14. When my phone bill came in May I was surprised to see that that night—the night of April 21, the night of our last-ever conversation—we’d talked for 80 minutes. It hardly felt like 20.
15. No one, and schizophrenics least of all who do it best, can live in this heightened state of reflective receptivity forever. Because this empathy’s involuntary, there’s terror here. Loss of control, a seepage. Becoming someone else or worse: becoming nothing but the vibratory field between two people.
“And who are you?” Brion Gysin’s question, asked to ridicule the authenticity of authorship (“Since when do words belong to anybody? ‘Your very own words’ indeed. And who are you?”) gets scarier the more you think about it. In Minneapolis when I collapsed with Crohn’s Disease after realizing Sylvère didn’t love me I lay on a stranger’s couch feverish and doubled up with pain, hallucinating through swirling particles to a face behind my face. Before they stuck the tubes down through my nose I knew “I” “wasn’t” “anywhere.”
16. Calling you that night was torture that I’d pledged myself to do. “I have to let you know,” I said, “how I felt last weekend in LA after I saw you.” (It’d been ten days and my body was still locked up with sickness). “If I can’t tell you this I’ll have no choice except to hate you in my heart, perhaps in public.”
You said: “I’m sick of your emotional blackmail.”
But I went on, and told you how when I got back to New York that Wednesday, April 12, I had three different kinds of rashes: a rash that made my eyes swell closed, a rash across my face and a different rash around my body.
You said: “I’m not responsible.”
Somehow on the plane that Tuesday night I’d been able to exorcize the stomach pain that’d started in LA the night before, the night I called to say goodbye, the way you’d asked me to. Pacing in the tiny space behind the cabin, shouting down the Airphone to Sylvère as the plane flew over Denver, I’d barricaded myself against another Crohn’s Disease flareup but the somatic body won’t be denied, it’s like a freeway. Open up an extra lane of traffic and it’ll fill up too. On Wednesday morning I crashed with rashes, tears, a yeast infection and cystitis. A malady diffuse enough for Dr. Blum to write five separate prescriptions. I got the drugs and drove upstate. And now it was overcast Good Friday.
17. Because identifying so completely with someone else can only happen by abandoning yourself, the schizophrenic panics and retreats abruptly from these connections. Connect and cut. Connecticut. Schizophrenics reach beyond the parameters of language into the realm of pure coincidence. Freed from signifying logic, time spreads out in all directions. “Think of language as a signifying chain.” (Lacan) Without the map of language you’re not anywhere.
“Even if everything between us was 80 percent in my own mind,” I said, “20 had to come from you.” You disagreed; insisted everything that passed between us was my own fabrication. I wondered if that’s possible. Granted, fan-dom is an engineered psychosis. But what went on with us was singular and private. And by the end of 80 minutes the conversation looped around. You listened; you were kind. You started talking in percentages.
Schizophrenia is metaphysics-brut. The schizophrenic leaves the body, transcends himself, herself, outside any system of belief. Freedom equals panic because without belief there is no language. When you’ve lost yourself to empathy, a total shutdown is the only way back in.
And when does empathy turn into dissolution?
18. On Wednesday, April 5 I left New York to “teach for a week” at Art Center in Los Angeles, hoping I might see you. All winter, spring, I was shuttling between the rural poverty of upstate New York to Avenue D, New York, to Pasadena. That Wednesday afternoon I took a cab to JFK, upgraded my ticket in the Admiral’s Club Lounge, caught the 5, got in at 8 to Los Angeles. I picked up a rental car and drove out to a motel in Pasadena. My entire existential-economic situation was schizophrenic, if you accept Félix’s terms: schizophrenia as a paradigm for the internalized contradictions of late capitalism. I wasn’t travelling as Chris Kraus. I was travelling as the wife of Sylvère Lotringer. “You may be brave,” you said to me that weekend, “but you’re not wise.” But Dick, if wisdom’s silence then it’s time to play the fool—
That night I got lost on the 405, found myself driving towards your house in Piru. I turned around, cut back across the 101 to Pasadena. I didn’t have to be at school ’til Friday but I came in Wednesday night ’cause I thought it would increase the chance of seeing you. Besides, on Wednesday night I’d been invited to a party for my friend Ray Johannson’s 40th birthday.
At 10p.m. I checked into the Vagabond Motel on Colorado. I ran a bath, unpacked my clothes, then called you. Your phone rang eight times, there was no answer. I washed and styled my hair, then called again. This time your answerphone kicked on. I didn’t leave a message. I smoked a cigarette, then thought about an outfit for Ray’s party. Wisely, I decided against the Kanae & Onyx gold lame rubber jacket. But after getting dressed (black chiffon shirt, English military pants, black leather jacket) I reached another impasse. If I left a message on your answerphone I couldn’t call again. No, I had to talk to you directly. But could I skip Ray’s party just to sit beside the phone? Finally I decided to wait until 10:30. If you weren’t home I’d leave and call you in the morning. At 10:35 p.m. I called again. You answered.
“Lived experience,” said Gilles Dleuze in Chaosophy “does not mean sensible qualities. It means intensification. ‘I feel that’ means that something is happening inside me. It happens all the time with schizophrenics. When a schizophrenic says ‘I feel that I’m becoming God’ it’s as if he were passing beyond a threshold of intensity with his very body… The body of the schizophrenic is a kind of egg. It is a catatonic body.”
You didn’t sound surprised when I told you I was calling from LA. Or maybe you just sounded non-committal. At first your voice was cold, detached, but then it softened. You said you couldn’t really talk… But then you did, you did. I don’t remember which conference in which European country you’d just got back from. You said you were exhausted and depressed. Two nights ago you’d narrowly escaped a DUI driving on Route 126 and you’d decided to stop drinking.
“I feel clearer now than I’ve ever felt before,” you said, after 36 hours of sobriety. Waves of remorse pounded from my heart out to my fingers. I clasped the phone, regretting this entire schizophrenic project that’d started when I met you. “I’ve never been stalked before,” you said in February. But was it stalking? Loving you was like a kind of truth-drug because you knew everything. You made me think it might be possible to reconstruct a life ’cause after all, you’d walked away from yours. If I could love you consciously, take an experience that was so completely female and subject it to an abstract analytic system, then perhaps I had a chance of understanding something and could go on living.