The Purloined Letter

If there’s something disturbing for you in the way I relate to the absent you, I’m not able to experience that disturbance without your intervention. I can think it, imagine it, but it’s not something I can feel. I do not know how to teach myself to be less intense, to give you a breather, the only way would be to be told to do it as maybe you are doing now, or in a sense by making me do it, through the automatic peace and docility that comes after being fed a piece of communication. I was talking about my greed yesterday, how I am afraid that if you gave me something, a little bit of attention, I would ask for more, perhaps too much more, but I don’t know what this means, other than the fact of your withdrawal. I spoke about how sex, on the other hand, never seemed problematic, never greedy—that I had some concerns about the possibility that I’d run out of it, or that the climaxes would become too much of the same, but perhaps something about my thinking life is actually reinforcing their novelty—last morning, I had my first sexual hallucination, "hypnopompic," since some day in 2014, and I’ve been experiencing erotic sensation differently from day to day, like the weather, which can be so wonderful if one just pays attention to it. I wish this sensation could be more contagious. It’s pure energy, pure variation.

I’m sorry if this is sort of adding to the tiredness, just a week or two ago I wondered if I was simply a bullet of lead or a blob of mercury, and then rejected the thought, and then I’m thinking it again. but I also feel good enough from hearing from you that I feel like I could be more calm for a while, though we’ll see about that.

I don’t know what the hell is inside of me, this windpipe, windbag, etc., or more pointedly, should I say that any time I say something, it reveals its falsehood to me—so when I read you I also wonder how much of what you’re saying isn’t true was once the case, and it’s a little frightening to do the computations. Or it’s not. It’s not frightening, it’s actually exhilarating, whenever I feel the slightest intimations of disgust or hatred, when I see the word “hate” in the fiction, I am glad, these are emotions which I feel have been suppressed or absent for too long—at least they’re emotions I can relate to with some immediacy, which seem to move one from one place to another place, and so however you may seem in text, I experience it as good, ultimately.

It’s interesting to hear about being admired, etc.—I don’t think I could take it.
I assume with a certain of automatic repulsion that it’s sickening, poisoning.
But then again I think I have liked being the object, it just seems to rot quick.

I enjoy getting to know you, however repetitive you may be, however depressed or tired or whatever, regardless of whatever “bad media” you think you engage with, regardless of my perceptions of the value of the content you like on twitter, regardless of the long silences. It’s just not possible to get to know you, in a way, when there’s no communication, even if there’s something indirect going on. Why do you seem to wish to be watched? And then you reject the specularity of it all. I’m admonishing you back, but not really, because this seems like a perfectly reasonable knot to find oneself in. Sometimes I write to you because I’m happy and sometimes (rarely, as with the berlant email) I do it because I’m stuck and because I feel it will bring me energy or change.

I don’t know what makes minor interactions seem so dangerous to you at this point, though at this point I’m so afraid of the scent of fear in you that I can’t really imagine what it would mean to communicate with you on a more regular basis either. Well I can, I can, and the first thing that shoots to my mind is small vignettes. I find the idea of using my website to communicate with you sleazy, but I share things from there with you because I’m no longer so afraid of exposing its inchoateness and because it is another side of how I process the world that I obviously can’t present in an email. Also I did it more immediately because I eventually figured out that you were looking at my website and was embarrassed (it probably would’ve lain fallow for a longish while otherwise). I like the idea of having copied you in a sense, and of continuing to copy, or to unconsciously “introject” aspects of your writing that I’ve been exposed to. I think of it less as a mark of devotion or admiration than a kind of threat, an act of aggression, however playful—insinuations of a desire to usurp you, to steal, to plagiarize, to appropriate. Of course, it could also just be a way of humiliating myself. In any case, the point is to create energy, provoke a response, and not embalm you in some kind of noble gas. The way I process disturbance is to increase intensity because it has always worked, I’ve never really been exposed to a true failure, a true loss, or at least I forget loss because I’ve caulked things with so much excess. I remember beginning the site with a sense of loss—you had contacted me in June, and though I wasn’t particularly invested in getting to know you again, I felt a bit sad that there wasn’t more of you or anyone that summer, and was veering back into a kind of anhedonic inhumanism: me and orchids. It is possible that I have already lost, and that this is all just hurtling towards its end.

[I took a break here to urinate, wash my face, etc.]

you know the risk involved with communicating with me—that I would find you boring and discard you. you know that you’re unimpeachable as it stands (I can project whatever I’d like, make the elements of my career stand in abstract numinous relation to you)—and all the material in the February post which i had been writing probably as you were writing that email just goes to show that I am somewhat more interested in Lacan right now than I am in you, given the paucity of my knowledge of you in the moment. But I do not know if that is an illusion, in fact I believe it is, the illusion of obsession with a dead writer’s text is one fundamentally distinct from the illusion of an obsession with the text of a person I know and may know more of in the future.

I can work through my thoughts, working them as if wringing all the soapy water out of them, and then they mean very little, but of course as you apprehend them for the first time, they may seem to mean a great deal, or at least something, while for me they are just newsprint that I rip up to add carbon to the compost pile. I don’t think I’m so absolute (absolutism is stupid) that any one idea I may have about you would last, so long as I am thinking, and working through life in multiple contexts, i.e. with and around others. also it doesn’t disgust me that poetry would be rare and occasional for you, as for me the public fame of the poem as an object for hermetic structuralist analysis is something I’ve been intensively repudiating. Also, I rarely, or never, think about math, or do math; I don’t expect you to engage me when I’m sending block quotes, even when cognizable, though maybe you can understand the basic gesture behind it (sometimes stuckness, sometimes elation). I find whatever jealousy I might have regarding your relationships with others really circumstantial, arbitrary, meaningless—except for the fact that your social circle may tell me a story about you that isn’t concordant with that otherwise purified or rarefied image—this “always happens,” I meet my friends’ friends and have some sort of allergic reaction to the experience, which calms down as I spend more time with them and with my own knots.

I also tell myself, perhaps not often enough, but multiple times at this point, that I can’t imagine what it would be like to be on the receiving end of all this. I don’t know how one could “take it.” Your email begins with the problem of not knowing what I want from you, which sounds like a problem, and though it comes to soften a bit, it is essentially (under one polarity) an admonishment. I think the first words out of my mouth were “You would have to know me from birth” (to know what’s going on here). I mean, “don’t worry too much about comprehending what’s going on, it’s really 99% me, and if you’re there, just pretend it’s not really you. Pretend it could be anybody.” Or relish it, or whatever. In a sense, I’m happy to be doing this, on another, it comes out of mostly anguish, and a desire to pass through that anguish.

I think I can reliably say that I “need” interventions like this (your email) otherwise this whole thing would be, of course, headed towards an end. I am already plotting my escape, in a sense, out of an intense form of devotion to thaumaturgy: what would be most miraculous of me, I think, would be for me to completely lose interest in whatever I’ve made out of you. Not to lose in the loose sense of what happens when I lose myself entirely in my work and studies, because I’ve been sated by some glimmer of your presence. I mean lose as in replace you by a new paradigm—which is what you become to the exclusion of much else in long periods of silence. To construct out of someone else (living being, close at hand, not one of those favored dead or distant authors) an oppositional, totally non-overlapping paradigm. I literally can’t imagine it. I can only refer to differences between you and Lara, or maybe a few other people I’ve known in the past, but I always eventually felt my attachments to them to be misconceptions of a sort (maybe Lara is the only exception, in parts). There are easy reasons for this: something to do with the core of my sexuality and the numerous falsehoods I encountered along the way (e.g., the notion that greek pederasty was the only model I could follow). Something about the amount of time I’ve known you, and the circumstances under which we met. And some actual, simple, deep similarities in world view—value placed on the especial or particular, the “inscape” of things, and also a very tense, strong melancholic core, which just manifests itself in opposite (complementary?) ways.

I think of the fun it would be to succeed by this metric—miraculous detachment—but then it sickens me, nauseates me quite completely, the idea of having cast you aside, unwilling and unable to engage if you were to reappear—what is so evil about that? It seems to me like the ultimate sin, to forget—perhaps that is just the story of my relationships with people, a series of forgetting, which is made stronger again by the “caulk of excess” (the sense something and I have been through). There is a core of me that is pure sex, and while I think that is true of all, it seems I am more invested in saying it, and in acting in intensity (for which sexuality ultimately stands), and that I happen to be in the privileged position of being able to spend my days elaborating.....

Rain corroded the snow into a patchwork of darkness. I took a nap before the meeting. I thought, I have become disgusting. If there is a message it is—it reminded me of—a line I had once tweeted—he sews my labia up / it is my verbal profusion. I thought, I have become sick. And I was always sickening. I curled and curled and curled and curled and curled and curled up into myself and there was no center there, nothing to curl around or into. you venomous cunt you venomous you venomous cunt whose opening is so much like a typeset glyph, let the dark ink seep out, or hold onto it, hold onto the little other that can't be seen or spoken. I am reading too much about psychosis and letters and nœuds.

He seems to me to want me to kill myself. He tells me that my optimism is delusional. I think I've been affirmed a preferrer of God over men. When I try to scream no sound comes out. I shake the pen so hard my brain shakes with it. Why is it clogged? Why is it dried? Splatters out like menstrual blood.

“True love, on the other hand, as Lacan puts it, “gives way to hatred” (146). When love is true it neither conceals antagonism nor lives with it; it opens up to hatred. This is, precisely, the kind of love the female character in Antichrist is capable of.” (Ahmed Elbeshlawy, Woman in Lars von Trier's Cinema: 1996-2014, Ch. 7, p. 142)

It's no secret that your writings have become more aggressive. This is a language I speak, understand, and mirror, though whether or not or how I act aggressively in response is another matter. In other words, I feel you. You're right. But I've already thought about this—and I've already said this. In a sense I would ask the question back. What is it that you want from me? The only thing I understand from what you've written is shut the fuck up. Or maybe it's this one that's different from all the rest, this is the final. Or it's an inflection point, a blind spot, a period, a punctum.

If you could hate me, I could understand you. Not only that, I would not hate you back. I would accept your hatred and feel a gratitude towards it. I don't just mean hate as pure feeling. I mean hate bolstered with facts, with accusations, with substance. Something I could remember and chew into.

I am hyperbolizing. I am unsafe. I am undealable. Your email, in the way it begins, essentially says that no, you are not asking me to get scarce, not that exactly, though that may be a consequence or a temporary symptom. I am in shock because you seem to be troubled by the question of how we might communicate. I had assumed, whether or not I could say it, that the answer was no, that no communication was possible.