LOVE IS A MANY SPLINTERED THING – Andrew Eldritch

“while everywhere love is breathing draftily” – Frank O’Hara

Our sense of love is conjured vaguely in our sleep, without sound or alphabet, by the mixing of smells – of our particular detergent, of breakfast crumbs, of tired bodies in tired bedsheets. Its potent moments are dissolved into our days and disseminated among the many, becoming the domestic dust that falls and fills the little crevices of our existence. The constant expansion of time drags against the climactic instants of love and their fullness. We are not accustomed to complete fullness, and do not have the capacity to sustain it. Love therefore must splinter into our long quotidian days. We must fluctuate lest we are to die from love and its devastating totality. We must choose to erupt with its moments, or to survive by allowing it to splinter and fray like a twisting rope. You will find it in your pocket like lint – it is the gunk in the cracks between the things we are sure of seeing, the gunk between the senses. You could call it love when you find yourself picking parts of another person from your skin, particles that have been wedged into your pores like soil or grime under your fingernails. It is the still morning light that bleaches our senses so we can really see the pimpled mossy stuff of love in its stark mundanity. Love is the nesting of a self within another, when duality glints into oneness. It is a closing in. We move closer and closer to the truth, and the inevitable falsities which become the essential truths. We move closer and closer until we cannot see wholes but only splintering fragments.

This issue accompanies the ‘A Many Splintered Thing’ exhibition at Void Gallery, Derry opening in July curated by Susanne Stich and Gregory McCartney

A PDF version of the issue can be found here: http://abridgedonline.com/abridged-0-47/

Abridged is supported by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the British Council