A Cup of Love

 

Kahlil Gibran said: Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.

Ben Johnson said: Leave a kisse but in the cup, And Ile not looke for wine.

Shakespeare said: [The lover's eyes] To his palate doth prepare the cup.

Ovid said: Love sparkles in the cup and fills it higher

Ghalib said: An age has passed since I last brought my loved one to my house
Lighting the whole assembly with the wine- cup's radiance) 

Kabir said: I have drunk of the Cup of the Ineffable. 

Rumi said: Love's dawn cup is our sunrise, his dusk our supper.

The Aquarian, the water bearer, has long since been associated with the container that shapes otherwise liquid ideas. With Valentines Day right in the middle of the Aquarius sign, it is no wonder that the cup features so prominently amid the Great Poets' love melodies. A belief in the stars, a longing for a bond, and a desire to consume might be some roots to the idea of the cup of love. 

It is only erudite, but cosmically appropriate then, that Cupid has the word cup in his name. The couplet too, whose root is in providing an ambiguous insight, has phonetically, contains the cup. 

Love, I believe, is the kind of thing that takes place in form. One cannot surmise the content of it, nor can one demarcate its boundaries. The manifestations are diverse and meanings multiple, but the symptoms of love are universal. The selfless generosity, the desire to control, the need to challenge, doing things you'd never dream of doing otherwise, seeing aesthetics through the eyes of the other, imagining your loved one will appear before you in the unlikeliest circumstances. 

The love stories in this issue stem from works of art that have inspired personal dreams of lust, thought, desire and longing. They are not stories of a love between a person and an object or an idea, these are stories of entirely human love, decontextualized love, blind, sorrowful, tragic, beautiful, lustful, resentful, cupful of love. 

Janice addresses, through the paintings of Abir Karmakar, the first stage of love: loving the self. Decontextualized and Absolute, self-love enables us to love the world more truly. 

Waylon writes a letter to a lover, evoking Manjari Sharma’s photographs of water and its various associations with falling and buoyancy, distance and detachment. 

I have included a story of my own, in which Thukral and Tagra’s ‘Put it On’ series becomes about the more psychological layers of protection that We create in order to distance Ourselves from Others. 

Finally, Rosalyn writes a heartfelt piece after internalizing Rohini Devasher’s Arboreal series, about time, timelessness, the ethereal and the real, the imaginary and the measurable, nature’s desires and its discontents. 

Each one utilizes the body and the mind as a kind of cup, where, left brewing with love, it evaporates and overflows alike. 

So paint the rooms of your mind red, make heart shaped wings, sit down with a cup of wine, and read our Love issue. And share it, so the cycle is complete.

Wishing you a slow read,

Himali.