When a male and female bee fall in love, they both fly to a dizzy
height in the direction of the sun and there perform the sexual union.
To an unscientific mind of the Maeterlinckian type, there might be in
that picture a beautiful symbol of love's exaltation.
The cold blooded scientist, on the other hand, will simply tell us that
erotic excitement in the bee produces a large amount of irritating
phototropic materials which compel the bees to fly toward the source of
light.
At the end of the sexual act, the production of phototropic materials
ceases and the bees come back to earth .... like lovers tired of each
other.
In love the conqueror feels like a conqueror and is a hard adversary
to defeat. Like the amorous bees which can reach, physically speaking,
heights which they would never dream of exploring when out of love, the
successful lover can rise to infinite heights physically and mentally.
=The Unsuccessful Lover=, on the other hand, may be, in extreme cases,
a pitiful individual to contemplate.
The humiliation of defeat and the fear of other defeats, the starvation
of all the senses which the love object would have gratified, produce a
depression which stops temporarily all the life activities.
Appetite is lacking and there may be nausea and vomiting; diarrhea or
constipation replace the normal activities of the intestine, thereby
inducing weakness or autointoxication which, through a vicious circle,
still increase the depression. The heart action is disturbed, which
increases the uneasiness of the sufferer, his breathing is difficult,
causing much sighing, the surface capillaries are emptied of blood,
producing a morbid pallor, etc.
A person in that condition is incapable of continued effort in any
direction. The stoppage of all the life functions induces a sense of
worthlessness. The fear of defeat not infrequently drives the sufferer
to suicide, which is a symbolic attempt at returning to the safest
condition in which the organism ever found itself: death, the return to
uterine life, to _mother_ earth, etc.
It may, if the adrenal cortex, productive of anger and violence
chemicals, has been sufficiently stimulated by suffering, provoke
attempts at vengeance, cause hatred, murderous cravings, which, if
indulged in, land the patient in jail, if repressed with difficulty,
land him in a sanitarium.
=Calf Love.= Those things should be borne in mind by parents
attempting, for instance, to break up some absurd infatuation which is
the more overwhelming as the unexperienced lover is not restrained by
the many social or financial considerations which hover in the mind of
a more sophisticated person in the throes of "erotropism."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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