At one time at one moment you felt love for one person and it surrounded you multiplied you exponentially making air light and light air robbing you of bitterness and anger and pain and when the moment passed you still said you loved that person out of respect for that feeling and maybe since then that emotion that overwhelming tenderness that sense of expansiveness and joy has arrived again or maybe it hasn’t for quite some time but despite its momentary fragmented appearance you called that feeling love and then subsequently you loved that person. So now there is love the feeling a noun something which is of an instant and beautiful and fills you with light and air and then there is love the verb the state of being and the action that you do more or less it is supposed constantly. Between the two the noun and the verb there is a semantic distance. It’s not just a question of semantics or maybe it is and that’s what makes it so important. Semantics. Love is a moment then an explosion of air and light and to love is a daily decision to hold tight to that feeling and shelter it and to await its twinkling reappearance. But the verb love is comprised of many small moments and is not a constant state at all but a kind of arc on an XY graph with points on it but love is never a line. That moment you felt reappears at intervals sometimes often and sometimes less so always out of the ether and unexpected never willed or called into being and in the meantime the verb of love ties these moments together but could never be constantly felt in that way and so the semantic distance between love and to love is clear. If only how to love in the wide expanses between the appearances of the noun of love were so obvious.

(Foto by Abraham Palafox. See Abraham´s fotoblog here.)

(This is a reprint from the Catalogue of Feeling.)

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