Forgive Me

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This was a valentire I made for my wife in 2012.

Originally published February 14, 2012 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

Tags (from Open Salon): poem, poetry, art, valentine's day, valentine, card, commercialism, 800, eight hundred, florists, eflorists, flowers, love, committed, commitment, life, friendship, friend, celebrate, celebration, bauble, ardor, passion, i love you, circumscribe, circumscribed, circumscribing, circumscription, heart, negative, inverse, inverted, negative space, empty space

What is Love?

It's Valentine's Day. A day full of love—whatever that is. I don't think there's any one, uniquely right definition of “Love.” People probably vary widely in how they approach the concept. Far be it from me to tell anyone they're going about it wrong. I think it's one of life's big mysteries, to figure out how we're going to confront the concept. In that regard, it's perhaps more a question than an answer. What I offer here is my own answer, not any Grand Unified Plan for Love you are obliged to subscribe to, just a written record of how I personally approach the matter.

A question that often fascinates me is “Why do you love me?” It's interesting because it seems to presuppose a certain kind of answer. “I love you because you're a good cook.” Or perhaps, “I love you because you're beautiful.” Or maybe, “I love you because you're such a good singer.” Personally, I find this a dangerous way of approaching the concept. If one defines love in terms of a service provided or a characteristic that may be transient, it might be that if circumstances change, there will be no love. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if some people do define love this way. Some might say such love is shallow—I don't know, that's perhaps a value judgment. I'd like to steer clear of that. But I will say it sounds fragile, waiting to be broken by an arbitrary change in circumstance.

Some people appear to perceive love as simply a more intense version of like. “I like you. I like you a lot. OK, it's so much I guess I love you.” This too seems fragile, but more than that, I think it doesn't create a space for the commonly observed place where we can sometimes find ourselves loving someone we do not like. Certainly that's not well-explained by simply saying that love means intense liking. So I don't use the word to mean a kind of intense liking.

In fact, I think the part where one can love someone they aren't liking gets closer to the point. It takes commitment to have that kind of feeling that allows love to span the rough times. Whatever love is, it had better somehow explain this whole business of commitment.

I think of liking something as a sensation of positive feeling, disliking as a negative feeling. But love is more like a decision. It's a switch I can decide to flip. I can choose to love. The decision may be for an arbitrary reason. Maybe I liked your smile in that moment. It could be I think you're a great cook. Or perhaps we just shared an amazing experience, like climbing a mountain or building a house together.

I guess what I'm saying is that the reason one falls in love doesn't have to be the reason one continues to love. If we climbed a mountain, we don't have to always climb mountains. If we do, that love is fragile. Or so I claim.

To my mind, the liking of something expresses a positive sensation that can be more or less strong. But the loving of something is just there, or not, or at least it is to me. It's notable for its constancy. I make the decision to love, and after that there's no more work to do. I just love. That's the commitment part. It's a decision that the love will be there regardless.

This formulation neatly gets around the thing some people have where they pester you every moment of the day to find out if they are still loved. Love is not supposed to be that changeable. I don't have a problem about expressing that I love, but I do feel the expression should be pro forma. The person should just know and rely on it. What other point is there to it? If I can love you at 2pm, not love you at 3pm, and love you again at 4pm, then what is it I committed to? It needs to be more durable, not to mention more relaxed. It needs to reinforce the other things I do for you, especially things that require effort, not call into question the validity of doing those things.

Love has hysteresis. (No relation to hysterics. A minimum of hysterics is just fine thank you.) Many people don't know this concept of hysteresis, but it's a good one and worth learning. You see it in a thermostat. Something you want to do with a thermostat is to set your furnace to go on, let's say if the temperature falls below 68°F. But suppose the thermostat reaches 68°F and then hangs right around there, fluttering up and down. Should the furnace go on and off? Thermostats are designed so that they don't. Once the furnace goes on, it stays on unless there's a much bigger change than it took to get it to go on. Small changes don't affect the decision once it's made. It should tend to stay set and not move capriciously back just because you waver a little. It requires a big motion in the system for it to back out.

And love needs a lot of hysteresis so that it can be depended upon. Perhaps there are circumstances that can break one out of love, but they should be rare and extreme, not common everyday things.

Love provides predictability, constancy, stability, commitment. It's there and not going anywhere. It's not something to worry might slip away if you say or do some little wrong thing. It can be relied upon.

Love is also something to celebrate.

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Originally published February 13, 2011 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

Tags (from Open Salon): philosophy, love, commitment, definition, why, like, emotion, decision, intensity

Haiku: Mom Watched Over Me

If you enjoyed this haiku, please “rate” it.

This is a response to Just Cathy's post on Mother's Day Haiku.
She notes the original open call came from Texas Bubba.
The effects we have on one another are both direct and indirect.

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Originally published May 8, 2009 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

Tags (from Open Salon): celebration, family, greeting card, greetings, haiku, i love you, mom, mom haiku, mother's day, open call, personal, social, thoughts, too cheap to send flowers, tribute, wishes

The Nature of a Hero

With the luxury of time to look back on the value that resulted, we endow our heroes with all manner of mystic qualities, such that our heroes, hearing themselves described as such, often don't recognize themselves.

Heroism is often not something you can plan or save up for. The need for it may come upon you suddenly. It must be done in the moment, which is often part of the sacrifice. If you knew the need was coming, you might have scheduled other events differently. The event may be something they were prepared to do, but the timing of the event may not have been.

A firefighter may be prepared to lose his life in a fire for another, but he doesn't get to choose a good day for it to happen. Every day could be that day, and yet the day it happens is never a good one. It may be the day he's had a fight with someone and wishes he hadn't, or it may be the week before that big trip he was going to take with a loved one.

It is rarely something where you get a second chance. Usually what you do is what you do. It is therefore messy, unfinished, not particularly artistic, “done in a single take.” And in the time just afterward, while everyone is singing their praises, our hero, if lucky enough to have survived at all, is probably lost in self-critical thoughts of “I should have somehow done it differently, better,” as if that were really an option.

The messiness of heroism is illustrated in the brilliant movie 1776, where the spotlight falls at one point on the awful dilemma of patriots committed to opposing slavery being told in a high-stakes game of intellectual poker that the new nation would have slavery at its core or there would be no new nation to later rise above slavery. Who would want to be the kind of hero who said yes to that deal? Bad enough you had risked your life daily just for the right to participate in a process you'd hoped would free all men, but in the end you realize your opposition to slavery will likely be forgotten by history and you'll be remembered instead for having enshrined it. For some of those men, signing their names to the Declaration of Independence on those terms must have been the kind of awful compromise faced by a doctor who saws off a man's leg to save him from death. Messy, but something one sometimes has as one's only choice. Our heroes sometimes make these choices just so we won't have to, accepting a shame upon themselves so that others will not have to.

George Bush was not able to muster what it took to be the messy kind of hero. In the final days of his Presidency, when the economy was a mess, due in part to a war that should never have been fought, he could have made a useful sacrifice and drawn fire upon himself by taking responsibility and admitting it was his fault. Even if he didn't believe it, he could have said he did. That would have freed his whole party to move forward without pointing fingers at one another. But he couldn't do it, and so he condemned many to endure continued finger-pointing. The kind of heroism he wanted was the clean, pretty, photo-op kind of heroism of a scheduled landing in a pristine jumpsuit on a military-looking set that sat well out of harm's way.

Barack Obama, by contrast, was a hero when he apologized on behalf of the US for the economic mess that we as a nation pulled the world into. He didn't cause the problem, but he didn't make a big point of that. He had no reason to expect the world to applaud him for what he said. It wasn't completely true, but it was enough true, and saying it was just the right thing to do. He must surely have known that the Republicans would say he had somehow sold us out. But he took with grace the slings and arrows that followed.

Some heroism is big and public, while some is small and private. Some happens in an instant, perhaps under active gunfire, while some is the product of relentless small acts over time, like the aforementioned founding of our nation or the unheralded endurance of a parent raising a child.

My wife is such a private hero. I won't detail why here. The details probably matter, but saying them out loud will only arm her with ways to dismiss the accolade. Like the enigmatic referent in Carly Simon's famous song, but without all the unattractive vanity, she'll have to just know that if she can think up something about which she wants to say “but that was nothing,” the very fact that she knows what to disclaim is proof that she knows she did something worthy. And, anyway, I'll always know.

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Public domain graphic obtained from
freeclipartnow.com.

Author's Note: Originally published April 30, 2009 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

Tags (from Open Salon): barack obama, bush, firefighters, firemen, first responders, founding fathers, george bush, george w bush, heroism, mothers, obama, police, policemen, politics, sacrifice, slavery, social, society, thank you, thankless, thanks, wives

Fresh Thoughts on Kissing ... and Beyond

I was pretty nerdy in my youth—unlike now, of course—and so my parents confronted the issue of sexuality with me by doing the obviously right thing: They handed me a four-volume encyclopedia on the subject and told me to read up.

I wish I could remember the name of the thing, but alas I don't. A lot of it was stuff that was boring to me at the time, like the details of reproduction. I skimmed it but didn't really care a lot about the details. I never really resonated to biology—it always seemed messy and imprecise.

There was a section on dating, though, and I read through that pretty thoroughly in case it had any useful tips. It did. It's funny the kinds of things that stick with you over the years, but this did because of the practical and specific nature of it. It defined the confusing term “fresh” (a sort of interjection that was supposed to get uttered just before you got slapped in some mysterious circumstances) in the only detailed, serious way I've ever seen anyone try to define it. I checked the dictionary just now and it merely says very vague things like these:

15. informal forward or presumptuous
Random House Dictionary

15. Informal Bold and saucy; impudent
The American Heritage ® Dictionary

12. improperly forward or bold; “don't be fresh with me”;
WordNet® 3.0

This encyclopedia, instead of offering just a word or two, offered a full description of how things were supposed to work and why the word was significant. It was highly specific in a way that I doubt people will readily agree with—many will quibble that the numbers are arbitrary, and I suppose they are. But I was able to read past that and to get the essence of what it was getting at.

The article just came straight out and said that it was permissible for a boy to try to kiss a girl on the second date and to try “petting” on the eighth date. I have no idea where they got these numbers. They seemed arbitrary and unmotivated to me, and I knew even at the age of 11 or 12 when I read this that they were probably not universally agreed upon. But the point was that there was some such number. What was interesting was that the article was very clear on the notion that you had no entitlement to succeed in these things. It did not encourage you to be pushy. It didn't say that someone must submit. What it seemed to imply was that there was a time at which it was not out of bounds to think it might be proper.

So, as the article explained, it might be that a girl will kiss a boy on the first date, but he ought not try. The relationship is too fresh. After the first date, he may try, but she may still decline. Likewise, it might be that the girl would engage in petting on the eighth date, but maybe not. The relationship was too fresh before that to really consider the matter.

By the way, I'm recalling all of this from memory, but I don't recall it talking about discussing, only trying. It might be I was just reading selectively, but more likely they were just acknowledging the obvious truth that it's enough trouble having to be a bumbling adolescent without having to be articulate about what you're bumbling about.

And that was a lot of dates out—I don't think I ever got to that many dates. I did count, though, even knowing that my date probably didn't have access to my encyclopedia and that all my counting was probably for nothing. I wasn't going to feel emboldened after that time, more likely just like I was timidly missing out. Being a kid is rough. It's a wonder any of us survives to adulthood.

Anyway, I think my encyclopedia's definition of this obscure word highlights an important detail that is often lost in a lot of dialog between the sexes at any age. Lessons in interpersonal communication rarely distinguish between the correctness of a bid for doing something and the entitlement to do something. This leads to the magical and unrealistic notion that people will “just know” when it's right, and that if either party tries something when it isn't “just known,” that's wrong.

Great emphasis is placed in our society on how important it is for men to respect a “no” answer from a woman. And I agree. But equally great emphasis should be placed on giving respect to the fact that there will be questions that, in due course, need asking, even if the answer will ultimately be “no.” Whether by word or by wordless bumbling deed, the mere asking of those questions at the proper time and without attempt to pressure is not disrespectful, and the need to ask them must be respected in the same way that the answer must. Respect between caring individuals goes in both ways.

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Originally published April 26, 2009 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

Tags (from Open Salon): language, linguistics, vocabulary word, usage, word usage, meaning, semantics, definition, terminology, fresh, dating, kissing, petting, caress, touch, felt up, feel up, felt out, feel out, getting to first base, get to first base, getting to second base, get to second base, encyclopedia, dating, social, advice, manners, etiquette, polite, politeness, impudent, bold, saucy, sex education, sex ed, first kiss, first time, sexuality, kissing on the first date, kiss on the first date, first date, eighth date, appropriate, inappropriate

What Love Endures

Background

This is not a traditional-style Valentine’s Day poem.

I originally wrote this as prose, years ago, for submission to another forum, one that had solicited for various categories of extremely short stories, including a call for stories of no more than 150 characters. This one uses 146 characters, just so you don’t have to count. My submission was rejected by the editors of that other forum, and I shelved it for a time.

As I finally publish it, I thought perhaps the juxtaposition of today (Friday the 13th of February, 2009) and tomorrow (Valentine’s Day) would offer readers a chance to reflect on the notion that not all love stories are played out with chocolate hearts and red roses.

To my surprise, a friend who once previewed this work referred to it as a poem rather than a short story. On reflection, I decided that almost anything so textually short was at risk of being thought of in such a way. Rather than fight it, I embraced the idea and broke the lines in free verse style. But you may refer to it either way, as prose or poem, with my thanks for taking the time to read it at all.

By the way, the photo and artistic composition are my own work as well.

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Originally published February 13, 2009 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

Tags (from Open Salon): love, caring, poem, poetry, raped, aftermath of rape, rape aftermath, emotional scars, emotional scars, rape survivor, sex, intimacy, strained, difficult, pain