Part II
Having established the logical point that Shakespeare’s characterization of love could be mistaken, even while he ever writ, it is time to tackle the central challenge of demonstrating how and why Shakespeare is wrong about Love in this sonnet. This discussion will only be of value if I can somehow develop a proof, such that it is is more than a matter of subjective opinion, but rather an analytic truth: that is, I will need to show that if my intuitions and analysis are correct, then Shakespeare is wrong by logical necessity.
I aim to achieve this in three stages, moving from a set of general intuitions about what love is, stemming from Julian’s question of some weeks ago, through an exploration of Shakespeare’s metaphors in the sonnet—explaining why they are so unsatisfactory given these intuitions—to a linguistic consideration of ‘Love as concept’ and love as an English predicate, exposing the gap between these two notions. May God forgive me if I end up sounding like a literary critic or—geschweige denn, God forbid—a cognitive linguist: I pretend no talent or experience in either domain. And yet in the words of the sadly under-rated Spandau Ballet—and the justly under-rated Wally Lamb: I know this much is true. I’ll end the piece with a brief discussion of episode two of the second series of Wallander, the Swedish detective show (Prästen—The Priest), which provides the most beautiful, accurate and revealing representation of love, jealousy, death—and what is mistakenly called ‘chemistry’—of any piece of contemporary drama.
First, to Julian's question: "Daddy, do you love me more than Sean?". This affected me at the time, and has bothered me since. The trite and politic answer, which is the one I probably gave (being generally a trite and politic sort of person) is: "No, don't be silly, I love you both equally, and baby Justin too." Yet the truth is that there can be no answer to this; the question is a non-sequitur. There are two kinds of reason for this, one quantitative, the others qualitative. The dull, quantitative reason—for arguments about quantities are rarely of interest to anyone except university and health service administrators, computational linguists, baseball fans, and some autistic children—is this: I cannot compare what I cannot measure. Since I don't know how much I love my eldest son, it's impossible to say whether I love my middle child more or less. (The claim that I'm advancing here is that love is never unconditional, not that it is not infinite.) Of course, I could with some difficulty calculate and compare the acts of parental love: since Sean is 5 years older than his brother I must have expressed my love for him on more occasions. But that would yield a meaningless statistic, since—as in the case of language—it is the immanent mental state(s), not the associated behaviors, that are important; (emotional) 'competence, not performance' in linguistics jargon. Incidently, this is another place where Shakespeare is mistaken: the line "Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken" clearly implies that one can measure love ('take his height'). But this is wrong: Love's height is as well unknown as is his worth.
As for the qualitative reasons for the unanswerability of Julian's question, these are considerably more interesting. First off is the observation that my love for Sean is qualitatively different from my love for Julian or Justin, or indeed my love (of any kind for any other human being; be it sexual or filial, parental or vicarious—eros or agape). So, even if I could compare amounts, it would be to compare two different properties; as it were, chocolate ice-cream vs. sushi, waterskiing vs. piano-playing. Only an alien, or other creature devoid of Theory of Mind, would think to ask about such preferences, and yet we frequently ask about love, as though it were the same on each occasion.
This reason, of course, underpins the other glib answer I could have given Julian, and which we too commonly use to wriggle out of tight spots: "I love you both equally, but in different ways." Glib though it may be, it expresses a powerful truth. For love is different, every time, and each time around; if this were not the case, there might be very little reason to go on living. This is why jealousy and envy in respect of love is so deeply irrational: it makes no sense to be jealous of someone's love for another person, since you could not enjoy that strain of love in any case; it is—as the measurers would say—a 'non-transferable' benefit. This does not mean that jealousy is irrational tout court: for love (of any type) takes time, attention and energy, and all of these are finite resources. Our capacity for loving relationships may be unbounded, but our time is not, and we may rightly resent the person who steals from us our lover's hours. Which brings me rather naturally to the next error in the sonnet: 'Love is Time's fool', as are we all—as Shakespeare himself noted in many other places:
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.
But perhaps the more important question is why love is different every time. To this question, the most obvious answer, which is no doubt partly correct, is that as we are all constituted differently, different physical bodies as it were—so the interactions between us will perforce be different as well. Just as sound-waves produce a different effect when they come into contact with different surfaces, or a ball assumes a different trajectory as a consequence of the smoothness of the cushion, the composition and weight of the golf club, the tension of the racquet strings, the angle of the kicker’s foot—pick your favourite sporting metaphor—so the quality and intensity of our emotional interactions will be determined and individuated by our physical properties; the roughness of our edges, the depths of our respective layers…But this is ballistic love, love as Newtonian physics. Or perhaps, love as inorganic chemistry: the high-school chemistry teacher safeguards his job—and his charges—by knowing which chemical compounds will react in which range of specific conditions; a peck of this, a pinch of that, heated above this or that critical temperature. Love whose outcomes can be replicated, as long as the initial conditions remain the same, as long as the same quantities of chemicals are combined: 'Take a girl like you,’ a guy like me, and the results will be the same each time. Except that they won't of course, for the physics and chemistry both change, as a result of contingent experience. I am not the person I was last week, let alone thirty years ago: my physique and chemistry is altered, mutated, by the history of my interactions, and by the ravages of Time and Fate.
What’s more, even if I had remained constant the nature of my relationship to another person would have changed as a function of the others in my universe of discourse. A basic and enduring insight of linguistic structuralism is that elements have meaning only in relation to one another, whether one considers word-sense, or semantic roles, or any other notional constituent of the grammatical system. In a language like Japanese, for example, without a separate word for foot, one’s leg (ashi) extends from hip to toe; in a language like English, with such a word foot~feet, the meaning of leg is discretely terminated—docked, as it were—at the ankle. (If we need an expression to cover both leg and foot, we have recourse to technical language—lower limb—but in English no single morpheme can do the job for us). Or, in respect of semantic roles, the interpretation of a subject noun-phrase is immediately transformed from ‘involved participant/experiencer’ to ‘agent’ by the presence of an object in the same clause: cf. Alice burned with righteous indignation/Alice burned the toast.
It is the same with love—as concept: I’ll come to the predicate meaning anon. The particular quality of my love for Julian is affected by the presence of his siblings as much as by his character and mine: it is different since he became the middle child, and can never be like that of an only child, as it was for Sean before Julian came along. We are all equally—but disparately—victims of birth order. Likewise, my response to him will be continually adjusted by the myriad interactions with all of the other people I know and care about, not just now—over whatever stretch of proximate time that term extends—but in all my recorded experience.
(If the enduring insight of structuralism was the essential interrelatedness of things, its enduring flaw—which persists in post-structuralist linguistics, including generativism, as well as in all conventional science—is its zealous ahistoricism: the notion that current physical, chemical and biological states form coherent, closed systems, and that everything can be explained by internal, synchronic mechanisms. In the case of love, though—and I suspect, of any construct complex enough to be intellectually interesting, including language—this is tosh, bunkum, a face-spiting nasal amputation (so to speak). A ‘misleading idealization,’ at best. For the particular quality of love I feel for any person is constantly infused and infected by past associations, and remembered sensations: a certain perfume, the after-dinner cigarette, that view from the bridge in the summer of ’83; the recollection of some private ritual. I leave the details to experts—Baudelaire or Proust—but the point should be clear: our current feelings and emotional responses are the non-linear sum of our life’s travails. Which is, no doubt, why it is so damned easy to be young, even if it doesn’t feel like it at the time...)
But if only a fraction of this is correct—if love is dynamic, interactive, ever-changing, always contingent, if it is neither (classical) physics nor (inorganic) chemistry, but rather biochemistry—the biochemistry of the specific human at that, not the disembodied gene—then Shakespeare just has to be wrong:
Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds
Or bends with the remover to remove;
Oh no! It is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken
It is the star to every wandering bark
- If Love did not alter when it alteration finds, it would not be human love: it would be an aberration of Nature, wherein no straight lines are found;
- If Love did not bend with the remover to remove, we should lose contact with those we love everyday;
- If Love were an ever-fixed mark, it would have no place in our metaphysics, for nothing else is so rigid in that domain;
- If Love is the star to every wandering bark, then it is also a wandering star (as all stars are).
In the final part of this piece—should it ever appear—I’ll consider the predicate ‘love,’ rather than the concept. This really might be for linguists only, except that you’ll miss the discussion of Wallander...Which would be a shame. There again, you’d be better off just watching it without commentary.
End of Part II.
Comments