Do we believe that love is material, and that a piece, cut from the whole, and wrapped around the subject of our longing leaves an original gross amount diminished? Are the remnants of this love, once the fairest share is allocated a place, only scraps of less integrity which cannot provide the warmth of the greater mantle? Or is love much like the shattered mirror, whose individual shards reflect the world with equal potency as its full measure?
If love cannot be compromised or restrained except through our own systems of accounting, what name will it take such that any amount we impose will be equal to zero or infinity?
Is love chronic, or contiguous to time? We say it dies, or fades, or flourishes. As if it has a will and a vitality of its very own. We say it unfolds and perseveres. That it bites. That it hurts. Love can be lost, as well as found. It can be tragic and true. These words are ways before me, like the dips and valleys of a crater ripped into the earth by one massive impact with love, and I might only wander the ravaged site of the ancient thrust.
Is an ACT of love, one of its various states? Does it pass through an act into an object? Is love much like the self, in that it demands to be acknowledged through identification with an Other? Does it exist in One? Must there be two or more for it to be manifest? When we are IN love, where have we found our selves? Are we IN love or is LOVE IN US? Does it transcend the very thought of containment either way, such as Augstine’s God?
How might love be spoken so that it is not at odds with itself? How can love even the score?
For Hannah,
I stopped at “being in Love”, then wavered between “we love” and “we are in love” and wondered of the the difference in relation to the One.
“How might it be spoken so that it is not at odds with itself?” … I arrived at the place, “at odds with itself” … this is the question of uniqueness and One again … no ? What is it to name love ? Is it to make our representation of it coincide with the world itself ? It is love … there is love, … etc. Or do we try to name ourselves constantly ‘in love’ by making the representation of the world coincide with what we tell others. I guess what I am trying to get at is that before naming things, we are caught in trying to name ourselves. Is the problem augustine has ? (he wants to constantly hand naming over to someone naming someone else: god names us, for example) But is the failure to name ourselves in language what requires or is the condition of love ( a bit like a child being read a night time story before they fade into sleep … ) Does this gap, this passage from speaking of things to “being in love” introduce something that we are constantly calling art ? That the passage from a mere referential relation to reality to the ACT of love, is constantly “odd’ in so far as it opens us to a difference of having to refer, but not knowing what we are referring to. Is this the lack … we have been going around and working with: ONE and LACK ? What is the mode of working with this ? Perhaps already to call it One and Other ?
Well, this enough … for the moment,
Robert