All You Need is Love
The Universal Justifier
He said to me — It’s all about love I said — There’s less to it than that
Love, the universal justifier — it makes everything right. Love, the overriding reason for so many things, so many anythings; for so many lives, so many deaths, even some wars, or many.
Of course, it’s also a matter of definition.
Not only will any given dictionary give you a heaping handful of unlike meanings, different cultures will then add their own slants and takes on love and its myriad variations.
And burrowing down further: each individual — whether experientially or intellectually — will offer you a unique tale and take on love, some leaning toward out-and-out lust, others toward middling infatuation, and yet others leaning toward the selfless (disinterested — some would say pure) love.
While still (after fifty-plus years) an incredible song, I think that perhaps The Beatles’ “All You Need is Love” is a song with as many meanings as there are pairs of legs walking this Earth. None of them entirely true — not by any known definition.
Messrs. John and Paul need to supply some definitions as well: of words like “All”, “You”, “Need”, and, of course, “Love”. We’ll take “is” as it is.
If by “All” you mean “absolutely nothing but” then you cannot possibly be a human being. One word: food — you cannot eat Love, and so you starve to death. Another word: water — you’ll die without it. Sorry. Same goes for sleep and an army of other human physical life-requirements.
If by “You” you include human beings, then see the preceding paragraph.
If by “Need” you mean “have to have in order to survive” then see the preceding two paragraphs.
And then comes the sticky word: “Love”. Precisely what love are John and Paul talking about?
We have at our disposal the full gamut of candidates running all the way from lust to infatuation to sexual love to fondness to adoration to tenderness to compassion to pure (universal) love to choose from. Which one are they talking about? Or are they in fact talking about any of the above? Are they leaving it up to us, hearing the song, to decide what type of love is all that you need?
Hearing the song as a teenager, I (of course) knew precisely what they meant by that word, love: they meant what I had already experienced once or twice by then: infatuation — only I didn’t call it infatuation, I called it LOVE, aka hormonal overload.
Growing a little more cynical in my twenties, I knew exactly what love they were talking about (after all, 1967 was the summer of the thing, wasn’t it?): they were talking cliché, pure and simple. A cliché of the “Make Love not War” variety. Just so many words, really, along with the Beatles’ usual unbeatable melody and arrangement (they really were the perfect musical storm, The Beatles were).
If anything, I grew more cynical in my thirties, and, to my mind, the song grew more and more commercial, even opportunistic. Just so much empty (though beautiful) noise.
In my forties I wondered whether George might have had some input; after all, George was the Eastern Philosophy Beatle, and by his light “love” would have been more altruistic than the sixties’ make-love-fest rendition. But he was not given writer’s credit, so probably not.
Today, I still believe that John and Paul wrote the song against the global backdrop of the Summer of Love, with no more personal, or deep thought than “let’s write a feel-good love-song,” which they did — no one can dispute that.
Looking back over my own life, love has, as a pretty hard and fast rule, been about propagating the race. At heart, in the engine room of love, it’s been about hormones and the drive to bed (as a verb).
Leaving the engine room for the upper decks, this same love, shedding its practical coat, does not appear quite so pragmatic, or impersonal; no, no, not at all, here it’s taking on a sheer, romantic sheen that part blinds and part beautifies. It has also have rid itself of any stray strand of logic that might still have clung about.
“Head in the clouds” describes the condition quite well.
And in this condition, love justifies all, for love transcends all.
What grocers considers wrong, what bakers consider selfish, love considers right and noble. What common (not-in-love) sense considers idiotic or foolhardy or just plain insane, love considers brave and oh, so romantic — gallant, even.
Love knows best, and as the heart dances about drunk on possibilities, the truly afflicted listens to it and acts accordingly.
That’s how babies are made.
I think that in the universal dictionary, only the Bodhisattva and Jesus varieties would qualify as true love — the love of, and empathy with, and compassion for all beings.
Yes, I’ve heard of Mr. and Mrs. who have been married going on sixty years now and still hold hands walking down the street. To be honest, I’m mystified. Either they share the emotional depth of plywood, or they are truly in love with each other — soul mates, as it were, and that would be a fine and beautiful thing. What’s the expression? That expression that doesn’t make an ounce of sense: The exception that proves the rule.
Yes, that’s the one.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
© Wolfstuff
