Get to “I Love You,” Cosmic Version

We’ve been saying over the past couple of weeks that the dramatic arcs of many, many novels and movies can be seen as simply

            Get to “I love you.”

Start with two characters who are as far apart as they can be (or are indifferent or utterly resistant to one another), then bring them together somehow over the course of the story so that by the final moment they connect truly on the deepest, most intimate level.

The next question is, “Why does this work?”

Why does it always work?

Here’s my answer on the cosmic level:

I think “Get to ‘I love you’” is the prime spiritual imperative of human life itself.

One of the great “Get to ‘I love you’s’” in recent films is the final moment in Logan. Do you know the movie? It’s the concluding episode in the X-Men Wolverine saga, starring Hugh Jackman as the steel-clawed mutant who is too isolated, too traumatized, too dark to care or to love.

Dafne Keen and Hugh Jackman as “Laura” and “Logan”

Now in this final instalment, in his most-human-like form as “Logan,” he shares a geographic and emotional odyssey with a young mutant girl named Laura (Dafne Keen), who also possesses the Wolverine claws and the Wolverine fury, having been laboratory-conceived and laboratory-bred from Logan’s own DNA. 

But Laura loves him. He’s a father figure to her. She needs him. She wants to help him. She becomes attached to him.

Logan/Wolverine resists young Laura throughout the story until finally finally finally, after saving her from the Bad Guys … and having allowed her at last into his cold, bitter heart, with his terminal breath he declares

                                    LOGAN

            So this is what it feels like.

And he dies. 

He dies happy, or at least at peace.

I think that’s the journey of every human. It’s Odysseus’ journey, it’s Hamlet’s, it’s Henry Miller’s. It’s yours and mine.

If you follow this blog, you know that I believe life happens on two levels—the material plane and the plane of the soul.

On the material level, we show up in physical form as isolated individuals. I can hurt you and it won’t hurt me. I can ignore you and it won’t hurt me. I can kill you and it won’t hurt me.

But on the cosmic plane, the laws are different.

We’re all one on that plane.

All souls are interconnected and interdependent.

If I hurt you, it hurts me, etc.

I don’t know why all of us or any of us were put here or appeared here on this dark and brutal plane, unless it was … maybe … to learn that lesson. To make that breakthrough to love. 

To live by the laws of the higher plane here on the lower.

That’s what stories are about, if you ask me. That’s their purpose. That’s why we need them. They’re here to show us, to inspire us to get to “I love you.”

Interesting too, isn’t it, how many of the most moving stories end with the principal character, the hero, sacrificing his or her life … all she has, all she will ever have … for love, for another human being. And that that sacrifice is, in the story, the ultimate act of self-realization and fulfilment.

                        LOGAN

            So this is what it feels like.

He got to “I love you.”