In a high school art class of mine, our teacher gave us the assignment of creating an object - a sculpture of some kind - which symbolized love. Oh, and it also needed to have some kind of container as well - I’m not sure why that was part of the assignment. Like many of my classmates at the time I’m sure, I had never been in love. So what it became was an exercise in exploring our own projections and ideas concerning that most holy of subjects, love.

I was friends with a lot of the “bad” kids in high school, and they all tended to cluster together around art classes. We had a teacher who was really good and very tough. And I remember this one guy I knew, who’d gone through a lot of trouble in his days with his family life, etc. And who had consequently become very “dark” as a result, well the project that he came up with in answer to this assignment has always stuck with me. He created a hilariously ugly wire tree over which he had modeled some clay, which I think he then painted black. His “container” for this love-tree was a ripped brown cardboard box, which we later discovered also had a dead cockroach inside of it.

It was both a funny and sadly touching depiction of one person’s failure to connect with love as a growing natural thing from which all life had fled. My own artistic exploration of the subject was somewhat more “lofty.” I based it on the Biblical passage where it is said, “and the two will become one flesh, so that they are no longer two, but one flesh.” Again, I didn’t know anything about love beyond the sort of vague feelings of familial love that I had experienced throughout my life. This line though, and the project I made based on it (a candle in which I carved two people who would “melt together” inexorably leading to the destruction of both) was what I believed love was.

And it is an image which I have struggled with ever since as it has brought me to the brink of personal destruction several times. I remember that when I brought this project in, my art teacher sternly reprimanded me. At the time I didn’t see why, but she insisted very harshly that this wasn’t what love was. I don’t remember what she said exactly, but I remember being astonished by her insistence that my project was just flat out wrong (as was the black love-tree my friend made). How could somebody’s idea or experience of what love was be simply wrong? I just didn’t get it.

And honestly, I guess I still don’t. I still struggle with it ten years later almost. I know in myself that I still harbor this image of as being basically equivalent with death. Or at least with self-sacrifice. And this is one of the reasons I connected so strongly with the movie The Fountain, because it seemed to explore this same “death-image of love” and lead some kind of path through the darkness out of that way of being into something else.

I wonder today what I would make if I were to travel back in time and have to complete that art project again. How would I define or symbolize love now? How would I package and present it to communicate it with others? I’m really not sure. Maybe I ought to engage in it as an exercise for myself.

One thing that has been rattling around in my mind a lot lately: this whole idea of the self. The self is supposed to be this unitary thing that we are. The etymology of it goes back to seolf or sulf, from Old English, where it meant “one’s own person, same.” That in turn hooks backwards into Indo-European linguistic roots with “s(w)e” which apparently means “separate, apart.” Evidently, this is the origin also of our modern words such as: self, gossip, suicide, secret, sober, sullen, ethic, and idiot.

I tend to think that the etymology of words we use every day often reveals what we really mean when we use them. I find it only too fitting that when we refere to one’s “self”, what we really mean is that thing which is separate and apart. The part which is a sober sullen idiotic secret. The part which we destroy in suicide, the part of others that we gossip about. The parts that are separate and apart.

Building on that, I also realize that what we often mean when we say, “I love you” translate more roughly to something like, “I recognize that I am separate and apart from you and I don’t want to be.” That is, in order for there to be an “I” and a “you” which love can link together, we must first establish that these two entities are separate.

Which is leading me into a tailspin of understanding what love really is because it is starting to sound like love is not a bleeding together but a tangible (and often painful) awareness of separation. And it almost seems that the underlying *thing* we refer to when we say “love” might actually be better served in some other way. It may be that love is not the final force which unites us with others, but that it is the last obstacle before that union can occur. To say “I love you” is in some sense to say “I am separate from you.” But to dispense altogether with the “me” or “you” (with the separate s(w)e-selves) leads one perhaps into a place where love (with root meanings of caring and “desire”) - or at least ideas about it - falls away entirely.

It’s hard to say. I realize I am still figuring it out after all these years and that maybe I am just as naive and foolish as I ever was to begin with. Maybe I have just expertly constructed a new clever rationalization to disguise the fact that I still cling to the same impossible image of what love is and should be that I’ve always had…