Love Abuse

Joshua Gottdenker might think he has the answer to Levon Galstyan’s quandaries. To Joshua, love as we experience it is mainly an illusion, because it has goals, an object of desire. This “love” is a projection,, though it stems from a sincere longing. Real love is a negation of self, it is not an object to hold or a feeling to achieve. It is something else, though I’m afraid Joshua isn’t very clear on this – is it a feeling of being in the Now? A planetary wholeness? A dissolution of ego? However defined, Joshua seems pretty optimistic about this feeling’s growth today.

Joshua does a nice job of describing the misapplication of the concept, as he sees it. I think he needs to work on his description of what love is, and why it is growing (though he says we really can’t do anything to increase it, for that would be falling into the trap of purposefulness). I wonder what Levon thinks of this. I am too jaded, perhaps, or too Western in my orientation to have this faith. I am sorry to disappoint you, Joshua.

Although I found some of the ideas of this essay extremely interesting, I felt that the arguments made were not specific enough to be persuasive nor were there any concrete examples offered to back up some of the claims being made. The essay could have benefited from the deployment of some of the theories and case studies connected to critical writing without necessarily losing any of its poetic style.
A truly fascinating part of the essay, however, concerns the invitation to the reader to try out an experiment connected to situations in which one professes to love another. Some of problems noted above could have been avoided if the essay had been cast as a detailed examination of a number of such experiments conducted by different people and the findings thus extended into a more general view of aspects of love, conflict, and imagination. Maybe precisely such an examination could form the basis for a future project the author could consider actually implementing?