Opening The Wounds

I'm a circle incomplete, I'm a heart that barely beats All the memories stay forever like tattoos I'm a star without a sky, I'm hello with no goodbye I'm the dreams we had that never will come true That's me with no you
-Bowling For Soup, "Me With No You"

A Spilled Notion

Of all the definitions of love that the pages of history and literature has to offer, it seems that we are faced with a multitude of names that do not remain on the nominal level, to mere words that point to one and the same something. It is not about just listing down "love is this" and "love is that" as if they do not really mean anything. With each signification of what love is, one is geared towards a kind of questioning, that which resounds from each and every one of these pieces. "How do I love?"

Eventually, the common denominator that seemed to, in a way, encapsulate the multitude of these significations is that love as "radical alterity." To see love as this is to not give love a definite, closed description, that which could immediately unite all experience one may call as a totalized experience of loving. Rather, it has to be seen as a breaking apart of love, of reminding us of its real meaning and significance. Indeed, what it means to love is something that is, in experience, ungraspable. It spills over, from one simple moment to a whole life, together with the world it brings, in general.

Though it may shed us some light about what love is, we can't still discard the question of the how. For in asking this, we can't seem to escape the issue of starting it and bringing it to fullness. As a person who loves, how do we look at love and loving? How do we open ourselves to love? More precisely, how do we live in love?

These questions throw us back to a perennial problem that has disturbed the history of thought, and life as well, for centuries, until those who gained the key insight was able to figure things out and, in some ways, tried to fix things. "How can the subject know the object?" This has been the problematic, the enigma of philosophers of decades past. It is nevertheless an epistemological problem, but then, since knowledge and understanding is part of our humanity, this question cannot but penetrate our selves and also become spilled over in our life. Now we ask, "how does the lover love the beloved?"

And we stumble upon the notion of the modern philosophy that was too much concerned with the "I."

I Love Because I Can

To cut a long (and perhaps tragic) story short, the Moderns placed the self, an individual thinking substance separate from the world, as the foundation of all knowing and experiencing. As a consequence, they pictured reality as the way man would like to construct it. Thus, all that is experienced is only possible as such if and only if man organized everything and made sense of it. The human mind should learn how to arrange the manifold of sensibilities before him, and therefore judges it as real or not, meaningful or not, depending on his own definitions of meaning and organization.

Perhaps being too much, but more or less, this is the image of how a separate thinking mind sees everything. Perhaps, we could say that in an extent, everything is as he pleases. Even science of this time would even go so far as to say that those that did not fit have to be discarded and regarded not as an important piece of information but just an anomaly that one has to ignore.

And it is never far from a heart that separates from itself, a kind of loving that is grounded on a false belief that one loves primarily because one is able to love in his own way. As a dire consequence, one would only love the beloved in such a way that it becomes favorable to the lover. There would be no such thing as a complete acceptance, for the lover would only accept certain images, aspects, or parts of the beloved. The rest of the beloved's being would be taken merely as accidental and need not be paid attention or accepted.

In this idolatrous form of loving, it seems that fragments of the beloved, and not the beloved herself, are accepted and loved. In the end, "loving" just becomes a matter of convenience and self-satisfaction. It is a selfish confinement of the other, boxing her according to my own categories and expectations, because it is only in this way that I experience her as someone I love. If times change and my beloved would change, then perhaps it would just be proper to cut our ties and call it quits. After all, these changes would surely lead to a change in our relationship, and thing would not be the way they were before. Thus, it would be the easier way out to escape future pain rather than endure it, since it guarantees the safety of the self.

But then, would that be loving? To do so would be to see love as an accessory in our life that we can live without, as an activity among others. It is first and foremost something that I starts from myself and ends with myself, and if I am not happy with it, I could just learn to get by without it. If the feelings and the sense of security and happiness is gone, then so is love.

Would we just be content with it being a mere creation of the self, an attempt to construct a bridge to the other, believing that man has reached his fellow, but what he only did was to draw a definite picture of the other side? Where is the beloved in this picture?

I Love From Being Loved

Love, then, does not start with "I love." It cannot be called genuine love if the whole experience of love is presumed to start with an individual self, an ego which has deceived itself of already reaching out to others through his conceptions of the other. To start with this is to also end up to where it started.

Where could it be found, then? The only option (and the necessary one at that) starts with a "we," expressing the fact that I am already connected to others beyond myself, and it is only through these connections that I learn to fully connect, to fully love the beloved as she is.

A very important thing that should not be missed is the fact that the truest form of "we" is in two parts: first, "I am loved," and the second, "I am towards love," and it is from this where we will start. In this understanding, to love then is to always give back, to reciprocate, for one started already as someone who has received love. Before one decides to love, he has first and foremost received love from another. In fact, the ability to love is something that the person receives as a loved individual. I learn how to give myself to another because I have already known and appreciated what it feels like to be given, to be cared of, and to be loved. It is from these experience of receiving that I learn and start to give myself to love, to surrender myself completely to the other.

So instead of a self that is separated from the world, love now starts as being fundamentally connected to the other, being loved already. We are already thrown into a world where we cannot get rid of those that are beyond ourselves. We might prefer ignoring them and continuing to exist as if there are people who are not with us, but we cannot deny their presence, their very being which continues to affect us and influence us as we continue to live in this earth. Most of those around you are the persons who form who you are, whether they know it or not, even coming up with things that are part of your very self. They are those who continue to affirm you that you are that kind of person, living in this kind of community, having these particular roots, principles, and goals. This means that who I am is made up my connections with the other, and I could not get rid of it, for to do such is to rid myself of who I am. Thus, we could say that my identity is made up of connections, and I believe that they are not just factual and influential connections. These are connections made by the various degrees of love, of belonging and being accepted in a certain community. The strength and influence of others in you determine the intensity and impact of the love of the other towards the self. We even have to take note that these influences are forged out of great love and appreciation for who we are and who we might be.

Thus, my very existence is a product of love, not just in a biological sense, but also in an existential one. I cannot be who I am without the "energy" of love surrounding me and shaping me each and every day of my life. And because love goes freely within me, it is my duty to let it flow as it is, to prevent it from freezing and going hard and instead learn to pass it on. Not only will it be a way of existing as to who I really am as a human being who is always towards outside himself, but in this very existence I learn how to give thanks: not just to those who loved you, but to whom the energy of love springs forth and returns, Love Himself.

And to exist as love is to accept one's connection with the other, to strengthen it by giving our whole selves to the other, to let the energy of love not only flow from one being to another but also let it totally bind the self to the other. This is where the second sense of "we" comes out: "I am towards love." My self is primarily open towards the other, towards my beloved, existing as an open human being, complete in itself, yet paradoxically lacking, needing the presence of someone genuinely other for my existence to be truly affirmed and taken care of. As I discover myself to be a complete human being, I find that I do need the other, for me to live as a true and complete human being.

And from this seemingly paradoxical experience, I come to understand, that I exist as a wounded person, always open towards giving and receiving from the other, always open to love, always in love.

Towards the Mystery of the Other

To say that man is fundamentally in love is to cease trudging the long road towards knowing how the lover loves the beloved. We stop asking this by accepting the fact that primarily, man is already connected to the other, towards the beloved, towards love itself. Primarily, his identity, his very being springs forth from love and its various degrees - from mere recognition to devotion and commitment made by the other. He then finds meaning and direction in his existence only in loving, in knowing and recognizing the presence of his beloved, by getting out of himself and offering his life, fully saying "Here I am for you" and accepting the responsibility of walking along with the beloved.

But this is rooted in a fundamental disposition towards the other - that of acceptance. To accept is to fully recognize the other as mysterious - as someone whose existence is so rich and complex that my images, my categories, of my beloved are still those that only point to that which I still do not know about her. It might be true that it is only through those impressions that I have that I first started to like and love her, but the real challenge here is to learn to accept and recognize the other as unfathomable, someone whom I cannot capture as a whole. O have to recognize that it is in commitment and in time that I would gradually know and see her for who she really is.

That is why accepting the beloved is not like watching her just like a scientific observation. To do so is to refuse to accept her communication of the self, to do away with her self-giving. Rather, to accept her entails going with her, walking with her, joining her in unfolding the mysteries of her very being, and at the same time opening yourself to her and asking her to join you in your own journey. To accept the beloved is to help her trudge the long walk of life, to be there when she needs someone, to be of help when she asks for one, to be PRESENT for her. That, I believe, is the only way to dive into her mystery and my own mystery, and it is only in this plunging that I learn to unearth who I am and who she is, both in relation to each other.

It is only in joining one another that one truly accepts, loves, and, most importantly, hopes for one another. I merely do not hope for the better, but I just hope. I choose to continue to give myself to her because I know that it is only in this way that I learn to accept her for what she is, for what I really am. It is only in this way that I open my wounds, that I learn to see myself as belonging to a bigger picture. It is only in walking with her that I learn that I really am a circle incomplete, a star that has to rise with the sky, an authentic whole me that is never complete without a you. In loving, I recognize the need to walk together as one, to go into paths we have not yet trudged, to walk with each other, letting each other grow in each other's embrace and let one blossom in time.

It is in love that we learn that our wounds could be healed only in our compassion, our suffering with, the other.