HEARTACHE
AND TROUBLE
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR: JAMES PEEL: APRIL 2008
Adam Philips has said that to be in love is to be in a state of crisis,
a little bleak perhaps, but it has stayed with me and seems evident in
the heartache and troubled nature of the letters I read and selected.
Falling in love is arguably always falling in love again, creation is
recreation and so on, endlessly replacing the lost object. The word itself
is so ineffable and convoluted that it is hard to understand what love
is, maybe there is too much importance attached to love and the ideal,
though the desire to search for an ideal object is neverending and even
when you don't want to think about romantic attachment it is evident in
almost every work of art and daily life - the more the idea of love means,
the more elusive its meaning seems to be.
Of course there is so much to think and say about this subject and it
is always subjective, so to keep it brief I will leave the last word to
Irvin D. Yalom, who has I think clearly set forth an answer to the paradox
as he clearly defines the difference between falling in love and standing
in love:
"Love is not just a passion spark between two people; there is infinite
difference between falling in love and standing in love. Rather, love
is a way of being, a 'giving to,' not a 'falling for'; a mode of relating
at large, not an act limited to a single person.
One of the greatest paradoxes of life is that self-awareness breeds anxiety.
Fusion eradicates anxiety in a radical fashion-by eliminating self-awareness.
The person who has fallen in love, and entered a blissful state of merger,
is not self-reflective because the questioning lonely I (and the attendant
anxiety of isolation) dissolve into the we. Thus one sheds anxiety but
loses oneself."
Irvin D. Yalom ‘Love’s Executioner’
James Peel is an English artist living in New York. Since graduating from the Royal College of Art in London, he has shown his work at Tate Liverpool, The Henry Moore Institute and other Museum and gallery spaces in the UK and Europe, has contributed to Cabinet and Tate Magazine, and held several fellowships and residencies, most recently at the Laurenz House, Basel, CH. through 2006. He is currently developing a collection of work which explores the space and narratives along the Rio Grande, through film, photography and music.
LIBRARY, (incomplete) is a collection of translations of the verb ‘to
love’. The index numbers on the dustjacket of each volume refer to
the ethnographically alphabetised position for each of the translations’
language or dialect. The gaps in the ascending numerical order of the
books corresponds to the fact that out of a possible 16,315 translations,
I have to date collected only 701. James Peel 2003.