APRIL, 1969 Tie .:' Collegian .Presents An Essay 'By- : Mr. Campbell Love is a matter of extreme derioultnessi. It is, as Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, "that for vhich all else is but a prepara ion." Love is of ultimate ser ousness because it is a matter' of your whole being. In love it is rour self that is at stake. Seriousness is having your self issue' in what you do. It is not matter of any one particular iedvity iikwhich you participate, mt a matter of, the way in which rou relate to any event what,so ver in'your World. A clown can ie serious. A poet can be frivi ous. What counts is whether or iot the clown is himself at issue n his seeming frivolity. Is some rf him destroyed if children fail o laught with him? Is he born mew in joyousness if they do aught? A poet may have nothing a stake in his poem. It may to din be a matter of technique, iothing more. Whether it wins a 3 ulitzer • prize or is lost in a leap" of poems never published s to him a matter of indiffer nice, Is love an idea? Is it a thought n our head which once under stood by reason guarantees that we are able to live lovingly in mar world? Is love a word we Non live once we have read its lefinition in Webster's? Is it a ;ping like a stone which we place n our pocket or skip across a )ond, an object we easily forget >r lose in the muddy bottom of ntr existence? Is love like a aorkscrew, something we master nice we understand its use? Or s love a feeling? Is it what we lave when our heart pounds, our lands sweat, our knees weaken at the sight of that he or she we 2onsider special, who makes our toes tingle and our hair curl? According to Eric Fromm here are several types of serious Love. There is what he calls 'motherly love",- love for the ielpless and the weak, love. THE HIGHACRES COJ•T.FGIAN en whether or not it is deserved. There is what he calls "fatherly love'„ a love for the successful and the strong, love given when RICHARD CAMPBELL it is earned. There is "brotherly love", love for one's fellow man, and "self love", love for oneself based not on a neurotic narcis sism but on an understanding of oneself as a: unique human being. Lastly, there is what Fromm calls "erotic love," love rooted in the responsiveness one has to a single person he considels to be of exceptional importance. Er otic love, to be healty, presup poses the several other kinds of love. In order to fully love a particular' person one must be able to forgive, be able to judge, be able to sympathize and be able to respect himself. Fromm also distinguishes sev eral ways in which we fail to love. Love is not a weapon or a shield. It is not something to be 'used." But to many persons love is no more than a means of glorifying themselves by coerc ing other individuals into becom- ing their slaves. To still others it has become a way of removing their responsibility for 'themselv es. by permitting themselves to be abused, to be mastered for the sake of love. Sadism on the one hand, and masochism on the other, are ways in which many of us escape - real love by substi tuting for it a sham. In our culture, even in the halls of Highacres, a common example of the sadist is Mr. Ci)ol, the modern day Don Juan who conceives of a woman as a "bird" that he will have the pleasure of defeathering, of plucking. He approaches her not because of the person she 13 but because of the clothes she wears (or fails to wear), or because of the Mends she has ar because of her willingness to "go down", as if he were the new Moses or the new Messiah. There is Miss Hot too. She is the turkey who gobbles up men because of their willingness to savor the flavors with which she taunts them. She cares about a man's car, about his clothes, about his ability to take her wherever she wants to go, about his money in the bank (or better in his pocket), more than she does about him. To both Cool and Hot, who are themselv es sick with the inability to deve lop rich human relationships with other persons, the people to be relished or those who offer testimony ,to the metallic cook ware to which our Mr. or Miss have reduced themselves. The persons with whom Cool and Hot become involved, if that is the word for it; are to them no more than so many licorice sticks to be sucked dry as they see fit, no more than some rusty pennies thrown in a dirty jar and sought only when the cellophane egos of Cool or Hot need some small change. PAGE FIVE Mr. Cool and Miss Hot are able to function in the world be cause a large number of indivi duals have failed to develop any temperature of their own, any humanity that is healthfully and wholly theirs. They are the color less, odorless, tasteless non-per sons who use Ban and Lavoris because someone told them to. They hope to acquire froth the world what they have refused to create for themselves an iden tity. They are the Nowhere Man who relies totally on others for his evaluation of himself. If they are ravished, their first reaction is gratitude. You may believe that what is suggested here is a fabrication. Men tend to exclude themselves from any generalization which may indict their behavior. So do women. Perhaps a way to show that the attitude so far described occurs on this campus and in this town as much as they do else where is to examine several phrases in our colloquial speech. We "pick up" a chic; we "make" a girl or we "make it"; we also "cut it" or "stitch it" or "starch it." These phrases are singularly mechanistic. We talk about other human beings in the same terms as we speak about our garbage; both. are "picked up." Just what is it that we "make" when we have plucked a bird? Just what have we made when we have "made it"? Have we dug a ditch? Have we begun to forge in iron our own exit from paradise? Have we put one more entry in our celestial log; the on we keep by the toilet: "Stardate. Knocked off another one. 'That's eighteen this week. Color me used and advance me three spaces toward being a real man!" And let us not think it is only the men who do the ravish ing. If men use language that (Continued On Page Six)
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