Except joy.
I have tried to make a place where pleasures and arousals spread in a lateral radiance, in a kind of prolonged ecstatic. In an aureole of desire. At once diffuse, specific, and inclusive. A place where what is often discarded as unusable will be kept. A place at once interested in the abstract, distant, and also the utterly urgent, personal, even confessional. A place where we do not have to apologize. A place of forgiveness. I have incorporated, taken into the body of this book, my own past work. That there might be a place where we wouldn’t have to disown ourselves, loathe ourselves in that mild, insidious way, feel ashamed of who we are, or who we were — ashamed by the one who was younger, played it more safely perhaps, made even more mistakes. To embrace our own texts, our written texts, and the texts of our lives. To risk the things they love to call us most: self-indulgent, histrionic, irrational. Indulgent, excessive, pleasure texts — unconcerned with getting to the point. In love with freedom. To walk out of the constraints of perfection, or modesty, or approval, or taste, or integrity as integrity has too often been defined. To escape the burden of the already-constructed and received forms — like the props and scaffolding those traveling players cobble together in hopes of staging the story of the bursting, uncontainable Anju — their efforts, slightly funny, kind of wonderful, a little pathetic, sweet, naive, creaking, and ultimately useless. And this is how I regard the old fictions. I want something else. I want there to be space enough for all sorts of accidents of beauty, revelations, kindnesses, small surprises. A space that encourages new identity constructions for the reader as well as the writer. New patterns of thought and ways of perceiving. New visions of world, renewed hope.
I have tried to create a space neither fictive nor autobiographical where I am allowed to exist in an utterly different way. Not as a character or through character, and yet not as author either. “Once again sadness has caught you off guard,” a voice says in “Exquisite Hour.” I have no idea who is speaking, it might be the drugs, or the desire, or the fencing master or a party guest — but I do know who is being spoken to — alas. It is me. Once again sadness.
In a piece I am working on now which shall appear in the next book, I have let my mind and body exist at such an angle to the subject that I am allowed to inhabit the material in a way that affords me a new place in the text. A question arises, painfully, acutely, through the text, and not in the voice of the character, and not in my own voice, and not in an “authorial” voice. A question I in any other guise would not have the courage or ability to pose: Where does your life go? The piece somehow has allowed me to ask the essential, unbearable question at the center of my fear. Because of the time it takes to make money I may not get to where I need to go. Overwhelmed, panicked, utterly dispirited by my day job. There has been no way to approach such a thing. But the text has allowed me to face it. This is perhaps the most difficult thing of all to describe. Through the urgency and force of my desire and through the open place desire has created in me I may enter my work and be engaged in ways that up until now have been off-limits. There is a different engagement — and the stakes finally start to make a little bit of sense.
Another interesting thing: For me there is less and less of a distinction between writing and living, and this work has clarified that. But that does not quite say it. Let me ask Woolf for help here. She says, “The test of a book (to a writer) is if it makes a space in which quite naturally, you can say what you want to say…. This proves that a book is alive: because it has not crushed the thing I wanted to say, but allowed me to slip it in, without any compression or alteration.” As I was finishing Aureole I happened to hear on the radio that Marguerite Duras, one of the presiding angels of this text, had died. If there had not been room enough in the body of my work to honor her, I would have considered this work to be a failure, a book that failed to live on the most basic level. What would my writing be worth then? If on that March day completing “In the Last Village,” there had not been made a place for her? The creation of an inclusive place — a viable and flexible internal and external space, much like sexual space, at once immediate and remote, completely mundane and utterly sublime — that is what I am after.
(I want to go as far as we went that afternoon in that room in the trees, our bodies filtering leaves and sunlight — the shapes on the wall — that odd, tripped-up time, the hum of early summer — to let in that kind of pleasure, that kind of light. A line of girls appears — you were always such a child — then disappears. You are long gone — except here. Right here. And then you are gone again. But I will not close the parenthesis yet…
The tenacity of the erotic.
I am on a train, as I always seem to be these days, and walking down the aisle I stop to look at someone lying stretched out on two seats, who must have looked like you because standing over this innocent figure I whisper, wake up now. What has brought you here to me? The motion of the train? The desire in these pages, as I finish up the last revisions to Aureole? What has provoked such emotion, such delusion? Who has brought you here? Could it really be you? The movement of the train, does that have something to do with this delusion, this emotion? And the fact that I know you are afraid to fly and that you must be doing a lot of traveling lately and that you travel by train whenever you can, and because you are tired — sleeping in fact, as I stand over you in motion, scribbling, whispering — I try not to think of myself this way…
My desire to awaken you, and us, retrieve you again, and us, seeing you now as I do before me. You are in the midst of your fifteen minutes of fame and there is not a place, quite suddenly, I can turn without seeing your face — a face I have not seen in years now; there is not a mouth who is not saying your name — or so it seems. And as I write over someone quite asleep, desiring, longing to have you with me (that Amtrak bathroom), to keep you with me — even this sleeping version of you — though you have gone for what is probably forever — trying even here, in the most inappropriate of places, an essay for God’s sake — the elongation of the sentence, to keep you here — not allowing the pen to lift from the paper — to make the words, run on and on, in the terrible, too small — and yes of course, I notice as I stand there that I try in language, using every resource, every strategy to have you with me again. I dreamt that floating train carried us and the narrative. And those words, once broken off with some violence, resumed. At least for a minute.
I want to get closer to sexual abandon in language, erotic wonder, spiritual awe. I want to be pressed up close to the speechlessness — as we form our first words after making love, having come back from that amazing and sacred place. I want to live next to the impossible, next to that which forever escapes us, eludes us. Aureole is small progress. But the book I love is the book it suggests — and it sends me back again into my own desire and want. This, all this too, and why not this and more and yes. That is the kind of book I wish for. Always more.