scraps of love, radical or not

“Loving someone and being loved means so much to me. I always make fun of it and stuff. but isn’t everything we’re doing in life a way to be loved a little more?” —Celine, “Before Sunrise”

i just rewatched “Before Sunrise” tonight. i suppose it sort of inspired me to put up a bunch of scraps about love, so here they are.

i wrote the following passages last year for a friend’s project that never really got going.  i sort of purposefully wrote with the ‘we’ pronoun to imply a plurality of voices, because i expected others might add or revise:

How might we write about love yet simultaneously remain both fluid and reflexive to the politics of our life experiences? Quite obviously, we change, along with our lovers and friends. Life is impermanent. We live and learn lessons later in life that we did not have earlier on. What we think is solid and secure might suddenly or unexpectedly become groundless and insecure. For reasons such as these, we do not wish to provide rigid “theories” or “rules” about love or suggest there is a “right” or “ultimate” form of social relationship that others must conform to. Rigidity denies the growth, change and evolution of humans as social beings.

We can, however, willingly expose ourselves to radical (and historical) critiques of the contemporary social order. These critiques include feminist critiques of patriarchy, serial monogamy and heterosexism, anarchist critiques of the state, capitalism and civilization, ecological critiques of destructive environmental practices, and anti-racist critiques of colonialism and imperialism. Many writings of this ilk hold a consensus that contemporary social structures (such as cities, industrialized countries, and the global economy) and interpersonal relationship practices are not “natural” or immutable, but instead primarily the outcome of specific historical events that involved human agency and choice.

From such perspectives we can either infer or find direct messages that carry deeply personal implications for all of us; messages that suggest we have denied ourselves a more meaningful life experience, and it is possible to live in a different manner. Messages that suggest how we live our personal lives carry large-scale, societal-wide implications. Messages that tell us things have changed before, and they can (and will) change again. Not only so we might live more meaningfully and spiritually connected to others, and ourselves but also for the health and survival of the planet we are intrinsically connected to.

Radical (“to the root”) love signifies an alternative set of interpersonal relationship practices to what we name institutional serial monogamy. While radical love describes some boundary conditions for responsible, anti-authoritarian, feminist, and nonviolent intimate human-to-human relationships, it is not a map or definitive set of rules for how such relationships “should” function. Given the highly subjective and psychological aspects of interpersonal relationships, and the fact that historical, scientific and intellectual have througoughly dismantled the idea “normativity” again emphasize that there is no one “right” or “ultimate” form of social relationship.

“say yes” from elliott smith’s last show before he died:

and lastly a poem that i found in my desk drawer. i wrote it on the train in the winter. it’s a jpeg file because wordpress is so awful at formatting line breaks.