love is the whole and more than all —E. E. Cummings

  

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We’ve seen nonlocality pop up all over the place: in experiments on the quantum realm, in the paradoxes of black holes, in the grand structure of the universe, in the maelstrom of particle collisions.

In all these examples, physics enters a twilight zone.

Things can outrun light; cause and effect can be reversed; distance can lose meaning; two objects may actually be one. The universe becomes spooky.


—George Musser
Spooky Action at a Distance

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Love is not exactly a relation between two people, but a relation between two multiplicities. And it is also a kind of construction, the construction of a landscape, of a universe that can include these multiplicities. So, in a certain way it is work of art. The loving subject is an artist, and I would say the subject in general has to be thought not simply as a self-related identity but as an artist. Subjectivity is a matter of operations, and those operations are alterations. 

There is a becoming-other in the very constitution of the other as an object of love. 


—J. Rancière
Critical Questions on the Theory of Recognition

 

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Lying there among the trees, despite a learned wariness towards anthropomorphism, I find it hard not to imagine these arboreal relations in terms of tenderness, generosity and even love: the respectful distance of their shy crowns, the kissing branches that have pleached with one another, the unseen connections forged by root and hyphae between seemingly distant trees. I remember something Louis de Bernières has written about a relationship that endured into old age: “we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.”

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I think of good love as something that roots, not rots, over time, and of the hyphae that are weaving through the ground below me, reaching out through the soil in search of mergings.

—Robert Macfarlane

Underland: A Deep Time Journey

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