She began the website as a provocation and as a response to a series of events.
It was the flattest summer after a flat close to the spring; term papers and drafts of poems had been written, but nothing formed the support for lasting excitation. She forgot what she had done sooner than usual. She was quite serious about making something of value before she died. A graduate seminar on “genres, platforms, media” had given her a lot to think about the necessity of producing creative work within a given framework, environment, milieu. And so it was even clearer that there was nothing for her to share, to publish, nothing of her life which felt legible, as there was no place to hold what she wanted to create. What if her life wasn’t made for creation, what if the point was to sweep the floor and wash the clothes and tend to a plot of land, a garden, a kitchen, a house? Then, there was a brief spike in conviction: it came about in tandem with the notion of the child, the notion of the child as harbinger of an anti-aesthetic mode of life. To live for the other, to empty the self of ambition, in service of the other creative project that was up to chance—this seemed to be the ultimate creative act. Meanwhile, orchids stood in as signifiers for a symbolized interest in fertility, in the domestic. She declared that one of these themes—that of the child—would become the substance of her dissertation.
I decided to write to nobody at all. It occurred to me that writing for nobody would be a way of giving up. It would involve renouncing my relationships with all individuals, but not out of a specific desire to avoid an event. I wanted rather to avoid the feeling of shame that arose from writing itself, from the grandiosity which engendered it, and the final disappointment I felt when it made no difference. I figured that it would be less trouble for the others I exchanged writing with if I transferred the effort behind the composition of emails into some kind of indirected writing. I could then insulate the world from what I would later discover to be ugly while developing some strands of beauty under more pressurized conditions. Even if I did continue writing to specific people, any emotional investment that went into the correspondence could be buffered by the fact that I was writing somewhere else, and in a way that showed I was concerned about the stakes of communication.
Perhaps I might even manage to connect with an undefined crowd of readers, who might affirm my presence after death. Maybe I could even use this place to pay for the costs of living while I was still alive. A career made through writing might even bring me into a new circle of friends. But it seemed more likely that making public works was a way of producing nodules of envy in near and distant readers. I couldn’t imagine a scenario in which good writing would simply be enjoyed. It seemed that the only valid reason to write for a public was to become a minor celebrity, and I was not really interested in this. I simply wanted to admit to myself that I was not fit for maintaining lasting social bonds. My imperative would be to contribute to the creation of value for a dead self in the future, a self which wouldn’t be able to witness or evaluate the fruits of its labors. It could at least be posited to exist, through sentences like these. So I resolved to give up on my ties to individuals. To behave otherwise would be to act on the desire to possess a person, to identify a person as a target of my hatred, inevitably accumulated along a line of successive failures, like enamel abraded by lemon-soaked cakes.
Then what she had disavowed—a person—came back in the form of an email. He wrote back after she had rejected him and spent a year outside of his direct influence. This return of the repressed produced in her a special kind of energy. But she didn’t trust that it would lead her back to a state of passion. She disavowed the notion of correspondence, and wrote that she would write to no one, and started this site: “Against Public Life.” The thing she wrote to no one was in fact a bowerbird’s nest. She became obsessed with desire as her new concept; the dissertation shifted once more. Public life was starting to get abraded by the insistency of this motive; desire seemed more disruptive, consumptive, destabilizing than the “child,” which still had valences of newness and creation. Desire centered around lack, around the anti-social, around permanent discontent.
I was trying to choose good or evil, but neither option sounded real. What mattered was cutting ties with creation. Is creation anything but a form of accumulation? I wanted to create things which would be true, which would contribute neither to my bank account nor to sexual desire. I didn’t know if I could do what was true if it had something to do with those motives which seemed so unclean. Perhaps I could write for the things that existed near me, like orchids. Writing might exist in service of things; it would be pure expenditure. I asked myself if custodial work would be better than investing myself in the dream of uninhibited and unseen spaces and times to come. With the word “custodial,” I generalize over all activities which involve care of something immediately in front of you, whether it be the cleanliness of a kitchen or the care of an infant child. At the same time, I wanted to be bad. I wanted to revel in my antisocial condition, which I imagined would make me mute and sessile like a plant. Then I could exercise and make permanent my difference. I could turn my plant-like existence into a novel form of writing, a writing of blurred boundaries between the wilting pen and the deathless camera. That was the billionaire side of me. What could be more brilliant to investors than a totally passive object? Being passive was hard work, though, as it involved doing the very kinds of work that one typically associates with the entrepreneur. Passive cooling, passive heating. Think of a thing that is frictionless, an ideal machine. I liked the idea of lacking scale and becoming omnipotent, and of not relying on institutional frameworks. This required building a new “house,” which was my first move: APL is a “new house."
Yet she has refused to answer to the provocation which lies in the title of the website, abbreviated in her mind as “APL,” as if she needs to escape the permanent question of the project she has not quite set out to define. Nobody was there to ask her and demand of her an answer to these questions, so she didn’t answer them in advance. It wouldn’t have made sense for her to answer these questions before setting out on the journey. Those who apply for money to embark on journeys have to describe the journey before it has occurred, but she didn’t need money for this trip. So she went off and followed her nose and didn’t attempt to see the full picture until she had gotten past a certain point. But where was that point? At every point she resisted defining the terms of the site; “against,” “public,” “life.” However, with time it became easier to frame certain questions: What leads you to push against yourself the word “public”? What is this obsession with “public life” hiding under the disavowal in the name, “Against Public Life”? And there came a preliminary response: the answer lies in the word “femininity." But before “I” begin to develop this in the present, as the current speaker of the website, I will continue to read what has been written in the past, before anything more substantial had been worked out.
She said something about having felt comfortable returning to the original provocation, that all indirection is against direction. It’s a stark accusation, but how could it not be true? The two parts form a pair so fundamental that they appear to be like the hydrophobic skin that sets water and oil apart. But the pair is misleading if we consider it fixed. One doesn’t ever give up on either “direction.” Work made for the public is indeed a distraction from private life; private life is indeed a distraction from public functioning. They do not work together.
The two aren’t in competition or in conspiration, they just happen to co-exist. Sometimes they exist in a symbiotic relation, but symbiosis isn’t self-aware, an it isn’t even the result of intelligent design. It’s an accidental co-functioning of independent parts. That’s how scientists see it, at least. A purely diagrammatic view of the situation would necessarily portray indirection and direction as occupying positions of equal importance, but the diagram says nothing about their awareness of one another as forces, as vectors of desire. The question is if we should allow ourselves to work against this natural equilibrium. Though I have purposely posed this in abstract terms, I would like to clarify: one can either be against public life or for it, never both. Indirection is a public phenomenon associated with scalability and capitalism, while direction is a service phenomenon, as when I wrote emails directly to particular recipients. One cannot do both at once. But one can do both in alternation.
She went on to conclude the initial “about” page of “Against Public Life” with a value statement:
I think it’s more important to remember private life and to actively cultivate it. It doesn’t go recorded otherwise. I also believe it is possible to do work on the private life without making it public, as in the work of writing. This is embedded in the psychoanalytic model of the “id” and the “ego,” or in Bataille’s notion of the “accursed share.” Perhaps the imbalance is a consequence of our polarized economic system, where infinite profits over infinite time over infinite populations occupy the top of the value hierarchy. Taking care of children or plants inside a home cannot and does not reach outwards forever, so this sort of labor is not marked as labor, it does not earn one wages. I like the idea of giving up, or more pointedly, of being “against public life” because I want to highlight the undercurrent of direct and private orientations towards objects and people which nevertheless survives, exists. I’m not sure if I want to do this because I aspire to capitalize on everything, or because I feel choked out of current institutions. Perhaps this will become a public project at the end of the day. If it does, frankly, I am not concerned. My only duty is to “give up” at some point, in some way, and to some effect.
Later she came to admit that “Against Public Life” sounds like the name of a corporation, a brand, a movement, an ethic. It might as well be associated with a proper manifesto, which imagines what it incites others to do.
The statement which stands out as the locus of greatest excitation connects most clearly to the nature of the “public,” and to the feminine: At the same time, I wanted to be bad. I wanted to revel in my antisocial condition, which I imagined would make me mute and sessile like a plant. Then I could exercise and make permanent my difference. I could turn my plant-like existence into a novel form of writing, a writing of blurred boundaries between the wilting pen and the deathless camera. That was the billionaire side of me. What could be more brilliant to investors than a totally passive object? Mute, sessile, passive. Taking “her” self as a passive object, “he” became a “she,” and made fun of herself for embarking on what could be considered the worst of feminist writing projects: boundless, fragmented, and not concerned with coherence or power of expression. It advanced nothing but dailiness, anecdotes, drafts. It flailed its limpness and never subject that limpness to the crunch of stricture. It sometimes embarrassed itself with the words feminine, female, feminist. Nevermind what those words mean. But that was the inevitable task, and once more it became the subject of the dissertation.
She’s not against public life, exactly. She just wants to build something new, and for me that means delving into what’s unknown and private. She said that the feminine isn’t a substance, it’s a form of reaction to a problem.
It’s a reaction to the problem of the “primary experience of passivity, in which the subject is enjoyed sexually by the Other, what Lacan has taught us to identify as the position in which the subject is reduced to being the object/cause of the Other’s desire—in fantasy, but also in the real experience of dependence on that first Other who is the mother” (André 93). The subject is initiated into being through this fundamental experience of helplessness; she comes to desire for the rest of her life according to the structure of this experience, an experience of passivity before the mother. Psychotic, neurotic, pervert are the names of three fundamental structures, structures of the subject as s/he comes into being as a desiring subject, in relation to an Other.
Two (or more) notions of the feminine:
everything for the other, nothing of the self.
supplementary: beyond the phallic.
Three forms of the subject:
psychotic
neurotic
pervert
The most famous structure of femininity is that of the hysteric: the hysteric seeks out an Other who can answer her questions: Am I a woman?—What does a woman want?—but she is always dissatisfied with the response. She asks on account of the experience of a traumatic sexual event, which in turn involves a feminine experience of passivity. She cannot remember this experience. It is a hole in her capacity to put words together, it is a no-thing, it is unconscious. The unconscious and the feminine are knotted together.
Serge André: “the experience underlying all neurosis—hysterical, obsessional, or phobic—is that of being assigned the position of object offered to the Other, a position in which the subject disappears as such and exists merely as the waste product or the instrument of the jouissance of the Other.”
Now if you want me to speak about my own relation to the subject, to cast off the academic language, I can point a finger to various experiences, but I claim to sit at the base of a mountain which I experience as nothing but the meadow before me; grass, a slow ascent, some stone, some tree.
Pleasure: I can complain so much about the absence of sensation during sexual intercourse and still experience so much pleasure in the exact complement of the disappointment, i.e. in the aftermath of that absence—the whole zone is resensitized, and what it feels now is much stronger, staggering forward into a new plane of pleasure. It has refound the object it was only able to find once it realized it lacked it: the cunt realizes something new in direct proportion to how much sensation it lacks, as if it could see more clearly something that goes beyond the perceptual, as if it were a veritable brain or soul, but unlike the brain it is cut from a non-sensory cloth, a non-haptic and non-olfactory and non-gustatory and non-auditory and non-visual matrix of non-nerves. It is informed by something “supersensual” instead. What it is informed by seems to be nothing other than repetition itself. Hence the repetitiveness of its demands: (it wants to be fucked), (it wants to be fucked, (it wants to be fucked)), (it wants to be fucked, (it wants to be fucked), (it wants to be fucked, (it wants to be fucked))), (it wants to be fucked, (it wants to be fucked), (it wants to be fucked, (it wants to be fucked)), (it wants to be fucked, (it wants to be fucked), (it wants to be fucked, (it wants to be fucked)), (it wants to be fucked, (it wants to be fucked), (it wants to be fucked, (it wants to be fucked)))). And I can be sitting in a chair reading and it feels like it’s telling me that what I’m reading is wonderful, but that leads to wanting to be fucked. Happiness in the reading and happiness in the sleep after having been fucked. It feels like an ache or a pain that is threatening to end the absorption in the task, which causes me to hunker down, like what happens before a man enters a woman; “a woman is superior to a man because she never loses her erection; only a woman who does not actually have a penis can never lose it.”
The pleasure of fucking.
The absence of pleasure in the act of fucking.
The pleasure after fucking; the ghost-pleasure of fucking.
It’s difficult to write about pleasure, which for some reason I believe needs to be a central term in the discourse of the feminine. APL might just be a term for concentrated pleasure. No, there’s no “pleasure-concentrate” here. But it is a project undertaken for the sake of pleasure. For the sake of now-pleasure, or for future-pleasure? A place to save up pleasure? Barthes differentiates between pleasure and jouissance (translated as “bliss” by Richard Howard) in The Pleasure of the Text. He observes that desire seems to take precedence over pleasure in psychoanalytic discourse, because desire involves lack, and so it has its special “epistemic dignity.”
Pleasure is continually disappointed, reduced, deflated, in favor of strong, noble values: Truth, Death, Progress, Struggle, Joy, etc. Its victorious rival is Desire: we are always being told about Desire, never about Pleasure; Desire has an epistemic dignity, Pleasure does not. It seems that (our) society refuses (and ends up by ignoring) bliss to such a point that it can produce only epistemologies of the law (and of its contestation), never of its absence, or better still: of its nullity. Odd, this philosophical permanence of Desire (insofar as it is never satisfied): doesn’t the word itself denote a “class notion”? (A rather crude presumption of proof, and yet noteworthy: the “populace” does not know Desire-only pleasures.) (Barthes 57-58)
Is pleasure merely the diminution of excitation, as Freud wrote?
What does the title of Beyond the Pleasure Principle even mean?
Why does it ache to say the word “task”—now she’s become a table.
There are all these ridges and details inside, but past a certain point it becomes smooth.
I want it to fuse into me like a hook and detach later as if it were a piece of molded plastic.
Please be as scared of me as possible! You will freeze to death inside here, or starve…
“the mother of the steppe, who nurtures and brings death."
“The object raised to the Dignity of the Thing”
The “vacancy of the feminine Thing”
A “void created at the center of the flow of terms”
The teapot as vacant phallus…
If the “beyond” of pleasure is in fact immanent to it?
In Coldness and Cruelty, Deleuze says it—the beyond of the pleasure principle—is a “residue that is irreducible to it”—the pleasure principle. The beyond is in the binding force of repetition: a transcendental rule, an unconditioned condition—“repetition came before the pleasure principle as the unconditioned condition of the principle”; “binding makes the pleasure principle possible” (112, 113, 115).
With the formation of the ego is a certain defusion of instinct, a certain desexualization. Idealization: imagination of the ego; identification: power of thought of the superego. Desexualization disturbs the “application” of the pleasure principle, or “promotes a sublimation of the instincts whereby pleasure is transcended in favor of gratifications of a different kind.” And beyond these two routes of desexualization are the perversions, which preserve the desexualized element even as they accomplish a resexualization: “it is as if the desexualized element were resexualized but nevertheless retained, in a different form, the original desexualization; the desexualized has become in itself the object of sexualization. This explains why coldness is the essential feature of the structure of perversion; it is present both in the apathy of the sadist, where it figures as theory, and in the ideal of the masochist, where it figures as fantasy. The deeper the coldness of the desexualization, the more powerful and extensive the process of perverse resexualization” (117).
Words for the death drive: speculative, mythical, invisible, indefinite, abstract, silent, imperceptible, ungiven, unconscious, purely mental… the “glacial and severe cold mother”… the “specific freezing point” which the masochist seeks… “the pursuit of the coldness between hot and hot.”
(Tracy McNulty, Unbound: The Speculative Mythology of the Death Drive”)
None of this sounds pleasurable to the lover of warmth and tenderness.
It sounds hot and cold to me—hot and cold make heat and coldness, which are even hotter and colder (for me) that hot and cold. The sublimation of the floated adjective into the floatful noun. Float, floated, floatful.
I told him that pleasure for me involved fear. Pleasure is wrapped around fear like a thread around its spool. Pleasure is the precipitate of fear, or the veil over fear’s face. It was the cloud on which one could not stand, it was the feeling of standing aloft and being unclear of whether one is supposed to fall, an impossible state that engenders a strong frisson in the body. Unlocalizable sensation, so hot that it’s cold, so cold that it’s hot. Loss of reference, loss of relative scale. Something like anxiety but without the blockage of sensation.
It wasn’t true or accurate, so it frustrated me. But it was more true than saying that I enjoyed what was pleasant, nice, good—because the words “pleasant,” “nice,” and “good” were vacant for me, they referred to nothing. I like red bean bread—I find it pleasant, and nice, and good, but I would never think of red bean bread in that way—I think it’s red bean bread. All the positive aspects of pleasurable experience tacked onto other words like parasitical organisms. Pleasure is bodiless and suspends itself from an invisible string. Who knows how it’s attached to the body of another, to a word, to a material point of reference?
No more abstractions: speak of the sensation of the cunt, anatomize it, refer to it with words from the latin, with verbs of motion, with the measurable observables of heat and length and width and volume. All of these supposed descriptions involve pointing to the organ like a map with known territories, but whatever, do it against the impulse to make fantasies of the zero, null, void. No, I don’t submit to the demand for that falseness. What if I said that the cunt was laughing, what if I insisted on prosopopoeia?
THE RAINBOW
Or the pleasure of sex as it is trammeled in a restricted vocabulary: “a flame,” a “centre,” “complete”:
She was still, to Brangwen, immeasurably beautiful. She was still passionate, with a flame of being. But the flame was not robust and present. Her eyes shone, her face glowed for him, but like some flower opened in the shade, that could not bear the full light. She loved the baby. But even this, with a sort of dimness, a faint absence about her, a shadowiness even in her mother-love. When Brangwen saw her nursing his child, happy, absorbed in it, a pain went over him like a thin flame. (80, III: Childhood of Anna Lensky)
He wanted to give her all his love, all his passion, all his essential energy. But it could not be. He must find other things than her, other centres of living. She sat close and impregnable with the child. And he was jealous of the child. // But he loved her, and time came to give some sort of course to his troublesome current of life, so that it did not foam and flood and make misery. He formed another centre of love in her child, Anna. Gradually a part of his stream of life was diverted to the child, relieving the main flood to his wife. Also he sought the company of men, he drank heavily now and again. // The child ceased to have so much anxiety for her mother after the baby came. Seeing the mother with the baby boy, delighted and serene and secure, Anna was at first puzzled, then gradually she became indignant, and at last her little life settled on its own swivel, she was no more strained and distorted to support her mother. She became more childish, not so abnormal, not charged with cares she could not understand. The charge of the mother, the satisfying of the mother, had devolved elsewhere than on her. Gradually the child was freed. She became an independent, forgetful little soul, loving from her own centre. (81, III: Childhood of Anna Lensky)
Inside the room was a great steadiness, a core of living eternity. Only far outside, at the rim, went on the noise and the destruction. Here at the centre the great wheel was motionless, centred upon itself. Here was a poised, unflawed stillness that was beyond time, because it remained the same, inexhaustible, unchanging, unexhausted. // As they lay close together, complete and beyond the touch of time or change, it was as if they were at the very centre of all the slow wheeling of space and the rapid agitation of life, deep, deep inside them all, at the centre where there is utter radiance, and eternal being, and the silence absorbed in praise: the steady core of all movements, the unawakened sleep of all wakefulness. They found themselves there, and they lay still, in each other’s arms; for their moment they were at the heart of eternity, whilst time roared far off, forever far off, towards the rim. // Then gradually they were passed away from the supreme centre, down the circles of praise and joy and gladness, further and further out, towards the noise and the friction. But their hearts had burned and were tempered by the inner reality, they were unalterably glad. (143, VI: Anna Victrix)
His soul only grew the blacker. His condition now became complete, the darkness of his soul was thorough. Everything had gone: he remained complete in his own tense, black will. He was now unaware of her. She did not exist. His dark, passionate soul had recoiled upon itself, and now, clinched and coiled round a centre of hatred, existed in its own power. There was a curiously ugly pallor, an expressionlessness in his face. She shuddered from him. She was afraid of him. His will seemed grappled upon her. (150, VI: Anna Victrix)
“THEY THOUGHT ONE THOUGHT.”
One of the sins of APL is that of the glutton; she consumes her sustenance and puts this act of consumption on display in the form of the Very Long Citation. Here, it seems that she wishes to say: I believe the exact same thing; I experience the exact same thing. Or, look at the “pleasure of sex as it is trammeled in a restricted vocabulary”: darkness, softness, soul, will. And look at that emphasized sentence; do you cleave to it too?
They crossed the bridge, descended, and went away from the lights. In an instant, in the darkness, he took her hand and they went in silence, with subtle feet treading the darkness. The town fumed away on their left, there were strange lights and sounds, the wind rushed against the trees, and under the bridge. They walked close together, powerful in unison. He drew her very close, held her with a subtle, stealthy, powerful passion, as if they had a secret agreement which held good in the profound darkness. The profound darkness was their universe.‘It is like it was before,’ she said.
Yet it was not in the least as it was before. Nevertheless his heart was perfectly in accord with her. They thought one thought.
‘I knew I should come back,’ he said at length.
She quivered.
‘Did you always love me?’ she asked.
The directness of the question overcame him, submerged him for a moment. The darkness travelled massively along.
‘I had to come back to you,’ he said, as if hypnotised. ‘You were always at the back of everything.’
She was silent with triumph, like fate.
‘I loved you,’ she said, ‘always.’
The dark flame leaped up in him. He must give her himself. He must give her the very foundations of himself. He drew her very close, and they went on in silence.
She started violently, hearing voices. They were near a stile across the dark meadows.
‘It’s only lovers,’ he said to her, softly.
She looked to see the dark figures against the fence, wondering that the darkness was inhabited.
‘Only lovers will walk here to-night,’ he said.
Then in a low, vibrating voice he told her about Africa, the strange darkness, the strange, blood fear.
‘I am not afraid of the darkness in England,’ he said. ‘It is soft, and natural to me, it is my medium, especially when you are here. But in Africa it seems massive and fluid with terror—not fear of anything—just fear. One breathes it, like a smell of blood. The blacks know it. They worship it, really, the darkness. One almost likes it—the fear—something sensual.’
She thrilled again to him. He was to her a voice out of the darkness. He talked to her all the while, in low tones, about Africa, conveying something strange and sensual to her: the negro, with his loose, soft passion that could envelop one like a bath. Gradually he transferred to her the hot, fecund darkness that possessed his own blood. He was strangely secret. The whole world must be abolished. He maddened her with his soft, cajoling, vibrating tones. He wanted her to answer, to understand. A turgid, teeming night, heavy with fecundity in which every molecule of matter grew big with increase, secretly urgent with fecund desire, seemed to come to pass. She quivered, taut and vibrating, almost pained. And gradually, he ceased telling her of Africa, there came a silence, whilst they walked the darkness beside the massive river. Her limbs were rich and tense, she felt they must be vibrating with a low, profound vibration. She could scarcely walk. The deep vibration of the darkness could only be felt, not heard.
Suddenly, as they walked, she turned to him and held him fast, as if she were turned to steel.
‘Do you love me?’ she cried in anguish.
‘Yes,’ he said, in a curious, lapping voice, unlike himself. ‘Yes, I love you.’
He seemed like the living darkness upon her, she was in the embrace of the strong darkness. He held her enclosed, soft, unutterably soft, and with the unrelaxing softness of fate, the relentless softness of fecundity. She quivered, and quivered, like a tense thing that is struck. But he held her all the time, soft, unending, like darkness closed upon her, omnipresent as the night. He kissed her, and she quivered as if she were being destroyed, shattered. The lighted vessel vibrated, and broke in her soul, the light fell, struggled, and went dark. She was all dark, will-less, having only the receptive will.
He kissed her, with his soft, enveloping kisses, and she responded to them completely, her mind, her soul gone out. Darkness cleaving to darkness, she hung close to him, pressed herself into soft flow of his kiss, pressed herself down, down to the source and core of his kiss, herself covered and enveloped in the warm, fecund flow of his kiss, that travelled over her, flowed over her, covered her, flowed over the last fibre of her, so they were one stream, one dark fecundity, and she clung at the core of him, with her lips holding open the very bottommost source of him.
So they stood in the utter, dark kiss, that triumphed over them both, subjected them, knitted them into one fecund nucleus of the fluid darkness.
It was bliss, it was the nucleolating of the fecund darkness. Once the vessel had vibrated till it was shattered, the light of consciousness gone, then the darkness reigned, and the unutterable satisfaction.
They stood enjoying the unmitigated kiss, taking it, given to it endlessly, and still it was not exhausted. Their veins fluttered, their blood ran together as one stream.
Till gradually a sleep, a heaviness settled on them, a drowse, and out of the drowse, a small light of consciousness woke up. Ursula became aware of the night around her, the water lapping and running full just near, the trees roaring and soughing in gusts of wind.
She kept near to him, in contact with him, but she became ever more and more herself. And she knew she must go to catch her train. But she did not want to draw away from contact with him.
At length they roused and set out. No longer they existed in the unblemished darkness. There was the glitter of a bridge, the twinkle of lights across the river, the big flare of the town in front and on their right.
But still, dark and soft and incontestable, their bodies walked untouched by the lights, darkness supreme and arrogant.
(443-445, XV: The Bitterness of Ecstasy)
He looked back at her. She saw his eyes, tense and brilliant, fierce, not loving. But her will had left her. A strange weight was on her limbs. She was giving way. She was giving up. He led her through the wall of prickly trees, that were difficult to come through, to a place where was a little space and a pile of dead boughs. He threw one or two dry ones down, put his coat and waistcoat over them, and she had to lie down there under the boughs of the tree, like an animal, while he waited, standing there in his shirt and breeches, watching her with haunted eyes. But still he was provident—he made her lie properly, properly. Yet he broke the band of her underclothes, for she did not help him, only lay inert.
He too had bared the front part of his body and she felt his naked flesh against her as he came into her. For a moment he was still inside her, turgid there and quivering. Then as he began to move, in the sudden helpless orgasm, there awoke in her new strange thrills rippling inside her. Rippling, rippling, rippling, like a flapping overlapping of soft flames, soft as feathers, running to points of brilliance, exquisite, exquisite and melting her all molten inside. It was like bells rippling up and up to a culmination. She lay unconscious of the wild little cries she uttered at the last. But it was over too soon, too soon, and she could no longer force her own conclusion with her own activity. This was different, different. She could do nothing. She could no longer harden and grip for her own satisfaction upon him. She could only wait, wait and moan in spirit as she felt him withdrawing, withdrawing and contracting, coming to the terrible moment when he would slip out of her and be gone. Whilst all her womb was open and soft, and softly clamoring, like a sea-anemone under the tide, clamoring for him to come in again and make a fulfillment for her. She clung to him unconscious in passion, and he never quite slipped from her, and she felt the soft bud of him within her stirring, and strange rhythms flushing up into her with a strange rhythmic growing motion, swelling and swelling till it filled all her cleaving consciousness, and then began again the unspeakable motion that was not really motion, but pure deepening whirlpools of sensation swirling deeper and deeper through all her tissue and consciousness, till she was one perfect concentric fluid of feeling, and she lay there crying in unconscious inarticulate cries. The voice out of the uttermost night, the life! The man heard it beneath him with a kind of awe, as his life sprang out into her. And as it subsided, he subsided too and lay utterly still, unknowing, while her grip on him slowly relaxed, and she lay inert. And they lay and knew nothing, not even of each other, both lost. Till at last he began to rouse and become aware of his defenseless nakedness, and she was aware that his body was loosening its clasp on her. He was coming apart; but in her breast she felt she could not bear him to leave her uncovered. He must cover her now for ever.
But he drew away at last, and kissed her and covered her over, and began to cover himself. She lay looking up to the boughs of the tree, unable as yet to move. He stood and fastened up his breeches, looking round. All was dense and silent, save for the awed dog that lay with its paws against its nose. He sat down again on the brushwood and took Connie’s hand in silence.
She turned and looked at him. “We came off together that time,” he said.
She did not answer.
“It’s good when it’s like that. Most folks live their lives through and they never know it,” he said, speaking rather dreamily.
She looked into his brooding face.
“Do they?” she said. “Are you glad?”
He looked back into her eyes. “Glad,” he said. “Ay, but never mind.” He did not want her to talk. And he bent over her and kissed her, and she felt, so he must kiss her for ever.
At last she sat up.
“Don’t people often come off together?” she asked with naive curiosity.
“A good many of them never. You can see by the raw look of them.”
(Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Chapter Ten)
Cut off, trail off, the “manifesto” rests somewhere else.
APL has something to do with the presence-absence of its addressees.
APL has something to do with the coldness of concepts like “the feminine.”
APL has to do with a desire to contribute to the posthumous.
It “keeps in touch” with what remains out of touch.
It is or it aspires to be the out-of-touch.