All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks
bell hooks provides a radical defense and promotion of love. Indeed, we do not often think of how we fail to view ourselves as loving beings. We rather be people that wait to fall in love and release ourselves of the intentional responsibility true love so desperately needs. We use romantic love as the guise of healing from the past love we felt we had not received. We pray that love comes our way in the form of a romantic partner but we have no notion of action after we have found such a person. It is significantly easier to talk of the woes of love as opposed to the way it uplifts us.
hooks leads us through the web we have tangled around ourselves, as we clutch towards the transparent strings of inaction. hooks holds that love has essential values. If we do not recognize these values, we will fail to love long before we have set out to love. hooks paint the act of loving as a small community; it is a small town where the connection between its residents allows for the survival of a joyous soul. We see the process of love idealized in hooks’ very conception of love.
True love is the takes on a variety of definitions for hooks within this text. But there is a consistent and ongoing theme of genuineness, humility, and action. Loving is necessary.
Forgiveness is a radical act. But it appears that the act of loving is even more radical. It is necessary to forgive in order to love fully and truly. Both ourselves and the ones we love are necessary recipients of forgiveness. This does seem somewhat paradoxical to hook’s early claim that love can not be present where abuse is. But perhaps this can be resolved through the action of love. It is necessary to forgive to love, and while love might not be present in situations of abuse, it is always possible to be someone willing to act lovingly. Perhaps this forgiveness does not happen within the relationship of abuse. There is a whole variety of abusive models that perpetuate the lives of many American relationships, and hooks touches on many of them. But if we are to hold that loving requires active and ongoing work, often synonymous with struggle, then where do we draw the line between a relationship in need of mending and one of abuse that should not be tolerated. I agree both forgiveness and loving are radical acts. But there is an onslaught of complicated roadblocks that deter many of us from reaching true love or a realm of forgiveness. I do not doubt that bell hooks saw these hurdles and would hold that her treatise remains appropriate.
Despite feeling a noticeable change in my body after having read All About Love, I still fight against the purity of loving hooks presents. How could such a perfect thing as this form of loving exist? I do not believe I am alone in this reluctant acceptance; this skepticism of the ideal. It even remains a challenge to refer to love as a verb as opposed to a noun. It might be my mantra from now that: I am an individual that is loving, loves, has and will experience loving. I feel I can say, with confidence, that there would be a decrease in pain if these text were in the hands of many more.