In John Steinbeck’s novel The Pearl, a Mexican fisherman named Kino retrieved a huge pearl. As he attempted to get the pearl to the market, the corrupt entities that ran Mexico at the time went after him and slaughtered his family. The book ends with Kino returning to the coast, seeing the pearl being full of faces, and throwing the pearl back into the ocean.
The pearl, of course, was not the guilty party, and neither was the fisherman. The guilty party were the corrupt entities that had the power over the lives of people in Mexico and abused that power to the extend that they did. The pearl was the pure and the true; the goodness that, being what it was, was sought after and desired – that being the pearl of goodness was also transparent, and dissolved into itself the reality of the context in which it existed. And what happened to the pearl, was the pure and precise reflection of the character of the place that it inhabited.
Same is the case with love. When love comes alive, becomes manifest and visible to all the reality of the place and the time in which the love takes place. All that lays claim on the people – official, unofficial, social, familial, religious – makes its interests known, frequently in very ugly ways. Many people make the mistake of blaming love for this. But love is itself innocent. What they should be blaming is the interests that lay such claims on people in nations that are intended to be free.
Sometimes these interests are manifest from without – through murder, violence, legal action, social attacks, and many more. At other times these interests are internalized in the minds of one or more of the lovers and teach them to abuse or suspect the lover. In both cases, the corruption and snares of the context eat into the pearl that is love in much the way that the faces of the corrupt did into the Kino’s pearl. And in many cases it is love that is blamed for anything bad that results when what should be blamed is the oppression and the corruption in which are operating the lovers.
What happens to lovers at any given place and time, therefore makes precise assayal of what the world is like at that given place and time. In many respects it is like a canary that is placed in the coal well to see whether, and to what extent, it is poisoned. What happens to the lovers – and what happens to the love – becomes precisely diagnostic of the character of the place and the time. And what comes their way, both externally and internally, gives precise analysis of the poisons that are found therein. The best way to understand the time and the place is therefore to fall in love with someone who lives in the place and the time and, from what comes one’s own way and her way, to make a precise assessment of the actual character of the place and the time.
One example that has been highly formative to the Anglophone civilization has been what happened to Queen Elizabeth I. The place and the time was owned by feudalism; and her lover, who was part of the feudalist order, betrayed her to join the feudalists’ plot against her. She had to choose between love and power and chose power (as well as of course survival). Queen Elizabeth turned England from a feudalist backwater into a great global civilization; but Anglophone women paid a price. Based on her example, women in Anglophone civilization have been running an Elizabethan script, where they have to choose between love and power over their lives. Those who chose love, have had to go into subservient roles where they had to give up their power and become dependent on men, many of whom had and have now a nasty habit of vastly abusing the power that they had over the women. Those who chose power over their lives, had to go without love. Neither group therefore was allowed a full existence; and for women to have full existence this Elizabethan script must be overcome. And this demands two things: For men to be able to accept women being free and powerful, and to be willing to love such women while treating them the way that a free and powerful person would accept.
One piecemeal solution – the English solution – is found in Romeo and Juliet. The lovers, who came from two warring feudalist clans, were sacrificed; and the clans, having seen through their deaths the pointlessness of their feud, ended the feud and came together to work on building a civilization. Another – the American solution – is found in Huckleberry Finn, in which the lovers swim the river to freedom as clans kill each other off. Both solutions are partial. The ideal solution is for the lovers to come together to build a life while reconciling the clans. In this is honored the love and becomes the seed of new life, while peace and reconciliation is accomplished between the respective societies.
The relationship between love and choice is a more intricate one than many suspect. As anyone who’s been in love knows, one doesn’t choose to be in love; being in love chooses oneself. Thereafter however one can either choose love or not choose love. Love pre-exists choice; then choice becomes requisite for maintaining the love. It’s not love under will and it’s not will under love. Love initiates; will maintains.
Therefore instead of making the error of Kino and blaming love, the duty of intellect and integrity is finding, addressing and resolving oppression, corruption and poison that is made apparent by its appearance. The clarity as to the workings of the time and the place that becomes manifest in the face of emotional truth then becomes the motive force for its improvement. And then not only can love be a reality, but so can honesty and freedom in the time and the place, and the corruption and the oppression within it can be overcome. And that carries a vast array of benefits for the time and the place and everyone in it.
What love makes manifest is then what stands in the way, not only of love, but also of truth and of freedom. In 1990s, the biggest barrier to love was a malicious, sex-hating, beauty-hating, passion-hating perversion of feminism known as political correctness, which was fanned by authors such as Andrea Dworkin and Catherine McKinnon and thrown on the population primarily from centers of higher learning. The women involved in that movement were practicing one side of the Elizabethan script: To have power by rejecting love – and in the process also attacking others’ right to have love likewise, ensuring, by poisoning against love the men and women who took feminism seriously, that women who sought love could only go into relationships with men who were thoroughly patriarchal and had no use for women’s rights at all.
Presently, the greatest problem comes not from feminism but from mens’ movements. The violent men who got together in anger management groups – groups such as Black Shirts who assault women who’ve left wife-beaters – men’s movements led by such figures as Ash Patil and Barry Williams in Australia, Michael Murphy in Canada, and the late Dr.Richard Gardner in America who was the author of the fictional Parental Alienation Syndrome – the corrupt courts that want to force family cohesion at the price of dignity, integrity, human rights and factual truth – and the people who think that family values and Christianity means beating one’s wife and molesting one’s children and forcing both to put up with such things all their life and on through generations – constitute now an even greater danger to love, but more importantly to truth and transparency. And while the men’s movement came as a reaction to 1990s feminism, in fact both are similar in their totalitarian intent, oppressive character, and corrupt and malicious tactics. And it is once again when there are manifestations of love that such are activated and show to the whole world what they truly are, where they intend to take the countries in which they operate, and where many of them have actually taken these countries.
Australia, where I have resided since October 2006, has a well-earned reputation for abusive treatment of women. One common joke is, “An American turns to his wife and says, ‘Pass the sugar, sugar.’ An Englishman turns to his wife and says, ‘Pass the honey, honey.’ An Australian turns to his wife and says, ‘Pass the tea, bag.’” For women involved in situations of family violence, whether in Australia or any place else, this is no laughing matter. Not only is real, ongoing, brutality faced by hundreds of millions of women, but it is when they attempt to break free from the violence that the real torture begins.
Two years ago, a man named Arthur Freeman, who was on an access visit with his four-year-old daughter Darcy, threw her off Melbourne’s West Gate Bridge. The child’s mother had warned the court about Mr. Freeman’s violence; the court disregarded her warnings. It turns out that filicide and matricide is more common than anyone suspects, and in America alone four mothers and nine children die daily as a result of it. In Australia, the numbers are not as easy to come by any more because in New South Wales, by far Australia’s most populous state, the fathers have the right to suppress coroners’ records when they have committed filicide.