* * *
Feel still lovely. Got back into Tours last night on the final train from Paris. Alexandre woke up early to move a couch from his mother’s, which he had promised her, and I didn’t stay too long in Villejuif, worried that if I were still asleep in his bed upon his return, I’d have worn out my welcome. Slightly hungover, but mostly dehydrated from the heat wave lasting over a week now. My slightly dispassionate account of last night does not do justice to how lovely Alexandre is or how refreshing he is to spend time with. He’s not a difficult person. He plays the guitar for Odile (the house in Villejuif, as well as the default bed-and-breakfast for friends-of-friends from out of town, is where they practise). During the show two nights ago, he looked handsome playing. And he told me, well before we kissed, I looked rather good dancing. I had a considerably nicer experience two nights ago than just “fucking the cute one.”
They played another show last night in Barbès, and I had plans to meet Odile there to drop off the phone she lent me before heading back to the train. They played early enough that I’d be able to watch before heading back to Gare d’Austerlitz, but I wasn’t really up to hanging out again, and purposefully waited until the last moment to go. Said hello to Alexandre, and Odile, and everyone, because I’ve somehow developed an air of familiarity with many. Alexandre apologized for the hectic night and quick morning and said he had a seven-hour disaster with the couch. Odile left with me and we waited together for my train. She had finally made it clear to Anton that she was ending things with him the afternoon prior, and we talked about that, and her developing feelings for Bruno, and the conversation, which I’d initially felt too shy for, was lovely. Now that I’m witness to more, now that I have my own connection with those Odile talks about, I don’t feel so alienated. I’m thankful for her passion. At some moment on the metro ride, actually, it began to overwhelm me how much I owe to Odile, how magnanimous she is to me, and the extent to which she, alone, has made Paris into a sort of second home for me. She felt supernatural to me—the concerts, the friends, the warmth, the freedom, a whole network of others, familiarity I hadn’t felt in six months of living in France the first time. Behind it all, this creative, passionate woman. She adored to hear that I’d slept with Alexandre, that I’d chosen “the good one.” Bruno, her object of attraction, is a very bizarre man and perhaps a disaster. He is scattered and flirtatious and self-deprecating and in need of saving. But he’s exciting, and perhaps a little manic-seeming, and supposedly quite good at playing the drums. Bruno reminds me of Julian, a lot. Odile recognizes all of this. She says, no matter what happens, she’s not worried she’ll be hurt, because he’s sensitive the way a teenager is, and she’s so much stronger than him! I said, I don’t know about this: when you come to care for someone, it doesn’t matter if you can recognize that they are like children in their emotional development—worse, it can make you want to lose confidence, kindness, and the capacity for emotional articulation, just for the chance at being right for them. She says, oh boy, I know this is true. And then for both of us there is this feeling of congratulation that I had been attracted to Alexandre, whom she knows well and has only the kindest things to say about. Life is not a straight line; neither is your desire. But sometimes desire can behave with a sensible, forgiving maturity.
Of French and of life: when I fail to understand something, it’s most likely that I’ve come in with the expectation that I’d hear something else, and I’m not open to anything but the simple binary of correspondence/non-correspondence.
* * *
I think I have been suffering from hypertension, but I’m just going to breathe more deeply, and stop eating kebab and drinking more than three coffees a day, and I won’t freak out about it. Since I’ve been here, it has hurt my heart to do push-ups, and this morning it exhausted me to walk to school, too.
Sometimes French words come to me first. Being at the Institut is effective. I wish the course were six weeks long (it’s four). I’ve been planning vaguely with Miles to go down to the south to some big party at a chantier in Tarn, but I think it’d be better not to exert myself so much until I feel my circulation and breathing have returned to normal. This stuff worries me. Never felt tension in my chest before this year. I do not want to reach some position of calm, centred adulthood and then immediately develop a heart condition, Lord.
I think, due to how slowly I process sound in French, I don’t develop memories of speech very easily. I can never remember what anyone says to me, and further still, I can hardly remember what I say to anyone. Some utterance just gets forced out in haste while my mind is equally preoccupied with producing a better phrase than I could, and soon after I have no recollection of what it was I did say. This could also be a way to avoid forming memories in one’s mother tongue.
Sometimes, rather than being unable to remember what was said, I simply can’t remember in what language. Last Friday, wandering the streets back to Villejuif with Alexandre, I misused a qualifier, beaucoup instead of tout. He corrected me, saying, “People don’t say that. I like it, but people don’t say that.” I don’t know whether he said this to me in English or French. I registered it in the language most comfortable to me, because I thought it was a great thing to be told.
* * *
Watched a documentary on French communists at the Institut’s médiatheque that clarified that the pre-’68 French communists were emotionally useless. They were just Stalinists! Their social values were hugely heteronormative in order to preserve familial order so as to produce more communists—as one woman said, three children for every family: one to replace the father, one to replace the mother, and one for the party. It was a program of shared wealth and labour with no imagination for art or pleasure. And when the students came out in the streets that spring, the party had no idea what was going on, and no interest in joining it.
I chose against going down to the Tarn to party with Miles and gang since I am still waiting until I feel no symptoms of hypertension. Did I just fall back out of shape having forgotten what it feels like to be out of shape? Plenty of people tire instantly climbing stairs (right?!). I visited a little typography museum (which was just a small printing house with a room of ephemera) and the Pierre de Fenoÿl exhibit at the Jeu de Paume arm in the Château de Tours. Both lovely.
* * *
Strange thing: my physical condition has worsened. I can’t even say when this began, this strange pressure I feel daily upon my heart, the new limits I have to impose upon my physical exertion. This morning, I had a little heart seizure before leaving for class. It was incredibly painful and arresting, so I finally visited my program assistants to tell them, and they made me a doctor’s appointment for tomorrow morning. I don’t know what’s going on but I’m certain it’s not in my head. And of course there have been so many false ailments that I’ve been certain of having during my life. But this one: I’m really sure. Something is up.
All the same, I feel fine. Never like I’m dying. Not worried even if I have to change my diet or take medication. Not worried in general. Actually, the whole ordeal slows me down. I breathe more slowly; I’m careful not to get too excited: I think it’s better for my emotional state, and for my concentration, to have a slightly tired heart. The extent to which I am without general worry makes me feel certain my brain is not conspiring with my heart against me. My roommate told me he is leaving the apartment to NYC, blessed be, and Max offered himself up the empty room in September. I have nothing more to do or plan and I’m happy with it. My chest still hurts.
Lord, try to explain to a medical professional how strange it is that you were once an anxious person, but now you’re so calm, so how could it happen that now you’re having possibly life-threatening heart problems? Explain it with a straight face, in French. I was told my blood pressure is excellent and my heart beats only as quickly as that of any worried person. The pressure I feel on my heart when I move my upper body in certain ways is the pressure
felt by people with overstimulated hearts trapped in tiny rib cages. So I’ve been prescribed an anxiolytic the doctor recommends I take for three weeks, whether I feel anxious or not, because it will bring my heart rate back down to normal, where nothing will hurt any longer. I’m not dying of heart trouble. Maybe for months in Toronto I had been inadvertently taking an anxiolytic and it was called marijuana.
* * *
Still feel disheartened that I can’t leave behind my conscious worries without them just making their way to my subconscious, speeding my heart up, as though something I’m not even feeding still gives them a reason to continue on. This is foolish. My life is on vacation, and little concerns me here. My bank account is replete with government-borrowed funds. I have a single responsibility and nothing else to worry about. Class is enjoyable and instructive. Further, I don’t miss home. I don’t know what the problem is. I did, after taking the anxiolytic, sleep incredibly well last night.
I can never tell if it’s the drugs that make me feel different or if there’s never a day that I don’t feel different. Either the drugs have calmed me in a way I wasn’t aware I needed to be calmed, or I was ready to feel some way and call it drugs. Anyway, drowsy yesterday but not today, but I feel slow today, in a good way. It’s not like Cipralex, which made me feel dopey and impotent. It’s that I’m slower. I can think of all the same things, there’s just a lot of noise I don’t have time for anymore. This is a good way to be saturated.
I rush past: feeling secure; the right language; everything. Notable that one of the things I took to indicate my heart failure was that suddenly I felt the exhaustion caused by walking at twice the pace of everyone else.
Oh, will: I am feeling somewhat lacking in will—but not like a depressive. In life, my will has most often taken the form of a will against something. I am willed back to my apartment or toward something vague and unavailable. This is the kind of will that ultimately does little more than make me perpetually uncomfortable. This is the will I am presently lacking.
* * *
I like to read and dream about fully conceived, fully formulated utopias: I fantasize that if I submit myself to some regime I suit well enough, that regime will surreptitiously become inescapable. It would slip under my skin and I would eventually lose any thought of retreating from it. The order it would give me would fix my life. It’s the same fantasy I have when beginning relationships—that if I fit well enough with someone, I’ll begin to belong to him, and if only I were to give someone more of a chance, belonging to his order would fix my life, so much that I wouldn’t be able to remember any desire for a life outside of him. But: I know too much. I wasn’t born into any of it. I’m doomed to live sharing with, not living in. (Except: this isn’t doom. This is freedom when it’s accepted.)
Wandering attention threatens she who worries that she could be under scrutiny. Fixed attention does not. Many in proximity with focused attention are no threat to one another. You are permitted to focus your own attention at will when you are forgiven from asking, finally, “What should I be doing?” I’ve arrived at the Centre for Expanded Research. There is no surveillance in the library here, but still it retains its function: in this room people are concerned only with their own work. There are no cautions in place to ensure that books won’t be damaged or stolen, so the collection is fluid and materials are lost. They will be replaced with new materials.
Insofar as CER has administrators, one of the administrators has a baby. The baby is friendly, trusting, and a joy to play with. Sometimes the mother leaves the room, but the child always has self-appointed company.
Ruby told me there are three rules here: “Leave no traces”; “Make it possible for others”; “Do or decide.” I said, I don’t really understand the distinction. She said, no, “The doer decides.”
When listening to a speech about the potential for social change through erotic praxis next to the more handsome of the men here for the week, and there is a baby in the room, I feel like praxis isn’t possible, because I just feel flush.
* * *
Two nights at CER so far. It’s more wonderful here than I could have anticipated. I feel no social anxiety around the group. A seminar is on for the week. All food and drink is provided and prepared. We eat together, we participate in seminars together, we can meditate together in the chapel each morning if we so choose. It’s luxurious. The facility, a converted monastery in rural northeast France, is what I’d imagined a Phalanx might look like. Rooms of different sizes, high ceilings, music rooms, libraries, several kitchens, spaces for quiet, and spaces for noise. When you want to organize something for the group, you write it on the chalkboard, and people may participate at their will. There are collaborative writing and discussion seminars. One scholar had us in groups devising shared definitions of the erotic, and what I discovered was that people can be very territorial about their definition of the erotic. There was surprisingly great tension around this. Ruby doesn’t give priority to speaking with me before other members of the group, which is fine. Haven’t been writing much, but read the New Yorker yesterday, like, front to back. Big earthquake, big catastrophe imminent. People here are very verbal. I sleep well. My bedroom is cute, with a comfortable spring mattress and a view of a tree-lined hillside. Something in the scent of the sheets reminds me of vacations to New England as a little kid. I think. They give me a cottage feeling, one of being suspended in time and looked after by others.
* * *
I’m not certain I find this seminar intellectually rigorous, but it is calming. When the historian leads discussion, I like where it goes. When the poet leads discussion, or meditation, I like that I feel physically at ease. There’s a certain aspect of the poet’s methodology that seems foolish to me, or at least not fully thought through. They seize upon one form of pleasure—creativity!—and theorize life around it, as though all it should take someone to enjoy their life is to be better in touch with their creative faculties. I just think this person has a much better considered approach to pleasure than they do to misery, which has equal power in structuring our lives. I do as much to direct my misery as I do to direct my pleasure, and it’s clear to me that writing each day does not make it so I am not miserable. Aiming to produce art only invites into your life a host of new miseries you’d never have known of otherwise. Why is the world at the office rather than here with us at the commune? Not strictly because others are being forced, but because not everyone considers the choice we have made to be desirable. The valorizing of creativity for creativity’s sake seems vacuously therapeutic. How can one ensure that creativity-for-creativity—creativity-for-health—doesn’t turn into an empty form of therapy separate from their life? It just seems like in seminar there’s a whole lot of idle talk about how this is the way to live, and that if everyone else were “in touch with themselves,” there would be no more greed and no more poverty. Not that people organize their lives upon innumerable pleasures and stresses, and it isn’t somehow the right choice to make poetry or whatever we’re doing here.
In any case, I love the commune. My rules aren’t the same here. If I’m chilly or if I’m kept up hearing my neighbours make love through paper-thin walls (the detail with which I hear the sex is astonishing—down to the suction of the kisses and the very gentlest, normally inaudible sighs of abandon), I’m not really bothered. Discomfort doesn’t accumulate in my body as stress here. All flows through. Because the space isn’t mine, and I feel grateful to it. I don’t feel I have dominion over it.
Finally spent alone time with Ruby yesterday, which was lovely. Took a walk together before lunch through the pastures and the woods, and after dinner and a couple glasses of wine, took a bath together in a sumptuous wing of the building I hadn’t seen. It’s easy to speak honestly with her.
* * *
Last night I slept with someone primarily due to our shared capacity for extreme misery, but you cannot give up absolutely that whi
ch brings you closest to who you are. I can never forget how joyful it makes me to share misery with another. I laugh more. Hangovers too are a special and distinct experience of being and I feel more alive during them than sometimes otherwise. Mutual rejection (of the rest of the world) is hugely intimate. I feel great this morning after Noah, whom I didn’t have to share a bed with because mine was just down the hall. You say to another: creativity doesn’t solve misery and we cannot seize upon the generation of it like it’s the antidote to a bad life, and he’s like yes because he knows, obviously; he’s just finished his PhD! On Kant? I tell him I’ve never even considered giving a shit about Kant, but it’s cool. I ask him, is it conservative to prefer some people to others? It’s so important to laugh, Jesus Christ. I am having a hard time identifying with others at the commune, but he insists it’s not a commune because there’s no duty, there’s will. Not under law but grace! My enjoyment of and engagement with everything in life is so heightened when I have been laughing. Who gives two shits about permissive public touch. Laughter is the shit that’s joy, man! Like, the difference between putting music on because silence feels vaguely bad and being chained in place unable to take your morning constitutional because each song queued up is the perfect song that you had completely forgotten about while the previous song—which then seemed like the song—was playing; but here it is: the true song, and it’s fucking very good. The difference between those experiences is joy! Of anyone I’ve fucked since leaving Toronto, I’ve been the least physically attracted to Noah, but fucking him has made me happiest. He told me I was beautiful enough that earlier he’d had to resist staring, and I was like, right! Such statements are a part of this thing. This deal. The fuck deal.
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