Cut

What a thrill —-
My thumb instead of an onion.
The top quite gone
Except for a sort of a hinge

Of skin,
A flap like a hat,
Dead white.
Then that red plush.

On the way home, at a different spot (although still raining), I noticed another rabbit patiently watching me from an exposed grassy strip.

I’m sure there are a thousand plausible reasons why a rainstorm would drive rabbits into the open, but there was something about the stillness of their posture that I found quite exhilarating. Perhaps, like me, they also enjoy the smell of wet grass, or the feel of midnight air, swollen by the storm.

WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Whitman

I have this dream where the young Johnny Depp and Matt Damon circa The Talented Mr. Ripley have a fight over who gets to be my best friend, while I look on coyly and bite my finger. In the end, I yell “Guys, guys! Let’s not fight. Why don’t we all just hang out together?” and we all go out to Trivia Night and Jude Law gets pissed (not sure why he’s there) because women keep asking him “Hey, whose that guy hanging out with Matt Damon?”

Another intriguing example I came across was Rilke’s “Die Liebende”, which goes like this [my translation]:

Ja ich sehne mich nach dir. Ich gleite
mich verlierend selbst mir aus der Hand,
ohne Hoffnung, dass ich Das bestreite,
was zu mir kommt wie aus deiner Seite
ernst und unbeirrt und unverwandt.

… jene Zeiten: O wie war ich Eines,
nichts was rief und nichts was mich verriet;
meine Stille war wie eines Steines,
über den der Bach sein Murmeln zieht.

Aber jetzt in diesen Frühlingswochen
hat mich etwas langsam abgebrochen
von dem unbewussten dunkeln Jahr.
Etwas hat mein armes warmes Leben
irgendeinem in die Hand gegeben,
der nicht weiß was ich noch gestern war.

Yes I long for you, I glide
losing myself, out of my own hand,
without hope of contesting that,
which comes to me as if from your side
serious and unwavering and unperturbed.

… those times: O how I was One
nothing that called and nothing that betrayed me;
my silence was as that of a stone
over which the brook draws its murmur.

But now in these spring weeks
something has broken me off
from the dark unconscious year.
Something has given my poor warm life
into the hand of someone
who doesn’t know what I was even yesterday.

The relevance of this, what intrigues me here, is the distinction that Rilke establishes in his work between Liebende (lover) and Geliebte (beloved): his ideal romantic relationship would be something like one in which there is no loved object, no Geliebte, but rather two love subjects, two Liebende. This is something I want to think about more, because I’m not really sure that I’ve ever had a relationship like this, like what takes place in the first paragraph of this poem: I have a hard time even picturing how it would work without a play of active/passive (in a back-and-forth or otherwise), what would happen when two people met each other and immediately experienced desire for each other without any sort of mediation (which is what seduction or flirtation would be for me; some way of providing a structure for desire, for docking and damming and channeling it). Maybe I’m afraid of desiring that much, maybe that’s why I write so much about confessions and seduction and flirting and rhetoric, because I’m afraid of what that sort of firestorm of passion would produce: maybe I’m throwing up a wall of mediation for my own desire because I’m afraid that otherwise, it might break me. Here I’m thinking of the utterly fractured body in Sappho’s “Poem of Jealousy”:

…

Laughing love’s low laughter. Oh this, this only

Stirs the troubled heart in my breast to tremble!

For should I but see thee a little moment,

          Straight is my voice hushed;

 

Yea, my tongue is broken, and through and through me

‘Neath the flesh impalpable fire runs tingling;

Nothing see mine eyes, and a noise of roaring

          Waves in my ear sounds;

 

Sweat runs down in rivers, a tremor seizes

All my limbs, and paler than grass in autumn,

Caught by pains of menacing death, I falter,

          Lost in the love-trance.

Or, for example, Goethe’s Pandora [my poor translation]:

956 Gewöhnet Erdgeborner schwaches Auge sanft
957 Dass nicht vor Helios Pfeil erblinde mein Geschlecht,
958 Bestimmt Erleuchtetes zu sehen, nicht das Licht.

Accustom gently, weak eye of mortals
That Helios’ arrow does not blind my race
Destined to see the illuminated, and not the Light

A sort of dialectical resolution in Rilke’s Die Liebenden [again my trans.]:

Sieh, wie sie zueinander erwachsen:
in ihren Adern wird alles Geist.
Ihre Gestalten beben wie Achsen,
um die es heiß und hinreißend kreist.
Dürstende, und sie bekommen zu trinken,
Wache und sieh : sie bekommen zu sehn.
Laß sie ineinander sinken,
um einander zu überstehn.

See, how they have grown into one another
in their veins all becomes spirit.
Their forms quake like axles,
around which it circles, hot and entrancing
Thirsting, and they receive drink,
observe and see: they receive vision.
Let them sink into one another,
such that each other they can overcome.

The difficulty in this last translation, which I want to deal with later, is this final word: ueberstehen, which I think is at the heart of this question of what happens when you have two active lovers paired with one another, the sort of mutual waves of passion colliding with one another. The word could be translated (and sometimes is) as “to withstand, to endure”, in the sense that  one might weather a storm — but there’s another meaning, “ueberwinden”, which means to overcome. The question is what the status of the two lovers is vis-a-vis unity and division (shades of Plato’s Symposium): I suspect that this second translation is more accurate for the sort of internal logic of this instance, in that what’s happening here is a sort of necessary fusion, where the desire has to lead to a kind of fusion. I’ll think about it.
 

Then, however, I realized in a sort of dialectical twist the real brilliance of Y.’s insight: I thought about (perhaps thought about again, because I enjoy thinking about this moment and have thought about it a few times since it happened) Y. sitting next to me on a couch at a party, remarking with a shy (mischievous?) smile:

Y: “You know, I didn’t tell you this, but I had a crush on you…”
Me [surprised, intrigued]: “Oh really? When was this?”
Y.: “Yeah, really. Recently…”

and how this moment led to a kiss, which led to (as kisses tend to) more kisses, and the good kind of shivers and elevated heart-rate &etc., in a way that I totally hadn’t anticipated and realized that perhaps I had been seduced. And when I thought a little more about this, I realized that Y. had taken the initiative more than a few times since that first remark, which started within me this whole cascade / avalanche of mental reassessment: nearly all of the women who have stolen my heart in the last year or so had initiated or advanced at significant points the romantic angle of the relationship, yet I had been (in my own mental narrative of the romance) totally oblivious to this.

The realization was that I was translating my own subjective experience into terms such that what one would almost have to classify as seduction was sort of passed over when it came from women; I was selectively structuring my own perception (at an unconscious level) in such a way that it reaffirmed my own conceptions, rather than allowing these notions of a male-dominated theory of seduction to be challenged. This, of course, is the whole point of Foucault’s Order of Things: one realizes that we think with the terms that we have, that what is even thinkable is dependent on the terms that we have, that we tend to perceive lived experience in the world in the discourses we have already at hand and that we are generally being the most oblivious precisely when we think we are being the most clever.

So what are the implications of realizing that my own notion of what counted as “seduction” was reifying some sort of male-centric notion and discounting acts of female agency? I mean, I partially answered the question just in the way I posed it: it seems fairly evident to me now that my former understanding was designed to privilege male agency over female, making my own actions active and the object of my affection precisely that, an object. Further, it seems as if latent in that understanding, or that valorization of male seduction, would be something like an idea that female sexual desire isn’t as powerful or self-willed as male desire, that a man sort of intuitively has an active libido and that women have to be persuaded or drawn into desiring. Thus, there’s a sort of harmony of theory and praxis (or the potential for combining theory with lived experience): knowledge of a sort of Foucauldian discourse-theoretical approach provides me with a tool for uncovering (slowly) some of the blind spots in my own subjectivity, a tool for critiquing (and becoming more open to) my own lived experience. Virginia Woolf writes in A Room of One’s Own:

For there is a spot the size of a shilling at the back of the head which one can never see for oneself. It is one of the good offices that sex can discharge for sex — to describe that spot the size of a shilling at the back of the head.

Where all this is heading is simply a complication of my own concept of seduction; I still think that there are active/passive roles (at least potentially) in the rhetoric of seduction regardless of gender, but that one might first have to re-evaluate what exactly is understood under the concept of seduction to see how this idea might privilege certain gendered forms of seduction over others. I’ve also been thinking, based on Y.’s prompting, about instances of seduction in literature that would complicate the one I laid out there; I’m not sure that I have any examples coming to mind immediately, although I definitely re-read big chunks of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own while thinking about this (particularly the section about “Olivia liked Chloe…” ).

Of course, at a much simpler and less theoretically reflected (less self-critical) level, there’s the answer I posted a while back in one of my other ramblings on the nature of falling in love. This, I think, is perhaps the best explanation for the gender of my pronouns (and this explanation, of course, is a move loaded with “dark glasses”:

One might say that every discussion of love (however detached its tonality) inevitably involves a secret allocution (I am addressing someone whom you do not know but who is there, at the end of my maxims)… there is always, in the discourse upon love, a person whom one addresses, though this person may have shifted to the condition of a phantom or a creature still to come. No one wants to speak of love unless it is for someone.

Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, “Talking”.

oh but the other thing i wanted to tell you is that i read your blog, as you know and the queerfeminist in me had to cringe a lot even though i do really like it

The instances she was talking about, insofar as I understand her critique (and we didn’t really get to talk about it too much), are that my discussions of seduction reproduce both gendered and hetero-normative discourses of seduction. In addition, I think she would argue that my writing had a certain universalizing tendency, that it claimed to represent a sort of authentic and ubiquitous male experience. While I would perhaps quibble on some smaller points (and clearly, the fact that I have here in this blog a platform for expressing my thoughts where she can’t means that I can quibble pretty effectively), I think that her critique is for the most part very right. So, this entry is sort of like an open letter to her and sort of like putting myself on blast.

In any case, I started to think about this critique a little bit, and my initial reaction was quite defensive: I consider myself relatively enlightened and relatively queered in my gender politics and was reluctant to concede that I had made such a blunder, but I also consider Y. very smart and very insightful, particularly in the spheres of politics and gender. Thus, a bit of an impasse: these two thoughts appeared to be in conflict with each other (and I do think that both statements, narcissistic as this may be about myself, are correct).  How was I to reconcile  them? My initial rhetorical counter-thrust was precisely an attempt to walk this line, a Foucauldian/post-structuralist argument which basically avoids taking responsibility by outsourcing the question of agency, something in the vein of what Barthes writes about subjectivity in S/Z:

This “I” which approaches the text is already itself a plurality of other texts, of codes which are infinite or, more precisely, lost (whose origin is lost)… Subjectivity is a plenary image… whose deceptive plenitude is merely the wake of all the codes which constitute me, so that my subjectivity has ultimately the generality of stereotypes.

The implication of this, as I read it, would be that at a fundamental level, we are individuals in society, we are made individuals through society: in essence, we are socialized in specific codes (through various means: our parents, our schooling, cultural artifacts like film and books, advertising) that pass on to us our ideas about gender, about heteronormativity, about what seduction is, who can do it and when. Thus, the argument would go, there is a male/female gendering and a heteronormative aspect to seduction, both in literature and in real life, because that is how it has been talked about and passed down for several thousand years. Y. tried to offer me a way out in this direction, saying that I was to some extent constrained by what counts as canon in terms of taking literary examples, but I think that it’s probably the flip-side which is true: what counts as canon, what has been enshrined in these discourses of seduction is both symptomatic of this gendered power structure and (re)productive of it, in the sense that it’s written in books which become popular because people think like that, which reproduces this in the sense that the next generation reads these books and accepts that manner of thinking.

So far, so good in my dodge of her critique. The second part of my self-defense would have been the assertion that because of the way in which discourses of gender and sexuality work in “our” (American?) society, various ideas about women and men’s sexual desire, who can have sex with whom and how often, etc., the playing field is gendered in such a way that predominantly men end up trying to seduce a woman. I’m bracketing queered seduction here, given that these instances are already transgressive and thus constitute thesmelves to some extent directly in opposition to these majority discourses about “proprietous” courtship.

So, why might one argue that you predominantly have men trying to seduce women and not vice versa? In some sense (in many senses), I think this is very true: men have much less to lose through being perceived as sexually desiring or promiscuous (both in terms of social perception and, in pre-contraceptive days, physically: I’m thinking of the examples from H. Mann’s Der Untertan, where a woman sleeps with a man (for the first time) before the marriage proposal, becomes pregnant and is subsequently dropped because she is no longer a virgin and thus no longer marriageable [and yes, Mann points out precisely the logical contortions necessary to think like this]). As such, lots of reasons and discourses encouraging men to sleep with almost all women they’re attracted to at least once, while the reciprocal is not true. Thus, gendered discourses of seduction emerge alongside other historical discourse formations regarding virginity, the question (pre-Freud) of whether female sexual desire even exists, etc. (and no doubt there’s also a link to gendered discourses on rhetoric and respect/acclaim awarded for being a talented speaker coming down to us from Antiquity; were women even allowed to speak in the polis in ancient Greece?).

The counter-claim here might be something like “Ah, but as 21st-century, gender-aware individuals we don’t have to give in to this, we aren’t condemned to just mindlessly submit to these codes, we make our own choices, etc.”, which is what I initially thought Y. was telling me when she said “if you actually think about your experiences and those of your friends do you actually think those rules, ways of thinking and acting apply?”, and which I would tend to think over-privileges conscious, individual action and overlooks underlying structures that work below the level of conscious, willed thought. An example of this might be something like the feminist Ryan Gosling tumblr, which basically throws a nod towards feminist theory, saying “yes, we know de Beauvoir, Butler, Spivak, etc. and since we know the theory it’s not a problem if we reproduce traditional structures in our actions” (e.g., Gosling always starts with “Hey Girl” or gives her flowers or says that instead of talking they should go watch Buffy in bed or whatever). Clearly, this is problematic, because it basically just lets us legitimize bad behaviour patterns in our personal lives by invoking sort of abstract theoretical critique that lets us off the hook, thereby reproducing those structures without the guilt (I’m thinking of a theoretical basis for this like what Zizek talks about with respect to Pascal in the Sublime Ideology book).

Continued in pt. 2 here.

You’re the only girl I’ve seen for a long time that actually did look like something blooming.

Feeling spent and petty for exhausting my writerly libido making fun of fashion bloggers (fish, barrels), so I want to write something vaguely literary. The topic is derived from a quote I stumbled across in Baudrillard’s book on seduction (entitled, appropriately, Seduction) in connection with playboy seducer Dick Diver of Fitzgerarld’s Tender is the Night (always makes me think Don Draper; maybe it’s the double-D bad boys?) The quote:

 Seduction is always more singular and sublime than sex, and it commands the higher price.

I’m never sure how I feel about Fitzgerald. The language seems coarse somehow, a bit forced, as if Fitzgerald knew a good sentence when he read one but couldn’t ever quite reproduce them without having to really toil at it: thus the belabored feel of so much of his description. But sometimes, this is precisely what one needs–the impression that the author is working, hard, to produce the scene is thrown into wonderful relief by a character’s dialogue, pieces start to fall back into one another and the whole thing seems to regain some sort of necessity. “Un éclair… puis la nuit ! – Fugitive beauté/dont le regard m’a fait soudainement renaître,/ne te verrai-je plus que dans l’éternité.” To wit (and hang in there for the excellent payoff at the end):

Rosemary bubbled with delight at the trunks. Her naïveté responded whole-heartedly to the expensive simplicity of the Divers, unaware of its complexity and its lack of innocence, unaware that it was all a selection of quality rather than quantity from the run of the world’s bazaar; and that the simplicity of behavior also, the nursery-like peace and good will, the emphasis on the simpler virtues, was part of a desperate bargain with the gods and had been attained through struggles she could not have guessed at. At that moment the Divers represented externally the exact furthermost evolution of a class, so that most people seemed awkward beside them — in reality a qualitative change had already set in that was not at all apparent to Rosemary.
…
Dick Diver looked at her with cold blue eyes; his kind, strong mouth said thoughtfully and deliberately:

“You’re the only girl I’ve seen for a long time that actually did look like something blooming.”

In her mother’s lap afterward Rosemary cried and cried.

- Tender is the Night

The brilliance of this line, I think, is that at first glance it seems like a sort of charming romantic counterpart, a sort of raw textual energy of seduction. Fitzgerald becomes rewarding though precisely when one looks at the sentence a little bit more closely: it’s equally complexly crafted and, what’s more, calls back and confirms all of the exposition that preceded it. Let’s look at the initial contradiction briefly: “You’re the only girl I’ve seen for a long time“– the implied uniquity of the moment is immediately annulled in a deft sleight of hand (of tongue?) with “for a long time”, whereby Dick delivers a sort of back-handed compliment. The onliness is immediately disavowed, and the implied message, upon closer reading, is “Sure, you’re pretty, but plenty of people are pretty.”

The second half completes the move begun in the first: “that actually did look like something blooming”. This, I think you will grant, is a strange chain of words: “actually did look like”, to my reading at least, is a mess of modifiers. On the one hand, the “actually did” suggests a certain normative exemplarity to the way Rosemary looks; one could read it as saying “Beautiful young actresses are supposed to look like something blooming (according to the poets, or common knowledge, or whatever). You, in distinction to many others, actually do.” Obviously, as far as seduction goes, this is a talented piece of flattery. On the other hand, another reading seems to suggest itself, particularly given what one knows about Dick Diver; namely, that Dick has told a number of women this but hasn’t meant it in the past. This time, however, he seems to be saying, I do mean it: I’m not seducing you on purpose, or at least, not with the intention of just seducing you but instead am genuinely moved by your vitality.

What I think is revealed here is a certain economy of seduction (perhaps only male; I would have to think more about the dynamics of female seduction), in that the allure exists at least partially in this sort of ars erotica knowledge that the seducer is experienced, knows his way around a woman’s body, knows how to produce pleasure, etc: the seducer promises a sort of initiation into an erotic world where precisely the experience of the seducer is the guarantee of his knowledge of producing affects on the seducee’s body. Thus Baudrillard’s distinction between seduction and love, and the reason why the idea of being seduced by a virgin seems like a non-starter: the response would be something like “Well, by what right do you seduce me? What sort of pleasure can you promise?”

The narrative structure of Fitzgerald’s text is aware of this: in both sections that I’ve analyzed, the suggestion is that Dick has done this before: “only girl for a long time” and “that actually did look like something…” both simultaneously suggest the seducer’s experience  with women while simultaneously disavowing that the rhetoric of this seduction is merely pro forma or ready-made. That is to say, he’s telling her “Look, I’ve done this all before, but this time it’s different, this time I mean it.” This is the funny play of seduction, the sort of rhetoric of the ars erotica which is always forced between the Scylla of received traditions in language and the lover’s discourse (you must recognize in my language that I am seducing you, you must think: this is how a seducer speaks) and the Charybdis of unique connections, personal experience (you must not feel as if I’m repeating what I’ve said to another lover before, or merely what I’ve heard others say: you must believe that I mean this).

The obvious conclusion is that successfully navigating this strait makes authentic seduction indistinguishable from exploitation; the experienced seducer, we suspect (Genet and Lacan’s defense of Don Juan to the contrary) has fallen in love with seducing itself, he has fallen for his own rhetoric: like Narcissus, he falls in love with his own reflection, he speaks more for his own ears, to seduce himself into believing that this time, he really means it.  Thus, Dick’s statement embodies precisely this indiscernability: does he mean it, this time, with Rosemary, in a way that he didn’t mean it with Nicole? Did he perhaps mean it then as well (the question that’s casting a pall over the entire text)? Does one mean it at the level of the énonciation and it becomes false only when it becomes énoncé, that is to say, does one mean it precisely until one… doesn’t?

This, in short, is the entire problem of iterability in language, the ineluctable (and irresolvable) structure which both renders personal speech possible and always renders it impersonal, which makes necessary the confession. Perhaps this is what Foucault is missing when he tries to link the contemporary scientia sexualis of the confession with the master/disciple discourse of the ars erotica. As I’ve written before, I think this tension between the received language of love (which one is constrained to use) and the desire to make it personal, to show that one really means every word, is evident in this final love confession of Molly Bloom; Joyce fractures language, breaks its back as it were, to show the sort of mimetic failures of using language to convey the emotions — and yet nonetheless, Molly’s constant ejaculation of “yes, yes, yes” works like a stopgap to prevent any sort of sliding, to assure Leopold that she does love him, that she does mean this:

and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

As a final thought, perhaps Fitzgerald selected “Ode to a Nightingale” deliberately as an example of effortless genius, the sort of writing that was precisely the opposite of his. Keats died at age 26 and had only been writing for 4 years. What a striking thought. I need more time.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.