Every story is a love Story. Does it make sense to speak of an archetypal story? Some common thread of goodness that makes a story worth listening to? The first time I heard the expression that, every story was a love story, was the musical Aida, and at the time it seemed really just so many pretty words. Sure, if you looked at everything searching for the phantom of love, either to justify ours or lack thereof wed certainly find it, but there didnt seem any more truth in it than that. Every story might as easily be a war story, or a story about death, or about learning, or a fall, or a climb. To say that every one was about love though seemed to do violence to the term love; if every story were a love story, and yet we know that stories are about myriad things, then love is also myriad things. Is everything, is meaningless to describe then, is nothing. I dont think of love in so formulaic a manner that I believe that one day I might so much as touch its coat-tails with words, but to try to give form to that thing I think now is quite the opposite of a meaningless task. What if love were a label for that thing that makes a story beautiful, and not the thing itself? What if love, the word, blanketed a mystery; an as near-to sacred as we might hope to discover in this world, force, that is part of and paradoxically constitutes what it means to be human? What if, yes, the words, Every story is a love story are absolutely meaningless but what they point towards is, in fact, the very central point of our collective experience of being human? Because if its true that the map is not the territory, then love is not the thing itself, and certainly not the thing we should devote ourselves towards finding. The words do not touch the truth, but the truth persists, and perhaps the words can open the doors to the room through whose windows , if we look out just far enough, we might see to what the words point. And perhaps it is only that thing to which all our stories refer.
Posted on: Sun, 28 Sep 2014 23:37:46 +0000
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