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