Arsenal

I think about words a lot. Maybe this is because I use them...poet, commentator, observer, philosopher. To me, a true intellectual has an arsenal at his disposal, and needs little else. Maybe its because my mother was an English teacher, and the finest I ever had. Maybe its because my father was a professor of foreign languages: Spanish, Portugese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Chinese (several dialects), Korean, Russian, Latin...and more. It was an odd way to grow up. My father always had all the words, in all the languages.

Tonight, I'm thinking of these words: adore and abhor. Aren't those precocious synonyms for love and hate? I must always equivocate if I ask myself that, and believe me equivocating with oneself isn't easy. Yes, I suppose, those are synonyms for love and hate, but they define synonym as directly substitutable for another word and I would argue that each and every word has its own distinct meaning and purpose. Oscar winner is synonymous with Tom Hanks, but they aren't the same thing. I'm just pulling your leg with that one.

I have read in metaphysical books that what you put your energy into is what truly matters to you. Workaholics may say they love their family most...but we all know the end to that one. Most people believe their true "love" lies in one spot, and then focus their energy elsewhere. It doesn't take a particularly large or shiny mirror to see what you really love, if you are open to self-reflection.

To abhor something, to loathe it so extremely as to be horrified by it (the root of the word abhor)...that seems a lot of energy to expend. And if I expend that much energy, then by the above principle, do I not love and adore the very same thing?

There's a line of Leonardo DiCaprio's in a marginal movie, that I enjoy anyway (The Man in the Iron Mask, I always enjoy Randall Wallace's directing). Speaking as Louis XIV, Leonardo delivers this line as he orders his twin, Phillipe, back into the Iron Mask. "Wear it until you love it." I can't think of many things more horrific than a life in prison in an iron mask. Wear it until you love it...

That's what we do, you know? We wear our hatreds, unstudied emotions, ill-formed opinions, and harsh judgments of others until we love them. That is where we put our energy. We adore our own egotistical satisfaction. It becomes the iron mask we cannot remove, and cannot remember why we would even want to.

My ex-husband likes to tell me that I'm the one who taught him this valuable lesson. He says, "Hate is not the opposite of Love, not caring is." Naturally, this drives me batshit , because that mismashed can of Who-hash is nothing this particular Grinch would offer up, heart as yet grown three sizes or not.
The opposite of Love is Indifference.

What I am indifferent to, I give no energy whatsoever. Ralph Waldo Emerson said this, "Know this to be the enemy: it is anger, born of desire." We abhor what we adore, and are denied....

My plans for the future, MY future, are to think upon the things that I abhor, and to strive for indifference, such that the things which I adore are of my own choosing.

"I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him." Booker T. Washington.