All You Need Is Love

The song was playing at the stand where I went to buy my tea. It got me thinking. Let us examine Mr. Lennon's claim, shall we?

All you need is love. Well, if we assume that a need is that which is necessary to maintain the organism, then I don't know how long one could be sustained on love alone. Nine minutes in an all-love, no-oxygen environment and you're dead. You may be loved, but assuming you need to continue to be alive in order to appreciate the fact, the love is rendered moot.

Okay, so all you need is love. And oxygen. And food, and water, and shelter. Because without these things you will very soon be popping your clogs.

(Yes, I looked that up. You can too.)

Now things are getting messy. In order to fulfill these biological needs, there's a lot of non-love activity involved. In order to get food, you either have to work to raise or gather it yourself or, more likely in this specialized post-industrial society, you work at some other task and somebody pays you for your work and you take your pay to a fourth party who has been commissioned by corporations to warehouse the food created by other other parties and then to exchange your payment--which has to be guaranteed by a government, so now there's *that*--for the food. Water and housing aren't much simpler.

Of course, all you really *need* to live in order to love and be loved are a few handfuls of berries and seeds and insects per day. But I'm thinking that if you're content to subsist at that level of material existence, you're not going to be getting much love from people who are members of a post-industrial society. Assuming that's the kind of love you need, and we'll assume that that's the kind of love Mr. Lennon is talking about, because that's the society he was a member of, drug-filled spiritual quests to India aside.

So now in order to love, you need to eat, and in order to eat, you need to work. In order to work, you need to do all kinds of other things. For a lot of jobs you need to get an education, so now you need to go to college in order to love. For those jobs that don't require a college degree, you might still need to undergo years of training. And in order to maintain most jobs, you need to cultivate a specific kind of appearance, work on one's social skills...so now we get to the fact that if all you need is love, in order to get that love, you have to wear a tie.

You're still with me? Good. I know it's been a bit of a jog to get here, but the logic is sound.

To Mr. Lennon in the year 1967, it might well have seemed that all one needed was love. But getting past that level of ebullient optimism, we see that there are layers and layers of economic necessity (and then layers of luxury that, once entrenched, are perceived as necessities, such that we think we "need" cars and flat-screen televisions and breast implants) in order to maintain the capacity for love. Recall that Mr. Lennon previously quoted Barret Strong to claims that "Your lovin' give me such a thrill / But your lovin' don't pay my bills;" his subsequent reversal of this position doesn't acknowledge the necessity of paying the bills in order to love. And this is to say nothing of the other realities that go into making one loveable and capable of being loved. Can one be content with love alone while dispensing with such other needs as job satisfaction, personal security, actualization through the meeting of self-created goals, variety, et cetera? Certainly love can contribute to the meeting of these other needs, and can even compensate for some deficiencies, but it can't satisfy all other psychic needs, all of the time. It can't really be all you need. Because nobody is liable to love you when you're depressed about how nobody cares about your work, or when you're panicking because you think the terrorists are going to come and get you.

And thus we end up with the causal relationship whereby in order to love, we have to have the war in Iraq. Personally, I'm not willing to make those links--my own needs for security and my own interpretation of the causal relationship between my personal security and the war in Iraq being very different from those of the lion's share of my countrymen--but I can assure you that there are plenty of people who do feel such a need, as stupid as it is.

And thus we end up with the actuality in which the need for love implicated myriad other needs, and the need for love actually generates wars and corporate capitalism and other dumb shit like that. Love equals the purchase of a diamond equals the endorsement of forced labor in Africa, so love equals the endorsement of forced labor in Africa, so John Lennon's original proposition could be retitled as "All You Need is Forced Labor in Africa." Not quite as cheery, but as true, given the assumptions we tend to make in post-industrial societies, some of which are based on actual organic needs but many of which are based on an incredibly luxuriant interpretation of what those needs actually are.

In any case, I am afraid, Mr. Lennon, that your position is an over-simplification of the matter at hand, ignoring the political and economic complexities of a person's "need." Perhaps at some point--like infancy--love includes and provides for these things, but by the point one is an adult, love is far more fraught and complicated

Nutshell

Imagine a man. The man is tall. The man is fat. The man is blondly bearded and his blond hair is unfashionably long. The man is young, but his weight and his beard and the hard set of his eyes make him seem older. The man is dressed in dark clothing. He is wearing too much clothing for late spring in a desert climate. He wears his black jeans and black sweatshirt as though to shield his shape against the outside world, as though he would as soon wear steel armor over his skin as cotton. He wears a backpack on his back and the backpack is full of books that cause his broad shoulders to stoop.

He stands at the foot of a bridge that spans a city street. A human flood comes at him over the bridge. Hundreds of eighteen-year-olds with perfect or adequately perfect or at the very least perfectly adequate bodies come jogging at him. The eighteen-year-old bodies are wearing nothing but underwear. The eighteen-year-old bodies wave and shout and cheer and wave their hands in the air with drunken exuberance. Their sweat smells of alcohol. Their sweat is eighty proof.

The man sets his jaw and locks his eyes. He deliberately stares at the point in the air fifty feet directly out from him. He deliberately does not stare at the nearly naked breasts. He fails, locks his eyes again.

The man takes a breath. He closes his eyes and bows his head. He opens his eyes and raises his head. He forges into the human flood, going against the current. He is jostled from all sides by young flesh, the soft flesh of women and the hard flesh of men. He forces his way forward through the flesh and the laughs and the screams of ecstasy, refusing to concede one inch to the circumstances. He is a darkness among all the bright nudity.

The tide overtakes him. He is pushed back.

Unable to force his way through the flood, he heads to the street to take a circuitous detour. Nearly naked people clutter the sidewalks and clutter the air with their loud chatter. One of the naked girls walks opposed to him on the sidewalk; she sees the hard set of his eyes and sees his beard and his fatness and his darkness and shies away, scared. Her boyfriend with moves protectively in front of her, putting the wall of his abs between the girlfriend and the man. The man does not stop. He looks at the girl's shivering breasts as little as he possibly can.

The man reaches an intersection, sees people standing next to the base of the streetlight, doesn't trust their judgment, reaches out to push the Walk button himself. Naked people crowd around him. One of the naked girls loudly and drunkly asks him if he did the Undie Run. Without ever looking at her, the heavily-clothed and heavyset man shakes his head and says “No.” She then asks another waiting and standing person if he did the Undie Run. She says they do Undie Runs in London, which is where she's from. She is very clearly lying; her voice is from nowhere near London, although now, as if to give some force to the lie, she remembers to torque her vowels a little bit, but the effort is inadequate and unconvincing.

The light changes. The man and the others cross the street. The man walks the several blocks to finally get to the parking structure, and walks to the far end where he parked his car.

It is only when he comes to his usual space and finds it empty that he recalls that he parked in the parking structure on the other end of the college campus. He realizes that he has, in fact, been going the wrong way this whole time.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give unto you the life of David Michael Kammerzelt III in a goddamn mother-fucking nut-shell.

(Last night actually happened exactly like this, almost.)