Love in Vain

Love in vain

Love unrequited

Love through the ages

Love tumbling on the shores

“It’s hard to tell, hard to tell, when all your love’s in vain,” said Robert Johnson.

Click on the song to hear Bumba and Maybank doing it.

What more to say about love, unrequited or otherwise? Here’s an excerpt from my novel The Phantom Speaks in which the Phantom, an astral visitor to our planet, who for reasons unknow is also our protagonist Chester Knowles, pontificates on Love:

The full novel(s) are available on Amazon as ebooks or hard copy. Click on Bumba Books above

Love

Love. I heard some biologist say that love is the most powerful and most durable of all the emotional states. Think about it. From an evolutionary standpoint, love serves to attach human beings to each other and link them one to the other. They form friendships, partnerships, family clans, and larger social groups. All of which tend to increase the humans’ chances of survival. You know, they hunt together, then they share firewood. They keep each other warm. Love has definite survival value. 

And love is also the thing that everybody feels compelled to sing about. Love. Love. Love. All those songs! Poems, books, movies, broken hearts, tears! Yatta, yatta, yatta. It goes on and on. 

I can’t say that I really understand very much about it. Even after all this time, and all these lives, I remain largely in the dark. O.K., I know. Chester told me all about it. Chester was big on the feeling of love. He loved it, if you’ll excuse the expression. And most people love it as well. I’ve noticed that. In fact they treasure love. And they miss it so sorely and painfully when they don’t have it (which is most of the time from what I can see). Most people behave as though they are lacking love (whatever love is, we still haven’t defined it, at least I haven’t) and it seems that the poor things can never get enough of it. It is their fear that would appear to be holding them back, blocking things. Fear inhibits love generally. Fear and Love are almost polar opposites.

As a phantom-like aside, I would say that the key determinant in these matters of love and of psychological health in general seems to be whether or not you were loved as a child. As it turns out, Chester was lucky; he had a happy childhood. Let me add, in another phantom-like aside, that it happens all too often that a child, a baby, is not loved, coddled, sung to, carried around the house and out in the fields, shared with relatives, read stories to, played with, and told that they are good little boys or girls, etc. etc. It happens all too often that children/babies don’t get all that (OK, we’ll call it) love. And then these children grow up to become parents themselves. And how can they provide the necessary love to their kids when they themselves are consumed or absorbed, even obsessed with finding love for themselves? Luckily (or, more correctly, as a result of mammalian evolution) babies tend to be cute and irresistible. So things often work out well. It’s surprising how often things work out well – despite the odds. We’ll get to the evens later. 

So everybody’s looking for love down there on planet earth. They are. And people will go to all sorts of lengths just for a little hug, a caress, a word of praise, perhaps the promise of a good roll in the sack. Especially for a good roll in the sack. Well, thanks again to the process of evolution, the animal, the organism, is wired to have it (call it love): ah, the embraces, the sex, the release, the pleasure, the peace. The company of another and the security of what they call love. And so needy and/or so deprived are the people down there on planet earth that they are more than willing to accept various and sundry substitutes for love: i.e., the various and assorted vicarious experiences: rock n’ roll revues, identifications with saints and movie stars, and the like. Freud called it sublimation, this moving toward, this branching out, into substitute venues.

In short, what this phantom is saying is that love is something very fundamental to the species. It’s quite important. Nothing to sneeze at. I myself, being a phantom, don’t understand too much about it, as I said. It’s like the Amazon jungle to me. Huge and incomprehensible. From what I read, (that’s right, phantoms can read, why not?) according to the schema of raja-yoga, love and the ability to feel for others, to empathize: this energy is centered in the heart, sweet valentine, at the fourth chakra – a spiritual step up (but only one step up) from the more “animal” centers of appetite and domination. 

But, like I say, as a phantom, love is just something that’s out there. It’s a part of the world – just like everything else. It’s out there. It’s in your heart, as they say. And it’s out there too.