Love's not-work

Hello darlings! If you’re just here for book updates, SCROLL DOWN as there’s a discount code for preorders and a giveaway you can still access even if you already ordered the book, you lovely humans. If you actually like reading my rambles, well…

I have been re-reading Gillian Rose’s Love’s Work.

In April when I arrived in London I attended a panel on this book hosted by someone I adore and I found it so disappointing, not least because Jacqueline Rose introduced the panel and then sat there while the panelists spouted dull pieties and completely ignored everything that makes the book outstanding. Because still, when a woman writes about love, it’s seen as kind of embarrassing.

But Love’s Work is a glorious book, recommended to me by a dear friend at something like 3am on the kitchen floor of the flat I was staying in while I finished Work Won’t Love You Back, three of us sitting there reconciling an argument and talking about the futility of trying to control love, of issuing rules for it. (Not that this stops any of us from continuing to try.) Rose knew and wrote so beautifully of the exquisite vulnerability that all of today’s rules and checklists try to dodge. It just doesn’t work that way.

In personal life, people have absolute power over each other, whereas in professional life, beyond the terms of the contract, people have authority, the power to make one another comply in ways which may be perceived as legitimate or illegitimate. In personal life, regardless of any covenant, one party may initiate a unilateral and fundamental change in the terms of relating without renegotiating them, and further, refusing even to acknowledge the change. . . .There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy.

I am perhaps thinking about all of this because I have written a book that is about grief and so again I have written a book about love. Not in the way that a multitude of internet cliches would have it (spare me forever your grief is just love that has lost its way) but nevertheless one does not grieve what one has not loved. And I wrote the book in the wake of heartbreak and I still see that heartbreak on every page.

(I was talking with friends Abby Kluchin and Patrick Blanchfield for their excellent podcast about how Freud’s description of mourning in Mourning and Melancholia really suits heartbreak better than grief; that they are different is a conversation I hashed out with another friend; you can listen to the podcast soon.)

When a woman writes about her heart it is unserious; when a woman writes about affairs of the heart it is assumed to be autobiographical. So naturally I wrote a book about grief and it is as much a memoir as anything else even though most of the book is not about me and I questioned this decision every day as I worked on it but now that it is about to be out in the world I am feeling feisty about it, I think. I am ready to scrap with anyone who wants to tell me that this was unserious, unimportant, most annoying of all, somehow un-materialist of me. When two people in the space of one dinner questioned the idea of writing about feeling (not even about my book but about someone else’s, but still) I got angry but I was not surprised that in fact both of them were also women. We claim our seriousness in the world by separating ourselves from womanly concerns too often. I don’t want to do this.

Why did I do it? The short answer is because I had to. Writing is work and not something that simply pours out of you when you put pen to paper and yet sometimes I do find it clawing away inside of me and demanding to be let out lest it chew itself an exit, Alien-style. Because everything that I read about grief was shit and utterly unhelpful (until I got to Judith Butler) but everyone who spoke to me about their own grief helped me see a way through the fog. Because the last few years have been an exercise in learning not to be afraid to be seen feeling. Because in the moments when I could not control or conceal the feelings I met the people who have loved me better than I have ever been loved.

The people who would attempt to put rules around love are also the ones who will misunderstand grief when it comes.

I wrote a book with the word love in the title that was mostly about work but I did differentiate love from work because one of those things I would like to abolish. In noting in that book that care can be work, that the home is a workplace and people pay for love, I did not want to sanctify love, exactly. But I keep trying to parse out things that are not work against the things that are. Because if we simply claim that everything is work we lose the ability to differentiate.

Because I kept on trying to work at love until I sat across from someone I loved and said “I keep trying to earn your love and you keep telling me I already have it.” And he tilted his head and said yes I was right and the knot I carried in my heart loosened and I have never again questioned it. I had read bell hooks on love and while I appreciate her insistence that love is a choice, it is a doing, that point of view led me to bashing my head against walls and missing the door that was right there. I had to learn to relax and believe that it just was. That there was nothing I could do to earn it but also nothing I could do to lose it.

Yet. I love Love’s Work because at bottom it is an insistence that Rose’s life’s work was not separable from her loves, that love is a subject worthy of her prodigious intellect as well as her heart, that philosophy is not an abstract pursuit but something that exists in the world between living breathing fucked-up humans who fuck each other up in the loving but also sometimes create something beautiful.

Love’s Work is a book about the body and the speakers at that event only wanted to speak of the mind but what, after all, is more material than the body? Whether ill or in love, or often both? Love and grief are physical things; the racing heart, the shortened breath, the sweat and tears and contact. Bodies together or alone.

Rose again:

It burdens the individual soul with an inner predestination: you have eternal life only if you dissolve the difficulty of living, of love, of self and other, of the other in the self, if you are translucid, without inner or outer boundaries. If you lead a normally unhappy life, you are predestined to eternal damnation, you will not live.

This is the counsel of despair which would keep the mind out of hell. The tradition is far kinder in its understanding that to live, to love, is to be failed, to forgive, to have failed, to be forgiven, for ever and ever. Keep your mind in hell, and despair not.

A crisis of illness, bereavement, separation, natural disaster, could be the opportunity to make contact with deeper levels of the errors of the soul, to loose and to bind, to bind and to loose. A soul which is not bound is as mad as one with cemented boundaries. To grow in love-ability is to accept the boundaries of oneself and others, which remaining vulnerable, woundable, around the bounds. Acknowledgement of conditionality is the only unconditionality of human love.

What are we doing all of our heartbreaking political work for, if not to make more space for life in its complicated, messy realities? Not to have some smooth frictionless existence but to be able to experience all of the dimensions of love and loss. Frictionlessness, after all, as that man who loves me wrote, is the desire of capital. Our power is in the ruptures, the snags and the imperfections. The pulling of the emergency brake.

Rose calls it work; I call it not-work. Perhaps we’re both right.

Troublemaking

Since we’re heading into the ongoing mess of BOOK PROMOTIONS, moving this section up for the foreseeable.

First things first! I promised you a discount code and here it is. If you preorder From The Ashes on Hachette.com with the code FTA20, you can get 20% off. Sadly, this is just for US orders.

But we also have a digital content giveaway! We’ve got a bonus section that didn’t make it into the book but was too good to just let go to waste, and if you send us your receipt for a preorder, we’ll make sure you get that if you already preordered, prefer to preorder from your own local bookseller (encouraged! I love local bookstores! And if you work in/own a bookstore, please get at me and we’ll discuss other ways to promise people buying books from you…), or from my Bookshop.org page. It will be sent out on publication day, which is SEPTEMBER 10 in the US. You do not have to preorder with the code to get the content, but you must fill out the form in order to!

If you’re in Britain and Ireland, you can preorder HERE and she’ll be with you October 10!

Preorders really help. They signal to booksellers that this is a book people care about and want to read, they contribute to hype, all that fun stuff. Plus, free content! We’re also working on some other promotions, including some fabulous art prints that I can’t wait to show you…

And now…

Launch event! In Chicago on September 10, where I will be live and in person. Hosted by the lovely folks at Haymarket House, co-sponsored by In These Times, there will be fun and refreshments and me and some of my favorite people talking about this book. If you’re in town, please come! And if not, we’ll be livestreaming courtesy of Haymarket! It’s been too long since I’ve been in Chicago and I’m looking forward to plenty of time there because, as mentioned before…

I will be at the Socialism conference in Chicago August 30-September 2. I’m chairing a session related to my book but featuring three brilliant badass organizer-writer-thinkers: Eman Abdelhadi, Kelly Hayes and Lydia Pelot-Hobbs on Sunday, September 1 at noon. Come! It’ll be good.

I’m also going to be at Printers Row Lit Fest in Chicago September 7, at 3pm, with comrade and friend Ajay Singh Chaudhary. I’m so looking forward to putting our books in conversation.

September 19-22 I will be in Chattanooga, Tennessee for the Southern Labor Studies Conference. In addition to talking about my book, I’ll be moderating a plenary session about the UAW and the South.

And Minneapolis, October 1, at Magers & Quinn! Super pleased to be going to Minnesota for this book, where a lot of it takes place, and where you know I’ve been spending a lot of time in conversation with a bunch of the sharpest organizers I know.

Then it’s back to sunny England (and Scotland) to launch the book over this way! More details on all of that very soon.

And if you want to host me at your organization or bookstore, please do get in touch!

Writing

More Minnesota! What timing, as I wrote this feature on the “Minnesota Model” just before Kamala Harris chose Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate. But me being me, there isn’t as much about electoral politics in here as there is a lot of thought about the kind of deep organizing and collaboration that the Minnesota movement has done so well.

Podcasting

Episodes 5 and 6 of Heart Reacts live! Episode 5 we unpacked the question of “having the bandwidth” and decided that bandwidth is a bad metaphor. What’s a better one? Listen! And Episode 6 we tackle whether and how (and why) one should talk to relatives, friends, acquaintances, that dude on the street with bad politics. You can get it wherever you get your podcasts, and please do share and review and tell your friends! We’re doing this all by word of mouth and our own sweat. Also, send us questions!

And someone else’s dog

This is Coco. She is tiny and belongs to a very dear London friend of mine. She wants cheese.