as an exercise to expand, extend, enlarge, smear y/ourselves onto others in dedication to deep listening, showing up for solidarity and support. piss off privilege.

may these terms act as prompts to understanding the entanglements of love woven throughout all facets and levels of mental health, communion, care, & growth.

abolish the family / marriage / private property / white supremacy / capitalism / human trafficking (sophie anne lewis)

absence there is an absence of writing work dedicated to making known loving practice as a vital form of politics in a collective struggle to end domination and oppression (hooks)

absence of love causes mental illness (m. scott peck)

acceptance of pain

action as a sacrament is the material work of invisible spirit (bell hooks)

activism a practice based on love practice

affectionate care an aspect of love practice

afraid of love many may focus on having a partner instead (hooks)

age of narcissism many people have never learned or have forgotten how to listen to the needs of others (hooks)

aidōs ‘shamefastness’, a shyness between lovers (sappho)

again

() again love tears me, which paralyses the body, bittersweet, wild serpent

() again I am upset by love, which unties the limbs, that bittersweet creature that makes me weak

() again eros, who unties the limbs, shakes me, that bittersweet serpent, impossible to escape

(different interpretations of the original sappho poem:)

‘eρος δηὖτέ μ᾽ ὀ λυσιμέλης δόνει, γλυκύπικρον ἀμάχανον ὄρπετον’ (sappho)

aids in indigenous circles hiv and aids are historically considered to be part of a genocidal neglect campaign (lou cornum)

amateur mid-18th century: french, from latin amator ‘lover’, from amare ‘to love’

anarcho-primitivism is a branch of anarchism that promotes and imagines a

post-civilisation society akin to how indigenous communities still live today, except for excluding any industrial technology

ancient analogy of language & love

ancient bond of women & words

anger we experience anger whenever we perceive another organism attempting to encroach upon our geographical or psychological territory or trying, one or another, to put us down, it leads us to fight back. without anger we would indeed be continually stepped on, until we were totally squashed and exterminated (peck, p. 53)

archives of anti-slavery caregiving, loving, and sexual or gender self-expression [show] a willfully deviant profusion of anti-geneological fugitivities; all kinds of ways of negating, pre-dating, ignoring, and/or provincializing the private nuclear household (lewis, p. 45)

artist lover

balancing is the discipline to discipline discipline (adapted from peck)

beauty of refusing respectability (adapted from saidiya hartman)

belly is the place in the female storyteller’s body that holds the occult power of creating matter and the ability to hold words (adapted from trinh t minh-ha)

berdache derogatory term for ‘two-spirited’ from french ‘bardache’, related to english ‘bardash’, meaning ‘passive homosexual’, ‘catamite’, ’boy prostitute’. derived from persian هدرب (barda), meaning ‘captive’, ‘prisoner of war’, ‘slave’; and spanish ‘joyas’, meaning ‘jewels’. the term two spirit is used since 1990

biofam the biological family of origin

boys when we learn to use language as boys, we very quickly learn how to conceal y/ourselves through language, mastering language in order to exercise control over their environment including other people (victor seidler via hooks, rediscovering masculinity)

broken heart syndrome also: takotsubo cardiomyopathy— stuns the heart in acute emotional-psychological distress resulting in loss ofpump function, the condition is more common in women than men (bhanu kapil)

cathexis investing feeling or emotion in someone or something, often mistaking this feeling for love, as love is an action and practice, not a feeling (this is an important point peck makes and hooks picks up on, disentangeling misconceptions of love. hooks x scott peck)

children will not belong to the patriarchy / they will not belong to us either / they will belong to themselves (sisterhood of black single mothers)

‘civilisation’ classified many of the realities it does not understand in the categories of the untrue and the superstitious (minh-ha, p. 124)

‘civilised’ adults violently educate the imaginative conception of children

courageous people practice complete honesty, however challenging this practice is, accompanied by assuming and rejecting responsibility appropriately (adapted from hooks, p. 52)

cultures of domination cultivate fear to ensure obedience

cultures of greed establish logic that protects privileged class interests and lessens their accountability

dara gamuru old or ancient batak: ‘thundering blood’, in indonesian also: ‘roaring blood’, in batak: mundar na durus: to give birth

decentralization of the ego

desire a part of me has gone (carson)

desire to love is not itself love (peck)

dēute ancient greek: ‘come’, ‘come now’ erotic situation in time, ‘once in this time’, ‘again, this time’

diōkein ancient greek: ‘to pursue’

discipline makes loving practice

disposable relationships dismantle friendships & loving community

drawing weapons

drowning in blood

ears are queer sexual organs, as holes of the body, as well as relating sexuality to speech acts and language, the auricles are considered male & the auditory apertures are considered female

emotional labour changing or adapting our emotional state to suit capitalist labour conditions in public & private life, which can involve both deep acting (trying to genuinely change your emotions) and surface acting (faking emotions)

emotional reproduction or: heart management—in capitalist society, love is a form of labour, that reproduces more and less violent social hierarchies. rather than stemming from an authentic feeling: break it / open

epos ancient greek: ‘speech’ ‘tale’ ‘song’ ‘line of verse’ or ‘epic poetry as a whole’

eros ancient greek: ‘want’, ‘lack’, ‘desire for what is missing’. the lover wants what he does not have. it is by definition impossible for him to have what he wants if, as soon as it is had, it is no longer wanting (carson, p. 10)

erotic attraction often serves as the catalyst for an intimate connection between two people, but it is not a sign of love (adapted from hooks)

erotics of liberation artistic-abolitionist practice by care (they / them), based on accountability, abundance, agency (eroticsofliberation.com)

estrangement from feelings a trance state passed on as survival strategy to assert manhood (hooks)

euphonious pleasing to the ear, of sound and especially speech

falling in love suggests that love is based on having uncontrollable feelings rather than a conscious choice (hooks)

familialization colonial familialization is a continuing process imposing a nuclear family structure as patriarchal model, replacing indigenous kinship systems to control land and citizenship, imposing marriage laws and property ownership rules, infantilizing colonized adults as ‘underdeveloped’, justifying policies of assimilation, removing indigenous children from their families into the care of colonial institutions (minh-ha)

families disrupt fair patterns of distribution and, in particular, equality of opportunity (socrates adapted by lewis, p. 36)

family abolitionism collectively letting go of the family as technology of privatization (adapted from lewis)

feelings come & go

female foeticide the selective abortion of female fetuses

female infanticide female infanticide is the deliberate killing of newborn infant girls. the practice has occurred in numerous cultures throughout history, but is most common today in societies with a strong cultural, social, and economic bias against females, especially in parts of south asia and east asia. while some instances of infanticide are direct and violent, it can also happen passively through neglect, such as denying female children adequate nutrition or medical care. availability of prenatal sex-selective technology, such as ultrasound, has led to a significant increase in female feticide as related phenomenon

four basic techniques of discipline: (one) delaying gratification (two) taking responsibility (three) dedication to the truth of reality (four) balancing them (peck)

fourierist movement fourier laid the anarchist groundwork for marxist theorization to unfold, prescribing polyamory, universal basic income, escape from markets, nonmonogamy, excellent food, and varied recreation for all generations all living is communal (lewis, p. 38)

free palestine

full-of-the-white-man’s-complex-of-superiority

gisèle pelicot

glukupikron ancient greek: sweetbitter / bittersweet (carson discussing sappho)

gossip as a women’s practice creates space for truth-telling that is not safe or allowed in other male-dominated spaces (hooks x minh-ha)

greed violates the spirit of connectedness and community that is natural to human survival (hooks, p. 117)

grief is a burning of the heart, reconciling the reality of loss— love invites us to grieve for the dead as ritual of mourning and as celebration (hooks)

griot/te french: colonial term for african traditionalists or public entertainers who hold ancestral knowledge through oral transmission

griotte every griotte who dies is a whole library that burns down (a. hampate ba via minh-ha)

gussuck yupik (indigenous alaskan language): non-indigenous person, derived from cossack, relating to early russian colonization of alaska, derogatory

gussuck yupik (indigenous alaskan language): non-indigenous person, derived from cossack, relating to early russian colonization of alaska, derogatory

harpagmos ancient greek: literally: ‘something to be exploited’, a ritual homosexual rape of boys by their lovers in ancient cretan society. the rape began with a conventional gift-exchange [grooming] and ended with the rapist carrying off his beloved on horseback for a two-month sojourn in hiding. as the couple rode away, the boy’s family and friends would stand around uttering token cries of distress: ‘if the man is equal to or superior to the boy, people follow and resist the rape only enough to satisfy the law but are really glad…’ confides the fourth-century historian ephoros (carson, p. 24)

healers are known as the living memories of the people. not only do they hold esoteric and technical knowledge, but they also kept closely informed of the problems of their communities and are entrusted with all family affairs. in other words, they know everyone’s story, they derive their power from listening to the others and absorbing daily realities (minh-ha, p. 140)

healing happens in accepting the wound as blessing

healthy narcissism self-acceptance and self-worth are the ingredients of self-love

heart connection appreciating someone as they are. compare to: soul-connection

hedonistic consumption

history haunts

homelessness exploited by capital or empirewe are all homeless, having been divorced from the commons (adapted from lewis, p. 77)

hurt instructs

i loved earth years ago (caconrad speaking about his late boyfriend earth)

immigrant heart what can you tell me about the immigrant heart? ‘yes,’ he wrote back, ‘this is the area of my expertise. of course, anxiety and shock have an effect… the heart gets “stunned” during acute emotional/psychological stress, and it affects the heart muscle and its pumping function… it can be life-threatening, is more common in women, and does recover/regain the lost function is several weeks’ time, after the acute stressor fades away/is absorbed or processed’ (kapil, pp. 47–48)

intimate terrorism

in truth love is all about work

job misery

justice without justice there can be no love (hooks, p. 30)

kut limburgs: cunt, traditionally used in south-limburg region of maastricht as address between girlfriends, similar to the use of bitch among girlfriends in english today, reintroduction for: cunt-positive language

liberationism practices dedicated to dismantling all forms of injustice libraries the world’s first archives or libraries were the memories of women, patiently transmitted from mouth to ear, body to body, hand to hand (minh-ha, p. 121)

love is not a feeling

love is an action

love fearlessly

love is the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth (peck, p. 69)

love invites us to grieve for the dead as ritual of mourning and as celebration (hooks, p. 201)

love heals

love will not prevail in any situation where someone wants to maintain control (hooks, p. 152)

love is intended as our natural state (deepak chopra via hooks, p. 156)

love is a combination of care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, trust, honest & open communication

matrophobia anti-maternal sentiment

men even debase the female sex by their flattery of it (fourier via lewis)

men sleeping beauties (hooks)

mental illness one of the main roots of mental illness is produced invariably by an interlocking system of lies we have been told and lies we have told ourselves (peck)

misogynoir hatred of black women

mother-priestess-prophetess

mothering against motherhood (lewis)

nda non-disclosure agreement

ndn native-american or Indian

necessity of telling the story correctly (minh-ha)

neet not in employment, education, or training: a status that for youth is more than twice as high for women as for men globally, highest rates: northern africa and western asia (28.5%) and central and southern asia (27.4%)

neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering (carl jung)

oikeios ancient greek: ‘suitable, related, akin to myself’ and ‘belonging to me, properly mine’

on this planet nobody really has the opportunity to know love since it is power and not love that is the order of the day (hooks, p. 152)

open people are continually growing people (peck, p. 51)

partus sequitur ventrem latin: literally: what follows the womb: colonial legislation that stipulated that children automatically inherited their mother's (slave) status, thus establishing generations of hereditary slavery in the american colonies and other european colonial territories.

pathological narcissism a mental health condition in which only the self matters, justifying any action that enables the satisfying of individual desires

patriarchy like all systems of domination relies on socializing us to believe that in all human relations there is an inferior and a superior party (hooks, p. 97). patriarchal thinking relies on the acceptance of maintaining power and control by whatever means

philos ancient greek: ‘loving’, ‘loved’, ‘friendly’, ‘dear’

poikilos nomos (ancient) greek: nomos: ‘law’, ‘custom’, ‘convention’ + poikilos: ‘dappled’, ‘complicated’, ‘spangled’, ‘intricately wrought’, ‘abstruse’, ‘subtle’, ‘devious’. this erotic code is a social expression of the division within a lover’s heart, erotic “shame”

politics of greed are normalized (hooks, p.115) when greedy consumption is the order of the day, dehumanization becomes acceptable. then, treating people like objects is not only acceptable but is required behaviour

politics of shame as long as we feel shame, we can never believe ourselves worthy of love (hooks, p. 232)

politicization of love loving practice as the end of domination & oppression

polymaternalism is the practice of having multiple mothers for a child, often found in black feminist, queer, and other non-traditional family structures, and can include what is known as ‘othermothering’, where non-birth mothers in a community play a vital role in raising a child

post-work politics post-work politics is a political perspective that envisions a future society liberated from traditional labour structures, driven by automation and technology: shorter working hours, universal basic income "ubi" (concept by helen hester & nick srnicek)

practice forms of counter-familiality, non-nuclear kinning, polymaternalism (lewis)

privilege of power is at the heart of patriarchal thinking (hooks, p. 152)

problems wise people welcome the pain of (resolving) problems (peck)

protest kitchens form self-organized shared sleeping areas for safety. set up cooperative childcare to support the full involvement of parents. establish syringe exchanges and other harm reduction practices to welcome active drug users (m.e. o’brien via lewis)

queer loving embrace of the strange

raise children

raise consciousness

raise hell

reconciliation the principle of healing rests on reconciliation… the act of healing is therefore a socio-cultural act, a collective, motherly undertaking (minh-ha)

r.i.p rest in power

rise up

romantic love is one of the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. its destructiveness resides in the notion that we come to love with no will and no capacity to choose. this illusion, perpetuated by so much romantic lore, stands in the way of learning how to love (toni morrison x hooks, p. 170)

sacredness is created by practices that break, outside enclosure: on every scale from the individual, to the body, to the family, to the nation-state

sacrifice zones of imperialism

see they see objects instead of life

settler sexuality refers to a specific form of white, national heteronormativity created by settler-colonialism to regulate and control indigenous sexualities and genders. it involves enforcing monogamous marriage and heterosexuality as the "modern" and "exceptional" norm, while simultaneously criminalizing or pathologizing indigenous and other non-settler sexual and gender expressions as "primitive". this was a crucial part of the settler-colonial project to dispossess indigenous peoples, with its roots in the historical violence against them (tallbear via cornum)

sex as reflection of the cosmic dance between heaven and earth (michio kushi)

s/he suffocates the codes of lie and truth (minh-ha, p. 134)

s/he every woman, is credited with the possession of magic powers (minh-ha, p. 128)

single family dwellings are among the chief obstacles to improving the position of women in the world

social reproduction is the process by which existing social structures, inequalities, and relationships are maintained and passed down across generations. this can refer to both the broader maintenance of social institutions and the more specific reproduction of social inequality through the transmission of financial, social, and cultural capital from parents to children. the concept is also used in economics and feminist theory to describe the unpaid & often invisible labour such as housework, childcare, and care for the elderly, that reproduces the workforce, which is essential for the capitalist system

solidarity politics also: radical solidarity follows principles of mutual recognition, acknowledging different experiences of oppression without hierarchy x coalition-building, uniting across differences for shared goals x accountability, standing together with others x acting responsibly in allyship, structural analysis of solidarity as resistance to systems

soma indo-persian: ‘divine’

somatic greek: ‘tissue’, ‘nervous system’

soul connection happens on a deeper level as a sacred alliance (john welwood adapted by hooks, p. 182)

speech is a universal force of creation

story is cure & protection

story truth

subject-in-the-making

successful transition into greater maturity

taroktok (old) batak: ‘heartbeating-place’, to have a pounding heart tókhah’an ‘to lose’, ‘to suffer’, ‘loss’, ‘to be gone’, ‘lost’ used in reply to: what has become of it? (layli long soldier, p. 34)

tradition is an on-going commitment (minh-ha)

transference when the worldview of you as a child is mistakenly reproduced in the life of the adult, meaning that one will behave and respond to the world as if they still were surviving the world in a much more vulnerable way, that is not grounded in your current maturity and adulthood, then this is called inappropriate transference (adapted from peck)

transit of empire is a concept by jodi byrd, analysing the u.s.(a.) as an active settler colony today that logically & materially reproduces colonial cosmology with the purpose of erasing native american or indian existence. akin to: social reproduction, the active continuation of social inequality transmission, power of is passed on as intergenerationality

trouble how to unite queer culture against private property while bettering the material conditions able to support indigenous life (adapted from cornum)

true love true love may present itself like y/our lives are in danger (hooks, p. 182) by the complete honesty and vulnerability and accountability true love is carried by

truth is a never-ending burden of self discipline, which is why most people opt for a life of very limited honesty and openness and relative closedness, hiding themselves and their maps from the world (hooks, p. 51)

understanding is creation

underwater love

virginia giuffre

wa japanese: harmony or peace

wahpánica i wanted to write about wahpánica a word translated into english as poor comma which means more precisely to be destitute to have nothing of one’s own. but tonight i cannot bring myself to swing a worn hammer at poverty to pound the conditions of that slow frustration. so i ask what else is there to hear? a comma instructs me to divide a sentence. to pause. the comma orders a sequence of elements the comma is caesura itself. the comma interrupts me with, quiet. … yet i intend the comma to mean what we do possess… (long soldier, p. 44)

war against women (judith herman)

warrior-woman-story-teller

we choose to love

words create, save, destroy

work love can be nothing else but work (rainer maria rilke)

writing, her is neither non/fiction

xenia ancient greek: ξενία [kse'ni.a]) concept of hospitality. it is almost always translated as 'guest-friendship' or 'ritualized friendship'. it is an institutionalized relationship rooted in generosity, gift exchange, and reciprocity. historically, hospitality towards foreigners and guests was understood as a moral obligation, as well as a political imperative. hospitality towards foreigners honored zeus, xenios (and athene, xenia), patrons of foreigners

xenofeminism emphasises embracing difference and fostering radical political relationships based on mutuality and the abolition of hierarchical structures like the traditional family

xenohospitality is the practice of welcoming or being open to the "other", the alien, or the foreign, a concept derived from the greek ‘xenos’ (stranger, guest, foreigner) term from xenofeminism

you

this love lexicon is composed & written by cpr (b. 1986). cpr is an artistic researcher dealing with language & plants, on the intersections of postcolonial discourse & marxist feminisms. hir practice centres on oracular literature, possessed narratives, and matrilineality. cpr describes hir work as pharmakon poetry—an exploration of psychic and spiritual health through the lens of cultural sanity. ze is currently finalizing a working environment in rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten as extension of the pressing matter research program, of artistic restitution & community work of manuscripts from the indonesian archipelago.

cpr is co-initiator of the omah omah foundation, a collaborative environment dedicated to cosmological recovery in response to politics of erasure and extinction. omah omah means ‘homecoming’ in indonesian, and ‘house/s’ in javanese, centring the question of what shelter of home & cultural belonging entails. omahomah.net

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