lycanthropia

According to Lacan, the sexual relationship—or, more precisely, its failure—represents the primary stumbling block in human relations, a stumbling block that results from our insertion into language. As Lacan puts it, “No relationship gets constituted between the sexes in the case of speaking beings.” “There is no sexual relationship” because the categories of male and female indicate a structural impasse: each position is structured so that it looks for what the other does not have, not for what it has. The desires of the sexes are thus not complementary. This dooms relationships between the sexes to be antagonistic, and it dooms both sexes to a continual battle to overcome this antagonism. The only way out of this antagonism is to turn to fantasy, although fantasy can only overcome this conflict in an imaginary way. Fantasy allows the subject to discover, through producing a narrative around it, a way of creating the illusion that the successful sexual relationship is possible.

[Todd McGowan, The Impossible David Lynch]

I have reached that point in the semester. The make-it-or-break-it point, the moment of truth, the small but powerful eddying whirlpool of black-hole hell down which one is inexorably sucked. In short, grades are due Monday and worst, my research paper is due Friday. And I have fallen headfirst into the classic grad-student trap of, “I’ll just read one more book/article and then I’ll start writing.” Now it’s Tuesday and the paper is due Friday and all I have are pages and pages and pages of notes—

Dead cold panic.  The usual. Cursing my lack of work ethic and all those nights I stayed up late eating tangerines and watching Firefly. (NOTE TO SELF NEVER EVER ORDER FIREFLY UNTIL AFTER ALL THE PAPERS ARE HANDED IN OH MY GOOD LORD.) Wishing I had an extra weekend, that same panic that assaults the hearts of my own students, its icy fist gripping inside their chests, and then in a rictus of fear they google desperately and start downloading and/or cutting-and-pasting. Out of a class of 25 students, 6 plagiarists. I asked four to rewrite their papers, after being stern and scaring the bejeezus out of them; and the others will have official university sanctions, which means I have to write letters and print out websites and document copied passages with a highlighter and colored pens and OH GOD I DO NOT HAVE TIME FOR ANY OF THIS.

So of course, I woke up this morning and immediately started making salsa verde/green chile chicken enchiladas from scratch. You know. Because.

There is really no known terror, for me, quite like the unwritten-writing-assignment terror. Which is kind of hilarious, since I’m, you know, a writer and all. Sometimes I’m not sure how I bore it, working at the alt weekly for as long as I somehow did (thanks mostly to everyone’s studiously and kindly looking the other way as I floundered and gasped and thrashed)—I don’t know why I wasn’t vomiting on like a weekly basis every Sunday night. I guess I was cutting and hitting myself instead, and accusing my boyfriends of being to blame somehow—hang on, I have to peel the blistered skin off the poblano and serrano and jalapeño.

Where was I. Ah yes, reminiscing delightfully about my dashed career as a movie reviewer. And my thwarted career as an academic, off to yet another lurching start. All because writing prose scares the pants off me.

(Taste salsa verde: way too mild. I knew I should’ve bought more serranos. Can I text the neighbor and ask him to pick up some more habaneros or something? Add to list of things I’ve learned to do since my ex left me: Revel in insanely hot Mexican/Thai food.)

Suddenly I have to post this and not write it anymore. It’s a day where I hate everything I write, myself, am convinced my friends all secretly find me a big drag, and why the hell didn’t I start this paper two weeks ago. Just the usual. But when I was looking up whether habanero should have a tilde, I found this Wiki entry on hyperforeignisms, and you should read it, because Americans are silly and we apparently like to gussy up our foreign loan words even more than the foreigners originally did. We mispronounce everything! Petruchio! Empanada! Schizophrenia! Beijing! Maraschino! Now I can be even more snobby.

(PS here is my winterface. This is the face that tries to figure out how Kristeva’s chora relates to Eraserhead, or Lacanian ego development to the construction of the lesbian in Mulholland Drive. This is the face that panics and goes into denial and paces the house, skin prickling with anxiety, and tastes the salsa verde, really pretty amazing with all the cilantro and lime.)

I am feeling very fond of myself, and defiant, and very silly.

Maybe I take so many pictures of myself to see that I am here. Without the male gaze sometimes I wonder. Am I beautiful? Am I plain? Am I anything? Am I invisible? So I photograph myself with the little camera on my laptop, and try to see if I am there, like the ghost in the old department store downtown who for years has been trying to take pictures of herself in their photo booth at night, but in the morning the only thing in the photographs is the bright bulb of the flash, and empty space.

Last night I watched Biutiful, tonight I am watching Stroszek. The orange tulips have dried to a reddish-brown and with their last energy exploded open, revealing black stigma, petals dropping to the table. I look and look for apartments in Houston on craigslist, still a month too early. I take a long bath and shave everything and condition my hair and scrub my feet with pumice. I go to the grocery store and buy almond soap, tuna and avocado roll, Ranier cherries which cost more than God. I write my big thing, which, I really don’t know yet what it is going to be, only that in many ways it drags me back down into it, leaves me sodden with an old longing for my ex-lover, an aching I really thought was over by now. But is not. I lie twisted in the bed, throbbing with blood. I am reduced to the simplicity of that longing, I turn into one big red inflamed heart, or more honestly another body part, the pain radiates out to the palms of my hands and down to the soles of my feet and I am rendered simple and astonished that desire can hurt like this. That after a year and infinite small betrayals and several large ones I still would want him, still cannot think of anything else for long moments at a time but the taste of his skin. My sponsor says it is like alcohol or drug addiction, I am craving the substance, and must wait it out. I am a little bit angry that I am still having to feel these feelings. That his body would still be so vivid to me. I am disappointed in myself, and embarrassed, that I have not been able to stop wanting someone so patently bad for me. I walk past his car on the way to my meeting and see a black sticker with red lettering that I placed on the bumper: I <3 PUPUSAS. I remember the night I put it there, laughing, after we’d had pupusas. I remember every fucking thing.

(Mostly I think it all came up for me because of Biutiful, and my ex used to have prostate problems, so I started to imagine “What if he gets prostate cancer” and then I became terribly sentimental and I wanted to be there for him in his final imaginary illness, etc.)

A close friend advises me not to write this thing I am writing, for exactly this reason. That as long as I am writing it, the relationship isn’t former but is still alive and I am just prolonging it or rather postponing ending it. He quotes William Burroughs on quitting smoking and says I just have to make a conscious decision never to think about my ex again, and that way I will be cured of my obsession. The thing of it is, though, I don’t mind. I know the companionship of my lost lover isn’t real, is evanescent on sheets of paper, ends every time I pull one out of the typewriter. (And tomorrow I must go buy actual typing paper, erasable bond we used to call it, does that even still exist? I don’t know, but I am running out of paper.) I think my friend and I have a different aesthetic and a different working style, a different methodology. My method is, bluntly put, to hurl myself down from the tower seven times and let the dogs of the city lap up my blood. I am not afraid to do this, not afraid that afterward I’ll weep, the same way I still cry every time I try to touch myself. This is how it is. I am not afraid to be ridiculous, or obsessive, or messy, or gross.

I think the really funny thing is that friends think it is okay to tell me how to work.

My friend is probably right. I will go back now to watching Stroszek, which he recommended, which has just started and at which I have already laughed aloud twice. I think, nonsequentially, of Dedalus. Of being not afraid to make a mistake as long as life itself.

I will tell you what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity.

If I waste my work then it is already well and truly wasted, I come from a place from which I was never meant to emerge in the first place, anything else I might accomplish is already an unexpected gift and I am not afraid to have my writing be pointless and lost. I continue writing my thing. I continue working.

I struggle with writing, then I write, then I struggle with writing, then I write. It is not uninteresting. It is also sometimes very boring, already, only twenty pages in. There has been resistance from unexpected corners and people, and I struggle and then I write. As I write I discover things—I discover that I love the city where I live, and I am writing about it as much as him—that a certain sloppy-seeming style (the bulimic, the gurlesque, the grotesque?) may look perhaps effortless but is fairly effortful to achieve—that in order for a reader to understand why I still miss my ex, I have to depict the original courtship and relationship, explain why we fell in love in the first place, show how it was when one day aliens took away my boyfriend; otherwise the reader will just think, as I sometimes think, as we all sometimes think, “what a sociopath/narcissist/asshole, why is she still grieving?” And in going over those stories, I find that I groom them, I curate them, I am tender with them: because someone needs to be the rememberer. Others may turn away from inconvenient memories, my sponsor said “you are not a discarded dishrag” but her having said this expressed perfectly how I was feeling; others may discard things and times together and people like dishrags, but I have often said: that: being a poet simply means to be a professional rememberer, I am not forgetting, not forgetting, I am not forgetting this.