Love Conquers All?

We have all been duped, drugged, and misled. The soft hearted poets and idealistic dreamers of this world have conspired against our common sense and succeeded in bringing us all to believe that love conquers all. Sadly they speak with their heads in the clouds, and cannot see the full picture.

The great paradox of love, it’s great beauty and great tragedy, is that the world cannot change our love, but because of this detachment, our love cannot change the world. How we like to believe that our love never dies; that nothing could stop us. How immortal love makes us feel, strong and untouchable. But while love is divine, we unfortunately are not. Love is truly the most resilient yet impotent of all our emotions, the paradox that has lived throughout human history.

In the short stories “A Domestic Dilemma” by Carson McCullers, and “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin, the authors attempt to show this to us through the eyes of two men. One, who is in love with a woman who has fallen into the grasp of alcohol. And the other, whose love for his brother, and his brothers love for his music, cannot change the pain that they live in. Their love cannot save their neighborhood, their children, or those they cherish. All these men have great loves, emotions that fill them and fuel them, but they remain powerless to stop “the darkness coming, and the darkness in the faces” (88) that grows all around them.

In McCullers’ short story, “A Domestic Dilemma”, the vastness of the husbands love is rendered powerless when faced with his wife’s loss of control. His love is “insidiously undermined” by her “unexplainable malevolence, times when the alcoholic fuse caused an explosion of unseemly anger” (75).

The wife too, although lost and confused in their new suburban settings, still clings to the love of her husband and children. Her embarrassment, grief, and pain are shown as she weeps bitterly after an explosion in front of the children (77). But this love can not ease the changing of times, the deep feelings of alienation in their new suburban settings, nor can it save them from drowning in the high tide of sorrow. The husband, although all his hopes and dreams lay with his wife and family, cannot “[hide] the truth” (79) nor change the fact that “…he and his children were bound to a future of degradation and slow ruin” (79).

Love is not blind to Martin, but rather helpless against the drifting of his wife. And even as “the ghost of the old anger vanished” (79), Martin knows that his love can never save his wife. Had love been affected by this change in his wife, had the alteration in their lifestyle and in each other brought changes also to their feelings, then Martin would have been able to make the decision of leaving long before he did . When Martin had “cradled the hurt child, so infinitely precious at that moment, he had an affrighted vision of the future” (75) , he had already seen the path on which they walked.

But despite this realization, even at the pivotal moment of great tragedy, his love for her “touched a strain of tenderness [in him]” (77) and remained above and beyond her current failings. While his love remained untouched by the filth of the circumstance, the world could not be cleansed in the purity of his love. And so Martin is forced to make the decision which he dreads, to both hold on to his love, but let go of the one he loves; to “[look upon] his wife one last time” (79). Martin finds himself tied to that which once set him free, as he drowns in the “immense complexity of love” (79).

In the short story “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin, the author introduces us to a family, and a neighborhood, filled with both love, and a darkness which cannot be dispelled by it. Sonny is a young musician, filled with passion and love for his music, and perhaps love for the world he saw around him. It is love that has driven him to feel the stings of others, the reality of the world, the “stink of the garbage cans” that he had grown sick of (93).

Sonny is a Christ-like figure who takes upon himself the “cup of trembling” (104) as a symbol of the sins of the world. He absorbs the pain of others, the hurt and loss and suffering that he sees all around him, and because of his love for beauty, for music, for the peace and happiness he seeks for his own soul, he suffers. In this great sacrifice, Sonny shows his love, but also, how little it truly does. Although Sonny pours his heart and soul into his music, although he loves, they still live in squalor and deprivation.

Baldwin writes:

“The beat looking grass lying around isn’t enough to make their lives
green, the hedges will never hold out the streets, and they know it. The
bit windows fool no one, they aren’t big enough to make space out of
no space. They don’t bother with the windows, they watch the TV screen
instead. The playground is most popular with the children who don’t play
jacks, or skip rope, or roller-skate, or swing, and they can be found in it
after dark … The same things happen, and the same things will continue
to happen” (87).

And yet, Sonny still returns to the “danger he had almost died trying to escape” (87). He returns to “all that hatred and misery and love” (101). Sonny’s ultimate sacrifice, his parallel to the death of Christ, is in his undying and unchanging love for the world. And much like Christ, all his sacrifice will not dispel sin from the world, will not rid the world of drugs, or poverty, or suffering. Will not stop murder, or hate, or illness.

Instead, Sonny’s love and Sonny’s music exist on a plane where, although it brings and binds those around him, does nothing to change the circumstance. In this way, it shines as a beacon of hope instead of being a concrete solution. Although music brings comfort to Sonny in the moment, how it “cease[es] the lamenting” in his spirit (104), it does not change “what he had gone through, and what he would continue to go through until he came to rest in the earth” (104). “It’s terrible sometimes, inside” Sonny once said, “…you’ll do anything to play… but I can’t forget – where I’ve been. I don’t mean just the physical place I’ve been, I mean where I’ve been. And what I’ve been” (100).

The music itself and the love which Sonny expresses though this medium are a form of testifying, an acknowledgment to the ugly, and a tribute to the beautiful. But in all of it’s strength and truth, it is still powerless to do any more than shine a dim light in the growing darkness.

Sonny’s Garden of Gethsemane is a small bar in Harlem, and the cross he bears is in the weight of piano keys, and in the pain that soaks into his heart.
Sonny’s brother is also one bound to his love that does not change, and cannot change what is around him. His love for his brother extends as deep as the line which bore them, the moments they shared in childhood, and the despair they felt in adulthood. These memories and these tragedy’s bound them together, and yet through all his love for Sonny, the Brother is powerless to save him from his suffering. The brother “had been there when [Sonny] was born … had heard the first words he had ever spoken.

When he started to walk, he walked from our mother straight to me, I caught him just before he fell when he took the first steps he ever took in this world” (85), and though he tried, and though he loved, the Brother is unable to catch Sonny every time he fell. The anguish of watching his brother fail and falling into despair and his own inability to alter this path, took it’s toll on him. It wasn’t until his own daughter died of polio that “[his] trouble made [Sonny's] real” (96). Again, renewing his promise to his mother, the Brother tried to save Sonny from the drugs and the life that he felt were bringing Sonny to his end. “I … care how you suffer” (99) he said.

But despite his deepest love, Sonny’s brother was unable to pull him out of the pit of despair, to take the “cup of trembling” from him. The author symbolizes this by the brother ordering the very drink which compared his brother to Christ. He cannot save his brother, but instead, offers him his support in the sacrifice. Despite all the pain and all the suffering they inflict upon each other, their love remains above the loathsome suffering and base degeneration of the world, while they struggle to tread water. All the love, and yet all this suffering remains.
Love exists, but not as they would have us believe. It is not omnipotent, only inexorable.

The world and it exist in completely separate places, and we are trapped in between. The changes love make are within us, and not without, and the suffering we go through cannot be magically made undone through love. But love is the reason to suffer onward. Both McCullers and Baldwin express the complexity of love through the acknowledgment that love is powerful and powerless. It is beautiful, but it can be painful. Though love does not conquer all it can never be conquered.

I understand what you are saying about Sonny’s Blues, and I think we just have a difference of opinion. Forgive me if the lack of content makes me seem pig headed, for you make many valid points, but for me – as a writer and a human being – I just see things differently.

You made a comment that love isn’t changed by circumstance. And I whole heartedly stand by my belief that it does not. But I also don’t hold to the notion that the love can change the circumstance, or that the love can always be the way we want it to be. In my own experiences, (which is really all we have to go on when writing, especially about a deep emotion like love), everything can change and yet that kernel of love will not. The person can change, and the environment can change. But the love we had, for the person, for the time – even if it’s all in the past, remains. Some call this nostalgia. I think it’s all the same thing.

I think you would be hard pressed to find somebody who was deeply in love, to have circumstance ruin it all. And then to look back on the time of love as being something negative. We all would want to go back to that time of love, but sometimes it’s impossible. No, I’m not claiming that love is eternal in the sense that you will always be IN love, but the love you had for the person at that time will always be a part of you. That’s the first part of my thesis: life doesn’t change love.

I think you are missing the point behind my essay. I’m saying that emotionally, love is potent, but corporally it is useless. In the end, Sonny’s music does form an emotional bond with other people, it brings them together, and it gives them hope. It changes them, as all love does. But it doesn’t change the circumstance, the poverty, the squalor. They will all go home to the same darkness they came from. That was my thesis, in a nutshell. That’s the second part of my thesis: love doesn’t change life.