I Wanna Know What Love Is…

… sang Foreigner. Now that I’ve reached the Lover in my new book, which is based around classical psychological archetypes, I realise that I don’t know what love is. I’ve had plenty of experience of the Lover archetype in its Shadow form, and will be able to write reams about that, but not the Lover archetype in its most healthily expressed whole form.

This is the first time I’ve had to pause in my writing… otherwise, it’s been flowing like a river. It seems that the past seven decades I’ve spent on planet Earth has been a virtual masquerade or Commedia dell’arte of Magicians, Fools, Sages, Creators, Warriors, Innocents, Seekers and Orphans etc, so that there has been no lack of material and my hands have been dancing across the keyboard.

I suppose now I’m finding it a real challenge to find the right words to describe true love is, perhaps, hardly surprising in an age when ‘love’ has probably become the most misused and abused four-letter word of all – bought and sold in the market place like a common whore.

I knew we were in trouble with ‘love’ when, back in the Nineties, the Liverpool and Victoria insurance company changed their logo to a heart surrounded by the letters L and V, and the newly-popular Innocent branding of packaging meant that the backs of products we were being told to ‘love’ had to be typeset in a childlike scrawl or Comic Sans font.

I’m pretty sure that I have never in my life been loved by another human being in the way that countless Doris Day movies told me I would be, when I grow up. The “free love” I was sold in the Sixties was really just an excuse for anyone to feel free to hit on me and me, more often than not, not feeling free to say No – and especially once the men realised that if they used the term “twin soul”, they were in guaranteed leg-over territory.

Not so much “Love is a many-splendoured thing” but more “Love is a many-pretended thing”.

I’ve been married twice: once to a mad drummer and the second time to a mad saxophonist. Both were called Tony … which is why I go out of my way, nowadays, to avoid anyone called Tony. But I’ve seen a few episodes of the Channel 4 docu-drama series Married At First Sight, and some of those put-together-by-experts couples, who only meet for the first time at the wedding altar, really do seem to fall in love with each other – or at least fall in love with love. So I wonder if perhaps that kind of lottery is a good a way as any to find love, compared to the equally random-seeming lottery of life…but I don’t know…

Nowadays, there are posters everywhere admonishing us to “Be Kind”. It seems to me that this is just the latest iteration of the psy-op in which you have to ‘love’ everyone in your “community”. This is very difficult for me because I don’t even like many of them. However, if you disagree with anyone, or use critical thought to analyse a concept differently to the required norm, you are a right-wing racist or a homophobe or a white misognist male or anti-semitic – take your pick. I want to scrawl on the “Be Kind” posters “Be Kritical”, but I’d probably be arrested.

I must say I was finding my writers’ block on the Lover quite ironic given that my most bestselling book, by far, is The Sacred Sex Rites of Ishtar. But then I thought maybe it should be retitled The Sacred Love Rites of Ishtar, because that’s what that book is really about, in essence: the love of the spirits for human beings – and it’s that love, and none other, for me, that really makes the world go round.

It is spiritual love which is inspiring me to write the new book. The basic sketched outline of the story was recounted to me one night by my spirit muse, hovering over my dreaming bed. Now it’s as if I’m colouring in the narrative from the experience of my life lessons, so perhaps I am about to find out what true love between humans really is? I hope so. Otherwise, I don’t know how to continue.