LANGUAGE OF LOVE

No subject has been more written about in every language known in the world than love. And yet love has eluded definition because it embraces a wide range of emotions, which have little in common with each other. A mother’s love for her child, the child’s love for his mother’s, a man’s love to god, his guru, and his country or quite distinct from love that envelops men and women and craves for consummation in physical union. It defies differences of age, race wealth, learning, and look.

In love there is no calculation, no concern with social norms or consequences. “Of all forms of caution.” “Caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to the happiness”. Love can produce agony and ecstasy, fulfilment and frustration, uncertainty, anguish and jealousy and dire hate. All these have found expression in prose and poetry.

Everyone who has been in love has his own favourite quotations, URDU (the most persuasive language of seduction). Having experienced it many times, like most others one could pose a number of questions and then answering them.

होता है राजे-इश्क़-ओ मुह्हबत इन्हीं से पस।

आँखे जुबाँ हैं पर बेजुबाँ नहीं।।

(“The secrets of desire and love are revealed by the eyes, Eyes have tongue, but they are not without speech.”)

जिनको नशा चढा हो आँखों का।

वह भला शराब कब पीते हैं ।।

(“Those who are intoxicated with a glance of eyes, why they should drink wine.”)

What exactly is this phenomenon called love?

How does it emanate? And

How dissolution? Each one of us has his or her own theory based on personal experience and knowledge of others.

The basic cause, which makes us seek the love of another person, is because we are extremely lonely. This void inner loneliness can be described as inner solitude. The feeling of being is all-alone in the world. At times we feel this solitude with great pain feeling and it is almost like physical pain. It can come upon in suddenly and without warning as in the early hours of the morning wail of a locomotive as it speeds through the black of the night not knowing, where it has come from or where it is going.

This inner solitude is something of a paradox. At one time it is like an aching void bagging to be filled by the warmth of affection of another, at others it becomes a walled fortress with a notice bearing the warning. “Keep out” what happens when two people meet can be best illustrated by depicting human beings as a series of concentric circles, one inside the other. The inner most circle- may be described as the circle of inner solitude. When two people meet and happen to like each other, they invite each other to trespass towards this inner most circle - to share this inner loneliness. The two sets of concentric circles begin to overlap.

In actual life this invitation to trespass is expressed in exposure-baring of oneself-emotionally and physically. “Love desires that its secret be revealed.” If a mirror reflects nothing what use it is? Said Rumi. The ideal equation is of course when the two sets of circles completely over-lap when the integration between two human beings is emotionally and physically complete. This ideal equation seldom takes place as in the inner solitudes. Conflicts may arise, One may be irked by the other’s mannerism, dress, body, odour, halitosis just anything. Then there arise the desire to preserve one's inner solitude and the people concerned begin to put up their defences with the notice. “Thus far but no further.” They may even expel the intruder outwards. To the extent to which a person allows another to trespass towards his or her inner solitude, to that extend her or she in emotionally involved or in love with the other. There is no such thing as total, all- consuming love. We are in different stages of love with different people.

Rightly they say, heaven within us resides To rise it out, we need but love; we act as her aides.