[...] Indiana’s work suggests a spiritual ambivalence that sees love as tethered to the brutalizing character of our society yet holding out some twinkling promise: a “mortal illness,” yes, but also a “rescuer’s flashlight.” He would object to the comparison (Indiana’s is a fitful radicalism, always wriggling out of ideology’s drab uniform), but his orientation to love resembles Marx’s critique of religious faith: love devolves into an opiate of the masses. Religion dreams of utopias, grasps at transcendence, dignifies our slogging trials — and is fastened to the notion, however distant, of redemption. Might the desire for love, too, be an “expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering?” Might love be “the heart of a heartless world,” “the soul of soulless conditions” — or, in Marx’s most swooning, sympathetic formulation, the “sigh of the oppressed creature”?