Undressed
Be sure to leave something behind - this is how you will be remembered. Or at least, you always have something to go back and get. The remains. As a friend said recently "like a girl on a one night stand who leaves something behind so she has a reason to see her lover again."
I have this curious relationship with a friend - the currency of our friendship is an exchange of favours. Favours that appear to be loose collaborations, but in many ways are a empty of any real effort. They get dressed up and pretend to be something that in many ways I see as being those remains. If we continue to create work for ourselves, situations, than there's always something remaining. Always an excuse or reason to continue the friendship. I can't quite surmise why we need a project in order to be friends until I think about other, older friends, and realize that in less obvious ways, this is how friendships had been formed in the past. In the absence of sexuality, we possess things by trapping them in other nets. Ultimately, however, I'm unsatisfied with that. I feel as though I've been given only one route to understand someone, a rigid framework in which to function that allows for little nuance to the routine. In the future I might take that back and say - no, it was these limitations that made certain relationships interesting, but for now, these restrictions seem to mold the knowing unnaturally. I feel 'used', although for what ends I don't know. Maybe I'm projecting since it turns out I have at least 4 other friends with whom our friendship is based on collaboration. I in fact, take distinct pleasure in team work.
How friendships, hobbies, passions of mine have taken shape I am concluding go something like this: I desire things in order to understand them. Most people desire to have and in the having are finally freed of their desire. Either they are bored by the having, or desire other, shinier and prettier things. My desire - be it lust for a man or a creative ambition - is for knowledge. There are things I see and I don't quite understand yet. If I already understand it, I don't want it. But I can also have things, I mean physically possess them, and not understand them - having and understanding are not the same thing. And just because something allows itself to be possessed does not mean you know it, real having is more than physical acquisition.
If I do a mental survey of my attractions, I am drawn repeatedly to people who remain foreign to me for as long as possible. This is a type. The type is not height, width, hair color - its a composite of mysteries or disguises. I want to solve puzzles. This might be why looking and thinking about art objects has more appeal than making them (now), because with each (foreign) object I have something new I have to understand. I can fall in love over and over: an endless supply of objects, and makers, to understand. Where as myself and the things I make - I think I understand thoroughly.
If I look at friends, the strongest I have are ones that were subjected to a certain effort on my part to understand what they are; friends I asked more questions of and did in the end, maybe have a better understanding of, but still found them foreign to me. I can mark that transitional point from feeling nervous around them, slightly uncomfortable but in some masochistic way, finding the discomfort tantalizing, to feeling at ease and familiar. That discomfort was what drew me in - that intimidation you feel around new people who on some intuitive level you immediately desire. Not unlike lust, which is always for an 'other' - the mirror arc that will complete.
I bristle when a friend reminds me that I had described myself as having a type. I bristle because I don't want conversations said in flirtation to be remembered past their sell date. Things said 4 months ago no longer have face value. I also bristle because I'm sorry to have simplified my desire into 'taste'. As if to say you could parade any number of things before me that were similar and I'd be satisfied, that as if the gentle nuance of a moment didn't count for anything. What kept my ex-husband and I together for 6 years is not repeatable in a similar model, a fact I think that has made similar models so dissimilar. My attraction to him was constant because the understanding could never be resolved. We appeared to know so much about one another on the surface, our analytical skill for each other's every action and word part of a rapid fire game we played called "I'm going to find you out yet." This is exhausting. We never found each other out, we gave up. I mean, I was tired out for good.
But isn't this a version of everyone's failed affairs - you keep at the destructive ones because you want to solve them. The easy ones fizzle out. In both cases you have, you possess, but without challenge you can no longer lust. The same desire that drives travel and exploration, creativity and knowledge. I am ready anytime to pick up and move, expose myself to that discomfort of discovery just to avoid complacency.
But back to the remains. What if you are never quite sure that its been solved. If everytime you walk away thinking you've figured it out, something shorts out. Everytime you're sure you've put that last piece away, you find another missing. That's when you leave something behind to go back for. Just to check, just in case. Its one's intuition doing battle with one's logic. I have often rushed through things in order to make the most of it before it fizzled. Thrown all my best material away too soon. What about those that unfolded slowly over years? Those were the most beautiful and ultimately the most heartbreaking. After 12 years I wonder why we waited so long to turn on one another so cruelly. After 3 years I wonder why we have to go the long way round to being friends. Were the friendships fraught with tension that end poorly when the pressure is released - are they more momentous and more delicious that those that have formulaically disposed of desire on the early end in order to function? I think they are more memorable. I will remember the narrative better with that crescendo than without. I will remember that desire longer with so many years given to undress it. I left more there to go back for, more of myself than one can leave at a one night stand.
I have this curious relationship with a friend - the currency of our friendship is an exchange of favours. Favours that appear to be loose collaborations, but in many ways are a empty of any real effort. They get dressed up and pretend to be something that in many ways I see as being those remains. If we continue to create work for ourselves, situations, than there's always something remaining. Always an excuse or reason to continue the friendship. I can't quite surmise why we need a project in order to be friends until I think about other, older friends, and realize that in less obvious ways, this is how friendships had been formed in the past. In the absence of sexuality, we possess things by trapping them in other nets. Ultimately, however, I'm unsatisfied with that. I feel as though I've been given only one route to understand someone, a rigid framework in which to function that allows for little nuance to the routine. In the future I might take that back and say - no, it was these limitations that made certain relationships interesting, but for now, these restrictions seem to mold the knowing unnaturally. I feel 'used', although for what ends I don't know. Maybe I'm projecting since it turns out I have at least 4 other friends with whom our friendship is based on collaboration. I in fact, take distinct pleasure in team work.
How friendships, hobbies, passions of mine have taken shape I am concluding go something like this: I desire things in order to understand them. Most people desire to have and in the having are finally freed of their desire. Either they are bored by the having, or desire other, shinier and prettier things. My desire - be it lust for a man or a creative ambition - is for knowledge. There are things I see and I don't quite understand yet. If I already understand it, I don't want it. But I can also have things, I mean physically possess them, and not understand them - having and understanding are not the same thing. And just because something allows itself to be possessed does not mean you know it, real having is more than physical acquisition.
If I do a mental survey of my attractions, I am drawn repeatedly to people who remain foreign to me for as long as possible. This is a type. The type is not height, width, hair color - its a composite of mysteries or disguises. I want to solve puzzles. This might be why looking and thinking about art objects has more appeal than making them (now), because with each (foreign) object I have something new I have to understand. I can fall in love over and over: an endless supply of objects, and makers, to understand. Where as myself and the things I make - I think I understand thoroughly.
If I look at friends, the strongest I have are ones that were subjected to a certain effort on my part to understand what they are; friends I asked more questions of and did in the end, maybe have a better understanding of, but still found them foreign to me. I can mark that transitional point from feeling nervous around them, slightly uncomfortable but in some masochistic way, finding the discomfort tantalizing, to feeling at ease and familiar. That discomfort was what drew me in - that intimidation you feel around new people who on some intuitive level you immediately desire. Not unlike lust, which is always for an 'other' - the mirror arc that will complete.
I bristle when a friend reminds me that I had described myself as having a type. I bristle because I don't want conversations said in flirtation to be remembered past their sell date. Things said 4 months ago no longer have face value. I also bristle because I'm sorry to have simplified my desire into 'taste'. As if to say you could parade any number of things before me that were similar and I'd be satisfied, that as if the gentle nuance of a moment didn't count for anything. What kept my ex-husband and I together for 6 years is not repeatable in a similar model, a fact I think that has made similar models so dissimilar. My attraction to him was constant because the understanding could never be resolved. We appeared to know so much about one another on the surface, our analytical skill for each other's every action and word part of a rapid fire game we played called "I'm going to find you out yet." This is exhausting. We never found each other out, we gave up. I mean, I was tired out for good.
But isn't this a version of everyone's failed affairs - you keep at the destructive ones because you want to solve them. The easy ones fizzle out. In both cases you have, you possess, but without challenge you can no longer lust. The same desire that drives travel and exploration, creativity and knowledge. I am ready anytime to pick up and move, expose myself to that discomfort of discovery just to avoid complacency.
But back to the remains. What if you are never quite sure that its been solved. If everytime you walk away thinking you've figured it out, something shorts out. Everytime you're sure you've put that last piece away, you find another missing. That's when you leave something behind to go back for. Just to check, just in case. Its one's intuition doing battle with one's logic. I have often rushed through things in order to make the most of it before it fizzled. Thrown all my best material away too soon. What about those that unfolded slowly over years? Those were the most beautiful and ultimately the most heartbreaking. After 12 years I wonder why we waited so long to turn on one another so cruelly. After 3 years I wonder why we have to go the long way round to being friends. Were the friendships fraught with tension that end poorly when the pressure is released - are they more momentous and more delicious that those that have formulaically disposed of desire on the early end in order to function? I think they are more memorable. I will remember the narrative better with that crescendo than without. I will remember that desire longer with so many years given to undress it. I left more there to go back for, more of myself than one can leave at a one night stand.
posted by Francine at 4:22 p.m.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home