Love is Strong as Death

Labor Day: I have been thinking about Irigaray's writing about relationship and friendship as a labor of love. As our feast day approaches I have been busy with this labor. It has been a great pleasure to correspond with people I don't know, to invite them to the feast, to welcome their friends and partners and to follow up on suggestions of others to contact. So a network of this labor of love is growing and it is becoming part of the aesthetic and form of this work of conviviality. I've been having fun looking up organic and local food sources and talking with feminist farmers,yoghurt makers, bakers. Even these simple acts of relation, of recognition and affirmation, already create something between us. So this work becomes a new way of creating spaces between us which are a different kind of public sphere, a different space of sociality. I am wondering about the concept of an ephemeral public, or as Hakim Bey put it, a temporary autonomous zone, in relation to this work. So far it feels different than a "hit and run" sort of performance. I hope it will be more like neural connections--once they are activated they become part of the larger thinking network. For me then, this work is not an indulgence but a pleasurable way of creating thinking and acting in common.

Invitation - it means so much in itself. Even though it is the unexpected guests that we seem to cherish the most. People whom we do not know - yet. This "yet" is a very special word, it is a kind of anticipation, one kind of many ways of acticipating. It is a promise of a possibility of friendship, really. One is yet to come in. We hope that totally unknown people, 'total strangers', will come. It is a wonder and hope for new friendships. It is a hope that things are not what they seem, and may be, what they are. Invitation is open, we are waiting. Waiting is a pleasure in itself, it is an opening which is not yet closed. A pleasurable waiting, like for an e-mail or a phone call. And when one is specially invited, it is a gift that sets up a certain responsibility and humility. Humility - such an alien word, a total stranger in today's political alliances. Humility of being invited, being chosen. A promise of friendship, anticipation, and its realization - realization of political love. Humility.

I like the word "yet"--anticipation, the thrill of risk, of the unknown. Even the fear that no one will come, or no one will speak is strangely mitigated in the possibility of "yet." I understand what you mean by humility. I feel that we are asking a lot from people who do not even know us. They are trusting our invitation and taking a risk and coming. I'm thankful for that. I often feel that thankfulness when I invite friends to my home and they make the time, they come and they come with pleasure and with gifts of talk and friendship and wine. And each time the spaces between us expand and grow and include so much that is new and makes me glow.

Well, it has been almost two weeks since we gathered for the love-feast at Brown University. I am trying to find time to write a full account of this remarkable experience. I want to mull over some of its meanings after the first flush of joy and relief at how well it went is over. But meanwhile I want to hail all the wonderful "becoming-women" who came and made it such a pleasurable and moving event. And especially I want to thank the fabulous cooks--our friends--Paige Sarlin and Liz Rosenfeld--without whom this feast would not have been possible. And I'm also thanking my dear niece Robin Barron and her 3 friends who came from Clark University and helped serve and said profound words. And finally also I want to hail and greet with love our special subRosa friends Maria Fernandez and Christina Hung who came from New York and Florida to be with us on this special night. More feast thoughts to follow.