Weird science

theories

Hi, thanks for being here. Some announcements about changes to the structure and schedule of this project will be coming soon. I hope you enjoy this essay in the meantime. xoxo.

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I have this theory: You either have a poet and philosopher’s heart, or you’re a utilitarian. Nothing is wrong with either. But I know which I prefer in my own approach.

This is all I can talk about. Desire, romance, sex, having it and losing it. In conversations with friends, I fail the Bechdel test and I don’t really care. I know how to talk about other things, but the root of every topic is our relationships with each other.

Maybe you have found your calling, Isabelle says.

She means writing about relationships. It is funny because someone tells me I can’t use my past ones as models for future ones. I’m not sure who to listen to. As with most things, I’m learning it doesn’t have to be one or the other.

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So goes this rule I heard: don’t take relationship advice from someone whose relationships you don’t want. I found it odd because I don’t think any two relationships can be the same, nor can the feelings within. To say you have never felt this way holds multiple truths. You have said it before and you haven’t felt it before. Because it is different every time.

And anyways I am always asking for advice and rarely taking it. 

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I tried articulating to a friend and crush how I wanted things to be. We walked around Herbert Von King under an uneasy purple sky. Deep darkness. What I wanted: always this feeling. And that I always wanted to chase it down until I ran myself ragged. We could admit things to each other now. That’s all I wanted, to be able to admit truth. And to hear nothing is over, not really. Even if now was not the time. 

One foot in front of the other. Headed east. We were getting somewhere. At some point it got too cold. We should have kissed goodbye but we were shy. It was a bookmark, a page to visit not for the first or last time. 

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Bataille: Movement is the figure of love, incapable of stopping at a particular being, and rapidly passing from one to another. But the forgetting that determines it in this way is only a subterfuge of memory. 

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Someone in grad school said all their poems were about yearning. I thought about this often, partly because I had a crush on the person who said it. I wondered if any of their yearning was directed at me. As I tend to do, I messed up with them—tremendously—because maybe for the first time ever, I got scared of how much I could feel. That I could desire more than I previously believed I was allowed. But I couldn’t hold that duality then. I was a coward. I don’t like who I am when I get scared. From then on, I promised myself that I would live with the discomfort rather than run from it.

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My only wish is that feelings will become strong enough that I forget myself entirely. Often this happens when I am walking through the city alone unable to quiet my mind. I feel so close to understanding. Because I am forced to confront what I want without the current means to get it. A face floats into my mind, the moments replayed until I meet the fray. I walk slow but my heart moves fast. On Sundays, always in rain, always in confusion between bodies that are animated and tangible but evade my grasp. I could know them someday but how could I know that now?

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Watching the new Yorgos Lanthimos film Poor Things this week, I’m surprised how much it resonates with what I’ve discovered recently. First comes sex then comes revelation. All my theorizing comes from the physical. Wanting more of both in equal turns and then realizing they’re inextricable. I can’t think without sex, and without sex, I wouldn’t be thinking. (Anne Carson: In any act of thinking, the mind must reach across this space between known and unknown, linking one to the other but also keeping visible to difference. It is an erotic space.)

Considering the way I become single minded during, totally emptied out after, it’s a paradox. To think nothing and everything. Maybe this is too much information for you. Like when I say I need to wash my hair and Mitch asks me to stop before I explain further. I delight in the abject, lowkey desire it. But then I get embarrassed and hide my face on Madeline’s shoulder.

The movie makes me squirm too because—again, forgive me—it turns me on. I laugh because I can’t believe how hot it is despite its absurdity. The main character and woman-equivalent of Frankenstein’s monster named Bella discovers a world that reflects her newly discovered desires. All the delight in duality, like how spending time with the person you’re sleeping with should feel as good as actually sleeping together. It becomes hard to tell what you like more, the discovery or the act itself, if they can be separated.

Bella’s mind develops over the course of the film. She begins childlike, then becomes carnal, then cerebral, finally settling somewhere ecstatically between the two. Where I am, too. I feel like Bella, wandering through the streets looking for reasons to be touched. I’m her, indignant, when I’m denied. I’m her, too, when I recognize my body as magnificent, a vessel greater than its parts, a thing to be reanimated again and again by electricity, by my own generation or someone else’s. The push and pull of attraction. Not a game to be played as much as it is about the means rather than the end. The searching equally satisfying as the discovery.

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I have these theories. You may disagree with them. It doesn’t actually matter if we see things the same way. It’s just that I’m trying to show you not only the workings of my mind, but my heart, too.

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If everyone thought about romance as much as I did, nothing would get done. But maybe the world would be a better place. I’m told I’m naive and I can see why someone would call me this. Bella also thinks her ideas will improve the world, that she is the first to think them. Naive, but not stupid. Idealistic without being moralistic.

If everyone thought about this constantly, I would know I’m not alone. Otherwise I’m singular, which I doubt entirely. But maybe the creature I am is disastrously and destructively desirous. Maybe I am depraved. Maybe I shouldn’t be set loose on the world. Maybe I yearn more than every other person. That can’t be true. People are so private about what makes them happy.

If everyone thought about romance all the time, people would forget themselves. (In Poor Things, Bella asks after sex, Why don’t people do this all the time?) I’m suspicious that people would stop being obsessed with finding meaning. Because it would be found.

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I delight in the attempt to understand. That is the job of the philosopher. I was once a poet and now I’m a philosopher. I joke to several friends that I’m going to solve romance. I am almost sure of it, so close to grasping that I feel agonized in how close I am but I enjoy it all the same. You have to give yourself entirely over to not understanding before you can begin to understand—that you know now less than you ever did.

Pure experience beats theory again and again. There’s no logic. You don’t have to play 20 questions with me to know that I’m not driven by logic. I follow some other line of reasoning. The only truth I know is what I feel. Empirically speaking.

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There are mirrors surrounding the cardio machines at the gym. Catching my own reflection, I notice a dark spot on my neck while on the treadmill. I wonder about its origin. I briefly hope that it is a mark that will carry a memory but it may only be a shadow. 

I’m reminded again of a scene in Poor Things. The handwritten marks Bella puts on her inner thighs to indicate the softest part of her body. Proof that someone was there, to make touch a permanent fact on the skin. The act was a discovery, not a mark of territory. A revelation more than anything.

Whether I’m marked or not, I won’t soon forget. I touch my neck. Some parts are off limits, but I’ll allow this vulnerability. As if I have ever been very good at hiding in the first place.

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This summer I saw Passages at IFC. The film was not rated because of its explicit sex scenes. Between my two friends, I ate popcorn somewhat grotesquely. We had to sit too close to the front. I didn’t blame the man behind me for grunting every time sex happened on screen. After the movie, I wished there were more sex scenes. I couldn’t decide if I liked the movie or not. I was too distracted. I thought about the bodies onscreen and around me. And how I wanted a hand on my knee, in every movie, in every dark theater.

That night, I spoke a certain desire out loud for the first time. It made me laugh because it seemed so ridiculous and impossible. Parting with my friends, I walked through the Village alone, back to the train, back to Brooklyn, because I still so desperately wanted the past, back to my room where he never let himself sleep, back to silence only I could fill, knowing so little of what was ahead. And looking back, I wouldn’t have wanted to know what I desired wasn’t impossible. It never fails to surprise me that the surprise was worth the suspension of belief.