A Word on Words; 2816; Bell Hooks

once again welcome toward own words i guess that bell hooks welcome bela the word on words this book is called all about love new visions insurers i can't eighteenth book that is a high achievement the author with the with the eighteen books and this one about love approaches the subject from fascinating perspective you say it at the outset maybe in the preface so on intervention you say there's a small trial you knew and then somehow taken from the last band and trying to re discover it you found it was terribly difficult to do and that when you talk to people at all and i'm moving ahead now when you talk to people a lot about your search for a lot of people would say and it reduces their list

but talk about that i'm going to write about so often talk about the need of children for love is a gun throughout or what i start off this book saying that felt that the child what it was like to be loved and to be recognized and then i thought that love move away particularly talking about my relationship with my father which i think that lots of people feel that our art our intimate connections with our mothers remain forever but many many adults have talked with me now about their sense as children that they held their father's regard in love at a certain moment of time and then last month and i've been amazed at the number of people that have come up to me after reading the preface and said to me that's exactly how i felt as a child but i couldn't tell anyone because we're not allowed to talk about not being

locked in our culture were made to feel that everybody knows law i mean i i i talk in the book about all these people will say you know my dad beat me or mom get this but she really loved me and a key chapter in the book is the chapter on children or i'm saying that no in fact if we are being abused in any way we're not being law that love is that a call to abuse and the domination in that aisle marvelous moment for me in the book but i'm talking about what we teach our children about love what is the newest education we give that and i miss education we give them is that you can violate someone and then say you love them and i think as we ponder why we are raising a nation of violent children what we have to ponder that means education about the nature of love you recite that cliche of

of a couple with a straw or the switch saying you know this interview more than it hurt me and really doing this for your own good and then you so the fact that that this is why if that's the case is that happening it is is it isn't a it was not an act of love and put another code on it really covers up in this role exposing it which doesn't mean to say that we were not staying in the discipline is important because discipline is crucial to any true law with that we have boundaries that we set boundaries on so but i think part of what happened to us as a nation if we have confused discipline with a kind of blind obedience to authoritarianism whether its children to parents are asked to the government to work a nation that is acting in a way that is is it's autocratic it and wrong so that

the book doesn't just try to look at our personal relationship to love but what happened to us as a nation as we move away from the kind of ethnic of love that many of us felt undergirded all the great social movements are the movements for social justice in our society you say that we're really as a nation and as a society forgotten what it is to really love to find true love and that is evident in our music we used to so ago but scream about the moon june in tuna now we come up with lyrics from tina turner and others what's love got to do with love got to do with it that's right and that and that the concert so his horn and especially the youth culture and one of the things that so

disturbing view about gangsta rap and let me say that i'm not attacking on hip hop in like the forms of hip hop but in its most brutal forms its entire ironic it's anti female its entire life except to call the death and then one of the passages that i quite often in this book is a passage from the bible from the book of john that says anyone who does not know love is still in death and we're at risk of being a culture that cultivates this sort of worship of death and it is fascinating to me that to me you know when i think about the defining movement for social justice that we had in our culture that rocked the world with the civil rights movement the fact is there could be no end to apartheid in south africa today had there not been a civil rights movement in the united states whether we're talking about aborigines in australia or so many people around the world that led to the civil rights and freedom struggle here in the

united sates is emblematic of justice but the heart of that movement was an ethics of love when i began writing this book i went back to martha came straight to love which was such a marvelous spoken and he really was one of the first leaders in our society to really talk about love not as the sentimental emotion you know many of my readers my bell hooks readers who are used to the height at you know so schumann has meant to me or why live in his eyes and you know i liked the we hope we're not gonna lose that you know then it an intervention to talk about love and the relationship between loving in the nomination whether we're talking about racism homophobia our class elite isn't it is a lot of the talks about greed and how you read has made us less loving as a nation i mean why do we think welfare is bare

with the trial being as a nation that we have the resources i am an artist also died for people you live you say there that that we now embrace the reform welfare not on the basis that there was need compassion we use welfare abuse as the excuse to cover up the fact we've lost our compassion for those are have nots exactly i mean i've been so disturbed by that seeing so many people of my generation who came out of radical thinking into a kind of thinking that says we can't give to others people only appreciate what they work for there's a lack of compassion a hardening of the heart marianne williamson began to talk about that in her book the healing of america mean it's it's this

sense that the kind of law that ethic and i think people have to hear those two words in combination lock epic which means it it's the values and we talk about family values in this nation we don't talk about what are the values that underlie a lot at stake this sense of respect when i say to people while wal mart has to do with respect the way we look at children particularly the violence of children against children in our nation right now part of what we're seeing is a lack of care or a lack of respect a lack of understanding or seen in tv i mean it is a crucial emotion connected to agree and you want to destroy what you envy when you have a ten year old kid wanting to destroy another kid because that kid is more popular or that is something deep and profound that is a deep and profound love letters next and we didn't just talk about it in relationship to what parents are doing we have to talk about it in terms of what we have been saying as a nation what matters to us as a nation

you know i knew that you had written previously to both feminist then same generation think and so it didn't surprise me to find an all about love let you say gender as and that concept that men look at love one way that hasn't has really some inhibit our ability to meet click meaney meaningfully bring the search for love to a man as a society are troubled about about that that concept roche employees what just recently i was talking about love in it at the la public library and a man in the audience said that you know growing up i wanted to be

lucky that i had gotten the message that you could not be a me and below so he wanted me to talk to him about how to how to mean in our culture move into a space where they can have that healthy masculinity that that is not the patriarchal dominating masculinity and one that allows them to claim the space of their own hearts in their own need for love in one of the main major studies i think that feminism has brought forth is i'm emotional neglect of adolescent males you know the idea that somehow when a boy starts turning twelve or thirteen we suddenly decide he doesn't need affection any more if he wants to be out a lucid not speak it one of the stories that i tell in the book and that i remember from my childhood i have five sisters and one brother and as my brother was getting i guess his patriarchal masculinity happening he comes home from school one day and we're all sitting around in the living room and he races and to

be with his buddies any racist past all of us and he goes to his room and he raises back out and nonstop since just is he going to go out the door and she says we need to start this over when you come into this house and your sisters are here and i'm here you green guess you acknowledge us um and you go back you do that over and it was for me an incident that stayed in my mind that instead of allowing him to assert that kind of negative masculinity that says connection doesn't matter intimacy doesn't matter all that matters is my kind of homo social bonding with my male buddies i felt that she she showed us both won her daughter's the respect that we should work to have in our relations with the male including our brother or father and she enabled my brother to see that this is it's this connection is important to you and i think khamenei mean habitats have been falsely led into

thinking that love is not vital and important to them in an early on in the book i talk about the fact that despite the fact that we were in a culture where we basically believe love is a woman's issue but most of the book some of them have become you know kind of our eyes are sort of archival tax i think of the one i talk about and pray so much is our eric from czar of loving that as a teenager when i wanted to know i went through that walking and it still to me a crucial bloc but in general we don't look to books by women women like romances i joke in the book that if a woman had written the bridges of madison county right this woman on eradicating initiative the first thought that in the photograph and then buying initiative well you also saw it was a preface just a glimpse you know you that's whether that you tell about a story your of of your of your brother and your sisters and your family it would be

impossible to tell this story without personalizing it in some ways still much of your writing seems lean away from first on but when you talk about the end of a fifteen year relationship and how devastating it was and how it set you on your own search to reinvent it and for him to re evaluate your own life in light of the love you so you also write later on about romantic love and relationship with a younger man very briefly again just enough to whet the appetite and make the point and then at another point utah after calling those entries about spiritual love in a humvee in a really beautiful way i think that it is clear that this book despite your efforts to depersonalize at times is a very personal here about i thought it was a kind of combination of trying to share the personnel but also trying to say to our

personal attitudes about love i tied to our culture's politics to what our nation tell that is important when that chapter i'd read where i'm talking about i talk about the fact that one of the wonderful aspects of love is a good thing and then as we get others we grow in our capacity to connect mean the first major chapter in the book is a sense how we define well how do we now live in a culture where most of us don't have a sense of what it is in fact the book is dedicated to my ex boyfriend the younger man that you just you vote because we had these continual fights and are still having them after eight years we broke up plots five years ago where we kept talking about what is love and it was clear that he felt often that he didn't know what i was talking about and they can talk to other women who say the same thing about the partners in their lives near who say why dont know what love is so it goes that idea that gender does make a

difference in the way look at lord look a lot like what must be until they're not looking at love it all and so part of what the book tried to say is perhaps if we had common destinations if we started out promising a common point it won't mean for us as a nation to start off feeling that line is important for males as much as it is for females because of deeply embedded in our national psyche is an assumption that love can't be important to me and how many go and fight wars if they are dedicated to live and until we begin to is to recognize that a lot has to be essential to a man everybody and sexism it mirrored other reclaim those spaces where they can't be connected to their feelings to their father's to their mothers in different kinds of ways of the books as romantic love has been the myth that has as the only law that really matters at challenges that notion that one of the new vision said it's as all the foundation of all our

love like the foundation of a house there are certain principles that will make you have a sturdy house in those principles are the same irrespective of the kind of house you're building the same is true of love and we had been a culture that has over valor rise romantic love that no matter how horrible and miserable where like this band as a kid or so teenagers someday you're going to find this love and it's going to come into your life and it's going to change all that and many of us found that that was not so i think a lot of new and felt that one day they'll grow up and they'll be euthanized bio woman or a park or giving them live rather than thinking about what will it mean what will it take for me to become a loving person well i mean i define it is a kind of in fact i was it is historian the number of fans a lot of people get his intellectual is quoting and scott hepburn books i love

nasa literature i love the fact that we can have books like the road less traveled by thomas more scared the soul then reach out with broad intellectual concepts to a wide audience and i critically take his definition a lot as the well to nurture one town in another spiritual growth and lean get two eric from saying life is a combination karen knowledge responsibility commitment in trust because one of the things that happen in our culture is weak wage love primarily with care and that's why we can say parents were really be decades but who still love them because it i like a non chocolate and i say in the book again and again my parents cared for mike me deeply but they also wanted me in ways that were violating a wounded my spirit and i think that i would be a different person today had they not given the care as i've met lots of adults who didn't get care but i did not feel lucky talk about how your family

reacted to how your mother yet again just to glimpse when uganda publicly discuss your own dysfunctional family it was as if you know you're talking about what i told you when we were talking right before the show began it i see myself as a southern writer i see my sensibility as a southern sensibility and we know one of the heart so the southern sensibility is that if there's anything going wrong in your family life you don't talk about you know talk about with in the family when you don't talk it out about it outside the family so that part of what has been for me it a radicalization of mining is trying to do to attend to innocence claim a new sense of a sudden sensibility because i think that you know i was as i was going home front for national and the other day to visit my folks and i guess our sign that said something about but the new south and i kept thinking that hardness but

a new south because that i think the south have a unique sensibility that for me informs my work the civility that courtesy the kind of things i evoke on the community in iraq right about the right length about the community in and how you can have love unless it goes beyond yourself and reaches out to commute are the lessons about love that i've learned here in the south in the southern baptist church that that sense of what it is to care for the stranger to be to move beyond yourself all those things it's a big challenge when it means telling their stories that we've been told to keep secret anyhow like a chapter in the book on honesty that say what every other face at the nation and this goes back to our president how we can not be loving and tell lies when i heard about clinton in the monica lewinsky the first thing i thought about is he violated

colton some kind of war rally but the idea of the trust and honesty that should have been essential to the fabric of us for neil your relationships because his actions didn't just affect himself and it affected his family they must live with the brilliant consequences of those that you know i hadn't thought of a lot to lose and when you're brought up or president clinton and his relationship with monica lewinsky but a very well since the public the national public's willingness to tolerate them and to give the law make your case that that love is a lost value in a society that will embrace a liar and a cheater especially when i would imagine what would've happened if it just imagine this scenario in our nation one of this couple had come together on national tv and said bob but that the

essence of our marriage is honesty and communication and what ever much has taken place it was discussed in the context of our marriage and that would've really walk the foundation of above everyone in our society because it says that we all make mistakes and we can't do things and we we don't win on are always thought that the key question in this to put the burden on the woman not at all i meant that as a couple i said come together as a couple and talk about the dynamics of their relationship because i still am proud of the clintons and in terms of their relationship as a public couple so hard to be a public person you know that i know that it's hard to be a public couple but i felt let down by the fact that and this woman that many of us look forward up to him for it to how she would progress in the white house who was a woman a powerful

voice was suddenly silent and she wasn't saying we have a marriage and we have determined the terms on which we communicate because the heart of a lot to that i talk about in the book is forgiveness so certainly do you say that it is an end as part of a larger community is in the chapter where you talk about a larger community of forgiveness is crucial what about the fact that martha thinking you know talked about art for our nation's ending racism he talked about forgiveness as crucial to how we as people of color as the black people in particular how to extend to those who have wounded us compassion and forgiveness while we always end up in the same violent when you know that reminds me you what he said to white liberals said those of you who are at our table size in the end we will liberate you which was another active of not just to those who occasionally but those who support him but couldn't travel on

in the few minutes that i left less focus on that chapter that view from spiritual we can teach our nation look after all we set out i wanna say to that our nation is yearning for love and community that people want to know how we can live deeper and more meaningful lives and the focus on the dalai lama to focus on a buddhist monk tit not haunted by quote a lot in the body as we had been looking for those spiritual teachers in our life today who can help us return to love and community and have what what is interesting about us as a country is that the vast majority of people in this country still say they're christians only know one up the heartbeats of christianity is the idea that god is low that we're relies more fully as spiritual beings through love so the question becomes if we think it is in this is that the core of our beliefs why are we not living it out in our actions and not the kind of

political and spiritual question because i feel like we have got it and to the needs of the spirit and one of the things that i would say about the american left is that the american left has never been interested in talking to the needs of the spear exactly and that's part of why the conservative right wing always reaches out more to masses of people because it acknowledges emotional needs and acknowledges the need for family now is june usually reputation as a radical kinder to make nationalism be true to the spirit of itself which is if you are thinking lonely that you have to be willing to change that thinking i think the left has to begin to talk about love was it even more radical movement in our country than civil rights in the sense that i mean that isn't as radical but many women have always lived together the civil rights movement the end of a certain kind of

white supremacist apartheid that was about love and it changed the senate changes as a nation for the better so i don't think that i'm you know breaking with that tradition are trying to revoke it because we are losing that kind of radical love of justice they have the potential to make this nation be a great nation always and not be a nation that's that's false to its own values fall so that notion of of really believing in freedom and justice one of the things i say in the book is that there could be no love without justice well as a lion and george bernard shaw and all conclude that as muscular price died in every generation to save those who have no imagination is you don't love you have great imagination to work