Sludge Utopia

by Catherine Fatima

  * * *

  “Thought is a moment of solitude,” someone said during one of the seminars, and I agree. It’s been a very special week at the residency, but I didn’t get what I thought I’d get out of it. I never found the seminars totally enthralling so I participated in only half of them. It is a place that operates under an ethic of freedom, but nevertheless I have a stifled feeling to be so close to a group of others I feel the pressure to be present for. We’ve all elected to be here. We’ve all nominated ourselves as each other’s contemporaries as open, creative people. Supposed intimacy is immediate: it doesn’t have to be won. I feel guilt when I just don’t want to be around, when I’m just not interested in something. I don’t think I’m very clearheaded when there’s an ethic of pure communicability. I don’t want to share all my thoughts! I want to fortify them in private. I articulated with Noah that I think I’m at the point where I’m really splitting open what social anxiety means to me. Guilt has sometimes pressured me into claiming anxiety when, in fact, it’s often that I choose against things. I reject things, and I don’t want to take responsibility for that choice. You get more sympathy from suffering than you do by rejecting.

  It’s not as though I’ve disliked this week—I’ve just reached limits whereafter I want to be elsewhere. I don’t know how it should be that I, so intellectually interested in public intimacy, should want it only by piecemeal when it’s right there to be indulged in.

  Slept with Noah again last night. We were near each other at dinner, had some wine with Ruby, and then split off to be by ourselves—I asked him to show me the unfinished and uninhabitable wings of the building. I have splinters in my palm from feeling my way under the wooden beams in the dark. I get along with Noah, but I don’t know if I would have initiated sex if he hadn’t. I feel unattached to the idea. How I felt yesterday, giddy upon the cultivation of joy from twin miseries, it was just: right, I’m familiar. I know exactly what is happening and exactly what proceeds to happen if you consecrate the object with whom you share your distaste for the world. You become vulnerable to it. I can tell Noah anything, and I kind of do—that I’ve never had a relationship lasting more than a few months, that I have hugely stilted and erratic attachment patterns, that I think I have a way of understanding and practising devotion that is different from 99% of the world. That I’ve never come with a partner. That I have a weird interest in mommy porn. If he’s hard or not because he has intimacy issues, too, I don’t care at all. I have to explain to him that if I laugh during penetration, it’s a good sign. He likes being a bit dominant and testing the limits of dominance, but after I say no when he pulls my hair, he doesn’t do it again. Again last night I suggested we not share a bed for sleeping. He seems like an honest person, like when he confesses to being nervous or says he’s always amazed when women are interested in him, and I wonder, is this what men are thinking? How barely I’m attached to its outcome lets me be free in sex and more selfish than usual, or at least not impatient to rush past cunnilingus to something that will stimulate Noah’s dick. No, I will not tap his shoulder and invite him up; he shall stay there as long as he sees appropriate. I don’t know when sex last felt like it did last night: sensationally good but ultimately unimportant. I don’t have any investment in how he should behave with me the morning that follows. I feel warmth toward him; I know what warmth feels like; his degree of comfort or wish to fuck me again are not issues I’m anxious to uncover. It’s nice to fuck him, and he’s interesting, good to talk to, but I have no concern whatsoever with how he feels about me or what he might want from me. If this is what freedom feels like, it’s as safe as it is bland.

  * * *

  I have now left CER. I am joining standard public life by way of the café across from the train station, which is broadcasting horse racing, a locally beloved sport. I have a different way of being attentive to life when there is a possibility of threat. This is necessary for my attention. That everything at the residency gets taken care of, and no one trespasses on your space or on your person, everything’s so respectful and safe, I don’t know. My surveillance faculties spend this time sleeping. Everything was comfortable, but I’m glad to go back to the world I have to be awake to. I like both worlds. I’m glad to have had the opportunity to circulate between both worlds.

  Another friend of Odile, Paz, wrote to offer me a sublet in the 20th, so I’ll be staying there instead of Villejuif. Alexandre, to whom I hadn’t spoken in a month, texted me yesterday to say he had left Paris for holidays but had hidden his keys somewhere so I could grab them if I needed a place to sleep. I would be disappointed if he were gone the whole time and I didn’t get to see him again. All the same. It was sweet that he offered me his keys buried in the sand.

  * * *

  I’m worried about spending time with Odile and her friends tonight, starting from what feels like scratch again. I’m glad that with Noah I found a cynic at the commune to be intimate with, but I don’t think he’ll leave the impression on me that either Alexandre or Miles have, because they represent activity and newness to me and Noah represents: the life of a man finishing his dissertation. It’s like: I know. I know. It doesn’t make me dream of the glittering possibilities of earth.

  It was nice, though. As I was listening to music and writing an email (to Ivan, among other things, about Noah), he drifted into my bedroom and we chatted for a bit before I invited him to hang out and work, so we lay in my bed listening to piano songs as he read about Kant and I read about Spinoza, one of his hands stroking my leg and hip. He slid his fingers under my shorts and began to jerk me off while we both kept reading, and when he slid off my shorts to eat me out, he invited me to continue on reading if I wanted. Though I did find the idea of this a little sexy, I didn’t think it sexier than rude, even with his permission. So I placed the book to my side and had my part in the cunnilingus, sighing. We’d fucked the two previous nights and I didn’t have so much of the fuck energy left—yesterday, possessed of an odd sort of serenity, I didn’t have much energy at all. Just as well I didn’t feel much pressure to bring myself to energy’s occasion, so everything proceeded slowly: lying close; long, firm caresses. He finally fucked me on my side slowly and deeply, but not for long, either because he was more excited, hadn’t masturbated recently, or, for the first of the times we’d slept together, hadn’t had anything to drink. I take passive pleasure in fucking and touching slowly. It feels good like it’s just feeling good to me, because when the excitement and pleasure generates from within me, I always tend to move fast. His hands, which never stop moving on me, just make me feel empathetic: sometimes I too am possessed of the unstoppable urge to explore. Not on Noah. It’s like my mind already makes up that I want some other body, so I don’t play around with him.

  First class between Reims and Paris cost less than a euro more than the alternative, and despite my political belongings, I am luxuriating.

  I nearly began crying on Noah’s chest yesterday afternoon. After he came, I lay beside him, tapping my fingers lightly on his shoulder, staring at his chest. I wasn’t upset, and I wasn’t miserable, so I don’t know why I started to tear up. Soft music streaming from my laptop. The feeling of passive pleasure that didn’t produce excitement or exhilaration. The suspicion that I’m entering a stage in life in which this is the kind of experience that will dominate. Like my wish for years has been to experience sexual pleasure without the vulnerability that it has usually relied on, and I’ve been granted that wish, but I fear I’ve unknowingly offered up the opposite experience in exchange for it. If I never miss Noah, if I never fantasize about sex with him again—did I still enjoy the way his dick felt inside me? Yes. And that shit can make you cry if the music’s right.

  Oh, this is funny. A fact I’ve heard a few times this summer, but never earlier, is that Thoreau, writing in his cabin about a purity of self through autonomy and isolation, was actually right down the street from his mother, who regularly brought him meals. />
  I’m learning to be open; I’m developing into a woman who can actually be turned on by another person rather than having to do the psychic work herself before they arrive. To not have to be good to go. This is not settling or accepting less. It’s adapting to the speed at which others move. It is slowing down and getting in step with people. It’s less risky, because you learn to take pleasure in others, not in some projection of your private world onto the body of another that you can’t see because you spend all your time with your eyes closed to avoid learning what he’s actually like. Because you do not want to know how little he resembles you, or how little you desire to resemble those parts of him you’re blind to. To go more slowly is to take the time to be attentive to the touch of another—to feel slower pulses of touch as they move through you, exciting, failing to excite, always producing some or another sensation. You go too quickly and all you feel is the life being knocked out of you. (“I don’t know what happened, but it was terrific!”)

  Autonomy is the funniest notion. This week I’m paying for an empty apartment, and I feel a freedom I couldn’t have felt when staying with friends. Now I have a place of my own to come and go from as I please, because I met Paz through Odile, because I went out to concerts, because I’ve been warm with people who’ve been warm with me. Every link contingent on some earlier link. But look at me, I’m autonomous now!

  Just dreamt of writing to Helena, I don’t even know if I was joking, “I’m not sure of the quality of the last email I wrote you. I am really trying to keep myself at the edge of language.”

  * * *

  Serology report used as bookmark of book borrowed from shelf of my sublet: little could be more intimate.

  Odile came to sleep over last night after a show. Sleeping next to her, oddly, I dreamt that the proprietor of the arts residency had died in a skiing accident, and the group of long-stayers (including Noah) were forming plans to split the estate between themselves. I then dreamt that I slept with a professor who behaved in the style of Noah, slipping off my track shorts to go down on me, but he was married and it was a very big deal. Learned from Odile that Alexandre, already in the south of France, won’t be back in Paris before I leave, and she thinks it’s sad, too. She hasn’t seen her friends much since recording with them in Berlin, so last night, hanging out with her and the others, was nice. Miles comes into town today. You really do not become obsessed by singular objects when open to whichever are near. Autonomy. Being in Paz’s room is nice because she is a musician with a certain sensibility. Her bookshelf is like mine but smaller; her windowsill is decorated with plants. Her roommate, Alain, throws parties, including the concert I went to my second night in France. He’s throwing one in Lisbon I might go to while I’m there. Dancing is a ritual I believe in. It’s sensible to live floating without preference between whomever or whatever should propose itself to you. I feel great. Not sped even slightly but totally great.

  From Paz’s shelf, Ian Svenonius (in the “Sex” chapter):

  Since these ideals of womanhood looked like they were sixteen, mid-60s girls attempted to look—and act—like infants. Thus, when the groupies appeared, they weren’t actually sexy or sexual. […] Groupies weren’t interested in sex. Their sexuality was incidental—they had the erotic sophistication of bonobo monkeys. Eros for them was a transaction, a means to an end in a world where a female’s only asset was her willingness to utilize her sexuality.

  As with modern DIY “indie” music, and “amateur” pornography, groupie-ism was more about power and narcissism—using the tools that were values by the power structure. The assertion of self was the point of the transaction, similar to the one in which the majority of the bands were involved as well.

  A funny thing about last week’s seminars: the insistence that just the word erotic should be ours—it should be rescued, pried from the hands of those who use it for evil and dominance and put to use by the utopians who want to maximize positive sensuality. But why not just use sensuality instead? Or amity? Eros has always involved violence. Let the powerful have it. (What’s the trouble in leaving erotics to the fuckers?)

  It’s a bit absurd to talk of some purified true sexuality unmediated by representations of sexuality and plays of power. It felt during the seminars as though my sexuality didn’t even qualify, because it’s too insecure, too sprawling, too infantile. It’s insecure, it’s sprawling, it’s infantile, and it’s real. It’s mine.

  How can the same mind made tired and paranoid by life under patriarchal capitalism still so desire it and be unable to take pleasure in the ease of the commune, an environment of acceptance and permission? (Acceptance has its limits: how well can the other accept that I do not accept them?)

  One reason people tend not to free themselves from the imposed direction of external standards: it’s not in anyone else’s interest, so others are unlikely to advise you to do so.

  The historian, at the residency, pointed out the obvious emphasis on feminine beauty through cultivated smallness and weakness, women seeking to develop explicitly less healthy bodies in order to suit the sensibilities of a dominating aesthetic. I thought of my body hair, and how much I can’t help but despise it, though it too indicates that I have a healthy body. Though I don’t have a weak body, and I love my body for its thickness, the particular details of the thickness I’m happy with still meet a normative feminine standard. Small but soft, dominable yet bountiful, and white, white, white, with the endless privilege extended by these qualities.

  Here’s the way I dominate the sphere of attention: I wear very little clothing in cities in the summer. It’s not “work,” so the attention doesn’t feel like a reward, and it doesn’t feel ethically right.

  * * *

  To me, Miles’s politics seem simplistic though stable, and hardly involve desire or misery or affect at all. Structurally solid: one should build shared autonomous spaces; one should engage in crime. Whereas I wonder: why are we all bound to that which we do, and what if one enjoys living in the city, reading sentimental philosophy, having lots of alone time, playing cards with their friends, involving themselves minimally in the larger capitalist economy except for the purchase of food and residential rents? I don’t think his praxis has the patience to account for the extreme valences of human desire or the possibility of living an engaged, satisfying life without totally absenting oneself from the public world. I don’t know that his understanding of feminism or anything more largely comprising “identity politics” (as he calls it) is terribly nuanced. I got angry at him last night when he called the 20th a shitty neighbourhood and I was like, what the fuck, man! Nearly told him to go home but then felt like, no, I could still have sex with him. Miles’s healthy, healthy body so fascinates me. He’s no theorist. He has such a gorgeous physique. I don’t feel when I’m with him like I’m discovering my own ideas or having them opened up. I sometimes feel like I’m translating those ideas for someone in a different register. I get annoyed, but then just look at him! He’s so strong. It makes it so I want to fuck him but I still become bored when fucking has commenced, and penetration becomes painful before he finishes. Then I think about Oreste, and what he said to me shortly before we stopped seeing each other: that he couldn’t stop thinking of what I was like when I fucked other people. And I told him that mostly I stop enjoying penetration much more quickly than with him. During sex with Miles, I don’t feel intimate with him; I feel separate. He went down on me for the first time (when we’d first slept together, I was menstruating), and I got distracted when an embarrassing song came up on my computer. Sex with him is not an experience of dissolution. But then just look at him! He’s so muscled and golden and healthy all summer on construction sites and communes and farms. Realistically, he knows how to do all sorts of shit I don’t know how to do. He told me some comrades were building a plane. This afternoon he stole a Simone Weil book for me but then told me he didn’t think there was any such thing as subversi
ve living without literally criminal practices. Is this so? He told me how often Roman got into fights, and it made me suspect that much of their praxis is just hooliganism. Hooliganism’s not a program, but I think it’s kind of sexy he stole a book for me. I told him, not only is criminality unimportant to me, but the commune is not something in my plans. And further, as a woman, what I think is ethically important is mostly to claim intellectual space and resist the domination of others in order to maintain my autonomy and will, to be a more effective feminine subject than would have been possible a generation ago. I think, had this been Noah, I could have joked with him: ultimately the goal of my feminist praxis is to achieve orgasm in the presence of another, and we’ll see about the rest thereafter. I didn’t feel, the way Miles engaged with me, that he would be able to see that I was saying this in jest as a veil over total seriousness, because pleasure and presence are praxis, man! Would I be able to come in the commune if there were no big capitalist world outside it? We can’t speculate. To speculate is all we can do. The way Miles talked about his longest relationship and smaller involvements since made it sound like he enjoys being in a couple, but feels a political injunction to resist it, so he resists. This is so strange to me, this submission of one’s desires to the supposed spoils of ideological prescription. I tell him: I’ve never put politics before my sex life. The way I want the world organized is dependent upon my desires (or, if my desires are under ideological influence—and they are, certainly—the influence is deep enough that I feel the desire before denying it over a political injunction). If I desired to be with anyone exclusively, long-term, I just would. They’d have to desire it, too, of course. (Ideology is too safe deep in my libido, like a little burrowed bug.)

  Lack of real pleasure will attract one to the weakest sort of liberalism. For the time being.