Lover Education

Love education is what we need. If bringing the real world and the classroom into some harmony is possible, topics of sex as well as religion, in their broadest sense, will have to be a big part of the alchemy.

'Melting apparent surfaces away,' education won’t reduce love, but improve it. 'An improvement of sensual enjoyment,' as Blake sees it. Nothing less will do.

This would cover sexism, homophobia,--we're okay at frank discussion of anatomy, but the social anatomy eludes us. And the sort of thing some people get stuck calling emotional intelligence; that is, loftily, philosophy, or being human. The difference between sitting in a car and lying on the grass—but we are the same thing. How to express yourself, getting angry, getting sad, romantic, joyful; how to love freely and safely and then to love one person, so that married or not you will stay together, raise kids together, in love and far from violence, abandonment, distrust, in an unbroken family. How to reconcile loneliness with being busy and having everyone and everything available, friendship with more extravagant imagination, love with confidence and self-reliance, an awareness of the relation of all things. How to make the best of, how not to sell yourself short, how not to sabotage possibilities in their nascent clarity. How to undress fakeness, bare honesty and not abrasively, but with touch, warmth. How not to analyze into abstractness or deconstructed ugliness, but to begin to understand. To learn to dance, all that entails unlearning. Do you see how little a teacher would have to do, the inherent interest the questions hold for youth? Yet who would presume to teach it?

All the influences we have teach us this most important thing, because being so important it pervades them all—every human interaction, mediated or not, the words we speak, the clothes we wear, books, movies, advertisements, responses, jokes, morals, laws, places—everything asserts its loves, gives advice, gives warnings. The models we see for the good life in all its facets are fractured—here the youth, there the up and coming, elsewhere old age—but threaded on a strand of connections to significant others, to God or whatever seems to take his place—this in-common, never-scrutinized thing which makes them good—at least once we become conscious of needing it. In part biology, in part culture—the strict demarcation is not the issue—the idea of love enters our head and deeply grips us, relative associations grow relevant—the religious, the sexual, the status quo and the rebellious form appropriate—so that what we need is not love itself—so thoroughly we are suffused with it or so utterly beyond our comprehension, depending on how you look at it, it is—but a way to mindfully choose it, to act with a hope of living up to it.

This is not as simple as avoiding living out someone else’s dream, the way Obama talks about visiting Europe, or the nausea induced by certain kinds of premature weddings or past-expiration marriages—rather love education would be providing many dreams and sighting on them from many angles, encouraging not the wholehearted acceptance of any one kind of love—though not discouraging that, necessarily—but the awareness of many kinds with some things in common, abstract elements and concrete expressions, some things transposed or totally in contradiction. Nor is it going to denigrate the real education in love that comes only by loving. Nothing is spoiled, nothing precluded, no secret let out: the reality is in experience. No real knowledge is secondhand, only the glosses on it, reflection of more or less value as it is brought to bear on further experience. All of what we know, short of revelation, is carnal knowledge.

And again it bears saying, we are being taught already, crudely, ways of love secondhand, by magazines and gossip and TV, so the philosophical-religious-artistic approach, the humanist approach, has its work cut out for it—its real work consisting, in a sense, in nothing so much as trenchant critique of the idiotic-calculating glosses we flock to in the busier world. This is in line with the aims of the current sex-ed model, lest we range too far afield and neglect—to reduce disease, unwanted pregnancy, abusiveness of the worst sort—only it is oriented toward a more encompassing conception of peace and health—not merely proscribing—nature abhors a vacuum—but promoting in its place: romance, kindness, mutual understanding, self-understanding. (Indeed, it is impossible to love genuinely, you might say, without having built up reserves of confidence in your own heart—such people are certainly more attractive.) Promoting love instead of lust, whether the robust burning or the frigid hushed-up kind—drawing people out of their shells, showing them discipline as the case may be, and thought instead of ignorance. Innocence, so far as it may be preserved, and illusions where possible left intact—but showing no mercy where the damage has been done, healing, setting straight misconceptions, feeding generous tendencies.

As for the semantics-sticklers and epistemologists, the shift from lust to love being too dubious to pass their muster, so that this seems to purport to reduce sexual abuse and ills by promoting, since abstinence hasn’t worked, sex—the thing is that abstinence-only education has focused too narrowly on sex, and failed. What can go toe-to-toe with sex? Certainly not not-sex. But perhaps love. What can compete with the drug high? A little help from my friend! We are talking about all the art and morality of this and many prior cultural forebears, streams of consciousness of the grandeur of being alive, or creativity in all its forms, including the human life’s own generation and preservation, the inward spark of meaning and joy we can externalize as God, or just as well the dynamic interrelatedness of the universe which we can feel inwardly, the microcosm of which, towards which we are biased, being our relationship with some beautiful person, and they of course biased towards us. Sex is a part of it, biology is on one level the ground of our being and all our art and consciousness—but that’s no ultimatum, all or nothing, lust or abstinence, if all our culture and will is not ignored.

And for those who have no room for love still, no faith or hope--the sin against the holy ghost, denying the spiritual gifts; the sin against the human condition, seeing no sense in being alive—life has been cruel to them, but their perspective, their lack of belief or feeling, this stubborn stuntedness still has its lessons, it is welcome in the discussion. The abysmal bleakness of falling out of love, heartbreak, sexual frustration and broken up dreams, have their place, they must be addressed, we all have one death to die—some believe in reincarnation, or an eternity of bliss, or of nothing—and any love, if we open ourselves to its reality, contains its possibilities of extension, repetition, or finality. Some would suppose we have a kind of afterlife in the return of our elements to the earth—this could fall, in our analogy, into ‘well, let’s just be friends.’

We could read Neruda, Blake, "Come live with me and be my love, and we will all the pleasures prove"; we could listen to Shakespeare and the Beatles and make much of the sensuality of music and literature, the music of literature, the sense of music, celebrating subjective interpretation, but insisting that we hear each other out—this includes doing the reading. Song of Solomon, Jesus, Rumi, and Milton, Dante, Petrarch and Rimbaud—the latest music video and the first 20 minutes of ‘Up,’ or parts of Proust, Slumdog Millionaire, Brokeback Mountain, Y tu mama tambien—whatever will reach the students. So their own stories, influences, dreams, beliefs, and really considering how they live in light of them, how they act or don’t act. A romantic meal, a scenic photo, a tango dance—a communion, an abortion, a rape, drunken hook-up, apotheosis, jealousy. The proper use of a condom, the nervousness of getting them; the bitterness of intentions or actual doing contrasted with simultaneous inhibitions on another part. The beauty of being unself-conscious, the real learning, which we have mentioned—mention it, praise it—doing so through these works, it won’t be diminished by it. The kama sutra, all kinds of smut and pornography, yoga, give them all their due. What is it like to identify as homosexual—do you identify as straight? As a man or woman or neither? Consider it. The honesty it requires, the resolve—or abandon. Kierkegaard and the knights, puppy love, what it was like to be innocent, what it means to be responsible. Keats, Pullman, the circumstances, the power of imagined love or doubt and physical lovemaking reacting, working at one another—William James and the smile that makes happy, the arousal that feels like love—seduction, and the way leading not to temptation—the Feminine Mystique, the Tao, a self beyond oneself. A twoself. Or an immolation in God, the ecstasy of St. Teresa. Love at first sight, catching sight of ourselves and laughing at ourselves. Freewheeling and coming back into balance, which seems to have something to do with moons, weather, love letters.