Love, if you will

A drunken circus of touching. The stain that spoils the white of the cloth. Love, if you will.

We would suppose that the grand story of the human is his rise from an undifferentiated primitiveness, through persistence, to a state of exhausting sophistication. Or enlightenment. Or technological singularity. Or some kind of utopic arrival. A heroic odyssey through evolutionary backwaters. We would assume that some kind of cosmic purpose or imperative is stitched into the scheme of things. We would frame civic justice as the banishment of evil, the liberation of the repressed, the mobilization of nature for our greatest ends, the righting of all wrongs.

But there are no endpoints. No steady plots. No yellow brick roads. No unstained ethical stiles. No heavens down the road. And no ready paths that lead ‘there’ as well. Home doesn’t lie in wait, specially prepared for the deserving pilgrim. And we are not the guests of honour. For as soon as we set out, so to speak, we are touched and changed in a loop of becoming-with that mocks maps and pre-arranged trajectories. To love is to disappear into thick knots, where boundaries are restless, where imperatives are still being made, where justice is always-to-come, where what we are is the supposed ‘other’, and where we notice that we are never intact. Love will not take us home. Love is home. Love is entanglement – and home is this mad confusion.