Citing your sources isn’t always necessary: a bitch slap across the face is as equally or more valid to the receiver as hundreds of replications of pain studies when determining whether it hurts to get hit in the face.
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The best way to test whether you are good at making maps isn’t to ask for a copy to compare to: go explore and see if you get lost.
“But then I risk death!?” Does that matter? Is that even likely today? You risk living with always being a map reader and never a map maker. More broadly: someone born to remember others, not to be remembered by others.
You don’t even risk getting lost; you never explore anywhere that you can’t already buy a map for anyways.
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“Don’t ask me to prove that pain is real, it’s too easy…
…to prove that love is real, however, is much more than the absence of pain…
…I can only produce pain reliably within and throughout myself…
…the pleasure that follows from the physical is simply not love to me.”
Which one of the terms used above has the moving-definition? In other words: do you think you’re better at mapping pain or love?
The answer is in the language, very clearly: why does pain remain pain and yet love becomes pleasure? I know that the message is pleasure =/= love — that’s literally the meaning of the quote — but if the point is that pleasure isn’t love then why bring up pleasure at all? Is it the antithesis to pain? Then why is the subject of the quote a comparison of pain and love? What is the antithesis to love then? It can’t be pain, so is it: hatred? loneliness? apathy?!
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You don’t like pain. You avoid it. You certainly don’t want to map it yourself. You buy maps for pain — on how to feel pain without damaging yourself in ways that really matter (okay, alcohol is bad, cigarettes are bad, fair… but you’re still here).
Love sounds fun and you don’t want to avoid it. But that doesn’t mean you don’t buy maps for it. In fact, love is the map; this antithesis to pain really is pleasure and your map of pleasure has adapted to create love.
If you want to think physically, maybe you make maps like a cheap evolutionary biologist: pain avoidance has to be physical, it keeps you from dying which means you have more babies. Love-seeking used to mean physical too — you want stronger men or women with wider hips so that they have less chance of dying and more chance of more babies.
But as you remove the physical ties to staying alive, love-seeking becomes inherently less based on physical needs. But notice, just because you don’t die as much from physicals, doesn’t change how those physical will kill you. You know what pain feels like.
On the other hand, the less physical needs, the more abstract needs come in to play. The character of your partner is now equally or more important than their bicep or hip measurements. And you know what abstraction calls for: map-makers; fantasy-creators; love-makers (not in the way you hope).