#like if you accept that Harrison and Eliot are together

[rotationalsymmetry]

Ahem (about Eliot Spencer as football captain in a high school au):

None of the Leverage “kids”/OT3/whatever — Eliot, Parker, Hardison — were popular in high school. Definitely not Parker, who was more or less raised by her thief mentor and was never even in high school, and has noticeable difficulty interacting with people as an adult when we first meet her in season one. Not anyone who found as much time to learn how to code as Hardison did. Not Eliot either — it’s canon both that he took home ec and that he got teased by other guys for it.

There’s a tendency to associate being good with the ladies with being gender-conforming (in men.) But you know what? When we see Eliot seducing women, he doesn’t put on a strong manly man vibe. Mostly he goes for sensitive and attentive and vulnerable and women love it. That’s not gender conforming. That’s...not intrinsically incompatible with football captain, but they don’t fit easily with each other either.

Even the one time his physical fighting skill is a factor, with the other fighter (Mikel Dayan), it’s less about his strength and more about mutual respect for each others’ skill. The attraction is about both of them being really into the same thing, a thing that most people don’t get that deeply into.

All of them are “nerds” in the sense of having a narrow range of interests that they get really, really into: Harrison’s nerdery is focused on computers, which is classic, but Eliot’s hard-skills nerdery that’s focused on fighting and cooking and paying incredible amounts of attention to sensory details, is actually the same sort of thing just with a different focus.

Parker’s is actually the most extreme: her interests at the start of the show are security systems and jumping off buildings and not much else, and she’s also the least good at “masking” or faking being normal. She asks what an ornamental houseplant is for, because at that point she really just doesn’t see the value in anything outside of her very narrow interests. She doesn’t even appreciate art as art, just as something that can be stolen.

And I’m not saying that to dis any of the characters. Rather? I’m thinking: these are my kind of people, people who get really into things most people don’t care about, and who tend to not get interested in things just because everyone else is. The sorts of people who don’t know how to answer when other people ask them what music they like to listen to. (Well, maybe Eliot does.) The sorts of people who barely know what football is, because either a thing is your entire world or you know virtually nothing about it and care even less, with no middle ground.

And they get to have an entire show about them doing amazing things and doing good in the world, you know? Their differences don’t make them lesser. Parker doesn’t have to be able to appreciate art or know what plants are for! Being able to thwart complex security systems and jump off tall buildings is actually enough for her to be living an amazing life and contributing to the world in a positive way.

And that means when Parker does start broadening her horizons, she’s able to do it for herself, because she decided she’s missing out on things, and not to “be normal” or fit in. Or because she has to do it to find people who care about her and support her, she was able to get that before making any changes. That’s such a powerful message, you know?

And when I see Eliot as captain of the football team high school AU headcanons, what I think is: that’s missing Eliot’s character, that’s flattening him to just being good at things like fighting and sports and making him as stereotypically male as possible. Because just like Parker didn’t need to be normal or popular or even know how to make small talk with a jerk without sticking a fork in his hand in order to find her people, Eliot also didn’t have to get on the football team to find his people, and that matters too. He found his people by being himself, his weird oddball self who notices things other people miss and grows his hair out and is a fighter who won’t touch guns and really notices people and is probably way too sensitive for his own good. Don’t let his ability to terrify strangers by looking at them and pound them flat when necessary keep you from seeing the rest of Eliot Spencer, the guy who never quite figured out how to be a normal guy and decided early on that he wasn’t going to bother trying.

And that coexists peacefully and comfortably with Eliot as a guy who gets around a lot; I’m polyamorous and kinky, and a lot of the guys in those worlds who get the most dates are absolutely not the sort of person who would have been captain of the football team in high school. Getting a lot of action does not support a narrative that Spencer is gender-conforming, even though getting a lot of action is something that manly men are supposed to aspire to.

There are a lot of people like that: who were loners, outcasts, bullied in school, and who later on were able to find people who didn’t care whether you made the cheerleading squad or whether you had the right kinds of celebrity crushes. Or the adult world equivalents. Who see value in people living their most authentic lives, rather than conforming as closely as possible to expected social roles.

Maybe I’m the one who’s missing something, and this sort of hc is about how you can be all that and get the social recognition of being homecoming king or queen as well. Maybe it’s coming from people who like to imagine that they could have had that without sacrificing parts of themselves. I for one am very firmly in the category of “fuck them and their arbitrary markers of acceptability, I’m going off and finding better goals to aspire to.”

Parker was not a cheerleader, even though she had all the physical abilities that being a good cheerleader requires (plus the looks for it.) Eliot was not football captain. They got to do amazing things with their lives because being football captain or chearleading whatever is not actually especially important. It’s just a marker of success within a very specific social context that’s disconnected from being able to do anything in particular outside of that context, and which prioritizes conformity, especially conformity to gender roles, over authenticity and diversity.

(Note, because apparently this is necessary: this is a personal opinion, people get to have whatever headcanons they want, don’t harass people, etc. it’s better to lift up examples of doing it well than be confrontational about people doing it badly. I just think it’s actually more meaningful and more consistent with canon to present Eliot as an outsider in high school than to present him as one of the popular kids, and popular in an extremely conventional/stereotypical way at that.)

(I can relate to the Eliot who got teased for taking home ec but felt secretly vindicated because he was the one getting close one on one attention from a hot lady teacher; I cannot possibly relate to football captain Eliot.)

(It’s a power thing? Within a high school social framework, football players and cheerleaders (not at my high school, but whatever) have the most social status and therefor the most power. The whole deal with the Leverage crew is that they’re restoring power imbalances. Putting them in positions of relative power makes no sense. Highschooler Eliot should be beating up the football captain for groping the girls or bullying weaker boys, not being the football captain himself.)

[idanit]

possibly underappreciated Good Omens fics I enjoyed once upon a time

Indirectly inspired by a video series about fanfiction I watched, I decided to pull together a list of Good Omens fics I have bookmarked as stories I enjoyed, but which have less than 250-300 kudos at the time I’m writing this. No particular order. They’re accompanied by short excerpts from my private fic reading notes (not originally intended to be read by anyone but me, mind), sometimes slightly edited for clarity—and, sometimes, the comments I left on the fics.

This list sat in my drafts for a long time and the recent S2 announcement reminded me of it. I’d love it if it inspired you to do something similar! Spread the love.

And mind the tags, please.

△ = general and teen ▲ = mature and explicit 

thermodynamic equilibrium ▲ 7K the author has such an ear for dialogue and is unapologetic about what they want to write the characters like. They think of the characters as a mix of TV and book canon, but they feel like a homemade blend to me. (...) It’s very funny.

such dear follies ▲ 6K I can really picture this Aziraphale—Crowley as well, but her especially. She’s rather distinct. (...) Nice writing.

The Words Were With - △ 1.2K post-Blitz vignette, Aziraphale realizes what he feels and wonders if they're human enough for this. I liked it, and I liked the tag "transhumanism, but in reverse?", too—what an interesting idea. I'd say it's a vignette in a dire need of a follow-up, but, well, there's the show. The show is the follow-up. It fits very nicely within the canon and I totally believe it could have happened, like a deleted scene.

Gossip and Good Counsel △ 19K/? I love their companionship and how they're set up to be opposites by the management even though they get on pretty well. It feels very in keeping with the canon, but I feel like the fact that it's an F/F set in this particular time period adds a meaningful layer to the situation. It's women supporting each other in the world of men, working with the personas that are created for them, but, privately, being normal, well-rounded people. (...) and of course your writing is always a pleasure to read. (...) SDHDGDHDHDG Maisie is truly an Aziraphale.

Crowley Went Down to Georgia (he was looking for a soul to steal) △ 6K This was nice. Based on a song I didn’t know. Crowley goes to a funeral in the USA, one of a fiddler he knew and lost a bet to once. (...) The fic has not one but two songs composed for it and embedded inside it and that makes it even better. I really enjoyed the experience.

The Thing With Feathers △ 18K WARLOCK you'rE HORRIBLE AND I LOVE IT I would read an entire novel-length fic just of Crowley fighting his battles with Warlock. Written like this? It would be a blast. (...) The OCs are believably characterized and well-loved by the story. (...) Everyone seems to need a friend in this house. (...) This was so fun, and at the same time, their mission has weight here (...) We wonder about what the future holds even though we know it.

Here Quiet Find △ 11K This fic aimed for my head and the aim was sure precise. It was a story of Crowley sensing Aziraphale's distress and finding him in a self-quarantined English village in the seventeenth century, tired and anxious. It's hurt/comfort, so there was washing and bedsharing and I had to love it, so I did.

outside of time △ 2K Post-Almostgeddon, (...) nicely-written, short, but strung with a soft kind of tension and unspoken words. There's no drama, just "can we really", and "do you really" of sudden freedom. They fall into being inseparable. Book canon, which I like for this story (sitting on a tarmac). I liked the footnotes. There's a mention of Eliot. All in all, very much yes.

She'asani Yisrael △ 2K It’s Crowley going through a two-hour service and drinking blessed wine. He also keeps an eye on a boy he was asked to. It’s 1946. It was pretty good, so far the best Jewish GO fic, I think, from the ones I’ve read.

To Guard The Eastern Gate △ 11K  I loved it. You really made Sodom feel lived-in; the description of Keret, Hurriya and Yassib's house and relationship were great. I got attached to both them and the city (...) Aziraphale and Crawley’s interactions were generally very entertaining. I laughed (...) Your rendering of their voices just lands so well (...) But then oh, the entire ending (...) hurt, hurt a lot, and your descriptions are so vivid.

If you’ve been waiting (for falling in love) △ 14K AAAAA a good ending line. The whole paragraph, in fact. I love a good smattering of philosophy in my fics, and this was really nice. I can get behind Thomas Aequinus's and Crowley's view on eternity. It's (...) a pretty simple fic (...) - the courage to express yourself and take a risk is awarded with winning what was at stake by the virtue of reciprocity - but the way it was intertwined with a study of how they would experience a forever was done well. 

Holy unnecessary ▲ 2.2K It's well-written. (...) this is my type of sexual humour if I have any. So subtle. Blink and you'll miss it. Lovely.

The Parting Glass △ 17K Through the ages, they're dancing around their relationship until after the Armageddoff. (...) Wow, this was really, really nice. Very simple in its concept and nothing I haven't read before, but very well-executed. (...) AAAAH I LOVED the first chapter. I always like abbeys as settings, that's a given, but the banter, the good writing, the moral ambiguity!

Name The Sky △ 33K This Crowley is different, but very intriguing. Without his sarcastic talk, and much more animalistic. (...) I love how expressive Crowley is. (...) This fic has a very nice balance of drama and levity. I don't love Crowley-before-the-Fall stories very much, but with this execution I can read about it. (...) Okay I've read Crowley offering fruits, and even Aziraphale biting fruits, but the two of them sharing the apple? Outstanding. Ingenious. What a take.

A Flame in Your Heart △ 5K post-Blitz (why are so many dance fics post-Blitz?), they go to the bookshop and have an actually believable conversation. Then they dance the gavotte. It was really nice! Believable writing, emotions, the dancing! (...) Of course it's too early for them, (...) but the author's note? yeah.

Put down the apple, Adam, and come away with me ▲ 32K At this point it's just reading original stories with characters with names and some personality traits that I recognize. (...) I really enjoy this, the careful dance, the opposition between their views. (...) This is well-written, wow. (...) it's not an easy read (...) this story feels very believably 50s, but also reaches out to the present time. 

Liebestraum ▲ 10K/? It really is like music. I'm enjoying the writing a lot. (...) oh my actual god. This, this? Wow, uh. This came for my throat. (...) THE MUSICAL COMPOSITION, THE MOTIF RETURNING, THE AUTHOR KNOWS WHERE IT'S AT (...) Excellent. This hits the right beats so precisely, (...) and with feeling, too.

Down Comforter △ 2.4K and they lay down in angeldown, a soft rug ‘neath their heads– alright. Well, Crowley lies under Aziraphale's wing on a Persian rug after the Apocalypse, and they talk (...). It was sweet.

The Corsair of Carcosa △ 5K Crowley wakes up from a nap, visits Aziraphale for some drinking, and they read The King in Yellow that he happens to own. Good writing, so I'm bought. Aziraphale mentions Beardsley, so I'm bought twice over. My god, a discussion of etheral/occult madness? Caused by some wrong/true reading? Yes.

Very Good, Omens! △ 6K It's rather well-written, well-pastiched. People don't do that too often, nowadays - try to write in the style of a particular writer. (...) I love wordplay like this.

Reviving Robin Hood: The Complicated Process of Crème Brûlée △ 30K it's well-written (...), has a rhythm to it, and quiet humour. (...) Finally some nice, good, light writing. The attention to detail! (...) I'm still reading most of it aloud, the rhythm of it compels me to. (...) okay this does sound like Pratchett&Gaiman, the Good Omens itself (...) The fic is meandering, hilarious, sensitive in all the right places, and overall lovely.

my dear acquaintance △ 1K Oh. Oh. Yes, yes! Aziraphale in Russia, Russia I've never been in, but I can feel the snow and the evening of. Very real, and the bar, too. Attention to detail - vodka flavoured with dill, what on earth? Yes. He would totally have a distinct taste in operas and he would totally complain about a subpar one. I'm glad Tchaikovsky's there.

there is a crack in everything △ 1.8K This was good! Ah. Inspired by a comment (...), I went looking for Mr. Harrison and Mr. Cortese fics—really, what a big brain moment someone had and why have I never thought to look for them? This is Crowley getting suddenly anxious and Aziraphale going out of his way, through all his layers of not-thinking and denial, to console him. I also really liked how the Arrangement is a carefully unacknowledged partnership-marriage.

Scales And Gold And Wings And Scars △ 6K  No conflict, no plot, one tiny arc like a ripple on the surface of water on a calm sunny day - of Aziraphale discovering Crowley’s scars. It's the South Downs and it's early summer. They bask and swim in a spring. Non-sexual nudity, love in the air like a scent. Nice.

Nineteen Footnotes In Search Of A Story △ 0.4K This is a Good Omens story told only through footnotes. Your mind can fill in the gaps. Fascinating (...). Also, it’s an experiment so apt for this particular fandom.

Hell on Earth △ 6.5K Oh, I loved it! How could I not love it: it's Beelzebub-centric, it's historical, it has classical painting, and even a hilarious scene with a cuneiform phrase, as if I didn't enjoy this story enough already. There are so few Beelzebub fics out there and I find searching for them very difficult (I accept recs if anyone has any), and it's such a shame, so this was really like a gift to the fandom. I absolutely adore the way you portrayed them, small, frightening, powerful, and confident. Also, it was super fun to see how different Crowley seems when we're not in his POV or in a story about him and Aziraphale. (...)

Go Up to Ramoth-Gilead and Triumph △ 24K Daegaer is... pure class. (...) hdhdhdh what pfttt why you so funny (...) I love this Crowley. (...) This got unexpectedly intense. (...) I love the little nods to the fact that Israelites, especially the poorer ones, still believe in other gods. I also really like that they sleep on roofs. It's just the kind of detail that grounds the story and shows that the author is, in fact, a historian. 

[wemultitudinous]

@strlitmemries​ asked:  you know i’m in love with you, right? ( from Parker )

CRITICAL ROLE SENTENCE STARTERS // ACCEPTING

Parker doesn’t communicate like most other people.

Hardison’s known that since the beginning; she’s three steps left of what most people would call ‘normal’, and to an outside observer, maybe can be a little confusing. Maybe things can be unclear.

From the first, though, Hardison understood her. Not always and not completely, but enough. And who needs ‘normal’, anyway? The lives they lead, it isn’t exactly a prerequisite.

And so they’ve talked around and under things, skirted it and expressed it in words that hide other words. They’ve talked about pretzels. They’ve talked about robots named Parker. Hardison has never wanted or needed anything more than that, because Parker’s love language isn’t language, but it’s love all the same. He’s content with her, just the way the she is.

And so the words, sudden and unexpected from his left in the cramped space inside Lucille 3.0, leave him blinking in surprise for the barest of moments. It’s nothing they haven’t felt before----nothing they haven’t expressed before. But he’s sure as hell it’s the first time she’s sad it. 

There’s worry in her voice, and Hardison can’t tell if it’s worry that he might not know or worry that she might be doing it wrong. He wants nothing more than to push away from the desk, slide his chair over and kiss her, hold her close, maybe say something tender and altogether too cheesy. But he doesn’t want to make it a big deal, doesn’t want to freak her out or throw them off-kilter from the not-normal normal they occupy.

So he lets a smile curve his lips, fingers still flying over the keyboard, and tries to summon up his best Harrison Ford.

“I know,” he confirms. His gaze flickers over to her, sideways smile reaching all up one side of his face. “I got you, babe.”

And he reaches out and tosses her something. It’s pocket-sized, all sleek black lines and a small metal point on end, small screen set just above it. The diamond-edged blade designed for cutting through glass is nothing special on its own, but once pressed against glass the device also detects electrical fields, mapping out the location of any sensors, cameras or apparatus beyond the glass. Hardison spent a good long while cannibalising enough pieces of tech to put it together. She can do it all herself, but this is his love language---the hours of work, the care and effort put into it, the hope that any one of his dozen contraptions and gadgets and props might one day save them half a second, save them a disaster, save their lives.

This one means I love you too.

Maybe there’s more to this moment, and Hardison opens his mouth to say something, but he’s interrupted by Eliot’s voice in his ear, aggressive and low.

“Hate to interrupt your little date, but I got incoming.”

And just like that, they’re back on the job. Back to robbing a rich guy on behalf of the poor. Just like everything else, it’s not normal----but Hardison wouldn’t change it for the world.

[topmixtrends]

This piece appears in the LARB Print Quarterly Journal: No. 19,  Romance

To receive the LARB Quarterly Journal, become a member  or purchase a copy at your local bookstore.

    ¤

Why does love got to be so sad? The question is from a song famously performed and co-written by Eric Clapton, the guitar maestro, for whom love could, apparently, be a sad affair in life as well as in art. “Layla,” the song he’s best known for, has him down on his knees, begging for love from a woman who, the story goes, happened to be George Harrison’s wife. Even rock stars get the blues. Even rock stars suffer in love. It’s a universal condition, erotic suffering. It afflicts us all. “Ay me,” says Shakespeare’s Lysander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “for aught that I could ever read, / Could ever hear by tale or history / The course of true love never did run smooth.”

Why is this so — assuming that it is? Why is the erotic life so often full of grief, sorrow, or at least radical disappointment when it is supposed to be — and of course on occasion actually is — a world of joy? Is it in our stars? Is it in ourselves? Is it a societal flaw? Might we, by creating a better culture, make erotic life a sphere of enduring joy? We know, or think we know, that love promises ongoing bliss, yet it so often ends in sorrow. (“As high as we have mounted in delight,” the poet says, “in our dejection do we sink as low.”) Perhaps we should simply reduce our expectations, anticipate disappointment and dissatisfaction. But many people are erotic idealists — they seek joy in love. They are people — dare one say — whose erotic lives have become their spiritual lives. They are Romantics, and Romance is their highest good. Why does love fail them so often?

One of the first people to tackle the question, years before Clapton ever set eyes on Layla or anyone else, was Aristophanes. According to Plato’s Aristophanes, there was a time when human beings lived in a condition of bliss. Two people lived together as one body. They were all and everything in themselves. They were complete, though they were also, to be sure, rather grotesque. They had eight limbs (spider-like) and were fused in the middle. They must have cartwheeled from place to place. But they were merry, so merry that they made the gods jealous. The gods split these rolling unities apart, and made them into two people. From then on, people have roamed the world, looking for the missing part of themselves, the half that had been sundered on that sorry day.

The soul mate, Aristophanes believed (perhaps with some irony), is the person who makes us complete. Without him, without her, we are only partial beings. We are all mind and no heart, all analysis and no imagination, all work and no play — the list goes on. But when we merge these qualities, we become whole and free. We work and play at once, making our avocation our vocation, as Frost puts it. We think and feel at the same time, conquering what Eliot called the dissociation of sensibility. We play with full and productive seriousness, as Schiller said that we might when we made ourselves one. We labor and know the fruits of our labors as being our own and not the property — in fact or in conception — of another (Marx, indirectly). Love without that true other half is not possible, and must by necessity be sad.

Schopenhauer had his own interpretation of love. Though he wrote years before Darwin, his notion of Romantic love was Darwinian in virtually every way. Why are so many individuals miserable in love? Why does love have to be so sad? For Schopenhauer, sexual desire is at the core of our being (like, well, Darwin). As natural creatures, we have one fundamental task in life and that is the task of reproduction. We are propelled to find the best mate to create the healthiest possible child. We are pushed — driven — in the direction of an individual to collaborate with. And we are filled with happiness when we have found our object and been accepted. Thus Schopenhauer — and thus, the Darwin of Origin of Species, who depicts Nature as a great “pigeon fancier”, spectacularly adept at breeding the healthiest, strongest possible pigeons.

Nature, Schopenhauer says, does not care for our happiness at all. What Nature cares about is the health of the next generation. Nature does not care much about the powers of nurture that a given couple might be able to generate between them. In the great Nature-nurture debate, Nature casts the ultimate vote. It does not matter to Nature that the child-to-be will live in a house full of books or listen to Mozart while he is in the womb. It doesn’t matter that both of the parents will dedicate themselves entirely to the baby. No, all Nature cares about is creating a bouncing, healthy, thriving little integer who will go on to produce more of the same. Says Schopenhauer:

There is something quite peculiar to be found in the deep, unconscious seriousness with which two young people of opposite sex regard each other when they meet for the first time, the searching and the penetrating glance they cast at each other, the careful inspection all the features and parts of their respective person have to undergo. This scrutiny and examination is the meditation of the genius of the species concerning the individual possible through these two, and the combination of its qualities.

Nature has no concern whatsoever about the happiness of the two people who come together to create the best possible child. The child is the object — not the pleasure of the parents. The idea is to create a winning baby, not to live happily ever after. Nature cares absolutely nothing about ever after.

Why does love have to be so sad? According to Schopenhauer, it is because Nature brings people together regardless of their personalities, their wants and desires and dreams and hopes. Nature is not worried about whether the male and the female in question are compatible or not. (About same-sex attraction, Schopenhauer has, alas, little that is illuminating to say.) Happiness is not part of Nature’s plan. Life is. So, people wake up from the dream of love and they find themselves ill-matched. Nature brings them together through the laws of attraction — her laws — and then, her work done, leaves the scene.

Love is an affair of the Will, Schopenhauer says. It is a matter of transpersonal drives much stronger than we are. In love, we use our intellects instrumentally. That is, we use them to help us gain the favors of the beloved. The intellect creates the stratagems that make love into a version of war. With the mind, Iplot and plan to secure what I want — but of course in love there is no I, there is no individual. We plot and plan thinking that we are fulfilling our own desires, when in fact we are pursuing the desires of Nature.

But in love, the intellect also deceives us, weaving a story about the beloved and creating a narrative that justifies the love we feel. The intellect finds all of the beloved’s better qualities and enhances them. Shakespeare has a lot of fun with the erotic mobility of our esteem in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which the characters, their eyes anointed with love’s balm, snap from despising to worshipping each other. The mind, in this theory, actually functions as an unpaid attorney — an advocate for Nature — acting in the interest of the species.

How can you be happy in love, from Schopenhauer’s harsh and rather Darwinian vantage? You can get lucky. You can wake up and find that besides being a splendid biological match, you two are a human match to boot. Is this theory rather off-putting? Schopenhauer has an answer for the disappointed:

However loudly those persons of a lofty and sentimental soul, especially those in love, may raise an outcry over the gross realism of my view, they are nevertheless mistaken. For is not the precise determination of the individualities of the next generation a much higher and worthier aim than those exuberant feelings and immaterial soap bubbles of theirs?

This was perhaps the most potent philosophical attack on erotic idealism, though Nietzsche, who saw Schopenhauer as his master and guide, did take up the question some years later. (Nietzsche was so dedicated to Schopenhauer that when he was in the army — conceive of Nietzsche in the army! — and matters became too exasperating, he was prone to look to the heavens and cry out, “Schopenhauer, help me!”) Nietzsche, as might be expected, fell into Schopenhauer’s dim view of things. He claimed that Romanticism was the spiritualization of sensuality — an attempt to confer meaning and respectability on the pleasures and needs of the flesh. Nietzsche may have been in a particularly prickly mood that day, but he clearly rejected the more charitable view of things: the Romantic as someone who aspires to make his or her erotic life into a spiritual life.

This brings us back to the Romantics. All worldly-wise people know that the path to erotic satisfaction is not an easy one, perhaps nonexistent. Love is a peril and all the rest. This was clear even to the writers and thinkers we call Romantics. But the Romantics were willing to take the ideal of love and Romance as being at the center of life and consider the possibility that an erotic life can be a spiritual life. The Romantic wants love to be his spiritual life, but he will not rest easy with what we might call spiritual love. He wants his love to be as physically intense as possible. He wants it to include all the passion that Darwin and Schopenhauer evoke. But he wants more than that, too.

Shelley famously defined love as “a going out of our own nature and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person not our own.” The definition sounds abstract and a bit cold, as though Shelley’s sense of love was Christian and monastic, but nothing could be less true. Shelley was a proponent of sexual love. For Shelley, if love was authentic, it had powerful erotic attraction and sexual consummation at its core. The instincts must be engaged and the appetites must be awakened.

Did Shelley believe in free love? That’s what many people think. He surely wrote a ferocious polemic against marriage: “[W]ith one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe, / The dreariest and the longest journey [we] go,” he says of that institution. He also seemed to endorse multiple loves: “True love in this differs from gold and clay / That to divide is not to take away.” But no one should think of Shelley as an avatar of promiscuous abandon. To him, love was sacred — too sacred to be confined by mock sacraments, such as churchly marriage. Nothing should stand between a man or woman and the embrace of the soul mate.

For Shelley, love was the primary venture in life. You see this in one of his first major poems, Prometheus Unbound. To unbind himself from his limitations, physical and metaphysical, Prometheus needs to perform two tasks: he has to repudiate the spirit of revenge and he has to fully embrace his beloved, Asia. She is his soul mate — the being that Aristophanes describes when he speaks in Plato’s Symposium.

Prometheus finds this sort of completion in his Romance with Asia. Thinking of her, he cries out: “Asia! who when my being overflowed / Wert like a golden chalice to bright wine / Which else had sunk into the thirsty dust.” That is, she gave him focus, aim, objective, form. And it often seems that Asia is the more analytical of the pair. She spends herself in shrewd, lawyerlike questioning of the poem’s weird spirit of transformation, Demogorgon. It is she who seems to have more gift for metaphysics.

Who is Shelley’s Prometheus? Or to put the question in a better way: Who is Prometheus once he is unchained and joined with Asia? When the two are joined together, Prometheus attains full powers. He has been the one who made cities and seen the azure ocean flow between the white columns as they stand on the cliffs. He has not only created the works of poetry that matter — for as Shelley says, all true poems contribute to a giant poem always in the making — but also made scientific discoveries, to free men from pain and to prolong a joyful life:

He told the hidden powers of herbs and springs, And Disease drank and slept. Death grew like sleep. He taught the implicated orbits woven Of the wide wandering stars; and how the sun Changes his lair and by what secret spell The pale moon is transformed when her broad eye Gazes not on the interlunar sea: He taught to rule, as life directs the limbs, The tempest-winged chariots of the Ocean, And the Celt knew the Indian. Cities then Were built and through their snow-like columns flowed The warm winds and the azure ether shone, And the blue sea and the shadowy hills were seen.

Where does such creativity come from? Shelley answers that it comes from love and from unbinding the imagination from the constraints imposed by repressive cultures and by the mind’s own timidity. It comes from the joining of lover and beloved.

How does Shelley’s vision of love and Romance respond to Schopenhauer — and all the other enemies of Romantic love who have been, and still are, abroad in the world? Shelley will not repudiate the instincts. Love, to count as love, must be sexual love and based in the drives, but it must pass beyond that too. Love that matters for Shelley not only dispenses sexual bliss, but fires invention, imagination, creation. The question for Shelley’s lover isn’t simply: Does he set me aflame? It’s the question of what happens to the flame. Does this love get poems written, discoveries made, move people to justice? If not, then it’s merely the old biological delusion.

For Shelley, the only love that matters is the love that feeds creation. He only respects love that leads to more work, and works. If an attraction doesn’t make the individual more creative, more humane, more generous, and more eager to redeem the world (or at least some corner of it) then it is not love. When love ceases to inspire fresh creation, it is no longer love.

Is it possible to be anything but a fool to Schopenhauer and Darwin’s procreative Nature? Can you ever see through the haze of obfuscation, ever truly recognize the authentic beloved? Shelley’s poem suggests that you can prove it on your pulse. If love makes you and your beloved more generously imaginative then you have beaten the biological imperative — though you will be indulging biology, too. If you thrive and make and do for others, not yourself, when you are in love, then it is love worthy of the name. If your love makes you kinder, more compassionate, more generous, then that is true love. If it makes you ready to sell something of what you have and give it to the poor, then that is true love. If love makes you braver — readier to stand up and fight when fighting is what’s needed, then that is true love. If love makes you more thoughtful and you take a step, no matter how shaky, in trying to answer the everlasting questions, then that, Shelley suggests to us, is true love.

In this insistence on the creative impulse, Shelley creates a definition of authentic love that defies the skeptics and isolationists. Freud says repeatedly that lovers create a world in which only two people exist. Yes; true. If what you have is “dull sublunary lovers’ love, whose soul is sense,” as Donne immortally put it, then yes, you’ve created a world of only two people. But that’s the definition of lazy love. It’s narcissistic love, Oedipal love, the spiritualization of sensuality, the love of one biological entity bent on improving the species for another. (Though without that natural imperative, Shelley says, there is no true love.) But if love begets “Ode to the West Wind,” then it is something else again. If it makes you fight, as Shelley did from the time he was a boy, for political justice, then who is to say it is not true love?

How rarely does this happen? Rarely. Though I persist in thinking that no effort, however shaky, is to be disregarded, if it comes from a loving heart. Do not judge yourself by results, the Bhagavad Gita says, but by what you aspired to do and how potently you have thrown yourself into the effort.

Clapton had it wrong — love doesn’t have to be so sad. Though unless we are as wise about love as Shelley was, it probably will be.

¤

Mark Edmundson teaches at the University of Virginia. His newest book is  The Heart of the Humanities: Reading, Writing, Teaching.

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