We Do Not Have Love
a sermon
This past weekend, I had the pleasure of celebrating the marriage of two dear friends. I don’t always feel this way (pleasure, celebration) about marriage and weddings, but the couple’s situatedness within community prompted, collectively, a different kind of life affirming with-nessing.
Here is a little text I wrote for them which I have been half-jokingly calling my love sermon. I’ve replaced the names with open-air brackets so that you all may feel and breathe your way in and out of these open spaces as you desire.
[ ] do not have love.
They have not hit the jackpot They have not obtained, through chance or calculation, a key to the locked treasure trove of love. By the signing of marriage documents and contracts, they have not been deemed possessors of a sought-after commodity.
[ ] do not have love.
Love has them.
And by them, I mean us, all of us. We are ecological beings. We share what is carried in the wind. We share the air and resources and that complex, ever-changing aliveness we call atmosphere. Love comes to all of us like clouds formulated by our collective vaporous emissions, shading and watering us into organisms of love’s design, organs of love’s dissemination. The scale of love is the scale of air. We’ve come to this celebration of the marriage of [ ] , each of us feeling what we think is our own heart. We place hands on our chests, on each other’s shoulders, hands and cheeks, feeling the ache of boundless expansion or the place where our hearts were coppiced into shapes and capacities beyond what we ever thought we could bear. But our hearts are air-borne, and our celebration of [ ] ’s love is also a collective call to recognize that we are all the enfleshed extensions of love’s atmosphere, that we are all here making love with each other.
In his blog post titled “We do not feel emotions,” Bayo Akomolafe (his work and related affiliations and titles include, but are not limited to: fugitive neo-materialist com-post-activist public intellectual and Yoruba poet) he writes:
Affective states are not individual events, quarantined within human bodies, lining up with predetermined neural networks that track unto recognizable physiological manifestations. Instead the “things” we call “emotions” are principalities and powers at large that enlist bodies of all kind in their mattering. Affective assemblages. Large territorial beasts with human bodies as organelles.
Akomolafe’s thinking on this, as he has described in other interviews and podcasts, has been informed by the work of feminist philosopher and psychoanalytic theorist Teresa Brennan. In her book, The Transmission of Affect, Brennan dissolves the self-contained subject, offering instead a theory of atmospheric affect, of dynamic environmental exchanges happening between humans and their surrounding environment that shapes and permeates what we think of as individual emotions.
Followers of my work know that I am interested in the so-called fundamentals of perception. One of these fundamental principles is the figure ground relationship, simply defined as the human's ability to visually differentiate between an object and its background. Whatever is the object of focus is the figure, and the rest is the background. The figure ground relationship is considered fundamental to learning to see. Normal human vision, and the use of it to navigate the world, is dependent on separation, on fixing a subject by finding its edges, the places where the figure ends and the rest of the world recedes around it.
But what if there is no separation between figure and ground? What is there is no self and other? Biologist Merlin Sheldrake writes in his book Entangled Life:
“For humans, identifying where one individual stops and another one starts is not generally something we think about. It is usually taken for granted— within modern industrial societies, at least— that we start where our bodies begin and stop where our bodies end. Developments in modern science, such as organ transplants, worry these distinctions; developments in the microbial sciences shake them at their foundations. We are ecosystems, composed of—and decomposed by—an ecology of microbes, the significance of which is only now coming to light.”
The more we come to understand the ongoingness of life, that we are more verb than noun, the more we begin to see that the words that we use like me, you, plant, rock, dog, dirt, or air are really brackets which gesture towards a series of interrelated goings on, complex entangled ecosystems. We are earth beings living between something we call soil and something we call atmosphere, ever-changing complex systems of interrelated lives. Who is to say that there is any hierarchy to any of this? How can we definitively say that these complex systems aren’t employing us as their arms, their hands, their mouths and tongues so that they might hold and stroke and taste all that they desire? Perhaps we are all always engaged in fulfilling the desires of all of the complex organisms that we are intimately interconnected with. Perhaps we are all, always, here making love with each other.
Akomolafe ends his post with this proposition: the new may not feel right. Loving ourselves as ecosystems involves disintegration, dissolving the concepts we have held for thousands of years about ourselves and doing so will inevitably feel disorienting and difficult at times. But what else might be possible as we compost those restrictions and open ourselves towards new entangled forms of love?
A note on time: as the summer draws me outside and away from my computer, it is likely that I will be sending out these essay posts monthly rather than weekly, with shorter videos and project updates in between. Thank you to all of you who have been reading and listening, and asking me when I’d be getting back to it. Writing these little pieces is a pleasure, and I look forward to folding the pleasures of the season into the process in these weeks and months to come.
And, for those of you following the Drawing on the Senses exercises (available to all paid subscribers), I’ve posted a new one on the DOTS page.