by Jacob Wren
During these years, Paul thought a lot about the question of betrayal. Though, to say the least, it had a nasty reputation, there was some sense in which betrayal was essential. To use the simplest possible analogy: If you are living in thirties Germany and all your friends are joining the Nazi party, the best thing to do would be to betray their trust in order to fight for something else. But of course nothing in real life is so simple. And here he was using Nazis again, his perennial, but least favourite, example.
He was haunted by a line he once read in an interview with Genet: “Anyone who’s never experienced the pleasure of betrayal doesn’t know what pleasure is.” Was this the pleasure he was experiencing when he finally decided to reject his former conceptions around thinking and instead produce?
Of course the Nazi example was somehow wrong-headed, was using the word betrayal not in its usual sense. One did not ‘betray’ a community or society. Against an entire society it was not betrayal, it was treason. (Treason was a form of betrayal, but that was another kind of question.) No, one betrayed a friend or lover. One betrayed trust. And yes, perhaps it was also possible to betray an idea.
He tried to remember: What was the exact idea he now felt he had betrayed? What were its dimensions? What precisely had it felt like? Just then the phone rang. It was Silvia. They had been living apart for the past few years, but they’d been talking about living together again. Her book had been a striking success, considerably more successful than his own. This had created tension between them and they had decided to live in separate cities for a while. It alarmed him how petty he could be. Or insecure. Back before he was making art he never remembered being so insecure. But perhaps, in itself, the decision not to make art was a form of insecurity. As they talked, Paul noticed how great Silvia sounded. He never remembered her being so convivial and relaxed when they were living together. There had always been an edge in her voice, in her stance, and now he thought that discomfort had basically come from him, or from the dynamic between them.
“But we’ll see each other at the book fair in New York.”
“That’s true. It will be nice to spend some time together in New York again.”
“Did I tell you I got asked to write an article about the Mascots?”
“I’m sorry?”
“An article. For Atlantic Monthly. About the Mascots. How they’ve changed strategy, been spotted in Portugal, Egypt, Japan.”
Paul thought back to the crumpled photograph he used to carry around in his jacket pocket. He couldn’t quite remember when he had first found it. Maybe when he was twenty, twenty-one. At the time the Mascots had represented something for him, something absolutely pure. They were artists and not artists. They were absolutely loyal to something even more absolutely absurd. They risked their lives. There was a conviction even more essential than his own previous compulsion not to make art. He knew so little about them.
He didn’t like the idea of Silvia writing about the Mascots, publicizing them, questioning them. For Paul, the Mascots were best back when he first heard about them, when they were barely a rumour, hardly existed. But as he continued to speak on the phone with Silvia he chose not to share these concerns. He didn’t want to fight anymore, knew his criticisms cut more deeply than intended. Were they really going to live together again?
Around that time I was thinking a great deal about pop music. I had the idea that most already existing love songs, mainstream or otherwise, were directed towards one person, the ultimate soulmate or new excitement, and maybe a polyamorous love song, a love song directed towards a few (or many) soulmates, might undermine some basic songwriting assumptions. I dreamed of these not-yet-existing love songs, wondering what they would actually sound like, who might write them and who might listen.
Pop music is the gasoline of monogamy. Love songs are propaganda for monogamy. Writing is another form of loneliness. These are all statements that feel relatively true, that feel true in their gestures of empty, highly personal, provocation. Statements whose truth-value is little more than an opening for debate. Songwriting is a strange kind of writing. I remember something I once heard Darren Hayman (from the band Hefner) say in an interview, that people often complimented him on his lyrics, and he was flattered by this, but he had always been more interested in writing tunes. Because a song could have bad lyrics and a great melody and still be a good song. But if a song had great lyrics and a terrible melody, the entire endeavour was kind of doomed. How would we experience love if pop culture did not exist?
There is no need to explain how I escaped from the Mascots. I had no desire to escape. They abandoned me. If I’d had my way I would have spent the rest of my life chained to that radiator. No need to explain how or why I wrote a book about my time with them, how the book brought them much unwanted notoriety and, of course, worsened their general predicament, placing them in much greater danger. That, I suppose, was my great betrayal. Yet it also brought me the success I had always craved. I had read each of Paul’s books, astonished that I’d previously been so mistaken about him, that he had not dedicated his life to the brilliant privacy of his own thoughts, but instead decided to share them. We were both very young back then, it was too soon to tell where we would eventually land. Paul now writes and publishes, so he can no longer look down at me for publishing, but I am certain he would never approve of me writing a popular book about my time in captivity. The Mascots wouldn’t approve either. I don’t care, I’m no longer looking for approval. I stand behind what I’ve done. For me, in the years following my abandonment, in the years after they no longer wished to have me around, it was a necessity.
From time to time I wonder where they are. The ones I knew and the ones I didn’t. The ones who are still alive. I miss them. I want them to survive, to persevere, but it is hard for me to imagine. It is hard to imagine how their revolution will ever succeed, how, after all the chaos and violence they have brought into the world, they will ever be able to live in peace, as they sometimes claimed to wish, that their outfits will ever be accepted as a natural, ordinary part of the modern world. But successful or not, whatever becomes of them, they had ripped through our lives and none of us would ever be the same. That is how I ended my book: They had ripped through our lives and none of us would ever be the same. It didn’t bother me that it was a sentimental ending. I believe there are times for genuine sentiment, in journalism as in life.
Love songs attempt to describe how we feel when we’re in love. But as they’re describing, they are also telling us how we should feel, creating norms we can compare to our own experiences, giving us language that helps us describe a realm of emotion that in some sense is always beyond language. Many of these songs are written in about five minutes and yet we can listen to them over and over again for years. Love songs are about desire, but they are also, often, about loyalty. In some ways romantic love is the passage from desire towards loyalty. But maybe the polyamorous love songs that I dream might some day exist will complicate such dualities, generating nuances closer to our daily reality in which, if we are open to life, conflicting thoughts, questions and desires continuously surprise us.
Paul and Silvia did see each other again in New York and neither could remember when they’d last had such a wonderful time together. And it was during that visit they did something they had never done before. One night, lying in bed, they started describing, telling stories about, all the other people they had slept with during the time they were together. Neither of them could believe just how enjoyable these stories were, mainly because they had happened so long ago and whatever jealousy had existed was now ancient history.
But jealousy is perhaps the wrong word. They were jealous of each other’s books, but less so with other lovers. And this might have been what connected them most, and would keep them close until the end. In the past, they’d both had to overcome something in order to begin writing: Paul, his own belief in thinking as an end in itself; Silvia, her relationship with new
filmmaking and its mentor. Before they could begin telling stories they’d had to break free. And now they had all these juicy stories to tell each other, stories that concerned them both, that were tied up in the fact that they ‘weren’t really a couple’ and that they were now telling each other for the first time.
Have you ever had a dream in which nothing unusual happens? A dream in which you simply do ordinary things in an ordinary way and there is nothing particularly ‘dream-like’ about it? Such dreams are fascinating in their apparent lack of imagination. What might they be trying to tell us? That ordinary reality is enough and does not require wild elaborations? That the richest symbolism is to be found within the most banal details? That we are boring? I am thinking of dreams in which one is simply driving a car and then wakes up. Or a dream in which one pleasantly enacts all the routine tasks of a normal day at the office. It seems that in such dreams it is not the car or the job that carry the symbolic value, but instead the very normality of the dream itself. These dreams hold up a mirror to reality, and ask us if there is any meaning or strangeness added to an object simply because it takes place within a reflection.
It would be impossible to gather statistics around such questions, but I wonder what percentage of all the dreams that occur in the world might fall into this ‘normal’ category. When we are awake, on rare occasions, something incredibly dreamlike might happen to us, and when we are asleep, perhaps with equal rarity, we can have an analogously un-dreamlike experience. So I find myself wondering: What if the proportions were reversed, much as they have been for the past hundred and eighty-three pages.
There was one particular story Silvia told that night which struck them both far more than any of the others. She had just dropped Paul off at the airport and decided to stop for a drink on the way home. The bar was half-empty and she sat at the counter nursing a gin and tonic, wondering about her life. A young woman sat down on the stool beside her. Silvia realized she had ended up at the queer bar, one of the places she used to frequent years ago. She had come here out of habit, without realizing it, almost as if she had slipped back in time. They started to talk. The young woman was flirting and Silvia was smiling and drinking and starting to enjoy herself. She realized this woman had read her book, it had just come out, and was also something of a fan. Silvia couldn’t remember a time when someone had chatted her up because she was famous, perhaps this was the first time ever, and this sense of newness, also a slight feeling of power, drove a surge of excitement straight through their flirtation. And then, out of the blue, without knowing why, Silvia said: “Would you like to kiss me? Right now? Here?” The young woman beside her seemed hesitant, so Silvia let it drop, didn’t press the matter. But they had another drink and another, continued to talk about random, unimportant things, smiling and making eye contact, and a few minutes later, spontaneously, without warning, the young woman leaned over and kissed Silvia, one long wonderful kiss, then slipped away from the bar stool and bolted out of the room, ran off, straight out of the bar.
There was a song playing over the sound system that Silvia loved. She didn’t remember which song exactly. But she remembered that it was playing and it was a song she loved. And thinking back, Silvia felt that perhaps that kiss was one of the kisses she would remember most in her entire life. Because it was only a single, perfect moment in time. Because it didn’t lead to anything more. And if she ever heard the song again she would instantly remember that moment. She told Paul this story and Paul listened as they lay in bed together and they both felt that this was one of the stories they would come back to, that it would be one of the many anecdotes, many shortcuts, that were like a kind of secret code between them, but they didn’t yet know for what.
Acknowledgements
It would have been impossible for me to complete this book without the generous support of three international writing residencies. I would very much like to thank the Danish Centre for Writers and Translators at Hald Hovedgaard in Viborg, the International House of Literature Passa Porta in Brussels, and Alkantara in Lisbon, as well as those who invited me and made my stays so hospitable and productive, including: Peter Q. Rannes, Ilke Froyen, Thomas Walgrave and Ana Riscado. Plus all the amazing writers and artists I met along the way.
Sections from this book have been previously published in Le Livre de chevet, Fence, Gone Lawn and Lemon Hound.
Godfrey Cheshire quotations from the December 29th, 1999, issue of New York Press. Jean Genet quotation from Prisoner of Love. Unattributed quotations on page 168 from an interview with E.M. Cioran in Writing at Risk: Interviews in Paris with Uncommon Writers by Jason Weiss and, I believe, from Friedrich Nietzsche, though I am no longer able to find or verify the source. Very special thanks to Terry Tempest Williams for permission to print her letter in full.
The author wishes to thank the Canada Council for the Arts for their support in the form of a travel grant.
Colophon
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Cover painting by Matthew Palladino.
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Copyright © Jacob Wren, 2014
Cover image by Matthew Palladino. Used with permission.
The production of this book was made possible through the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
library and archives canada cataloguing in publication
Wren, Jacob, author
Polyamorous love song / Jacob Wren.
(Department of narrative studies ; no. 12)
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77166-030-3 (pbk.).--ISBN 978-1-77166-037-2 (html)
I. Title. II. Series: Department of narrative studies ; no. 12
PS8595.R454P64 2014 C813'.54 C2013-908721-4
C2013-908722-2