Let’s kill this thing called love because it’s already dead anyway

"I brought a mirror to lover’s lane. I told everyone I am Narcissus."– Stephen Wright, comedic outsider

"Sex alleviates tension. Love causes it." – Woody Allen, celluloid outsider

"There are more love songs than anything else.

If songs could make you do something then we’d all love one another." – Frank Zappa, musical outsider

Writing about love is like dancing to an insurance policy.

It is so easy to look stupid, to look like an idiot, to come across as somebody who woke up one fine day with soy sauce or political aspirations inside his head, or, worse, woke up with hallucinations of Genta Ogami in full bushido warrior regalia, brandishing a samurai and running after Joyce Jimenez. Tough feat to make sense, to not sound like a quack, to say something relevant or sensible – especially for this warbling mass of defective cells and sadness trying to write something about love on Friday the 13th, a day before Valentine’s. Come to think of it, I think it is better to dance like Vanness Wu to a piece of paper that speaks of premiums, annuities and other non-funky stuff.

What do I dare say about love? Most of my life, I felt like Bill Pullman in a Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan movie, or Steve Buscemi as a cranky eccentric curiosity in a flick where the cranky eccentric curiosity doesn’t get the girl, fails to get redemption in the end, and instead dies in a freak washing machine accident.

In high school, I was such a luckless lovesick teenager that I consoled myself with the fact that even Hitler and Ted Bundy had a girlfriend. (If this turns out to be not entirely true, then it’s a life-affirming myth in the Joseph Campbell sense.) I heard the line "Can we be friends na lang?" so many times that I acquired the uncanny ability to foresee it – even without actually hearing those words (horrified stares and puking gestures are dead giveaways), even without asking a girl out in the first place, even from complete strangers.

In college, I buried myself in books that the only girls I got intimate with was a chick who wrote fiery poetry and who put her head in an oven, another chick who hung out with Henry Miller (that horny devil; that even hornier femme), as well as a student librarian with glasses that looked like the bottom of an atsara jar. (She dumped me the moment she got "contacts" – both the lenses and men.)

Now, suddenly I’m supposed to be an authority on love? (No different from, say, someone who bought two pirated "Best of Alternative Rock" CDs, got an Internet connection, wiggled a job in a newspaper, and became a "music critic.")

Was there a burning bush in Smokey Mountain that told me in a booming voice to write something about love? Were there voices in the wilderness (or in my head)? Was there a talking dog involved? Did I hear something subliminal in an AC/DC or Black Sabbath song? Was there a strong clamor (as in thousands of people marching, shouting and putting up banners and such), the kind that provokes rich, washed-up actors to suddenly grow a social conscience overnight and get the urge to unify the nation? Did someone write me and ask my advice about love and relationships, crushes and exes, as well as other stupidities?

None at all, but I am churning out an article, anyway.

Love? Yes, I’m talking about love (that word uttered in a Barry White baritone). Anyway, what is it, really? Attempts have been made to write about the L-word, to kick some daylight into such dark, so nebulous, and very misunderstood a concept. But I will dispense with putting love quotes in this article, since doing so would be taking the path of least resistance (oops, I already did). It’s too easy to quote Alfred Lord Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning or freaking Air Supply (whose entire discography was devoted to love), and get away with a bloody greeting card article.

Besides, I think others wrote about that crazy little thing called love in far more eloquent ways. Reminds me of what Frank Zappa said about all the good music already composed by people with wigs and Marie Antoinette outfits. I think love had already been diagnosed or autopsied by that Will person whose surname was Shakespeare. Or Pablo Neruda. Or The Beatles. Or that prolific Anonymous fellow.

According to my former professor, Ophelia Dimalanta, the line "I love you" has been so said so many times it doesn’t mean anything anymore. But what can you tell a person you’re very fond of (during TV commercials, while doing the funky chicken, or in between you and your partner’s parallel monologues)?

Me: I had a crappy day at the office today.

You: Me, too, I arrived late and…

Me: My computer conked out and…

You: Well, my computer had a worse conk. My boss asked me to produce 10,000 copies of…

Me: (Pauses) I love you…

You: (Pauses also) I love you, too…

Stage direction: Someone turns on the karaoke machine and starts singing Feelings, nothing more. "You" and "Me" and the world barf for a week.

Plato once told the myth of how humans were originally hermaphrodites. People became too ambitious, which angered the gods who then cut the creatures in half (one, male; the other, female) with handy, easy-to-use lightning bolts, and condemned humans to a life in constant search of each other’s half. How sad. Survivor has a song about it. Not Eye of the Tiger, dum-dum.

(Must be why one time I suddenly got the urge to talk to a girl I saw at the Gil Puyat station of the LRT. I went up to her, gazed into her eyes, swooned and almost lost consciousness – not because of love sweet love, but because of ACME-strength BO, nasty BO. Obviously, she was not in love with deodorants.)

Plato’s myth on The Symposium was the inspiration for John Cameron Mitchell’s musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch. A song from it goes:

Last time I saw you, we had just split in two/You were looking at me, I was looking at you/You had a way so familiar, but I could not recognize/‘Cause you had blood on your face, I had blood in my eyes/But I could swear by your expression that the pain down in your soul/Was the same as the one down in mine.

Oh yeah, it is called The Origin of Love. And oh yeah again, Hedwig the transvestite rocker quipped that love doesn’t last as long as I Will Always Love You, which goes on forever. He’s right: Love is short, forgetting is long, that freaking song is longest!

Do these musings approximate what love is? Beats me. Maybe there’s no overarching definition. Just like God, happiness or "presidentiable."

I may not really discover what love essentially is, but I have an idea of what existence is without it. Without love, I think life would be nothing but infinite moments of paying bills, cleaning dog shit, picking noses, being crushed like a sardine in the LRT and voting the same people every four years – the same hammy actors – into public office (we are nothing but amnesiacs experiencing déjà vu: "Hmm… I think I’ve forgotten this before.") Love makes our forgettable lives somewhat tolerable. Besides, take away love and Air Supply has nothing to sing about.

Thus, we could listen to Chick Corea play piano (either on My Spanish Heart or Where Have I Known You Before?) and think not just of ghost notes or glissandos. We could read e e cummings ("somewhere i have never traveled") or Charles Bukowski ("The Best Love Poem I Could Think Of At The Moment") and not just think of free verse. We could gaze at Gustav Klimt’s "The Kiss" and see not just the gold swirls, empty ovals and impossible postures. We could grow old with someone and look past crippled or cracked bones, gray hairs and liver spots.

Love, whatever it is, puts more meaning into everything. And we lovers are both pretentious and eloquent (and sometimes doomed). In a happy sort of doom, that is.

Afterword

Ideas about love as illusion, love as damnation turn to rubbish when (sitting and smoking in a coffee shop in a shitty mall, looking at all the shitty shoppers, turning your gaze away from all the shitty items on display, contemplating your shitty proletarian future…) your girlfriend suddenly strolls in with a face bannered with news of your fate. Like a savior with freckles, curly hair and the backside of a lioness. Like an angel.

And then she walks toward you, stops and asks how you are. You hold hands. You walk into the general direction of the sunset. Eyes lock. Everything is obliterated. Universes throb. Planets palpitate. Your heart trashes about like a tricycle on the pimply surfaces of Sta. Cruz and Recto. John Coltrane in the afterworld suddenly whips out a shiny saxophone and plays your darkness away. Sirens sing. Everything’s fine. Temporarily.

Love walks in when logic takes a break.

* * *

Becca Rodriguez inspired all this. I’d like to thank her for the crystal bunny, the dreamcatcher, the skull pendant, the CDs and for simply being Becca. I hope those horny, harassing, hairless toads in the office she works in quit wrapping their arms around her and asking her out for lunch (are you reading this, Kerwin?). For comments, suggestions, curses and invocations, e-mail iganja@hotmail.com.