Four Letter Words–Emmanuel Theus-Roberts

FOUR LETTER WORDS —E.C. Theus-Roberts

                Love is a four-letter word for treachery. Can it be doubted? Well, let one assume.

                It is not a question of what love is so much as an inquiry of what is known of love. This is no specific questioning of specific loves. Nothing to do with romantic or amorous feelings, familial devotion, companionship, the carousing, carefree, caring affection of friends.

                Love and treachery correlate not because of these categories or others. Rather they correspond because of modern comprehension because of the aforementioned four-letter word.

                What is known of love? The very opposite that is known of pain. Leve, everybody on some level desires to possess. Pain, for many, is an acquired taste. Love is most often sought after as a thing, item, mere commodity. This of mind infects the blood. What is sought after to possess is destined to be controlled. What is possessed is controlled and things we control we own. There is no such thing as ownership in love. Possessiveness breeds jealousy. Jealously is the insecurity of an uncertain possession.

                To wrest love from treachery may seem a difficult task. In reality one is never present without the other. The potential for one constitutes the other’s possibility.

                How is love gauged but by the absence of other four-letter words?

                Pain, foremost among these, presides over all others enthroned in a red gossamer dais. At pains side is hate in the equally brilliant pride of place. Fear firmly figures among treachery’s retinue. With fear comes envy so lights dim, and sentiments turn gloomy. Pain, hate, fear, and envy, whether acknowledged or not, these are the trappings of modern love.

                The most sublime of all acts we approach as a commercial interest. So base. SO full of fear, apprehension, uncertain of success. Yet what qualifies “success” in love? The very same as describes accomplishment in business—championing one’s interests. Though love is no business transaction. When failure is greeted, bitter hate blossoms. Enmity in business leads to competition, a greater desire to possess. In love the covetous effect tends toward the sadistic. There is no stronger hate than a love denied. Like anger, hate is a pleasant balm for discomforting emotions.

Hate and anger most often cloak hurt. Pain is the offspring of every hurt. Few hurts are worse than rejection. Few emotions are stronger than love. Stronger the emotions, more deep rooting the consequences. Hate raised by the pain of a hurt from a love lost is a desolate thing. Desolation is only one aspect of the other four-letter word characteristic of modern love. Loss, it leaves its mark. Even puppy love is a heartache one never forgets.

                Measures, ratios, balances. The mathematics of love.

                Today, love is weighed and compared no different than a heart on a scale. The value of those four letters is found by a rational pros and cons calculus. Tallying up accounts, love is appraised its expenses versus earnings. To welcome the parts as sufficient pay for tolerating the whole. Love gained is love lost if darkness is shunned. Such is the crux of modern love: loss.

                Loss is a catastrophe. Love is catastrophic. Each shatters a paradigm not merely shifting reality. Loss is a forlorn abundance, frequent as dawn kissing an eastern sky. Love, the smiling fool, shunted aside in our could courts, Love is considered through the taint of loss. More than anything else in love is the fear of losing yourself.

                Self is Priam’s tall citadel of strong ramparts and higher walls; a fortress to protect one from the vulnerability of being human. To love is to be vulnerable. Love demands such because it is expensive, actually and potentially. In the same breath, it is also constricting and fearsome.

                For modern society, love is a Greek bearing gifts.

                Though no man is an island, there is safety in isolation. This safety is a two-edged sword. Likewise love, the black twin of treachery, apartness cuts equally of sadness. Once love is given then betrayed, sad emotions are all that remain. From this lachrymose palace floats the perfumes of longing. Longing is a piteous hope and hope is decisive, unless and until that longing is fulfilled. The quest to solve such longings is what defines modern love while, at the same time, making betrayal most probable.

                The question is: To love or not to love?

                Hope, another four letter word, is a conquest, there is always some degree of failure. Failure in love comes from seeking to gain and profit, not give and accept.

                Fear. Hurt. Envy. Loss. Pain. Hate. Hope.

                Eros and Thanatos, the correlates of hope and hate. The reality is treachery is part and parcel every love withheld for love demanded. We pursue the disappointment in each love encounter and therefore, are creators of our own hells.

                To love is to willingly become vulnerable. For a love realized is an amazing thing. Despite failure after failure, there is no insanity in hoping for what could be. Loving is to embrace the torture of love. Though today love is often something different.

                Love is a viper who only smiles before it strikes.