the camera obscura

“There is something that comes suddenly like a wind on a warm summer’s evening. It takes you off guard and leaves you with no peace. It follows you like a shadow and it’s impossible to shake. I don’t know what it is, so I can only call it love.” –diary of Yu Hong, Summer Palace-

It's been a while since I felt the kind of love Yu Hong -the character in Summer Palace movie- had for Zhou Wei, the man she loved deeply. The kind of love that hurts you so much you don't know how to deal with. The kind of love that makes you capable of doing things beyond your thoughts. When I was watching the movie, I could still feel the scar in my heart, left by a guy I once loved acutely.

There's something about this movie that stirred me. I don't miss or feel in love with that guy anymore. But I'm sad, because love had been treating Yu Hong unfairly. Love wrecked her. Love posed a question without giving her clues to answers, love started a fire that burnt her alive and then left her alone, agitated. You know how it feels to live with unanswered questions, it seems you never rest in peace. Just thinking about it I felt so tired. This kind of love, weighs you down like a chain ball attached to you. No, it's like a chain ball attached to your leg in the sea, it drowns you fast and quick.

Then today, I found out that the guy I used to love wrote something about love for his paper assignment. He said, after reading Derrida, he had an empty head when it came to love. This is what Derrida said about love and being "is love the love of someone or the love of something? Ok, supposing I loved someone, do I love someone for the absolute singularity of who they are? I love you because you are you, or do I love your qualities, your beauty, your intelligence? Does one love someone, or does one love something about someone?"

What he wrote made me think.  I think we can't separate the who and the what from love. I mean, we are made from what we think, we experience, we feel. In the matter of man and women love, it's possible to solely love a being, without anything else that makes that being, a someone. I know I sound like I'm boxing my mind but I do sincerely believe that it's almost non-sense to love someone for their being only.

I think my parents are capable of loving my siblings and I that way. The moment we arrived in their lives, they've already loved our beings, regardless what we would become later on. There's something pure about newborns and especially if that newborn is our own. That gives us reasons to love them for who they are. And also the purpose of their existence is to make the lives of the adults around them better, they represent hope.
So, to parents their children are like salvation. Their love for their children save them, from many things. From the fear of the unknown future, from the stagnant life, I don't know. I'm just guessing, it's pretty magical to see an abstract thing called "love between a man and a woman" in a concrete shape called a baby.

But, if a person can love someone who's not blood related to them for the way they are as beings, I guess we call that person, Mother Theresa?
It's just really hard for me to grasp if there's a person capable of loving someone (as a man and a woman or vice versa) for their being, solely. Isn't it a bit naive? I don't know.