I haven't written on GC for quite some time - it feels good to be posting something again:) This is basically something I wrote out before the New Year; I've been tinkering with it ever sinceÂ… I was going to insert a bit here, to explain the background to it, but on re-reading, I think I'd just be repeating myselfÂ… and it's already pretty long! The influences will make themselves clearÂ…



What would you say is, for most people, the most fundamental and significant desire in life? I would say, relationship. Desire for relationship is, I think, absolutely central for the majority of people.

Now one might say, for some it would be any number of other things: success in a chosen career or other area; maybe knowledge and intellectual understanding; maybe just a quiet life. Or that it would depend on circumstance: for the person with a serious illness, it would likely be a desire for a scientific breakthrough in that field. But behind most positive motivations there is a desire to relate with others around us and the world we find ourselves in. A desire for a quiet life is a desire to be at ease with experience; a desire for knowledge of the world is a desire to understand it, and hence better relate to it. The hermits and the 'pillar saints' all sought out isolation, but they did so in order to find communion. (And as to negative motivations, these can often be seen as perversions of the natural desire to relate.)

Desire for relationship would seem to be central to life. And we desire and seek relationship in many different ways, with humanity in general, with people who are significant to us in their various ways in our own lives, with the physical world around us.

But I think that, of most importance to most of us, is that fundamental desire and longing for mutual, shared, personal intimacy; and we feel incomplete without it. We want to love and be loved. And there is a powerful aspect of the self which is very obviously connected with this, a form in which this longing for relationship and intimacy very readily and naturally flows: sexuality. And feelings of sexual desire, and sexual love, are one of the great 'spices' of life. The libido - not for all, but for many or most of us - is a particularly vibrant part of the self. It is felt physically and internally, sensually and emotionally. Most people are able to pursue the possibility of a romantic relationship; even if a desired relationship doesn't come about, they are able to be open about their feelings. But for those of us who are girl lovers, or boylovers, even that freedom to be open about our feelings is either entirely or mostly closed off. For me personally, that inability to be freely expressive, to not be able to be really open with a girl about the way I feel about her, has been hugely frustrating. And to know that the intimacy of romantic relationship, yes physical intimacy but most important the emotional intimacy which gives that meaning, is never to be possible. Some of the deepest and strongest emotions and feelings one can experience are all intermingled and enmeshed within romantic feeling and sexuality, and right at the heart of it is that overwhelming longing for intimacy, for mutually expressed love, for relationship.

I tried to deal with the frustration through the fullest possible immersion in fantasy, and the kind of sexual expression one can engage in aloneÂ… And the imaginative accessories that go along with it. Hours upon hours, chasing an ever more elusive moment of "fulfilment". There used to be pleasure in it. But the pleasure was ebbing away, taken over by the devils of frustration and plain old misery. The "drugs" weren't working any more. I'd try desperately to get into that place of disconnection with reality, but it was ever harder to attain. I guess there is a paradox in trying to deal with what is essentially a desire for intimacy with another, by burying oneself deeper and deeper within personal and private fantasy. Fantasising about intimate relationship really just reminded me constantly that I didn't have intimate relationship! And I'd try and deal with that by trying to intensify the fantasy - in other words, by submerging even deeper within my own self. I went for marathon "sessions", and I'd try to increase the "disconnect" with reality, in various ways.

So, to sum up at this point: the overwhelming desire for intimate relationship; the formation of that desire in the most natural and obvious form, emotional-sexual desire; but the impossibility of genuine fulfilment, and the frustration that entails.

Then in the midst of all that, through an encounter with a story, I got to thinking about the fundamental basis of desire and frustration. Sexuality is a form in which an essential desire seeks a way of expression; in some cases that form is closed off or doesn't apply. But I got to thinking about exactly what that essential desire is, what it entails, what gives it value; are there other forms in which that core desire can be expressed with equal value - and so on. The core desire is for relational intimacy.

First, a bit of theory, and then a consideration of that story.

Themes

Before I get into discussing that story, I'd like to highlight the themes I want to explore here. We desire relationship, we desire intimacy; that can take different forms, sexual or non-sexual - in themselves of equal potential in expressing and facilitating that relational intimacy; in terms of value, what matters is not the form but the quality behind the form. Quality, of course, is a subjective thing; all I want to do here is to share one theoretical formulation which seems to me to place in focus a beautiful mutuality and intimacy.

Although I don't share the Christian faith he had, I really like the theologian Paul Tillich's theory of love. In Christian thought, two types of love in particular are often seen as being at odds with one another: 'eros' (relationally desirous love) and 'agape' (unconditional love). If the former is seen as based in what is desired for the self, the latter is held to be a much nobler form, selfless and self-sacrificial. But Tillich suggests that these loves combine to form true relationship, and that both are essential. It's also worth bearing in mind that Tillich uses and develops classical concepts, where eros is not simply synonymous with sexual desire, but is seen in terms of relational longing:

"Different types of love have been distinguished, and the Greek eros type of love has been contrasted with the Christian agape type of love. Eros is described as the desire for self-fulfillment by the other, agape as the will to self-surrender for the sake of the other being. But this alternative does not exist. The so-called "types of love" are actually "qualities of love," lying within each other and driven into conflict only in their distorted forms. No love is real without a unity of eros and agape. Agape without eros is obedience to a moral law, without warmth, without longing, without reunion. Eros without agape is chaotic desire, denying the validity of the claim of the other one to be acknowledged as an independent self, able to love and to be loved."

-- Tillich, Dynamics Of Faith

I think there is a powerful principle here. The desire of the self to find fulfilment (or completion, wholeness) in relationship (whether through sexual or non-sexual relationship) combines with a surrender of the self in a focus on the one loved. I think the best term for what Tillich is talking about would be mutual empathic love. Mutual empathic love must equate to total intimacy and union.

Now, a bit about The ExorcistÂ…


I can't resist a little excursus here, before getting on to the main story I want to talk about - this is not it, but it will serve to open up the themes a little more first. William Peter Blatty's two connected works, The Ninth Configuration and The Exorcist are both, in part, an exploration of the nature of love. The two stories have little narrative relation (except the shared character of the astronaut at the MacNeil party), but are linked thematically. The Ninth focuses on the question, Can any human action be a genuine example of truly selfless love? The answer to this question provided in The Ninth is, I think, rather contrived; but Blatty did a much more interesting job of exploring answers in The Exorcist.

The two priests, Merrin (the 'saintly' believer) and Karras (the very 'human' doubter), seem to me to represent two pictures of love. The first is in Merrin's confession to Karras about his past loss of faith which resulted from his inability to love the unlovable:

"Â…at last I realized that God would never ask of me that which I know to be psychologically impossible; that the love which He asked was in my will and not meant to be felt as emotion at all. Not at all. He was asking that I act with love; that I do unto others; and that I should do it unto those who repelled me, I believe, was a greater act of love than any other."

The second is in what Karras actually does for Regan, to save her from the demon.

Merrin, at first sight, seems to be being extolled as the more "exemplary" of the two men. But that is not so: it is Karras who succeeds, and Merrin who fails. In the narrative, of course, he fails due to his weak heart, which is nicely symbolic. Perhaps the real reason he fails and Karras succeeds is that Merrin's love is precisely the kind of 'dutiful', rule-inspired (and rule-bound) love that Tillich insists is not really love at all. Karras's love, on the other hand, is influenced and informed by (genuine) emotion. He not only doesn't adhere to the rules, he ignores them completely. I think, by this stage, we are meant to understand that Karras has regained a good deal of his faith - he believes in the reality of the demon. In which case, in inviting the demon into himself and throwing himself out of Regan's window, he is committing several mortal sins: suicide; rejection of Church authority in favour of his own perception of what is needed; inviting possession on himself. His motivation is a type of relational desire - the desire to save Regan and bring her back to her proper human state. How can that be if he's never (really) met her? But he has - albeit briefly. He caught glimpses of Regan, previously, in her true state - a terrified child - and she communicated two words to him: "Help me." Because it was mixed with the warmth of emotional human love, his version of agape, in contrast to Merrin's, became fully genuine. His love became totally selfless, even to the extent of casting aside every concern for himself, and risking (within Catholic conceptions) his own soul.

When he gives Karras absolution, Fr. Dyer sees in his eyes "something mysteriously like joy at the end of heart's longing." If his (literal) heart hadn't failed him, would Merrin have been able to act as Karras did? Without emotional feeling, all he had was a command to love, and a set of commands prescribing how - and how not - to express that 'love'. If Merrin had 'seen' Regan, as Karras did? I think part of the point of his lengthy speech to Karras is that it reveals he wouldn't have been able to: he is only able to perceive two possibilities in his speech to Karras: repulsion on an emotional level, or a bypassing of emotion through "right action". Tillich is right: the two qualities of human relational desire and agape, in combination, form the truest and most powerful kind of love.

Now, the main story I want to consider; one which provides a beautiful example of empathic love and intimacy, in this case in a romantic but non-sexual friendship form.


**Discussion of Let The Right One In followsÂ…








"Be Me A Little": Love, Friendship, and Empathy in "Let The Right One In"

One online fan of the 2008 Swedish movie, Let The Right One In ("LTROI" from here on), has described it as a "once in a lifetime" film. I couldn't agree more. It's that for me, anyway. And I love the novel on which it's based, by John Ajvide Lindqvist. This film and story has affected me more than anything else I've seen or read - period. I first saw the movie about eighteen months ago, and I've lost count of the number of times I've re-watched it, over and over and over again; and I've read and re-read the novel - my copy is pretty much falling apartÂ… The relationship at the heart of it, between Eli and Oskar, is, for me, the most beautiful relationship I've ever seen depicted in film or literature - or in fact ever encountered at all, in fiction or in reality. That's one hell of a grand claim, I know, but that's how I see it. And, although this is quite something to say about a fictional character, it is true nonetheless: I love Eli with a depth of feeling that I have never felt for any other person. I've been in love; I've felt strong feelings of attraction; but I've never felt about anyone the way I feel for Eli.

I want to consider this story in four, related, ways. First, a personal connection which caught my interest initially; second, to think about just what it is about Eli that makes me feel as I do; third, the nature, value and worth of Oskar and Eli's relationship; and, the key theme of agapeic empathy in the story.

Oskar himself was the first point of personal connection. Watching Oskar was like looking at myself at about his age in a mirror. Not in every respect: my parents weren't split up and my father was pretty much teetotal. But apart from that, I was Oskar. Oskar is a 'misfit' who becomes a victim; and he becomes used to being a victim. (And it's worth noting that some of Oskar's tribulations are based on experiences endured by Lindqvist himself as a boy, which lends the story an even greater realism.) He tries to repair himself by building an alternative, fantasised self-image, but of course it doesn't work. It's another case, in a different way, of the drugs not working. I won't dwell on this (it was a long old time ago - I'm over it;)), but in short, his life was, for a good few years of my young life, pretty much mine.

"Oskar Eriksson perched there with a wad of paper in his hand and his pissball in the other. Got nosebleeds, wet his pantsÂ… Soon he would probably start to shit his pants as well. Piggy.

He got up and left the bathroom. Didn't wipe up the drop of blood. Let someone see it, let them wonder. Let them think someone had been killed here, because someone had been killed here. And for the hundredth time."

Pretty much mine, except - I didn't have a friend like Eli. Eli, of course, becomes Oskar's saviour, in more ways than one. But what is it about Eli that affects me so much? I love Eli dearly, more than I've ever loved anyone in my life. SoÂ… why? I can't get anywhere near explaining it fully, but I can say something on it.

Eli has suffered - and suffers - a great deal. The acts of abuse he's been subjected to; and the effects they have had; among them, of course, the need to feed off the blood of others, and hence to kill, in order to live. In a sense, Eli outwardly appears to accept this fate in a kind of 'matter of fact' way; he is amazingly un-self-pitying. But he has not become hardened to the act of killing. Rather, he internalises his torment; we see it, but subtly: the scene after he has killed Jocke in the underpass; and in his longing for intimacy and relationship with Oskar.

The scene at the sweet kiosk really gets to the heart of everything about Eli. Oskar wants to share his candy with Eli, as a gesture of friendship. This is massively important to him. Eli knows that he can't eat regular food, it'll make him sick. If he doesn't take it, Oskar won't understand and he's looking very hurt already that Eli's refused; if Eli does take it, he'll be sick, and Oskar will have been given an indication that Eli is 'different'. It's early on in their friendship and Eli desperately fears rejection, when Oskar finally learns the truth (and the whole truth). Eli takes the candy, because the desire to respond to Oskar's friendship is so strong, and he is willing to begin to let him see something of what he has had to keep hidden; and because he so badly just wants to be a normal child - to enjoy such an obvious childhood pleasure as sharing a bag of sweets. And when Eli is, inevitably, sick - the whole thing comes to a point in his single word response. Eli stands very still; he is a picture of abject sorrow and unhappiness. And he says to Oskar, quietly, "Förlåt" - 'forgive'.

That scene just tore me inside out. The whole thing is a microcosm of Eli's tragic fate, and he responds by asking Oskar to forgive himÂ… I just found myself feeling and thinking, "ThisÂ… dear soulÂ…" And I cursed the fact it was a scene on a DVD - because I wanted to hold him. I wanted to hug him. As Oskar did.

"Would you like me if I wasn't a girl?"

Eli's question to Oskar as Oskar hugs him. When I first saw that scene, I thought Eli meant, "If I wasn't a regular human - if I was a vampire?" Later, of course, I realised what he really meant. And that it didn't alter, diminish or in any way affect how I felt.

The movie critic Owen Gleiberman, pretty much the only professional critic I've read who dislikes the film, described LTROI in a review for Entertainment Weekly as "a teasingly angelic prepubescent homoerotic love story." Well, I've nothing at all against homoerotic love stories, prepubescent or otherwise, but this is neither a homo- nor a hetero- sexual love. At the heart of it is a deeply intimate friendship. And they are in love; it is romantic; though there isn't a sexual element. This is made very clear in the scene where Eli shares Oskar's bed. Oskar's talk of "being together" with Eli, in the novel, momentarily draws out a "suspicion" and a "hardness" in Eli's voice. (If you've read the novel, in particular, you'll really know why Eli reacts in this way.) Then Eli sees that he doesn't really want anything sexual either. He wants to be "together" with Eli.

Privately, at least, I always felt that a loving sexual relationship must surely be the most amazing 'facilitator' of total intimacy because it combines the emotional, sensual, physical in an obvious, and beautiful, way. LTROI offers, not an essay in "sex-negativity", (the story is not "anti-sex") but a way of seeing intimacy from a different perspective. It presents a love that is utterly intimate, utterly close, and more than a match for the greatest love stories ever written (I love the Romeo and Juliet references), which just happens to be non-sexual. The scene in Oskar's bedroom is, in my opinion, the most beautiful love scene ever put on film. (Not because of what it does not depict, but because of what it does; not because it is non-sexual, but because it is beautifully intimate; the form is irrelevant - here we see a love behind 'forms', a love behind loves.)

I want to come back to the question of how I feel about Eli - is there a sexual element? To be honest, I'm not sure how to articulate or explain this fully. It seems hard to explain, because I find Eli achingly beautiful - beautiful in every sense - and it doesn't matter who else I might be thinking about, once a thought of Eli springs to mind, anyone else just scoots off out of my head. And yet I've never fantasised sexually about Eli. Not because I'm trying not to. Because Eli is not a girl? No. Not that either. (When I "see" Eli in my head, having seen the movie before I read the book, it is of course Lina - or rather, "Eli-na", has she has been called - that I "see" giving visible form to Eli.) Well, I don't know, but I think it's partly because of the way I came to love Eli, as I described above; and partly because I know Eli doesn't want a sexual love - maybe somehow subconsciously, those potential desires just got cancelled out (or re-directed into something else) in me.

One central way in which the relationship between Oskar and Eli is explored and depicted in the story is through contrast with the (deficient) relationship between Eli and his 'helper', HÃ¥kan. HÃ¥kan is a middle-aged guy and has a sexual attraction to children. The contrast presented is, I admit, at first sight a tricky one to get to grips with for myself as a paedophile admirer of the book and film. Does it seek to imply that child / adult relationships will, of necessity, be inferior (and even abusive), and could never match the beautiful mutuality of the friendship between two children?

I don't take that view. HÃ¥kan's relationship with Eli is not deficient because he has a sexual attraction to children, nor is it deficient because he is an adult. It's deficient because HÃ¥kan is unable to relate empathically with other people. Social fragmentation is a key theme in the novel, and the film. HÃ¥kan himself is a victim, of vigilantism, and he exists in a society characterised by isolated cliques, and emotional and psychological distances between people at every level, from peer groups to families to the wider community. The folks in the Chinese restaurant (unaware of his past) will invite him to join them, but only because he might get a round of drinks in - in which case he's welcome "even if he has cancer". Oskar's mother is content to be fobbed off with lame 'explanations' for the scar inflicted by the bullies, because she can't seem to deal with the fact that Oskar is being bullied. Oskar's dad becomes oblivious to him once the neighbour comes round and the bottle comes out. Lacke is carrying around with him his means of making a future for himself and Virginia (his stamp), but when he finally decides to sell it, it's too late. He even tries to address what is wrong, in his little speech about the "angles of the buildings" - the disjointed, non-cohesive society - but he can't achieve any kind of clarity, as he is a part of it as well, and focuses on physical surface details, symbolically significant to us the audience, but actually irrelevant to him as a character within the story.

So HÃ¥kan is not some entirely distinct figure; his being a paedophile is not the problem. I would argue that his lack of empathy is despite his paedophilia, certainly not because of it; but he has become a part of the non-empathic society he exists in. At the same time, he is actually a pretty complex character. He has a conscience, but within the world he lives in, it has been focused away from the unpleasant reality of life, and into a kind of extreme idealism. For HÃ¥kan, an aesthetic ideal has become the basis of his whole moral sense. In some ways, this has led him to great acts of self-sacrifice, and this I admire: the acid; and his offering of himself to Eli. But the same idealism has also destroyed his ability to relate to Eli as a person. To him, Eli is, as he thinks of him at one point, "the beloved body" - not really a person at all.

The key scene in the novel which contrasts Eli and HÃ¥kan as against Eli and Oskar is not, as I see it, an indictment of the ability of an adult and a child to relate with each other, it's an indictment of HÃ¥kan's inability to empathise - characteristic not of paedophilia but of the society as a whole - set against its exact opposite in the friendship of Oskar and Eli. Oskar is helping Eli to really live - Eli is re-discovering the fun of being a child, through his friendship with him. This is there in the film, but brought out even more strongly in the novel in scenes where they both find the pleasure of making each other laugh; Oskar has a recollection of "black and white kids" - meaning street kids laughing and playing in old black and white movies he's seen - together they're both now experiencing this themselves. HÃ¥kan, in contrast, is focused solely on his idealised conception of Eli, on what he "needs" Eli to be. And what is that? A child? No - he "needs" Eli in a sense to be both a child and an adult - and not just an adult, but an adult over and above him, so that he is, in a way, the child:

"HÃ¥kan sat on the floorÂ… and listened to [Eli splashing in the bath, trying to make herself smell nice for Oskar]. Jealousy was a fat, chalk-white snake in his chestÂ…
Last night he had [listened to Eli and Oskar]. Their high voices, laughter. A lightness he could never achieve. His was the leaden seriousness, the demands, the desire.
He had thought his beloved was like himÂ… The young, lithe body that brought beauty to his life, and at the same time lifted him from responsibility... And he did not have to feel guilt for his desire; his beloved was older than heÂ…
But since all this with OskarÂ… Eli had started to behave more and more like [a] childÂ…; had started to move her body in a loose-limbed and careless way, use childish expressionsÂ… Wanted to playÂ… Eli had become angry when HÃ¥kan had not shown the necessary enthusiasm for the game, then tried to tickle him to get him to laugh. He had relished Eli's touchÂ…"

HÃ¥kan seeks sex with Eli even though he knows Eli doesn't want it; when it is refused, he will settle for as much as Eli is prepared to give him, but it's a relationship of bargains and deals.

The contrast with Oskar and Eli is not, in my view, a comparative idealisation of childhood relationships, which are frequently seen to fall victim here to the same pervasive dysfunction as most of the relationships in the story. So how is Oskar somehow 'above' this dysfunction? He isn't - not on his own. But Oskar, through all they share in common, and through a perception of Eli's beauty of character, wants to be Eli's friend. And because he relates to Eli as a person rather than, as with HÃ¥kan, a personified ideal, he paradoxically has a much harder time fully coming to terms with Eli than HÃ¥kan did. HÃ¥kan doesn't question. Oskar does; and because he questions, he is open to understanding - which is a lot better than mere surface acceptance. Even so, he couldn't get there without the beautifully selfless love which Eli is able to show him. This is a perfect example of desire for relationship infused with agape. Eli will go so far for his friend that he will actually place a barrier (literally) between them (the 'through the glass' scene in the apartment), if that is what Oskar appears to need. He places a barrier between them to give Oskar the space he needs at that time; Eli's hand reaches out and gently touches the glass - his longing for Oskar's love is visible, tenderly demonstrated, but contained - for Oskar's sake. One of the fascinating things about this story is that the character one might expect to have the least amount of empathy is actually the person who is most characterised by it: Eli.

Relational longing (in this case in a non-sexual form) and agape (unconditional loving): this fusion of loves has, in this story, its prime motif in the "bleeding scene". Eli is willing to place his life, literally, in Oskar's hands. There are no conditions here, and nothing is held back - if Oskar doesn't respond, if he panics, if he freaks out, Eli will die.

Oskar's love is refined through Eli's self-sacrificial act. He is brought to a point where he can then be receptive to Eli's sharing of himself - where he can fully empathise with Eli. Eli's plea to Oskar - "Bli mig lite" ('Be me a little') - creates a kind of spiritual fusion of selves. With Eli's help, Oskar can understand exactly how he and Eli are alike; he can relate to Eli imaginatively; and as, in the novel, he shares Eli's memories, and even 'becomes' Eli in memory, they achieve a total spiritual union. Total relationship, total union, has been reached through self-giving, trust, and empathy.

Eli and Oskar provide a contrast to the detachment and distance between people that is endemic in the society portrayed in the film: here, the barrier that one would expect to be the most impenetrable of all, one between potential predator and potential prey, has been broken down through love. This is beautifully symbolised throughout: the wall separating the two apartments, the tapping in Morse Code through the barrier, the delicate use of hands to sense and feel a way to communicate, and ultimately in this sharing of self and memory.

Eli, himself the ultimate 'outcast', is also the exact opposite in Oskar's life of this sense of detachment: Eli does notice; Eli really does care and understand, and this leads Oskar away, and out from, a position of loneliness and rejection within his social group, to a position of complete rejection of it: he has found what he lacks and needs outside, with Eli.

When Oskar leaves Blackeberg with Eli, he is leaving because he has found something with Eli which he was unable to find within "normal society", at every level, from family to peers, to the wider community: genuine relationship, characterised by a self-giving, empathic unconditional love. LTROI is, at its core, a story of social dis-ease, emptiness and fragmentation, as much as it is also an incredibly beautiful love story - tinged with despair and sadness at the state of the modern social condition.

Impact and Implications

1. An Equality of Loves

First, I want to return to the idea of love being expressed with potentially equal significance and value in different relational forms, among them being sexual relationship, and friendship. The ultimate desire in relationship is for a sharing of selves, for intimacy and union with the one loved. The more that relationship is characterised by empathic love, and hence by the quality of the unconditional (agapeic empathy), the more beautiful and the more fulfilling that relationship will be.

We know the worth and value of a relationship is not dependent on its 'category' or type, but on the value of the quality characterising it. The longing to relate to another is fundamental to all forms of love. Agapeic empathy gives all forms of love their quality and worth.

The example of Oskar and Eli is moving in itself; but it is also interesting in that it illustrates the way in which a beautifully intimate love does not require a particular form in which to express itself. Friendship love can be on an equal footing with romantic-sexual love in terms of its potential for personal intimacy, value and worth.

This is not to denigrate sexual love, but the opposite; because it places the focus on the significance of the desire for relational intimacy which lies behind sexual love just as surely as behind other forms.

I think it must be true that in sexual love, relationally disconnected physical pleasure is not the focus. Negativity towards the value of sexuality is therefore always characterised by lack of empathy on the part of commentators. Is this true for intergenerational sexual relationships? Yes, just as much as it's true of any type of mutual sexual relationship. The negative critic cannot relate to the experience shared by the lovers - s/he cannot empathise.

This is born out in a great many personal accounts, some of which are cited as testimonies on Newgon. For example, Germaine Greer ⚠️ ↗ writes of a woman she knew who "enjoyed sex with an uncle all through her childhood, and never realized that anything was unusual until she went away to school. What disturbed her then was not what her uncle had done but the attitude of her teachers and the school psychiatrist. They assumed that she must have been traumatized and disgusted and therefore in need of very special help. In order to capitulate their expectations, she began to fake symptoms that she did not feel, until at length she began to feel truly guilty about not having been guilty. She ended up judging herself very harshly for this innate lechery."

They 'assumed' because they couldn't (or refused to try to) empathically relate. Why will many sympathise with, say, Alan Turing's tragic fate as the result of non-empathic refusal to imagine value in same-sex relationship, but not sympathise equally over the thoughtless and damaging way in which Greer's friend was treated by her school's staff members? Because of this persistent insistence on category over quality. The whole point I've been trying to make here is that category quite literally doesn't matter. Quality is all. Was the relationship between girl and uncle in that example a supreme, top-of-the-scale example of life-enhancing love? I don't know. But it was, evidently, recalled as a loving relationship; and clearly better than the one she had with her teachers and psychiatrist!

The qualitative difference in the relationships of Eli and Oskar and Eli and HÃ¥kan doesn't lie in the fact that Oskar is a child and HÃ¥kan is an adult, nor in the fact that HÃ¥kan is a paedophile. Nor would it matter, in qualitative terms, whether these relationships were (mutually desired) sexual relationships or (mutually desired) non-sexual friendships. None of that matters. What matters is the powerful quality of empathic love. HÃ¥kan didn't have it; Oskar was open to it, and then developed it more and more, with Eli's help, through a mutually shared love.


2. Empathic Influence On Forms Of Expression

Love can be expressed, in terms of equal value-potential, in different ways. And the form of expression itself is not the significant factor. Forms of love will, of course, also 'blend', and take on multiple characteristics. Lovers will often also be the closest of friends as well as romantic partners; affectional and nurturing love, which we might think of as most obviously fitting the familial forms of love, also mixes and crosses over into both romantic and philia relationships. To what extent does the love behind the form of expression have the potential to shape and re-shape its form?

In Oskar and Eli's relationship we see elements of romantic love, while the specifically sexual elements are left aside - in this case, they are not desired and would not facilitate the relationship. We see a caring, affectionate and powerfully protective love - on Eli's part, obviously, but also in Oskar. Primarily, we see a beautiful friendship which has the qualities of intimacy but also of shared fun and pleasure, in this case the fun of childhood. And behind all of this is the empathic love which develops between them, shaping the form(s) of expression.

I described my own feelings for Eli somewhere above. They didn't take a sexual form; at first this was something of a puzzle to me, because I find Eli incredibly beautiful. If I'd not seen the film, or read the book, but only seen screenshots or short clips of the movie - decontextualised from the story - I'm certain that Eli (as "Eli-na") would have taken top place in my library of sexual stimuli. (Whether I knew Eli was written as a boy or not.) As it was, I guess I was just in the same 'place' as Oskar when he hugged Eli for the first time; everything in Eli was 'asking' a different form of love from Oskar, not a sexual love, but a love that was primarily based in non-sexual intimacy, in deeply caring mutual love and affection, in friendship. (Not because non-sexual love is somehow 'better', but because that form of love was, in this case, the ideal form, what was needed, what was desired.)

At back of this, it would seem, is the potential of empathic love to mould and direct our responses, our ways of acting and reacting, and even the forms in which feeling takes expression. And it's with regard to that - to influence on one's own internal feelings - that I want to share a little GM.

I had a day's teaching in a school I'd never worked in before recently, covering various classes throughout the day. The Year 6s (ten / eleven year olds) in particular were full of beans, very funny, and very responsive. It was very much a collaborative effort, and a lot of fun. But the point is, three girls in particular stuck in my mind from that experience. One was an adorable sweetheart with one of the cutest, freckliest, faces I've ever seen; to say she liked to get a lot of reassurance about her work would be something of an understatement - they were working through a page of maths questions, and the completion of each and every question provided a new and exciting reason to come and have a little chat with me, with plenty of cuteness thrown in. She had this way of tilting her head back and beaming, or rather, 'glowing' up at me. She was lovely, funny, warm, cute, affectionate. With a nose to die for. (I have quite a thing for cute noses.)

I said three girls. Yes. The other two were friends, sat together. And they were flirting with me - in a fun, implicit way, which of course makes it all the more exciting. They knew I liked this. One girl in particular just had that way of flicking her hair back, the knowing smile; leaning in against my arm, and sensing the effect she was having. I could have used a cold showerÂ…

The sense of feeling you get from the girl exerts its influence: shall we say, the imaginative constructions one engages in (alone!) afterwards are coloured by this. There's a difference, though not distinct in quality - because there was a warmth in all of this, and therefore an overlap in that sense.

And of course I am talking about internal feelings - I wasn't about to interpret what was going on with those two girls as an invitation for anything! They sensed intuitively that I found them sexy and attractive, and they liked it. They were enjoying themselves. And so was IÂ… But it was all intuitive, and I hardly need say, not a prelude to anything of a nature impermissible to be spoken of on this board:).


3. External Influence: Imposed Restriction

I wrote in the early part of this post about the feelings of emotional frustration that come as a result of living with a woefully misunderstood type of feeling and sexuality. I also wrote about how the private ways I had of dealing with that frustration, through fantasy and (solitary!) sexual expression were just not working the same way any more, they'd lost their edge and potency. So I'd got to the state of obsessing all the more, trying to get that sense of fulfilment, and just feeling more and more miserable.

I should add that I am only talking personally here, of course; that is how it was for me.

I wrote at some length about the personal effect that the film and novel, LTROI, had had on me, and in particular the experience of feeling so powerfully love in a different form to that which I was used to. It got me thinking, with a bit of help from some related theoretical constructs, about the idea of a love behind loves, of love filtered and expressed through varying forms. I have found this helpful - it's given a broader perspective and begun to ease a certain kind of debilitating frustration which was really getting me down.

On the other hand, whilst intimacy of the same worth and value may be expressed in different forms, there is still an externally imposed restriction. We see this in many ways, from cases in the news of certain schools outlawing even displays of affection between students themselves, to guys being made to feel wary of working with kids in any capacity at all. We live in depressing times.

One response of course is to celebrate every instance of a recognition of the absurdity of this. And one final thought related to the general theme of this post: if the form of expression is secondary to the value of the feeling behind it, then even the smallest and least externally noticed expressions can take on the greatest possible meaning and value. One of my personal favourite non-GL related movies is David Lean's Brief Encounter. It's the theme of a love which is deeply felt but cannot be acted upon or publicly expressed. The scene in the railway tearoom, where Trevor Howard places his hand on Celia Johnson's shoulder; in the circumstances - someone else intruding who must not know of their love - it is all that is possible, and how that small expression becomes invested with huge significance. This reflects for me the way in which any small expression of affection between myself and a girl, even something as small as a smile or a hand briefly held, contains great meaning, and will be remembered and reflected on years afterwards.

A hand placed on a shoulder: it can mean very little; or it can mean everything. The personal context and the feeling behind it give it its worth and meaning. The gentle touching of hands is a powerful motif throughout LTROI, and if you've read the novel version, the scene early on in which Oskar touches Eli's faceÂ… I won't elaborate, but that one expression has more meaning for Eli than anything he has experienced in over two hundred years.

I'd give anything to have been Oskar in that moment. To recall and honour those moments - a hand held; a lovely hug - when a 'tiny' gesture contains every ounce of meaning is to treasure what life must surely be all about.