Love-like
1月20日 (水ー木) 12:09am JST
Why is it that like and love are so different?
Ok, yes, there are the obvious reasons. But, a preference is a preference, and a judgment is a judgment. So, why do these two kinds of preference judgments seem so different?
I love Buffalo Daughter, for reasons I can’t explain. Certainly, considered with my other musical likes, you might expect me to like them too, but love? My fondness for them clearly has its roots in both circumstance and substance, accident and essence. The time and manner in which the band entered my life has a lot to do with the way that I consider “Li303ve” to be the greatest song ever or “Big Wednesday” to embody an entire summer of my life or “Son of Altair” to be joy in sonic form. And don’t even get me started on New Rock’s “Sad Guitar,” “Super Blooper,” or “Jellyfish Blues.” All these songs tie into parts of my life and the ways and places that I enjoyed listening to them.
The connection I have with all this has to do with my life, yes, but it seems deeper than that. When I wonder why I am living here in this nowhere town in Japan, Buffalo Daughter is as succinct and cogent an answer as any.
My feeling for Buffalo Daughter is a kind of love, one for which I feel little obligation to make excuses or predictions. With human love, you want your vague hunches and fleeting feelings to have a ground in experience that is as solid as granite. Even if the love isn’t based on an rational experience, there should at least be an emotion with the compelling power of the self-identifying driving it.
What we want is for love to be a statement about tomorrow. Not just what will be tomorrow, but how we’ll feel tomorrow. If I like eggs today, then tomorrow, I may like eggs or I may not, but if I don’t love something tomorrow, can I be said to have loved it today? We tell ourselves that love makes sense only as an expression through time. Love as a particle is less than nothing.
But life just isn’t that firm. Everything tomorrow is just hunch. Unless we can give a priori proof of empiricism (something that a priori logic tells us cannot be given), then tomorrow is always merely a best guess. And if you look at love and say, “probably,” then it isn’t love anymore.
Plato wanted romantic-, erotic-, eros- love to be the first rung on the ladder to the Forms. Love is a desire for beauty, and beauty is a kind of truth. Be that as it may, love is never something we can understand, because love isn’t just a desire for today, but a hope for the future.
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