From the Neighbor's Bedroom

The only real mutuality is that which is received from one’s furniture—reflecting the acute affectations of our inmost desires, just as the orchid reflects the wasp. And the forgiving body of the chair, too, presents its depression for our desires to fill, conjoined in a lazy interplay of rearrangement and adjustment. Reciprocity and trust can form only under such an agreeable exchange, whereas this relationship is impossible to maintain with articles of clothing, which merely sag from us for a time.

The Dessert Menu

Every weekend now we are calling to make reservations for a dinner that we do not intend to ever have. A name is written in the book but no one ever turns up at the restaurant to claim it. Eventually, the table that had been prepared for us is filled just the same. The people who take our place, peering at each other across their wine glasses, worry themselves about avoiding missed opportunities, careful to catch what every slight eye movement and involuntary tremble is trying to communicate, to pursue every possibility to its end, lest the end should catch them unexpectedly. They learn seven secrets of successful sex in line at the checkout counter.

We, on the contrary, are preoccupied with opportunities deliberately not taken. Our retreat forms only a contemptible lack of interest, an unthinkable turning away from their cinematic candlelight. The tumult of desire yields always unnoticed to passive sighs, and on our breath is the taste of the dinner we have not had. This passive gesture only faintly resembles Howard Hughes, alone in his room atop the Desert Inn, staring into a cinematic void with tissue boxes on his feet. Our absurd ritual repeats, and with every weekend that goes by Jennifer Aniston moves closer and closer to death. This is the power of negation.

Fashion Brigade

A friend flew into town with volumes of notebooks bundled together so tightly that they might coalesce into a single, instructive word. If we had ever followed such an exhortation in the past it would have been that of the itinerant salesman, wandering gaily and caring only for the persuasiveness of his pitch. But this modest figure is now as hard to imagine crossing these gray parking lots that encircle the airport as a goat-footed Walt Whitman with commercial wares filling his threadbare pockets in the place of fractured verse. Perhaps nomadic thinking has now turned to self-exile.

When there was room for persuasion in poesis, for the way in which some words compelled and others repulsed, we could raise our tastes to the level of fashion. There is no greater inertia in the industry of persuasion than desiring the monstrously sexual body found absent in shriveled clothes hanging on the rack but which inhabit the clothing and makeup that move people en masse down the sidewalk. The émigré, abandoned by the discernment of a culture in which she no longer has a home, cannot bear to think about her irrelevance in the hands of its outmoded fashions. I was only too quick to point out the dispersive character of exiled thought before I discovered it regrouping here and there—ghettoized, but surviving.

Dollhouse # 2

To be wed in miniature is the daydream of bourgeois little girls. Insulated from any harshness, their bourgeois sensibilities can dream up only tiny commitments in manageable sizes. It is the opposite for their husbands though, who are willing to proclaim sweeping patriarchal devotions without any real control. Men who are thought controlling are perhaps more often than not the victims of their own obsessions. But it is not control that they are so obsessed with. They were never taught to know the uncontrollable in relation to themselves. Nor did their fathers know. Because they do not know what they cannot control, they are themselves controlled. As Agamben points out, “it is only the lucid vision of what we cannot, or can not, do that gives consistency to our actions.”

Even before their honeymoon, the couple immediately begins saving for future vacations. Each of them quietly suspect that heterosexual, romantic love can only flourish while everything else is in suspense. When love is most focused, as on the honeymoon or on the altar, eros is supposedly immanent. But as the wedding planner begins making the arrangements, picking the flowers, it becomes clear that in every instance that the word marriage is used, the word voyeurism was intended instead. Love demands witnesses, of course, and the shrunken proportion of a little girl’s playtime is easily observed. A dollhouse provides the best venue, a cross-sectioning of the ceremony which permits the voyeuristic eye to move effortlessly between rooms, to peer into the lives of those whom eros has enraptured, to maintain a feelingless distance, to apprehend in secret the redundancy of the term home economics.

Graveyard

Dying is perhaps no more near-sighted than living in the ordinary and divided present. It is for this reason that the city designates a neighborhood for its forlorn mass to inhabit, safeguarding its anxieties with the ritual ancestor worship of municipal body disposal. With dying, as in life, every duration is patterned by a whence and whither, but only the expediency of fatalism narrows their juncture. The fatalist sets out to arrange the death sequence in blind, morbid linearity, as prelude to a certain end. The future decomposes into the past. For someone like Bergson or James, however, that prelude dilates and contracts, as if drawn in upon the edge of an enormous waterfall and later recollected in the pool below. There, dead in the water, the present is belly up, and our discarded bodies are nakedly pressed against the granite skin of the graveyard moon.

Epilepsy

I have kept myself in the most uninhabited parts of the day. Fastidiously eating only between meals, sleeping through rush hour, doing the shopping at midnight. I have been conversing in pauses, lulls, and breaks. I wait in lines that have not yet formed, I leave my money on unattended counters and walk when the streets are perfectly still—seized by the encircling delusion that everybody has gone, that some disaster has inverted the world and emptied it out. More and more, every routine becomes a desert to wander through, like a hermit searching for the eternal. But these commonplaces, despite their untimely manner, retain all order and necessity, to the effect that living with or without an audience is incidental to the phone calls being made, to the flicker of the television.

Dollhouse # 1

What’s at the back of your mind? A city shrunken to one tenth its size, a city small enough to fit into your memory like a ship in a bottle. What’s happening down there? Tiny hands relaying tiny messages, tiny avenues lined with tiny florists. There is a one tenth currency conversion, everyone speaks at one tenth their normal speed and tone, all human relationships and emotions operate in one tenth fractions. This suits the city, since all things are exactly proportional. One tenth of a heart with which to love, one tenth the love to receive. But we notice a strange exception: in this miniaturized city, the total annulments outnumber the total marriages. Did your memory miscalculate? You have already meticulously dressed all of the residents for the occasion. The cake is made, the decorations are set. There is an official nod from the minister that issues to the institution of love its admittance into the various hearts and other organs of God and state. But the illegitimacy of this matrimony is established and multiplied before it even began, engagements broken off repeatedly before even a single proposal. Why?