A Lover's Fantasy

 I’m sitting on a train and thumbing through Roland Barthes’ A Lover's Discourse.

I remember buying it for the first time maybe five years ago now, sniffing out some semblance of wisdom and thus approaching it with the aim of devourment. It was with a level of almost desperate insatiability that I attempted to burn the words into my various modes of living. And as I’m sure you can foresee, it was with a sense of disappointment that I withdrew, the only prize a new intellectualised sheen to my facile romantic musings.

Don’t say it. Don’t even think it. Remember, I’m trying to stay irony free.

In hindsight, I realise that my fundamental mistake was in attempting to read the book, in the harbouring of an expectation that I could simply sit back and allow the words to do the work for me. The title should’ve been my initial clue, as the text unrelentingly demands discourse – though not between people, but different parts of the self. This is what the psychoanalyst, Thomas Ogden, refers to when he talks of dreaming a text. It isn’t the author who harbours the bulk of the creative load – hammering home philosophical propositions or literary refrains – but rather, the text is the starting point of a new dream for the reader.

In keeping with this slightly esoteric current, bibliomancy is the process of literary divination; the act of approaching a text with a question and then opening it at random, gleaning an answer from the page before us. I’ve been treating this paperback as a flicker-book for a while, hoping that a chapter will graze my eyes and I’ll feel inspired to write about it. Though, the woman sitting across from me is staring at my increasingly warped book with the eyes of a concerned mother, so in order to alleviate her fears, I’ll return the decision to the source.

I’ve asked her to pick a page number for me, so I’m no longer the only bibliomancer on this train.

In the other’s perfect and “embalmed” figure (for that is the degree to which it fascinates me) I perceive suddenly a speck of corruption. This speck is a tiny one: a gesture, a word, an object, a garment, something unexpected which appears (which dawns) from a region I had never even suspected, and suddenly attaches the loved object to a commonplace world. 

This is from the chosen fragment, Alteration. 

I remember a time when I once had a crush as a young boy, she was a few years older, and we never spoke. My feelings were perfectly preserved within this silence. Though, I once stood behind her in the queue for a lunchtime panini and whilst she was talking to a friend, a perfectly formed globule of spit flew out of her mouth and hit the adjacent wall. Neither of them acknowledged it, perhaps neither even noticed it. The only wounded party was myself. The entire edifice of this childhood crush, the fantasy that I had created, came tumbling down and was never to be resurrected.

The concern of Barthes here that can be aptly illustrated through my crush is that of narcissistic fantasy. I had never spoken to this girl so I constructed an ideal through her – she was a blank screen onto which I projected. All it took was a momentary glimpse of reality, something extraneous and foreign to the ideal, for it to shatter. I think that we’ve probably all been here, enamoured and enchanted, wistful and wanting, until the emergence of a frilly sock or a name from the past (these are nonspecific examples) allow reality in, so to speak. An irredeemable tear in the surface of our canvas.

I spoke this all through with the woman sitting across from me, Philippa. She listened with an acute intensity, her eyes interrogating my words and locating them within a pain that I didn’t know. After I’d finished, I broke into a silence, which she punctured with the words;

           Growing up is realising that everyone is corrupted.

I didn’t question her. These words deserved to stand by themselves as the dreary, Warwickshire countryside flew by. I do wonder however, if we can ever truly grow out of fantasy. For being with people involves the reconciliation of the anxiety that we cannot know them and therefore, cannot control them. What then takes the place of this unknowability? 

I suppose that Philippa was hinting towards growing up as the maturation into loving the Otherness inherent in the Other. It is the building of relationships, whether friendly or romantic, upon these specks of corruption. They are our connection to what is real, that which we can truly share – our existence as singularities.

I recently watched Eric Rohmer’s La Collectionneuse and in a state of anger, one of the characters utters this pronouncement: I’m most attracted to the flashes of ugliness that cross your face. Whilst the speaker is an abominable artist, aiming to wound our protagonist in the film, I think that it offers an interesting inverse to Barthes’ refrain. The love of that which falls outside of the frame – the love of that which we can never control and never truly know.

I’ll leave this with one of my favourite lines from Emerson and a thank you to Philippa for choosing the right page and then having all of the right words:

If you love me, what is that to you? It is that which you know not in yourself and can never know. 

A Grasp at Truth

 

There are multiple explanations as to why I’ve left this blog out to die; a failed creative project quickly lost in an internal tumult of aesthetic perfectionism and therapeutic baggage. You’d think that the medium would get tired and discard me, another young man added to the canon-fodder of jaded, and thus inadequate, bloggers.

God, I hate that word.

I suppose the most pressing reason is that I no longer recognise myself in anything that I’ve ever written; the word contains no truth – in fact, I’d go even further and say that my words contain nothing at all. I’ve always found it hard to allow a sentence to breathe for me, preferring instead to suffocate any authentic trace of myself through my use of language. I wish that I had a grand explanation for this; a Derridean analysis of differance to somehow justify my excessive verbosity. But I don’t. And I’m very much aware that I’ve done it again.

The feeling of alienation seems to be fairly universal; that occasional presence of the lightning rod, cleaving apart the self from the body and its surroundings, until we can somehow stand apart from both in abject horror. I mention this because I was recently reading old diary entries of mine, indulging in old indulgences, when I realised that they were full of lies. For some inexplicable (or perhaps crushingly obvious reason), my diary didn’t contain a shred of recognisable truth. Any genuine feeling, any connection to bodily experience, had been buried beneath pure style – sad signifiers floating around, used and abused. I’m sure you can imagine the bodily sensations that followed this realisation.

I suppose that this piece of writing can be thought of as a means to move past this; an attempt to write about that which concerns me most. And more pressingly perhaps, to preserve some feeling in the text. A task that has always seemed too impossible for me to attempt.

For several years now, I’ve thought that every life can be measured by a series of encounters – supple stains upon the self. These can be interpersonal, literary, filmic – it doesn’t really matter to me – but they are demarked by their ability to tangibly introduce otherness into our lives. A psychic home invasion perhaps, the introduction of an unsettling current of life that not only has the potential to take us outside of ourselves, but further inside, too. This isn’t to say that they necessarily reveal how things are, akin to some entry into the light of Platonic truth, but rather, how things aren’t. They reveal the profound contradictions that animate our lives. The fact that the Other – the invader – has always already been here.

It is a mark of my newfound honesty then, which I hope isn’t reading like a desperate confessional, that I want to share one of the encounters that I’ve had recently.

In the 1980s, Christopher Bollas coined the term known unthought to refer to experiences or introspective gleanings that we know, but we cannot think. These are the thoughts that continually threaten our psychic housing, teasing the delicately poised edifice of the mind. These are the thoughts that laugh in the face of the Socratic injunction to know thyself, for they reveal the impossibility of such an endeavour. Anyway, I recently stumbled across the poem, A Girl in a Library, by Randall Jarrell and I’ve been enamoured by a singular line, which may be the known unthought that I’ve most struggled to grapple with over the course of my life.

And yet, the ways we miss our lives is life.

This is the fundamental fact of self-formulation; in being ourselves, we are not that which we could have been. Written into the fabric of our lives is the lives that we don’t have. I’ve yet to meet someone who I think isn’t somewhat haunted by the possibilities of the alternative future, the enclosure of space, time and selfhood that arises simply through being ourselves. And yes, I’m aware that I may be projecting. The lovers we missed by a minute; the conversations caught by the tongue. We continually have to grapple with the presence of unrealised selves, a perpetual haunting, in which mourning becomes commonplace. This is impossibly crushing. And yet, the way that we miss our lives is life.

The writer and psychoanalyst, Adam Phillips, says that we live our life through a set of quotations. They form an interior text through which we relate to the world. And then one day, if they are ever truly integrated, our minds can release the mystery and they dissipate back into the text. A parallel can be drawn here with the words of T.S Eliot, in which the end of our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. The moment Jarrell stops reverberating around, stops infiltrating the dark corners, is the moment that I’ve understood him. Not that I truly believe in the possibility.

I think that the importance of the poem for me, the stark reflection that it encourages, is that in our new economy of self-creation, this fantasy of could have been sometimes operates on an almost transcendental level. The self that walked the other path; the self that is the best version of who we could be, is the idol that we begin to worship in our dreams. And the idol constructed with mental matter (ghostly ectoplasm) is a lot harder to crush than that of clay. In his text, The Ideology of Modernism, Lukacs writes about our tendency, post Gods untimely death, to focus our hopes upon a transcendence conceived of as a pure absence. We cannot dispel this metaphysical shadow, grasping in the darkness, moving our hands outwards and attempting to claw back something that can exist in this absence. We clutch at alternative futures, comfort ourselves in the sheer fact of their (once) possibility, that in Beckett’s words, aid in this obliteration of an unbearable presence.

This reflection frames my diary in a new light.

The total collapse of any recognition arose from the fact that I was writing from the perspective of one of the men that I’ve missed. A fantasy at the end of a lofty detour around the potential possibilities of my life. I was writing as someone that I was not, in order to not be who I am.

I'm afraid to say that there’s no lofty conclusion here, or any distinguishable lesson. There’s simply a collection of disparate words that I’ve tried to make as honest to me as possible. Though, I can already foresee the picture in a few months’ time. I’ll be sitting and reading this in a state of shaken disgust, recoiling at the presence of the ghost who guides the hand. The ghost who has ascribed these words.  

Anyway, I don’t want to end on such a heavy, dramatic note. I’ve always enjoyed the line that the reason we know Hamlet isn’t mad is because he had more thoughts than one.

And in that vein, I need to stop thinking about this now.