Sludge Utopia

by Catherine Fatima

  If the hysteric is, at her core, she who searches endlessly for truth, and the master is he who is not concerned with truth—he simply desires that everything work—my maternal grandpa, who does not like discussing emotional or figurative things, but desires that people behave or pretend to behave decently to each other of their own accord (and who so fittingly made his profession as a carpenter), is a master. Maybe the only master in my familial lineage.

  Also apropos this flourishing recount, as though a volcano museum was my madeleine, the tour starts with a neat 3-D movie about the volcano, which, pursuant to it being a geological phenomenon, starts at the beginning of the universe.

  Again, a logic of enduring consent applicable in depression: if this weren’t how one had to live, I’d never agree to it.

  * * *

  I feel guilt over my separation from some members of my family because I can’t identify the problem perfectly: it isn’t clear to me. It is a mark of having been witness to the abuse of another and perpetually feeling proximate to it.

  The idea that trauma has to surpass some limit is built into its definition as Freud delivered it: the traumatic wound is the one that pierces. The trouble is that no two people will ever have the same threshold. Extreme diversity in this, even within families, in generations woven tightly as fifteen or twenty years apart—between my mother and I, between her and her parents. A world of precarity and changing rhythm will provoke traumas in some and not in others, and the near immeasurability of what registers as trauma requires that to understand what is traumatic—or even undesirable—for another, we exercise radical trust and love.

  The anxiety of each misstep proving to your family what they assume because they want you closer: you are not fit to live. The fear of asking for help because you can’t risk that this be revealed, because you suspect it of yourself. The fear of asking for help because they don’t know how to help, and they’ve no interest in learning: they simply want to pull you back in.

  * * *

  I thought my grandmother, at home in Toronto, did not like plants because they’re too messy, but I discovered here that she loves plants, and that all the ones in her house in Toronto are plastic only because she spends all summer in Portugal and there’d be no one to water them. And then I remember: right. The office above the woodshop where I spent my afternoons with her as a little kid was a fucking jungle. This could be why I like them so much.

  I suppose I got exactly what I wanted this summer, which was to have a mind that could direct itself to whatever I should put before it, and not to long for something distant and invisible. I no longer feel preoccupied or dissatisfied. As far as the Açores, I prefer to be with my grandparents when my mother isn’t around, and with my mother when my grandparents aren’t around. They’re all much more pleasant without what the other brings out in them. No emotional matter worries me. Of course I should feel good: it is still summer and I am not in school yet and I am not back in Toronto, where sociality is the Açores turned on its head: here, everyone welcomes you for nothing (or: for family) and it takes no social work or charm. There, it is a constant game of charming and beguiling in order to gain entry, the off chance of being welcome if someone happens not to feel guarded that week. Then you guard yourself accordingly. You’re all of you miserable alone at home preparing yourself to be impressive enough to go out and see someone again, next week. Cultural producer’s ethic cultivated from work and taken into the home, into sociality. But I’ll live with someone I like. And I’ll be at school all the time. I’ll smoke a nice lavender joint every Saturday after work with some fruit liquor I bring home as a souvenir. And perhaps, in a year, I’ll leave again, to somewhere I like better.

  * * *

  Stupidity is the quick skip. It comes from supervalent thought concerning a stable imaginary object or, otherwise, the enduring conviction that thought isn’t worth your time (the first manifestation I have suffered; the second is prevalent here in Pico).

  That I might be able to demonstrate to the world that I am effective, like an insecure child. I’ve sought this through sex. I must somehow know only joy and never the anxiety felt upon the injunction to impress someone. It should be so easy to see that attracting someone to you has no relation to how effective you are, despite my adolescent path toward confounding the two.

  If women have finally uncovered, honestly, that to love men we need to pity them, and men have finally discovered, honestly, that to love women they have to dominate us, how is heterosexual love at all feasible? We’d need to return to being unsure of these matters (or: we’d need to give them up).

  * * *

  Slept quite poorly over the past two nights. I don’t know if it’s the surfeit of thoughts I’ve had during the day in comparison to the week prior, or the pressure system (rain and wind that have mostly kept me in the house having thoughts in the first place). I have a throat ache that worsens each night, a constant, low one that I carried over from Paris. Suspicion has me ascribing it to being throat-fucked by Miles the morning he left, which I don’t even like, but there were no condoms left and I thought I should make him come. Was one of the reasons I suffered no anxiety with Miles because I cared so little about the sex, or at least about my own experience of pleasure? I mean: I wanted to feel good, but I wanted more frequently to just give him an orgasm and then look at his body or fall asleep. Or I just wanted to hang out. I just wanted to hang out with the person it made sense to hang out with, to whom I grew gradually attached through the act of hanging out. The sex didn’t feel integral, or the focus wasn’t on sex for me, so I never instructed him to do what I like better, and I didn’t protest when he fucked the back of my throat before he caught his plane. I don’t know. I have a throat ache because people get them, in particular those spending months with no fixed address. What does one gain by only fucking when they want to fuck the most? They gain either falling in love with someone who’ll do something about it or giving themselves a reason to feel very sad.

  Oh! I dreamt so much last night. New transformations of Pico: the mountain, the roads, the coast. Another was a sex dream I think made me come but there weren’t really any characters and I can’t explain the contours of it.

  Love, the event, and the family. What the young do now is postpone all these things. But they simply form new social groupings that reproduce the worst of the family, without any of the security and with fewer of the benefits. Some such groupings (Île-Saint-Denis, friends from high school) retain more of the benefits. The models built upon shared aspiration toward creative production are most often terrible, eruptive, insecure, put too much in peril through jealousies and competition; again, everyone wants to dominate the landscape of attention.

  Enduring anxiety postponed: how will I ever be so compatible with a man that I should have a child by him, and also have the means to support it, before turning forty? Everything seems impossible until it happens. In any other case, your imagination is doing useless work, tricking you with something false.

  Saw a dog in the back of a moving truck, attached by the throat on a leash to the car: the beginning of thought, but not the end of it.

  * * *

  As I prepare to return to Toronto, I do not feel as vibrant and open to possibility as I did leaving it. I rather feel a closing. My family in Pico feel like a fully extrinsic amenity to me. I feel privileged to have them there for the chance to be witness to that world, but the bulk of it has little to do with me. It’s horrible to witness the closest thing I might to truly communal, agrarian life, and no one has any intellectual conversation whatsoever. No imaginative inclination! Everything is just: who lives where and who is related to who and what happened to them.

  Very common word in Portuguese: ficar, to be located/placed. The verb is the depth of many statements: direct your attention to that: it is there. This, too, is closing, and makes me feel like in the last two weeks I’ve gotten little more than rest. But i
t’s not rest that really energizes, it’s stimulation.

  Last night my grandparents had the uncles, aunts, and cousins over for dinner, and after everyone left, I couldn’t sleep at all. Juiced two hours of sleep from the night before waking up to prepare for my flight. I’m spoiled to have such generous, open family members and never tire of thinking, But I just wish they had something interesting to say! I don’t know. I have half the appetite of these people when it comes to food or luxury. All I want are some good books and conversation (but the sunshine, figs, and ocean water certainly didn’t hurt). Different appetites. Is this wrong?

  These are people who’ve never had anything but company all their lives. They know pain, care, and hard work but they do not know solitude and they do not know its value. The trouble with family: it is not bare proximity, it’s invested proximity. It’s immobilizing. It made me so anxious to do any number of regular, daily tasks in view of my grandparents so eager to believe I can’t do anything (so they might do it for me instead). Like this, too, with language: treated as this poor thing that can’t speak Portuguese because they only speak it around me, never to me, so I can’t understand anyone else speak, and so I can honour this inability, as though I’ll just arrive there one year, having learned to speak it somewhere else? So finally I just ask them to speak it to me when the language is simple. It is bizarre to insist, “Don’t infantilize me!” while accepting the charity of others. But that is what charity must be: a gift you choose to give out of kindness, not a contract with the fact that another can’t take care of themselves.

  I liked the weeks for swimming and eating and plants and animals. It’s a wonderful place to be. It’s not like the seventies: young people are not anxious to leave. Now that there’s plumbing, weatherproof homes, and the internet, they don’t need North America, or even continental Portugal, for very much. For the returned boomers, it must have been that the North American capital brought something else along. That the ethic of communality was interrupted by an injection of foreign money and all its attendant materialism. The homes rebuilt by expats resemble suburban North York mini-mansions: manicured gardens full of semi-tropical plants, with taller, wild versions of the same species looming over from the next hill.

  Bizarre that just as I should articulate my distaste for what occurs in the domestic/familial realm, I think of making my own (I have never had so many daydreams of pregnancy and early motherhood as I have this summer). More than once, I’ve thought: if I somehow were the recipient of a whole bunch of money allowing me rent and nourishment while completing a PhD, I would get pregnant yesterday. I want the domestic warmth I can invent myself completely on my own terms, at least until the child develops its own subjectivity. I want to plump up with something half-mine that I can give, upon delivery, what I’ve always been taught is a contradiction: protection together with freedom. I’d enact through my own kid what I want to prove to myself is real. I’d be occupied with a completely new light on the world. All the love I’d give it, I’d receive. Ideally. It’s not so strange that one should fantasize in this way of doubling the self. The species depends on it. The species depends on at least once having the fantasy of increasing love by doubling the self, and then acting on it.

  Everything’s so easy to fantasize about when you live with those distant and dissimilar from you. In hours I land in Toronto, but I fear it: to live again with many whose sensibilities resemble mine closely enough that our friendships don’t work, because all it brings out is friction.

  Anyway. You can read into whomever whatever incapability and mal-intent you want, but ultimately you have only yourself to forgive: for wanting to be elsewhere, not wanting to listen to people talk about where things are, how much they cost, and who they are related to. From the window, I see Canada. Life begins again.

  Love

  Since returning to Toronto, I haven’t been getting much sleep, but I feel good. The night I arrived I felt a tinge of need for Ivan after coming home to an empty apartment, and tried calling him, but he wasn’t around, and Max got home before Ivan returned my call. I attended an interview reading Freida performed, and Helena was there, and we didn’t talk. I wrote her a short, friendly email, which she promptly returned with one of her own. Why did neither of us say hello to the other? Because people are very uncomfortable, and we are all liable to assume that someone wants nothing to do with us. On the whole, lately, I haven’t felt like this. I’ve felt light and receptive, because this needn’t change now that I’m home. It’s foolish to idealize Paris as though my experience was of some permanent, unchanging community. There are fragmenting attachments and discomfort everywhere. You build the closest thing to the life you want wherever you happen to be.

  It all feels about equally pleasant. Been back to the library; seen many friends. Long walks, circumstances, running into people, being thankful for the chance to get to talk to them. Things aren’t uncomplicated with Max, but so far I love living with him. We’re extremely sweet with each other. The standard of kindness is high. We kiss a little but I won’t have sex with him because I have no interest in doing so. I’ve gotten no time to feel lonely, and if I’m lucky I won’t for months. Maurice and Rebecca are on the west coast right now, but they’ll be home soon, and then euchre.

  * * *

  What inspires my sexual response isn’t always generous, and it isn’t always kind, but at least it’s complicated. What if what inspires theirs is simply that I look a little humiliated?

  Chatting with Max is lovely, but this will not turn out well. Finally, I feel exhausted, but I am not able to sleep in. I’m over trying to find some motive for my sexual desire or my lack of it. I relate to Max in a very particular way: sentimentally, intimately, comfortably. Dare I say near lovingly. And physically: I am drawn to him, and I love cuddling with him, kissing a little, being held. But these things don’t feel to me like the sexual that is genital. The moment Max gets turned on, I feel like, this again!? And then I feel embarrassed and guilty because I brought it that far and I feel beholden to him: and we keep doing this, every single night. We’ve had a few really phenomenal conversations since I’ve been back, about sex and relationships, and I’m able to articulate nearly everything with him, just short of where it concerns him. If I say I feel guilty, he can’t hear that I don’t mean about the person he dates openly who is currently in another city. I mean that I frustrate him every night. He thinks the impediment is elsewhere, guilt about this woman, that’s why I can’t have sex with him. I try to make clear that that is not it, and he doesn’t trust me. It’s like he tries to gather evidence against it: but you fucked me during the spring, but we’ve come so near it. I am making as clear as possible without explicitly insulting him that I just don’t want it. I am not swept. I don’t want to think during sex in the manner I might normally, especially if my thoughts are I wish this were not happening.

  It’s possible that if we were getting close again from a distance rather than from a shared apartment, my desire might be aroused in a different way. For instance. Of a particularly lovely conversation we shared yesterday over dinner, I thought, if we hadn’t have been living together, I would have, after such a conversation, drafted him a sweet little email telling him how much it meant to me. The email would most likely make me anxious for a response, and the response would most likely be delayed or disappointing to me. As it is, if we’re seeing each other in a couple of hours after other plans, there’s no reason or chance to draft a little note, and there’s no response to feel anxious for. No moment is that much more significant than any other.

  How much of ambivalence is really just being terrified of another’s departure or choice against you? How easily can you act the way you really want when you know you’ve both consented in some way to being trapped? I do feel trapped! Not explicitly by ruse, but in the sense of having fallen into something that wasn’t at all what I anticipated, that I had good reason not to expect.

  Ap
parently I told a new man at an art opening last night that “attachment is a violent form of love,” and he wrote me saying he’d gotten home and jotted it down. It had me embarrassed, as though I’d stolen it from somewhere (I googled it; I hadn’t).

  Really, the most intimate thing to admit is your most shameful, irrational egotism: “I’m disappointed in almost everyone’s thoughts but my own.” I have admitted this to Max. Intimacy is many things.

  “Where has your mind been this morning?” could be a very different sort of accusation than one might expect.

  * * *

  Living with Max is comforting but it makes me very sad. I think he’s lovable, but I alternately, on occasion, find him lamentable or resentable. I’m judgmental with him like a mother, or perhaps more like a counsellor—an uninvested party—so he tells me everything. Maybe I don’t want to know everything. Maybe it makes me frustrated with his character when he reveals not at all accidentally that he uses his Tinder app despite having, by all accounts, three loving girlfriends (Cybil, me, Lori, whom he chats with daily, spends lots of time with, and is clearly still attracted to). I admonish him: I can’t begin to understand even what you think you want. He makes a comment that it’s bizarre that I can be mad at him without really being mad. I tell him, plainly, I have no belief that he has any idea what he wants or what he is doing, so I am not invested in it. Sometimes it’s the bluntest of what I say that he has no reaction to. Two nights ago we had penetrative sex, which I just wanted to go quickly, but he didn’t bring himself to orgasm, and then I got frustrated and wanted it to stop, and he said, it looked like you were enjoying yourself, and I said, sure, I only stopped it once I’d really stopped enjoying myself but still prior to this I was playing it up because I thought you would come. There’s no one but Max for whom my desire has been distributed this way: I want to be physically affectionate with him, but I never want to fuck him. He has a bit less physical affection toward me, but what he does have makes it so he’d like to fuck. Even our non-physical affection is so differently arranged. He’s more likely to talk to me, invite me to something, want to be near if we’re both a little happy, but he’s unchanged: he’s not exercising more, working more, or eating any differently than usual. I never really invite him to anything (since moving back in, I’ve mostly had one-on-one plans), I don’t say as much to him, because when I’m stimulated, I come up with some abstraction, something I feel either makes more sense to write down for myself, or for Ivan or Maurice. I don’t want to be next to him doing nothing while he chats on his phone. But I find that his presence moderates me and prevents me from eating badly or wasting time in certain compulsive ways. Even though I feel it is I who more explicitly rejects the idea that we have a primary relationship (on two accounts, which I don’t euphemize with him: that his attention span bothers me and the sex isn’t what I want), I still feel like I’m the one who loves him more. But It’s not quantifiable like this.