I haven’t yet spent any time anxious to be alone, which is strange to me—it’s as though something from my natural disposition has gone missing. I am feeling open to almost anything, spending time with others who seem in a similarly open mood. Arrived in Villejuif today: new, foreign, faraway neighbourhood. Odile’s friends, who were to let me in, were not yet home. There was a dog on the property, which I hadn’t been told, but she had a very playful disposition. Somehow my emotional state took no detour for frustration or anxiety—When will they be home? What am I doing? How long will I be here? So much I haven’t planned! I just played with the dog like a sensible person, and then, when I was distracted by the animal, they arrived. I dropped off my suitcase, which I had carried across town for the third time, and we left the house again at once. They loaded their things into a van and asked if I wanted a ride to the metro. I said, no, it’s right there! And Alexandre said, yes, but this will be funny. And I said, OK, OK, I want to do the more fun thing.
There is a fantasy to my attraction to Miles. He is a leftist who lives by the theory. Living takes precedence over the theory. He builds, and he’s strong. He’s interesting, but he doesn’t talk too much. He’s smart, but he feels no need to be too demonstrative. He’s broad-shouldered and glistening. He has this wonderful, wholesome attractiveness, with just a touch of a southern accent. Claude thinks in such absurd consequentialist abstracts that together we came up with a funny way of classifying our respective intellectual approaches: he thinks in projecting, capacious, and systematic abstractions with little relationship to what happens on the ground, and I, focused on horizontal ethics, affect, and psychoanalysis, am feminized—doing, philosophically, the housework. Two nights later at the house in Île-St-Denis, I read and chat and play cards while Miles sweeps, collects dishes, picks up beers to share using money I give him. I love to look at the angel who works: shirtless, otherwise. I love quiet, contained, supposedly normative masculinity (when it tidies up the house).
Notes on the vocal, those for whom it clarifies and those it overwhelms: at the party in Montreuil, I met Miles at a stairwell in conversation with others. Hitting it off quickly, we followed each other through the house all night, finally in a room with Odile and her new romantic focus, who were dancing and having a more rambunctious time than we were. At a break in our conversation, we smiled at each other, and Miles asked plainly, “Do you want to make out?” Partial to such clarifications, I said, “Yeah!” and we found another room that was empty but for people’s bags (an ethical conundrum—should we lock the door? No, our shame was worth less than the ability of others to access their belongings). Claude never asks: he kisses. During sex with Claude, which happened after an extended period of wordless pawing, I found actual penetration less energetic and forceful than I expected was his ability, so I said to him, “I want you to go as hard as you can.” The language was plain and unaffected, but he came instantly, before even complying with the injunction.
He says, after (in his own defence? Of men?), “Sometimes the first time is fast.” I don’t think he is even aware of how funny it is that he, a straight man, should tell me with any authority how long it takes men to come. How many times have I first had sex with a man? I’m past counting. I tell Claude I have better access to this data than he does, but I spoil no secrets (the reality is obvious—every time is different!). I will not ever recover from how absurd I find Claude to be. Somehow still philosophical, he is the most closed thinker. Conversation with him is so confined, and while I don’t quite think there’s evil in his heart, there’s just something that doesn’t click. I told him the man whose house I stayed at in Île-St-Denis is likely in his program—he doesn’t ask who, he just goes on to say that ENS has blah blah blah a world-class philosophy program. When I tell Austin of my friend, he asked, oh, I’ve probably met him—which one? I describe Claude, nondescript (uh—mid-twenties, small-medium build, white, brown-haired, handsome, you think you know anyone like that? In your philosophy program?). Austin does think they’ve meet, and Claude seemed “not to do well with people,” which Lord on high is true. Where are all of Claude’s friends? Why is all our time private? Why can’t we be with others? He’s been here for five months! When talking about past romantic vulnerability, I said to Claude, something of the last people I’ve been significantly attracted to relied on my desire to protect them, to give them something they were too debilitated to get from the world without my help. I saw discontented, socially helpless men and wanted to provide them the warmth necessary to see some light and welcoming in the world. It would make perfect sense that I should want to do the same with Claude, but there’s something about him that so repulses me. I’m glad this week instead to be attracted to Miles, who appears comfortable with others, and structures his life on those bonds.
* * *
I have been made a coffee that is strange, spicy. It wasn’t a desire of mine, but it’s fine.
Very funny: last night, my first of two sleeping in Villejuif, Odile slept in a bed with another friend, Ada, visiting from Brussels. Among Odile and the musical friends living in the house, Ada seemed, like me, quiet and out of place. This morning, we all lounged on laptops, synthesizers, guitars, and had coffee, listening to music and playing it. Around noon, Odile, Ada, and I took the metro up to Paris together. At Place d’Italie, Odile went in one direction and Ada and I in the other. Immediately, Ada confided: Odile never asks me anything. I told her, that’s funny, me neither! Ada said that even though she thinks Odile is exhausting, she always ends up missing her once they’re back in their own cities. I said, me too! But I don’t even get exhausted, it’s just that I have all these stresses in Toronto, and once I’ve flown over an ocean I don’t want to relive them. I want a vacation from life and the company of a hyperactive woman always telegraphing her own stresses. Odile and I are joined, above all, by an aesthetic sensibility, visually and musically. She’s better at both: a more creative dresser, a musician, a collector of records. But her choices are ones I would make. The music we were listening to in Villejuif suited this sensibility exactly: grainy, old, twinkly guitars. We are not reading the same things. Actually, there were few books in this house at all. My library resembles that of the communists in Île-St-Denis. But in many ways, the Villejuif house was the same as that one: welcoming, crowded; people in proximity living at their own pace. Different ways to draw bonds with others.
Rereading Agamben’s Highest Poverty, which I bought when last here but never finished. In the monastery, you are not under the same law as in common life: you elect. You elect with a vow, your spoken belief and commitment is a subscription to a private set of ethics that you can’t disavow without a withdrawal from your community. Like my new communist friends? Living to steal from the outside, sharing together, an ethic of non-dominance within the community. And a trust: that what they’re doing is correct, that there is, abstractly, some reason for it. When in regular public life, your position has little bearing on your capacity to believe in something: you are ruled equally to your peers regardless. Miles and I spoke of meeting again, in August. I hope this happens. I’d like to know the people I met for years: the building, the praxis, but above all the kindness and invitation.
Actual poverty, the poverty of those without access to anything else, is more visible here than in Toronto. It makes sitting in cafés reading theory and writing reports on my inconsequential life seem incredibly facile. The standard of interpersonal ethics I seek is bourgeois. I have to accept that my thoughts of public intimacy and generous contracts stop just short of those with the most demonstrable need. So I’ve spent my time supposedly with activists who have some commitment outside themselves but think only of how it feels to socialize with them. So I want socialism, but live through a nihilistic compact with the world whereby I ignore the interests of anyone with less power than I have until I’ve somehow been made to feel satisfied in my own position. So I’ve accepted. So I’ve accepted that my presen
t goal in life is to help other insufferable neurotics come up with new ways to describe their feelings. So I’m worthless otherwise. There are less admirable goals, I’m sure.
A final realization, of Claude: on only a couple of occasions did he say anything I agreed with, and they were probably just repeated from some book. He said of me, “You’re all different sizes.” So I’ve been told for a decade now. I hardly care anymore. My breasts, for their part, seem to have minds of their own, and plump up slightly when attention comes their way. It’s OK that my life is still interpersonally precarious enough that it’s apropos to ask, why don’t I happen to desire this fucking idiot? (The asshole is such an idiot, fuck.)
On Claude and every emotionally debilitated, predatory fucker in life: they’re not rapists, they just do not care whether or not the thing they’re fucking would really rather be somewhere else.
I mean: I can think of Claude—patronizing, egotistical, evasive, selfish—as a person, or I can think of him as a beautiful failure of a masculinity that was just recently in favour, a signal of a better world to come. I’m not the only one who finds him repulsive: this is why he’s alone. I choose optimism. Life!
OK, OK, OK, so there’s adolescence, which is subjectivity as constitution by that to which you are subjected (oh no, I spend time with and have fucked someone I dislike and disrespect, like a person still searching for guidance from this world!), and then there’s adulthood, which is being certain of your values, but knowing when you’ve chosen to compromise, because what we all want are better worlds than will ever be available to us (I have spent time with and fucked someone I dislike and disrespect, not because there was some truth there, nor because I had to, but because I chose to against other options [boredom, a public nap, the cold that would likely result therefrom], and it has neither changed me nor proven that I’m different from what I had thought before). I know this contradicts much of what I believe about a contiguity of desire, ethics, and action. But that, too, cannot be perfect in every case.
It’s beautiful here in Tours—a bit boring. By the time I leave, I will have figured out French, and I will have figured out life.
What turns on doesn’t obey optimism or ethics. For my week on the couches of others, I did not masturbate. Within an hour of settling into my apartment in Tours, one can imagine my priorities. Though I’ve had some notion that I might stop watching porn in support of a future of orgasms conjured only from my mindscape, this abstract future did not concern me so much as my present orgasm, and I loaded up something familiar on the residence Wi-Fi, which is surprisingly not so bad. And, for the first time in a long time, I became distracted from the video by an image in my head—but not the image of the encounter I’d recently enjoyed more. I thought not of Miles but of Claude, because it was Claude who I had stared at. Though the encounter itself had made me feel unhappy and uncomfortable, I retained the visual stimulus of Claude’s sustained suckle. I came not to the video, but to this, with my eyes closed! The experience of Claude was similar to my experience of porn: visual, disengaged, looking at someone else’s desire from a distance. The suckle-face looks so great. I don’t even know, when gazing upon them mid-suckle, if I understand them as my own tits. What I can change to come with others: open my eyes. As a reflex, I only keep them open when the other’s eyes are closed, or when I feel, as I did with Claude, disengaged. But I only come with a visual! This unbelievable, overpowering shiver I always got from Oreste, this ineffable feeling that was never my own to generate: it was never the orgasm. It was just tension. And save for fleeting instances, my eyes were always closed.
* * *
Grand Marché vide-greniers was tight. Two silk shirts, Henri Lefebvre’s Que sais-je? on Marxism, and an old but untouched pack of cards, all for four euros.
OK, I found the vide-greniers, the marché des fleurs, the cheap café-bar with the good music, the philosophy booksellers, the record store, the Lebanese sandwich places, and now the café where the Marxists are. The music is not good here as there is only so much to share.
Who am I in touch with? Some chatting with Ivan, who says he has a long email coming; with Max, who feels immobile because his father has fallen ill again; with Freida, who injured her back; with my roommate, who doesn’t yet know if he’s moving to NYC in September; with my mother, who’s still only feeling so-so. Short emails with Miles. Most recently I sent him my Fourier lecture and some of the more romantic passages from À nos amis. Haven’t written Odile since getting to Tours.
* * *
OK, Tours is great. The language institute is ideal. Classes are terrific. There must be a few hundred international students all combined, but only fifteen students per class. The professors are kind, bright, and clear. The students are competent and confident. I’m the oldest, but not by too much: most people are between nineteen and twenty-two. The campus is pretty, small, just three buildings around a square in close proximity to anywhere I should want to go. The Institut is lovely. It makes me feel, surtout, awake.
I missed a trip to Amboise with the class group last night because I felt sick to my stomach in the morning, but had I only forced myself, I would have had a better day. I expected that not having had a day to myself since my arrival in France, I really needed one—but, choosing to spend the day in my flat, this didn’t feel true. Without habituating oneself to the pattern of solitude, there’s nothing to find within it. I spent time on Facebook again, but I wasn’t rapt, I was bored. I played solitaire, but it didn’t pull me into a spiralling time void. I was giving myself medicine I didn’t need. I masturbated maybe four, five times. But did I need to? These lonesome orgasms will not change my life. They will not even speed it up.
* * *
Altogether, what there might be to dislike about the Institut is that I’m only here for three weeks longer. It’s been lovely. It’s been a kind of language instruction I’ve never gotten before: conversational and engaging, never by rote, giving us the material we ought to respond to. I still speak slowly and shyly, with constant unease and a consistent stammer, but it’s coming. It’s just so enjoyable! Each day, my comprehension improves. My verbal recall, too! Today we had our first in-class exercise that will be marked, and while I worry about my orthography and my preposition use, which is just a matter of practice, I didn’t feel that what I wanted to say surpassed what I was able to say. That was a terrific feeling.
A month might be the perfect amount of time to spend in this place where I do not quite have friends, but I am friendly with everyone, and I like my daily routines very much (back at the apartment: cook nice meals for myself, as I hadn’t done in Toronto, attend to only my own physical organization, do daily calisthenics).
It has happened: there’s no one in my mind to whom my thoughts are directed. I feel free and unbound. Hopeful. I have to remember when I next obsess myself with someone or something or some purpose not to forget the feeling I have now. It is one of pure potential. It is the only way I feel neither mania nor depression. The question is how to return here when I next inevitably depart. The answer seems to be: give yourself to a new task, something discrete from your previous life, or leave Toronto, or really bar yourself from those things that cause you anxiety. (It doesn’t suffice not to contact Oreste—you must neither contact nor monitor him. It doesn’t suffice to leave it at Oreste—you mustn’t contact nor monitor Helena, either, and still not Julian.) And right now, there’s no one else in all the world who makes me feel as though I could be compromised, who makes my stomach sink. Only three people in all the fucking world cause my stomach to sink! Plus: I’m vibrant and still young. We’re not under law, we’re under grace, motherfuckers.
* * *
I’m in Paris again, for the evening, where Odile plays her last show before recording her album in Berlin. It is hot, hot, fucking hot here, and not in Toronto, which is unusual. Paris is especially magnificent when you’ve been cleansed for a week by a small town.
/> On ceding to one’s desires to quit the abbey and return to Paris: there must be a model of remaining single with close proximity to intimacies, which is close to the image of someone who cannot bear to be alone in the countryside, who rushes to the bosom of the city for the same feeling: lonesomeness with an out.
* * *
I think harceler means to molest, but according to this book, monks only got six months in prison for doing it to children, so maybe it means to teach a shitty thing to or to trick out of money.
Show was fun; I slept with Alexandre, the best-looking and sweetest one in that group. Everyone I’ve slept with since arriving here is so young and so handsome. Alexandre is twenty-three and fucks like he is. He’s so, so cute. Such a well-structured face, beautiful, beautiful thick, curly black hair, kept short. Also: very kind. We took an incredibly strange journey from the 11th to the 6th to the 14th arrondissement to Villejuif, and I saw the largest and most beautiful apartment I’d seen yet in Paris, which belongs to Alexandre’s mother. He grew up where the rich grew up. Plus: the best-looking person in most rooms. It is completely to my surprise that he seemed untrained in fucking, or perhaps we were not physically compatible. I am slutty since arriving. I have always used protection. I stepped accidentally on the condom after I’d put on my clean socks this morning. Imagine that, after sex, you had to? That it was mandatory to step on the condom.
Sludge Utopia Page 9