Radical Incompleteness & Windows of Ritournelle with Bayo Akomolafe

Ritournelle is a concept created by Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari for A Thousand Plateaus (1987.) It's the main subject of 11th plateau 1837: Of the refrain. In this episode of 'Love and Philosophy,' host Andrea Hiott engages in a deep and thought-provoking conversation with philosopher, psychologist, and poet Bayo Akomolafe. They discuss the transformative power of love, the complexities beyond binary categorizations, and the idea of life as a process filled with relational tensions and incompleteness. The discussion covers Bayo's personal journey, including reflections on his father and his book 'These Wilds Beyond Our Fences.' They explore themes of care, disruption, and the radical incompleteness of reality, providing listeners with insights into how we can embrace the multiplicities of being human.

Give here to Support the show and sign up here for the newsletter.

Bayo Akomolafe
https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/

These Wilds Beyond Our Fences

00:00 Introduction to Categories and Relational Tensions
02:20 Welcome to Love and Philosophy
02:43 Introducing Bayo Akomolafe
03:19 Themes of the Podcast and Bayo's Background
05:36 Binaries and Relationality
09:11 Personal Reflections and Philosophical Insights
09:46 The Concept of Retournello and Repetition
10:56 Navigating Categories and Structures
12:22 The Story of Bayo's Daughter
14:17 Philosophical Reflections on Life and Death
23:05 The Role of Trauma and Healing
32:11 The Pandemic and Societal Reflections
36:42 Love as Radical Incompleteness
38:27 Conclusion and Farewell

host and philosopher Andrea Hiott

Love and Philosophy in Video

The Living in Clarity Podcast, with Fish & Coach

Do you want to live an awesome life and to also inspire others? Fish is a world...

Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

Chapters

• 13:19 [Ad] The Living in Clarity Podcast, with Fish & Coach
• 13:50 (Cont.) Radical Incompleteness & Windows of Ritournelle with Bayo Akomolafe

Transcript

Bayo: [00:00:00] when you categorize the world in that way, when you think in terms of categories, you leave out to the processual relational tensions that always mediate category categoricity, that within every binary, or bin binary formulation are worlds in their becoming. 

Cultures are holding spaces for bodies, right? The rituals, the rites of passage. But cultures can also become a form of imprisonment, so in the retournello in the repetition, something crystallizes, but then in its crystallization, cracks become possible, right? 

Maybe my father is defracted in the thick now maybe he's here. Maybe his ghost is how I live. Maybe his ghost is in fungal blooms or in the architecture of ancestrally. [00:01:00] Maybe he is here in a way that I, I have. Missed out on, because I've been looking at the doorway instead of the crack on the wall, 

It, it's incomplete. And maybe that's my way of also saying that I think of love as the radical incompleteness of everything, right? That, that it's love is the crack that emerges in the retournello just as much as it is the retournello. Right? It is how we craft embodied spaces, even though there are always violent risks.

The imminent fields of DRE that is ongoing. but it is also how that field speaks to the structures that emerge. It is also the intimacy between field and structure that says, don't trust your completeness. Don't trust your ideologies too much. Don't trust the shape that your body has taken. There's still something else to do.[00:02:00] 

There's still shape shifting to do that conversation between field and structure is the radical insufficiency or incompleteness of everything we presume to be and do. hello everyone. Welcome to Love and Philosophy. This is Andrea Hiott, and this podcast is still forming, but is forming around the idea of life as a journey and one that involves binaries, but that we can learn how to hold beyond dichotomy one that takes love seriously. And thinks about what it really means in our lives and our academic work.

Andrea Hiott: I'm talking with Bio AK Lafe today. He's a philosopher, a psychologist, a professor, a poet, a teacher. He's also the founder of the Emergence Network, and I. He's written two books today. We mostly talk about one of those books called These Wilds Beyond Our Fences, letters to My Daughter on Humanity Search for Home.

And because [00:03:00] there was some disruption we were supposed to meet earlier and, and we couldn't. So you kind of hear that at the beginning. We have to settle and get our our poise and then we just launch into a conversation and decide not to follow any sort of script. Not that I ever follow scripts, as you can probably tell, however, we talk about the main themes of this podcast, and because we didn't have a lot of time, we didn't explain some of the background to some of the things we talk about.

So I just wanna mention that here. For the sake of the conversation, I want you to know that Bay's father was a diplomat and they moved a lot, and he also lost his father when he was young, and that's part of the story, and I just wanted to mention it so you're prepared for that.

That's what we're talking about when we're discussing his father. The book is also written as letters to his young daughter. there's one part in the book where she gets stuck in a room. She goes in and accidentally locks herself in a room up some stairs, and she's very young, so of course you can imagine that's very scary.

this is in India where Bayo [00:04:00] lives much of the year because his wife is Indian Bayo is from Nigeria and his daughter, his little daughter gets locked in in the room and we discuss that here and how Bios found this rickety ladder and somehow managed to find a little window or hole to get his arm through to help comfort his daughter and also to hold her so they could tear the, tear the door down, basically to get her out.

I hope you will have a look at Bayo's work. He's, he writes in a way that really opens up, multiplicities, makes us think about the many other ways there are of being human that we haven't explored yet, and how we can hold our differences and let them be what they are while also understanding that as he says it here, the cracks are the love and the openings, the portals.

The place is to move through, to fill one another and see one another differently. So I hope you find some of those cracks that let the light in today. Follow [00:05:00] that transformation, fill whatever you're feeling, fully, embrace it. Know that you are important, and I'm glad you're here. And I send you a lot of love today, wherever you are.

All right. Here we go.

Okay. Hi, via, thank you so much for making time being here today. I know it wasn't easy. 

Bayo: Thank you, Andrea. Yes. It hasn't been easy, but it's worth it. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. Well, thank you. I think since we've had a little disruption and that's an important word, what I'd really like to do is just get right to the heart of it.

This my research this podcast. A lot of the philosophy I do has to do with dichotomy and this idea of beyond dichotomy holding paradox, which I have a million notes here of how this could relate to your work. But instead of trying to follow a script, I'll, maybe I'll just ask you. Lately in your life and even right now, how do those words feel to [00:06:00] you?

The idea of, of binaries and those not being what they seem? How do you see that? I, I think I'll just start there. What, what comes to mind? 

Bayo: Hmm. Uh, thank you, sister. And again, it's, I'm grounded myself in this vocation. Of, of care that is larger than care. Um, I'm here somewhere in Great Barrington in Massachusetts, which I flew into just, uh, last night.

and, um, yes, there, there is something to be said about binaries as, um. Modulated attempts to, uh, ways we organize the world so that it, so that it is convenient, it is legible, it is accessible, it is intelligible, right? Modernity is a form of organizing. It organizes complexity. Um, [00:07:00] this organizing is a form of care, right?

It, it is. It is an attempt to hold ourselves. It's a ritual. It's a way to hold ourselves and hold our bodies. We would say that darkness is the opposite of light. That man is the opposite of woman. That the divine is the opposite of the mundane. That this is the opposite of that. Right? Um, it, it's, it's not evil, it's not wrong.

It's not, it, it's just a very inadequate and limited way of, of meeting complexity. What is obscured? Obviously is that, um, when you categorize the world in that way, when you think in terms of categories, you leave out to the processual relational tensions that always mediate category categoricity that there is, that within [00:08:00] every binary, uh, or bin binary formulation are worlds in their becoming.

Um, are slaves escaping the plantation right? Or are things that don't really fit right, which immediately renders every act of inclusion, an act of violence? There, there, there, there's something that is left out when we try to gentrify the world into ontological familiarity. So I speak about on Fugitivity or Onl Spillage to mark the ways that the world is too promiscuous to feed ly into binary formulations or binary formulations.

Yes. 

Andrea Hiott: That's very beautiful. What you said about it being an act of care to think about categorization or, or binaries. Do you think, I mean, even right now, you're, I, I feel like you're [00:09:00] doing so many things. You're in so many different countries, languages, many different use that you have to be each day, and I wonder about that care.

Is it necessary for you sometimes to have some order and some categories for yourself? How do you hold. How do you hold that also with, you know, everything you write about, which is about multiplicities and about opening the space in a way, and this other kind of power. Is that hard for you to hold? Does it help you sometimes to have structure in that way?

Bayo: Absolutely. Mm-hmm. Um, there, there is a, there is a, a word that comes to mind, tonello, and it's, it's. I mean, um, the Lu and Guari and some other continental philosophers used it to describe this, reframe this, it, it's, it's basically a [00:10:00] small story that is told to children at night. It's like a, uh, to, to, to get them to sleep, basically.

Mm-hmm. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. Like a refrain or a little bit different each time. But same patterns. 

Bayo: Exactly. The, the repetition. Right. And. I, my son comes to mind and, and how, who is autistic and how we often depends on repetition in order to shield himself from the tsunami of complexity. he is less impervious to than I am the sensorial onslaught.

that he is immediately his body. Is aware of his body is in touch with. Um, I, I think at some level we will always create structure. We will always create categor. Categories are not bad themselves, it's just that they can become carceral, they can incarcerate us. Care can [00:11:00] slowly become, in its embrace, can slowly become a form of asphyxiation cultures.

Um. Cultures are holding spaces for bodies, right? The rituals, the rites of passage. But cultures can also become a form of imprisonment, right? Um, so in the retournello in the repetition, something crystallizes, but then in its crystallization, cracks become possible, right? And it's those cracks within binaries, within care, within formulaic algorithms.

That, uh, um, presume that they understand our bodies fully. Um, new words, glisten, new words, new words are always possible. Riskily in the emergence of a crack. And, and yes, I, I find myself, um, well not [00:12:00] consciously or intentionally, but that's only a part of what it means to be present. Um, um, I find myself.

Dabbling in trafficking in categories. Um, right now, um, I have lots of Canadian friends, Canadian, uh, families. Um, and with the recent imposition of Trumpian tariffs, I found myself dabbling in nationalistic, you know, fervor, you know, saying, ah, hit back. You know, it, uh, elbows up. Yes. Even though I would never consider myself a na nationalist or patriot in any sense of the word.

Um, uh, I, um, I'm not even American, but, or Canadian, but I found myself wishing for some sha fr moment, like, like a, like a nation winning. [00:13:00] Battle against another nation. We will, we will always be caught up in the vortices of these categoric cities. Yes. It's not ours to choose, um, all the time, I guess. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah.

That makes me think of what you write often about relation or relationality things not being things, but. In relation. And that seems to be the way to hold all that that you just said because it's that we need categories. Binaries are kind of real in that structural way, and then at the same time they're not.

And everything is messy. And that's a word you use a lot. Dust. You talk about, you know, in your books. And, um, both of those are true. But isn't that, that's very hard, isn't it, to. Hold or to, to, to be, to, to live as, uh, especially in these kind of moments like the one you just described, which I felt very strongly to having similar kind of mm-hmm.

Confusion about, about those things. Mm-hmm. And I wonder, is it, [00:14:00] has it become easier for you over time? is it always the same kind of practice that you have to remember or. 

Bayo: No, I mean, life itself being practice doesn't have a script, right. It doesn't have a standardized, uh, progressive script where Oh, it, this gets easier.

Right. We will, we will. Even the fugitive that escapes the plantation might repeat the logic of the plantation in, in flight, in exile, right? It's, it's that life, death. You know, life death is messy in that way. So I, even though I speak and wax poetic about emergence, about complexity, about modernity, constituting some kind of unto epistemological trap in, its in its formulations of binaries, and then the need of the trickster who might be referred to here as the third way.[00:15:00] 

Transversal cut walking across the binary and dismantling it from within. Um, yes. Even, even emancipatory moments like that tend to give birth to new binaries and new categories. Right. And, um, 

Andrea Hiott: yeah, 

Bayo: and, and, and that's the world in its comings and goings and, and its, and its fluidity. There isn't a destination, a utopian arrival, a point of conscious wokeness where we some really get mastery or become masters of it all.

We will be taken and spirited away. And in our spirit, in our spirit, in away we will, we will fall into traps, traps of thought, traps of categoric, traps, of um, uh, of being. That's what it means to be alive. Or did. 

Andrea Hiott: Yes. And I think sometimes we can also feel like we shouldn't be feeling those things, [00:16:00] like we shouldn't be feeling this way.

And that definitely does something numbing or that gets us away from, from the source or, or life in a way too that, oh, I shouldn't feel this way. Sometimes we have to embrace that we feel this way, don't we? Yeah. 

Bayo: The should is a trap as well. Yeah. Right. The should is a moral is a. Is a, is some kind of moral holding space too.

So we're talking about layers upon layers upon layers, machines, morality machines, um, other kinds of machines constantly in a palem est that is never fully rendered, always interacting with one another. So even the moment of saying, should I feel this way, that is potentially um, uh, uh. Uh, a category, you know, invisibly wearing its head.

Andrea Hiott: Yes. And at the same time, there is something about [00:17:00] being able to become aware of that. For example, reading your work or reading other work and, and starting to understand that we do see the world through binaries, and then you kind of realize that, you always see a contrast. But if you zoom out, that contrast is within a multiplicity.

The complexity that you. Discuss. and when you were talking about your son and about this sensory overwhelm, I was thinking of you as a, as a boy, the way you describe yourself in, in these wilds beyond our fences. Did I say that right? When you were talking about, um, the tapes that you listened to over and over after this very moving.

everything with your father is very moving in that book, I find to just bring up love right now, but, and you were listening to these tapes over and over and over again and, I wondered in those moments how you became the person you are now, because in, in that part of the book, you seem so.

Unable to deal with all of this multiplicity and sensory overload, and you just wanna, or at least I'm, I'm projecting probably you wanna be alone with your books. And that was kind of how I was as a kid and [00:18:00] protected. And I found myself wondering, how did you, how did you become a public intellectual, from that place?

And I think as I read through the book, then I started to realize it was this practice of. Understanding your habits and stepping out of them and looking at them or something. But I wanted to ask you about it and just like, what came to mind or if, if that relates to what we've been talking about at all.

Bayo: That is intriguing. Um, well, I did, I did try to save my dad, uh, conceptually from his incarceration behind the pearl gates or death or whatever. Um. My way of trying to do that was to deepen my exercise of understanding my faith. I think those are the early days, the seeds of my public intellectual, career, that if I understood well how the world worked, I could build a time machine.[00:19:00] 

Of some kind, a temporality machine, a vehicle, a multidimensional vehicle that could take me from the mundane to peel back the membranes of the ordinary so that I could actually touch him again. Yeah. Um, and, and yeah, the more that I did try to do that, the more my time machine glitched and failed. It didn't quite.

Transport me to the pearly gates. And then I started to recall, um, a lost memory, so to speak. And maybe the pearly gates were not at a distance. Maybe it is here, maybe the afterlife is in the meanwhile. Right? And in thinking about in increasing or bending space time in that way, increasing. Reality in that way, other kinds of thoughts became possible.

I 

started to let go [00:20:00] gently of the notion of a giant truth. Mm-hmm. A destination, a the, the jump of point. And I started to think about the materiality of the world we're already in. Maybe heaven is not at a distance. You know, it, it felt like a rationalizing of my failure, but it worked. Right? Maybe my father isn't there.

Maybe my father is defracted in the thick. Now maybe he's here. Maybe his ghost is how I live. Maybe his ghost is in fungal blooms or in the architecture of ancestrally. Maybe he is here in a way that I, I have. Missed out on, because I've been looking at the doorway instead of the crack on the wall, right?

Maybe I'm already intimate or in, uh, maybe I already have intimacy with my father, even though it's in attenuated forms. Maybe there's some attenuated intimacy [00:21:00] that I'm already part of the ocean by being the shore, and, and that that of course, led to a poetics of relation, a processual philosophy. A social constructivist account of the world that bled into anal realism.

Right. And I started to think in terms of the moment that now our bodies, the imminent instead of the transcendent. 

Presto, I'm here in front of you. 

Andrea Hiott: That makes a lot of sense because you, you do, you do say that you got closer to your father. you were trying so much to find him, to get, he, he had passed away and you, you almost wanted to join him.

You were so desperate to, It's almost as if you wanted to, to find the place where those binaries met and what you just described. You also talk about physics a lot in the book, and um, what you just described is more like that folding of space of that, that it is a multiplicity and the complexity and, I can really see that, that then you started to understand it's not.

[00:22:00] Like a linear thing where I'm gonna go and meet at the point where the bin touch Instead, there's all this other stuff that, which I've heard you say before too, that, you know, there there are multiplicities of being human that we don't know and that we have yet to explore. Yeah. So that makes, that's actually very beautiful.

I can see that. Because you also say, you know, it was very unfair, right? That your father and sounds like that started to shift. Or heal or something too. Is that connected to it? That, 

Bayo: I mean, at some level, um, I, it still feels unfair, right? Um, I don't think there is a letting go of that in any, in any summary fashion.

I said to some friends a while ago, some days ago, that. I know that many people before they parent children, um, attempt to [00:23:00] purify themselves of their trauma so that they don't pass it across, and I think that's noble. But I also think quite controversially that the greatest gift a parent can give their child is their trauma.

Right? That, that it is the, it is trauma, which, which is how bodies are shaped. That becomes this, this anchorage of gravity in a world that is not resolved. Right? It's, it's, it's like I imagine a child coming through the matrix of a woman's body. There's no passage through, into life without the bacterial microbial gift.

It's almost like a heritage like, oh, you're coming out here, have this. Take. Take a get, get a load of the messiness of life, you will not arrive pure, right? So that if [00:24:00] it were possible to find a modality where we are completely purged of trauma, completely purged of any notion of woundedness or brokenness.

And if there was such a technology, maybe in an app or in a drink. In a dosage of some pills, I would not take it because, because it would mean that whoever is birthed through me is not able to participate in the world. It's basically co-creating Balor Balor, the famous Norse God who was impervious to pain and as a result was impervious to pleasure.

Right? That there's something about. The transaction, not the, I don't wanna use the word transactionality, but there's something about the, the contract of being embodied and being alive and being in touch. That means we are also never not broken. And Yeah. Yeah, yeah. [00:25:00] Please, please. 

Andrea Hiott: No, go ahead. If you had something else.

Bayo: No, I, I, I wasn't sure. Uh, I, I, I tricked stuff into, uh, side quest. Uh, but I, I think the main highway of my response was supposed to be this, um, in response to your question that, yeah, I still feel it's unfair. I, I, and maybe that is interacting in my family in some way. I still feel, um, I lost my father too early and he was my best friend, and I wish that did not happen.

At the same time, paradoxically or ironically, or however you would have it, I'm, I'm okay with that. I'm okay with that unfairness. I'm able to bracket it long enough to know that it has its place in the world, but it is not the world itself. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, I think it isn't fair. I mean, no one should lose the person.

A person, they're so close to. Especially at that age, and yet I also really understand what you mean because you, you do, you [00:26:00] do show that in the book there's, there's a lot of portals, right? And I think what you described there is almost like a portal like this, that same with your father's, with all that pain.

If you can, Look at it in the way you just described before, it becomes a kind of portal, but it doesn't change the binary. It doesn't change the, that the things are what they are. And in, in your book, you talk about doors a lot. or their doors or windows, like when your little daughter who the, the book is to her, it's letters to her when she got stuck behind the door and.

You found the window to hold her. that seems like another example in a way of what you were just describing. I'm not sure how, but does that make any sense at all? This? 

Bayo: Well, I love, I love you so much for bringing back that story to me, Andrea, thank you. Of holding. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Of folding my daughter through the window, but.

But in, but not to, but, but not quite grasping her [00:27:00] and her not quite reaching me, but just the more so of, of, of connect, of connection in that moment made things bearable for both of us, I think. Yeah. While the doors were being cracked open. Right. Oh, thank you. Right. That's a yes. That is a way to see it.

It's. It, it may even be a way to think about the entire book, right? The wilds beyond the offenses are already within the fences. They're already here. They're not, they're not outside. They have some kind of ambassadorial presence within the ordinary. They're, they're, there's an embassy of the otherwise that exists.

Our spaces. Yes. 

Andrea Hiott: That's very touching. Thinking of your father with the ambassador in the embassy. 

Bayo: Yes. Yes. 

Andrea Hiott: But yeah, exactly that. The, the way you describe it in the book, your daughter is [00:28:00] really scared because she's been locked in a room and, but you can just touch her and it's not enough right. To take away the pain in this.

The fear, but it's enough to keep her there so she's safe. And so that the situation can change. And that feels a bit like what we were talking about with your dad of that space. You got to that portal, you know, doesn't make it less what it is, but Yeah. Yeah. and that, that brings up something which I can't remember, but maybe you do, about the, the saying about, um, Oh gosh, what is it? It's too much to handle, right? It has to do with the sensory overload. We walk around the tree, but it's too much for us and we walk around the well, but we don't. Go into the don't, it's too much to, to get into it or to jump into it. Is that, do you have a better way of remembering that or, 

Bayo: uh, no, I don't.

I don't. You see that was in the book as well? 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, I think so. Yeah. It's like a one, I think you're talking [00:29:00] about you hated, um, listening to your, the tongue, mother tongue and, but then you wanted to learn some sayings, you know, I guess when you were writing the book and there's one saying. Yuba, do I say it right?

Yes. Yuba. Yeah. And it, and it's about this of, but, but yeah, I mean that's kind of, that, that realization of you go around the well and you see that it's there, but you don't go into it. 

Bayo: Yes, yes. 

Andrea Hiott: That, that feels like that. What I'm trying to get at is what maybe happened to you or, or what can happen to us when we do start to notice our.

Our habits and our patterns. Does that make sense at all? 

Bayo: It it does. It does. It's, it's, it's that noticing is an interruption of some kind. 

Andrea Hiott: Disruption interruption. That's right. 

Bayo: Yeah. Systems know themselves only through cracks, right? 

it's, it's like a desensitization. It's like, [00:30:00] sorry to use this macab and indelicate and impolite example, but it's like someone farting.

Farting in a room and stinking up the place and, and you just resign yourself to it because it's not, and, and I heard a very comical account of a plane returning to the takeoff point to the airport because someone was just letting go and was Oh no. 

Yes. And, and the, the, the strange thing about that is that everyone will close their noses.

The criminal will never, there will, there's no Scooby do moment. There's not gonna be like you did it. You know, it's everyone is in this together, right? So imagine a room being, being staed up, you know, hurting the language. Staed up to the nth degree. But you resign yourself to it, not only by choice, uh, or by compulsion or by enforcement, but your body actually loses [00:31:00] the, the, the taste, the whiff of the room because you just become part of the room.

We always become part of our environment, but someone cracks a window open or comes into the door and says. What is that awful smell? By this time you've forgotten what's happening in your life. What smell, right? It's that it's through cracks that systems recognize themselves and know themselves. So noticing is not just, um, an individual, an individual thing, it's a perceptual regime.

Um, understanding and meeting itself as if for the first time, cracks are always impersonal. They're more than personal, more than human, and maybe going around the well and not jumping into it or going around the tree. I need to understand what that proverb is saying. I'll re, I'll revisit it so I can see what I was saying there, or what the Yoruba people were saying.

There is an invitation to notice that, that yeah, it's simply that an invitation to [00:32:00] notice. 

Andrea Hiott: Do you see any parallels with that and where we are right now, just in terms of what we were both kind of hinting at as being, we're in a room right now and I'm not sure who's opening the window or if there's windows or what's going on, but there also seem to be a lot of cracks and how do you see this moment that we're in, in, in, through that orientation?

Bayo: It's, it's, the circle is the concretized. Crystallizing circle, think about a pandemic. It made us ask questions like, what is work though? What is education? Why do we need to go to work? Right? It's, it's that the entire world started to like, okay, what is normal? What is abnormal? What are children? What are those little things running around?

You know? Because parents were so used to sending their children off to school. That when they came home in the morning, they came down in the morning to go to work. They met these little versions of [00:33:00] themselves and they didn't know what to do with them. Literally, there were papers in India and we're in the pandemic in India that were asking questions like, what do we do with these things that we call our children?

Right. They came to interview my wife, who at this point in time was a, was was known in some places for her home schooling. Work. And so they came to interview her and said, you are unschooling these little versions of ourselves. What are they, what do you call them? What's their botanical name? It's very interesting.

Oh, 

Andrea Hiott: wow. Of course, 

Bayo: I'm missing it up a little bit, but yes, this seems to be where we are as a species, as as, um, amniotic spaces within white modernity that it's care paradigm. White stability is, its care is flailing, it's dying. The United States is specif specifically is witnessing [00:34:00] a, uh, uh, an empire in decline, right?

And as this space of care withers and as the ruin image of the anthrop scene becomes more, um, um, clarifying more lucid in its spread in its pervasiveness. Um, we are doing many things at once. We are attempting to return to what a, uh, someone that I know and care about very deeply. Her name is Lara Pena.

Zana would call rituals of absence and, and it's also, you know, a way that we're stabilizing ourselves. Um, within a world that is dying. We don't know how to really meet this moment, but we're also experimenting tentatively, you know, haltingly, surprisingly riskily with the crack. And that is important work.

That is para politics, that is post [00:35:00] activism. Yes, we are at the threshold of a care that doesn't know how to care any longer. 

Andrea Hiott: I'm glad you brought up care, because before we go, we, I wanna talk about love a little bit and, When you were talking, I was thinking of how you've said experimentation is I don't know, holding the space for experimentation is what we're trying to do in a way, or open the space and you just brought up care there.

And also reading your book, the one I've already mentioned, it's so about love, it's love of your dad, it's love of your family, it's love of your daughter, it's love of your wife. Your wife even writes, you know, in it, it's so loving. but it. In a, in a, in a way we've been talking about it a very disruptive way.

And, there's spiders and it's like, you know, it's, it's a lot of, you know, there's water, there's all kinds of disturbing moments. But, so I guess I'm just trying to put that together. We're in a disturbing moment now too. And how do you see love, what's love gonna do for us? Or what is it right now for you?

Bayo: Well, this, the, that book, [00:36:00] these was Beyond Offenses, which has, um. Which, which has bec was the shimmering data point in our conversation system. Um, ends without ending. It's a truncated ending. I'm supposed to gather nine hushes. I don't quite, or 10 hushes. I don't quite fulfill the ritual. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, I was gonna ask you about that, the last four in the little flower, but that's not, 

Bayo: yeah.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. 

Bayo: It, it's incomplete. And maybe that's my way of also saying that I think of love as the radical incompleteness of everything, right? That, that it's love is decoloniality love is the crack that emerges in the retournello just as much as it is the retournello Right? It is. It is how we craft embodied spaces, even though there are always violent risks.

The [00:37:00] imminent fields of DRE that is ongoing. Um, but it is also how that field speaks to the structures that emerge. It is also the intimacy between field and structure that says, don't trust your completeness. Don't trust your ideologies too much. Don't trust the shape that your body has taken. There's still something else to do.

There's still shape shifting to do that conversation between field and structure is the radical insufficiency or incompleteness of everything we presume to be and do. Right. And love continues into my next book, it's called, um, and Ocean of Milk, A Parable of Love in Three Numbers. 

Andrea Hiott: Oh, wonderful. 

Bayo: And, and, and it's, it's basically.

Pain to this radical incompleteness through told, through the story of a trickster that leaves the familiar in order to [00:38:00] die well. And that's, that's what I'll say. 

Andrea Hiott: Well, I can't wait to read it. And that makes a lot of sense as the sort of fold in space time that got you closer to your father, and that's the window that you found to touch your daughter.

And I, so I, I see that. So thank you for ma, you know, connecting those dots with the word love. And thanks for making time today, Bayo. I really hope things go well for you today and, I appreciate you and your work. 

Bayo: Thank you very much, Andrea. Thank you. Thank you. 

Andrea Hiott: All right. Bye bye. [00:39:00]