ABOUT LOVE _____________________________________     I think it is about time that  we all might be  acquainted with the concept of what the word "LOVE" means. Love is bandied about in all the types of media that we possess and usually relates to an ideal situation that does not, in fact, exist.     Surely we must distinguish between love and lust.     Love is what you feel before sex, not during sex and hopefully afterwards.     The act of sex is not love.     Sex should be an expression of love.     The world is not ideal. It has harsh reality brought about by greed and fear, not by love.     If we capitalise love with  "L' we get a Platonic Form which is only to be striven for, but can never be realised.      Our human feelings are made up of many loves, (small 'l'). There is love of a brother, sister, mother, father, friend, a place, country, car, pet, the world, the universe and so on. They  are each unique.     An idealistic 'Love' is not possible in the real world (whatever that is to us) because we lose sight of the little 'loves' that make life worth the living. A person who is destitute and jobless can thus find these 'loves' in his/her world where striving for a complete Love would be impossible.     Those of us in more fortunate circumstances can perhaps find many more forms of love and are perhaps more able to contemplate the philosophical 'ideal'.     Idealised love is comparatively recent in history (mainly a Victorian concept). This is the attitude of the naiive. The ultimate Woman, the Knight in Shining Armour.     The world is about Change (like it or not...there is no harm) and our ideas about love must therefore change. What we loved yesterday, we do not necessarily love today and may not love tomorrow. Was this not love then? Yes, it was.     For some, love is eternal. But that does not make all loves eternal otherwise there would be no change and nothing to look forward to.     If people were aware (or needed reminding) of this changing aspect of nature, they would not feel guilty of, for instance, breakdowns of relationships,  marriage, boy/girl-friends and so on.     The idea of a multiplicity of loves does not demean them or take away their powerful forces.  It heightens the concept of them and makes them real. It gives them a new quality and dimension.     We ought really to get away from the concept of an Ideal Love. Perhaps we would inject a little more of our world into music.     The old romantic notion (Victorian) of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl is so hackneyed as to be unbelievable.     The fact that so much penny-dreadful material is devoured by so many people is an escapism that should really disappear rapidly and it is up to writers (who are supposed to be creative and all-seeing) to produce literature in keeping with intelligence.     There is a place for titillation but it should be kept in its place. It is not a substitute for real life (which is far more interesting, anyway).     It's what I love, not what you love anyway. In other words our selfishness. This is a negation of love, anyway, upper or lower case. I rest my case.

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