Another Love Discourse, page 14
A handsome rain-shined forest of upstate New York.
A narrow alley of New England.
An arresting light shining off that one particular face.
That which gives us our punctum has to do with our more subjective past: how we have learned to see, layers of more personal (even aleatory) history which compose our vision.
The strange pastness of a photograph, Roland notes, rests in its doubled time signature. An image seems to interrupt an ongoing event yet blends with presentness in both the photographer’s act of spectatorship and our own when stumbling upon the image.
Elsewhere he says the imperfect tense, in contrast, unlinked with photography, is the tense of fascination: the action continues beyond the duration of the words voiced. Examples of the imperfect tense: I always pined for mother or tomorrow we will find some improvement.
And what Roland appreciates about this form is how it seems to be alive and yet it doesn’t move; imperfect presence, imperfect death; neither oblivion nor resurrection; simply the exhausting lure of memory.
Mourning will forever stay our act lacking tense. Despite all the attempts to stratify it, grief rejects rungs, strainers, durations, philtrums. For all its taxonomists, grief becomes more like a thick peasant soup with the ladles of the world stirring it, everyone getting a singular portion, each tasting only what they can handle. Mother is mother.
The aorist—the preterite past, in which a simple act is a task fully completed—is one of those forms young Roland loved, and he used it whenever he wrote secretly fawning, pun-riddled letters to his first beloved: a schoolmate named Reybarol, who traveled upward the golden path of the successful educator in the tendentious academy Roland dedicated his life toward tearing down.
Stuck in sanatoria, nursing ill health, unable to amuse himself with city life, young Roland wrote letter after letter to Reybarol, powered by eros and despair. His friend, ascendant, received these pun-riddled gifts, and what did he make of them? Did he understand more of Roland than we do now? Was he the reader who became ideal?
Literature, that extended adolescence: the belief you can still find someone like a first ideal reader.
Say you are stuck far from what you consider life or education, say you find yourself unhealthy, it might become natural that you dedicate yourself to toppling the golden calves you believe live in the far-off center of everything. To imagine a center: an adolescent illusion. To write toward such a center: an aspiration toward maturity. To believe you could be understood: the hope of infancy, our deathbeds, or any life you try to string up between like fancy fairylights. How literature appears to so many of us. How it appeared to Roland, predicting and vanishing, his smile our own Cheshire cat, bemused and ironic between anyone’s lines.
Alteration
This editor for the Roland book: I had first met him years ago when we were all so painfully young. Living in Manhattan, I held down three jobs trying to find time to be a Roland scholar. To this editor, I had sent a Roland-inspired story written as a man in love with a younger man. Those first years, before beginning to write on Roland for the dwindling market of those who might understand, I wrote only as an older man.
Why? In my personal life I knew in bed mainly older people—twenty-plus years older, once even forty. My innumeracy one of the innumerable problems that have dogged me. (Cf. problem with timing and history.)
In the first of these stories, I was a Japanese monk in love with a boy at the monastery. In the second, a male model in love with a particular artist at the weekly sitting sessions. Is it of worth to recall why it was so convenient to gender myself male in my early writing?
1) My eyes had been trained to see as a man. (The western canon, which could also mean all the ways a civilization has used to avoid hurt.)
2) My eyes had been trained to see as a man. (Identification with father, which could also mean the formation of a family, created to avoid hurt.)
3) My eyes had been trained to see as a man. (The paucity of women writing around me, despite the flourishing of women emerging elsewhere at that time, keeping central as a performance of labor my parents’ workaholism, which stays an epigenetic, immigrant, and capitalist means of avoiding hurt.)
In that precursor time, I envisioned staying with gender hidden, like another, publishing under initials: R.D. Using the dated term—a tomboy? What in the swirling patchouli airs of northern California created such assumption? A child, I wished to play endless summertime games of capture-the-flag or horse with my brothers’ team of friends, then scrawl observations later, hoping that sight alone would not separate me.
Can a female writer ever fully be inducted into the grotto?
That first grotto crush: a boy who seemed knowing in every centimeter of his being: a halo of hair, his neck canted sideways, a soft pelt. Today he grins over social media, a large genial musician, open to collaboration. As children who found themselves undertaking odd habits at the edge of adult peril, the magic rituals of our days a way to decode whatever happened next, we stayed solemn in games under the wingspan of giant birds but indoors found levity, conferred in the unfinished low-ceilinged basement where the dirt of the crawl space suggested dead bodies could be stacked, by a dense iron safe locked with an unknown treasure which no one will ever remove from that house ever, even after my mother’s death—there I was almost inducted.
Dirt, rust, mold, concrete, an unknown treasury, plus inclusion in the boys’ club: not dissimilar to literature. The possibility that staying by the side of that club, watching and knowing in the present, and recollecting with whatever degree of tranquility, might after all equate with belonging: the writer’s dream.
Who came to shine the way? An uncaged bird of an author who spoke at our school, magisterial, her presence so large I recall her as if she were a giant series of lights hung from the roof. Or the female writer whose autofiction tilted on my mother’s bedside, a contemporary pioneer wedding prose and prurience, frolicking in something called the Upper West Side with ease so exotic it seemed to spell the writer’s life.
I kept bumping into those who kept wishing to yoke writing and conventional femininity: the peer who, in our post-college lives, appeared at a wedding wearing a buxom-bright red dress, claiming she could not be a successful writer as, if you were female, you had to sleep with critics and editors, her concept a ripped thread from some mid-century Hollywood casting couch.
In contrast, I wanted there to be an illuminated scroll we would all write alongside gender, to have writing forever queer the world. Let writing be the way for us to love (without syntagm) friends (the community of our future readers) so we might mate with, as Roland saw it, the bliss of understanding.
Because what Roland saw was how all text affects us in two ways: pleasure (plaisir) or bliss/orgasm (jouissance), which correlate to what he calls readable or writable texts. When you encounter the readerly/readable text, you find pleasure, yet your position as a subject in the center of your own empire does not shift. While what he calls the writable/writerly text offers bliss, a way to explode literary codes and let the reader enter new modes of being, no longer living the false myth of the dominant, subject position.
How do you ever know which text you see? Roland thinks writerly ones matter a bit more, those in which the composition invites you in, those in which you as reader end up connecting with the composition itself so that our codes stay open, streaming through, next to you yet also placing you in a whole nother borough. According to him, take on a readerly text and you stay a staid burgher having tea in your house at your usual hour in your usual armchair. Passive, you receive known pleasures and then shut the book. While Roland would say the writerly text asks for a little effort. Maybe you find yourself enacting some of the actions of the writer to understand the dance out of your usual self, perhaps you become no longer the subject in your armchair, maybe at least one of the codes in the writerly text asks you to alter the very walls of your codes—cultural, hermeneutic, proairetic, semantic, symbolic—all so that you end up in the exact field you might never have guessed before. Your understanding changes the text as it might change you, you have cowritten it, and when you return to it, the book will also have been changed by your future self, you will have rewritten understanding so that reading has the possibility of moving beyond pleasure to become bliss.
In other words, the writerly text is premised on greater optimism about our capacity to change as people—but who’s to say?
.
Meetings
The ruddy editor had wanted to meet me in lower Manhattan, in a café which would become significant for every other later meeting, historic only in how memory hungered to layer over it, the palimpsest and signifier awaiting future memories.
I came into the cafe and the light rose in a funnel behind his hair which stacked vertically up toward the skylight. Have you not had that moment in life when phenomena proliferate to signal directions of your future life? In his case, as with others, it was as if heaven’s lux finger pointed to say someone would become significant.
You’re the first writer I ever wanted to meet, he said, embodying camaraderie. By that logic of encounter, a friendship was born.
More about this editor: he presents to the world a dazzling and breezily associative dismissive mind, not above name-dropping with a kid’s glee, as if to say: hey, I got to go to this party with all the important ones, let’s sneak in! An editor impatient with lesser mortals. Not exactly the kind to come north and skulk around the property shooting at my retooled garden shed as if to create a series of commas on the page. Who has it in for me?
Mature with a cohort and you will see others’ eccentricities become more pronounced. In the editor’s case, what has grown along with his brilliant expertise is an impatience, neither vicious nor destructive, with those who fail to move through time as he does.
Yet who knows? The game I once loved involved guessing where your opponent placed battleships on a series of coordinates, as you placed yours on a different series, but no longer am I certain, if I ever was, that my inner map has any one-to-one correlation with any outside series of points.
Roland says language holds the necessary yet always illusory hope that you might be able to plot any part of yourself to the outer world. When a marriage rends itself, with children involved, you pilot your course off the gameboard of everyone else’s expectations, and then what can you say or believe, what authority do you heed?
Could the bulletpocking come from the person truest to fever dreams but least likely, X who might wish most to mark the distance from first gameboard to current reality? We were a family, he keeps saying (had only his actions said the same). Memory of his words: ballistic, x’d out, the dream of the intact.
Unrest
Today the mortgage
official is again after me.
I neglected to sign
something, the disclosure,
federal laws and something else
make her cranky:
I take it personally.
My failure to sustain order.
Try as you might,
forever someone
will be disappointed.
Why is it some women
seem to know how to keep
their physical space so orderly?
I knew you were neglected,
(Vegas mate said). So many mates have
seen this little girl.
You too may find it hard
to hide your most vulnerable self.
The insect grows its carapace
but the soft underbelly remains.
When the genius friend
suggested I do what everyone
often suggests—now
dead, she
gave me a little clay
figurine to imagine my
current self cradling
that elusive inner child—
I could not.
This particular exercise
stays so difficult:
be the adult knowing
how to tend your inner self,
you must know how to attach. Hunger for intimacy,
yet you might also have disorganized
attachment style—that great combo
platter of anxiety and avoidance.
You too might wish to please, bearing
the hope of being loved not just for what you
can do, you too might fear
being taken over by the great
tidal wave of others’ needs. Believe
others mostly narcissistic, you can find
very little
reason to be proven wrong.
And then there can come the people
who do not
suck all air toward
themselves,
and it is such shock: they stand,
pure in themselves.
(Such is my newish beau.)
Here was the hard dance
for so many years: pining
for connection,
working hard for it, but then afraid
of being engulfed by the others’
fall into the dread pool
where everyone sinks.
I knew myself most fully
when I would stride out, inner soundtrack intact
from that
college beau’s little dorm room,
with its great records, teen-boy funk,
crumpled wrappers, burger-and-soda ways.
Out! Into the bracing
cool of another New England
morning. I had known myself fully, I believed,
when sixteen, living with that twenty-six-year-old
beau who lay back in my brother’s
room, when closing the door behind
to write a sonnet against the
lure of domesticity.
I would be in bed with him
thinking: okay, now what, how
to make this time matter?
When you are born into
a system in which you feel you must
earn your keep, when you work hard for
love, when you end up with someone
who is one of the most challenging
people to get the love
from, then your system might
go a little haywire.
Back in college, after the burger-and-music
beau, I had a ground-floor
studio apartment
with no bars and no furniture,
occasionally a sea
of clothes on the floor.
One Easter break, two men broke in
when I was there alone. My last
semester. Having seen them,
I ran, inspirited, down the hall.
They took nothing: perhaps
they were high.
Survival itself became a miracle.
When you grow up uncertain where you
begin and others intrude,
violence skirts you. One definition
might serve for both
violence and pride: not seeing
the other and so annexing their being
for your needs. The same semester
of the break-in, I was held
up at knifepoint at night
while ringing a friend’s doorbell,
a younger guy who was just
a friend though we lay
together in bed, a guy so raised
on Manhattan mores his speech
about money and power
and his poodle on a science diet
converged: my consolation buddy.
Don’t blame us, the woman said,
holding knife at my throat,
we’re just motherfuckers.
Don’t worry—I said, feeling
odd love, the societal screwup of
it all, probably the pink fog—
I get it, just please if you don’t mind
let me have that computer
disk from the backpack,
work mattering more than life
itself, and later at the police
station and driving through
the streets of New Haven, did not wish
to identify her.
Why so silent? the cop asked.
What I believed: the men broke
in because I had not protected my
space, (deserving)(being
not neat enough)(unmothered, not
knowing what to put
into the drawer my mother
had labeled) miscellaneous.
And the woman held a knife
at my throat because no righteous system
had mothered anyone well yet,
all the greater systems
broken by unlove. What is it about people
who were demonstrably loved by present mothers,
who had enough growing up,
who learned
