Sludge Utopia

by Catherine Fatima

  Last week, wrote Miles an email to ask if he’d like any company on NYE. He wrote back a very kind email to say that he’s in a new relationship, one that would make this difficult. I wept a little. I had memories of how I felt with him over the summer: sometimes critical and never like we were matched optimally, but always very happy and always very free. When not together, never with the feeling that my life somehow bore upon him. It was quick, but, by God, it suited me well. I was never fucking worried about what something I said might incur—anger, a clumsiness in the kitchen handling knives that threatens to go awry. Miles and I could get annoyed with each other, but it never seemed threatening. It’s not right to live in fear of what you might set off.

  It is not selfish to do one’s best to try to cultivate a life wherein there is the least resentment, the most engagement, the most stimulation, the most freedom, the most love. It’s what one must do.

  * * *

  Update on life is there’s been little of it, and I am waiting it out. Resistance is only a feeling until it’s enacted, and it can’t be enacted when you have little power to change things in your life. I don’t feel a glimmer of love or affection any longer. I’ve spent some time lately very high, some time crying, some time sleeping. I’ve checked out of everything. Things are changing. I’ll go days without the thought of possessing any power, and then I’ll think about being alone again and having no one but myself to answer to, and then I’ll feel seven feet tall and sturdy.

  Last Saturday evening, I came home from Freida’s incredibly, incredibly stoned. A pot high that felt like mushrooms. Edibles, smokables: a whole platter. When Max got in and shouted my name up the stairwell, I was certain I heard my father. I was terrified. I endure another self-pitying middle-aged man with anger management issues in whose presence I do not feel free. Another man who wants company, who couldn’t care less about trying to understand me better, who hears what he wants.

  This man, I can be stoned in front of, and I can cry in front of, and I can miss engagements in front of, and I can sleep eleven-hour nights in front of. At least I have those freedoms. I am, at least, allowed to feel blue.

  * * *

  It never turned into the sex I wanted, and they never turned into the conversations I wanted, and my fear of his anger still moderates my behaviour. Being loved is no mystery any longer. Find a delusional man who needs company to whom it doesn’t matter if you feel sick. Do nothing in service of love, I’ve learned. Or: nothing in service of romantic love, and everything in service of: 1) fraternal/sororal love; 2) intellectual objects of love/fascination.

  To be young: exactly when you might be at the height of your intellect, you’re also struggling to make yourself up in a way you feel at peace with, and navigating relationships that perpetually offer you firsts to make sense of. So sensitive, but so eager. So ambitious but so soon to retreat in fear. Learning what can be changed and what must be accepted. Figuring out which opportunities have been lost and what is still possible. Figuring out who you’re responsible to, or how simple that responsibility can be. Figuring out: no one to whom you don’t consent. I don’t need anyone’s surveillance, and I don’t need anyone’s love.

  * * *

  I’ve finished a fall semester that was abysmal but not as abysmal as last year’s, and I’ve been through many mood swings. Today, I became suddenly aware of the smell of spice coming out of a restaurant, and I felt my senses come back.

  * * *

  It’s difficult to understand how Max endures my pessimism. For a moment. Until I remember that pessimism and distrust can work the same as absence: Max can always imagine how good things might be if I were only around for him as I have been during moments he’s idealized.

  Max’s love: I’ll never feel it. If I feel it for a moment, I’ll take the first opportunity to stop. I’ve seen myself recently carrying out a stereotypical exercise in feminine masochism: refuse to express to your partner something important to you, and then, after he’s failed to do it, resent him. Retreat instead. Tell yourself that the clumsy man will always fail you because everyone fails you. I am the only person who fails myself in a way that I can anticipate and consent to.

  Ivan says it’s the fashion in his graduate cohort for people to carry on labour-unintensive long-distance relationships, requiring under an hour upkeep per day, reassurance via a text-message check-in, and that these tend to be conducive to academic survival. So the next step in my relationship with Max could actually turn out to be less decimating to me than the first—instead a lucky little pick-me-up during a time of the year that I don’t tend to be very sexually hungry, anyway.

  Max’s favourite experience of me is neither when he’s confused nor when I’m unusually stimulated. It’s when we’re out together for averagely nice nights. It’s when we eat together in the morning, listen to something, banter absentmindedly about not much. Moments during which we are not glowing but instead our sustainably average selves. I am almost pathologically unwilling to extend more than average effort toward him, lest I feel used later. So he doesn’t actually love any fantasy. He just loves me, daily, naturally, nude or clothed, quick or slow.

  When I see him clumsy or slow, I tell myself I don’t love him, or that I shouldn’t. I should love a more organized or better disciplined person. I should love someone I haven’t met, who doesn’t exist. I shouldn’t love someone who, whenever I express sadness or anger with him, is immediately concerned, and tells me how sorry he is, and that he wishes he knew better how to give me what I want, or who wishes I told him more readily what it is that I want. No! I should love instead the fantasy of some absent person, or I should love someone who isn’t responsible to me, or I should love something I can’t see who keeps me awake just as hunger does. Nothing in service of itself: everything in service of some other thing. Everything threaded with distrust because I can’t make the decision to settle down and have faith in this person who vows himself to me, because I’m too anxious of the threat that he’ll leave me, and it will all have been for naught. How can I know that I don’t love Max when I’ve never known love before? All I’ve known has been the feeling of hunger for people who evoked nothing but it. Hunger that made me live desperately and fast. Of course love, in its active presence, would have to be slowing. You don’t have to spring forth quickly to claim something that’s yours.

  Thought both communistic and pessimistic: just as nothing is anyone’s, nothing is mine. (As soon as I believe in assignment and belonging, I might have to believe that I have something, too.)

  It may sometimes be others, but it is always me. You will never make yourself worse off by learning how to accept and express love safely, and how to cooperate, how to stake space for your own life while sharing it with the life of another. I will not have given something up—I will have gotten better. Look to who is willing to be optimistic. Do you love them? Even if it’s a comfortable and domestic love rather than an overpowering one, do it with them.

  I sometimes think, in patronization, that Max should get over me and love someone fawning and insecure who seeks to mimic him, or to transform herself into something more resembling him to win his affection. Like certain men are used to. I think I’ll never make him happy: that will. But I don’t know better than Max does what will make him happy. He tells me ongoing: I do. Not the promise or imagination of me: me. And he makes me happy, too, when I let him. Only willing, I can have more love and everything else, too.

  You can say yes to something besides the void. You can say yes to someone you know, though never completely. You can say yes to someone who says yes to you. Audibly, decipherably, consistently. You can say yes without being forced, upon your own decision. You can say yes with an optimism that helps to trick you into the idea that it’s easy.

  * * *

  I try my best to stay positive, but I may have to wait for the next opportunity.

  Being wanted is worse than being unwanted.
It’s taken me too many years to learn this.

  * * *

  What else. For the year. Resolutions. Oh, I don’t know. Stick to a schedule. Keep up with readings. Establish a good rapport with my professors. Express myself more simply. Exercise, as I love, five times a week. Visit my grandparents, who love me and little else, once a week, if I can. Mom, too, although she will likely have a job and is satisfied by text messages. Try to make sure you’re at Maurice and Rebecca’s, playing cards once a week, too. Maintain your most stimulating correspondences. Go dancing at least once every couple of weeks. Maintain friendships with Ruby, Caroline, and Freida—do this with them. Eat more nutritiously and with greater regularity; prepare meals. Spend more time on friendships that are collaborative or form around common interests. Know that perhaps you are past the time in your life in which every new friendship has to be an intimate one. Spend late nights at the library; feel the thrill of research; aim for clarity; know that it is possible.

  Sludge

  It may be wired into me to be turned on by the promise of a threat to order—a way of commingling failed heteronormative fears of abandonment and a real longing for change, or a longing to cultivate public change through the nex(us)(es) of my own relationships. Allergy to care can take much the same form as resistance to tradition. So stupid: as traditional and closed as my pairing with Max feels, one thing I like about it is that it’s somewhat public—Max and I both work publicly with words (or, God, desire to). There’s something generous and generative about this, as though regardless of who we’re fucking, we still produce something from the pairing to put forth into the world.

  Because, here’s this: as much as fucking isn’t revolutionary, writing isn’t either? Even writing with subversive elements? Everything fits. That’s the fear. Everything participates in the economy that permits it.

  It’s possible that the only way to live free of immediate constraint from the economy you’d prefer not to consent to is being a criminal in a community of criminals or to inherit a bunch of private capital. There’s compliance, criminality, and private capital! (And love, gifts, community—but everything given must originate somewhere.)

  I just want to desire—and be gratified by my desire for—something both politically progressive and pragmatic. And I would like the desire of others near me to fall in line with my own. I want it to cooperate with school and work. I want to live cultivating an interpersonal ethic that works to change larger public ethics. I want a psyche that has sucked in so much garbage from outside to project itself back out, cleansed, onto the heart of the world, eliminating capitalism. Is that too much to ask?

  * * *

  I’m in Toronto, Max is in New York, we have broken up, and I feel calm and strength as I return to my life. Phewf.

  I don’t care about being lovable. I’d prefer to be strong, focused, self-sufficient, and perhaps a bit unruly, too. Onward, forward, to being alone, and to otherwise being only with people I crave. I can’t wait to start fucking again. I get to fuck again! I get to fuck and then only continue on fucking those who don’t interrupt me while I’m talking! And then those people will leave my house! They will leave my house after we’ve really fucked each other! All the world will be new again!

  * * *

  I find it difficult to elevate my mood or energy levels, but also to read Mind Over Mood without laughing. “In the past, my heartrate returned to normal when I […] thought in non-catastrophic ways.”

  On all my most optimistic days, I try to come to abstract notions of what’s right and good, but it’s hard to bring about a climax from this. What good masturbatory material is made of light? My orgasms have come only from darkness. They have not come from the playfulness of the sexual encounters that have made me feel most utopian. Did Max, who made me feel slow, dark, and tired, help me to foster a mind of erotic material that was for the first time potent on its own? He slowed me to the deep, dark sludge. I don’t like what I come to. I needn’t. There’s always shame, envy, dominance. Not quite prosocial. Will I move toward a life where I come to something that looks like the sex I have, or that I want to have, or that I think I want to have? I love a sexual encounter that feels friendly and fun because it suits my values, but I never masturbate to “friendly and fun.” I masturbate to things getting very uncomfortable. I want to like the sex I desire in my utopian mind, but I come instead to the sludge.

  I can come to what I think is a bit gross—or to anything besides perfectly equal division of touch—in private or with company. What makes me come can be the underside of things. What makes me come does not have to be my intellectual favourite. It can be the reverse of what I want to see in the world. It betrays an idea of ethical consistency: I want to come to what is good and light because I want to be good and light. What a joke. Who could expect the achievement of sexual satisfaction without being able to come to terms with the reality of their own character.

  If soon I stop feeling so dark, will my sexual imaginary move with me to match this? Is it just a lack of concordance of mind and intention? Who do I really trust so much to practise something utopian with? Maybe shame is what I feel, so I like the fantasies that make use of it. Let sex bring you into the gloom of your psyche, just like in your masturbation fantasies. Maybe then there will be concordance. Maybe then there will be orgasms. And maybe then I’ll be past the childish idea of some abstract future where sexual desire should relate coherently to considered intent or political will. That my desire should coherently relate to ethical fucking purity.

  * * *

  Adam Phillips writes, “Our utopias tell us more about our lived lives and privations than about our wished-for lives.” If I read about a hypothetical program for life all mapped out, I see it less for what it will produce than for what it details that I recognize I do not have. I see it sketch out what I’m missing. More importantly, I see it sketch out what I’m missing regardless of whether or not it’s something I want.

  84

  Sources

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  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to Alex, Amelia, Claire, Daniel, and Rachel for being the sources of stability, curiosity, and joy that anchor me in the world. Thank you to Derek and Jacob for reading my earliest drafts, and to Malcolm for his skilful editing, without which those drafts would not have been made into something more. For their friendship and creative support, I am leaving out dozens. Thanks, everyone.

  Catherine Fatima is a writer who was born, raised, and currently lives in Toronto. Sludge Utopia is her first book.

  Colophon

  Distributed in Canada by the Literary Press Group:

  www.lpg.ca

  Distributed in the United States by Small Press Distribution: