Love: Bliss or a cage for two birds?

Just my Heart and Soul (Hurlstone/Austin Oct 2024)

Trying to untangle the existential experience we call ‘love’ is not easy! Artists, be they writers’ poets, painters’ dancers or musicians have been attempting to capture the essence of this complex, mercurial, shape shifting emotion since we first became aware that it even existed.

‘Just my Heart and Soul’ is a celebration of this state of being, a condition that can sometimes bring us overwhelming joy but also crushing emotional pain. We all have our own experiences.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson in his (Canto 27 of In Memoriam 1850) expressed the potential trade-off, the emotional for and against arguments of being in love, succinctly: ‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.’ The pain of loss does not outweigh the pleasure brought through love is his conclusion. Love, in this interpretation, is always worth the price we sometimes must pay.

Great philosophers such as Jean Paul Satre saw love as something of an illusion. He postulated that the essence and pleasure of love is achieved when we truly possess the other person and find our meaning through this secure bond of control, so much so that we live our life through the security of this bond. But control has significant drawbacks, not least the fact that it tends to impact negatively on relationship. Commitment might provide us with a degree of security but further down the road eyes that once looked at us lovingly might now flash with anger. Birds find little pleasure in being caged.

We might hope that love will last, for some it surely does, but for many it is a hopeless dance, a beautiful one perhaps, but one doomed for many to lie on the cutting room floor like a remake of ‘Romeo and Julie’. Romantic love can be powerful, passionate, all consuming, but it does not come with any guarantees. We choose to be with or without someone, partners, lovers are free to stay or leave, the future is not known. When in love we are vulnerable and this drives our behaviour, argues Satre, as we attempt to close the padlock on our partners freedom. The consequence of this is often conflict. The beginning of the end.
So, does love always force us to make deals about our freedom? Jean-Paul Sartre felt this to be the case, a struggle between submission or dominance, an emotional, sometimes coercive power brokerage where freedom, perhaps unintentionally, becomes the ultimate loser.

Way back in 1985 Sting was advocating ‘If you love somebody set them free’ on his first album ‘The Dream of the Blue Turtles.’ His 27yr marriage to Trudy Tyler has been a happy one and, based upon his public reflections, it has steadily morphed from the passion of the early years to a relationship of friends, confidants. “We’re friends too – we love each other but we actually like each other…” He seems to be suggesting that long commitments are indeed quite possible, but expectations, in his view, need to change and close friendship is a vitally important ingredient of any long-term commitment.

Sting’s views, and the title of his song seem to have been influenced by the writing of Nietzche, who suggested that lovers often act like “the dragon guarding his golden hoard” and treat a loved one like an exotic bird - “as something also which must be cooped up to prevent it flying away.”

The words of ‘Just my Heart and Soul’- based upon a poem written by Amanda Austin, explore both sides of the divide. The song though is meant as a celebration, love as a journey not a destination and the universal language spoken and understood by us all.

'Just my Heart and Soul' will be released in October.