I can't afford to take any time off, but then again I can't afford not to. It's a delicate balance at the moment as I attempt to get my work done without actually exhausting myself to a point where my brain is no longer capable of doing the work. With just 2 more AIOTMs, half an Edinburgh show, five-sixths of a TV script and one Richard Herring's Objective to complete by Edinburgh things (genuinely) already feel a bit more manageable. If I can make the necessary progress on the TV script this week then my main concern will be Edinburgh and weirdly getting my hour of stand up right is something I am relishing. I did a little bit of reading on the science of love today and it's a fascinating subject. Yet there's some superstitious part of my brain that feels like I am opening Pandora's box. Is love perhaps one of those things that we don't want explained by science? Might it destroy the magic and worse might the truth make us question the way we live and the things we hold as true? Or will an understanding of what makes us tick and what creates the bonds between us actually make us stronger? The parallels with religion keep on coming and the reticence and slight fear I felt opening up a book that promised to blow the lid on romantic ideals about love was very similar to teenage feelings about challenging Christianity.
I suspect that, as with religion, the scientific explanation of how things have come to be as they are will be more mind-blowing and incredible than our romantic fantasies. I got an email from someone a few weeks ago about this subject who said that what is remarkable is that we can feel anything at all. 13 billion years ago everything was in one tiny piece of superdense matter, which then exploded and set off a chain of events that would lead to our existence. The atoms that would make up my brain and my girlfriend's brain were in there somewhere, as was the stuff that would become the chemicals that would flood our brains when we met to make us believe (rightly or wrongly, romantically or pragmatically) that we were in love. That something inanimate could become animate, that something without conscience could gain conciousness - these things are more wondrous than the idea that some flying baby with a bow and arrow is hovering above us to ensure we meet our soul mate. It is natural to fear learning stuff that might unsettle your cosy view of the world, especially when most of the things we believe are put there to protect us from the harsh realities of existence. But it's just a matter of perspective. A Universe without a God is in some way more terrifying a prospect than one with some sort of divine scheme and protection, but it is also liberating in other ways. It's horrible to think that you might one day not exist in any conscious form, but it's just as horrible to think that you will never stop existing. You've had 13 billion years of not being able to think and comment and fret and fall in love and there's another 13 billion years (and more) to come where that will be the case again. Enjoy this little window, either in blissful ignorance or in awe at your insignificance in this huge evolving machine that we find ourselves in.
And maybe if we all knew the truth about love (and I really know nothing about it at the moment so this is all conjecture really) we wouldn't be so harsh on each other for our occasional inability to uphold the vision of what it is. If you look at the cultural and historical differences in our attitudes to this subject then you can immediately see that it is no more of a constant force than religion. Relationships work in different ways for different people and we seem to punish some of the people when they fail to live up to an ideal that is unrealistic. Even from my very brief amount of reading it's clear that different people love in different ways and want different stuff from relationships, and yet in many cases people are expected to conform to this relatively modern idea of the importance of being in love. People try, it works for some and not for others, but if you fail you get castigated for it. Are we being forced to repress our true natures in order to try and conform to an ideal that isn't even necessarily particularly ideal? Looking at Ryan Giggs for example, you could see an awful philanderer or a man who desperately wanted to conform to the paragon life of being the family man, but whose nature didn't allow him to do so. I wonder if in the future people will look back at our modern marriages in the same way as we now look back at the attitudes to homosexuality in the middle of the 20th Century, where gay men tried to deny who they were and marry for the sake of appearances. That's not to say that marriage isn't right for some, just that it's maybe not right for all. And admittedly society has moved away from believing it is compulsory.
I am waffling away, partly just to try and get these thoughts into some kind of shape and this is not a cogent or coherent argument at all. I love romance and I loved and was overwhelmed by the feelings that pounced on me unexpectedly when I met my girlfriend. But there's a danger that a romantic ideal can set the bar too high. Once the chemical fizz has died down a little, you can start to see if you are really suited to be together in the long term and that less passionate love is about a series of compromises and pragmatism, which in a sense is more meaningful than the idea that you just meet the right person and then it's happily ever. Even if those overwhelming feelings at the start (and it's probably lucky for the world that those don't last for ever in that heightened way or we'd never get anything done and would probably walk in front of buses on a regular basis) were chemical reactions in my brain, it's still fascinating to me as to why they appeared when I met my girlfriend - what was it about her that made them happen and what was it about me that made the same thing happen to her. Even if it's a subconscious decision based on breeding suitability it's still pretty astonishing.
All I am trying to say, I guess, is that that superstitious fear of investigating the truth behind things that seem sacred or magic should not put us off. The truth is usually more incredible than the invention.
Anyway enough of this flim-flam. Time to write my script. Sorry for using you as a rough pad for my show. This will be a lot funnier by the time it makes it to the stage!
