If Music be the Food for Love…

This month love is in the air with Valentine’s Day just around the corner. Those who have ever had the fortune/misfortune (delete as appropriate) to fall in love will know the associated symptoms of eternal butterflies, loss of all appetite, tingles, unexpected giggles and dizzying sweats that accompany this beautiful sickness. The very phrase ‘to fall in love’ is a very apt description. You do not ‘jump’ into love. That description implies a choice is being made. You fall. I mean, no one chooses to fall off a building do they? The results of both activities can often unfortunately feel very similar however, especially if the love is unrequited.
Being in love is the most powerful, instinctive feeling we can possess. It is not surprising that since the first single-celled amoeba winked at a slightly more curvy single-celled amoeba Man has struggled to make sense of this emotion.
In fact, love is the most widely-documented topic in the history of the world. More art, music and literature has been dedicated to this intricate and often intangible emotion than all of the subjects common to human perception lumped together.

Plato, one of the early Greek philosophers, noted how “At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet”.

Enter Shakespeare, Keats, Van Gogh, Blake and John Lennon; a few of the visionaries who led the way on deconstructing how we love and pushed themselves to the limits of human comprehension, imagination and creativity. They all suffered in some way for it and found that the more they probed and investigated into this infuriatingly complex impulse the more questions were exposed. Van Gogh cut his own ear off. Lennon simply sighed, smiled, and then wrote “All You Need is Love”. •