Grief has loops and knots, snake coils that come unfleshed into being.
The skeletons in my closet dance at 3am. It is hard to write in grief-time. Language comes in fragments. But what is a newsletter if not already a fragment of something else?
When I started Acts of Listening back in February, I set myself parameters. Not just to make the task of writing more manageable, but to give me space to play. Rules are not just orders; games have rules too – to be broken, for sure, but also to work with. My parameters are the rules of the game: tools with which to experiment. Like all writing experiments, creative constraint fuels a framework amenable to consistency. Consistency of a sort, anyway.
The rules for this newsletter are fairly simple – only now, write it slant, everything is connected. The intention is to post once a week, though if you are a regular reader you’ll notice I have failed this standard a few times already. There have been spells this year when I couldn’t put words out. Instead they lay like nested serpents, hissing behind closed eyelids. They weren’t ready.
Everything is connected of course. The writing, the thinking, the loving that underpins every act of listening I have ever committed myself to.
I guess I am telling you that I withhold. I also wait. I am listening for the right conditions. And the wrong ones.
In the protracted spiral time of bereavement’s aftermath, I have been asking myself and others about love. Borrowing from others too, so we can both find our way through the tangled mass we call love in all its forms. I have parameters for my interest in love. I’m less concerned with unconditional, untrammelled love and its deep, bleak, but surprisingly direct counterpart in grief. Poets and musicians have always carried the flame for this kind of love. Instead, I am listening to conversations about complex, conditional, partial love. The love which doesn’t feel like love. The love that leaves a hole behind.
In its simplest form, I understand grief as love’s cruel shadow; the demonstrable evidence of love that is lost. That’s true, of course. All that we love we lose, and this is the truth of a life well-lived. But love has other cruelties in plain sight. Conditional love is one of them.
When Shakespeare wrote “love is not love/Which alters when it alteration finds”; when Rainer Maria Rilke wrote “For one being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation”; I think they were talking bullshit.
Respectfully of course. I say this with love.
They are both right in observing that love is both a subject and an action. It is also an object, a plaything, a term as ubiquitous as peeling wallpaper. Love is neither monolithic nor binary. What looks like love may not feel like love. Bad love and bad loving exist – not as moral judgements, but the progenitors of, as non-violent communication Marshall B Rosenberg puts it, the tragic expression of an unmet need.
Love can make you feel bad. Grief is an example of that. But so is conditional love.
My first instinct is to say that conditional love does not exist. That conditional love does not feel like love, and therefore is not love. It feels foremost like conditions.
But when I listen hard and deeply, of course conditional love exists. It exists within its own conditions. A transactional form of reward. If you obey me then I love you.
I would walk to eternity and back to meet the conditions of love. I find this embarrassing to admit in my 40-something body; and yet, let me tell you: I would. The number of times I have left my own self behind while attempting to pacify an argument with a friend or colleague; abandoned myself completely to the sole task of being loved enough. It’s less a selfless act than an addiction.
The circular loop to eternity would be a wasted journey for the sake of conditional love. But each step, like the gambler’s hope of the next big win, pulls me onward. For the longest time I thought conditional love was the only kind of love available. An impoverished iota, delivered like a boiled sweet after a tooth extraction.
If only I had. If only I knew how. If only I could know the rules then I would obey them to a fault. To a fault. If only. If only. If only.
But what is the conditional if only a passing condition?
The conditional of grammar is neither a mood nor a tense. It hovers somewhere between the two: the conditional is the function of conditions. If only I had is indicative of the past. If only I could indicates the future. I might’ve been able to do what you needed to make you love me if you had ever shown me what it is that I will need to do. (This is bell hooks’ point – that love is learned, not known). Instead, unknowing and unlearning, in conditional love I sit – have sat – in limbo.
Conditional love is a limbo of the soul. It’s not that it doesn’t exist. It is a form of love that corrodes love itself.
I’m not talking about conditional relationships. The social contracting of friendship or collegiality or community is, or course dependent upon the shared or unshared, spoken or unspoken relational agreements that conjured them into existence. That is not love in the conditional, but a response to the conditions of love. I take care of you and you take care of me: that is the nature of our connection. When you stop taking care of me, I start to wonder how much I should continue extending that care to you. This is political. What happens to those who are extended the least care? Care takes a hit, and in comes the shame, anger, despair, disillusionment. Care takes a hit, even less care replaces it. As the laws of thermodynamics dictate, energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed. What exists, persists. The violence builds and the collateral damage takes unconditional love with it.
I wish I had learned the value of conditional relationships much earlier in my life. It might have saved me much heartache if I had realised that some people are present in my life for a season and not an eternity, because the conditions themselves were adapted to the circumstances. Then the season changes and there is no shame in moving onward, apart. Conditional relationships are important, and walking away is not an inappropriate response to cruelty – though it is one of many options.
If I could express it in the simplest words: conditional love is love’s failure to thrive. It is love confined, darkened, yoked to power as a tool of transaction. It’s a logic gate of entirely (in)fallible Enlightenment colonial construction that birthed white supremacy. It says: I will love you when you show me you are loveable. But what it means is: Love is a condition that will never be fulfilled because I have already predetermined its limits.
There will never be love enough if love is in the conditional.
Because the conditions of love are now.
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Read: If you’re in despair about the world’s current political situation, you might like to try Elif Shafak’s pamphlet How To Stay Sane In An Age of Division.
See: it’s gearing up to Big Exhibition and Festival season for art and film in London. But on Monday I saw Mother Vera, an exquisite portrait of a Belarusian nun grappling with faith and belonging. It’s screening around the UK this month – try to catch it if you can.
Do: anything. Go to that protest, attend that fundraiser, call that friend, sign that petition, volunteer at that food bank, tend that garden, pick that litter, listen a little longer. Slow down. Show the abundance of your love.
*A note on the image that opens this Substack, from the Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand from its website:
This poster was printed and displayed by Phantom Billstickers to share a message of love and solidarity in the aftermath of the Christchurch terror attacks. The Masjid Al Noor Mosque and the Linwood Islamic Centre were attacked by a heavily armed white supremacist during Friday prayer on 15 March 2019, killing 51 people and wounding 40 more (the last victim died in Christchurch Hospital on 2 May). The victims ranged from three years old to 78.
There was an instant outpouring of grief and outrage online and in streets throughout New Zealand and around the world, from hastily scrawled graffiti to delicate artworks. This poster features one of the most commonly seen images in the aftermath: Ruby Jones’ illustration of two women, one with a hijab headscarf, comforting each other: ‘This is your home and you should have been safe here’.
Ruby’s illustration had wide popular reach across the world with many copies left by mourners at memorials, displayed in shop windows, and sometimes redrawn by other people. Jones observed that her work may have resonated with people because of its softness and vulnerability. ‘Maybe it’s just what people need right now - something really simple but loving, just showing human connection’ (The Dominion Post, 23 March 2019, p. A3). ‘A hug, although small, is a symbol of love, togetherness and warmth’ (Woman’s Day, 1 April 2019, p. 21). Jones was invited to illustrate the cover of Time magazine for its 1 April 2019 issue.
Such public images and messaging are often seen in the wake of mass violence. They are touching and provide comfort, but are temporary. The work of addressing and challenging racism, Islamophobia and white supremacy in our history and everyday life continues.