he waits
Archive for April, 2007
He goes to the mirror to make sense of his unruly body
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He whispers I love you into the wind a thousand times
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He longs to be astonished
He tells me his secrets
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I become a weapon
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We call this love
He relished the tartness of stolen berries, red lace seemed unnatural, but one had to consider the worms, and a splash of meaning
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He said that flowers seemed too obvious and was pleased with spiny offerings, claiming that water-starved plants suited a world denuded of love, but then he had to account for the fleshy desert plants and his tastes, sharp with a pleasing roundness
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He had learned the pleasures of guilt and played overwrought love songs
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Tenderness was required as her teeth were fragile.
a suitable metaphor
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Refrain from triteness.
As a rule, it limited encounters with the love industry, laden with overstocked phrases, Titus Andronicus masquerading as Romeo and Juliet, we all fall down
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I’m Shirley Temple, I have a dimple to match my underwear, I have a tailor, and curls and smiles and dances – I will not dance
Arrhythmia makes him lose the beat
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Once he pressed flowers like heroines in beautiful books—in a country without seasons it made little sense, but Romeo and Juliet is universal, like butter and jam, bata and jams, batter my – did you think it would be that easy
He smiles
Models pose for long stretches of time
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When you are finished, we will go somewhere
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He has discovered the pleasure of extended walks
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It was possible to interrupt
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One need not believe in sequence to wait for unfolding
He murmurs something
Sup? Yes. Looking? Yes. Into? Yes. Interested? Yes.
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Touch. Yes. Kiss. Yes. Hug. Yes. Lick. Yes. Hold. Yes. Lick. Yes. Kiss. Yes. Hold. Yes. Touch. Yes. Lick. Yes. Fuck. Yes. Hold. Yes. Suck. Yes. Touch. Yes. Kiss. Yes. Come. Yes. Go. Yes. Jump. Yes. Run. Yes. Hold. Yes. Suck. Yes. Eat. Yes. Ate. Yes. Ran. Yes. Touched. Yes. Kissed. Yes. Suck. Yes. Stay.
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I. Like. That.
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Smooth. Soft. Hard.
Hard. Rough. Tough.
Tough. Smooth. Soft.
Soft. Hard. Rough.
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And. It. Was. Good.
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Call. Yes. But. Yes. Butt. Yes. Bat. Yes. Bat. Yes. Bat. Yes. Text. Yes.
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Hairy. Supple. Subtle. Hirsute.
Supple. Hairy. Hirsute. Subtle.
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Stay?
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Yes.
If one were to change the question: to ask that the other be desirable.
Interlude One: Desire articulated stabilizes itself, normalizes its temporality so one may have pleasure. There is no necessary link between desire and pleasure. We might read personal ads as stop signs on the desire highway. Tearooms. Articulations of non-desire. Reining in rather than letting go. Compulsion is the mark of desire.
As simple as a misused article. He writes “off of” and I am cold.
Interlude Two: I am startled by how quickly it changes. Less beauty, more voice. Less pitch, more accent. Less refined, more mellifluous. Perhaps I am repelled by my own foreignness. After 3 words, 4 at the most, I turn away. Politeness compels me to nod and speak. I am waiting for the moment of arrest.
On the bus. He turns every so often, switching angles. Each time, I am arrested and then repelled. My breath catches, victim to desire’s amnesia.
Interlude Three: Anecdotes and anniversaries remind us we once loved. I have known the joy of seeing beauty in the same person. This might be termed desire’s faith. Even the option of desire is itself an act of faith. Some call it ontological. Such big words frighten me. I think they mean it’s like salt.
He once looked at me as though he might care.
Interlude Four: Strangers understood him to be dull and indifferent, his blank face offering little encouragement and even less entertainment. They marveled at her choice in friends. He can be charming, she said. They felt it was too much work and wished her well.
The intimate lives of complex people.
Interlude Five: Desire can be capacious. Desire is paratactic. Desire may be parasitic. Desire burrows. Desire digs. Desire spreads. Desire infects. Desire corrupts. At a certain point, we wondered why they all wanted the unattractive singer with the terrible voice.
After she stopped smoking.
I join the analysts.
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Perhaps the finest academic work that might contextualize Cho’s actions is Anne Anlin Cheng’s The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis. Assimilation, and Hidden Grief.
We are a nation at ease with grievance but not with grief. It is reassuring . . . to believe in the efficacy of grievance in redressing grief. Yet if grievance is understood to be the social and legal articulation of grief, then it has been incapable of addressing those aspects of grief that speak in a different language—a language that may seem inchoate because it is not fully reconcilable to the vocabulary of social formulation or ideology but that nonetheless cuts a formative pattern. (x)
Even now the lawyers line up. Asked if he feels like a hero, a student breaks down. Grievance points a finger: it is his upbringing, his lack of assimilation, his mental health, the school’s negligence. Grief stutters and hiccups and cannot fill hours of television programming. We want statements punctuated with sobs. We cannot accommodate inarticulate expressions of pain.
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What is needed is a serious effort at rethinking the term “agency” in relation to forms of racial grief, to broaden the term beyond the assumption of a pure sovereign subject to other manifestations, forms, tonalities, and graduations of governance. (15)
What if we were to understand the social as a site of perpetual wounding? Not to say that the “strange” kid in class does not know how to socialize, but to examine how the very ways we socialize may always contain a kernel of violence. A long time ago, a professor opened class by saying, “we are all middle class here.” Ostensibly a gesture of inclusion, it inevitably produced failure and fracture.
The chancellor of my university sent out an email that read “We are all family.” I register this attempt at inclusion through the metaphor of kinship as deeply problematic. In part because this “family” is predicated on hiding what Charles Chesnutt once termed the “dusty record of our ancestry.”
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An understanding of melancholia as experienced by the raced subject must extend beyond a superficial or merely affective description of sadness to a deep sense of how that sadness—as a kind of ambulatory despair or manic euphoria—conditions life for the disenfranchised and, indeed, conditions their identity and shapes their subjectivity. (24)
One might think of melancholia as a psychic bedsore, on the condition that intersubjective relations are considered the bed. This is the ongoing challenge of Cheng’s work: to understand the continual production of psychic wounding.
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While social and racial integration offer the preeminent American social myths, assimilation remains one of the deepest sources of anxiety in the American psyche. That is, while integration promises a socionational dream, assimilation as its cultural corollary catches all the material and immaterial anxieties inadmissible to that promise. Today, Asian Americans present one of the most charged contemporary focuses for the mainstream culture’s idealization and fear of assimilation. (70)
As more news comes in, we are learning that the dream of immigration and assimilation is just that, a dream: Cho is Korean. His actions were those of a Korean child. That he was a legal resident who had lived in America for over a decade must be effaced. He is evidence of the failure of assimilation. After all, we all know those people like to cluster together. Those people avoid mixing with proper white Americans. We can never trust those people. We forget, at our peril, the long history of Anti-Asian sentiment in American political and public discourse.
In small towns, one remains a newcomer after 50 years residence. In racial migrations, one remains a foreigner regardless of legal status.
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We do not know yet what it means for politics to accommodate a concept of identity based on constitutive loss or for politics to explore the psychic and social anchoring points that keep us chained to the oppressive wounding memories of love and hate that condition that mutual enmeshment of the “dominant” and the “disempowered.” To refuse to contemplate these aspects of racial dynamics, however, has not been productive either, as is evidenced by the ongoing national drama of racial repudiation and reprisal. (25)
American campuses remain great social experiments, governed by ideas of academic freedom and social equality. But we forget at our peril that life extends beyond the classroom, increasingly so. Those who can forget that the drama between the “dominant” and the “disempowered” is played out every day.
What might it mean for a student to walk across campus and be confronted with racist paraphernalia in every direction? What does it mean that at my current institution many white students and their kin are mourning and protesting the university’s decision to retire an extremely racist mascot?
I envision a short story that riffs on Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” In this version, a small town has only 24 hours before a complete ban on lynching takes place. Perhaps it has already been written.
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