Love Dog notebook, 07/27/2014: a kind of exile
This is the fifth entry in my Love Dog notebook. As I read Masha Tupitsyn’s remarkable book, I keep wanting to gently cut sections out with scissors and paste them into my own journal, then scrawl reactions and reflections beneath them, underlining passages, circling words, drawing arrows linking one thing to another. Instead, as I read the book, I constantly find myself typing notes, fragments of thoughts into my phone, then later trying to reassemble them here into something that makes some kind of sense.
On April 30, 2012, in an entry called Exile, Masha wrote of the Bob Marley song “Slave Driver”:
The summer I was 17, in Provincetown, next to ocean trees and ocean sand, my boyfriend had this song playing all the time, along with the Beastie Boys’ Check Your Head and Liz Phair’s first and only great album,Exile in Guyville. I think I was free in a way that I’m not anymore, or in a way that’s been lost or taken away. Will I get it back? I don’t know. That’s the big question. Love sets you free. I still believe that. The rest is exile. It hurts to think about it. It hurts to not think about it. But sometimes a sad song is part of and accompanies a happy life. “The writer of the journal exists, solely as a perceiving, suffering, struggling being.” -Susan Sontag.
Exile is a word that’s always resonated with me. On May 19, 2011, in my GameSpot blog, I posted an entry called Exile, in which I wrote:
I knew from a very young age that I was very different from the other boys. It wasn’t something I picked up from anybody. I wasn’t influenced to be this way. It was simply who I was. Expressing this side of myself resulted in disapproval from my parents and vicious teasing from other kids at school, so I quickly learned to hide it, to bury it deep inside and try as hard as I could to fit in, to be like everybody else. As I got older, I did a decent job of this, and nobody knew what I felt. But on the inside, I was in anguish. Denying my true self was like carrying a stone in my soul everywhere. There was a hole inside me, like the one you feel when you really miss somebody, but the person I missed was me. I was an exile from society and from myself.
The title of Liz Phair’s album, Exile in Guyville, always had a very different meaning for me, when I was younger, like I had been exiled to Guyville (as what others saw as a “guy”) when that wasn’t where I belonged at all. Things are different now, of course, and better, but I still feel like a kind of exile. An exile among women who don’t see me as a woman, but also, the kind of exile Masha talks about in her post, the way love sets you free and everything else is exile. The person I’m missing isn’t myself anymore but I’m still missing someone. You’re the representation of that, for now. Of what I’m looking for, what I can only find with another person. Masha says it hurts to think about it and it hurts not to think about it. Someone asked me recently what it was like seeing you a while back and I said that it hurt seeing you and it hurt not seeing you. Maybe it was only an illusion but you made me see my freedom.
On May 23, 2012, Masha posted an entry called The time it took/The time It takes, which read:
It used to take me longer to kiss someone I liked because I thought I had more time, which means I didn’t really think about how long things took or whether I had the time for what something or someone was taking. I didn’t know that people left, that they prefer leaving over staying, or that things end as easily as they do. That they end over and over. I could draw things (time with someone; a kiss) out and the days would add up and I never thought:
I am running out of time. I am running out of chances. This will not happen.
Now I think about the time that I am losing all the time. I think about time-jumps. About the jump between what Masha was living or not-living, the waiting she was doing, the way she was stuck in time when she was writing these entries, and the living or not-living, the waiting I’m doing, the way I’m stuck in time now as I’m reading them. And I think of the time-jump that I hope will bring an end to this. And I wonder if I will ever feel like I have time again, like I am in something that I want to be in and I don’t need to worry that at any moment it’s going to end. Because for me too, things seem to end so easily, over and over. (On June 16, 2012, Masha quoted Alain Badiou, ““Everyone’s existence, when tested by love, confronts a new way of experiencing time…It is the desire for an unknown duration.”)
I have a friend who likes to say things like "Time heals all wounds.” But what I’m not sure she understands is that always waiting for things that never come creates its own kind of wound. A wound that can only be healed by an end to waiting. The wound can feel like an emptiness. The emptiness of a long-unfulfilled desire. On June 05, 2012, in an entry called Time is of the essence, Masha wrote:
Desire is sometimes an empty space. You in an empty space and an empty space in you. Growing full, growing empty. Trains pull in and out. Arrive and depart. Where and when do you get on? Where and when do you get off? I’m talking about timing. About knowing when and not-when, but also about going where you are supposed to go once you are going there.
*****
On June 8, 2012, Masha quoted from Kathy Acker's Don Quixote:
Finally Don Quixote understood her problem: she was both a woman therefore she couldn’t feel love and a knight in search of Love. She had to become a knight, for she could solve this problem only be becoming partly male…This is the beginning of her desperation to find love in a world in which love isn’t possible.
I always saw something of a knight in you. An eagerness to fight for the causes you deemed noble. A kind of chivalry. I wish I could be at your jousts, cheering you on.
On June 22, 2012, Masha quoted Bresson, then added her own comment:
“Hide the ideas, but so that people find them. The most important will be the most hidden.”
The most important people are like this, too. Hidden from the rest of the world, most of the world, but not hidden from you. I want to be hidden from everyone but you. I want you (whoever you are) to find me.
And I am hidden. From the world and from myself. I do want you (whoever you are) to find me, and in revealing myself to you, I will also be revealed to myself.
I say “whoever you are” here, and in an attempt to meet the universe half-way, I’ve signed up for OKCupid, where your compatibility with people is expressed in percentages and where you’re encouraged to rate people (or their profiles) with 1 to 5 stars like you’re rating a TV on Amazon. I feel like I need to take steps to meet people and I know that great people sometimes find great people by doing things like this but sometimes it all seems so incompatible with all of my feelings about compatibility and love. On July 11, 2012, in her great post called As Seen On TV, Masha wrote:
When I told the Tarot reader that in addition to my writing I also want true and lasting love, which is radically different from simply wanting a man or a relationship, he was dismissive. Real love as opposed to just being in a relationship means that no one gets to just be or have a man or just be or have a woman. Real love is about being radically opened up from the inside out, not enacting roles. If it were just about having a man, I would already have a man, as just having a man would reduce me to just being—playing— a woman.
Given the choice
Given the heart
Given the tool
Given the word
Given the cheers
And I want that too. Not just to “have” a person in some superficial sense, but real love. Can you find real love in a place where you give people star ratings, which seems to me like a cynical joke, a sad commentary on how love is too often conceived of today?
If there’s anything special about me, about being around me, I don’t know that responses to the questions in that controlled, Myspace-like space can communicate it. It feels like another video game, part of a dating sim, when what I need right now isn’t a sim of anything but is something realer than any game or book or film.
On June 27, 2012, in her post On Sleepless in Seattle, Masha quotes bell hooks: “I think that our culture doesn’t recognize passion because real passion has the power to disrupt boundaries.” I never knew (and still don’t really know) what boundaries to establish with you, what lines to draw, because all I wanted was to disrupt whatever boundaries existed between us. Now I browse OKCupid and it feels like a place made of boundaries, a place that pre-establishes boundaries.
On my way back to my apartment on BART tonight, I read what I thought was the most extraordinary thing in Masha’s book. From her entry on July 21, 2012:
I tell myself that if I get the big grant I applied for I can leave New York. I can leave America, too. But then I realize that I don’t know where to go until I meet the person I can go with. Until I have love because love is the home I’m really looking for. The real reason to leave this time. I can’t take off alone anymore because I’m not just waiting to leave, I’m waiting for someone to leave with. Someone to leave for. Someone to go to. Someone to stay with. This has not always been the case, as I’ve traveled my whole life, on long journeys, alone, and still go somewhere every year. Or maybe it has always been the case. Only where before I left to find something/someone, now I need to find someone/something in order to leave. This time I am running to stop. I think I’ve ended up with a loneliness most people start off with. Eventually it catches up with everyone.
That loneliness has caught up with me, I think. Masha writes that "love is the home I’m really looking for.” In February, I wrote a post called Love/Home, in which I wrote, “Love and home. So intertwined, they might as well be the same thing. Without love, I am a wanderer. ‘I’m just an animal, looking for a home.’" And in April, I wrote, "to love, and finding a place to belong (which seem to me to be nearly the same thing).”
What I am looking for/waiting for is an end to this particular kind of exile. I’m looking for a home.
Notes
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