When love is not just romance but compassion, too

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been thinking a lot about love. Not the romantic sense of the word, as wonderful and intoxicating as that can be, but rather a more challenging notion of love as a guide to how we conduct ourselves.

It often seems as if there is an unspoken but pervasive idea that love outside a romantic or familial context is somehow unserious. Certainly, each of the major religions has layered perspectives on love and the forms it takes, but in terms of a more general and secular viewpoint, we rarely consider it a subject worthy of public reflection. When was the last time any of us sat with others and discussed the idea of love, and the ways in which we try (or don’t) to act with love as our guiding principle?

I’m currently rereading All About Love, a collection of essays published in 1999 by the American Black theorist, writer and activist bell hooks. In this work, hooks weaves a conversation about love, both in its individual and collective expression, through 13 chapters covering subjects such as “justice”, “honesty” and “community”.

Her concept of love is based on a definition given by the psychiatrist M Scott Peck: “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth . . . an intention and an action”. In the book, hooks thinks through the possibilities of what it could mean to practise a form of love that interrupts every area of our lives. And in doing so, she also reflects on some of our failed understandings of love — that love is primarily a feeling rather than an action, for example — and where such ideas originate.

I return to hooks’ writing often and I have found this book to contain so many thoughtful and challenging ideas about the way we think of love as a practice: “Embracing a love ethic means that we utilize all the dimensions of love — ‘care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect, and knowledge’ — in our everyday lives,” hooks writes.

It’s that “everyday lives” part that makes me wonder what this ethic might require from each of us in ways that could prove difficult, and perhaps even painful, but ultimately essential for our wellbeing and the wellbeing of others.

I am repeatedly drawn to the work of the 20th-century figurative artist Alice Neel, primarily for her insistence on portraying people across socio-economical divisions, and her ability to convey our collective humanity in her painting. Neel’s 1940 painting “TB Harlem” is a portrait of a sick young man from her own neighbourhood of Spanish Harlem in New York.

The subject reclines bare-chested on a bed with purple sheets; another pale bedsheet covers him up to his torso. There is a large white bandage over a wound on his chest, which he touches gently with his right hand. His other hand rests beside him on the bedclothes. The shades of brown, from the wall to his skin tone, mixed with the soft lavender and cream of the bedding, give the canvas a concentrated and beguiling warmth. But the figure stares at us with a face that expresses both pain and quiet resilience.

The title reveals that he is a victim of tuberculosis. Yet there is something about the location of the bandage, seemingly over his heart, and the way Neel has painted the man’s gaze that draws me into his experience, so that I can envisage myself, and therefore anyone, in his general condition of suffering.

It makes me stop and think about when in my own life I have experienced love working this fiercely, or when I have exerted myself in this way

Each of us is familiar with suffering of some form or other. When I consider what it means to live by a love ethic in our daily lives, I suspect the first thing we might have to do is examine how our own hearts are wounded. I sometimes wonder if many of the troubling issues we deal with in our own lives are related to having been taught unhealthy ideas of what love is, and never having questioned those ideas or consequent behaviours.

It takes courage to revisit what we have learnt subconsciously about love from our early life experiences. And even more courage to try to unlearn ideas that could negatively affect how we love ourselves and, by extension, others. None of us escapes this life without multiple heart wounds, but how often do we examine our wounded hearts, and to what extent are we able to attend to those wounds? Neel’s painting appeals to me as an invitation not only to imagine our own pain but also to practise compassion.

It is easy to get caught up in the visual turmoil of “Love Steering the Boat of Humanity”, a painting from 1899-1901 by British artist George Frederic Watts. It depicts two male figures in a small wooden boat in the middle of a raging sea storm. The water crashes in all directions while the sky seems a battleground between dark clouds and swirling patches of light.

The two figures are personifications of Humanity and Love. Humanity, on the right side of the picture, has his hands on a set of oars but lies back unmoving, as if passed out from exhaustion. Love, meanwhile, is using all his might to redirect the boat. The storm, we assume, symbolises the conditions of the world.

I am taken by Watts’s attempt to depict Love as the saviour of Humanity. It makes me wonder about present times and where our current metaphorical boat is going. Love depicted in this painting is not sentimental. It is a love in action, a love consumed and willing to do courageous and exhausting work for the sake of not just one group of people but all people. It makes me stop and think about when in my own life I have experienced love working this fiercely or when I have exerted myself in this way.

“Naima’s Gift (Deon, Kym and Noah)” is a 2023 painting by the contemporary American artist Jordan Casteel. A man and a woman stand side by side in a garden, the woman holding a child in her arms and planting a kiss on his cheek. It is a beautiful image of a family, complete with the smallest gestures that signify deep love and recognition of one another. Though the man gazes out from the painting, we see that his hand joins with the woman’s hand to support the child. Both figures are standing ankle-deep in a flourishing abundance of plant life.

This garden to me represents an additional aspect of a love ethic of care, responsibility and respect, in this case for the rest of nature and by extension for one another. The nurturing of any kind of garden requires our consistent attention, and an investment in the outcome. It is a reminder that our seemingly small but daily attempts to live with integrity, to practise a generosity of hand and heart, all add up to an ability to stand upright in the gardens of our own lives.

Email Enuma at [email protected]

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