London Aphrodite

The collection of stories I have been reading has got me thinking of love and sex. Each one seems to revolve around issues of "love" in unusual relationships such as H.E.Bates story The Kimono which presents a Poly tale in the most proper of fashions, sensible injustice, and lust revolving around dress and colours. The Wanderers by Alun Lewis is a wild Welsh Gypsy tale involving adultery and commitment. The Pearl of Great Price is a tale sodden with values corrupted by food and ubiquitous morals as served by religion, this story is by Rhys Davies and so far I've just finished The Bridal Night by Frank O'Connor, Irish writer, and this tale involves love, madness and a twisted marriage of non-mutual ideals. All extremely different and somewhat adventurous in the way of "all flesh".

But it got me thinking about the potency of desire, how love is more akin to an existentialist idea on the general art of being. Each character in these short stories have to use love as an idea to guide them across varying moods of lust, desire, and all the temptations. If love didn't exist there would be no use in most of these surrounding moods, even if you don't a love a person you are desiring, you can still love desire, and that's probably what love is, an adjective for an adverb, not a noun, not a thing, as we all consider love to be this definition that fails to really be defined.

Another fascinating element to these short stories is the frankness of thought surround the characters motivations and actions, each writer is able to turn the spanner of each characters perspective nicely in tune with the narrative.

That's why I was so interested in Zero Zero yesterday, because I think the idea of a world without love is a really interesting canvass upon which to work out what exactly the hell it is.