Offering: May 2024
A transfiguring love
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“Do not let go of this moment. Make it bigger. Make it more massive, make it more powerful. Make it echo up into the stars. I am thrilled by your work. I love you, I admire you.” —Mumia Abu-Jamal, in a call from prison with students at the CUNY Gaza solidarity encampment, transcribed and shared by Sophie Hurwitz
A few months ago I started facilitating meetings on Sunday mornings in which we look at one of the twenty-two major arcana and take turns sharing thoughts about it. Because I’m facilitating, I have the privilege of kicking off the meeting with ideas I’ve pulled together beforehand and then others are invited to share.
Two weeks ago we looked at Wheel of Fortune, which is probably my favorite card in the deck. I am not a philosopher, and have no formal philosophical background beyond being a person who thinks non-stop which I tend to make sense of with less dignified names. I do dip into philosophical writing every now and again, including two weeks ago when I did some reading on amor fati—or love of fate—for our meeting on Wheel of Fortune.
Philosopher Friedrich Nietzche called amor fati the “formula for human greatness,” which meant wanting “nothing to be different, not forward, not backwards, not in all eternity.1” Responding to some of the obvious concerns raised by the idea that we should love fate no matter how awful, philosopher Béatrice Han-Pile considers that to understand amor fati we should clarify what is meant here by “love.2” To do so, they describe two kinds of love you may have heard of before: eros and agape.
For Han-Pile the erotic sort of love is acquisitive. It depends on the object of love being perceived as valuable. So if the object of love—fate, in this case—entails multiple genocides, mass graves, militarized policing of youth, and snipers on college campuses in America while every university in Gaza’s been destroyed by U.S.-backed Israeli forces, it seems love would involve contorting my heart to believing situations like these are somehow necessary or valuable. If “human greatness” hinges on my ability to love this fate in the sense that I can see it has value or believe that it eventually will, perhaps greatness is just not for me.
But there’s another kind of love that is possible when we think about loving fate. For Han-Pile, agapic love is “a divine form of love” that is transformative. Unlike erotic love, which is contingent on fate having some kind of necessity or value, agapic love is not dependent on the perceived value of the thing that it loves. Instead, it transfigures fate as it goes. It is a process of loving through which value is made. I especially love the word transfigure here, which is defined as “a complete change of form or appearance into a more beautiful or spiritual state.3”
It may feel paradoxical that I could be loving fate while pushing for change. But I’d much rather struggle with my understanding of love than assume my love of fate requires I give up struggling with the lived realities of violence and horror. I’d rather make, remake, and enact values in situations I detest than insist on their inherent or eventual necessity.
Wheel of Fortune is an interesting image in that it involves a sort of zoomed out, “bird’s eye view” of the “bigger picture.” This vantage point is a virtual impossibility for finite beings such as ourselves. But it seems this is precisely what we are being asked to do with an erotic conception of love for our fates: Zoom so far out of unacceptable situations that a pattern is revealed in which it all makes some kind of sense.
It was acute grief that revealed the inadequacy of this logic, for me. In the early days immediately following a difficult loss I was very invested in the idea that one day all the pain would make sense. I made many attempts at an erotic love of fate that was dependent on the pain having some sort of value that remained to be seen. It was comforting at times, but left me with little to do in the moment. I despised the situation I was in and for the most part, imagining what it had the potential to mean at some later time did little in the way of getting me through it.
I did not see the time as valuable or necessary in and of itself. In fact I still don’t. I assert and maintain that things should have been different. What did help me get through were daily, minute gestures of tenderness in the midst of loathsome feelings toward just about everything. Of what I might now call agapic love, which involved finding opportunities to situate myself in those terrible moments and responding to what was there with whatever amount of care I could muster.
Through artist Carrie Mae Weems, I learned to ask “where I am, what I’m making, what I’m committed to, and why it matters.” I made values in real time that slowly became more substantial. I did not force myself to feel good about my fate. Rather, I took fate upon myself in a sense, finding openings and cracks toward what I do feel good about to the limited degree I was able.
What kind of love is available within the limits of what we can see and know in a moment? When things are horrendous, and not simple, and we can’t know all that’s led to this moment, and therefore can’t know the “correct” way to respond? It seems the agapic sort of love, which doesn’t depend on a positive appraisal of a thing or situation in order to love it, may have a place here. Agapic love is generative in that as it goes it generates values. In doing so it transfigures and transforms what it loves. As it loves, it changes the thing that it loves. To love fate then, maybe, is to participate in changing it. After all, in my limited understanding, Wheel of Fortune’s a card about change.
My understandings of amor fati, erotic and agapic love are limited too. I do have a strong sense that to love fate is not about resigning to what is and forcing loving feelings onto bad situations. Maybe it’s more about resisting indifference—popularly said to be the antithesis of love—and its offspring pessimism, weariness, and inaction. In solidarity with Palestine, all those worldwide demonstrating the transfiguring and value-making agapic love in the face of atrocities, and all those loving every moment toward, in the words of theologian Ivone Gebara, “life options that refuse to put off justice and tenderness until tomorrow.”
Thank you so much for being here,
Jessica
Hitting the heart button is a great & free way to support these Offerings. <3
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If you’re looking for ways to support Palestinian people in a direct and material way please check out Operation Olive Branch, a mutual aid organization that has compiled a list of GoFundMe’s for those in need of urgent financial support. Even if you cannot afford to give, it’s worth taking a look at what they’re doing and spreading the word.
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