LOVE: BEING TWO.

 

This year, The Fuschia Tree's issues tackle 'The Unseen': seemingly invisible and tangential ideas that change the course of our lives. We begin the month of February with Love. Of course. The most obvious and the most elusive of the unseens. Our upcoming issues will explore other such infinite loops as Hunger, Will, Form, Coincidence, Folly and more. If there is an Unseen that has preoccupied you, or affected you deeply and you would like to have us create stories around it, feel free to email us at . The Choice, after all, is yours.

Our current issue, Love: Being Two, is another futile attempt at making a pattern on a thing that exists outside of known forms of measurement. It is perhaps this futility that links Love to Life, and therefore to Death. Perhaps Love is startlingly linked with death because in the moment of realizing love, life dissolves. Love digs deep as a grave in one's chest, then it lodges itself there. A complete, chance-like mystery becomes destiny. An individual's sense of time, place and experience before the moment of love is subsumed by the love itself.

It's like hanging off a roof, too weak to get back up, strong enough to hold on. Or perhaps it is learning to see yourself from the perspective of the roof. Two people, now one, revisit the world via "the mediation of the difference in their gazes" (Alan Badiou, In Praise of Love).

Love is anxious about the future, torn in the present, exhilarated by the past. Love is swept away by ideas and angst, and bound, entranced, steadied by weight. Anchored. Light and floating
Because it overcomes time: yes, indeed, only in love, is eternity finite.

"Happiness in love is the proof that time can accommodate eternity" (Badiou)

So here is a second year of love stories on art that evokes in us an existential murmur, because Time distorts: of the light-headed giddiness, the turmoil, the doubt, the safety, the adventure. Streetlights and pillowcases, books and coffee and constitutions and improvising. And of losing love, of letters, irrationality, planning, daydreaming and desperation.

Waylon D'mello evokes Ali Kazim's paintings to paint a portrait of a lover turning his back to him, concealing eyes that longed otherwise. The writer remembers the body, the tug of the heart, the strains of the mind and state of slipping between distance and the lack of it. In this post-modern take on a classic cross-continental love affair, when people left for faraway places to make their fortunes, leaving a lover behind, they had only the medium of letters to perpetuate their bond, a form that the writer utilizes to reveal the artist's portrayal of the last the last thing that one lover sees of the other: the back.

Manjari talks to about the heat of two bodies--Hema Sundari and Felix Buerkle--on a dance floor at the Gati festival. Here, love is entwined with something dark--a not-knowing, a fear of chance, a dependance on destiny.

Varsha Reshamwala analyses Narendra Yadav, Prashant Pandey and Jitish Kallat's fascination with the shape of a heart to wonder at the elusive qualities of love.

Janice Pariat speaks to author Mridula Koshy about her place-shifting, her family, her love for cooking, cycling, and her new book, Not Only The Things That Have Happened. Inherent, is also a narrative of the menage a trois: the writer, her pen and the page. The last image, a note written by her children under the guidance of their father, is what she describes as a "sort of a constitution for or at least Directive Principles of our family". This is one of the most special images we have yet to have published on The Fuschia Tree in that it also mimics the magazine's own ethics.

This is our only experience of a vacuum-- when we read. And when we are in love (for some, the two are synonymous), because love breathes on itself to live. It is our only experience of meaninglessness--everything ceases to matter. Deluded, even death is not scary if you and the roof were in it together.

With love,
Himali.