Places you might not otherwise go

I'm thinking, this rainy evening, of an assertion that bell hooks made during a round table discussion some years ago. "Love," she said, "will take you places you might not otherwise go."

It sounds like a truism, I suppose, and it could easily have a hundred variant meanings, depending on our current mood, or inclination. But, as Glenn Ligon realized in an engaging review in a recent issue of Artforum, that's part of its appeal: it can be fairly and productively applied, in short, to a range of subjects. Indeed, Ligon used hooks' assertion as a means into Thomas Hirschhorn's much-discussed Gramsci Monument: a ramshackle series of platforms erected in the Forest Hills housing complex in the South Bronx, and a product, Hirschhorn might say, of his love of working with local, marginal communities. Or perhaps Ligon was also thinking of all of the art world denizens who then, out of a love of Hirschhorn and the latest thing, took the train north, well beyond their comfort zone. Indeed, I was one of them, tentatively making my way last August across the busy avenue and then toward the projects, fully aware of my status as an artistic tourist, and outsider.

Or we might speak of longer walks, and in grander and more historical terms. Have you heard, for example, of J.S. Bach's 25-mile walk from Arnstadt to Lübeck? It took place in 1705, when Bach, wanting to spend time with the organist Dietrich Buxtehude ("to comprehend one thing and another about his art," as Bach supposedly put it), spent more than a week making the trip, and then wound up staying nearly three months, so that he was able to hear, as well, a series of Abendmusik concerts that traditionally took place in that town. Love, indeed: Bach had been granted only four weeks' leave by his employer, and was forced to resign his position when he finally did return home.

At times, though, the process by which love leads us to new places may be evident, but rather less dramatic. It was love, I would say, that took me to the aisle of Disney-related dolls in a local Walmart two months ago, out of a genuine curiosity about what Cleo might like, or see. It was love, arguably, that had me at the top of the oily Ferris wheel on the JHU campus yesterday, my little girl wide-eyed beside me. And it was love, I presume, that led L. to download one of the Magic Treehouse books, so that Cleo can now listen to Jack and Annie, and their encounters with ninjas, when we drive. Places we might not otherwise go have somehow, through love, become familiar.