#love's work

[dk-thrive]

However satisfying writing is—that mix of discipline and miracle, which leaves you in control, even when what appears on the page has emerged from regions beyond your control—it is a very poor substitute indeed for the joy and agony of loving.

— Gillian Rose, "Love's Work" (Penguin Books, March 14, 2024)

[merulae]

To spend the whole night with someone is agapē: it is ethical. For you must move with him and with yourself from the arms of the one twin to the abyss of the other. This shared journey, unsure yet close, honesty embracing dishonesty, changes the relationship. It may not be a marriage, but it will be sacramental even without benefit of sacraments. To navigate this together is to achieve the mundane: to be present to each other, both at the point of difficult ecstasy and at the point of abyssal infinity, brings you into the shared cares of the finite world.

Gillian Rose, Love’s Work: A Reckoning with Life

[041]

Gillian Rose, Love's Work (1995)

[rotgospels]

“In personal life, people have absolute power over each other, whereas in professional life, beyond the terms of the contract, people have authority, the power to make one another comply in ways which may be perceived as legitimate or illegitimate. In personal life, regardless of any covenant, one party may initiate a unilateral and fundamental change in the terms of relating without renegotiating them, and further, refusing even to acknowledge the change. Imagine how a beloved child or dog would respond, if the Lover turned away. There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy. To be at someone's mercy is dialectical damage: they may be merciful and they may be merciless. Yet each party, woman, man, the child in each, and their child, is absolute power as well as absolute vulnerability. You may be less powerful than the whole world, but you are always more powerful than yourself. 

Love is the submission of power. ”

— Gillian Rose, from Love’s Work: A Reckoning with Life. 

[godrevy]

“I like to pass unnoticed, which is why I hope that I am not deprived of old age. I aspire to Miss Marple’s persona: to be exactly as I am, decrepit nature, yet supernature in one, equally alert on the damp ground and in the turbulent air. Perhaps I don’t have to wait for old age for that invisible trespass and pedestrian tread, insensible of mortality and desperately mortal. I will stay in the fray, in the revel of ideas and risk; learning, failing, wooing, grieving, trusting, working, reposing – in this sin of language and lips.”

– Gillian Rose, Love’s Work, (London, 1995)

[041]

Gillian Rose, Love's Work (1995)

[the-quotes-project]

"Love-making is never simply pleasure. Sex manuals or feminist tracts which imply the infinite plasticity of position and pleasure, which counsel assertiveness, whether in bed or out, are dangerously destructive of imagination, of erotic and of spiritual ingenuity. The sexual exchange will be as complicated as the relationship in general, even more so. Kiss, caress and penetration are the relation of the relation, body and soul in touch, two times two adds up: three times three is the equation. The three I harbour within me—body, soul and paraclete—press against the same triplicity in you. What I want, my overcharged imagination, released inside your body, taken up into mine, with attack and with abandon, succumbs so readily and with more joy than I could claim, to your pasion, pudency and climax."

—Gillian Rose, Love's Work