The stars may be technically, scientifically dead, but they poetically and literally guide us through all this randomness.
“What is love?” the nine members of Twice sing in their 2015, pre-twentysomething girlish charm. One chirps, “Is it like in the books?” Another wonders, timed with a Tiktok-worthy dance move, “Is it as sweet as the movies?”
If any music video or song in the history of 2010s KPop could capture Valentine’s Day, vacuum seal it and make it fresh and marketable all year round, it’s likely this song, buoyed by the youthful charms and performed innocence of the then-barely debuted girl group.
Today, however, Twice is more candid than coy, perhaps jaded even, as they sing lines like “baby we’re a scandal” and about non-serious, non-committed summer loves. Like many of us, TWICE has outgrown the froufrou surrounding love, often reserved for marketing cultural content to teens.
But must our view of teens be so low?
A lot of stories about and for teens, from short fiction in the ’60s to anime in the ’90s had nuanced takes on love, and this isn’t far from many teenager’s experiences such as their first encounter with death and regret, or the idealism and sense of tragedy a teenager develops as they leave their history classes.
Notice too how under the veneer of romantic-obsession producers sell to teens lies another side of the coin dominant in teenaged experience: grief. And it’s not just the grief from rejection and breakups, valid as they may be, but it’s also the grief from feeling like an outsider, losing one’s comfort zone, and for many, the first encounter with real loss.
One early February night, as I lay on a bench in the garden of our ancestral home, I pondered all the love and loss that these old walls had witnessed, the many selves each Vergara had to discard as they moved on to another phase of life until eventually, the Great Goodbye called.
I remembered too my mother’s side of the family, whose deaths, from Mother’s, to Uncle’s, to Lolo’s and Lola’s, marked a decade of transition from my late teens to late twenties. Many good friends from childhood also bade life goodbye in their teen years.
The stars came out one by one, and I remembered each face, each name, now a memory, and found myself laughing and crying at the same time.
And so, teenage also marks the shift to more nuanced, if at times darker, even edgier (another thing to grow out of eventually!) view of the world.
Is ours a world of competition or a world of cooperation?
A misconception, which persists today, of Darwin’s theory of evolution is “survival of the fittest,” that is, the strong survive and that the weak perish. This has in turn influenced certain attitudes, world views, and eventually systems in modern society.
A dog-eat-dog world, the cliché goes.
But emerging interpretations suggest that species evolve through cooperation as well, not just within their genus and family, but also with other species. It’s easy to focus on predators, prey, and parasites, while overlooking symbiosis and the general self-sustaining nature of entire ecosystems and the planet as a whole.
Native American hunters, praying over prey, perhaps saw this interconnection before European colonizers and their science did.
Love is not something to possess or protect from others, but something that, once found and understood for what it is, makes one want to share it with everyone.
Carl Sagan’s Contact, a novel-turned-movie about mankind’s discovery of and eventually mission to meet with extra-terrestrials tells the sci-fi trope with a sense of wonder and discovery instead of the more blockbuster-friendly fear and warmongering.
There is a scene before the multinational mission launches, where one of the scientists, a burly Russian, is asked by their lodging host, a Japanese Zen master, what makes ants move.
The man of data tells the man of spirit: Why, chemical signals, of course, the desire for food, to which the teacher responds, “perhaps it’s love?” The Russian scoffs while the Japanese laughs, which Sagan describes as full childlike innocence.
“Perhaps we shall dream the dream of the ants another day,” the sage closes the conversation as the mission wraps dinner up, departing for space the next day.
And so it was as I gazed at the stars that early February night.
I think memory is like that. Like the light of dead stars reaching across literal millions of years and miles across space, reaching this tiny speck of blue dust called the earth in this tiny speck of a galaxy, to hit me, to hit us, at a particular moment and whoosh – things make sense.
Lost in the dark sea of grief, I found a light which guided me home, as it has guided many a lost sailor, many a pining poet, many a spurned lover.
I think in that moment, I sensed what editor AA Patawaran meant when he wrote last year of sense of wonder at a provident universe. I felt that I, you, we, weren’t so much holding on as being held by Something, by Someone.
And realizing this, rather than wanting to keep it for myself, like water slipping through one’s palm, I’d want others to experience it too. I want others to heal from their pain or gain even just a moment’s clarity in it.
Imagine looking at the world that way, imagine if this became our dominant view of love, and of life in general: That everyone has a part to play, that no one’s work is more or less important than another’s, that the symbiosis and unity of nature can be reflected in human affairs just as our best designs in mechanical engineering reflect the dynamics of nature.
That love is not something to possess or protect from others, but something that, once found and understood for what it really is, makes one want to share it with everyone, the way we can’t help but recommend—instead of hoard—good finds in shops, at restaurants, in bookstores, or in life.