Love and language are both contaminated by the Fall from Paradise or from the Golden Age: commentators and poets who are preoccupied with love almost necessarily become preoccupied with language as well. Both originate in Paradise as defining human faculties; both now exhibit a gap between will and performance, and between the natural and the artificial. In Paradise, according to Honorius Augustodunensis' Elucidarium, an infant would have been able to walk and to speak absolute [clearly] from birth; and in the Golden Age love was natural and innocent. Now we must learn to walk and learn to use language; and for the medieval poets schooled by Ovid, the language we use is not only analogous to but directly implicated in the domain of sexual difference and heterosexual desire. As Bloch argues, language – that is, language in the fallen world – engenders narrative, desire, and especially narratives of desire. And Augustine says that the “word uttered inside ourselves,” as it manifests itself in spoken words and deeds, is a word of love: