How Do I Know I Love You?

I was engrossed in my book while a painfully mundane old school love song came up on the radio. The first two lines went: "Don't know much about history, don't know much about biology". I rolled my eyes at the degree of cheesiness and predictability of the song which was very much reminiscent of the cheesy and predictable sandwich I just stuffed my face with. As I attempted to reacquaint myself with the intellectually engaging entertainment I had in hand which I so obnoxiously believed that would set me apart from people represented by whomever had sung the song, it suddenly hit me that the lyrics of the song actually delivers a message that, much to my surprise, resonates with the chapter I was reading in "Love's Knowledge by Martha Nussbaum". 

In celebration of my rare Eureka moment and for your readers' entertainment, I'm going to shortly summarize this chapter in "Love's Knowledge" through a scrutiny of the song that, under blithe research, is titled "Don't Know Much about History" (I know, as if the corny musicianship and lyrics doesn't already do the song justice). The lyrics of the song:

"Don't know much about history
Don't know much biology
Don't know much about science book
Don't know much about the French I took

But I do know that I love you
And I know that if you love me too
What a wonderful world this would be"

involves two kinds of "knowledge", the intellectual knowledge which we learn from history and biology, and the impressional knowledge which the immediate reality afflicts upon us. The song suggests that even though one knows nothing about the scientific method of approaching subject matters, he/she is still able to know where his/her own heart lies. How? The Stoic philosopher Zeno explains that what composes any of our knowledge of the outside world is a bunch of perceptual impressions. Because these impressions are brought about by reality itself, one can be certain that they are veracious. This certainty enables us to know our own heart, and it serves as the basis of the development of sciences.

Why is knowing the distinction between intellect and knowledge important? I'll share one of my own experiences: last week my friend told me that he was struggling with his relationship, in which he wasn't sure whether he should give up on his girlfriend who always blew hot and cold. I advised him to "do a cost-benefit analysis"on staying with his girlfriend. I now realize the problem with what I suggested was that the use of the cost-benefit analysis, one of the most commonplace assessment methods in our intellectual tradition, is a form of self-deception. It distances us from feelings we're afraid of, and makes us think that we're in control of a situation we're not. We often fail to recognize that these very feelings, unquantifiable under the lenses of reasoning, are the gateways to knowing our own heart. In fact, the Stoics explain that it is not only the gateways to knowing, it is knowing. Love is not waiting there to be revealed, it is in fact constituted by the emotions and sufferings that we have to go through. Especially that of suffering, since it is simply the most overwhelming.

In other words, my friend can know whether or not he loves his girlfriend enough to be with her, even if he's illiterate, by simply being susceptible to the depth and significance of his own feelings.

On Richard Siken's Poem

I just spent two hours listening to a friend's romantic episode. I don't watch a lot of movies but I always get intrigued with real life stories about love. My faith in the validity of true love has never been weak but every time I hear such a love story, it gets fortified a little more. She had told me that despite the many validations her guy had given her, she was still worried that her anxiety disorder will impede the progression of the relationship. Her worries reminded me of a poem written by Richard Siken, which poses a similar question about the roles we play in relationships: are we the princesses waiting to be saved, the heros fighting to death, the dragons who destroy everything, or the writers whose omnipotence our relationships depend upon?  Here goes the poem: 

Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out

BY RICHARD SIKEN

Every morning the maple leaves.

                               Every morning another chapter where the hero shifts

            from one foot to the other. Every morning the same big

and little words all spelling out desire, all spelling out

                                             You will be alone always and then you will die.

So maybe I wanted to give you something more than a catalog

         of non-definitive acts,

something other than the desperation.

                   Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I couldn’t come to your party.

Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I came to your party

         and seduced you

and left you bruised and ruined, you poor sad thing.

                                                         You want a better story. Who wouldn’t?

A forest, then. Beautiful trees. And a lady singing.

                  Love on the water, love underwater, love, love and so on.

What a sweet lady. Sing lady, sing! Of course, she wakes the dragon.

            Love always wakes the dragon and suddenly

                                                                                               flames everywhere.

I can tell already you think I’m the dragon,

                that would be so like me, but I’m not. I’m not the dragon.

I’m not the princess either.

                           Who am I? I’m just a writer. I write things down.

I walk through your dreams and invent the future. Sure,

               I sink the boat of love, but that comes later. And yes, I swallow

         glass, but that comes later.

                                                            And the part where I push you

flush against the wall and every part of your body rubs against the bricks,

            shut up

I’m getting to it.

                                    For a while I thought I was the dragon.

I guess I can tell you that now. And, for a while, I thought I was

                                                                                                the princess,

cotton candy pink, sitting there in my room, in the tower of the castle,

          young and beautiful and in love and waiting for you with

confidence

            but the princess looks into her mirror and only sees the princess,

while I’m out here, slogging through the mud, breathing fire,

                                                               and getting stabbed to death.

                                    Okay, so I’m the dragon. Big deal.

          You still get to be the hero.

You get magic gloves! A fish that talks! You get eyes like flashlights!

                  What more do you want?

I make you pancakes, I take you hunting, I talk to you as if you’re

            really there.

Are you there, sweetheart? Do you know me? Is this microphone live?

                                                       Let me do it right for once,

             for the record, let me make a thing of cream and stars that becomes,

you know the story, simply heaven.

                   Inside your head you hear a phone ringing

                                                               and when you open your eyes

only a clearing with deer in it. Hello deer.

                               Inside your head the sound of glass,

a car crash sound as the trucks roll over and explode in slow motion.

             Hello darling, sorry about that.

                                                       Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we

lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwell

                                    and how I ruined everything by saying it out loud.

            Especially that, but I should have known.

You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together

            to make a creature that will do what I say

or love me back.

                  I’m not really sure why I do it, but in this version you are not

feeding yourself to a bad man

                                                   against a black sky prickled with small lights.

            I take it back.

The wooden halls like caskets. These terms from the lower depths.

                                                I take them back.

Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed.

                                                                                               Crossed out.

            Clumsy hands in a dark room. Crossed out. There is something

underneath the floorboards.

                   Crossed out. And here is the tabernacle

                                                                                                reconstructed.

Here is the part where everyone was happy all the time and we were all

               forgiven,

even though we didn’t deserve it.

                                                                    Inside your head you hear

a phone ringing, and when you open your eyes you’re washing up

            in a stranger’s bathroom,

standing by the window in a yellow towel, only twenty minutes away

                           from the dirtiest thing you know.

All the rooms of the castle except this one, says someone, and suddenly

                                                                                              darkness,

                                                                                     suddenly only darkness.

In the living room, in the broken yard,

                                  in the back of the car as the lights go by. In the airport

          bathroom’s gurgle and flush, bathed in a pharmacy of

unnatural light,

             my hands looking weird, my face weird, my feet too far away.

And then the airplane, the window seat over the wing with a view

                                                            of the wing and a little foil bag of peanuts.

I arrived in the city and you met me at the station,

          smiling in a way

                    that made me frightened. Down the alley, around the arcade,

          up the stairs of the building

to the little room with the broken faucets, your drawings, all your things,

                                                I looked out the window and said

                                This doesn’t look that much different from home,

            because it didn’t,

but then I noticed the black sky and all those lights.

                                           We walked through the house to the elevated train.

            All these buildings, all that glass and the shiny beautiful

                                                                                             mechanical wind.

We were inside the train car when I started to cry. You were crying too,

            smiling and crying in a way that made me

even more hysterical. You said I could have anything I wanted, but I

                                                                                      just couldn’t say it out loud.

Actually, you said Love, for you,

                                 is larger than the usual romantic love. It’s like a religion. It’s

                                                                                                 terrifying. No one

                                                                                 will ever want to sleep with you.

Okay, if you’re so great, you do it—

                        here’s the pencil, make it work . . .

If the window is on your right, you are in your own bed. If the window

            is over your heart, and it is painted shut, then we are breathing

river water.

            Build me a city and call it Jerusalem. Build me another and call it

                                                                                                                 Jerusalem.

                            We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not

what we sought, so do it over, give me another version,

             a different room, another hallway, the kitchen painted over

and over,

             another bowl of soup.

The entire history of human desire takes about seventy minutes to tell.

             Unfortunately, we don’t have that kind of time.

                                                                                                 Forget the dragon,

leave the gun on the table, this has nothing to do with happiness.

                                        Let’s jump ahead to the moment of epiphany,

             in gold light, as the camera pans to where

the action is,

             lakeside and backlit, and it all falls into frame, close enough to see

                                                the blue rings of my eyes as I say

                                                                                                   something ugly.

I never liked that ending either. More love streaming out the wrong way,

             and I don’t want to be the kind that says the wrong way.

But it doesn’t work, these erasures, this constant refolding of the pleats.

                                                            There were some nice parts, sure,

all lemondrop and mellonball, laughing in silk pajamas

             and the grains of sugar

                              on the toast, love love or whatever, take a number. I’m sorry

                                                                                  it’s such a lousy story.

Dear Forgiveness, you know that recently

                     we have had our difficulties and there are many things

                                                                                                  I want to ask you.

I tried that one time, high school, second lunch, and then again,

             years later, in the chlorinated pool.

                                      I am still talking to you about help. I still do not have

             these luxuries.

I have told you where I’m coming from, so put it together.

                                                            We clutch our bellies and roll on the floor . . .

             When I say this, it should mean laughter,

not poison.

                  I want more applesauce. I want more seats reserved for heroes.

Dear Forgiveness, I saved a plate for you.

                                                  Quit milling around the yard and come inside.

From the Publicized Phone Call to the Unanswered Text Message

A clip from the 1944 movie "Meet Me In St. Louis" started off with the authoritarian father, monarch of the household sternly announcing: "From now on I will take all incoming calls." He had barely finished the sentence when the phone rang, a few silent seconds passed until he finally gave her daughter Rose, who was already too eager to sit still, permission to pick up the phone. The rest of the clip unfolded exactly like a modern nightmare: the whole family staring at Rose as she shouted, in an attempt to improve the audibility of her voice, to Warren, her potential fiance on the other end of the line. However exaggerated the clip is, it accurately portrayed the reality of technology in the regular house hold in that particular time period: privacy was practically non-existent since each family only had one phone, typically emplaced on the wall of the dinning room.

So often we hear how technology has "changed" the way we interact; the proponents of this view, upon seeing this clip will most probably argue that the telephone enabled the communication between Rose and Warren and therefore catalyzed their relationship. But in reality, the relationship dynamics between not only Rose and Warren, but also among members of the Smith family--the authoritarian father, the submissive female members, the implicitness in Roses' signals to Warren while testing his willingness to marry her--are already-existent issues that, rather than enabled by the technology of telephone, are made visible by it. The way people interacted with each other affected the means which technologies were used.

Fast forward to the world we live in today--Aziz Ansari brilliantly joked about our obsession with texting. The prevalence of texting as a technology brought to view our tendency to suspend communication--from calling to texting, to facebook messages, to emails... for as long as we can. It is a problem in today's society caused by our changing socio-economic statuses among many other determinants, not just technology. What technology does is providing a new lens. By looking at how technology interacts with our family and romantic life, we can learn about the existent relationships.