by Joanna Walsh
With my language I can do everything: even and especially say nothing.
Barthes, ibid
The passivity in which I waited for your story to stop for me, is my strength – after all it is my desire’s annihilation I desire. Instead of breaking you down, I let you break me apart so my words and my actions differed. Tears may have poured from my eyes but I always refused to speak less than calmly, which must have looked entirely out of place.
Maybe I let myself get carried away.
At the table next to me, an older and a younger German woman sit down. The older opens an elaborate cardboard box, gilt-etched. I cannot see what is in it but the gold interior of its flaps catch and toss the evening sun back and forth until there is a gold fire burning between them, as though the box were full of it.
I sit and drink. I don’t work. I don’t write. I don’t read.
Now that I am moving, I still want to disturb you in your familiar places. I still want to move you but any time I set you in motion, instead of walking with me, you leave. Thinking of me, I want you to be distracted, displaced. If I could email you now, would online be place enough for time and place to coincide? Love seems not to take place in normal time, so why should it take place in normal space? Perhaps cyberspace is its most appropriate venue. Or, for second choice, a train.
The older and younger German women are now sitting in front of plates of giant cream cakes. The fire in the empty box is still blazing.
All I have is this story, which travels forwards, not knowing how it will end, and any story is in the waiting. It’s a matter of knowing how to receive ideas. Better not to miss the train I came to catch, better to be in place, on time (by which I mean, as usual, slightly early). Then, when the train, or the story, arrives, I will be ready.
A story must also know when to leave itself alone.
I take out my book.
The hiding must be seen.
Barthes, ibid
You never saw me reading. We never travelled in companionable silence together.
11 Paris/Replaying
7/8 May
I am lonelier because I am in Paris. I arrive to find friends are out of town. Not finding them in familiar places, I know where they aren’t. And I know Paris, don’t have to walk it, look at it. I spend my time online, working.
I am staying in L’s apartment. She’s away in another city. On the overnight train from Munich, which was so very different from the sleeper trains in the movies, I didn’t sleep on my bed, one of six stacked like morgue slots in my compartment, fully clothed as a corpse under a gesture towards a sheet, textured like a wet-wipe. All day I sit in L’s apartment. I empty out my bag. I will take my clothes to the laverie on the corner to wash, but not now. Tomorrow…
All I can see of Paris is the mansard window opposite the window of L’s apartment, a fifth-floor walk-up with a tiny iron balcony and a tiny iron table and chair. It is so Paris that I don’t have to see any more of the city than this view. I know exactly where I am. It’s May now and it’s hot here, and I burn my palm cooking pasta in L’s tiny kitchen. Used to gas, I put my hand down on her electric hotplate and, though I switched it off a while ago, it’s still hot. The kitchen overlooks the back of her block, which looks – the dingy stairwell windows running stains down concrete walls – Paris Paris too, but in a different way. In the evening I go out to a bookshop to hear D read. This is what I came to Paris for. The bookshop is full. I arrive late and stand outside on the street listening to her disembodied voice crawl through the speakers. Afterwards she invites me for dinner with several others. We eat couscous, drink a lot, then smoke outside a café until 2am. The next day I’m hungover. D and my friends have returned to London. I stay all day in L’s apartment with my pile of washing, I don’t need to go out.
So what happened in Munich?
I missed my connection. Or rather, I was not allowed to catch it. I arrived at the station about 9pm and all over the concourse were food outlets of every kind: pizza, pasta, sushi, donuts, pancakes, every-food, all closing and – closed up with hunger, having eaten nothing all day save a few squares of chocolate – I sat down at the first one, or rather the last to still have lights on, and lucked out: it was cheap and good, but maybe any of them would have been.
And afterwards, loitering outside a closed coffee shop, there was connection: WiFi. You wrote, a single line:
I’m in Prague. Why not come?
And why not?
What does your name do to me? A sick lurch of pain, or hope (can I tell the difference?). When you get in touch, I feel it like a clamour. Still. Blood rings in my ears like an airplane taking off, numbing all other sensation. It is overwhelming but I do not want it not to replay, and I don’t know why. You told me once I’d never hear from you again, and I believed you. There was something wonderful about that. I really thought you had that strength. By giving in you made yourself human, made me wonder if this imperfect breaking off was just something you do with everyone. I’m always surprised that I am surprised when you get in touch; it should hardly be surprising because something in me is always waiting for that coincidence.
Come to Prague, you wrote.
You can stay at my place.
On the one hand, it’s the only generous offer you’ve ever made me.
On the other hand, it’s the only generous offer you’ve ever made me.
L emails, to make sure I got in. I tell her about your message: should I reply? Sure, she writes, Want to get burnt again?
Well, I don’t know.
But, still, I don’t answer. And even if I do… I have to remind myself it’s just talking. Remember, nothing’s happened. It’s only a string of words, it’s only online. Remember to keep everything at the level of fiction.
The complex of melancholia behaves like an open wound.
Freud, Mourning and Melancholia
That’s what L said the first time I told her about you. ‘You didn’t sleep with him? You only fooled around?’ Then you were just ‘talking’, or whatever sorority phrase. Your tongue in my mouth: did we speak truer when we spoke online, without bodies, sounding tinkling with the tongues of angels?
Yes yes. I write, I’ll come to Prague.
That’s all I write. No to, no from, no love.
No.
I press delete.
Then:
Will you be there next week?
I don’t press send.
We always sent emails without an X at the end, without salutations. I can only send Xs to people I’m not in love with, and to call you by your name… you were too exceptional, too particularly yourself to have a name I had already heard wrapped around so many other people. Writing about you to the few who knew, I used your initials, frightened, perhaps, of invoking you fully.
Next year, one friend wrote, intending consolation, you won’t even remember his name.
You complained once that I did not use your name, but you seldom used mine either. When I hear my name spoken aloud it shocks me, like something falling onto me from a high shelf, like being hit by something not heavy but unexpected. I know who I am but a name that has served so many others… I’m still surprised to find myself attached to it.
You forgot my name once too. You were introducing me to someone, a chance meeting in the street, and you floundered. And all the time we wrote to each other you supplemented mine with the names of people from books. You called me Macabea (insignificant, ignorant, dirty) from Clarice Lispector’s Hour of the Star, you called me Gudrun (bluestocking) from Women in Love, you called me (epicene) Shakespeare’s Viola. I was named and un-named. I loved it when you did that, felt I belonged to you, but I could never make you belong to me. To call anyone as though he belonged to me seemed wrong, though I loved to be possessed by language.
Come to Prague, Joanna, you said (you wrote).
Are you mine because you called me back? I don’t know whether I want anyone to be mine the way I wanted to be yours, because I’m unsure I ca
n be yours and my own at the same time, and that’s not something I’d ask of anybody. But surrender to another is also a kind of possession: How dare I claim to love you, you said, knowing so little of you? You don’t know how easy it is to know someone when you love what you see, each time you see it repeated. You didn’t know how much desire is observation, naming. But there was always more to notice, to catalogue. It was as though I spotted you across a crowded station, I tried to keep track, but when I caught up you kept on being a different person, not the one I recalled. You were a moving target. Whenever we met in the flesh, I felt foolish to have garnered a different image of you in the online space between, and given it your name. You are what you have loved: I’m wise to Freud’s idea that, whenever I talk of you, I’m also talking of myself. Each small thing I knew of you is what I still can’t leave. If I lose you I lose a world – behind your eyes, beneath your tongue – not only you: I lose myself.
Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego.
Freud, ibid
Nothing requires me to remake myself like love. Except perhaps the internet, and online I can call myself anything I like. A nom de plume, a nom de guerre – in writing or fighting there’s the same requirement for disguise. I add ‘writer’ to my profile, and here I am, a writer. It’s nice to say it in public because I’ve been writing all along. And aren’t I writing to you now? I check and recheck emails I sent you, and it’s like checking a manuscript, except that I can’t edit what has already been published, still searching for some evidence that could have turned the story in the wrong direction. Pre-internet lovers only ever possessed one end of the conversation, could never reread their own love-letters; once sent, those private feelings became private from them.
But it’s difficult to know if what’s made public was ever truly private, as all we know of anything private is what’s been shared. Love letters: what a performance! – even when made public to no more than a parliament of two. Any performance requires an understanding of privacy, of an inside to turn out until it’s performative as a soliloqy, a torch song. I wasn’t only your lover: I was your audience.
AMOUR FOU IS NOT a social democracy, it is not a parliament of two. The minutes of its secret meetings deal with meanings too enormous but too precise for prose. Not this, not that – its Book of Emblems trembles in your hand.
Hakim Bey, Temporary Autonomous Zone
And, when I do something online in public, I’m aware I’m doing something private too, as I’m usually alone, and there were times when I felt, seeing you were also online, I was performing only for you, a public performance with a private intent that paralleled my public purpose, an intent that remained private, even from you, and sometimes – until later – from myself.
The internet demands from me not a response, but that I am responded to. The last time I was in Paris, I remember, B said, proliferation. First email, then g-chat, Skype, texts: our profligate communication proliferated, became uncontrollable. I should have known, this is when it begins to get serious. Shifting from one online identity to another, there became several angles from which I must not be the first to write back.
Lightness is the ecstasy of communication without the irony, it’s the lie of disembodied cyberspace.
Kraus, I Love Dick
So you’re in Prague now? There’s a girl in Prague you have talked about, and I know her too, though she does not know we know each other. I know she is single. And, because she and I do not know each other well, these are more or less the only things I know about her, though I can find more about her on the public net. I wonder whether you have spent time in Prague with her. I try to reconstruct your weekend via other people’s public profiles, which are not entirely reliable. Posts disappear: tweets are deleted, or fall off the timeline. Could there be anything private between you? I still don’t know. Tracing her internet footprint, she seems to have spent the weekend with friends, no mention of you. I try another site, another angle. If knowledge is power, I want to know everything about her.
I am jealous (not envious) of your public conversations. Online envy is normal – the caddisfly-shell public profiles conjure glamorous lives – but jealousy is something else, the desire to possess. The jolt was physical when I discovered you had internet personas I didn’t know about. I wanted a stake in all of them: Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, I desired to be linked into you through every one. I wanted our connection acknowledged, ‘official’, but, superstitious of connecting too publicly too soon, we never followed one another.
I scroll down the list of connections from your profile, which links to hers. I hyperlink, displace myself. If I keep going I might come across everyone you’ve ever known, their friends, their relations, their relations’ friends. Then I try to trace the degrees of separation from my profile to yours, and after a while, the names come up of friends of friends, of acquaintances, of people you might have met, and the suggestions go on and on until the names become unrecognisable. But I never come across you. Careful not to perform our private lives in public, we are not linked. Our internet remains private, one-to-one. How astonishing!
If the object does not possess this great significance for the ego – a significance reinforced by a thousand links – then too its loss will not be of a kind to cause mourning or melancholia.
Freud, ibid
Online you can cut off, unfollow, but you can always declare a return of contact. Or, press a button and there’s always somebody else: each contact weighs the same, if all you’re counting is numbers. A message of congratulation: you’ve gone up a level! – there’s never any end to it. But whatever button I press now, you will not be there, nothing beyond your shiny public shell. That you go on, visibly, publicly, after ‘we’ ended is still hard. Every day I have to renew the decision not to search, not to write, not to look. Each day is a not-end.
What is strangest is inseparable from love… men’s and women’s sexual organs are attracted to each other like a magnet only through the introduction between them of a web of uncertainty ceaselessly renewed.
Breton, Mad Love
I used to search for your photos as though looking could conjure you, and then I stopped, as though not looking could make you disappear. I don’t want to look you up much anymore, haven’t looked for you for some time. I know that if I see you, I might be tempted to get in touch. But today I’ll try it, or I’ll try myself, and see if you have changed, or I have. Memory is necessarily incomplete; it looks for a revelation in something outside itself. Your message prompts a need to find you still exist, so I spend the morning, not walking through the city, but stalking you through the internet. How will I find you? By typing your name, though it is such a regular name that I have already found both its parts attached to several other people, who have all become tangential to my idea of you, until I’ve forgotten who it is I desire. I try a game: how many letters do I have to type before Google turns up your name. I hardly dare to enter your final letters, don’t want to leave the trace of you on my new laptop. Slot machines. Banana, lemon, cherry: all instances of your name become you, and I can accommodate them all in my desire for you. Online, love is not narcissism, but its inverse.
The existence of the lost object is psychically prolonged. Each single one of the memories and expectations in which the libido is bound to the object is called up and hyper-cathected, and detachment of the libido is accomplished in respect of it.
Freud, ibid
I’ll search a different way then, looking for a tell, a giveaway. Because I think they’ll tell me something of you beyond words – something barely voluntary – I’ll look for photos. This segue from read to look takes me scrolling through Google images to find the pictures to which you’ve outsourced your identity. If I type in your name, all those other people who share it stare back too, and I have to search for you in the crowd. Your name triggers several sets of faces, one via your first name in full, another if I abbreviate. Scrolling I confuse your avatar with someone el
se’s which, from a distance, looks like yours, but it is a face in shadow, the negative made positive (the shape behind you in your photo is a window).
Between the snaps of others, I see your public face again and again in all its states, each sharing the same stamp of manufacture. I have no private photographs of you. You did ask me to take a photo once, of you in front of an art gallery (we met in art galleries, sometimes, spaces as impersonal as a coffee chain, or a bus station). I took my phone out. No, you said, use mine. Superstitious, you didn’t want me to have a piece of you recorded. A photograph steals the soul, traps the ghost in the machine, if the ghost and the machine can be called separate things. I returned your phone and you looked at what I’d shot, deleted it, said it made you look old. I didn’t think so. Some people exist only at certain ages. Some old men have boyish wrinkles: some small girls have the faces of middle-aged women waiting to happen. Well, we put what we can into our faces and scrub them each day – they are our mirrors, better keep them shiny – but they wear down as though they were the rags we used. You never looked, how you ‘looked’ in any case. I had to describe you once. I was waiting in a bar, that might not have been the right bar. Had you been and gone? ‘What does he look like?’ the bartender asked, and I used words that fitted no more than your outsides. To delineate your quantifiable ordinary shell seemed a betrayal.
Unlucky charms, perhaps.
Philip Larkin, ‘Wild Oats’
The wrinkles and creases on our faces are the registration of the great passions, vices, insights that called on us; but we, the masters, were not home.
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Image of Proust’
As I type, the burn on my hand from L’s hotplate inflames. Maybe it’s my wrist’s angle; maybe the ibuprofen wore off.
I do not click on any of your photos. If I did, my computer would remember, and bring you back to haunt me. And even if I had, a photo is not reality. I’m OK. I didn’t get in touch. I’ve stuck to fiction. I still needed to be able to conjure your image on the coach across Serbia, on the train from Budapest; most especially during moments of difficulty, or boredom. In Paris, where I have friends (although they are not here) I need it less.