If I have not love...

A recent poll has revealed that the favourite word of Singaporeans is not, contrary to popular belief, ‘money’, but ‘love’.

This is hardly unexpected, however. When we are asked to name our favourite word, we are naturally led away from pragmatism and perhaps even honesty. Words represent ideas, rationalism, transcendence; the form of the question itself demands an unpragmatic answer. Words are power, especially if a word is considered in isolation, away from context, away from the sentence. Asking for someone’s one favourite word is asking for a distillation of an alarming number of ideas, values and philosophies; it is tantamount to asking about the meaning of life itself.

Of course, then, the word that is eventually produced would almost certainly be an over-determined one, as ‘love’ is. A word which is used in a bewildering variety of contexts and situations, a word which encompasses wide vistas of experience, feeling and thoughts, a word which has troubled generations of philosophers and given to generations of non-philosophers, otherwise known as human beings.

The criteria of choosing one’s favourite word necessarily come across as highly variable and subjective. Choose words for the sound? ‘Cellar door’ has been selected as one of the most beautiful-sounding words in the English language. But ‘love’ does not have a nice sound. It is a short monosyllable, and we can’t even decide whether to pronounce it to rhyme with ‘laugh’ or ‘above’. It is an exhalation through the lips that is lightly carried away by the slightest breeze. If we went by sound alone, ‘love’ is banal, inconsequential, wispy.

So the selection of ‘love’ must have been based on the ideas that the printed, or spoke, representation of ‘love’, evokes in the mind of the Singaporean. But what of its multiple meanings? I ‘love’ ice cream. I ‘love’ that woman. ‘Love’ is patient, ‘love’ is kind. We ‘love’ because he first ‘loved’ us. ‘Love’ is but a lust of the flesh and a permission of the will. I ‘love’ going to the beach.

Has this caused love to become an entirely banal cliché? An over-used, worn-out word fraying at the edges, which has become completely emptied of meaning? Are Singaporeans shallow, unimaginative, wallowing in intellectual poverty?

No, as the Cyclops said when he was asked if he had two eyes. Why can we not view the selection of this word, with all its possible meanings and nuances, as a recognition of the fact that the idea of ‘love’ pervades every facet of life, from the everyday to the profound, from the physical to the metaphysical, from the superficial to the ineffable or transcendent? For Singaporeans perhaps, and for me too, I reckon, it is the principle of love rather than hatred, love rather than revenge, love rather than evil, that makes life worth living. It is a generative principle of existence, an insistence on viewing the world as comic rather than tragic, a small soft exhalation of breath which desires a full life in all its complications, privations and unutterable sorrows and unutterable joys.

‘What should Cordelia do?
Love, and be silent’ King Lear

But should we even speak of love, are we not cheapening the idea of the transcendent by reducing it to words? As Wittgenstein famously says, ‘Of that which we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent’.

The problem with this is that it is one of those throwaway phrases, like Goethe’s Faust’s ‘We in truth can nothing know’, often used to end a debate and bludgeon one’s way out of the call to engage in earnest and fruitful thought. Wittgenstein reached that conclusion after long, concentrated, intellectually honest reflection and discussion. As did Faust, for whom it is the process through which the knowledge of not knowing that is important. The process is consubstantial with the conclusion; we can only come to a conclusion that talking about love is useless, if we have honestly thought about it, argued about it, written about it; in short, used words. Words, however inadequate, are the tools with which we apprehend the world and turn feelings into experience.

And even if we have completely exhausted all talk of love, and intellectually convinced ourselves that love is unexplainable, and that talk about love, nay even the word ‘love’, is pointless, can we force our feelings to behave? Can we remain mute before powerful feeling, can we remain silent in the presence of the king and queen of all emotion, love?

‘She speaks, yet she says nothing. What of it?
Her eye discourses, I will answer it.’ Romeo and Juliet

Romeo, poor, happy fellow, is in love, and like all lovers, he needs to talk. Yes, Romeo is a big-mouth, yes, he’s a hotheaded young boy. And yes, the conventions of the Shakespearean stage make it necessary that he talk; there is no way else we can gain an insight into his feelings. This is the theatre, it is all made up.

But ‘what of it’? Does the Shakespearean stage not reflect in some way real life, and more than that, make what is commonplace in real life but somewhat obscured, both commonplace and obvious? And is not the lifting of the obscuring veil infinitely moving and infinitely truthful? The silence on stage must be filled up. When possessed with emotion, do we not have to speak, to fill up the yawning emotionless world with the strength of our feelings, just as Romeo must, for the audience to feel with him? Words are his instruments, spoken words then heard and understood and made significant by the audience to amplify, project and actualize, to share and at the same time jealously hoard an unutterable and completely personal hidden feeling. The ineffable is made, if not totally comprehensible, at least visible ‘through a glass darkly’. We see intensely personal feeling, if not in all its glory, at least showing a shred of its brilliance through a cleft in the rock.

In the same way, an emotion we feel, like love, is not understood until we talk about it, think about it, cry out about it, in words. We never can fully understand it, but by finding words, and combinations of words, with which to talk about it, it becomes experience, it becomes real, it becomes completely true. It becomes more personal, less of a mass of generalized fellow feeling or electrical impulses in the nervous system. It becomes anchored to reality through the mediation, or medium, of words, and the feeling itself becomes concrete reality existing in the world, through our ability of language. I may not like to ‘unpack my heart with words’, but it is inevitably human, and also, inevitably what makes me human. Words, language, and love.

So ‘love’, Singapore, and to hell with the people who deride you for sentimentality, or poor language skills.

I wonder what I would have done if 'zucchini' won the poll.