Nothing to be done

discourses

+

So it is a lover who speaks and says¹: 

I like when I woke up this morning, this book was in my hand, and under the crook of my arm was a beautiful person. I won’t bore you with talk of how the light washed over everything. I’ll spare you the details because they are details that only belong to me. You can have both—a life of the mind that is informed by romance and a life of romance that is made possible by the mind.

When I can’t sleep it’s because my mind continues to move even though my body has stopped. The distance becomes too great. I lift up onto my elbows to peek at the hangnail moon in a foggy sky. The bed is where I dream of being, until I can’t sleep. A double bind. There are many hours ahead until it’s actually reasonable to be awake. I roll over and read a pirated PDF on my phone until my eyes grow heavy again. I wear myself out. I shall never know. This is what the lover does: exhausts herself. 

But when am I to do with this bundle of fatigue sat down before me? What does this gift mean? Leave me alone? Take care of me? No one answers, for what is given is precisely what does not answer.

Upon waking, all I want to do is talk about this. I blush at Barthes’ agonizing descriptions of romance. Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire. I’m reminded I’m not too much or too little of anything. Unlike Barthes, I think even when I agonize, it’s still fun.

I walk home when the snow starts to fall. I imagine how you might elongate a morning in an ideal world: you welcome the worst weather. Shops close early. There’s nothing urgent. Plans get canceled and you stay put. You lose the language to describe because the only thing that you can make sense of is the moment suspended between you and the other. Even then, you remain dazed, unsure that you’re making semantic sense. But the distance is a good and necessary thing, so I go home.

I wonder how anyone can ever be practical about romance. There are people who can be. Those who make practical decisions for their heart based on geography, lifestyle differences, or even time. Patient with all that’s unresolved in their hearts. Couldn’t be me.

The day before I spent mostly in bed. I decided to call it a romance study so I didn’t feel guilty about being languorous. I tried to read Barthes, tried to watch La jalousie (2013), tried to write anything. The cursor remained still. My distractions were unable to distract me. The truth was that I was sick. I’d worn myself out with all the new year festivities. I recently said I could write under any condition, including sickness. This turned out to be mostly not true.

I let myself play the invalid because the invalid is ultimately a romantic figure. The invalid needs care, and care requires a caretaker. But then I thought about the ways I’ve tried hard to keep the narrative of my own illness separate from the narratives of my romances. At a party in the spring, I remember telling a friend I was tired of taking care of others. And beyond that, I wanted to take care of myself first in order to allow myself to accept care from others.

That day I kept staring out the window at the world that continued on without my contribution. At one point, I got up and went outside. I stood barefoot in my pajamas on my stoop. I hadn’t been touched all morning, needed the cold air to remind me of contact. As usual, I was being dramatic. The lover becomes this way—agonized by their own small-scale tragedies that turn out to be comedies. Just the body in want of something that it has not yet formulated the language to ask for. I eat something, I nap, I make myself feel better. 

Every contact, for the lover, raises the question of an answer: the skin is asked to reply. (A squeeze of the hand-enormous documentation-a tiny gesture within the palm, a knee which doesn't move away, an arm extended, as if quite naturally, along the back of a sofa and against which the other's head gradually comes to rest—this is the paradisiac realm of subtle and clandestine signs, a kind of festival not of the senses but of meaning.) 

Madeline says A Lover’s Discourse is perfect for when the only thing you want to read about is desire. Many of Barthes’ assertions are obvious, but reading them, I argue, still feels like a revelation. Especially when your friends have grown tired of you talking about the same thing over and over. I can’t shut up. I’m language mad. No one listens to me. When I say I’ve been talking about romance, the common reaction is theatrical and sarcastic surprise. It’s a running joke. I still blush every time. Kate and I agree that if someone made a bingo board about us the free space would be labeled “desire.”

I read: “When you’re happy, the whole world is New York City. And everyone knows there’s nothing like kissing in New York.” This makes me think of the times I’ve been stopped in the middle of the street to be kissed. The whole world is New York, it also only exists between me and the other person. Is this what it’s always like to be kissed? To forget yourself momentarily but entirely? 

Over Christmas, at home in North Carolina, I was lonely and filled with longing. I drew out on a notecard a wheel of suffering in the name of desire. Beautifully, intensely, agonizingly, disastrously, destructively, catastrophically. Back to beautifully. I sent it around for input. It relieved my suffering to admit that I was not really suffering at all. Once again I found myself laughing at my own tendency to be dramatic. Everything was still beautiful. 

You can’t blame me for wanting to stay in the afterglow.

I’d been working on my unified theories in 2023. Now they can be applied. A friend has declared 2024 as the year of the crush. I run into her on my walk home. I almost miss her face because I’m so wrapped up in my own thoughts. Then we run into more friends a couple blocks later. She mentions how this time last year, things felt different. I agree. There’s so much excitement. Party after party. A neighborhood filled with crushes. I tell Isabelle on the way to the coffee shop that we’re entering the crush battleground. The casual run-ins that become their own intricate, intensely detailed narratives. (Accident happens to bring together several friends in this cafe: a whole bundle of affects. The situation is charged; though I am involved in it and even suffer from it, I experience it as a scene, a carefully drawn and well composed tableau.) Our theories become unified, our individual situations crucial to the research. Crushes are what make the neighborhood go round.  

At home, I replay it all over and over. Friends come over later and fill my home with a different kind of romance. I’m deeply happy, constantly, surrounded. In a week, I’ll live in a new apartment that I fell in love with the second I walked through the door. I imagine their comings and goings there too—my friends, with whom I’m in love and if I’m lucky, are in love with me too.

Then is it nothing, for you, to be someone's festivity? My exhaustion from all the joy is a good one. The new year, which is usually rinsed with sadness, has become something else for me. Another year I believe in possibility. And to my relief, my friends are experiencing similar feelings. Whatever happens, I don’t want to be alone in feeling.

Through developed photos I begin to remember: 

Everyone always ends up in the kitchen. I’m standing in a brown velvet dress that belongs to my best friend. We’re apart tonight, which feels wrong. We won’t share in the minute when the old year slips away and the new one comes rushing in. A whole host of bodies surround me. I’m almost unable to keep my feet on the ground. A few moments before, a friend rushed us outside so we could all kiss. A premeditation. Now someone begins counting, then everyone joins in. Everything will look so different in an hour and a half. I’ll touch and be touched. Another year begins. We kiss each other to say goodbye, we kiss each other to say I can’t believe you’re still here. I say to the other, let us begin again.

La jalousie, dir. Louis Garrel 2013.

1. All italicized passages come from A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes. Thanks to Kate for pointing me back to the text.