Falling in love

Falling in love is easy. The effort carries you along effortlessly for a while, every thing is harmonious, and the possibilities seem endless. Then one day you wake up in the room as another human being with his or her own needs and views and the interesting process is actually finding common grounds and forming a resilient and lasting bond begins… or fails.

Disaster and revolution both create carnival in some sense-an upheaval and a meeting ground, there are carnivalesque aspects to disaster. We could think of revolutions as carnivals, for whatever good they create in the long term it is only in the moment that they create sense of openness to each other and to possibility that is so exhilarating.

     Carnival makes sense as revolution too: an overthrow of established order which we are alienated from each other, too shy to act, divided along familiar lines. Those lines vanish and we merge exuberantly. Carnival is a hectic, short-lived, raucous version of utopia, one that matters because it is widely available, though just as carnival is scheduled and carnival is not, so carnival has known limits and disaster does not.

     Many traditional carnivals feature subversive and mocking elements: parodies of the church and religion, status reversals, reenactments of historical moments-such as the conquest of Latin America- in ways that reclaims power and voice.