you were there and so was i
I started reading Masha Tupitsyn’s book Love Dog today. The book is a deeply personal reckoning with her feelings for one person, and also a book about film, music, gender, feminism, politics and all the forces that influence the ways that we connect, think about connecting, or fail to connect with each other. As she said in this interview:
With Love Dog something happened to me: I met someone, it rattled me to the core, and I felt called upon to write about it in some roundabout, uncategorizable way that would still examine all the other social, political, and philosophical issues that I have always been concerned with. Tumblr allowed me to write the kind of interactive, associative, experimental, and discursive criticism that I have always wanted to write and that directly responds to the digital structure that now informs and organizes our lives.
I find the book so dense with meaning and so capable of stirring up my own feelings that I can only handle a little of it at a time before I need to take some time to just sit with what I’ve read for a while.
In the book’s first entry, dated November 22, 2011, she writes:
It’s important to make a name for yourself in a world that calls you names.
When your name isn’t called and other people’s names are.
When you don’t even want your name called.
I walk around foraging for a heartland that almost only exists in movies now. Movies, which have taught us to be cynical idol worshippers, as much as they have taught us to believe in love. I now find myself running to movies more and more because in movies things still matter. People still matter to people. Love still matters, and readiness is all. In the movies, the world is still held together by more than just string.The Hamletian stance: You don’t let go of your object.
Of course you are a fool for not letting go in the 21st century, which is all about not holding on and always letting go.
This is my big problem, the difficulty I have with letting go. A 21st century fool. I know you want me to let go and that makes me want to let go, but I haven’t been able to yet. Like Masha, I go to the movies again and again, because in the movies, things make sense to me, though it’s also true that the ways in which they make sense to me in the movies only make reality make less sense to me.
The early entries in Love Dog get to the heart of why I haven’t yet been able to let go of you, or, if you prefer, of the idea of you.
Tupitsyn addresses the person who rattled her to the core:
You, X., have become a book. The person for whom I read everything now and will write this year, making the “you” into a world (the you that came into mine)–an Event. I think all I’ve ever wanted to do is rise to an occasion, to answer a call.
The you will make this a love letter at times, or all the time. It will be a form of address. The you will make this intimate–you, close–but will also refer to the you that is never here and might never be. The you I am dreaming of. Calling forth. Writing to and for a you will make it easier to write. I need an imaginary person on the other side of the page–for a speech act, which is always for the Other. You. Both X. and not X. I need an addressee–someone to whom I write, and just one is enough–because everything I write is really just a letter to One. Elaine and I talk about this all the time, as we write letters to each other.
To whom do you tell things and to whom do you not tell things? The Web has collapsed all of these distinctions, making the reader—the intimate—anyone, everyone, and no one all at once. It also collapses the where and when of writing. Sometimes even the why. In the end does it matter if the you to whom you are writing, to whom you are dedicating, and towards whom you are moving in order to become, never or always hears us? I don’t know. There are different kinds of presence and absence. Silence and testament. Now disappearance and silence are tied to failure. But writers used to disappear all the time. Lovers too.
When Masha writes, “Writing to and for a you will make it easier to write," I’m reminded of how I wrote back in January in my post Rainfall in Tokyo:
Maybe I need to miss you this way. Maybe it’s all part of my journey. I don’t actually believe in such things, that anything is destined for us or that we’re destined for anything, but like Kele sings, “if that’s the way it is, then that’s the way it is,” and this is the way it is, so I might as well try to find some meaning in it. What would I be writing right now if this wasn’t the way things were? Maybe nothing. This is who I am right now. You are a part of that.
In other words, I still need you, or the idea of you, as my addressee. Do I even want you–the real you–to see this, to read these posts? Like Masha asks, "In the end does it matter if the you to whom you are writing, to whom you are dedicating, and towards whom you are moving in order to become, never or always hears us? I don’t know.” I don’t know, either.
But why you at all? Why is it still you, and not any of the people I’ve met since? Because when I was with you, time felt real, or maybe I felt real in time. In the entry from November 29th, 2011, Tupitsyn writes:
What decisions do you have to make in order not to die? In order to really live? To not walk around as though you are dead? Hamlet paces back and forth trying to decide.
After Elaine sent me a quote by Victor Shklovsky this morning on “love being a play with short acts and long intermissions,” I wrote back and compared intermissions to time-jumps (more on the time-jump in a later post. At some point, I’d like to make a list of movies that feature time-jumps).
When I was around you, I felt really alive. And when I saw you again after not seeing you for months, it was like a time-jump in a movie, from one real moment to another, and the things in between felt hazy in comparison, almost as if I’d leapt right over them, with the words “Six Months Later” emblazoned across the screen. When someone else makes me feel this way, (and as high as my standards are, I have to believe that it won’t be too much longer before someone does), I may finally be able to let go of you. But until then, it’s just like Tupitsyn writes in the entry from December 1st, 2011, about The Flamingos’ song “I Only Have Eyes For You”:
…the song is literally about something and someone being in time with you. Being an everywhere for you.
The lyric: “You are here and so am I” sums up the song’s acutely subjective temporal moment. It means: I can’t see anyone but you, and I won’t. I don’t want to. Enough is enough.
It sure is.
Notes
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prince0voaklandpoets said: Hi, are you presenting at GaymerX2?
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