Beauty That is Never Old

Another fantastic poem that needs to be shared, by James Weldon Johnson:

When buffeted and beaten by life’s storms,
When by the bitter cares of life oppressed,
I want no surer haven than your arms,
I want no sweeter heaven than your breast.

When over my life’s way there falls the blight
Of sunless days, and nights of starless skies;
Enough for me, the calm and steadfast light
That softly shines within your loving eyes.

The world, for me, and all the world can hold
Is circled by your arms; for me there lies,
Within the lights and shadows of your eyes,
The only beauty that is never old.

Are We Addicted to Love?

How do I love thee? Let a poet count the ways. I love you to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach, to the level of everyday's most quiet need; freely, purely, with the passion of old grief and childhood's faith, with a love lost with lost saints, with the breadth, smiles, tears, of all my life.

Why do I love thee? Let anthropologist Helen Fisher count the ways. I love you because of a complex chemistry of dopamine, oxytocin, vasopressin, testosterone and norepinephrine; because I have a large caudate nucleus, amygdala, and hippocampus; because I walk upright and have helpless babies and I need you to protect me from predators. I love you because your testosterone has made you taller and stronger than me and given your jaw a handsome square cut.

Not very romantic, but what do you expect from a physiologic, evolutionary, and anthropological assessment of love? For Fisher is a love researcher. That's right. Love researcher. And she has collected the results of this research in her new book Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love.
And it's quite a collection. For example, did you know that there is a natural anti-depressant in seminal fluid? That there is a National Broken Hearts Day? That love's passions are the same across such disparate cultures as the United States and Japan? OK, maybe you knew that, since poetry across all cultures has so much to say on the topic. Did you know that love is an addiction? Of course you did.

But, did you know that the biochemistry of love is the same as the biochemistry of addiction? That's what Fisher's research shows. She has scanned the brains of people who are newly, deeply, and passionately in love and found that they have increased activity in areas that (surprise) are associated with arousal and concentration, such as the caudate nucleus and the ventral segmental area, the bottom portion of the brain that is high in dopamine producing cells. It is dopamine that's responsible for the cocaine addict's high, the chocolate lover's satisfaction, the cigarette smoker's contentment, and, evidently, the lover's passionate obsession. Fisher has also scanned the brains of dejected and rejected lovers, and although she doesn't share those results in the book, her thesis is that the dejected suffer from a depletion of dopamine, leading to feelings very similar to withdrawal.

Since she's an evolutionary anthropologist, not a poet or a psychologist, Fisher's take on this is that our loving ways have evolved to give us an evolutionary edge. Our dopamine level surges when we meet people who are most likely to make the best mates for us. From her studies, that would suggest that love's catalyst for men is beautiful, come-hither women. For women, it's square-jawed, successful men. But, if that's true, how do you explain that someone like Harvey Pekar has been married three times (twice before he became comic book famous)? Or how do you explain the miserable failures that are the marriages of so many Hollywood beautiful people?

Clearly, there's more to this love thing than hardwiring and neurotransmitters and evolutionary gain. And, too her credit, Fisher recognizes this. Maybe it was the exposure to all the poetry about love she peppers throughout her book. Or maybe it was her exposure to her research subjects in the agonizing throws of lost love. But, for whatever reason, she admits that there's something more at work in human love than a finely tuned, highly evolved animal magnetism. Even in our worst moments we are capable of controlling our basest passions. We are not slaves to our neurons. And at our best moments, we are capable of a higher, selfless love that can't be explained by evolutionary theory and that isn't found anywhere else in the animal kingdom.

Maybe understanding this thing we call love is best left to the poets.

Being Human

Nature is one of the most complicated terms in English or any language. It carries the weight of projected human fears and hopes, the marks of history and political conflict, the grounds for moral legitimation or condemnation. Running throughout these discussions, tying many of them together, is an ongoing debate about what it means to be human. As Raymond William writes, "What is often being argued... in the idea of nature is the idea of man." The reverse is also true: what is often being argued in the idea of 'man' is the idea of nature. Just as we cannot speak easily of nature without referring , implicitly or explicitly, to some idea of the human, so we rearely speak of humanness without an underlying conception of nature, either as that which encompasses or excludes humans or, perhaps more often, as that which humans exclude.

Not only are ideas of humanness and of nature wrapped up with each other, but they also shape ethical systems and practices. Questions such as what counts as human, what does not, and what is natural or unnatural do not simply feed philosophical debates but help determine moral and political priorities, patterns of behaviour, and institutional structures. So what is the connection among ideas about nature, ideas about humanness and environmental ethics? These relations are culturally and historically variable, theoretically complicated, and potentially vital. In exploring them, we face central issues regarding the shape of our communities, the destruction of our natural environment, and the character of moral discourse. Rethinking our different natures can illuminate both the need for and the possibilities of transformation.

To say ethics are intimately connected to ideas about what it means to be human suggests that understandings of humans ought to be or do rest, almost always, on ideas about what human beings are: individualistic or social, rational or emotional, violent or peaceful, biologically or socially constructed, among countless other possibilities. It is worth noting that many of these ideas about human nature are really about the particular kinds of humans who count, usually the same ones who have made the definitions.

To be continued.....