O love, you take us to places familiar,

to places unknown.

You are the demon and the angel,

and the face with many eyes,

lighting the way as you descend

into the dark.

To speak of love is to attempt to hold water in open hands. The word arrives in English as a single syllable, but beneath it lie older tongues that insisted on naming love’s shapes with more precision than English allows. The Greeks fractured the word into seven or more registers: eros for the body’s ache, agape for the unconditioned giving, philia for the companionable warmth, storge for the quiet affection of kin, ludus for the play of courtship, pragma for the settled love of long marriages, philautia for the regard we hold toward our own selves. Sanskrit has prem प्रेमन्, Arabic hubb حب, Mandarin ài 全包, Italian amore, each word dragging behind it the weight of a thousand years of poetry, with threads of ritual, longing, and loss.

When I speak of love, I am speaking not of one thing only but of many: of histories, of literatures, of cultures, of languages, and of ways that trace back thousands of years to the origins of humans as a species. Love is singular but diverse; is one colour only in a moment and a spectrum of light at another. It has essence but with many parts that make up its impulse; and it is an energy that is pervasive, and from which emerges goodness, happiness, striving for more that is beyond the ordinary, and greatness that shines out of the fullness of humanity.

Sappho on the cliffs of Lesbos knew this. Rumi whirling in Konya knew this. Oodgeroo Noonuccal know it in her love for culture and country. The anonymous mother in Neolithic times, who, holding her infant against the cold of threatening world, knew this without needing the word for it at all. Love precedes its vocabulary. It lives in the body before it lives in the mouth and in the pen.

Love is the One that is not one.

Love is the Many that is more than many.

Love is the energy that sweeps to the good.

Love is the pulse that powers life.

To call love “the One that is not one” is to touch the paradox at its centre. Love concentrates—it gathers the world to a point, to this face, this hand, this voice on the phone at three in the morning—and yet love also scatters, opens, widens the self until the self is porous, permeable, no longer wholly its own. The lover becomes two-hearted: one beating inside the chest, one walking around in the body of another. I think of the ancient wedding rituals in which bread is torn and shared, where two cups are tipped into one, where threads are bound around wrists: all attempts to externalise the felt truth that in loving we become multiple without ceasing to be singular. Love is the Many that is more than many because it never stops at what it has gathered; it keeps reaching, gathering in the dog at the door, the stranger on the bus, the wounded bird, the stranger’s grief we overheard at the supermarket and carried home like a slow ember.

When I think of love, I imagine it as both a kernel that lies at the centre of human sense, and, at the same time, a force persistent and global that cannot be subdued and that infuses humanity with joy and hope, even as it also shows up (in silhouette) the hate and the dark, the division and the destruction. Even so, even if I wish to find its shape, it is sometimes hard to locate—elusive—and shifts like the will-less breeze across all times, all places and all expressions of humanity—finding its many forms in the situated textures of culture and the sensibilities of historical times.

Consider the lovers of Pompeii, preserved in ash with their arms still around each other, the body’s last vocabulary becomes the poetry of embrace. Consider the grandmother who saves the best piece of cake for the grandchild visiting on Sunday. Consider the protest marches in which strangers link arms against batons—a fierce love, political and communal, not for a person but for a polity yet to arrive. Love shows up differently in a Japanese garden than in a Neapolitan piazza, differently in the monastery than in the nightclub. The shape changes; the underlying heat does not.

Love, what a presence you are:

a wilful wild wave that will not be

located in any place and time,

but is everywhere, and nowhere.

 

I shall look for thee, seek thee,

hunger for thee, though you are

as unresolved as the breeze

and you fall where you will.

Where shall we find it, this wilful wild wave? In the lexicon of seekers, love has always been the quarry that flees even as it calls. Augustine wrote of a restlessness that could not rest until it rested in God, but perhaps the formulation is older and simpler than theology. The body itself is a seeking organ. The infant turns its head toward the voice. The elder reaches in the dark for the photograph beside the bed. Across a whole lifespan we are oriented toward something we cannot wholly name. I think of the Portuguese saudade, that exquisite word for the presence of what is absent, the deep longing, the ache for someone or somewhere that may never have existed in quite the way we remember it. To hunger for love is itself a form of love—the negative space in which its outline is drawn, the silence in which the unsung note rings.

Love, the mouth that will not

close on its own name:

I take you in sweet syllables,

in the thin bread of a glance,

yet the body keeps emptying,

a vessel of forgotten rooms,

and hunger, always hunger,

presides at the unlaid table.

Love was. Love is. Love will be. There is an ever-ness about love that exists as long as the human exists in longing; perhaps as long as the universe that cares enough to craft its matter and shape its fall.

Perhaps this is what the physicists brush against when they speak of the dark weak binding that holds galaxies together, the hidden mass we cannot see but whose gravitational insistence we cannot deny. Love, in its most generous reading, is the name we give to the tendency of matter to cluster, of cells to cooperate, of mothers to refuse abandonment of infants who cannot yet repay the debt of care. It is continuous with something deeper than sentiment, stitched into the fabric of how the world coheres.

Love is scattered across the breadth of this world.

Love lies in intimacy in the heart of being human.

Love settles as does the sand in times and places.

Love finds its collision in beings that strive for it.

Love emerges—this is the crucial verb. It is not manufactured, not chosen in the way one chooses a shirt from a rack, though there is choice within it. It arises, surfaces, breaks the water like a fish one did not know was there. Love is thus emergent in the many parts and myriad ways that reflect the site, and the times, the culture and the circumstances in which people connect and be together as friends, family, community, colleagues and intimately. But across these times, and histories and cultures, across the diversity from hunter gatherer to city dweller, those who see love know it for what it is—even if they resist its call—and those who see the feign and the fake recognise that as well. For love has its urgency, its authenticity, its rawness that bubbles over and slides into crevices of hope and despair, even into the places that it cannot fall.

Think of the moment a child, unprompted, places their hand on the cheek of a parent who is sad. No one taught them the gesture; it emerges, already whole, from something anterior to instruction. Or think of the small, unobserved kindnesses in a nursing home: the nurse who hums while changing the dressings, the daughter who brings her father a sprig of jasmine though he no longer knows her name. These are not performances. The fakery of love, by contrast, has a tell—its metrics, its accountancy, its quiet waiting for reciprocation, the fine cold thread of calculation that runs beneath the performance of warmth.

Love is the silky glue that slides in and between,

sometimes secretly, sometimes with loud desire,

holding the unholdable together even until death.

Love as adhesive. This is one of the ancient metaphors: Sanskrit philosophy speaks of the sticky substance of attachment, Christianity of the bond that nothing can sever, the Greeks of the chains Aphrodite weaves around her captives. The silky glue image captures something the more heroic metaphors miss: love is often quiet, often secret, often unspoken. It is the lunch your partner packed without saying anything. It is the way a long-married couple reach for each other’s hands in sleep. It is the unexplained weight that a friend who lost a child will carry into every room for the rest of their life, and which other friends learn to carry alongside them without commentary.

Though it may be hard to locate, like the wave into the particle, and the particle to the wave, love has its focus and intent when we choose to see, be it a human or another species, an object of great worth or a pulse of desire that captures the lover in the net of passion’s flame. Love connects to the thing being loved; perhaps that is it—love is about the force of connection, one that not too strong that it destroys and not too weak that it is easily dissolved and is not sustained at all.

The dog at the grave. The cat waiting at the window. The humpback travelling thousands of kilometres along a trench of old music. The oak that leans, slowly, over decades, toward the sun. The love we recognise in other species is not sentimental projection; it is the same tension, the same pull, the same binding, translated into other bodies, other alphabets of longing.

Let me gaze upon the object of my love,

and let me feel the joy of connection that comes

as an inundation across this life and brings

an ineffable sigh of understanding.

And yet love is not mere feeling. It is action, it is duration, it is the repeated choosing of the same person, the same life, the same commitments, morning after morning, through illness and tedium and the slow erosion of early glamour. Love might be of the soul, of the mind, of the inspiration to seek the beyond and find there such springs of hope. But love is also fundamentally driven by our biology, by the wish to form bonds, procreate and survive, but not totally so, for then the will to die for love would not be possible. At the pumping heart of our species is this unbreakable thread of love, tethered with all else that would break it, and in some cases it does. For love might well be eternal but it is also ephemeral and subject to the vagaries of human life, of biology and the complexity of living this day to the next.

Consider the parent who walks into the burning house. Consider the partisan who dies for a comrade. Consider the couple who stay together for forty years despite the bruises of ordinary disappointment, choosing to love not as ecstasy but as project, as craft, as practice requiring revision. Biology gives us the baseline, perhaps; but love as the human invention, love as civilisation’s deepest and most stubborn trick, goes further than biology, sometimes past self-preservation altogether, into the realm of sacrifice that no evolutionary gaze quite explains.

The bonds of love

are metallic and forged

in the cauldron of

relational fire,

and

strong, yet fragile,

under the weight of forces

of dissolution

Are the bonds of love truly metallic? The image is fierce and ancient. Hephaestus at his forge, the wedding ring, the chains of duty, the handcuffs of custom. And yet metal is also the thing that bends, that fatigues, that eventually fractures if stressed along certain planes. Or is this just part of our human survival myth that is about no more than why we have come to be the dominant species on this planet, and the seemingly unifying power of love is just the language of survival. In forming these bonds that lead to pairing, family, community and society we have found an advantage, and we have prospered it seems.

But the reductive reading feels incomplete, a half-music. The sociobiologist can account for why a mother loves her child, but she cannot quite account for why an elderly widow will stand, in her slippers, at a window every afternoon, watching a street where no one will come. Survival has no explanation for devotion past the moment of use. Love exceeds its evolutionary function and becomes something else—a gift given to the universe in return for the universe having held us up, however briefly, in its light.

Some say it is God or a god that makes the idea of love so

and breathes it into us

and into us for each other.

 

O breath, O unseen giver,

O Ruah of the old poets, O pneuma of the Greeks,

you enter and are never kept.

You cross the threshold of the mouth

and go out again, altered,

carrying the name of love

toward another body.

 

Love is the breath that arrives from elsewhere.

Love is the breath that leaves toward another.

Love is the air that knows itself only in passage,

only in the crossing,

only in the brief custody of the lungs.

 

The mystics have always insisted this. Rumi’s Beloved was both a friend and the divine. Teresa of Ávila’s ecstasies were both erotic and theological. The Hindu bhakti traditions worship the god as lover, as child, as friend, as enemy, as stranger, folding the human into the cosmic. The secular modern may turn away from these framings, yet even the atheist, standing beside the hospital bed, may feel that love arrives as if from elsewhere—a guest rather than a product of the self, a visitation that is just given.

Love is a feeling or complex set of feelings that pervade bodies and thoughts with varying degrees of intensity, from the enjoyment of a piece of music, to the strong and passionate feelings of lovers, to the indescribable bondedness of a parent and a child that is biology but then is beyond biology. Love is so often held in the body and formed in memories of pleasure, touch and gesture. It is immediate and momentary in being with another now, but it is formed from memories built in pain, pleasure, overcoming and loss. I think of a long-lost parent, friend or family member in this way. Death does not diminish love, just its immediacy. Loss in love is longing and the pain of separation that cannot be filled.

Love is not a thought about a person but a way the body leans, reaches, breathes differently in their presence. Proust’s whole project was to show how love is made of time—of remembered textures, of the madeleine dissolving in tea, of a phrase of Vinteuil’s fictional sonata that becomes inseparable from a face. When we lose a person, we do not lose the love; we lose only the living horizon in which it was addressed. The love remains, reconfigured, now speaking into absence, now echoing off the inside of a room the beloved has emptied but not, in some deeper register, vacated.

Love is a state of being that is prior to words: in that ineffable condition that is spiritual and beyond and is articulated in words that echo out of sentiment and feelings that may be immediate or may drift into thought of long ago, from whimsical memories of what used to be.

            Love is the thread connecting these histories,

            these memories only grey now that once

            were coloured and rainbowed with vibrance,

            but still, they remain so long as this body feels,

            and even then, maybe more beyond horizons.

And so, the poet keeps trying. Keeps finding language that almost, not quite, comes close. Keeps writing not because the words will finally capture love but because the reaching is itself a form of love—a love of the unnameable, a love of what precedes us and will outlast us, a love of the simple, staggering fact that we are here, on this warm turning planet, and we have loved, and we have been loved, and that this, however briefly, has been enough.