The Truth About Love

Since this Valentine's Day is so close to Auden's centenary, this ("O Tell Me the Truth About Love") seemed appropriate:

Some say that love's a little boy
And some say it's a bird,
Some say it makes the world go round,
And some say that's absurd,
And when I asked the man next-door,
Who looked as if he knew,
His wife got very cross indeed,
And said it wouldn't do.

Does it look like a pair of pajamas,
Or the ham in a temperance hotel?
Does it's odour remind one of llamas,
Or has it a comforting smell?
Is it prickly to touch as a hedge is,
Or soft as eiderdown fluff?
Is it sharp or quite smooth at the edges?
O tell me the truth about love.

But on the topic, EurekAlert! reports that the truth about it involves mostly oxytocin and vasopressin and the regions of the brain that respond to it:

A new study of young mothers by researchers at University College London (UCL) has shown that romantic and maternal love activate many of the same specific regions of the brain, and lead to a suppression of neural activity associated with critical social assessment of other people and negative emotions. The findings suggest that once one is closely familiar with a person, the need to assess the character and personality of that person is reduced, and bring us closer to explaining why, in neurological terms, 'love makes blind.'

In the experiment, published in February's NeuroImage online preview edition, the brains of 20 young mothers were scanned while they viewed pictures of their own children, children they were acquainted with, and adult friends, to control for feelings of familiarity and friendship (the brain regions involved in romantic love having been identified by the authors in an earlier study).

The similarity of the activity recorded in this study compared to those obtained in the earlier study was striking; with activity in several regions of the brain overlapping precisely in the two studies. In summary, the findings showed that both types of love activate specific regions in the reward system, while reducing activity in the systems necessary for making negative judgements.

Comments

[Maeve Adams]

Auden's poem offers an illumination of more than love in his playful critique of modern modes of rationality that give meaning and substance to abstract concepts like "love": the knowledge of love, as the poem's speaker unmasks, depends on the a priori logic of cliched knowledge. The hackneyed metaphors that make love know-able are deprived of their rich significance by juxtaposition. That is, in the moment that love looks like it means a lot (a boy, a bird and the force of diurnal rotation), it is exposed to mean nothing concrete at all. How is a "boy" like a "bird" and how are they like the force of diurnal rotation. The answer is that they are not like each other at all and "love," is in that instance made "absurd."

Auden transitions gleefully in the next stanza to deprive the knowledge of love not just of rational sense, but also of its capacity to be subjected to all other modes of sensory perception: love cannot be seen, touched, smelled or tasted. It's not just that love escapes reason, but that it also reminds us of the limitations of "reason": that is, it reminds us how we are limited by the very way we conceive of reason as a technological apparatus, outfitted exhaustively and perfectly with the tools for the acquisition (the senses) and the dissemination (the capacity to reason, write and deploy representation) of what we call knowledge.

And yet the beauty of the poem lies in its paradoxical affirmation that "love" is made real in ephemeral and unexpected ways. It is given form in strange textual places: railway guides, "cryptic little notes," "accounts of suicides" and the poem itself. At the same time that the knowledge of love contradicts itself--and threatens to make Love unknowable--the experience of being unable to account for Love or anticipate its arrival by knowing what it looks, feels, smells or tastes like (showing up when the speaker is picking his nose at the end of the poem) makes it worth knowing, or, trying to know.