WHAT:
I know what love can do to a person. I know it is indeed fleeting for a lot of people, but I don’t know if it’s because they choose not to hang onto it, or it chooses to leave to find a better host. I have heard the trite adages; let it go and if it comes back…, it’s a two way street, you can’t buy love, love is eternal, blah blah blah. I know these exist for the sole purpose of selling greeting cards. I know love is supposed to take effort and be its own reward. Some people try so hard to find love they miss it, while others have it fall into their laps. The focus of this paper for me is not defining love, I don’t think I own those words yet, but in discovering how to keep love once it finds you. I know couples still deeply in love after more than half a century together, and I know people who love more than one person at once. Some are serial lovers, with a predictable staccato series of relationships. I know there is hate involved with love, because every action has that equal and opposite, ying-yangy thing. Where does the hate go? I have heard the love songs, and heard the writers of the good ones explain they were in a bad way at the time, so I guess love is a muse when you don’t have it. I know there is a balance between head-over-heels lusty love where the buttons on your shirt get resewn every Thursday and the more sedate, holding hands is O.K. for now love. I guess I know a lot about love, except what it is and how to keep it.
Capt Havoc--you write so nicely, imaginatively, cleverly that you can usually tapdance over any problems, but this is part of a longer piece of work and, as it says in the Bible, 'Be sure your sin will find you out.' You simply can't sustain a long paper this way.
ReplyDeleteThis section has to work off the Why section and that section really isn't in any shape yet, and I don't think I've seen a Background yet, though probably the stuff you wrote about your first wife (and promised not to bring up again) is actually your beginning. All three of those first sections are a unit, working together or not.
What you are doing is re-stating your original point of departure over and over in different ways, trying to find your way through the thicket of your thoughts. You've got to get yourself organized, stop self-intoxicating on your prose, heady as it is, and give me those first three sections, nice and neat and even a little boring if that's what it takes to screw you down to the task.