need do you have of war?  There would be no enemy: only another friend, not yet embraced.

The Definition Explained: Bringing It Together

We go back to the original definition here, and perhaps you're wondering what all of this has to do with that original statement, which has only one word beginning with the letter C, and it's an adverb.  Well, fret not over my roundabout ways: it really does make sense.

A process takes time, in many cases, much time.  It begins and it ends, and in the middle happen many things.  Compassion is how love begins, and there is no love without compassion.  If you strive to understand a thing you do not care for, have no identification with, then it is not love.  Comprehension is how love moves, and there is no love without comprehension.  If you identify with it, but do not investigate, then it is not love.  If you do not seek to know, to explain and predict, to recognize the whys and hows, then it is not love.  Creation is how love manifests, and all love is creation, just a type of the thing.  If it does not create, it is not love; it does not need to flashy or showy, merely present, and that is enough.  Courage is how love is shown, and love can be measured by the retreat of fear.  Because love in its advance is the dawn of knowledge and the great illuminating omniscience that brings with it the power to dispell the darkness of ignorance from which fear springs full-grown.

If you love a thing, then you must discover its workings.  If you love an event, then you must partake of it.  If you love a cause, then you must join it.  If you love a topic, then you must study it.  If you love an ideal, then you must strive to achieve it.  If you love a person, you must experience them.

Conclusion

I have always spoken here of a very simple thing, no matter if it has taken six pages to explain, and I am not certain it expresses my thoughts perfectly, and especially not the thoughts that will take place in the future.  But love is not a simple thing, not when it is placed back into the context of the world from which it is born.

Consider the case of the average upper-middle class American.  This person has an immediate and extended family, is married and has children, owns a home, has a reasonably well-paying job, owns some various gadgets, and so on.  Does this person love their spouse?  Probably.  Children?  Probably.  Job?  More likely than not.  Parents?  Probably.  Grandparents?  Probably.  Uncles and aunts and cousins?  In-laws?  Television?  House?  The pool?  The membership to a country club?  Their car?  Their lifestyle?  The organizations they participate in?

A bit much, isn't it?

One final, crucial comment on what love is is that it is an intellectual feat.  It is often expressed physically and experienced in tandem with emotions, and some would argue it has powerful reverbations on a spiritual level.  But it is an intellectual feat: the simple strive to understand.

If you would love your wife, then you must understand her.  None of this mysterious female race crap.  If you would love your husband, then you must understand him.  None of this dense, incomprehensible male drivel.  They are human beings, too.  If you would love your children, then you must understand them.  None of this assumption of naivete and blindness; they have the same five senses you do.

But they, too, are different people, and thus the conclusions they reach are not the same as yours; at least, not always.  It might be a preference for rare over well-done steak, or an enjoyment of a wintry evergreen forest to a white sandy beach.  It might be favoring the death penalty or believing in Islamic teachings as opposed to Baha'i teachings.  Large or small, these are differences, and they are differences that you must not merely acknowledge, but also understand.  Not merely accept, but also challenge.  And neither are your views sacrosanct, for they should do unto you this, too.  But proactiveness is generally good.

If you would love God, then understand Him.  If you would love the environment, then understand it.  If you would love America, then understand it.  If you would love yourself, then understand yourself.

Understand completely.  Include, as an intrinsic part of your Self.  And grow with.

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Monday, February 14, 2005

The Valentine's Day 2005 Discourse

Recently, I went through the backlogs of another's Xanga. A particular post, that was probably my personal highlight throughout that reading. (A point of nearly expected disappointment; I'm forever disappointed in how much musing people actually do. But that's because I come from a set of values most people have never really been exposed to, or have long since rejected. My disappointment is a mere artifact of the belief that I have good values.)

The question was simple: How do you define love?

It prompted me to think; I haven't been thinking about my philosophies quite as much as the hard fatigue set in. Indeed, I'm not sure how strong I'd still be if I didn't keep finding these little motivations that poke and prod and revitalize me just barely enough. I digress. I thought while showering (an excellent time for thought, with the hard contact with water searing impurities from your flesh, a time where you're alone with what thoughts you might have, and minimal chance of interruption, a time when you stand naked, exposed and vulnerable, though you're likely enshrouded by privacy) and then while I lay in bed.

Then I got out of bed and went to the computer and spent half an hour writing this post, God Is Love.

In ninth grade, I had a crush. In tenth grade, I had to seriously call into question my feelings. I had to ask myself: Is what I feel for this girl love? Do I love her?

I couldn't answer the question, because I had no useful definition of love. What conceptions were in my mind were contradicted by evidence, what I saw elsewhere. So I thought about it, and thought about it. I had to find out. I wrote a paper and handed it off to a few peers for critique. I didn't get much back. (Some.. not enough.)

But the seed had been planted. It was a call to adventure, for me. It was a quiet voice that said, "Here is a doorway into the human soul. Step through, Michael! Find the truth and hold fast to it always!"

And the doorway was quite the place. The revelations were not unlike that of Neo, entering the mainframe and coming face to face with the Architect. And here are the key ones, in which I answer this person's question on her Xanga nearly a year ago at the end of April, when I myself was looking back to high school and remembering times.

Revelation: There isn't more than one kind of love.

The twin concepts of family and marriage are artificial. They're institutions set in place by man with no intrinsic value other than that of the census. Consider the excerpt by J.V. Jones. Marriage is a sacred institution, but only so long as its spirit stands as the central principle, rather than merely its founding principle. Marriage comes from love. There is no suggestion in the Bible that regards marriage as an institution ordained by God or anyone else. And thus I place little to no value in the institutions of boyfriend/girlfriend, in marriage, or in family. Because the simple word all three institutions are meant to teach are not being learned in earnest. Instead, like Valdis (you did click the link, right?), the institutions have become mediums of control.

How differs the love of a sibling from the love of a parent from the love of a friend from the love of a spouse from the love of a child from the love of God from the love of knowledge from the love of an object from the love of a cause from the love of an idea from any other love?

A point that was brought up was that different languages have many different words for love. As a student of linguistics, however, I am aware that this perceived difference is no difference at all. Different cultures conceive of different things in different ways; that doesn't mean that those things are different. As a student of mathematics (particularly linear alegbra), I know that transposing a matrix does not change its determinant. A matrix is a description of an object; to tranpose means to significantly change your viewpoint; a determinant is the volume of the object described. The object stays the same; the perception changes as the viewpoint does, because perception is relative.

And ultimately, some of those linguistic-based arguments boil down to the same monolingual argument: if there is a single word for "love from a sibling" and another for "love from a spouse", does that mean they are different things, or does that mean the language is more suited for describing the specific love from different people? If I have a word that means "love" called "ba", and I have the word for sibling "chub" and the word for spouse "ten"... and when you place the word "ba" as a suffix, it means "love from a", then the words "chubba" and "tenba" mean the SAME love from two DIFFERENT people. (Unless you're married to your sibling, but that's inconsequential.)

Corollary: There are different degrees of that single love.

Often, what is perceived as a different love is instead simply a different expression of it. Also as frequently is a perception that the love is different because it is offered in differing frequencies and intensities. If you define love in terms of how often it is expressed, in its manner of expression, and in its strength of communication, then perhaps it is different. I don't. I think that love is still love no matter when or how or with what you express it. The delivery is not the package.

Revelation: Love is something you do, not something you feel.

The most poignant revelation I ever had was hearing a simple anecdote, presented as a question: "How much love did your mother feel for you when she changed your diapers?" Love isn't a trance in which you stare at something and let all abandon as it fills your mind. That is awe; that is adoration. Love is neither.

It is a critical revelation, because one of the greatest stoppages in individuals' ability to love is the lack of a related emotion that they have come to expect. It doesn't feel like love anymore. But emotion has never been a critical component of any action. Watch the set in production of a movie with a few talented and skilled actors: how much of that emotion is thoroughly genuine, especially given the setting? Yet the actions remain the same. The actions are separate from the emotions; the emotions are coloring that changes one's interpretation of the actions into something believable. The relation between particular feelings and love itself is a false generalization, nothing more.

Revelation: You can love more than one person.

The Dunbar Number suggests that there is a limit to how many meaningful relationships a single individual is capable of maintaining. This may be a scientifically proven and factual truth, but it does not mean one should ever restrict oneself to a small group.

Group identification is an extremely powerful force among social animals. Described with a few differences, it's called the herding effect. It is the driving force behind such things as nationalism, patriotism, religious fanaticism, and any number of -isms where you sacrifice your personal identity and individuality for the sake of the common and greater collective. It's hardly the worst thing in the world, depending on your philosophy, but its a treacherous and potentially lethal ground to walk. As a side note, group identification doesn't necessarily mean buying into a self-sacrifice doctrine; it simply provides the force by which they work.

Identification with a single other person is a facet of this effect. The "cleaving" done by a pair is an unquestionably special thing, but sentiment hardly has a place in truth. (Worse still, it usually occludes truth from those involved. Bayesian probability judgments.) What must be seen is this: there is no such thing as a soulmate. People are not made as two halves to be brought together. We need contact with beings such as ourselves; that is what it means to be a social creature. But this contact mandates variety and novelty, particularly in the earlier years of life, and less so in the later years. Our best friends are those who can provide this variety and novelty, and at the same time grant an aura of familiarity and comfortableness.

One of the most grevious mistakes many people make is feeling guilty for loving more than one person, or for splitting their attention between two or more people. I have never heard of a case of simultaneous love (that is, at the same moment), which means that one person came FIRST, and then the rest in some irrelevant order. There's nothing, in all honesty, to be guilty over. Let me explain.

Attention devoted to someone you love is a Pareto optimal solution. If it's anything less, any kind of underutilization of your capacity, then consideration of what you love is in order; why aren't you putting your all into it? When you're confronted with a second object of your love, then it must be asked: which is more worthy? And by how much? At the point of Pareto optimality, you cannot give anything to this burgeoning love without taking away from the older one. This is a direct result of the limitations of human beings: we can only do so much. The balancing act is dangerous depending on circumstance, of course, but at the end of the day, the balancing act is what is required of us. There is an obligation to make that hard decision, which to favor when, and how.

Corollary: You should love more than one person.

Spread the love. Share the love. Simply because something is difficult is hardly reason not to. If you love your husband, and then give birth to a child, should you stop loving one in order to fully love the other? It is a fair thing to say, also, that if you can love something that deserves to be loved, then you ought to make the effort if you can spare it.

Sometimes you cannot; sometimes you must say no. It's a valuation of different things, that says I value this more than that. Such a decision is to be respected, of course, and it also must be remembered that times, people, and circumstances all change. The impossibilities of yesterdays are the easily achievables of tomorrow.

It should be remembered that, since love is an action, it is possible to not love and yet to love no less. This provides for a simultaneity that is often felt to be lacking. The utter devotion people devote to particular things often leave no time for anything else. Yet when conventional wisdom states that you should separate work from home, it should be taken to mean love your work while you work, and love your family while you're at home.

Revelation: There is no greater type of relationship than friendship.

There is no such thing as "more than friends", and therefore the idea of "just friends" is simply invalid. Within friendship, all involved build a rapport of love between each other. That's what friendship means: to love and to be loved back. And in fact, there is no action, no emotion, no obligation or responsibility, nothing whatsoever that can be claimed to be the exclusive domain of something greater than friendship. Because there is nothing greater, in the grand universe of human relationship. Ultimately, to claim another human being a friend is the most daring claim, and to treat them as such the largest act.

There are degrees of friendship, of course. There are best friends; there are friends you don't see often, but are close to anyway; there are friends in whom the memory is the best thing; there are friends who have changed, and friends who aren't so intimate; there are friends amongst family and friends without. But the love is the same; it's simply applied at a different intensity, a different frequency, a different source, a different way of expression.

Sometimes friends grow apart. This is fine. The Bible puts it more succinctly than I can: "When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me." (1 Cor 13:11, NIV) People change. People grow. That's an important part of individuality, of the human spirit. And people will grow in such a way that their friends might no longer be able to be something they can love easily. That love will grow too difficult, and at that point, it may be that it is foolish to hold onto something that has obviously been lost.

And sometimes they don't. One of the best things in life is a kindred spirit, one who is familiar with your ways and knows the small jokes and hidden subtleties of your words. The reassuring familiarity, coupled with the ability to be new and surprising in a delightful way, is the epitome of a lifelong friend. A change perceived to radical may be a mere challenge that can deepen your friendship, generating acts of love that are of greater intensity than ever before.

Corollary: Love does not belong to any individual.

How foolish it would be to say, "This kick is mine, and only I can use it," or to say "Only I am allowed to be punched in this manner." So in the same sense, love cannot belong to a person. A person may be the source of love, and also the object of love, but they can claim no dominion over the action itself.

Furthermore, just as love itself cannot be owned, loving something or someone does not create ownership. You do not own your friend, nor your pet project, nor your car because you love it. Perhaps you do own them, but the reason is not directly love. Perhaps in a country where slavery exists, you might own another human being; perhaps you own the intellectual property rights to a project; perhaps you bought the car with your money. But also, you might live in a place where human beings are assumed created equal, or your contract stipulates that any project begun is owned by the company, or the car is another's you saw in a magazine, on the television, on the road. Ownership has no bearing on love, in and of itself. The two are not actually related.

Ownership is an important thing. It is an impetus by which individuals are driven to improve that which is owned. But in the realm of human relationships, ownership becomes tricky ground, because the impetus to improve must exist, but the actual ownership is not always a reality. Thus, it is a different impetus that is required in order to "make it work," as it's commonly phrased.

Revelation: The purpose of love remains ultimately in the achievement of greater understanding.

There comes a point where love is no longer desirable, where you should not love. This is the point where love has fulfilled its purpose. Why love at all? Remember that earlier I spoke about social animals. Human beings are undeniably social animals. And the purpose of this repeated contact, like two ships calling to one another at sea in the night, is to deepen individual understanding. Not of any particular thing; what it is that is better understood as a result doesn't technically matter. Indeed, it is highly dependent upon the circumstances what you learn from the experience. In fact, you ought to learn many things. That's why kids are given pets to take care of.

One of the more laudable traits of love is that, as it grows, it drives out fear. The more intense, the more frequent the love, the more fearless the lover is shown to be. To the point of recklessness in the immature, foolish, and imprudent, but in others, better results. There is no address as to why this is so. I'll tell you; because love causes understanding, and with understanding, fear no longer has a foothold. Certainly, with a little understanding, perhaps fear might be heightened. But the greater the understanding (from a greater love), the more likely fear is banished, rather than increased.

Dunbar Number aside, this is really why you ought to love as much and as often as you can. To do so methodically and systematically banishes all fears and brings a person far, far closer to understanding all things. Once you're there, you can effectively do anything that could possibly need doing. Dunbar Number accounted for, that doesn't mean you have to do everyone at once.

Conclusion

I've done a lot of thinking, as you might have noticed, over the past five and a half years. There's a lot here, and there's a lot that's hard to swallow. Personally, I encourage thought, criticism, feedback; people let that kind of thing slide all too often. I don't mind if you attack my ideas from any angle, and as long as it's not ad hominem or unfounded, I do my best to keep an open mind.

Love is a mysterious thing, though no thing can remain mysterious for long if an inquisitive mind if willing to pry into its depths. There is much I still do not know about love, much that I am only guessing at, am unsure of. Sometimes I'll see or hear about something that contradicts what I think is true, and I'll make an effort to reconcile this new perspective. It's an ongoing process.

I never answered the question at the beginning of this discourse; I don't intend to yet, either. The truth is, my answer is "I don't know." Because I don't know. I have some inklings, some ideas, some guesses and partial answers. But nothing I'd put myself behind and say, "This is what I believe. This I hold to be true." Hopefully, though, what I've said here is enough to inspire some ideas of your own, to suggest courses of action that may have be preferable where once there was a dilemma. If I have, that's enough for me.
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Thursday, August 5, 2004

It's been nearly a month now since I last posted.  I'm posting here to put the "research" paper I wrote for EWRT 2 (due this afternoon) online, so that people can read it.  It can be found at...

http://flury.sytes.net/respap.html

I'm also thinking about eventually changing the entire make-up of this blog so that it forwards itself to one of my other blogs.  Basically, I'll replace the entirety of the HTML with a redirection.  I've been relatively displeased with UserLand and its format ever since I got it, and I feel that a better job could definitely be done.

That's all for now.

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Thursday, July 8, 2004

Envision reality:

Take a look inside a grand piano. Be sure to ooh and aah; it's a necessary step.
Now, imagine it if the precision were apparently infinite, with thousands upon millions of strings, wrapping around in a right circular cylinder.
Now, realize this: despite the apparently infinite space of reality, these strings are placed extraordinarily close together.

The perturbation of a single string will cause a less powerful perturbation on its neighbor strings, which, obviously, cause equally lessened effects on their neighbors and so on, until the perturbation becomes undetectable to the human ear and eye (but, with sufficiently powerful utilities, revealed to be eternally present).

Action is perturbation. Life is a melody. Civilizations symphonies.

Manipulation merely choice. Tapping a B-flat rather than a B. A dominant chord rather than subdominant. Intentionally.

"Change happens all of the time. Change happens when you're alone, but it happens more actively when you interact with someone. This is a risk you take, even unconsciously, when you interact. What I do is I make my interactions purposed, taking that change and directing it." -- Myself, June 25, 2004

Like I've said before, I'm not much of a pianist. But I can make music out of the tappings of black and white keys. It's nothing wondrous, but it's something. I'm still learning to play the piano of reality.

I am ta'veren, the threads of the Lace of Ages twist and bend about me. I am One, my existence disrupts the equations of the Architect. It's a shame there aren't any more stories from which I can take more examples. =)

Why be zero, when you can be One?
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Sunday, July 4, 2004

Happy Fourth of July.

The sounds of battle raged around her, the screams, the death cries, the thuds and groans, the clash of steel–but she heard none of it.

She waited calmly until she saw the body crumble. Then she reached down and, sifting the dust aside with her hand, she grasped the hilt of her sword and lifted it into the air. Sunlight flashed on the blood-stained blade, her enemy lay dead at her feet. She looked around but could not see Tanis. She could not see any of the others. For all she knew, they might be dead. For all she knew, she might herself be dead within the next moment.

Laurana lifted her eyes to the sun-drenched blue sky. The world she might soon be leaving seemed newly made–every object, every stone, every leaf stood out in painful clarity. A warm fragrant southern breeze sprang up, driving back the storm clouds that hung over her homeland to the north. Laurana's spirit, released from its prison of fear, soared higher than the clouds, and her sword flashed in the morning sun.

-- The Annotated Chronicles of Dragonlance, Dragons of Autumn Twilight, Ch. 14, page 456.

"Tomorrow I will leave this place," Laurana said softly, her luminous eyes on the dragonlance. "I will go to Palanthas. I will take with me the story of this day! I will take this lance and the head of a dragon. I will dump that sinister, bloody head upon the steps of their magnificent palace. I will stand upon the dragon's head and make them listen to me! And Palanthas will listen! They will see their danger! And then I will go to Sancrist and to Ergoth and to every other place in this world where people refused to lay down their petty hatreds and join together. For until we conquer the evils within ourselves–as this man did–we can never conquer the great evil that threatens to engulf us!"

-- The Annotated Chronicles of Dragonlance, Dragons of Winter Night, The Funeral, page 905

But there was death here, Tas knew; death and suffering. He'd seen too many die, too many suffer. His thoughts went to Flint, to Sturm, to Laurana.... Something had changed inside Tas. He would never again be like other kender. Through grief, he had come to know fear; fear not for himself but for others. He decided right now that he would rather die himself than lose anyone else he loved.

You have chosen the dark path, but you have the courage to walk it, Fizban had said.

-- The Annotated Chronicles of Dragonlance, Dragons of Spring Dawning, Ch 7, page 1213

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Mario ex Piano

I have tried, before, to play the Mario theme on the piano. The best I could manage was one-fingered bits, with a few chords that barely touched.

Here's a ten-fingered glory. Watch the sinistral hand. =)

http://flury.sytes.net/videos/mario%20piano.wmv

Or, to save it,

http://flury.sytes.net/save.php?url=http://flury.sytes.net/videos/mario%20piano.wmv

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