Being a Lover
‘I love’ makes a departure from the more oft seen, etched on monuments, the declaration of love to someone specific. Monuments have always been bearers of the markers of love- some choose to call it vandalism or the destruction of public property, but for me, this ‘destruction’ is symbolic of the presence and visibility of love in public space. Think about it, how perverse is it that monuments are erected to bear the names of people who have participated in war (one could argue, it’s another sort of love for the nation), but as soon as anonymous lovers occupy this space, it becomes a matter of public concern. Names set on stone are construed to be symbolic of eternal love, transcending time and space. However, when this declaration moves beyond the trajectory of two specific persons, it does something extraordinary. At the first glance, the sentence seems incomplete and there is an inevitable search for the missing name. But the next moment brings endless possibilities. Perhaps, at some level, it captures the fleeting, transient quality of love- ‘I love (no one in particular)’ because, my love object keeps changing. At another level, perhaps the level at which I like this, it signifies that ‘I love’, situating the love as a mode of existence, a way of being in the world. A way of relationality, thus moving from the particular (one love object) to the universal (many/all).
This statement redefines the lover and places him/her not in relation to specific love objects, but to the universe of possibilities. The incompletion is perhaps a parcel of the lover’s condition: the quest for love, like the pursuit of happiness, needn’t arrive at a particular point. Like desire which can never be fully grasped, love is posited in this statement as an elusive experience. To love, without having any particular love object is radically set apart from love between two people who occupy the subject position of lovers. ‘I love’, is thus expressive of love without a fixed subject, or a way of being in the world wherein love marks the relationship of the self to the other(s). The desire to complete the statement, to punctuate the expression, is almost an act of violence. A violence, derived from the hegemonic regimes of knowledge, which stresses so much on subjects and identities, that and expression of being is seen as incomplete without being associated to a particular person who embodies a certain subjectivity. In the times when love and identity has become so intertwined, especially with the propaganda against ‘Love Jihad’, it’s refreshing to see love devoid of identity. In this statement, the neither the ‘I’ nor the ‘you’ matters. It says, and beautifully so, that I love, inasmuch as love is a way of being, I love.