Beginning.
used to have a dream when I was young did I tell you this?
The dream. The dream as I can remember it is that I am running or skipping through a house with a boy my age, it’s a big house in some secluded place, there are other people it’s nighttime it may be a big family gathering, but we’re upstairs and skipping past rooms with people in them and go into a secluded room with red velvet and slanted ceilings and soft light and ledges and mirrors and it’s almost like a closet and we sit on the ledges maybe in each other’s laps and swing our legs and kiss and it’s our secret and we are boys and playmates and trust each other and have perfect privacy, intimacy. I had this when I was 11 or 12 or 13 and when I would try to tell myself I wasn’t gay I would remember that dream and hope, complexly.
Yes, the dream is like a dream of swimming. We run down the hallway and into the room with a certain fluidity, our bodies are like in a painting, not solid or clumsy or separate.
I wonder if I have expressed myself. I think I have. In the last seven or eight months I learned to see sex in a new way—as like fiction-writing, as vapid as that sounds. I want to produce and experience every effect. I like experimentation. I like manipulating myself, seeing my body or yours as puppets, materials for art. Think of it; one day we could really do anything together, and it wouldn’t mean anything, anything ultimate, wouldn’t express our essences. It would just be for itself, and that’s why it would be perfect.
End.
The only way I have learned to live, to bear living, to find my footing, is to accept a fiction, to fit my circumstances into the shape of a story – and then to lose myself in the rush of living it out. A relationship is a story, raising children is a story, sin and redemption and apocalypse is a story. In the spring I decided you were a convincing protagonist… I cast you; I took one of the great risks of my life, and emotional worlds, realities and pains, opened to me that wouldn’t have existed for me had I not entertained faith in a mirage, or in contingent pleasures, shimmering experiences. Making a decision requires conjuring up as much information, as many relevant considerations, as possible; summoning the right constellation of memory (this is why politics is so fraught: behind all values, all normativity, all action, is the mystery of one mind… making up its mind); at the center of the swarm there has to be will, desire, an interested party. To land on a specific object, a certain person, must be a matter of culture, or convention. But I long ago (the year O) decided that I want you; and to contradict this decision would incur considerable discontinuity. Whatever the stakes of the story of my life – those, I guess, are the stakes of losing you.
Two men can do anything they want, and we are free to be queer, which is to say free. Free to shape our ends. “Free artists of ourselves.” I mean let’s not play with concepts or norms. If I got a PhD and saw you in five years, I would want to embrace you. Let’s speak our minds, and be more alive than we’re expected to be.
Beginning.
I like the form of your email and the mind roiling underneath. Though it is not very Foucaultian of me to imagine a mind under the bits of your discourse.
You’re already full of meaning for me, a harbinger of meaning. I don’t want you to be sad, which is (strictly) pathetic.
Sacrifice and severity and separateness seem to be very important to me. Was thinking about this yesterday. I link it to my childhood, when I knew early on that I wouldn’t be able to participate in many of the normal pleasures, and so would have to find more difficult pleasures.
One of the applications has to be done today so that’s what I’ll do.
Beginning.
I just got out of bed.
I listened to a lecture about Derrida the other day, did not know anything about him, and heard that a sentence always takes the form of a metaphor, that the predicate “is” never the subject. I am happy. I am sad. I am out of sorts. The plane is flying.
I like the voice messages even better than your emails, probably because you have a nice voice. I also like the pauses and sighs.
Four years ago in Argentina I did not have a computer or smartphone, I had sold them, but I would go to a “kiosk” or shop and pay a few pesos to use a boxy Windows computer, and the only person I communicated with was R, and I remember sitting alone in the middle of that stagey city thinking about how a mind can be pressed into an email. Thrilling to words. Thrilling to the music of an email. Feeling love through words.
Beginning.
I cried in the movie (and may do so again now) because of the representation of love. In Anna Karenina, around 500 pages in, Levin, a monk-like rural landowner who’s writing a book about agriculture to pass the time, finally proposes to Kitty, I say finally because he endures much in the first 500 pages, and after doing so his older, better-adjusted friend says to him, “Not time to die anymore?”
This is no doubt what it’s like to be alive. I prefer it. Love is something the troubadours made up a thousand years ago. One mustn’t think too hard about it.
Beginning.
Now I remember your message (I get chills) about the lake and the forest and the adjoining rooms. And what you said about me on a bed behind you reading a book with a colon in the title. And I think, that would be living; that what I am doing now might be something less.
Oh. I meant to get to something else. I’ve noticed the refrain in your letters—it sounds for all the world as if you are saying it to yourself, trying to work yourself up to it—that you should leave your parents’ house, that the time has come. I like hearing you say it.
Beginning.
I think in such blunt categories, such abstractions. I think this is a kind of generalized repression. The delicate pain, the new subtle pleasures of doing what we’re doing is hard for me to keep in the fore.
Did I say this yesterday? I like to think of you as better than me. In a hundred ways. You are having the time of your life. I accepted a while ago that I am too; do I begin to know how to say it?
Beginning.
you,
i think you are justified
i spent much of the morning going back and forth with R about an idea he has ‘in connection with’ a short movie he wants to make. i think it’s important not to be idle. it’s important always to take another step
what is true: there is no solution to the problem. the feeling is the answer, the name the shape are the art, not a problem to be straightened out.
i am speaking to you in a particular way, in my own whimsical language, it’s very trusting i guess, and you’re doing the same.
a teacher, i only sat in on one class, but he said: the words don’t matter in this poem
Arms around each other feels good. Simple?
I worry that partnerships of this kind are a kind of bad religion.
End.
I am going home on Saturday, as I suggested.
You spoke eloquently yesterday as always. You said you didn’t feel I was speaking to your unhappiness… my first months here I felt energized or inspired, that I always knew what to do, that my footing was sure. I feared no longer feeling this way. And I now no longer feel this way.
i am here too
i am struggling with the ugliness of my response
i will always be happy to hear you, to try to see you (beautiful challenge)
Beginning.
I have felt (known?) for a long time that there is nothing that can’t be confronted, nothing you can’t be honest about. The more you absorb, the more you are capable of absorbing. It foreshortens the imagination, to tell the truth.
I think it is a nice certification of reality, that we know the same people. I think it makes perfect, earnest sense—that everyone is worthy and deserving, you know, and that young men are drawn to each other for good reasons.
Beginning.
I want to risk living with you.
This is all funny
and actual and devastating, but the only alternative is
numbness, passiveness, having your life lived for you
By forces outside of yourself.
I just mean I am scared too. Walking down the street
End.
Perhaps this is foolish of me, but I think I want to know the truth. I want to hear some account of what happened, if only because you were my witness for four months, four very long months, four very significant months—and I want to check my sense of reality against yours. Maybe you are protecting me—wisely, generously—but I’d feel safer if we had some frank discussion.
It is almost unbearably humid here!
Forgive my scattered response: you are a street called ridgeview onto which I have turned with Avatar trees and from this ridge, this thin elevated lip of a path curling upward from the dust I have a pleasant view.
Beginning.
I just, while I was eating brown-rice fusili, watched an Adam Phillips interview and, noticing the bizarre music halfway through, realized it must be the one you told me about.
(Your writing sounds the way your paintings look!)
(“It was the exemplary that I wanted to know and understand”!)
Who gave you permission to write a gorgeous essay about… your profound experience of a teacher (the erotics of pedagogy) and the nature of criticism! Much less to get it published.
I hope and expect quite confidently that I’ll never forget “the world has immediacy. this immediacy is its meaning.” Writing it that way, lower-case, makes it look almost like modernist poetry. The meaning of the last month surely was its immediacy, no criticism of it is possible, least of all by me, because I have not stopped to think, I have merely stayed in perpetual motion. Though maybe there is no other way to act—no other mediation than consciousness or memory, no matter how long we wait for it. We are always ourselves, alone, immediately…
And now I am thinking of you swimming, or you driving, or me getting into the passenger’s seat for the first time, or my laying my head on your lap in Beverly Hills or on the bench overlooking the ocean just down from the observatory. I marveled today at the timing of all this… I at least, after a few idle and confused months, was suddenly ready; and you in some sense were too
End.
I am in the airport, listening to tight connection and thinking of the couch, the bed, the car, crying under my mask and hat and hand
I’m sorry that I’m just learning now
I’m sorry I didn’t master it (art of sadness)
Beginning.
I think it is important not to sleep some nights, to be on edge some mornings, emotional some afternoons. I don’t feel I will be ready, fully mature, for many years. I think of myself as still in training (still soft and bluewhite).
i’ve had my share of losing my will in that of another. it’s followed by a retraction of my will into
itself typically, which is a process that allows for, or
generates, or is definitive of, meaning.
talking to you, writing to you, is a meditation,
helps me understand who i am and what i want.
as for telling you what i want: being forthright: and so forth
i suppose it is to live in a civilized and affectionate way
which seems easier with you than without you
i wonder if i have ever loved you more than i do right now or
less?
End.
I used to think about approximately that question: what was it like fifteen thousand years ago to know a language, or to meet a tribe that spoke a different language
Read books about native americans
and more memories (you are becoming my repository of memories, or… whatever), of: i couldn’t sleep on a summer night in new haven, two years ago,
and picked up the collected stevens off the floor, read through the… marginalia? notes? timelines? and finally essays
he accepted a prize once
and wrote, simply, humbly, stupidly, carefully, like a poet
you would like them! (the prose)
i like them
He read widely, went to law school; is an example I contemplate every now and then
Funny, this: two nights ago, sleepless, I picked john ashbery up off the bedside table and read “litany”
a poem by a genius, a great poem, even though poems evaporate when they’re not being read
dont have an effect, dont amount to anything – but while you’re reading it – it is exciting, shall we say, and worth it
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