Reflections on love, Leonard Cohen, and kissing

A Wonder Report for Valentine's Day

Happy Valentine’s Day, Story Rulers!

For many of us, this is a complicated day: on the one hand, what a lovely thing to have a holiday entirely devoted to love. On the other hand, what a crass and compromising thing for a holiday to so thoroughly commercialize and corrupt the concept of love it claims to celebrate. This year, Americans will spend over $27 billion on Valentine's Day, and we will do it in completely predictable ways that have been dictated by the marketplace: we'll give each other cards and candy, we’ll spring for roses and jewelry, we'll go out to dinner.

Many of us are caught in the same clichéd conundrum: we understand that Valentine's Day is big business, that it is economically and emotionally exploitative, that it pushes us into expensive, performative displays that have very little to do with actual, authentic expressions of love. And yet, we observe the holiday anyway. Because to ignore it would be worse.

I. What Is Love, Actually?

This Valentine's Day, I've been thinking a lot about what love actually is, and what genuine expressions of love actually are. I’m thinking of the small, sweet acts of kindness that punctuate a genuinely loving relationship, the little moments of being-together that look so small in themselves, but add up to everything: the laughter, the sharing, the gentle patience, the care, the warm holding of hands, literally and metaphorically. These things are the poetry of human connection – they cannot be boxed or bottled, bought or sold. They are the special unspoken language of love.

A line from ee cummings comes to me as I write this: “Since feeling is first who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you.” In other words, if you're caught up in expressing your love according to the consumerist rules of our world, you'll lose track of the feeling itself: in performing love, you'll stop feeling love, and your lover will feel all the force of that stopping.

This is a double bind with neurobiological roots. The brain in love is flooded with feel-good hormones such as dopamine, oxytocin, and vasopressin. This cocktail induces deep feelings of contentment, connection, security, and calm — all emotions that are foundational to monogamous human bonding. Even more dramatic: when the brain is high on love, it actually cannot experience emotions such as fear, social anxiety, and judgment. Love shuts down the neural pathways of negativity. Conversely, the brain that is caught up in the kind of anxiety that arises on a day such as Valentine's Day — the kind that drives us to spend money we may not have to stage a performance of feeling for our beloved — that brain cannot experience love.

The poet was more right than he knew: We truly cannot pay attention to the syntax of things and wholly kiss.

So how do we express our love to the one who is dearest to our heart? How can we show how we feel without losing the feeling – and, by extension, losing deep connection with the one we love?

II. The Art of Love

One answer, it turns out, is poetry.

For years now, neuroscientists have been hooking people up to EEGs and running them through fMRI machines in order to understand the effect of poetry on the brain. The results have been remarkable. Poetry, we now know, works on us in ways that other kinds of language – even literary language – do not. It also works on us in ways that are different from listening to music or watching films, and it does so in different parts of the brain. For these reasons and more, scientists believe that humans are wired for poetry — that we have evolved to respond intuitively to rhyme, meter, and layered, evocative metaphor, and that immersion in poetry, in turn, develops our capacities for creative, adaptive thought. Reading poetry, often seen as a “useless” activity with no real purpose, may actually help us grapple with the world.

One of the ways poetry does this: it helps us access, store, and communicate powerful feelings. More than any other kind of language, poetry can give us goosebumps and chills and also something called "pre-chills,” which we get when we are anticipating pleasure. We can get pre-chills when we are listening to poems we've never heard before, rather the way our mouths can water when we smell something magnificent, even if we have never tasted it. Finally, the lines that move us most in a poem are the ones we remember best. Poetry activates pleasure pathways while also laying down memory. In this way poetry works with the brain to form an endlessly accessible pleasure circuit — poetry stores emotion, or it enables the brain to store emotion. And that emotion is always there for us, available whenever we revisit the poem.

Poetry thus has a particular affinity with love: it allows us to do the impossible, to express feeling in a dramatic, artful way without losing touch with the feeling itself. To return to ee cummings’ words, poetry makes it possible to pay attention to the syntax of things and still wholly kiss.

And so, on this day, and really on every day, I encourage you to explore poetry. It's all over the Internet, much of it free. Do some googling, do some reading, and when you find something that stuns or moves you, read it out loud to yourself and really let yourself feel it: goosebumps, chills, pre-chills, all of it. And then, if you dare, read it to your love, and maybe then, if you double dare, wholly kiss them.

III The Verdict

Leonard Cohen called poetry a “verdict that we give to something that moves us” — by which he meant that a poem is in the eye — or the ear — of the beholder, and is whatever, to our mind, has “authority and music and resonance.” Poetry can be found anywhere, even in our casual daily speech.

In that spirit, I leave you with my own very most favorite love poem, which I discovered when I was about 16, and which has never been displaced.

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

That’s by e.e. cummings, and was published in 1931. Please share your own favorites in the comments — and Happy Valentines’ Day to you and yours.