Laura and I met Saturday morning in Pasadena for coffee, sat in a courtyard off Colorado pretending we were in Mexico or Ibiza, continuing a dialogue we’d started months ago circling around mysticism, love, obsession. Our conversations are not so much about the theories of love & desire, as its manifestations in our favorite books & poems. Study as a Fan Club meeting—the only kind.
There’s an implicit understanding between us that we accept it (love, extremity, desire) & can share some personal information/vision best by swapping favorite epigrams and poems. It was Laura who told me about this proverb about tooth & tongue—“That means, I guess,” she said, looking straight at me with wide and ice-blue eyes, “that the one you love the best has the most power to hurt you.” And we both nodded, smiling slightly, like we knew. But since this’s school, not girltalk, we both work hard to keep our conversations on a referential but ever so suggestive plane. Meeting Laura’s always like inhaling ether; like ladies in the Heian Court, we’re always conscious of ‘the form.’
When I first met Laura Paddock I was impressed by the fat notebooks she was keeping, full of favorite quotes and drawings & her own lines. Remembered how I used to do that years ago. And now—
Thurman, New York
February 9, 1995
—All yesterday on the train and today I’ve been reading your last book, The Ministry Of Fear, which I checked out from the Art Center library. It’s so amazing that the book came out in 1988 because even though the title comes from Orwell it took four more years for fear to drive everybody back into the fold. 1988 was the year when Seven Days, a magazine about real estate and restaurants swept New York and ending up living in the park no longer seemed impossible. Famous-Artist dinner party talk included stories about former colleagues seen scavenging in dumpsters. Money rewrote mythology and the lives of people I’d admired now seemed like cautionary tales. Paul Thek died of AIDS in 1986 and David Wojnarowicz was dying and there was all this academic shit out there about The Body as if it were a thing apart. And in the midst of this you wrote the most amazing thing about the need to bring things DOWN:
“The biological,” you wrote (quoting Emanuel Levinas) “with the notion of inevitability it implies, becomes more than an object of spiritual life. It becomes its heart. The mysterious urgings of the blood…lose the character of problems to be solved by a sovereignly free Self. Because the self is made of just these elements. Our essences no longer lie in freedom but in a kind of chaining. To be truly oneself means accepting this ineluctable original chain that is unique to our bodies, and above all in accepting this chaining.”
And then in Aliens & Anorexia you wrote about your own physical experience, being slightly anorexic—how anorexia arises not from narcissism, a fixation with your body, but a sense of its aloneness:
“If I’m not touched it becomes impossible to eat. Intersubjectivity occurs at the moment of orgasm: when things break down. If I’m not touched my skin feels the flip side of a magnet. It’s only after sex sometimes that I can eat a little.”
And that by recognizing the aloneness of your body it’s possible to reach outside, become an Alien, escape the predetermined world:
“Anorexia is an active stance. The creation of an involuted body. How to abstract oneself from food fluxes and the mechanical sign of the meal? Synchronicity shudders faster than the speed of light around the world. Distant memories of food: strawberry shortcake, mashed potatoes…”
This’s one of the most incredible things I’ve read in years.
It’s now 2 o’clock in the afternoon and as I copied these lines out from your book by hand I felt a shudder of connection with myself when I was 24, 25. It was as if I was right back there in the room on East 11th Street, all those pages of notes that I was writing then, tiny ballpoint letters on wrinkly onion paper about George Eliot, diagrams of molecular movement and attraction, Ulrike Meinhof and Merleau-Ponty. I believed I was inventing a new genre and it was secret because there was nobody to tell it to. Lonely Girl Phenomenology. Living totally alone for the first time, and everything I’d been before (a journalist, New Zealander, a Marxist) was breaking down. And all that writing eventually cohered or was manipulated (the mind’s revenge over dumb emotion!) into Disparate Action/Desperate Action, my first real play.
The arteries of the hand & arm that write lead straight into the heart, I was thinking last week in California, not seeing then that through writing it’s also possible to re-visit a ghost of your past self, as if at least the shell of who you were fifteen years ago can somehow be re-called.
When I got here yesterday the house was banked in snowdrifts three feet high. The pipes are frozen so I’m shitting in the yard and making coffee out of boiled snow. As I was writing this Tom Clayfield and his wife Renee pulled up with a load of firewood. Quick cut to winter coat and gloves, icy breath, hurling logs onto the ground. And suddenly it’s Survival Time in the Great Northwoods—the inescapable part of living here, not good or bad, just takes you someplace else… But even though this winter’s real it doesn’t seem as real as this… At least not for a little while.
What I was about to start writing before this poor Tom Clayfield (32 years old, a torn-up face and his few remaining teeth completely rotted) came by was The 1st Person. The difference between now and fifteen years ago is I don’t think I was able, ever, to write any of those notebooks then in the 1st Person. I had to find these ciphers for myself because whenever I tried writing in the 1st Person it sounded like some other person, or else the tritest most neurotic parts of myself that I wanted so badly to get beyond. Now I can’t stop writing in the 1st Person, it feels like it’s the last chance I’ll ever have to figure some of this stuff out.
Sylvère keeps socializing what I’m going through with you. Labeling it through other people’s eyes—Adultery in Academe, John Updike meets Marivaux… Faculty Wife Throws Herself At Husband’s Colleague. This presumes that there’s something inherently grotesque, unspeakable, about femaleness, desire. But what I’m going through with you is real and happening for the first time.
(Is there a place in this to talk about how wet I’ve been, constantly, since talking on the phone to you 8 days ago? Talking, writing, teaching, working out and dealing with this house, this part of me is melting & unfolding.)
Back to the 1st Person: I’d even made up art theories about my inability to use it. That I’d chosen film and theater, two artforms built entirely on collisions, that only reach their meanings through collision, because I couldn’t ever believe in the integrity/supremacy of the 1st Person (my own). That in order to write 1st Person narrative there needs to be a fixed self or persona and by refusing to believe in this I was merging with the fragmented reality of the time. But now I think okay, that’s right, there’s no fixed point of self but it exists & by writing you can somehow chart that movement. That maybe 1st Person writing’s just as fragmentary as more a-personal collage, it’s just more serious: bringing change & fragmentation closer, bringing it down to where you really are.