What's love got to do with it?

Dispatch #29: On becoming a true scholar of love

Hi friend,

I have been thinking about love. Angel & I celebrated our 13th anniversary on the same day of the eclipse. We went to the Botanical Gardens & joined other humans in staring up at the sky to witness an astronomical event. We had a picnic. Angel bought me Hilma af Klimt: Visionary & a stunning, handblown glass amber carafe & cup set. These specific gifts – spiritual, delicate, vibrant – made me feel seen & known. She gets me. Angel decorated the wrapping paper with printed photos of us from the past year, which was so thoughtful & beautiful that I kept the wrapping.

Background art is by Jeffrey Simmons

Seated on a picnic blanket near us, we soon learned, was a professional photographer named Krisanne Johnson: “Excuse me, I wasn’t going to do this, I mean, I wasn’t going to work today, but I like your vibe, would you mind if I snap a photo of you just as the eclipse is almost total?” Of course we said yes. What a special way to mark our anniversary. Here’s the photograph Krisanne took. To have our vibe vibed along with, to have our vibe inspire an artist to want to reach for art on a day off, well, that feels like love, too.

I have been thinking about love as a verb, of course, but also as a noun. What love-objects accompany my days? What love-objects accompanied us on our anniversary picnic? If you look closely, you can spy them in Krisanne’s photo: Richard Siken’s pivotal work Crush, my beloved Abstract Future’s tarot deck (inspired by the paintings of Hilma af Klimt!) & a Carhartt tote bag (Angel long ago spotted someone donning it on the subway & loved it, so I bought one for her.) What is more queer, I ask you, than Sir Siken, than a mystic ahead-of-her time, than…Carhartt? As a dyke, I need the fabric of dykes, the poems of gay men, the witchiness of genre-defining painters. This isn’t a capitalist manifesto, a vapid love of things. It’s simply to say: the objects we are surrounded by, the objects we carve ritual & inspiration & mentorship from, they make love less abstract. When I hold something beautiful – whether in color or language - my whole being resonates. We all deserve beauty. As Toni Morrison said, “I think of beauty as an absolute necessity. I don’t think it’s a privilege or an indulgence, it’s not even a quest. I think it’s almost like knowledge, which is to say, it’s what we were born for.”

Left: cup from orange carafe gift; Right: "The World" tarot card pulled from Abstract Future's deck during our picnic

So I drink in the amber glass with my eyes. So I let the cherry blossoms bless my nose, my lungs. So I delight in the shapes & color of the tarot deck. But I don’t stop there. This nourishment isn’t only for me. I pause to dedicate it to all visible & invisible beings: I dedicate this beauty as a return to my humanness. Beauty’s intoxicating wisdom must return me to my human (& animal & mineral & cosmic) family, or else it’s just appreciation. Appreciation is not quite the same thing as love.

I want to love well, to be an easily generous person, to make of love a verb, a quilting-thing, in motion, alive! Not conceptual, but felt. One of our premier scholars of love, bell hooks, has this to say of love’s transformative power: “When you say ‘I would die for you’ to those you love, the truth of those words may be not that you give your physical life but that you are willing to die to the past and be born again in the present where you can live fully and freely - where you can give us the love we need.”

Background art is by Jeffrey Simmons

So perhaps this is the central question: what enables me to give the love the world needs? How can I be ‘willing to die to the past & be born again in the present’? This moment in history is asking – well, really, Palestinians are asking – that every single human being on this planet consider what it truly means to ‘live fully & freely’. Can I live fully & freely while others are walled in, occupied, patrolled, surveilled, annihilated, ethnically cleansed, silenced?

The Palestinian cause is the question of liberation itself – across struggles, race, class, generations. We cannot be fed the distortion that Israel’s response, let alone its existence, is liberatory for Palestinians, or an example of justice. No. As Angela Davis said a few days ago at Northwestern University’s encampment, “Palestine is a litmus test for justice for everyone.”

My heart has been on fire with pride & joy & renewed commitment & energy at the college students across America (& now the world) setting up their encampments, doubling down on the demand for divestment. What deep love in action! Professors protecting their students from the cops in an encompassing circle, hand in hand: Love! The daily schedules full of education, yoga, shared meals, all peaceful & communal & focused on a better world: Love! With their constant refusal to cede to threats or violence, these protests have exposed the escalatory police state for what it actually protects: power, land, money.

So many of us are thinking about love specifically because we are thinking about sorrow. How to hold it. How to survive the deathgrip of capitalism’s man-made chaos. How to bear broadcasted genocide(s), white supremacism, police brutality, our government’s incessant, deliberate dehumanization. How to stay human in the face, the grinning lustfulness, of empire. Several times a day I think, witnessing ordinary people do extraordinarily loving things, isn’t it incredible? All of these people for whom sorrow is leading them to love?

Like a child, I look everywhere to learn love. To keep learning it. I look to you. I look to queer people. To Siken. To af Klimt. To bell hooks. To Angela Davis. To my partner. To strangers. If it doesn’t reek of love, of liberation, of justice, I don’t have use for it, I don’t want it.

I wake up each morning groggy, lazy, disoriented & that same impulse keeps burning through me: I must learn to love. I must learn to love. Truer, cleaner, kinder, wiser. I must learn to really love. Recently, I saw this tweet & have held close Siken’s brilliant response. I read Ibrahim Nasrallah – “I was silent and nothing came of it. / I spoke and nothing came of it.” – & the paradox, the desperation, the incendiary confrontation with effort & meaninglessness burns inside me, that impulse refining into a question: How can I learn to love? Truer? Wiser? Unabashed? Paradoxical? Holding it all in dialectic? My blood fighting my bones fighting my mind? How can I learn to love so I am born again & again, freer, fuller, with beauty at the core? I seek beauty’s wisdom, its freeing nature. We deserve beauty, @JamesLucasIT reminds me: in the paint spill, the rainstorm, the bird shit.

Brutality is not at our center. Art, communion, truth-seeking is. No matter what the police state tries to beat into us. That is not my textbook, that is not where I learn love.

I must learn to love. When I listen to Yo Yo Ma intermingle with the rivers of the Smoky Mountains, I am returned to myself. I am called to not just remember the earth, but recognize myself as the earth, & the earth as myself. bell hooks says, "It is easier to articulate the pain of love's absence than to describe its presence and meaning in our lives." I have been sitting with this passage for years. As the state prescribes a curriculum of brutality & dehumanization & monstrousness, how can I continue to be a scholar of love - but not just that - how can I continue to articulate ‘its presence & meaning’? How can I not be embarrassed or vague about love? About the necessity of beauty? About the truly transformative power of community?

Love has everything to do with justice. For my small community of two, Angel & I, celebrating our love by staring at the moon covering the sun among a crowd on picnic blankets, among an abundance of families & friends & flowers, was profound. How did I feel, seeing that distant coin blot out that other distant coin? Quiet awe. Strange gratitude. Total humility. It is a privilege to be an animal on this planet, capable of caring about other animals. I think that this malignancy of becoming a predator of your own kind is a sickness of the highest degree. In video after video, I watch Israeli soldiers pose mockingly with lingerie they’ve thieved from ransacked, emptied houses, or throw dollar bills at blindfolded Palestinians crouched on the floor, or delight yahoo-ingly at the sky-high heaps rubble. Really? On this, our one planet, this is your joy? I’m reminded of this poem by Mathew Olzman:

I wish I could translate to you, reader, the awe I have in my heart for this universe, despite the murderous agenda literally engulfing our planet. Really. If I could forgo language altogether, I would. I might place a flower petal in your palm: can you believe it? This color! This shape! This mystery, this mysterious aliveness is inside you, too! It is you! But would that convey the love in my chest? I’m not sure. bell hooks’ words on the difficulty in describing the presence & meaning of love in our lives are true. Still, it’s a worthy task to try & build a bridge between two human beings.

I just want you to feel how I felt, lying with my ear to the heartbeat of this person I’m so amazed to love, the whole sky getting darker, the air sharp & cold, while a planet (!) moved in front of another planet (!), blocking it almost completely, & a whole crowd of humans clapped. As if they knew: We were celebrating our 13th year together. & yes, that is miraculous, as miraculous as an eclipse. It is worthy of applause. Meeting Angel didn’t need to happen, but it did. Life-changing connection doesn’t have to happen, & when it does, we mark it. I say it on our eclipsaversary & on all days, as if language could touch it: Angel is genuine, generous, hilarious, my world.

& you? You are also a world. You are here. You have a heartbeat. You move beneath eclipsing planets. You live your life the best you can, breath by breath, step by step. You share the same star-stuff as the oldest leaf. Over the last six months, the agony of distant strangers has set your own heart ablaze. All of this means that life matters to you. Justice matters to you. You’ve been given a sacred human assignment: Act like you understand what love means. That’s it. That’s the whole assignment.

Act like you understand what love means.

With ample maple syrup,