Agathon, Socrates, Diotima, Appolodoros.
This is work. These are words.
This is Love.
What can Love be? A mortal?
Far from it.
Having Contrivance for his father and Poverty for his mother, Love is half-way between mortal and immortal.
A great spirit.
Everything that is of the nature of a spirit is half-god, half-human.
A garden.
A dwelling.
A world.

Love is always poor.
He is weather-beaten, shoeless and homeless, always sleeping out for want of a bed.
On the ground, on door-steps, and in the street.
He is full of resource and is a lover of wisdom all his life, a skilful magician, an alchemist.
On one and the same day he will live and flourish, and also meet his death.
And then comes to life again.
What he wins he always loses,
and is neither rich nor poor,
neither wise nor ignorant.
Something is always missing.
And so it is for any living being.
She, who is said to live, does not in fact retain the same attributes,
although she is considered the same person;
She is always becoming a new being
and undergoing a process of loss and reparation,
which affects her hair, her flesh, her bones, her blood, her whole body.
And not only her body but her soul as well.
No one’s character, habits, opinions, desires, pleasures, pains, and fears remain always the same;
New ones come into existence and old ones disappear.
Forget the name of the one you know.
Forgetting is the departure of knowledge,
Recollection preserves it.
By implanting a new impression in the place of that which is lost.
What else is it than what you are seeing?
What else? What else? What else? What else?
You don’t know, you experience.
Everything mortal is preserved not by remaining forever the same but by undergoing a process in which the losses repaired by something new of a similar kind.
This, Sokrates, enables the mortal to partake of immortality.
Building worlds.
And re-building a world.
A dwelling.
A garden.
This is work.
Trying.
Trying some thing. Some words. Some world.
Under a different rhythm.
In a fold.