Kamal Ghorui
In Plato’s Symposium, a conversation between real and imagined participants, one of the speakers, Aristophanes, recounts how the concept of love came into being.
Humans originally were created with two heads, and two pairs each of arms and legs, and were perfectly content in this unity.
The god Zeus, envious of their happiness, and being the meddlesome tyrant that he was, divided them, leaving each sundered half in search of its counterpart to become complete again.
For Aristophanes, love was the search for this lost oneness, a view that Plato endorsed with his axiom, “Love is the pursuit of the whole.”
The love of the ancient Greeks was not the heartthrob subject of Hollywood and Bollywood rom-coms, and institutionalised commercial events such as the celebration of Valentine’s Day.
In Europe, the notion of romantic or courtly love was the socio-economic creation of the Middle Ages in the late 11th century, originating in the French regions of Provence and Aquitaine, and was propagated by wandering minstrels called troubadours who sang of gallant knights seeking to succour maidens fair.
In those times, marriages,particularly among the nobility, were like corporate mergers, based on the mutually beneficial joining of property and other assets; there was little or no love, or even affection, involved.
The knight in shining armour wooing his lady love became the emblem of a revolutionary protest against the mercantilism of matrimony, and the subjugation of women by the rigid rules of patriarchy.
But even in this avatar, the ideal of human love retained its agency as a quest, aseeking for a part of oneself that had to be found to effect an essential completion.
The tropes of romantic love are often used to express the divine delirium of mystics who, across the ages and climes, have sought union with the Self that lies beyond the self, which is bound to earthly dust.
The 16th century saint, Teresa of Avila, sought and found the divine in a rapture of adoration, addressing her Creator in terms of endearment one would use with regard to a lover who needs to be cajoled or chided when necessary.
“Lord, save us from gloomy saints,” she beseeched her Significant Other, and on slipping and falling in mud, she sharply rebuked, “If this is how You treat your friends, no wonder You have so few left.”
St Teresa’s earthy spirituality has much in common with Sufism as articulated by poets such as Rumi and Ibn Arabi, both of whom could have been her Facebook friends.
Sufis use metaphors of intoxication and the passion of the unrequited lover in seeking that without which they cannot exist, thirst-parched travellers in a waterless desert.
“I am an atom; you are like the countenance of the Sun for me…Without wings, without feathers, i fly looking for you, i have become a rose petal and you are like the wind for me.”
“I am jealous of you…i want you to belong to no other, not even to yourself. Be mine, be for me as you are in me, though you are not even aware of it.”
Such a self in search of its other self is a love story like no other.
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