Love Minus Zero/No Limit

Bayu Wikranta
7 min readFeb 13, 2022

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Life of Pi (2012) / artwork: “The Glowing Island” by Alexandra Garcia.
It is an inward definition of love— albeit subjective, grounded with an essentialist approach.

Language is used depending on the definition that one constituted and desired, arbitrary. It is arbitrary and differentiated with such infinite context — leverage by every aspect from the world of a lifetime. For that, one’s idea and definition of a word need to be explained for the point of discussion. If there’s no agreement, then is no use to continue for it ends as a tautology and courtesy of maintaining a relationship. Some say that they would rather take off and let each of everyone with their own little world of definitions. Understanding a word comes the latest because language and words are often pragmatically defined, even with such celebrated words like love. A definition that needs evidence, and elaborations, such a mechanism will always be incomplete and debatable. Our solution is shaped by the urgency of our temporary life, by the different domain of studies on the matter of definitions, and for whom is not conflict-oriented.

What is a definition then? For everyone got their own, and in no way someone would succeed changing definitions people held at hand — someone could still try to take a step and arrive in the closest proximity of objective definition of a word. For a word and the world are aligned, a word to be as the case stated, needs to be experienced and embodied by the life of everyone, with just a minor distinction here and there. It’s an exercise to get out of a collective entanglement. Though I realize definitions soon stacked with another, one should make a stance for sometimes nothing of a good contestation yet comes to mind. I stated here — my definition of love. It is a simple definition of love and the belief that everyone has it all intuitively.

In our age of advanced technology, a relation of love is possible to get into contact and built with no meeting. This relation is as simple a speck of picture of someone in mind, that you take interested with, that you met unworldlyfor that’s enough as a relation. In this new world exists a vast amount of strangers that we know very well. If we would just hope, sit and wait, someone would come along, for the mind that does the work more than our practical well-being. It’s moving now to a kind of world in which everything is set and ready, of the world in minds. As we are thrown at it, selecting language carefully, dedicatedly, and after we arrive in opposition with the prefix, we are troubled even more than the invitation itself.

With repetition and practice by a ten thousand, love is wide in the open — with the structure began by other following others like a loop, in which the starter and the ending are unknown. Through many discussions regarding love from many people, and relatives, I should have had bowed for the experiences they encountered and lived by. But to my honesty, nothing sparks any interesting thought. It is all revolving through the ever-lasting positivity, practical decency, ethics, and fulfillment. It is not wrong, for who I am to tell the world what’s right and wrong. It just bored me to death.

“Egoism, is not opposed to love nor to thought; it is no enemy of the sweet life of love, nor of devotion and sacrifice; it is no enemy of intimate warmth, but it is also no enemy of critique, nor of socialism, nor, in short, of any actual interest. It doesn't exclude any interest. It is directed against only disinterestedness and the uninteresting; not against love, but against sacred love, not against thought, but against sacred thought, not against socialists, but against sacred socialists, etc.” - Max Stirner, Stirner’s Critics (1845).

Love is not a sacred fate, nor there is a soulmate, nor it is in God’s hands. If there’s fate, it’s a blend of free will and unfree will, around for a time until the exit is reasonably clear. A parent always sets a fate for his newborn child, until the child lives at a certain age, and goes on the free-falling. Some say, that our love is still being taken care of by someone somewhere. We wouldn’t know details about what was our lover past doings as long we still have the seal. It is the most grandeur for chemical substance stimulation. It gives us paranoia. It’s a kick for the psyche. Awkward jealousy. The sharp eyes to the proximate opponents. The need for comparison for self-assurance. The restful feeling of doing the deed populating the biosphere. As if there is something we need to protect, we need to fight for — to the world and our life the crude anomaly. Being in love is the death of serenity — for happiness does not equal peacefulness. Always in the state of excitement of being in love brings you the increasing probability of the chaotic opposite. Love should be about when nothing exciting is happening. A balance in the middle of the midst of excitements.

Yet again, I’m the last person who should critique anything regarding this very special word, nor anyone should ask me for advice, for I got none since the day I pack my bag and arrived at being. For obvious reason, I don’t doubt the existence of love from my family, and the Almighty. What we talked about here is the love-relation that gets into contact and is built through the lives of strangers. We were born long ago and lived our lives separately until a certain point of meeting. To eventually connect and rejoice in our unitary relation of individual maps. If it is not built by strangers, the world labeled it a disgust taboo. Though this idea of stranger and non-stranger is advanced by faith, empirical evidence is a good contest for the former. The world we were born in is no longer exists, but representational pictures of that world have said to be more real than the world itself, because it is in a perfect static harmony. Since a mere second we were born, even before we were born, our parent’s idea of us — or those any other who closely related to the individual maps of the stated, create us, in a way that no question for our legitimate existence, nor our idea of being part in a lineage of immense years is needed.

The love of strangers, most of us born into this world like a circle with lines that connect us with other circles — so on and so forth up to the whole family tree of strangers. I believe these stranger things broke gradually in which based on my plain knowledge of Darwin’s Evolution and some other anthropological, there was a time when such idea and definition of a stranger is not yet understood let alone in practice. It is the raw sexual urges of the early world, with no set of ethics, no social rules, no understanding of genetics — the defects. Love is all around the cave with no boundaries, for nature is huge and will forever leave enough space even with the massive reproduction of man. If we go high enough on the picture, we are all just long-lost relatives, coming from the same pond of regrettable will.

Nothing as nervous and demanding as before, for a love who has healed itself after being wounded— is the most powerful love out of them all. But it is the prime reign of a warrior that stays only a moment, before it slides again into repetition of struggle and grim recurrence. One must be liberated from the loop, in which only death makes the case.

Everyone got tales of lost love, where they compete to win for the most valuable, inspiring, and true protagonist in the story. Not at least the very normative definition of the protagonist. The confusion is not within the action, but our sense of judgments. I recall an observation that an ex-lover came into the wedding of his ex-lover and everybody cheered the son of a gun like a hero. Well, nobody is interested anymore with just an ordinary one making its way to the love one’s belief. Everybody needs some extra flavor from this freak show premiering in the town. The ordinary one — as NPC, just stood there, yearning for some sensibility of the situation.

Almost looks like, an act of altruistic love itself it is not a typical sacrifice we made in which we sow only the inadequacies, and truly feel saddened. Moreover, it ignites this sense of fragile heroism, the radical acceptance of the comical, absurd notion of love — with a stance though always look dimmed, yet maintaining a duration. It is not easy for someone to arrive here — it’s an exercise to finally overcome lost love again, and again, since the first glance. Not that we are suddenly enlightened, ready to move and live in solitude, don’t mind being alone forever — the boredom of a constant type of pain always set in. It is that kind of free-flowing and laid-back interest for love. The exquisite lie, stacked and forgotten with every other layer of lies until one loses the sense and definitions of love altogether. By the end, one laid presented by the vast choices of love and meanings with nothing comes as interesting. It is the zero and the unlimited, absolute love.

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