At this point we start to think of what the word “love” means,and that gets tricky because the more we observe the phenomenon,the more we accumulate information and the less we are able to produce a definition shorter than,well,a book. Dalton certainly tries to convey what love means,at times scatter-gunning images that reference belief in love as much as love itself. So we read that love is someone giving you a meaningful Cherry Ripe,or it’s a warm bowl,or it’s “the opposite of dark matter – light matter”;or it’s ambiguous,or deep,or complex or simple. Or it’s an orchid.
The images all have absolute validity in their contexts,each person’s unique universe of experience underpinning each testimony. Dalton quotes Alex Wittmann,a counsellor who works in many areas including post-suicide support,and who offers the teleological approach:describing what love does rather than defining what it is. Wittman said that analogies help us discern what the meaning of love is:“The analogy might be,‘Love is like the sun’. We cannot look directly at it,but we see our world because of it,and experience its many life-giving functions.”
It’s an approach exactly like Paul’s,two millennia ago,writing to the Corinthians,saying that love is kind and patient,always rejoices in truth and never ends. Like Paul and like Wittman,Dalton doesn’t say that he has love’s definition down pat,sewn up and tidy;his plethoric approach tries to cover as many bases as possible.
That means Love Stories isn’t something to read in one go;I found each of the short pieces to be an easy read,but then would find myself putting it down to have a think about what I’d just read. Love is a centenarian scientist telling of his search for knowledge,and of his certainty that science can’t define love. Love is a woman who is getting over a heroin addiction. Love is a widowed father emu caring for two chicks when his life-mate is killed. Each of Dalton’s stories implicitly invites the reader’s reciprocation;the emu story brought to my mind the recent little tragedy of the Collins Street peregrine falcons,that devoted pair raising four chicks,only to lose one to a wasting disease.
Towards the end Dalton places a short piece of writing titled The Cradle,which must be called poetry because it sings and swings competing truths without the pesky shackles of prose,scaffolded only by his love of language,his brain and heart all flashing insights. If it recalls Walt Whitman’sOut of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,all the better,because Dalton’sCradle echoes Whitman’s and distils something cogent and universal from it,something that ends ecstatically in a sort of mystic rocking repetition:“The love … the love … the love… the love…”