"What Wild Ecstasy":
Being In Love
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.
James Weldon Johnson
"Beauty That Is Never Old"
"Fires run through my body -- the pain of loving you. Pain runs
through my body with the fires of my love for you. Sickness wanders my
body with my love for you. Pain like a boil about to burst with my
love for you. Consumed by fire with my love for you. I remember what
you said to me. I am thinking of your love for me. I am torn by your
love for me. Pain and more pain. Where are you going with my love? I'm
told you will go from here. I am told you will leave me here. My body
is numb with grief. Remember what I've said, my love. Goodbye, my
love, goodbye." So spoke an anonymous Kwakiutl Indian of southern
Alaska in this wrenching poem, transcribed from the native tongue in
1896.
How many men and women have loved each other in all the seasons that
preceded you and me? How many of their dreams have been fulfilled; how
many of their passions wasted? Often as I walk or sit and contemplate,
I wonder at all the heartrending love affairs this planet has
absorbed. Fortunately, men and women around the world have left us a
great deal of evidence of their romantic lives.
From Uruk, in ancient Sumer, come poems on cuneiform tablets that hail
the passion of Inanna, Queen of Sumeria, for Dumuzi, a shepherd boy.
"My beloved, the delight of my eyes," Inanna cried to him over four
thousand years ago.
Vedic and other Indian texts, the earliest dating between 1000 and 700
B.C., tell of Shiva, the mythic Lord of the Universe, who was
infatuated with Sati, a young Indian girl. The god mused that "he saw
Sati and himself on a mountain pinnacle / enlaced in love."
For some, happiness would never come. Such was Qays, the son of a
tribal chieftain in ancient Arabia. An Arabic legend, dating to the
seventh century A.D., has it that Qays was a beautiful, brilliant boy
-- until he met Layla, meaning "night" for her jet black hair. So
intoxicated was Qays that one day he sprang from his school chair to
race through the streets shouting out her name. Henceforth he was
known as Majnun, or madman. Soon Majnun began to drift with the desert
sand, living in caves with the animals, singing verses to his beloved,
while Layla, cloistered in her father's tent, slipped out at night to
toss love notes to the wind. Sympathetic passersby would bring these
appeals to the wild-haired, almost-naked poet boy. Their mutual
passion would eventually lead to war between their tribes -- and death
to the lovers. Only this legend remains.
Meilan also lived by dying. In the twelfth century A.D. Chinese fable
"The Jade Goddess," Meilan was the pampered fifteen-year-old daughter
of a high official in Kaifeng -- until she fell in love with Chang Po,
a vivacious lad with long tapered fingers and a gift for carving jade.
"Since the heaven and earth were created, you were made for me and I
was made for you and I will not let you go," Chang Po declared to
Meilan one morning in her family's garden. These lovers were of
different classes in China's rigid, hierarchical social order,
however. Desperate, they eloped -- then were soon discovered. He
escaped. She was buried alive in her father's garden. But the tale of
Meilan still haunts the souls of many Chinese.
Romeo and Juliet, Paris and Helen, Orpheus and Eurydice, Abelard and
Eloise, Troilus and Cressida, Tristan and Iseult: thousands of
romantic poems, songs, and stories come across the centuries from
ancestral Europe, as well as the Middle East, Japan, China, India, and
every other society that has left written records.
Even where people have no written documents, they have left evidence
of this passion. In fact, in a survey of 166 varied cultures,
anthropologists found evidence of romantic love in 147, almost 90
percent of them. In the remaining 19 societies, scientists had simply
failed to examine this aspect of people's lives. But from Siberia to
the Australian Outback to the Amazon, people sing love songs, compose
love poems, and recount myths and legends of romantic love. Many
perform love magic -- carrying amulets and charms or serving
condiments or concoctions to stimulate romantic ardor. Many elope. And
many suffer deeply from unrequited love. Some kill their lovers. Some
kill themselves. Many sink into a sorrow so profound that they can
hardly eat or sleep.
From reading the poems, songs, and stories of people around the world,
I came to believe that the capacity for romantic love is woven firmly
into the fabric of the human brain. Romantic love is a universal human
experience.
What is this volatile, often uncontrollable feeling that hijacks the
mind, bringing bliss one moment, despair the next?
http://homepage.mac.com/helenfisher/Sites/articlespage/a2.htm
"It became apparent to me that
romantic love was a drive -- a
drive as strong as thirst,
as hunger..." --Helen Fisher
If romantic passion is hardwired into our brains by millions of years
of evolution, it is not an emotion; it is a drive as powerful as
hunger.
Anthropologist Fisher argues that much of our romantic behavior is
hard-wired in [her] provocative examination of love. Her case is
bolstered by behavioral research into the effects of two crucial
chemicals, norepinephrine and dopamine, and by surveys she conducted
across broad populations.
When we fall in love, she says, our brains create dramatic surges of
energy that fuel such feelings as passion, obsessiveness, joy and
jealousy. Fisher devotes a fascinating and substantial chapter to the
appearance of romance and love among non-human animals, and composes
careful theories about early humans in love.
In 1996, Dr. Helen Fisher, with a team of behavioral scientists, set
out to investigate the mystery of "being in love." Their objective was
to find out why we love, why we choose the people that we choose, the
differences between male and female feelings as it pertains to
romance, animal love, love at first sight, love and lust, love and
marriage, evolution of love, love and hate, and the brain in love. The
culmination of this study has now been summed in Dr. Fisher's book,
Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love.
The method used by Dr. Fisher and her team was to ask their love-
smitten subjects to look at a photograph of his or her beloved, and
secondly to look at another photograph of an acquaintance who
generated no positive or negative romantic feelings. Pictures were
taken of the brain and blood flows in the brain were also recorded.
In order to scientifically study these themes, Dr. Fisher and her team
used the newest technology for brain scanning known as functional
magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The team endeavored to record men
and women's brain activity, after they had just fallen madly in love.
The principal objective was to record the range of feelings associated
with "being in love." ...Fisher proved what psychologists had until
recently only suspected: when you fall in love, specific areas of the
brain "light up" with increased blood flow.
One of her many surprising conclusions suggests that, since "four-year
birth intervals were the regular pattern of birth spacing during our
long human prehistory," our modern brains still deal with
relationships in serially monogamous terms of about four years.
Indeed, Fisher gathered data from around the world showing that
divorce was most prevalent in the fourth year of marriage, when a
couple had a single dependent child.
Fisher also reports on the behaviors that lead to successful lifelong
partnerships and offers, based on what she's observed, numerous tips
on staying in love...
This book ...goes beyond observable behaviors to consider their
underlying brain mechanisms. Most people think of romantic love as a
feeling. Fisher, however, views it as a drive so powerful that it can
override other drives, such as hunger and thirst, render the most
dignified person a fool, or bring rapture to an unassuming wallflower.
This original hypothesis is consistent with the neurochemistry of
love. While emphasizing the complex and subtle interplay among
multiple brain chemicals, Fisher argues convincingly that dopamine
deserves center stage. This neurotransmitter drives animals to seek
rewards, such as food and sex, and is also essential to the pleasure
experienced when such drives are satisfied. Fisher thinks that
dopamine's action can explain both the highs of romantic passion
(dopamine rising) and the lows of rejection (dopamine falling).
Citing evidence from studies of humans and other animals, she also
demonstrates marked parallels between the behaviors, feelings and
chemicals that underlie romantic love and those associated with
substance addiction. Like the alcoholic who feels compelled to drink,
the impassioned lover cries that he will die without his beloved.
Dying of a broken heart is, of course, not adaptive, and neither is
forsaking family and fortune to pursue a sweetheart to the ends of the
earth.
Why then, Fisher asks, has evolution burdened humans with such
seemingly irrational passions? Drawing on evidence from living
primates, paleontology and diverse cultures, she argues that the
evolution of large-brained, helpless hominid infants created a new
imperative for mother and father to cooperate in child-rearing.
Romantic love, she contests, drove ancestral women and men to come
together long enough to conceive, whereas attachment, another complex
of feelings with a different chemical basis, kept them together long
enough to support a child until weaning (about four years).
Evidence indicates that as attachment grows, passion recedes. Thus,
the same feelings that bring parents together often force them apart,
as one or both fall in love with someone new. In this scenario, broken
hearts and self-defeating crimes of passion become the unfortunate by-
products of a biological system that usually facilitates
reproduction.
Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry
of Romantic Love - by Helen Fisher
http://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Love-Chemistry-Romantic/dp/0805069135
http://thebestreviews.com/review20806
http://www.theswartzfoundation.org/mind-brain-2006.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love
http://www.helenfisher.com/
http://homepage.mac.com/helenfisher/Sites/articlespage/a2.htm
http://www.cnn.com/2006/HEALTH/conditions/02/14/science.of.love/index.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/hottopics/love/
http://www.curledup.com/whywelov.htm
