Plans: Phobos & Deimos (Fear & Loathing)
January 22, 2006: When I wake up, I'm lying on the floor of a warehouse. It's cloudy outside, the whiteness of a dreary overcast midmorning. Although the floor's been painted, there's grit and dirt someone must have tracked in. Number One is somewhere off to my right, by a wall which seems impossibly far away. I'm in the center of the empty space covered by a blanket that's too small. When I get up to walk around, my vision starts to fade [my eyes had been pulsing all day from my contact lenses rebelling] and I shriek that I'm going blind. Suddenly, I'm sitting in a doctor's office, and although everything is fuzzy, I'm far from blind. Number One is sitting beside me flipping through a magazine or book or something and I'm very upset. I was going blind, he tells me. It wasn't so bad. You should feel lucky at all the things you won't have to see anymore. It won't be so bad.
I don't really believe him, because those don't sound like words he'd use. I'm scared One is either a: lying or b: not himself, but somebody else that is sitting next to me speaking in his voice, which I could clearly discern, but since I can't see him clearly, I can't be fully sure it's him.
While I'm waiting for a doctor to see me, I wake up to the same kind of light coming in through Angie's bedroom window.
*
4:37 p.m. On the plane, however, I dreamt about fire. I only know it was about fire; I had enough of a physical reaction that I woke myself up. I had only been asleep maybe 20 minutes.
*
Snippet: "We can't go on like this for much longer. I'm starting to think I might actually understand something about you and I know there's nothing that would scare you off quicker than somebody peeling back a layer."
"You know, whenever I get the urge to write a love poem, I distract myself by thinking about you."
"When have you written love poems? About who?"
"I write love poems all the time. This may shock you, but I'm quite versed on the subjects of truth and beauty and the many ways they intersect in our daily humdrum, workaday existences. It's just I hate both beauty and truth and therefore I have to excise it like a tumor from my life by putting it all down in verse form to avoid seeking all that unrealistic bullshit--the stuff that would eventually fade anyway--in somebody I want to fuck. It's when it all turns to poems of hate, degradation and shame, I know I've got a potential mate on my hands."
"Does that mean you love or hate me?"
"Take off your shirt and let's find out."
*
The Socratic Method - On the Nature of the Act of Love/Hate/Sex/Death/Fear
[n.b. Were this a Socratic dialogue, I would have been cast out because I didn't yes Socrates to death like that little suck up, Lysis]
What if. Okay. So it's possible to live your life like art, right? There are people who construct mosquito-net layers of personality around themselves and they stick that netting around them like a cover, a protection. But maybe not, because that sounds awfully calculated, contrived. Maybe it isn't that they are protecting themselves from anything; maybe it is that they know what they want to become, they have discovered how they want to be and they are working at it. Maybe that isn't right either. Maybe there aren't clues you can follow to find the distilled essence of a person, perhaps it can't be broken down that way. Maybe the way a person's skin smells, or the color of their hair, or the way they look at you, in a way you can't read or define or deconstruct is all you get to have of that person; that this is the role they are meant to play in your life, in this one link in a chain you build from the day your born stretching across the length of your life until your death. Maybe all you will ever know of them are the things they want you to see, or the things you yourself want to see. Is that any way to construct a reality? No. You don't construct a reality around your relationships with others, is the point. Your relations don't/shouldn't affect your reality, they should merely contextualize reality. Maybe what you think is in act is the truth of that person, and that their intent to be so, makes them so. Truth/beauty/truth.
But. If you say something often enough, long enough, it gets substituted in for the truth. Daily: I'm not worthy of this or that, I'm not capable, I'm doing this wrong, I'm trying but clearly not hard enough, I'm trying to figure out what's happening, but I'm not smart enough to deconstruct this. It starts to become a lowlight reel, an endless recording. So what, then. When is the right time to take a chance that your lowlight reel is wrong?
[[When you stand in your bathrobe and say things you wouldn't say fully dressed? Vulnerability: this is flannel; you wouldn't hurt a girl in flannel, would you? In how many conversations do you hold back what you really want? How often do you feel you're not worthy to make any demands? That your roar, no matter how tiny, will make the villagers flee anyway?]]
I fear rejection in all things, so I don't love. [That is not true.] When I do love, I love knowing I will be hurt. [That is true.] I expect it and I wait for it and it eventually comes. [And that I, most of the time, will be deserving of it.] The lower your expectations, they tell you, the less you will be hurt. [I'm working these things through in time, because it's better to get hurt and understand something you didn't before.] That seems like a line out of a 1950s girls' guide to the prom. You can't always convince somebody that you get them, that you accept them, or even convey what that means to you. The word unconditional comes to mind, but what is that but another word. Language is a problem--it is nothing and everything at once. So what, in the absence of language, is one supposed to do? Is sexual love the purest love? No. Is it the easiest? At times. But it, after a time, is far from fulfilling, when the moment is in the past.
The confusing of sexual love for "romantic" [per the Socratic dialogues, not my favorite term for it] love is probably more of a problem now than it ever was before (because of relaxed sexual mores, but that's another topic). I don't know what the line is, how you can sleep with somebody if you don't like them as a person, but how much liking of the person is too much to "ruin" [n.b. that's bullshit] the friendship between you. I think Socrates settles this one by claiming that the relationship between a young boy and a middle aged man is the only perfect love, though I'm hazy right now as to why. Anyway, my point is that there are no set reasons for how the lines get blurred, they just do. So when it comes to power (how is this the first time I've used that word in this?), who holds it? Ideally, there isn't a power struggle of any kind. But in "romantic" love, there are feelings, capricious human emotion to be taken into account (capricious as a general term; not to be interpreted as weak-minded, but merely flexible, changeable, mutable) and therein lies the emergence of who has the power in the relation, the "hand" as George Costanza said ["She's got the upper hand! I've got no hand! I need hand!"].
[I think the bottom line is that I'd like to have sex, if it's to be kept to that alone, with somebody who's enthusiastic about having sex with me. I can't really perform (as it were, an act, see paragraphs 1 & 2) with a psychological block like that--I'm constantly wondering what the hell does that look mean? Doesn't mean I don't like the look, I'd just like a little insight. Lack of knowledge, feeling somehow ill-informed, sticks in me like a hunger pang. That has nothing to do with Socrates, I'm just saying.]
To say it is hard to dissect is an absurd understatement, and I'm not really trying to do that. If Plato couldn't get it right, I don't expect much has simplified in 2000 years.
In the light of traditional relationships, I suspect I'm better off alone in the midst of the quarterlife crisis I seem to be having. This doesn't mean I've stopped feeling; clearly I have not. Holding yourself aloof as an act done purely in the name of conserving your energy to tackle whatever your next crisis will be, is so much horseshit. It's just that I've spent so much time in the period of getting over various people/places/things/events (in other words, nouns), I don't have the patience for the fucking around wondering what's happening/what might happen. Do we ever outgrow our own illusions about what we are capable of, and what it is we might someday have?
[In Benjamin Kunkel's Indecision, Dwight's father, who is committed to be a solitary man (an island), tells Dwight something to the effect of you'll create illusions and watch time dissolve them one by one, but you'll make new ones. Your one hope should be that you'll finally find one that will outlive you.]
>>Unphilosophical Astrological Sidenote: A fortune teller at the Jersey Shore once told me that while I wasn't going to be a mother for a long time, if ever, I had a very strong maternal wavelength (I forget how she put it, I'm sure she didn't use "wavelength" like some aging new age shaman) and that while it invited people in, it could create problems in defining boundaries in relationships. At the time I wanted to be like, fuck you, Lady, I'm nobody's mother, but that was because I wasn't currently tending to anybody's needs. My instinct is to help, to bolster, to support, to love, to give and that seems to most like 'motherly', although my mother herself lacks in the helping/supporting/being affectionate area, so Lord knows where it all spawned from. Nobody sees their mother as a sex kitten [I'm not saying that's a bad thing], and it isn't as though I wish to put aside what it is that I am (all those things listed above), but I don't want to be seen as a nester, a settler, a babymaker.
So, do we hide? Is it that relations between men and women are so complicated for some of us that we'd rather meet in the middle of the night, make the exchange with as little fanfare as possible until we reach thirty and then we start feeling our mortality and only then make a change? Is this Logan's Run? [That's extreme--I only said it to be able to reference Logan's Run] This has already gotten away from me, but I think what I'm trying to get across is that as much as I'm afraid to frighten off whoever, I only learn (really learn) through my mistakes, so I guess I have to go ahead and make them, if that's what they turn out to be in this arena. [And no longer will the results affect my self estimation]
I don't need to sell myself to you, but I feel like we should get a thing or two straightened out.
Yes, Socrates. You're right, Socrates.
-A.