my heart is an archipelago (a manifesto on love)

(maps have been on my mind lately)

i was reading the word for world is forest by ursula k. le guin recently. in this science-fiction novel, a fictional indigenous population, the athsheans, is colonized by an imperial population, the yumens, fragmenting not only their lives, but also their conception of the world. for the athsheans, there’s no epistemological difference between the words forest and world. they are one and the same. but the yumens impose that rupture. through fiction, le guin builds an ethics, not only advocating for a harmonious, environmentalist rapport of the self and the land, but also for a decolonial mode of care.

le guin’s process involves drawing speculative maps to sketch out her ideas visually. a curious impulse, given that cartography is steeped in the colonial worldview that she continuously unsettles. her speculative maps, naturally, never settle. they breathe, search, wonder, and yearn. the roots of a relational cartography, found also in the work of zarina hashmi or horacio zabala.

i also read leanne betasamosake simpson’s theory of water, which made me realize that to decolonize our relationship to the world is to cultivate an ethics of love. can we map out our internal worlds through this framework? what is the cartography of my heart?

(words are futile devices, but they also comfort me as I look around me, alone and confused, mistrustful of my intuition, convinced by my bodily senses, by that sweet overpowering thing we produce anytime our bodies touch, that every heart holds space for love and that every love is a precious fruit that should be enjoyed in its fullness while it is ripe, for every ripe fruit is a miracle, and that discarding the ripe fruit is both denial of the good and the self.)

*deep breath*

(love has been on my mind lately)

some definitions of love:

love is a story we tell ourselves
love is a communal garden
love is the world we build to share with someone else
love is the courage to open oneself
love is a fever, longing still
love is awful

i’m partial to the definition provided by plato
writing as aristophanes in the symposium:

love is the name
for the desire and pursuit
of wholeness

to love is to become yourself through the other. it’s not a fragmentation of the self. not an accommodation. not a compromise. just unadulterated mutual becoming. this is a radical idea, especially for those who view self-love
as a self-oriented practice. what if love is self-love?

le guin, simpson, and plato fundamentally articulate the same ethics: love (as a totalizing notion) is the wisdom of finding harmony and wholeness in the friction. to love is to embrace and honor the friction.

(pardon my attachment to academic jargon but) gillian rose’s concept of dialectical damage gets at this. that truly opening oneself to love is to be at someone’s mercy, which enacts a dialectical push-and-pull between the destructive fear of rejection and the fragile hope of receiving love in return. one cannot exist without the other.

tricky.

to love is to cross this vortex
unscathed, with the other,
grateful for their mercy
and proud of your own,
flying, smiling, crying
at the miracle of it all.

heartbreak, inversely, is your response to mercilessness. so now you’ve opened yourself and nothing could hold all of the overflow? the common response provided: you should focus on yourself, just learn to love yourself. the whole thing reeks of neoliberal puritanism, of prevention through deterrence border protection of the heart. the avoidant’s tactic. and yet, i have no solution. my love is scattered on the floor.

(archipelagos have been on my mind lately)

archipelagos teach us about maps and love. the etymology of the word is confusing. it is composed of greek elements, arkh- (chief, primeval) and -pelagos (open sea), but it first appears in late medieval italy as arcipelago, the name for the aegean sea, known for its countless island chains. it then becomes the noun for any body of water containing many island chains, before transforming into the noun to describe the island chains themselves. we were confused as to whether they were fragments or wholes.

geology tells a better story. archipelagos form either due to volcanic activity, rising sea levels, tectonic movements, erosion, post-glacial rebound, or natural disasters. they fit in three categories: oceanic islands, continental islands, and continental fragments. some arose alone. others now live independently, now separated from their continents. the rest still cling to their continents in silence, covertly.

to our eyes, it all appears the same: landmass rising above sea levels. but this is a failure of perception. we fail to see their roots, their foundational core. what we see as a chain of islands may be the most beautiful, expansive mountain range in the world. we need new eyes. we can never dream to uncover the infinite beauty of archipelagos, which they hide from us, so gracefully, humbly.

archipelagos unsettle the border between the center and the periphery, the inside and the outside, in their radical openness. they are, in their anatomies, decolonial, always reminding that our relationship to the land is contingent. they channel heraclitus, when he wrote that “no man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” that to be is to become. friction is the pathway to wholeness. that there is no love, where there is no bramble, and there is no love on the one true path. that love exists somewhere in the winding across our islands.

the sight of coconut water still overtakes me. i feel things with intensity. lisette asked me what i like about myself: i like that about myself. i also like my radical openness, my continental fragmentation, but i feel the colonial borders of cynicism closing in and i’m so fucking terrified.

i aspire to remain an archipelago. here is my new mantra:

i reject borders,
and choose porosity,
if it hurts, so be it.

i’ve found wisdom
in the erosion, to the
delight of my mountains.

i’ve found wholeness
in my fragmentation,
my subdued expanse.

my heart is an archipelago.