I am sick of hearing it. No matter whom I’m dealing with, they all think love is “very important.” It looks very much like the common denominator of the alternative scene, but also of the conservative, possibly even the reactionary one. You don’t forfeit anything with such a statement, on the contrary: You announce to yourself and your fellows that you are a loving person. Sounds good, anyway.
A lot of euphonious blah-blah
Finding love “important” is of similar relevance as the discussion about extraterrestrials. As a rule, such sentences are melodious blah-blah. They remind me of my youth when I knelt at the altar as a Catholic altar boy and listened to the priest’s sermon. Then it could happen that we – the priest, the second altar boy, and I – left the altar at the end of Mass to the roaring sounds of the organ and entered the sacristy. As soon as we were out of earshot, the priest began to talk about this or that churchgoer, about the fact that he or she had not been to Mass for a long time, that he or she was there without a partner, and what that might signify, or that the singing was very dull today or that the organist was lousy. Gone were all those noble sentiments, gone were the high words, replaced by hollow phrases, by the general gutter or even gutter consciousness.
The longing to become lovingly active.
Perhaps the most important reason for the irrelevance of general affirmations of love is the word “love” itself. We can rarely relate to this morally pompous term. It sounds metallic, like a horse harness to be put on us, and sounds more like a claim than a condition, without warmth and tenderness. You must think about that. You can get a taste of what I mean by comparing the following: “we have loved each other” and “we have made love”. I can have a dress made or I can make food, but love? That degrades it to a function. To get closer to the essence of love, the commonly used noun “love” would first have to be replaced by the verb “loving”. Behind the yearning for love, in fact, there is a deep need for connection; a person’s longing becomes palpable in it, his or her desire to become active at every opportunity and to take loving seriously instead of sloganeering; his or her willingness to place himself or herself entirely at the service of love. And entirely means entirely.
Every subject has to do with loving.
Perhaps we also shy away from talking about loving, rather than about love, because taking loving seriously is an enormous aspiration, an aspiration that cannot be redeemed between doorsteps, but either you do it – or you leave it alone. What I mean becomes most understandable when I remember my own days and weeks in love, when so much, perhaps everything around me reminded me of “her”. Then I saw the plants outside my window differently because we had sat together in the park among plants. In a mysterious way, these plants reminded me of “her,” even though they were completely different plants. Or I took a fork in my hand and already saw her hand taking a fork. In conversations with friends, I was hardly interested in the topic, because somehow every topic had to do with “her”. I fell asleep thinking about “her” and woke up smelling her hair. When I take loving seriously, it is quite similar, only more comprehensive. Loving is radically universal.
Dealing lovingly with the world
As one who takes loving seriously, I look at the world empathetically; not because it is valuable to be empathetic, but because it hurts me when pain is inflicted on the beloved. It is quite simple to understand. When I drink coffee, I don’t want coffee pickers to suffer, because then the coffee tastes half as good to me. When I enjoy my food, I don’t want animals to suffer or die for it. And when I pick up a cell phone, I don’t want children to have to dig up rare earth in mines. Or that nature around the mine is devastated and thousands of sentient beings die. And the ring on my finger gains values if no rivers were contaminated with mercury during the gold mining process. To take loving seriously means to deal lovingly with the world. In any case: to be ready for it in a matter-of-course way. Because of course, I don’t always succeed, at the end far too little, when the treadmill of everyday life takes me by the scruff of the neck; but every time I pause, it’s like emerging and taking a breath: this automatic connecting with a kind, healing energy.
Loving does not allow exceptions.
And how could it be otherwise: Taking loving seriously also involves knowing about the deep desire that is hidden in every person around me and rarely dares to surface: the desire to be loved. After all, as adults, we are not allowed to express this need if we do not want to lose face. Even experienced partners rarely admit to this longing in all openness. But wouldn’t it be just that: to really take loving seriously? And not only in the partner, in the sister, or in the friend but also in the neighbor, no matter where she meets me, on the street or on the train, in the office, on the phone or on the internet. Also, in the enemy – admittedly in a completely unromantic, realistic way, so to speak as a sober, objective loving. But wouldn’t I perceive her or him quite differently, wouldn’t I deal with her or him quite differently, if I were to get serious about love? How could I say that I take loving seriously, yet not with this or that person? How serious would I still be about taking myself seriously?
Loving is learning: a lifelong process.
Similarly inflationary as the assertion that love is “very important” is its reflexive variant: “Yes, yes, first you have to love yourself before you can love your neighbor,” I hear from everywhere – before people turn to the greater things in life again. In this case, too, we fail because of the idealistic content of love or self-love. It is not something that we can “have” at some point. Rather, learning to love oneself is a lifelong process in constant interaction with the world around us, which often imposes weird demands on us and prefers to operate us by remote control. If you take loving yourself seriously, you need solid ground under your feet. Quite literally, too: because loving includes loving one’s feet, which quite banally include the toenails as well as the cornea. So, can you love your calluses? Why not! There are still a lot of small, unspiritual points on my body, which I find difficult to love. And what about my genitals? I should really be able to love them. I haven’t even mentioned my desires, cravings and appetites, my shadows and shallows, because taking my talents seriously and devoting myself to them sounds easier than it is.
Bobby Langer, 1953, has been part of the environmental movement since 1976 and sees himself as “trans” in the sense of transnational, transreligious, transpolitical, transemotional and transrational. He considers the term “environment” to be a relic of the mental Middle Ages and hopes for a Copernican turn of the Western mind: namely, the realization that the world does not revolve around man, but that man is in it and with it like all other animals. He therefore prefers the term “co-world”.
