I Love Dick

by Chris Kraus

  22. Of course it’s no surprise when Félix Guattari talks about love in the same breath as schizophrenia. Here’s a passage that I found three weeks ago when I started writing this and now it’s August and I can’t find the citation, and anyhow it’s my translation, i.e., a cross between what he wrote and what I wanted him to say: “It’s like this: someone falls in love and in a universe that once was closed, suddenly everything seems possible. Love and sex are mediums for semiotizing mutation.”

  I disagree, at least I think I do, about the “semiotizing” part (Dear Dick, Dear Marshall, Dear Sylvère, What is semiotics?). Love and sex both cause mutation, just like I think desire isn’t lack, it’s surplus energy—a claustrophobia inside your skin—

  Félix goes on: “Previously unimagined systems unfurl themselves in a once empty world. New possibilities of freedom are revealed. Of course none of this is ever guaranteed.”

  And now IT’S GETTING VERY LATE. It’s August and since July 6 when I started writing this I’ve been in an altered state, have lost 10 lbs, etc.

  This morning when I took a walk I thought about a talk I’ll give next fall (I’ve been invited to your school) about poetics. I want to play video I edited two years ago for Jim Brodey’s funeral. Jim was a quote-minor New York poet who died of AIDS after living in the street. In the tape he talks about Lew Welch, a quote-minor San Francisco poet who would’ve drunk himself to death if he hadn’t suicided first in the ’70s. I want to hand out copies of Alice Notley’s brilliant essay Dr William’s Heiresses where she talks about how female poets like herself who externalize and twist internal daily life have hardly any female ancestors. The critic Kathleen Fraser thought that for not inventing some, Alice was a bad feminist. Alice Notley proved the possibility of writing poems no matter what; Kathleen Fraser is an academic. “No woman is an island-ess,” oh… The message is, IT’S GETTING VERY LATE. Be glad you’re in a California art school but don’t forget you live by compromise and contradiction ’cause those who don’t just die like dogs.

  I have to find a way of ending this, of getting to the point.

  23. I wasn’t really that surprised to get your answerphone on Thursday night when I called back, (April 6, 10:45 p.m.) the way you’d asked me to, just short of 24 hours later.

  Desire, claustrophobia. If I left a message I’d have to wait in the motel room, wondering if you’d call back. So I hung up and smoked some pot and went outside. The pot was very strong and I started flashing back again to 20 years ago (I know, I know). Remembering what it felt like to be 20, overwhelmed by feeling and sensation, lost for words. While having lots and lots of words to talk about Douglas Weir and Ian Martinson, Angola, China, rock & roll—the host culture, male. My schizophrenia. Is this letter all about the past? No, it’s about intensity. R.D. Laing never figured out that “the divided self’ is female subjectivity. Writing about an ambitious educated 26-year-old “schizophrenic girl” in the suburban 1950s: “…the patient repeatedly contrasts her real self with her false compliant self.” Oh really.

  That night I sat on a curb in sleeping Pasadena, stoned and spinning, writing notes about the bungalows.

  Later on, I left this message on your answerphone: “Hi it’s Chris. Just calling back to see if you still want to get together. If the timing isn’t good for you, just let me know. I’ll be in ’til 9 tomorrow morning.” The normalcy of this message sounded totally surreal.

  The philosopher Luce Irigaray thinks there is no female “I” in existing (patriarchal) language. She proved it once by bursting into tears while lecturing in a conference on Saussure at Columbia University.

  24. According to Charles Olsen, the best poetry is a kind of schizophrenia. The poem does not “express” the poet’s thoughts or feelings. It is “a transfer of energy between the poet and the reader.”

  25. The next morning—Friday, April 7—you returned my call.

  26. It was 8:30 a.m. The Violent Femmes song Add It Up was cranked up on a cheap cassette and I was getting ready to go to school. “Hello Chris,” you said, “it’s Dick.” Your accent sounded strained and bitter. It was the first time I’d ever heard you speak my name, or yours. “Look,” you said. “It turns out I’ve got a previous engagement this evening. So how about the weekend? Why don’t you give me a call tomorrow morning around this time?”

  A tsunami wave inside my body rolled. The telephone became a schizophrenic instrument, the “therefore” placed between us, two non-sequiturs. I had to take control.

  “No!,” I said, then curbed the violence of it. “I’m only here ’til Tuesday and there’re other things I need to do. If we’re going to get together it’d be better if we could make a plan right now.”

  You suggested that we meet for lunch the following afternoon.

  27. David Rattray was a 26-year-old American junkie when he started translating Antonin Artaud. He’d read Artaud in French at Dartmouth College, but in 1957, living on his own in Paris, he decided to become him. At the old Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the cataloging system held a list of every book checked out by every reader. Artaud was fairly freshly dead. And isn’t scholarship just a stalking of the dead by people who’re too stoned or scared to chase live bait? That year David Rattray read every single book checked out by Antonin Artaud.

  This afternoon (August 12) I went over to the Occidental College Library. It was about 102 degrees. I wanted to look at Katherine Mansfield’s famous story At The Bay, set in Wellington, New Zealand. I was hoping that its qualities—time frozen soft in green and blue—would help me write about the lunch we had in April, that Saturday afternoon. The third floor of the library was cool and empty and all of Katherine’s books were there. Among them was a gorgeous Knopf edition of Mansfield’s Bliss and Other Stories, the sixth printing, published in the year she died, 1923. Its dark green cover, thick lead type sunk deep on creamy pages, cheerful green and orange endpapers, threw me back into a time when books were friends. I sat down between the stacks and started thumbing through the pages. They were as intimate, delicious and inviting as Venusian skin.

  I checked out Bliss and another book of Katherine’s Collected Stories around 3 p.m. I had to try and eat, so I drove to 50th and Figueroa, a green and orange stucco restaurant, Chico’s Mexican Taquitos. Waiting for the soup I opened Bliss at random to page 71, the opening of a story called “Je Ne Parle Pas Français.” Chico’s only other customers were two guys named Vito and Jose, as thin as me and both fresh out of “rehab” (four days of tranquilized withdrawal) at a nearby public hospital. A woman sitting, reading all alone will always be a receptacle for passersby to rant on. Vito sat down next to me. “Heroin’s sooo good,” he said. “But, you see, it’s very bad.” Now that he was clean, he thought he’d try his luck in Laughlin. He’d heard there were plenty of good jobs in the casinos. He’d save some money, try and join his wife and baby girl. “I don’t know why I have such a fancy for this little cafe. It’s dirty, sad.” Page 71 of Bliss found Katherine sitting by herself one afternoon at the close of World War I in a French cafe.

  “Don’t talk so much,” Jose told Vito. I was sitting like a school-teacher with all my library books, offering advice on kicking. When Vito left he said “God bless.” And at that moment I was overwhelmed with love for Katherine, whose letters from this time (Paris, Spring, 1918) had been suppressed after her death by her husband because they were “too painful.”

  “I don’t believe in the human soul, I believe that people are like portmanteaux,” she writes at the opening of this story, as if anybody cared. “Bliss was so brilliant…,” Katherine’s friend Virginia Woolf wrote to Janet Case, “…and so hard, and so shallow, and so sentimental that I had to rush to the bookcase for something to drink.”

  Katherine, Queen of the Biscuit Box School of Writing, the brave colonial girl, determined to live in London, even though the checks sent by her bank-director father from Wellington, New Zealand didn’t take her very far. Wellington, the capital of New Zealand, was a
city of unpaved roads and horses. Men wrote heroic verse about the land. But there she was in Paris: 28 years old, alone, tubercular and hemoraging for the first time; willing to take a crack at it, at being “right” and making the most absolute of statements.

  Katherine, who capitalized words like Life and wrote themes on love and rhubarb, indulged by D.H. Lawrence and lots of other men because she was sincere and pretty. Katherine the utopian space cadet, whose entire literary project was to capture heightened states of adolescent feeling (“bliss”). Katherine, who tried so hard in London to be best-friends with Virginia Woolf, who hated her, because Katherine was the kind of naif-imbecile that the literary men adored and championed at her expense.

  “My God, I love to think of you, Virginia,” Katherine wrote in 1917, “as my friend…we have got the same job and it is really very curious & thrilling that we should both be after so nearly the same thing…” even though she later wrote John Murray that she found Virginia’s writing “intellectually snobbish, long and tiresome.” In 1911, her first year in London, Katherine posed uncomfortably for a portrait. Thick eyebrows, pointed nose, neck craned forward…in this photo she was not a pretty girl. Her life there was one big flourish of bravado, her impetuosity, “pores and vapours” which (according to Virginia Woolf) “sicken or bewilder most of our friends.”

  Yet seven years after Katherine’s death, Virginia admitted she still dreamed of Katherine, who had a quality she “adored and needed,” so in a sense she loved her too. This afternoon the thought of Katherine trying to be “right” in London made me get all clutchy, and Dick, that isn’t all:

  No matter where you go, someone else has been before.

  Because like me, Katherine Mansfield fell in love with Dick.

  On page 85 of “Je Ne Parle Pas Français,” she writes:

  “It was impossible not to notice Dick. What a catch! He was the only Englishman present (italics mine), reserved and serious, making a special study of literature and instead of circulating gracefully round the room he stayed in one place leaning against the wall, that dreamy half smile on his lips and replying in his low soft voice to anybody who spoke to him.”

  But unlike you, this Dick had no “previous engagements.” Straight off, he invited Katherine out to dinner. And they spent the night at his hotel,

  “Talking—but not only of literature. I discovered to my relief that it wasn’t necessary to keep to the tendency of the modern novel… Now and again, as if by accident, I threw in a card that seemed to have nothing to do with the game, just to see how he’d take it. But each time he gathered it into his hands with his dreamy look (my emphasis) and smile unchanged. Perhaps he murmured: ‘That’s curious.’ But not as if it were curious at all.”

  Dick was Katherine’s perfect schizophrenic listener. As Géza Róheim wrote, Dick was dreamily empathic because “a lack of ego boundaries makes it impossible for him to set limits to the process of identification.” And Katherine flipped:

  “Dick’s calm acceptance went to my head at last. It fascinated me. It led me on and on ’til I threw every card I possessed at him and sat back and watched him arrange them in his hand.”

  By that time both of them were very drunk. Dick didn’t judge. He just said, “Very interesting.” And she was overwhelmed,

  “…quite breathless at the thought of what I’d done. I had shown somebody both sides of my life. Told him everything as sincerely and truthfully as I could. Taken immense pains to explain things about my submerged life that really were disgusting and never could possibly see the light of day.”

  Have we talked enough about the schizophrenic phenomena of coincidence?

  Last week at school Pam Strugar wondered why the brilliant girls all die. Both Katherine Mansfield and the philosopher Simone Weil lived lives of passionate intensity. Both died alone of tubercular starvation in rooms attached to flakey “institutes,” dreaming in their notebooks about childhood happiness and comfort at the age of 34.

  It moved me so that tears came into my eyes.

  For weeks they had been talking about Butterfly Creek. “Let’s go to But-ter-fly Creek!” Eric Johnson intoned, mimicking the plummy baritone of his father, the Reverend Cyril Johnson.

  All January long there’d been record heat in Wellington. Miraculously still and cloudless days, sunlight glinting off the cars on Taranaki Street. That January all the offices shut down at 3 p.m. Clerks and typists mobbed the sandy crescent beach at Oriental Bay.

  High up on The Terrace overlooking Willis Street, even the fieldstone stucco’d walls and lead-glass windows of the Vicarage gave no protection from the heat. But the Vicar and his wife, Vita-Fleur, who’d emigrated here from England after Cyril’d finished university and seminary school, were prepared for this colonial eventuality. All summer long Vita-Fleur made ginger-beer for her children. The recipe’d been handed down by her mother, an Anglican missionary’s wife who’d spent 16 hellish years in Barbados. Five great stone jugs of ginger-beer sat outside the kitchen-garden on The Terrace: enough to last at least that many New Zealand summers. Mother to Laura, Eric, Josephine and Isabel, Vita-Fleur was a large, conservatively-dressed, pigeon-breasted woman who’d married well. No more trundling round the globe to dark-skinned colonies. Cyril was acerbic, brilliant and everybody knew that he’d eventually be made a bishop. And Vita-Fleur’s mission was to set a good example of wifely domesticity at St. Stephen’s, the largest Anglican church in Wellington. Wellington is the capital of New Zealand. New Zealand is the cultural center of the whole Pacific Rim. Therefore, Vita-Fleur was a a role model to at least one third of the world.

  God of Nations

  At our feet

  In these bonds of love we meet

  Hear our voices we entreat

  God Defend New Zealand

  (All rise, hats off, for the singing of the National Anthem at the 8 p.m. show on Saturday night at the Paramount on Courtney Place. Jaffas rolling down the aisles… Because the Paramount shows “popular” films, the audience is often mixed with Maoris…)

  It was 2 p.m. that January Sunday afternoon at the Vicarage and the dinner plates had just been cleared away. Eric Johnson and Constance Green sat on the floor beside the window seat in the living room playing records. Both were in their teens. They had an ongoing debate about the merits of English folk-rock versus American rock & roll. Eric played Lydia Pence and Fairport Convention; Constance countered with Janis Joplin and Frank Zappa. Every 15 minutes the grownups (Cyril, Vita-Fleur and Constance’s parents, Louise and Jaspar Green) hollered from the bloated depth of armchairs to “TURN THE RECORD DOWN!” Eric’s sisters were reading Elle and English Vogue in their rooms upstairs, and Carla, Constance’s little sister, was outside playing in the garden. Dull-dull-dull. But for Eric and Constance, the promise of this summer afternoon was still not killed.

  The Greens had only just arrived in New Zealand in December, emigrating from a Connecticut suburb about 20 miles northeast of Westport/Greenwich, Episcopal nirvana. The Johnson’s knowledge of geography did not extend to all the differences contained within the twenty miles between Bridgeport and Old Greenwich. Jaspar and Louise, both Anglophiles, were both still thrilled with their move to Wellington, which compared to Bridgeport was an epicenter of English-speaking culture. Meanwhile Eric and Constance circled round each other like two strange animals. Neither had met anyone like the other before.

  That summer, Eric was permanently “home” from Wanganui Boy’s Collegiate. He’d been expelled. After putting up with six years of torture—beatings from school prefects, classmates, even younger boys; being picked last for every team; weeping in the toilets, the School decided Eric “lacked character.” That is, he wasn’t using queerness as a means of negotiating power in Wanganui Boy’s Collegiate hierarchy. He was a full-time queer. The very sight of him—blonde tousled hair, gray shirt tails, pale and thin as a pre-Raphaelite Ophelia—became disruptive to the school. “Sent down” (from Wanganui back to Wellington, New Zealand) at 17,
Eric wanted to go straight to university. His parents refused. He was socially “not ready.” They insisted he attend the new, optional seventh-form, created for future math and science majors. Eric rebelled. In desperation, Cyril agreed to let Eric choose from any school in Wellington.

  At 14, Constance was a jumble of orange polyester miniskirts, plastic earrings, dirty words. Louise and Jaspar, hoping to raise her shabby self-esteem, also decided to let Constance choose a school. She’d be going into Sixth Form. Constance and Eric’s first revelation to each other was that they’d both enrolled at Wellington Trades and Tech. It was a decision they’d each made separately and perversely and to the horror of their parents so of course they bonded instantly.

  Located at the edges of the city’s only slum, Wellington Trades and Tech had an impressive Latin motto carved above the door: Qui Servum Magnum. But no one there could read it since the school had not taught Latin for at least 20 years. “He Who Serves Is Greatest.” Well, the future was no secret: lifetimes spent in auto body shops and typing pools. So everybody made the most of those last three years of school, getting stoned and fingerfucking each other in Biology and Study Hall.

  Unlike his parents, who were impressed by the Green’s Connecticut credentials, Eric knew straight off that Constance’s cultural pretensions were strictly trailer-park. Tough-talking Constance became Eric’s creature, his Pygmalion. Their first job was to get rid of her hideous American accent, replace it with the educated Yorkshire intonations he’d picked up from his Dad. Eric told Constance what to read and what to listen to. Sometimes they reviewed scenes from her past life for Eric’s judicious editing. Eric approved of Constance’s political transgressions—suspended from elementary school for reading Lenny Bruce and leafletting for the Black Panthers. But all the rest would have to go—the shoplifting, the biker gangs and blowjobs, the arrests for drug possession, breaking and entry—were just too tacky.