Thomas Bunstead

Where has it come from, this whole landscape of wounds?

– he says.

From bodies without passion, which are also landscape.

A person’s face does not exist in itself,’ Alfred Hitchcock said, ‘only when a light shines on it.’ An activity that is common but nonetheless just as strange as shining a light on people’s faces is the packaging up of things; we package up everything. The internet is only millions of metres of cable that package up the globe. Or take plants, which, left to grow unchecked, would package it up too. Or when people embrace: what is an embrace but the packaging up of the other, giving them a shape unknown to all but you. Or what is choosing one’s gender but the packaging up of
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sex. Meaning there is no need to wrap things up as gifts or send them in the post in order to give them an outline or an identity; light does that for us already. There is no face, once illuminated, that does not fill the beholder’s eyes with love. (Parcel love)

You and I are nothing.

– he says.

In a world whose only desire is to devour everything, it’s better to be nothing.

– she says.

And the years go by, and adult love arrives, which does everything within its power to invert this process, to turn it on its head: when two people are in love they are forever seeking a return to childhood, to create new names, new sexes, to invent a private language, to recast from inside all that is known and create a new roof for them alone; a place to take shelter. This is why the image, present in every culture throughout history, of a couple loving one another under what appears to be a sheet has nothing to do with modesty around nakedness but – in this improvised cave that is theirs and theirs alone – with
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rebelling against the language imposed in childhood. (Contra-language love)