The Biggest Lie

The spirit of the world is all about getting things, owning things, possessing things, and we have carried this attitude of consumerism into our relationships, into the very heart of our personal lives. We have come to think that people can belong to us, that we can own someone. And, just as with things, we get angry when the people we 'love' fail to minister to our needs or get broken or stolen from us.

You see, the biggest lie--a very common one these days--is when someone says 'I love you'. No doubt millions say these words every day. What they invariably mean is, 'I want you to be mine. I like the look of you and have decided that i want you to be around to make me happy forever.' That is what most people mean when they say 'I love you'. And this is the biggest lie.

We have come to think that people can belong to us, that we can own someone.

We collect girlfriends, boyfriends, wives and husbands the way we collect cellphones or washing machines or houses or cars. And when they fail to live up to our expectations we get frustrated and angry. And the desire for possession when angry results in husbands beating their wives, girlfriends killing their boyfriends, and anything that has legs and can move being raped. Rapes, yes, for it's all about possession. Everyone's on the lookout for collecting someone new. 

One of the commonest greetings here in Swaziland (and echoed around the world) is 'Sisi, I'm proposing love'. That it isn't love becomes immediately apparent when the child, woman, gogo or donkey doesn't immediately consent to the man's request. 

And when we get tired of our girlfriends, boyfriends, wives and husbands we trade them in for newer models--makhwapheni style. 

Yet the worst of it is that our 'I love you' collecting habit doesn't make us happy but rather enlarges our fear. You see, the moment we get something new we worry that someone might steal it from us. A friend of mine recently tried an old number he had on his phone, the number of a lady he'd once dated. He dialled the number and a male voice answered. He asked for the lady and received a gruff, 'She's not here'. Then a few moments later that same man with the gruff voice phoned him back, aggressive and loud, with a host of questions as if he was the police officer in charge of a criminal investigation: 'How did you get this number? Who gave you this number? What do want with this woman? Who are you?' and so on. Once a man has said, 'I love you', and you have said, 'I love you too', he is terrified that once you are out of his sight you might be saying 'I love you too' to somebody else.

This isn't love. and it never was. A couple say 'I love you' to each other and then believe that they own each other and deny each other any freedom in a desperate bid to secure the happiness that they themselves so desperately crave. The world's values are sick and the world's love is already as stiff as a carcass. No-one can ever own another person--we call this slavery, not love--and no-one should even try.

The secret to relationships is not possession but freedom. Real love is always wanting the best, the highest good, for someone. That doesn't mean ownership, but the opposite--it means being able to let someone go. If you really love her, then you'll set her free to follow her own path. If she chooses you, that's great; but if she chooses someone else, then that's her choice. The truth is that the highest best for the other person might not include you. If she wants to spend time with you today, then thank God for that, for it's a blessing; but if she doesn't want to be with you tomorrow, then thank God for that too, for she's following her own path.

Are you looking for Mr Right? You will never find him. Mr Right is always Mr Wrong if you're looking for someone to become part of your collection. But if you're able to let someone go, then--even if it hurts for a while--you'll learn to be content and when you say 'I love you', you'll mean it and won't be caught telling the biggest lie.

[Originally published in the Times of Swaziland SUNDAY, September 24th, 2006.]

The lie of romantic love

https://medium.com/@kenrowley/when-the-elephants-fight-the-grass-suffers-the-lie-of-romantic-love-7615cb5b86d4#.54by6uznn

I was so happy

I was so happy
seeing you again
seeing you again
that the image
now haunts my brain
like a watermark
or the acidic stain
left by an accidental spill
of the choicest wine.

In time
the image
may fade
but I wouldn't count on it;
your life
your life
is in that image
and everything that you were
or ever will be
to me
is there
for me to see
on the other side of my eyelids
whenever I close my eyes.

c Kenneth Rowley 2013

catching the plague

catching the plague

What is love? You meet someone, you dream someone, you sleep someone and then your heart is in your mouth, full of the burgeoning dawn. Your doom is already muscle-thighed and moving: she loves me, she loves me not, will she or won’t she? You can no longer sleep at night, your pulse is racing with the rush of the new. You get a kick out of her; does she get a kick out of you?

  Being in love is a recognised human condition, a measure of the state we’re in. It involves a lot of hugging and wave after wave of adrenaline. It rages like a fever. When Olivia, in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, realises that she is falling in love, she exclaims, ‘How now! Even so, can one so quickly catch the plague?’ And when Dr Faustus, in Marlowe’s play of the same name, kisses Helen of Troy, he immediately realises that he is lost: ‘Ah, her lips suck forth my soul: see where it flies!’

  There is no surviving an outbreak of love. Once infected, you’re gone.

  But where is love? The poet Roger McGough wrote that ‘the act of love lies somewhere between the belly and the mind’. Most would probably place it in the heart, but I think it’s more a sparkle in the eyes, or the surprise of a smile, or the warm, moist, open-mouthed invitation of a kiss. Faces spark the whole thing off. At least they do for me. Some men are butt-men or leg-men or breast-men. Some others drink so much that they settle for whoever they can get. But me, I check faces, peer through the trapdoors of the soul.

  I dream dreams; I see visions. But there’s a difference between dreaming a dream and dating one. Being in love is living on the edge, balancing on the very brink of chaos: does she love me? Of course she does.

  Whoosh! There’s a flow and a flux, an energy rush. Love is coming: get on the runaway train; board the bus; fly the plane. Romance is always just around the corner. There’s always a heart looking for you. Life is a dating agency.

  When I was just a young boy, I didn’t understand this love thing. If I saw a couple kissing it was more a 'Look mummy, they’re eating each other.’ But when I became a man I put away my childish things, sighed moodily and gave myself up to passion.

  In our modern age, phone numbers are the digits of love. You’ve got it bad girl—that’s the fifth call you’ve made today...

  But that’s the whole point of love: communication. No man is an island. We’re people people. We need each other. Loneliness burns down the wires and drives people into Internet chat rooms or onto porn sites. Loneliness opens the dark dungeons of the human psyche.

  There is no antidote for love, and only the dangerously depressed will ever look for a vaccine to prevent it. No, love’s a hot-wiring of the spirit, an intoxicating home run, a favourite shirt in the wardrobe of our days.

© Kenneth Rowley, 2003-2012

   

She's my (prose poem for Valentine 2012)

She's my familiar pleasure, my discovered treasure, my depth-plumbed measure of what it means to be a man. Long-limbed, lithe and lively, she is lovely to let me stir the cream with the cocoa. We share what we know, grow to be sure of what we can, plan and cook and hatch fast and slow in the slack lane of love. Ambassador me, envoy she, we meet in the shadow-lanes behind the cafes of passion. The steam erupts from our thousand cups. And we never order lonely plates of chips.

posted from Bloggeroid

Valentine R.I.P.

Valentine R.I.P.

I don't know if you've yet seen the new Rihanna video, S&M, but it's already done its promo job by stirring debate and controversy across the blogosphere. Coming hard on the heels of 2010's massive singles Eminem's Love the Way You Lie and Lady Gaga's Bad Romance, its bondage/men as dogs/scenes with bananas and dolls etc effectively means that kids growing up today will come to accept obsessive behaviour and domestic violence as the norm for what were once seen as romantic relationships. Cupid is still a fat boy, but his arrows are now valued for their pain rather than for warm fuzzy feelings of love.
   Love the Way You Lie was of course classic s&m: the ending especially, when the rapper warns, 'If you try to leave me, I'll tie you to the bed and set the house on fire.' Rihanna explains: "You'll stand there and watch me burn. That's all right cos' I like the way it hurts. You'll just stand there and watch me cry. That's all right cos I love the way you lie." Eminem as the sadist; Rihanna as the masochist.
   On Rihanna's latest, the chorus is
"'Cause I may be bad, but I'm perfectly good at it/Sex in the air, I don't care, I love the smell of it/Sticks and stones may break my bones,/But chains and whips excite me."
   Yes, it's clear from the video that she's responding to her critics, putting a finger in the air to especially the media, but still the other elements disturb. Even if the video is banned worldwide (it already has been banned in some places) it is obviously going to influence teens and others. In time, nothing in this video will be considered shocking or even abnormal. Don't get me wrong: I actually appreciate Rihanna's style and talent; but February 2011 surely marks the death of romance and a quick farewell to that old gentleman once known as Mr Valentine. 

Love is never a duality

We are aware of love because we live in a world without it. The world does not know what love is-- its art, its music, its films, its books--it does not recognise love and so it cannot describe it. Love is never a duality; it is not a man and a woman: it is the man and the woman together, a unity, in a place where neither of them any longer exist. In the place where you can no longer tell who is who and which is which, you might find love. Love is beyond the body, love is beyond the mind. Love is beyond duality; it cannot be described in words, for a word always implies its opposite. To say 'I love' means that I can also say 'I hate'. This is not love but just talking. This is liking or lusting; it is desire, not love. Love is beyond such distinctions. Love is beyond words.The world talks of falling in love because it knows also of falling out of love. Love is love. It doesn't have a falling out or a falling in. It deepens but it doesn't run away. It doesn't have valleys or mountaintops because it is the air and the stone and the plants--the very fabric from which the valleys and mountains are made.

There's no cure (be careful)

Be careful. There's no cure, no antidote, no forwarding address, for love. Be careful. How many hearts do you want to break? She has no money but still buys you chocolates; she has no dreams but dreams of you. Be careful. You are the song in her heart, in her mind, in her soul. You are every love song she hears on the radio. You are even the milk in her fridge. You think that's a joke? How many hearts do you want to break? Yours? There are no winners, no losers, only future children standing naked on the bridge; only cats and dogs howling in the sun and rain and every night the wind comes with the sound of pain every time you lie alone. And by your side, like a pill or a gun, lies the phone, asking you to call, always asking for you to call. Be careful. The pill and the gun can truly end it all. Do you really want to mix it, have those red red kisses throbbing for you in the dark? Do you really want to send all those smileys, or go online to book a face and upload that picture of you in the park? Be careful. There's no cure, no antidote, no forwarding address, for love. It's a dangerous game to call for a name. Late at night, when the wind comes moaning in the empty silence between two lonely heartbeats, and there's nowhere to run, be careful.

Emerald avatar

The more I watch Avatar, the more I think of John Boorman's 'Emerald Forest'. Is that because of the ecological theme, the tribal theme, the Corporate Greed theme or because the central character falls in love with a girl and her exotic culture? Or all of these together? I haven't figured that one out yet.

Do it again

Do it again

To be alive
is to feel joy
pain
sun
rain
to get up every morning
and do it again
simply because it's there;
to love the breeze
in your hair
the soft crunch of chocolate
on your lips
the gentle swagger of motion
as you roll your hips
the love
of being in love
and being alive
again
and again
and again.

Let's do it again
let's do it again
let's do it again
let's do it again
let's do it again
let's do it again
let's do it again



KenR, July 2009

Love in Berlin, 1977

Berlin 1977

We've got nothing to lose and nothing to gain/ we can be lovers and kiss in the rain/ we can be lovers just for one day/ we can be heroes; what do you say?

Recently I've been listening again to David Bowie's "Heroes" album and it's taken me back... Bowie recorded it in West Berlin when he was living near the wall with Iggy. During 1976-8 I was in and out of West Berlin because I had a berliner girlfriend who lived there, at Neu Spandau, out by the edge of the city. I also knew a few pretty women who stayed at Wedding and a guy whose father was a lawyer and I spent time with my friends and caroused and danced and talked and made love and walked the city and enjoyed its odd decadence and lasting vibrancy. "Heroes" came out at that time, and I bought the German version, 'Helden', for my girlfriend and played it repeatedly late one night while the rain poured heavily outside her flat. It was a good time, a time of another world, of a world long passed but not gone. This week I've been surprising myself with whispered glimpses of that silent age.

True love

The characteristics of true love are outlined in sonnet 116; the poet declares true love to be constant, unafraid of the present or the future, a guide, and not subject to time.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come:

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

I remember well the hour that my mother died. She was sixty years old, in a hospice, and for some time had been daily losing her fight against cancer. I arrived at the hospice perhaps 10 minutes after she died, and embraced my father. He looked at me, with tears in his eyes, and said, 'I loved that girl.' The words struck me: sixty years old, and still a girl: indeed love 'alters not... even to the edge of doom'.

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Rising from the dark

Just knowing that someone, somewhere in the world, loves you unconditionally is enough--even if you are seldom together. Everyone needs at least one special person/ soulmate in order to rise to the challenge to become fully human; those who know no love are those who crawl on all fours, cough, and live unseeing in the bright lights of the world's deepening dark.

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