Ampersand Gazette #98

Welcome to the Ampersand Gazette, a metaphysical take on some of the news of the day. If you know others like us, who want to create a world that includes and works for everyone, please feel free to share this newsletter. The sign-up is here. And now, on with the latest …  

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I Hate, Therefore I AmI

 find hate to be virtually omnipresent in the current culture. Hate trumps love by a mile now, or so it seems to me. Why should this be true? Descartes had a famous dictum about the constitutive powers of the thinking self: I think therefore I am. Could it be that, today, I hate, therefore I am?

The traditional sources of stable selfhood have been significantly depleted over time. One may define oneself—one may define the self—through hate. One day you are a blank slate, a void. But you can become yourself simply through hatred. You define yourself through your antipathies. Suddenly, ambiguity and nuance disappear.

Character is inner conflict much of the time. We tend to have warring internal lives in which we hate and love simultaneously. This is confusing, turbulent. But outright hate clears all that up. There are, I think, laudable ways to unite the spirit: Pursuing courage, compassion, creative expression and wisdom can do just that. But there are toxic ways as well.

We live in an age of identity. Everyone seems to need a profile. We cultivate the sense of identity in a world where there are very few props for self-construction. Hate is one, and perhaps the most reliable. (I hate therefore I am.)

What is to be done? The readiest answer is to work for a renewal of love. Love your enemy, or at least love your neighbor as yourself. Jacques Lacan said this might not be such a grand idea, given that most people don’t love themselves much at all.

Instead, we might cast a skeptical eye on this concept of identity that seems so powerful now to so many. What is on offer is an escape, or the prospect of an escape, from the burdens of constructing a self out of the culturally available material. They offer us a break from the fiction of individual unified being. They offer us an escape from hate.

Excerpted from a Guest Essay by Mark Edmundson in The New York Times
“I Hate, Therefore I Am”
July 23, 2025 

The last time I think I consciously thought about my identity in the sense of who I wanted to be, I think I was fourteen. Since then, identity has arisen out of everyday living. I think that’s how it works for most of us. 

I am not a hater. In fact, if you’ve been a subscriber for a while, you know that I had a beau who always said, “Ow!” whenever anyone claimed they hated something. It was supremely annoying, but also supremely mindful. 

We use hate—as a word, as a concept—much of the time mindlessly. It is more dangerous via this usage than using it deliberately.  

The moment we encounter hate, I believe it is incumbent upon all of us who want a world that works for everyone, to question it, to deconstruct it, to engage with it until it turns itself into something else.  

Unsustained by constant energy, hate becomes a more neutral thing. And what sustains energy? Emotion. People get het up about their hates, don’t they? Do you? If you do, do you like this about yourself? If you do, great, but if you don’t, how are you engaging with hate in order to help it change? 

Inasmuch as it would be swell if facing down hate in one arena would tear it down in all venues, it won’t. Hate is deconstructed on a case-by-case basis. It needs to be broken down gently, slowly, quietly in engagement, conversation, explanation, listening. 

So, of course, what the world needs now is love. (Streisand has a yummy version of this song out.) And do we even know what that means? 

The kind of love that tempers and changes hate isn’t usually personal. It’s impersonal. It’s the love that comes with witness—the ability to perceive without judgment, either good or bad. To help heal hate, hate itself needs a witness. 

This sort of witness is not easy to provide, especially in the face of one’s own intense feelings in a given circumstance. It is, however, essential.  

Every metaphysician knows that it is possible to manifest from what one doesn’t want, but it is impossible to sustain these manifestations. The what-is-not is never as strong as the what-is. Interestingly, that’s the proper definition for manna: what-is. I had it direct from an ancient rabbi’s mouth. 

I don’t know when or where the healing of this hate-filled culture is happening, but I do know that it is. It’s happening one sentence at a time. Yes, slow-going, but mostly permanent because of its slowness.  

For those who consider themselves Christians, I refer you to Romans 8:1. There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. 

Condemnation isn’t our job, Belovèd. Love is. Impersonal, witness love. I see you because you too, whether we agree or not, are made in the image and likeness of the same Creator Who made me. Boil it down to that, and there’s little argument remaining. 

Hatred isn’t good for us. Love is good for us. Choose love. 

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The Wrong Definition of Love

The time I used to spend on Twitter I now spend on Substack, and my life is much better for it. This week, I stumbled across a post from Antonia Bentel, who asked six strangers and friends about how they fall in love. What struck me about these answers is that they all had a common definition of love—that love blooms when somebody else makes you feel understood and good about yourself.

We can all relate. We all want to be seen and to be beheld. And yet I’d say the Substack answers betray a common misunderstanding of how you become beloved. There was a lot of self in these answers and not much about the other person. There was a lot about being paid attention to, and not much about maybe serving and caring for another person, or even putting that person’s interests above your own.

These answers didn’t come from nowhere; they’re a perfect distillation of the cultural trends that social critics have been describing for many decades. Way back in 1966, Philip Rieff argued that shared moral frameworks were being discarded and replaced by therapeutic values. The highest good is not some sacred ideal, but rather, personal well-being and psychological adjustment. Then in 1979, Christopher Lasch argued that therapeutic values and consumer capitalism combined to produce narcissistic individuals—self-absorbed, fragile and desperate for recognition.

In such a culture people are naturally going to define love as the feeling they get when somebody satisfies their craving for positive and tender attention, not as something they selflessly give to another.

In other, less self-oriented cultures, and in other times, love was seen as something closer to self-abnegation than to self-comfort. It was seen as a force so powerful that it could overcome our natural selfishness. Such love begins with admiration, a glimpse of another person who seems beautiful, good and true.

Falling in love in this view is not a decision you make for your own benefit, but a submission, a poetic surrender you assent to, often without counting the cost. It is not empowering, but rather it involves a loss of self-control.

Love is not an emotion (though it kicks up a lot of emotions); it is a motivational state—a desire to be close to and serve another. It blurs the boundary between one person and another.

This blending of one whole person with another whole person reduces the distinction between giving and receiving, because when you give to your beloved it feels like you are giving to a piece of yourself, and this giving is more pleasurable than receiving. The goal of this giving, the goal of love, is to enhance the life of another.

In his 1956 book, “The Art of Loving," the psychoanalyst and philosopher Erich Fromm argued that love is not a feeling; it’s a practice, an art form. It’s a series of actions that requires discipline, care, respect, knowledge and the overcoming of narcissism. The kind of love these people are describing is an outpouring. In this conception of love, feeling beloved is a byproduct two people receive after they have given themselves away to each other.

I wonder if the general misery and disconnection all around is partly a product of the gradual buildup of the culture of the therapeutic, the narcissistic, the performative. When I look at the self-help best sellers of our day, they are not generally about how to pour out service; they are more often about how to protect yourself from other people.

It’s not surprising that a culture that centers the self is going to produce inverted theories of love. I sometimes hear people say that you have to love yourself before you can love others. But this is backward. You have to observe yourself loving others before you can see yourself as lovable and before you genuinely are lovable. 

Excerpted from an Opinion Essay by David Brooks in The New York Times
“The Wrong Definition of Love”
August 28, 2025 

It seemed only right that if I intended to write about hate, the only balance possible was love. It also occurred to me, looking for images, that you never hear about hate-love relationships; you hear of love-hate relationships. 

Why is that? I think it’s because hate is only ever born out of love in its original form. Perhaps that’s a controversial notion to you. Think on it for a bit before you reject it outright. 

Love is the web that connects all of us. The connection itself is necessary in order to hate, which, in itself, is an attempt at disconnection. 

In more than forty years of counseling you can imagine that I have heard a great deal about soulmates, and wanting to manifest The One. To a person, it is my experience that when a soul announces that she is ready to love again—and not ready to be loved again—is she truly ready. 

True loving is giving, as David Brooks posits. He laments that we have become self-centered as a predictable foil for the failure of love. I disagree with him. 

Yes, in the beginning of any romance, the boundaries blur. That’s how we discover what our boundaries are with that person. But they don’t blur permanently. Boundaries blur when we need them to blur, and otherwise stay solid. 

Certainly, I can be crazy in love with my husband and still keep my distance with a cashier, for one example. 

Honestly, I prefer this usage of love as a verb. The Quakers call this putting hands and feet on your prayers. Love is also worth our hands and feet. It’s an action—a series of actions, meant to nourish the object of your love. 

And sure, it feels damn good to be seen, but seeing … oh, seeing is … as Barbra would say, Even bettah. Does it not make supreme sense that when I am willing to see an other, I would appear to that other as willing to be seen? It does. 

I don’t know if I agree with Mr. Brooks about a wrong definition of love, but I do know that Love itself is a many-faceted wonder to which we each have access when we choose it. If your definition of love needs a little refinement, Beloved, go ahead. 

It will only make you more beloved in the long run. 

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Here’s a universal affirmation. It works every time, for everyone, always and forever …  

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There was this plot twist … the first one—a week on IV antibiotics in the hospital. Now there are two more, both of them doozies. This would seem to be It’s-Time-To-Deal-With-All-of-Your-Health-Issues Season. 

I have a big test on Friday which requires that I arrive at 7:30 AM. Who thought that up? Update: this test yielded WAY better than expected results. Now, I have to go again, same Bat Time, same Bat Station, on Monday to do the treatment that Friday’s diagnostic suggested. 

I’ve seen one doc who had answers for me, but now we’re waiting for scheduling.  

We finished reading Impending Decision, book five of The Boots & Boas Romances. Even with the interruption(s), it’s a good book.  

Hopefully, both Tony and I will get caught up on the backlog of things, and he’ll get to editing the final Subversive Lovelies book, Jaq Direct.  

Thanks, everyone, for your patience, which is clearly better than my own. 

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Soon enough, it will be time to feature the complete series of The Subversive Lovelies. Here are the first three-and-a-half books. 

As always, whichever book of mine you enjoy, would you please leave a stellar review, if you loved it? Those reviews are how others find indie authors like me. I really appreciate it!

 Reviews really are the engine that powers the career of an indie author. 

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You know, I don’t think I’d ever have gotten around to letting go of my books so they could be in the world without the good offices of my favorite editor, Tony Amato. My esteem for the man is no surprise; I did marry him, after all.  

My first novel, Oklahoma! Hex, needed a lot—I really should say A LOT—of work. There were way too many voices. It had great dialogue, but crummy descriptives. Tony acted as a guardian for the truth of my author voice, and he can do the same thing for you. Tony Amato holds that position for me, and for many other authors in the LGBTQ+ community, and has done so for more than thirty years. 

Tony Amato is my favorite editor for lots of reasons, but mostly because he has an uncanny ability to seek, find, recognize, and polish the truth of a writer’s voice. There’s a good reason he calls what he does book-husbanding. And he can do it for any genre. 

Seriously, this is the guy. He’s edited my books for more than 20 years, so I ought to know. Find him here. Oh, and here’s his substack Subscribe here. 

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As you can imagine, being mid- multiple plot twists,
I did very little reading,
so no book review in this issue, but … 

That’s not really true.
I just did very little research reading. 

Instead, I repaired to an

Old Favorite: 

Outlander, 

All nine of their big, fat, juicy reliable selves. 

You know that thing we talk about
when we refer to Unreliable Narrators?
There are some authors who are
also unreliable too,
but oh, the reliable ones … 

Diana Gabaldon is one of these. 

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Are you waiting for a sign?
How about this one? 

This is the image that’s
helping me stay in the present
for my
Plot Twists Health Saga. 

Look carefully. 

Sure, it’s a rainbow bridge …
but it’s a rainbow bridge 

WHOSE END I CANNOT SEE. 

This is one way to stay in a process—
despite focusing on the desired result. 

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If you are inclined to add your prayers
for my renewed health and well-being,
please let them reflect the notion

that … 

I AM SUPERHEALTHY. 

You know as well as I do that this process
will take as long as it takes no matter how
urgently I want it resolved.

And remember, 

EVERYTHING ALWAYS WORKS IN MY FAVOR. 

I just get to stay on the bridge. 

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I am, without doubt, certain that And is the secret to all we desire.
Let’s commit to practicing And ever more diligently, shall we? 

Until next time,
Be Ampersand