I would like to respond to Trey Hoffman’s musing about love. I’m not necessarily disagreeing with what Hoffman had to say but offering a somewhat different perspective: What’s love got to do with it?

Ode to genetic code ... or the marginalization of the romantic:
Cupid’s arrow enjoined the knot,
and genetic apoptosis is not of late.
For recombinant DNA is physically hot,
thus double helix’s compelling fate.

Ethereal love comes this romantic day,
subtlety engineered toward a specific goal.
So ventured genetic code has its way,
and primordial parthenogenesis has no role.

Though socio-biologists cast a cold light
in their muted arcane way.
And claim it’s all clinically right
as we steal away hot to play.

And the geneticist says it’s all the same
as we furtively glance each other’s way.
All a part of life’s natural game,
that creates such transgenic surrealistic ambiguity as Renee.

Maybe it is just pure biology, all physical, all here and now. Of course maybe it is a bit of existential uncertainty haunting all of us. So to ease the burden, we render the unfathomable universe into a manageable reality by placing it on the altar of free will. In the same way the complexities of human love are simplified with an offering of chocolate or a dozen roses.

A dozen roses ... hmmm, takes me back to North Carolina ... I asked my love what was the pleasant dulcet fragrance enticingly wafting on a sprightly spring breeze as we ambled about the wooded backyard. With a playful diffidence, she coyly smiled and beckoned me with come-hither eyes to step closer and breath deeply of the essence of her new perfume.

I did so and after what seemed like a heavenly eternity of blissfully being encompassed by the totality of her being on that spring day she somewhat sheepishly pointed to a flowering lilac that she had planted a year before and informed me that it also contributed to the beautiful aromatic nature of that day.

What was it about the Hotel California and this could be heaven or this could be hell? What if the existentialists have it all wrong? And that essentially, all that you see, all that you touch, all that you believe, that minuscule bit of star dust that is you and me, that rock called Earth, that smattering of light we call the Milky Way, those trillions of galaxies, the relentless force of gravity, that ripple in time, that infinitesimal quantum force that holds it all together, the love of a mother for a child, the earnest supplications of mortals, all that was, all that is, all that is to be, is merely a mote in God’s eye?

r.j. desprez
Tyrone, Ga.

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