Love (Short Story Series) - Index & Description


This series of short essays is coming to an end - and will be republished in book form or perhaps as a series of short videos. 

Index

  1. Building the Fire
  2. Telling Stories to the Person You Love
  3. An Australian Wedding
  4. The Fishers Belt
  5. While the Crow’s Day drags on in the Darkness, We are the only Ones Left here on Earth
  6. What Becomes of the Brokenhearted
  7. Because the Night
  8. Blood of the Coopracambra 
  9. In Ameria
  10. For my Mother
  11. Only we dream
  12.  In the Minstrels Gallery
  13. Here is the Gold of the Otter's Well Gleaming
  14. Bone Girl
  15. Mercury in Retrograde
  16. Advice to My Daughter
  17. 1867 – Jerrabatgully
  18. 1882 – Jerrabatgully
  19. In Your Memory, I Still Live
  20. The Great Dance
  21. Futures Lost
  22. Moon Rider
  23. Insights
  24. Love in a Time of Plague and War
  25. Happiness and Imagination
  26. The Shepherdess Marcela
  27. The Mercantile Soldier Poet Abu Ja’far and the Aristocratic Lady Hafsa in the Grand Garden of Hawr Mu’ammil
  28. Recollections touching on The Knight of the Rueful Countenance
  29. In this Life, We only get One True Love
  30. All Good Things must come to an End
  31. The Unexamined Life
  32. Butterfly
  33. Echoes of You
  34. Abdulmajid
  35. Anthem
  36. Den Fenella
  37. Fire Storm
  38. Into Darkness
  39. Once Upon A Sunrise, In the Burrogorang
  40. I Wish We Had Never Met
  41. Wind-wolves raging
  42. For What is Love But Madness After All 
  43. Fiametta, What Has Love Got To Do With It?
  44. Krubi
  45. Lost Lovers Falls
  46. Resolute Penelope
  47. Silly Love Songs 
  48. Half a Life 
  49. Of Helen of Troy
  50. Orlando and Rosalind

Series Description

This is a series of essays concerning love. Some stories are told around a fire, and some deal with romance. My friend Rodri points out: "La Vida I l'Amor son símbols de Llum, per que il·luminen de goig l'Univers" (Catalan: Life and Love are symbols of Light because they illuminate the Universe with joy.) While I will strive for happiness here, I cannot promise it.

Love in popular culture is often reduced to the romantic love of one person for another. A whole genre of our writing concerns the yearnings for domestic bliss or momentary passion. But a moment's thought suggests that the concept has a far broader scope, including the love of a mother for her child, the faithful for their god, or those who sacrifice all for their community. It encompasses subjects expressing love by flute girls and comic playwrights.

Perhaps, for a moment, let us put all those other sorts of love into a basket and selfishly concentrate simply on ourselves. When we do, we part company with Socrates because the concept of a crystalline or abstract form of love is a thousand miles away from the touch of skin on skin. And while concentrating on one in the absence of all those other intangibles that contribute to love by themselves, the bits fade like sparks from a winter's fire. 

Unlike the Romantics, we are reluctant to say that love is no longer within our reach, having loved once and failed. While emotional creatures, we cannot adopt physical satisfaction as the sole criterion for success. While we might understand the point, the attempt of our poets and songwriters to describe love concerning the bliss of being lost in another’s eyes and body burns hot then, after the 10th repeat, simply leaves us cold.

But then, when each time we ask ourselves, “Well then, what more is there,” we turn to contemplate dishes yet to be washed, dinners uncooked, and floors unswept. Attempts to describe love in that broader domestic partnership sense engage different subject matters that can and must persist regardless of the desire. Relationship compounded by finance, dependents, and washing machines.

From a different angle, do we seek the love of Helen for Paris, or Troilus and Cressida, or Orlando and Angelica or Odysseus and Penelope or Socrates and Diotima? Will our love be so soon forgotten or distorted like that of Aurelius and Faustina? But perhaps our choices have already been reduced to those of Kormak searching in vain for Steingerd? Or lost behind the curtains of time like Patye and Dawes? Or maybe the intangible, Don Quixote and Dulcinea. And, perhaps even the intangible tragedy of Marcela and Chrysostom might color our view of love.

Some have got to this point and concluded that love is just an illusion. Or perhaps it is just a pale jewel, some bauble for the young to chase. Some ask, “Does it make any sense?”

And then it starts again, lightly brushing against another’s mind.

There can be little question that the subject of love is often quietly put into a basket. Perhaps the same bucket we put all complicated things or those with no scientific explanation. Maybe the same basket we placed a mother's love for her child or the faithful for their god a moment ago.


Copyright Dark Aelf, 2021 

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