Helen Fisher, Love Expert

"For over three decades, Dr. Helen Fisher has been instrumental in shaping what we know about the evolutionary origins of human behaviour and romantic love. A prominent public intellectual and active interdisciplinary scholar, her work has changed the way social and behavioural scientists think about the nuclear family and the reasons why humans form pair-bond relationships. By combining a variety of methodologies, her research on romantic relationships has continued to challenge conventional wisdom and shed new light on the intense human experiences of moving in, and out, of love."

https://www.elsevier.com/connect/anthropologist-and-love-expert-helen-fisher-on-the-mysteries-of-love

Holding the Paradox of Love and Pain

A friend recently introduced me to the idea of 'holding' the paradox of love and pain. 'It's like day and night' she said, 'they go together'.

I started to think about this from the perspective of the notion of a blueprint to life/art I'd developed through my creative research projects: This involves a dynamical oscillation between any oppositional tension that keeps the pot a-stir, leading to a 'becoming' through which an outcome or 'knowing' can emerge. In other words, this oscillation between tensions (that might be seen as between subjectivity-objectivity, intuitive-rational, inner-outer, self-other) drives a flow of action that leads something from the unknown into the known (or perhaps in love's case, from confusion to compromise) ... and ultimately towards the emergence of novel thinking or outcomes.

As for us two-legged emotional creatures, what more powerful oppositional tension is there to cause confusion and chaos, than being catapulted between love and pain. All those tragic romantic love stories written and passed down through the ages promulgate the immense power behind one of life's most viscerally 'felt' paradoxes. Paradoxical because with love, pain comes pre-wrapped as part of the package. Pain is inevitable, either through the chaotic dissolution of a relationship or in the end, a death. And this is true for all kinds of love, romantic, familial, or more broadly, the universal love of humanity. 

Dissolution or death is not always determined by a progressive, entropic decline towards an inevitable ending, but often there is a flash-point through which a shift of some kind takes place, and a rupture occurs that changes everything so significantly that you can't recognise the relationship as it was in its original form. This is the point of paradox, where novelty arises from those oppositional tensions central to the love-pain spectrum. Some part of us is transformed. One might say then, that any love-pain experience helps us to grow.

Those perennial, mythical love stories teach us this, even the lives and loves of real characters (such as Soloman and Sheba or John and Yoko) are a testament to the transformational, destructive/creative power of love. And I plan to investigate some of these. 

SO WHAT DOES ALL THIS LOVE STUFF HAVE TO DO WITH MY ART PRACTICE? 

Within my usual process of 'art-making', I start with an insight, a pointer. It's not always clear why I'm being beckoned to head down a particular path but I've learnt to trust in the process and to follow the breadcrumbs. Something in the timing of what my friend said deeply resonated. But why 'love and pain' and why the need to hold the paradox? What did it have to do with notions of empathy, unbound consciousness and the merging of subject-object/self-other, which underpinned my practice?

If however, all is interconnected in the Life-field (a term I use speculating there is an unseen ocean of unbound consciousnesses, or Jung's 'collective unconscious') and to empathise is to 'merge' albeit partly with an-Other for a shared subjective experience, what is at risk? Where do I end ... and you start, my love? Where is the boundary between us; is it the skin or is it beyond the boundary of the skin? In Wuthering Heights, Catherine had fully merged with her Other when she exclaimed: "I don't love Heathcliff, I am Heathcliff". Can true love ever be broken? What is at play in the ether during physical separation through both time and space that keeps us connected. Is there a red thread like the one Ariadne tied to Theseus' ankle that helps us find our way back to our significant Other?

And following from this, why do we have significant Others? How do we recognise them and what is the purpose of the attraction/connection? Is there something generated from a particular coupling that is useful either to a self or to a society?

Considering whatever I research follows me like a shadow into my own experiences, as I write I am thinking, "Do I really want to bring this on?" Would I embark Zombie-style, on a hero's journey looking for something I'd lost ... my own lost love perhaps? If I were to stay true to my methods, using Karen Barad's notion of onto-epistemology, there is an oscillation between subjective and objective experiential tensions that is necessary for any real 'knowing'. I must be prepared to have an ontological foot in the door so to speak, for some novel thinking to emerge, rendering my creative research fruitful ... and with some 'Strange Little Attractors' all bunched and bulging in readiness to enter the gates of consciousness !!

As I embark on this journey some initial questions arise:

"Could love, otherwise doomed, last if we learn to hold the paradox and simply accept that love hurts, nicely?"

"Why are some romantic connections more powerful than others? Is there unfinished business from other lives or times"? "Why do we keep returning to, or circling prior loves (e.g. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton)?"

"What do stories and myths tell us about powerful romantic connections (Tristan and Iseult, Romeo and Juliet) and love sacrifices made in the service of other commitments (Jesus and Mary Magdelene)? Is there anything in the field that might uncover such archetypes, either mythologically or historically, as a phenomenon?"

"Are there any culturally significant motifs that point to how tragic-romantic connections are transformative and therefore useful to partners or society at large?" "What do we learn from them?" "And why do such love stories remain so deeply embedded in our cultural consciousness and personal psyches?"

WISH ME LUCK AND STAND BY FOR UPDATES AND OUTCOMES!



APPENDIX: A few tragically romantic entanglements to explore (recommended by friends), for when you think you've got it tough! Feel free to add to the collection by leaving a comment.

A Million Little Pieces, James Frey 
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
Birds without Wings, Louis de Bernières
Candy, Luke Davies
Delicatessen, Gilles Adrien, Marc Caro, Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Dr Zhivago, Boris Pasternak
Elvira Madigan, Bo Widerberg
Like Water for Chocolate, Laura Esquivel
Love Story, Erich Segal
My Friend Leonard, James Frey
Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austin
The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje
The Golem and the Jinni, Helene Wecker
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
Swept Away, Kamery Solomon
Tess of the D'urbevilles, Thomas Hardy
The Fiery Angel, Valery Bryusov
The Mayor of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy
The Prophet, Kahil Gibran
The Slave, Isaac Bashevis Singer
The Virgin and the Gypsy, D. H. Lawrence
Tristan and Iseult, a Medieval legend