Final Love Dog Notebook: You Were My Witness, I Was Your Mutineer

When I started taking notes for this, my last collection of responses to Masha Tupitsyn’s book Love Dog, I still had my job. When I finished the book, I didn’t have that job anymore. It’s a new world for me.

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In her entry from July 27, 2012, Life Long Blue (Greece), Masha writes:

I think I heard Susan Sarandon say this once in some interview about a silly Jennifer Lopez/Richard Gere dance movie she was in, and I thought she was right: true friendship and true love is about witnessing and being witnessed. Being a witness to someone’s beingness. Taking note of how another—your other—lives. What it means for them to live, and vice versa. How one lives with another, for another, in another. 

I’ve called you my witness before. I’ve sent you this song. I’ve had the compulsion to share things with you, to tell you about the events of my life, as if, by doing so, I was making them more real, more meaningful, than they were by just being mine and mine alone. (Don't we seem to exist more fully when we know we exist in the thoughts and feelings and presence of a person we love than we do when we’re alone?) But now, because I can’t disrupt the boundaries that exist, I’m trying to establish and abide by boundaries between us, because what I want is not just for someone to be a witness for me but for me and someone to be witnesses for each other, and I know that I can’t be that for you, and that makes me incapable of behaving around you in a way that I can feel okay about, so I feel like it’s better if we don’t see each other at all. But in the midst of this, I still want to tell you that I think not just about you but of you. That I hope you’re doing well, that you’re happy. I want to tell you that if you ever need anything from me, I’m here for you. I want to tell you–despite how selfishly I know I’ve behaved with you–that you always come first. 

“I like that love is greedy,” Masha once quoted from Lauren Berlant. “You want incommensurate things and you want them now. And the now part is important.” And in Life Long Blue (Greece), she writes, "I rarely have any interest in anyone.” This is true of me, too, and it’s becoming something of a problem.

She quotes the Maximo Park lyric “Use your time just to work things out.” Now that I have a little time, I guess that’s what I’m trying to do.

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An entry from August 5th, called Mourning and Melancholia, reads in full:

Zizek always talks about the loss of loss. Yesterday in class he said it again. Yesterday I did something I shouldn’t have and the reaction I had to the person I did what I should not have done with made no difference to the person I was reacting to. And I thought: we have also lost the ability to feel rejected because people don’t really care whether they are wanted or unwanted anymore. At least not in any real way. Wanted and unwanted are one and the same now. You have and then you don’t have. Either one is fine. No one is invested enough in anything or anyone to feel something as gripping and arresting as loss. To feel like I lost: myself, you, him, her, that, a chance.

And all I can say is, well, this certainly isn’t true of me, in case you haven’t noticed.

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On September 1, 2012, Masha wrote of her and her classmates that “night (and drink) was what usually brought us together. Broke down the walls we had up during the day.” I admit that talking to you over drinks is something I really miss. And it’s not that I needed a drink for the walls to come down. You do that to me on your own, without even trying. I’ve had plenty of conversations with people over drinks before and since and it’s not the same. There was something so crystalline, so hyper-real to me, about the time I spent sitting at tables in bars with you. The lighting. The feel of the glass in my hand. Just looking at you and knowing you were really there. With me. That you were there and so was I

In that same entry, she writes:

How to love. It’s not that it’s so difficult, per say. It’s that people don’t know how to want what they want, if in fact they really still do want. Mostly it’s a diffuse—why not?—desire. How to love people who don’t want to be loved even when they do and want to love even when they don’t. How to not just “want” love in theory, but to do (give/receive) love in practice. Or are we now too fucked up? Too used to being alone. This modality of isolation total, inside and out. The writer Sarah Schulman once wrote (in After Delores, I think) that it takes a long time to break down someone’s isolation. 

And I wonder if I’m too used to being alone. I wonder if I can ever truly be as committed to love as I sometimes like to think I am, or as I want to be? Will I retreat into my own isolation again? Will anyone want to do the work of breaking it down–of being the Muriel to my Macon–and if they do, will they be someone who I actually want to get through to me, or will they be someone I wish would just leave me alone? Will they know the difference? Will I? Maybe. I felt like I knew it with you. But maybe I was all wrong about that.

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On September 29, 2012, Masha wrote:

On the phone with my mother I ask, “Why does everyone want shit and drama and the wrong people in their lives?” And my mother replies, “Because harmony is a burden. Don’t you know that? People don’t want happiness. Happiness requires the kind of work that apathy, misery, and destruction don’t. Real happiness is radical.”


And on Saturday, Matt Zoller Seitz posted an appreciation of Only Lovers Left Alive, in which he wrote:

The characters are clinging to the ephemeral pleasures while taking solace in that which is eternal: namely, their love for each other, which nourishes them both. The movie’s unabashed, un-ironic, and often deeply erotic belief in love-as-nourishment makes it an ecstatic viewing experience instead of a depressing one.

And I remember telling you that this was one of the things I loved about the film, that their love for each other was never a source of dramatic conflict. It was harmonious, a constant, a source of strength for both characters, a source of nourishment.

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And on October 23, 2012, Masha wrote, “in(ter)dependence…is learning how to be dependent, admitting to our need (not just desire for) of the other. How to need and let oneself be needed. How the other is our marrow, our sustenance.” I have needed nothing other than myself for so long. Now I want to need (or need to need) someone else.

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On October 30, 2012, Masha posted an entry called Hanging On the Telephone (Oh, Why Can’t We Talk Again?) in which she quotes the Blondie lyric, “I want to tell you something you’ve known all along.” And I miss talking to you so I just keep doing it here. I want to tell you something you’ve known all along so I just keep telling you, over and over again. 

But I know it’s time to stop now.

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On November 12, 2012, Masha posted an entry titled Naive Melody (So As Not To Live Alone, We Live With Cinema)and the title made me think of both my favorite love song:

and of how Masha lived with The Accidental Tourist for a while, and how I still live with the film Kyss Mig sometimes. (I wrote about the film in December, and again, briefly, in January, and obliquely in April, and in May.) I watched it again after I lost my job. I keep coming back to it. I have a relationship with that film that’s not like any relationship I’ve had with a film since I was a teenager.

Then on November 16, 2012, Masha put up a post called Untitled #21 (I Don’t Know How We Met), and it says:

Sometimes you meet someone beautiful, so rarely beautiful, it’s hard to look at them. Especially back at them. It’s hard to imagine that once you looked at them and once they looked at you, and you were doing that together at the same time, and that is one of the great things to do with another person. It’s hard to imagine you survived being looked at that way. Being with that way. How can you go without it the way you are going without it again?

And I thought about how I wrote recently that I couldn’t look at you the last time I saw you. And in that entry, Masha goes on to say:

How what happened feels like it will never happen again. How you don’t remember how to do anything, not even the things you have done. How you are turned inside out thinking about how you were outside in. You think you’ll never find your way into anything again. With anyone. How experience doesn’t make you feel you remember the way.

And I think that this is how it goes. You find yourself in a real moment and you don’t know how you got there. And then it’s over and you have no idea how to get back to something like that. I think:

I can’t tell one from the other
Did I find you or you find me?

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Epilogue

Last night a friend texted me:

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Once, I would have second-guessed myself. I would have thought that the voices in our culture that say that love is low priority, love is disposable, love is something you should get over right away, that those voices must be right and that I must be wrong. Masha’s work, and the work of the writers I’ve discovered through her, have given me the courage of my convictions where love is concerned.

“Let’s face it,” Masha has quoted Judith Butler, “we’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.”