What we know about love in the times that preceded us ours we have learned from proverb, myth and literature, and that knowledge remains, to this day, somewhat spotty. Love is blind, a baptism, a red rose or a wild plant born of wet night, a course that never did run smooth – despite a compass or a chart. It is a labour we frequently lose.
The reign of love commenced with our mitocondrial ‘Adam’ and ‘Eve’ on the African savanna – perhaps even earlier. Did ‘Adam’ profess undying love to ‘Eve’ before every hunt? Perhaps not, but how are we to know?
Hence, literature remains our best, most comprehensive archive of human love. All that we expect of love, our notions of how it will lift us, reward us, transform us, comes from a long line of books, poems and songs that have detailed what we may hope for from love and what price in exchange for its pleasure.
Love is a demon, a religious faith and a divine madness. But in recent times it is in danger from the last century that brought Freud, ‘antiromantic bias’ of conventional feminism, pheromones and friends with benefits – streamlined, safety-checked, and emptied of spiritual consequence – lacking grand passion, dare and poetry.
What follows is a charter for a new republic of love, a blueprint for a new model. A charter that embraces love as ecstatic, risky, transgressive, sometimes unequal and perhaps aggressive – but never violent . A faith, a demon and a divine madness. With a caveat though: the suffering that it induces must be the crucible in which we refine our souls. Let us allow ourselves to be derailed by love, flung around five continents, shaken, overjoyed, inspired and unsettled by love.
