Love is worth the caos

The stories we sit up late to hear are love stories. It seems that we can not know enough about this ridlle of our lives. We go back, and back, to the same scenes, the same words, trying to scrape out the meaning. Nothing could be more familiar than love. Nothing else eludes us so completely.

I do not know whether or not science will formulate its grand theory of the universe. I know that it will not make it any easier to read the plain text of our hearts. It is plain but it seems like a secret alphabet. We train as our own Egyptologists, hoping the fragments will tell a tale. We work at night as alchemists, struggling to decipher the letters mirrored and reversed. We are people who trace with our fingers a marvellous book, but when we turn to read it again the letters have vanished. Always the book must be rewritten. Sometimes a letter at a time is all we can do.

My search for you, your search for me, is a search after something that cannot de found. Only the impossible is worth the effort. What we seek is love itself, revealed now and again in human form, but pushing us beyond our humanity into animal instinct and gold-like sucess. The love we seek overrules human nature. It has a wildness in it and a glory that we want more than life itself. Love never counts the costs, to itself or otthers, and nothing is as cruel as love. There is no love that does not pierce the hands and feet.

Merely human love does not satisfy us, though we settle for it. It is an encampment on the edge of the wilderness, and we light the fire and turn up the lamps, and tell stories until late at night of those great loves lost and won.

The wilderness is not tamed. It waits- beautiful and terrible - beyond the reach of the campfire. Now and again someone gets up to leave, forced to read the map of themselves, hoping that the treasure is really there. A record of their journey comes back to us in note form, sometimes just a letter in a dead man's pocket.

Love is worth death. Love is worth life. My search for you, your search for me, goes beyond life and death into one long call in the wilderness. I do not know if what I hear is an answer or an echo. Perhaps I will hear nothing. It dosen't matter. The journey must be made. Janette Winterson - In The PowerBook