all about love by bell hooks. Preface & Introduction.

This is a close reading of all about love: new visions written by bell hooks and published in 2001. Every week I will read a chapter and complete a short writing exercise designed to probe her thinking and push mine. My commentary is in the WildeNotes.

I started with the 24 pages of preface and introduction on the first Sunday of 2022.

The book, all about love, centered on a flowered blanket.

Words that Open the Chapter

GRACE: TOUCHED BY LOVE

It is possible to speak with our heart directly. Most ancient cultures know this. We can actually converse with our heart as if it were a good friend. In modern life we have lost this essential art of taking time to converse with our heart.

Jack Kornfield

These are the words that begin the introduction to hooks’ scholarly work on love. They introduce themes and raise questions. Namely, why don’t we take the study of love seriously? Why don’t we question love and theorize about love with the same intensity that we do money, sex, or power? Is meaningful love missing from our culture? From our interpersonal lives?

3 Dope Quotes

In everyday life males and females alike are relatively silent about love. Our silence shields us from uncertainty. We want to know love. We are simply afraid the desire to know too much about love will lead us closer and closer to the abyss of lovelessness. (xxvi)

Everyone wants to know more about love. We want to know what it means to love, what we can do in our everyday lives to love and be loved. We want to know how to seduce those among us who remain wedded to lovelessness and open the door to their hearts to let love enter. (xxvii)

Everywhere we learn that love is important, and yet are bombarded by its failure… This bleak picture in no way alters the nature of our longing. We still hope that love will prevail. We still believe in love’s promise. (xxvi)

Books and Artists Mentioned

The preface largely focuses on bell’s own experience with love and lovelessness. But the introduction begins to look outward to ways society has chronicled or considered love as fantasy and reality.

Books

Poetry

Music

  • “What’s love got to do with it?” Tina Turner, xviii

Oh-oh, what’s love got to do, got to do with it?
What’s love but a second-hand emotion?
What’s love got to do, got to do with it?
Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken?

Tina Turner in “What’s love got to do with it?”

WildeNotes

Unfortunately, I think that Hollywood, mass media, and consumerism have obliterated our understanding of love. With a lot of help from the 40-80 hour work week. (Is the gig economy murdering our opportunities for love? Does love require time? Attention? I have to keep reading!) The love that hooks’ alludes to and searches for is not the love that immediately comes to mind when the word is mentioned.

In her analysis she points out that we heavily favor fantastical accounts of love written by men. I think that is because love has become another beacon of the patriarchy. Another way to exercise one-way control. She mentions Tina Turner’s song, “What’s love got to do with it?” and I think of movies like “A Thin Line Between Love and Hate” or the many, many, many scenes of Black women, all women, being made the fool for serving up too much love on a platter to someone that is too wrong. It also makes me think of Mary J. Blige, featuring Drake, “Mr. Wrong”:

I don’t get it, I would hate to think I tricked ’em

They fall victim to my system, guess I sure know how to pick ’em

And I’m always her regret, yeah, I’m always her regret

And I always make it harder on whoever’s coming next

It goes up and down, it’s just up and down

She’s crying now but she’ll laugh again

Cause we on the rise and she here with us

In expensive shit, just keeps happening

She loves it, she stares at me like who does this

And we hold hands while I pray that she’s not the type to hold grudges, I’m wrong…

When he put that loving on me

I can’t think of nothing

That’ll make me walk out

I’m holding on

I love my Mr. Wrong

He be kissing and touching on me

I can’t help but love him

I must be outta my mind

For going so strong

I love my Mr. Wrong

A snippet of Drake and Mary J. Blige in “Mr. Wrong”
Music video of “Mr. Wrong”.

Has love become synonymous with abuse via our art forms? How many people can identify with this understanding of love? That they are mistreated repeatedly but then the kisses and affection bring them back to the arms of their Mr. Wrong? How many of us are just dying to be held? So much that we have withheld any real analysis of what love is and what it means from ourselves?

The honest truth is that you can major in money. They call it economics or finance. You can major in power. Some people call it political science, and others call it theology. And you can focus your studies on sex. Whether that is through biology or psychiatry. There are multiple routes to material stability within these fields, albeit more security in some than others. But who can achieve stability with the study of love? Self-help gurus? Internet quacks? Is it that my understandings of the word love right now are too narrow? I have come into contact with various other professionals, from teachers to social workers, waiters to writers, and none seem to have devoted their life to the study of love.

The closest I have encountered came from two white women, Marianne Williamson and her interpretations of the Course of Miracles (she has written multiple books about her insights), and Brené Brown and her statistical studies of vulnerability (also featured across multiple titles). And a book called The Mastery of Love by Don Miguel Ruiz, an author and thinker that specializes in the Toltec tradition.

My short-sided, or lopsided understandings of love are why I have undertaken the study of all about love this year. I want to learn more about what it means to truly love. In all faucets of life, particularly in the midst of a raging pandemic and the roll back of democracy and civil rights, I want to know more about love and how it can keep me centered. How it can keep me honest. And how it can keep me alive.

My center text is bell hooks, she will begin my year. When I finish, I will work my way through the works of Williamson, Brown, and Ruiz, while also revisiting essays by Martin Luther King Jr, Nelson Mandela, and Ghandi on the beloved community. (How do we create love in our homes but also love in our communities?) I am looking for overlapping themes and contrasting understandings. My goal is to seek more queer theory in the realm of love too. How much control do we have over who and how we love? And how much of it is dictated to us by our environment, including the things we watch, listen to, and feel? I am curious. I find myself mighty curious about love. 2022 is as good a year as any to fuck around, and find out. The intro and preface to this book have me pumped.

#LetsGrow #LoveAlways #WhitneiWrites

Source Notes

I like to comb through texts to see who has influenced the thinker that is theorizing about the topic I am trying to learn about. Sometimes, I will pick these books up to read, especially if I find them on sale or easily available. Other times, I will look for essays and reviews that engage the text too. It’s also a reminder to be on the look out for interviews or other media that involves or engages the authors or artists involved in this work. Perspective is everything.

Books

When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough by Harold Kushner

“I am afraid that we may be raising a generation of young people who will grow up afraid to love, afraid to give themselves completely to another person, because they will have seen how much it hurts to take the risk of loving and have it nor work out. I am afraid that they will grow up looking for for intimacy without risk, for pleasure without significant emotional investment. They will be so fearful of the pain of disappointment that they will forgo the possibilities of love and joy” (from all about love, xvii)

Harold Kushner is a prominent American rabbi and author of more than 14 books, including two bestsellers. Kushner’s wikipedia page is well done. When All You’ve Ever Wanted is considered a theological text. Which is interesting considering hooks’ observations about religion and love:

“While ours is a nation wherein the vast majority of citizens are followers of religious faiths that proclaim the transformative power of love, many people feel that they do not have a clue as to how to love. And practically everyone suffers a crisis of faith when it comes to realizing biblical theories about the art of loving in everyday life.”

bell hooks, all about love, xxvi

Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women by Elizabeth Wurtzel

“None of us are getting better at loving: we are getting more scared of it. We were not given good skills to begin with, and the choices we make have tended only to reinforce our sense that it is hopeless and useless” (from all about love, xix).

Elizabeth Wurtzel was an American writer and journalist known for documenting her personal struggles with depression, addiction, and recovery. She died from breast cancer at the age of 57. She has a very well-done wiki. The title of this book reminds of a collection of short stories by Roxane Gay called Difficult Women. One day, I will re-read them together. Wurtzel’s book is a series of essays about women that derive their power from sexuality. According to goodreads, “Bitch tells a tale both celebratory and cautionary as Wurtzel catalogs some of the most infamous women in history, defending their outsize desires, describing their exquisite loneliness, championing their take-no-prisoners approach to live and love.”

A Little Book On Love by Jacob Needleman

Jacob Needleman is a professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University with an impressive resumé including education at Yale, Harvard, and in Germany. He’s written several books and accomplished numerous accolades, all featured on his website.

According to goodreads, A Little Book On Love “explores the greatest works of philosophy, myth, and sacred wisdom to offer a bold new interpretation of why two people are brought together in the first place…[It] shows us how true love can transcend time and the difficulties of daily life.”

bell hooks says that virtually all the major narratives Needleman comments on in this book are written by men: “His list of significant references doesn’t include books written by women” (xxi).

And There We Wept by bell hooks

A book of poetry published in 1978 while hooks’ was a professor and lecturer of Ethnic Studies at the University of Southern California. It is the first book she published under her chosen pen-name which is also her great-grandmother’s name.

hooks references the book in all about love:

“Death became my chosen topic. No one around me, professors and students alike, doubted a woman’s ability to be serious when it came to thinking and writing about death. All the poems in my first book were on the topic of death and dying. Even so, the poem that opened the book, “The woman’s mourning song” was about the loss of a loved one and the refusal to let death destroy memory. Contemplating death has always been a subject that leads me back to love” (xxii).

The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller

A 1992 romance novella that became a best seller and a film. It’s about an Italian woman living on a farm in Iowa that engages in an affair with a National Geographic photographer. hooks has thoughts:

“…when men appropriate the romance genre their work is far more rewarded than is the writing of women. A book like The Bridges of Madison County is the supreme example. Had a woman penned this sentimental, shallow story of love (which did, have its moments) it is unlikely it would ever have become such a major mainstream success, crossing all boundaries of genre” (xxiii).

Sidenote: This is why women change their pen names to be ambiguous or presenting.

Creating Love: The Next Great Stage of Growth by John Bradshaw

Bradshaw’s website says he is a philosopher, councelor, theologian, and teacher. He is the author of six books, and three are New York Times bestsellers. Creating Love is meant to give insights into how to stop making the same mistakes with love over and over. It is one of hooks’ favorite books on the topic.

“[Bradshaw] valiantly attempts to establish the link between male domination (the institutionalization of patriarchy) and the lack of love of families. Famous for work that calls attention to the ‘inner child,’ Bradshaw believes that ending patriarchy is one step in the direction of love. However, his work on love has never received ongoing attention and celebration. It did not get the notice given work by men who write about love while affirming sexist-defined gender roles” (xxiv).

Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus by John Gray

Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus has some incredible statistics. It is one USA Today’s 10 must influential books of the last quarter century. And it was the number 1 best-selling hardback of the 1990s.

John Gray has written over 20 books, most focused on helping men and women better understand and respect their differences in personal and professional life. His work troubles hooks:

“And even though John Gray’s work troubles me and makes me mad, I confess to reading and rereading Men Are from Mars, and Women Are from Venus” (xxv). According to hooks, this work makes use fo feminist perspectives on gender roles but remains “wedded to belief systems, which suggest that there are basic inherent differences between women and men” (xxv-xxvi).

Image Credit:

Picture by me. This is the first of bell hooks’ work that I have owned. It’s all red and titled, all about love: new visions.