I will belate my love ....................... (A Reflection on Valentine's Day)

                                             

We had the same nightly ritual that we do now. I’d read to the girls and tuck them in before my wife took over, and the last thing I’d say every night was “I love you,” and they would always reply promptly, “I love you too, Daddy.”

But one night after my declaration, Fiona was silent. She just kept staring at the ceiling.

“Do you love me too, Fiona?” I asked, foolishly . A long moment passed.

 “No, Daddy, I don’t.” “Oh Fiona sweetie, I bet you do.” I said

Nothing. 

“Well,” I said finally, “I love you, Finn, and I’ll see you in the morning.”

And then as I started to get up, I felt her small hand on my arm and she said dreamily, without looking at me, like a little Lauren Bacall, “I will love you in the summertime, Daddy. I will love you … in the summertime.”[1]

There is something in the conversation between the poet Christian Wiman and his young daughter, Fiona, that strikes at the very heart of the concept of love. And yet, little Fiona seems to grasp what it means to be so awestruck by the mere solicitation of love from her father - one that carries a certain hesitancy despite being part of their nightly ritual of bidding everyone goodnight before sighing into sleep. It would be somewhat reductionist to impose a definitive meaning upon Fiona’s silence, yet both her pause and Wiman’s wait for a response, and along with the promise of love in the summertime, they serve to deconstruct the notion of love within an established ritual that unfolds before a goodnight.

The calendar reminds us that it is Valentine's Day. Whether it calls for religious reflection within a secular devotion, lovers will have their time, and whatever we make of the rendezvous cannot be seen as something new - yet it holds the power of a yearly renewal. At the start of his essay Shattered Love, the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy offers a warning, posing the following:

The thinking of love, so ancient, so abundant and diverse in its forms and in its modulations, asks for an extreme reticence [retenue] as soon as it is solicited. It is a question of modesty, perhaps, but it is also a question of exhaustion: has not everything been said on the subject of love? Every excess and every exactitude? Has not the impossibility of speaking about love been as violently recognized as has been the experience of love itself as the true source of the possibility of speaking in general? We know the words of love to be inexhaustible, but as to speaking about love, could we perhaps be exhausted?[2]

Perhaps Fiona, in her gentle soul, understood this and threw her off balance a little. Well, it will not be a sad one to bring to my blog a little reflection on the concept of love, with a bit of hermeneutic retrieval. Mind you, I am not offering a manual on how to fall in love; that would be a total bankruptcy of my time. I am merely showing a bit of its promise and peril, assuming it has the latter. Mathew Abbott says that despite Nancy's warning that talking about love can be a bit exhausting, that doesn't mean it should be dismissed, Abbott writes:

The possibility of speaking about love has been placed in question by the sheer volume of texts that purport to do just that (it is a paradox worth reflecting on: the fact that something appears to be everywhere means it might be nowhere). Yet exhaustion can be alleviated with a change in trajectory: if one cannot speak about love, then one can still speak in it (for ‘[w]e know the words of love to be inexhaustible’).[3]    

Recently, my dear friend Daruan John - affectionately known as Chobay😃 - led me into a theological discussion on John 21, that well-known exchange between Jesus and Peter in which Jesus asks Peter three times whether he loves Him. Daruan takes a rather traditional view, arguing that Jesus' persistent questioning elevates the notion of love to agape. As he puts it:

"Peter would love to be loved by Jesus, and so Jesus might say to him: if you wish to be loved by me, then love me in return. Love begets love. The more we love, the more love we receive."

    Daruan John's interpretation seems to focus on the relational and reciprocal nature of love - how Peter can find assurance in Jesus’ love by actively loving in return. It provides a framework in which love is affirmed and reinforced.  I found no immediate cause to challenge his interpretation. However, being somewhat ambivalent, I stepped back from the conventional view and offered John an alternative perspective… I suggested a phenomenological approach to love, inspired by Jean-Luc Marion’s The Erotic Phenomenon or what he terms the ‘erotic reduction’- situating love within the urgency of the question itself that speaks directly to our most fundamental yearning to be loved: Peter, do you love me? 

    After all, the question is formulated because love is already given before it is shown.  For me that is the beauty of the conversation or as ÓMurchú would say- at some moment in every human life, we each grasp something of love’s own depth and beauty.[4]

As lovers go about their business today - matching outfits entirely red or at least adorned with a touch of it, rekindling failed romances, or succumbing to the inevitable Netflix and chill😀-love may come to us as either a promise or a threat. I am not particularly interested in the ritual of Valentine’s Day, where everyone exchanges “I love you.” What fascinates me more is Fiona’s silence - a suspension of the established ritual, a deferral of love’s declaration, a belated promise whispered in the warmth of summertime. Simply put, I am placing Fiona within Jean-Luc Nancy’s theme of the promise, where “I love you” resists immediate classification as either a constative or performative utterance. Abbott reads Nancy’s “I love you” as a kind of promise - a reading that Nancy himself contends with. In this sense, Fiona’s silence is not an absence but a lingering, a love that holds itself open, resisting closure in the immediacy of the moment.

Nancy wrote very strongly that:

“I love you" is not a performative (neither is it a descriptive nor a prescriptive statement). This sentence names nothing and does nothing. ("Though spoken billions of times, I LOVE YOU is extralexicographical; it is a figure whose definition cannot transcend the heading.")' It is the very sentence of indigence, immediately destined to its own lie or to its own ignorance and immediately abandoned to the harassment of a reality that will never authenticate it without reserve. In one sense, love does not arrive, and. on the contrary, it always arrives, so that in one way or another "the love boat has crashed against the everyday" (Mayakovsky).[5]

Saying "I love you" carries immense weight, yet it is not always a guarantee of truth. Can we ever be certain that what we feel is truly love, or do we sometimes mistake attachment, admiration, or fleeting passion for something deeper? Nancy further asserts that:

Love arrives then in the promise. In one sense (in another sense, always other, always at the limit of sense), it always arrives, as soon as it is promised, in words or in gestures. That is why, if we are exhausted or exasperated by the proliferating and contradictory multiplicity of representations and thoughts of love-which compose in effect the enclosure and the extenuation of a history of love---this same multiplicity still offers, however, another thought: love arrives in all the forms and in all the figures of love; it is projected in all its shatters.[6]

    The weight of saying "I love you" can feel heavier than receiving a poorly chosen Valentine’s gift - one that is thoughtless, inappropriate, or simply disappointing. If you manage to bear that weight, pulled in different directions by doubt, fear, and expectation, there’s something to learn from it. Love, after all, can sometimes be full of well-intended missteps - moments when words fail under the sheer weight of the heart. 

    I hadn't kept in touch with a friend I'd nicknamed "Nemesis" 😅. Time had widened the distance between us and I had let it.  Chobay😅 finally asked me why, out of unspoken concern. He didn't want an explanation, he just wanted to understand.  I hesitated, feeling the spaces where words should have been with a faint smile. Then, after a long pause, I smiled - not in dismissal, but in quiet determination.

"I will belate my love," I said.

     I'm not genetically obligated to search for our mutual friend, but the past compels me to enshrine our mutual friend  "Nemesis" as a memorial. I hope Valentine's Day allows us to reflect on this - but not so much that it becomes a cause for concern. After all, if we get too caught up in it, we might end up sending a Valentine to the wrong person... and no one needs that drama.😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅

 

Hemen A. Emmanuel O.S.A

Colegio Mayor Mendel. C. del Rector Royo-Villanova, 6, Moncloa - Aravaca, 28040 Madrid

Madrid, España.  

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[1] Wiman, Christian. "I Will Love You in the Summertime." The American Scholar, 29 Feb. 2016, https://theamericanscholar.org/i-will-love-you-in-the-summertime/.

[2] Nancy, Jean-Luc. “Shattered Love,” trans. Lisa Garbus and Simona Sawhney in The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 82-109. P.82

[3] Abbott, Mathew. "On Not Loving Everyone: Comments on Jean-Luc Nancy's 'L'amour en éclats' ['Shattered Love']." Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary, vol. 5, 2011, pp. 139–162.

[4] ÓMurchú, Diarmuid,  Quantum Theology : Spiritual Implications of the New Physics. Revised and updated, The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2004.

[5] Nancy, Jean-Luc. “Shattered Love,” P.100

[6] Ibid, p.101