These days, when someone thanks me, I shudder.
I can approach this in one of three ways: “I” can write to no one or “I” can write to “you.” I can write as if I were commanded by another pair of eyes, which sees me as a “she.” But there’s a certain artifice in the “she” which I’ve come to disavow; it feels too obvious that the writer who chooses the third person wants to escape some limitation imagined around the use of a perspective reducible to one’s own, but there is, in fact, a great deal of indirection embedded in the “I.” You never know who’s speaking, with the “I,” and you never know who the “you” truly is. Anyway, I’ve already chosen the path: to write to you. Dylan, I like what you wrote, so I took that sentence and wrote it down here, like the text that’s cut into trees. Now that I’ve read that sentence, I can never claim it as mine, and yet no one but you would know that I took it from you, unless I told them so.
But she forgot to tell you that she likes how the third person can place her somewhere.
Who’s the third person? A fake God invented by the pagan speaker? She wanted to remind you that the “I” here isn’t the same as the I who writes emails. Not that I’ve ever written you an email, not that I ever intend to write you an email, but… and if you wonder why I don’t want to write to you, or have you read my writing, it’s not because I don’t adore you, but because I think this whole writing thing has been a cold, hard, mean business, and I heard you like softness and warmth, and I have to agree with you; what good does it do to love the bad, to question the primacy of bliss?
i dreamt that dylan was sleeping in my room, which was already bright, and i went out into the living room, which had been refurnished and had modern scandinavian furniture, the stuff you’d find in ikea, but the original designs. my mother was in the kitchen reheating some liquid in small metal square molds like something i might find in japan, but putting them on large burners, and i told her to put them on smaller ones, and we got in a fight about it. i was so upset that i felt i was going to fall apart, a familiar feeling from our recent encounters. the liquid was yellow and viscous and somewhat clear. i went back to dylan and we embraced at the base of a yellow circular couch with a column in the middle. my mother wasn’t in the living room, but i wanted her to see us, and was also afraid of being “caught.” somewhere in the middle of this dream i saw that zane had updated his website, there were at least five new posts, the background color was a pinkish mauve, and the title phrases were a bit tender, or at least i searched for tenderness in them, but i didn’t read them before something interrupted me. in a separate, earlier dream, men were getting in fights on the streets, they looked like professional boxers. the impacts seemed to have a bounce to them, and they were loud and artificial, with foley. the whole thing was cartoonish, but i was still scared of the violence of it. then he told me his dream, which involved me living somewhere (near him?) and taking soiled fragments of towel to different places to clean them? or rather he saw a grid on an screen that showed a map of the places i would go to clean the towel, or fragments of towel, which had urine on them? i think of that dream as a dream about my promiscuity; it was like the dream i attempted to share with him but had forgotten: i was walking in a neighborhood and a very sickly looking man surrounded by sickly dogs started to talk to me, he asked me if i would not feel so healthy or clean if i left a dress of mine in some guy’s house, if that guy’s house was not clean. i thought about leaving clothing behind in zane’s place and the clothes smelling sour at the end of it, even though zane’s place doesn’t smell bad or sour. the guy that looked mangy told me i looked healthy lying on the ground in the house i had been in, i don’t remember why i was moving between houses. that’s an inexact transcript of what i recorded on the morning of 2/18, saturday, i couldn’t recall it without referencing the voice memo. it was the morning after my date with alex. i’m huddled here wondering if i left my black mohair sweater at alex’s place; it might be hanging out somewhere in his loft, where i took it off around when we kissed. i couldn’t have worn it on saturday or sunday because i barely left the house both days and it was too warm and i was with you and would have remembered if i had. i know i didn’t wear it on monday because i wore the thinner cardigan that day, and tuesday was when i realized i didn’t have it. fuck, i must have left the sweater at alex’s house, the dream told me so, i left an article of clothing at some guy’s house for sure! and this mangy dude told me i looked healthy lying down there in his large clean bed. ewww, this is what zane says, you look healthy. not beautiful, healthy. i don’t mind it, being called healthy or clean, but it’s not dylan’s way of speaking. i’m supposed to see alex on friday. he told me today that he almost got in a high-speed car crash, and that he just returned to ithaca. in other words, he almost died. i wonder if he’ll have sex with me, i don’t really want to have sex with someone that i don’t find compelling; you fucked me so hard that my vagina started to feel raw. i find you compelling. compellinger than even yourself, the standard of compelling. more compelling each time we meet, building the compellingness upon yourself, a palimpsest of compelling. i’m supposed to go on a first date with another person who engaged in more bookish flirtation with me on tinder on sunday, which means i might be more at ease knowing that there’s a basis for the connection that doesn’t lie in sex. will he be compelling? in any case i don’t care about having sex, i’ve had so much of it, it needs time to resonate in its white room, this imagined white room of no furniture and no object, not exactly a container for isolation, but like a calm field of snow. behind all this is my continuing affection for john; i speak to him at least twice, often three times a week, depending on whether i take the initiative to visit the table he sits at in the zeus café area. i dunno if it feels strange to see how i’m stretching my time around this matrix of men. i hesitated to share the url of the website with you when you asked because i wanted it to start with something that had been conceived after our encounters. i’m weird about my promiscuity, about the indiscriminateness of my attention. i wouldn’t say i’m ashamed of it, but i do feel guilt, and am concerned with the monogamy beneath it. isn’t it the case that i posit you as “the one” recipient of this statement, for now, but that that “for now” ruins the illusion of the pure permanence of “you” as the sole addressee? but i know i am rubbing against this business of address a little too hard.
the fourth meeting with dylan made me diffract; i felt pushed between the business of printing the photos and the desire to be as close to him as possible. like imagine light being pushed through the strings of a harp made up of alternating rows of two kinds of thing: the need to finish the business, the desire to lose oneself. so the frisson of distance and desire diffracts me, is punishing in the most delightful way; i’m “spaghettified.” i find the precarity of a standing embrace extremely powerful, it is even more potent than the sublime, than the experience of standing at the edge of a huge waterfall and wondering what it would be like to pulled in. it’s worse than that, the standing embrace, because when one enters a standing embrace one knows that both parties will uphold that embrace for as long as forever; no one knows how to end it. dy is awesome (awe-some) because he doesn’t seem to be afraid of excessive enjoyment. the fucking that led neither of us to come but almost to come was a sort of inverse of the time we came together and i loved it just as much. i love the fact that we went on past the good end to the third meeting and had that non-intersection during the fourth. then the dissatisfied misphases of fucking later had their own comic interest: my cunt clenching up after it had had too much, the strangeness of the smaller orgasm that came when you caused the tremor in the windows. if i had been more embarrassed i wouldn’t have come; i wasn’t embarrassed because i figured that if we woke up the downstairs neighbors it would register to them as a supernatural or paranormal occurrence, and not as something so mundane as two fuckers. and i like the notion that he could know me so well so as to make me come, until climax would no longer have the weight of a historical event: the notion of orgasm as a minor, uncountable occurrence, as a joke on nothing. “it’s nothing now,” to come and come and come, whereas before sex “felt like nothing.”
you sleeping beside me is in a lot of ways better than sex itself–or it is, for me, fundamental. it conditions the possibility of orgasm, the possiblity of coming again and again; it gives space for the unconscious to rove about and generate new sensibilities. the fact that i can feel so at ease with him that i can lose myself to sleep while he’s there, that his hand can be on me and i can lose myself still, that’s the most wondrous form of feeling nothing, and i contrast this with the intense sleeplessness i’ve felt while with the previous two men; the first night dylan slept over i fell asleep so soon that i don’t remember a single detail of the prevening period. another great form of nothing: i became so wet during the last night together that his cock felt like nothing inside me, and it was because of what had caused my cunt to dissolve before that: he had been the seat upon which i sat as i selected his photos for printing; while wanting to do it efficiently but also hoping to see as much of his produce as possible, for the sake of endless enjoyment, i sat and felt his erection pressed into me, and yet i had to do what i was supposed to do. ‘twas a pressure that dissolved me in the best possible way. but i needed assurance to come. my soul’d been whipped open, it needed a feathery bed of time in order to reach its rest. the soul refused to come during the subsequent long building fuck because i wasn’t sure if he was going to stay the night. so i became a despotic cunt-driven horny little bitch, making him do the thing i found most necessary for the soul-cunt’s release from her endless heat.
in between some of the student conferences i went over to the table where john was sitting and we ended up discussing the poem which i consider to be the greatest poem in the english language, george herbert’s “love (iii).” i was excited to see him become so excited about it, so absorbed in the shock in the fact that love and the speaker exchange roles as guest and host. i wanted to tell him about how dylan had left that day, how i had been an insistent host, had made him to sleep over; the argument being: i won’t come unless you stay until morning, and if i don’t come you won’t come, but i came, and he didn’t come, and then he came, and then the next morning he came, but i didn’t come. also: i insist you use this sleeping bag, i will make you the warm one.
i dunno, i want to write something beautiful and sweet, but i’m covered with dust and sin.
Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back
guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed love, observing me grow slack
from my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
if I lacked anything.
A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:
Love said, you shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply
Who made the eyes but I?
Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.
it’s a poem about love that doesn’t involve the beloved; here we get the direct representation of the dialogue between the speaker and love himself, in the form of a bare record of the first encounter. all we know of each person is what he invites, what he argues, in the present of the moment that happened once in the past. the poem depicts for us a single unrepeatable encounter, which is at least half of why I feel like I’m falling in love while reading it. it becomes possible to meet again for the first time, again and again, each time one reads this poem. and it’s astounding: most humans don’t come in direct contact with love; love ambushes them with his arrows, then the human “falls in love.” this brave speaker knocks on love’s door, and instead of getting what he wants, another guest, a human he can love, love makes him the guest. be love’s guest. be in love. be in love with love.
when i went on that first date with alex it was with a kind of impersonal, defensive posture: dy’s gonna be gone, i’m on the prowl for sex, i want sex in part because it’s interesting in and of itself, like a work of art which can be viewed from anywhere; it’s impersonal, it allows me to connect with anyone, it distances me from the difficulties of loss. but of course at that point we had already met twice and at the end of the second meeting i knew i liked you so much that there were no barriers to me wanting more of you. and then we met a third time, and i was like, no, i don’t need to distance myself from how much i like you, because you resonate in me. so the second meeting with alex felt reluctant for me; it was done out of a sense of obligation, it left me irritated and sad.
irritated and sad, and dragged down; i never want to see him again, but i do, in order to apologize, and to part properly, and to be able to articulate what i’ve violated with myself; the notion that a true connection needs to be created with and through and prior to sex. irritated because i was turned on when we touched, but he wasn’t right; i would have fucked him if he made me, but somehow both the fact that we didn’t and the fact that we could have irritated me, i don’t know what i want. i don’t want to see him again, i’d rather be chaste, but he gave me a container of leftover soup, and i wonder if i should return the container. i wonder if he wants to have sex, or if it is merely a fixture of unconscious desire, an instinct which he hopes to keep under control.
i do feel inadequate to the task of living sometimes, since i’ve felt so good with you. what am i supposed to do now that i’ve had all this happiness? some of it is automatic: i seem to be teaching a lot better this semester, after having met you, and i seem to be having better interactions with the friends i encounter on campus. i don’t feel promiscuous on account of multiplicity: having you and john at once as objects of fascination doesn’t feel promiscuous to me because i like you so much, you in the plural. but it does feel promiscuous to me that i would invite sexual touch with someone who doesn’t arouse that sort of fascination which i accord to the beloved; it feels like a betrayal of the task of being with love. so, I was re-reading Adam Phillips’s Monogamy. I liked all the aphorisms that had to do with the multiplicity of selves that we seek to control through monogamy; the notion that “monogamy is a way of getting the versions of ourselves down to a minimum” (§7). And then there are the aphorisms about excess and proportion; the notion that we’re terrified of excessive pleasure, excessive solitude. I like this one in particular, on “celebration”:
No one is indifferent to praise; but there is no test of character like the taking of compilments. We are wary of people who are keen to be praised, because that is not what they are supposed to want, butmerely what they might be lucky enough to get. No one is willing to make too great a claim for the wish to be praised, or indeed, for that talent for praising oneself that is called boasting.But what if our strongest wish was to be praised—and so to praise—not to be loved, or understood, or desired, or punished? What would our lives be like? Or rather, what would our relationships be like? How long would they last? What would people be doing together?
We might find ourselves saying things like: the cruelest thing one can do to one’s partner is to be good at fidelity but bad at celebration. Or, people have affairs either because they’re not praised enough by their partners, or because they are not praised in the way they most like. Or, it’s not difficult to sustain a relationship but it’s impossible to keep a celebration going. The long applause becomes baffling. (§43)
that’s the genius of dylan for me: his ability to keep the celebration going, the long applause which doesn’t become baffling, even if it does baffle, the fact that we saw each other four times this month.
and i mean, this would be an alright, an adequate place to end. but i just thought i’d mention that i read your writing on facebook and i enjoyed it, how much of it is about these women you’ve met, too! the one who presented to you a “unmarked white paper bag” with a sweater inside; the one you shared a long, non-sexual hug with at the ayahuasca retreat; i like how you are with all these women, in part because it makes me feel less alone to know that there are these other women out there who have enjoyed being with you. today i had a long dream in which i spoke to zane’s mother; in her house, where zane was holed up in his room, she told me that he was very depressed, and i kept on waiting out there at the kitchen table, talking to her, and feeling quite interested in sharing that space with her; as if i was more interested in becoming a mother’s friend than in the fact that zane was there, though i was concerned for him and wanted to see him, but was afraid that my mere presence would make him even more sick and depressed. but i was concerned for him through his mother; his mother was indispensable to the dream. i was interested in her and in tracing out what she desired, the outlines of desire over the course of her life. yesterday, i had attempted to write to my mother about my recent happiness, but it ended up being a reflection on the past unhappinesses, and once i finished with that, it was impossible to start the first sentence involving you. what am i supposed to say? when you texted me for the first time this year, i was in the middle of being fucked by this kind man from berlin, who’s actually from etters, p—a—… his glossy trails of semen cleansed me of some unhappiness, and now i’m joyously reading whitman again for the first time since the ages of 16 and 19. he made me come twice… one of the orgasms was shared, overlapping… feels dumb to anatomize experience in this way, counting happiness in units of coming-off. but it’s not all that inappropriate, as what matters comes in between, and isn’t anatomized, will never be. and you would’ve thought that being happy involved separating oneself from the props of men, but here i am happy because of this one nice man and this other nice man. i’m reading a d.h. lawrence story called “sun” about a woman who has sex with the sun, merely by lying down naked in the grass.
