by Chris Kraus
Years later I see Paul in a hardware store on Second Avenue. In his late 30s, neat and trim, he’s much diminished. Paul’s visiting New York to take a psychodrama class. He lives in Sydney. I throw my arms around him, feel as I’m embracing him like I’m reaching down a hall of mirrors back into the past. Encountering any piece of Wellington in New York City is magic, cinematic synchronicity. I want to tell Paul everything that’s happened since leaving. I’m overwhelmed. But since Paul’s never really left and Wellington, for him, isn’t frozen in the mythic past, he isn’t.
10. Last winter when I fell in love with you and left Sylvère and moved back alone up to the country, I found the second story that I’d ever written, 20 years ago in Wellington. It was written in the third person, the person most girls use when they want to talk about themselves but don’t think anyone will listen. “Sunday afternoon, again, again,” it led off. “The possibilities are not endless.” Names and actual events were carefully omitted, but it describes the heartbreak and abandonment I’d felt after spending Christmas Eve with the actor Ian Martinson.
I met Ian at a late night party at the BLERTA house on Aro Street. BLERTA was a travelling rock & roll roadshow commune—a bunch of guys and friends and wives. They toured around the country in an old bus painted with cartoons by Ruffo. Ian Martinson had just directed a short TV film of Alistair Campbell’s poem Like You I’m Trapped, and I’d reviewed it for the daily paper. I was the only girl who’d showed up at this party on her own, the only journalist, nonhippie, the only person under 21, all serious disadvantages, so I was incredibly flattered when Ian hung around the edges of the chair near me. Fane Flaws rolled around the carpet like a drunken centipede, Bruno Lawrence kept the party going with a string of dirty jokes. Ian Martinson and I talked about New Zealand poetry.
Around 3 a.m. we staggered up the road to my place for a fuck. “Aro” Street means “love” in Maori. Words left us the minute that we left the party. We were just two people walking up the street outside our bodies. Both of us were pretty drunk, and there was no way of making that transition, to sex from conversation, but anyway we tried. We took our clothes off. At first Ian couldn’t get it up, this pissed him off, and when he finally did he fucked me like a robot. He weighed a lot, the bed was old and squishy. I wanted him to kiss me. He turned away, passed out, I may’ve cried. At 8 a.m. he got up without a word and put his clothes on. “This must be the most sordid Christmas that I’ve spent in my whole life,” the Catholic Ian mumbled, leaving.
Six weeks later Douglas Weir, the first TV drama produced by New Zealand’s brand new second channel, aired. The aviator Douglas Weir was played with subtlety, brilliance and conviction…by Ian Martinson. Sitting up that night at the typewriter in my bedroom, writing a review for the Wellington Evening Post, I felt like Faye Dunaway being slapped by Jack Nicholson in Chinatown. I was a journalist…a girl…a journalist …a girl. Hatred and humiliation gathered, soared out from my chest into my throat, as I wrote ten paragraphs in praise of Ian Martinson. That year he won Best Actor.
This incident congealed into a philosophy: Art supercedes what’s personal. It’s a philosophy that serves patriarchy well and I followed it more or less for 20 years.
That is: until I met you.
11. On April 19 I called you at 10 p.m. and 1 a.m. from my apartment in the East Village. You weren’t home. The next night I tried again three times between 11 p.m. New York Time and midnight. Long distance bills fill the gaps left in my diaries. The next day, April 20, a Thursday, I left New York and drove upstate to Thurman. Freezing wind, stripped trees, gray thunderheads. It was the beginning of Easter weekend. That night between 9:30 and 11:30 EST my time I tried your number four more times but hung up on your machine without leaving any message. Every call to you, according to my phone bill, was preceded by a desperate phone call to Sylvère in New York City. These calls lasted for durations of 6:0, 19:0, 1:0 and .5 minutes. At 1:45 a.m. (10:45 p.m. for you) I tried again. This time your phone was busy. I sat and chainsmoked at my desk for 20 minutes. And when I called your number once again at 2:05 a.m. this time it rang and you picked up, I finally reached you.
12. In a science fiction story whose name and author I forget, a group that’s organized around utopian feelings sanctions, sanctifies group sex by describing elements of sex as Gifts from Aliens…“the touching gift,” “the whispering gift.” I am convinced that I’ve received “the writing gift” from you.
13. Schizophrenics have a gift for locking into other people’s minds. Direct current flows without any spoken language. Like the Star Wars robot that can unlock any code just by reaching into a machine, schizophrenics can instantly situate a person: their thoughts and their desires, their weaknesses and expectations. And isn’t “situation” such a schitzy word, both noun and verb?? “The schizophrenic…will suddenly burst out with the most incredible details of your private life, things that you would never imagine anyone could know and he will tell you in the most abrupt way truths that you believed to be absolutely secret,” Félix said in an interview with Caroline Laure and Vittorio Marchetti (Chaosophy). Schizophrenics aren’t sunk into themselves. Associatively, they’re hyperactive. The world gets creamy like a library. And schizophrenics are the most generous of scholars because they’re emotionally right there, they don’t just formulate, observe. They’re willing to become the situated person’s expectations. “The schizophrenic has lightning access to you,” Félix continued. “He internalizes all the links between you, makes them part of his subjective system.” This is empathy to the highest power: the schizophrenic turns into a seer, then enacts that vision through his or her becoming. But when does empathy turn into dissolution?
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.
“I never asked for this!” you said. And on the phone I was ashamed. My will had ridden over all your wishes, your fragility. By loving you this way I’d violated all your boundaries, hurt you.
Then you asked me how I was. Your way of asking ordinary social questions makes me think of Ruffo: it’s way past simple listening. It’s like you really want to know. Your attentive unshockability makes it possible to say anything. “I’m really fine,” I said. But I wanted you to know how much good you’ve done me. “It’s like—I’ve finally moved outside my head—I don’t think I’ll go back,” I said. Three days before I’d written in my notebook: “Since knowing D. my eyes have moved into my ribcage. My body’s turned to liquid glass and all the pieces fit…” And quoting Alice Notley quoting Donne: “No woman is an island-ess.”
And then again, remorse. I wanted you to understand I’d never use this writing to ‘expose’ you. “Look,” I said. “I’ll change the names, the dates, the place. It’ll be a past-tense narrative about cowboy love. I’ll call you ‘Derek Rafferty’ instead of Dick.”
You sounded less than thrilled. Was there any chance of redeeming things, this situation?
(A month before I’d sent you the first draft of a story called The Exegesis. On page 1 there was a line: “You were so wet,’ Dick ——’d said, glancing at his watch…” …You freaked. “But that’s my NAME!” you howled into the phone. And then you’d told me how, when you were writing your first book, you worked so hard to protect the people who you wrote about by concealing their identities. “And those were people who I loved,” you’d said. “You don’t even know me.”)
My feelings for you were so strong I had to find a way to make love selfless. So even though I’d travelled all this way just hoping I might see you, if seeing me was bad for you, I wouldn’t. It was April, the season of blood oranges, emotion running like the stream behind my house upstate, turbulent and thawing. I thought about how fragile people get when they withdraw from anything, how they become bloody yolks protected only by the thinnest shell.
“So—” you said.—“Did you want to see me?”
And this time (if morality’s repressing what you want over what you think is right) I responded morally: “I think the question’s more, do you feel like seeing me? ’Cause if this is a bad time for you, I think we should forget it.”
But then you said: “Ah, I just have to check my schedule for the next few days.”
You said: “Why don’t you call me back around this time tomorrow?”
It was 10:52. My hand was wet from holding the telephone so tightly.
19. Love has led me to a point
where I now live badly
’cause I’m dying of desire’
I therefore can’t feel sorry for myself
AND—
20. My hand was wet from holding the telephone so tightly. I was sitting on the edge of the double bed in the motel room. The bedside lamp glared back into the room against the windows.
By the time I got out to Silverlake, 11:45 p.m., Ray’s party was already breaking up. Ray introduced me to Michelle Di Blasi, a writer-filmmaker who’d been all over New York in the early ’80s. Where are they now? (a favorite conversational routine among survivors, sightings of the once-famous waiting tables, picking garbage…) But Michelle looked great, and on the plane that afternoon I’d been reading one of her new stories. It was the kind of story everybody
likes, about a tough girl who becomes a truer version of herself by uncovering her vulnerability. It was the kind of story people like because its universe is played out in the story of one person. It was the kind of story (dare I say it?) that women’re supposed to write because all its truths are grounded in a single lie: denying chaos. Michelle was nice: smart and open, radiant and charming.
The crowd was thinning out. Ray Johannson sat down and drank a beer with me and started to critique my writing. He said the “flaw” in all these stories is that I’m addressing them to you. I should learn to be more “independent.” Everyone was disappointed that Amanda Plummer hadn’t showed but I met another famous person’s sister.
21. Last January when Sylvère and I had dinner at your house and I handed you a xerox of my first 120 letters you said, “I’m gobstruck.” The other guests had all gone home and we sat around your table drinking vodka. The glass shattered when you poured Sylvère a shot. The three of us agreed to meet for breakfast the next day in Antelope Valley at Five Corners Diner.
Sylvère and I found you already sitting there at 9 a.m. and it was a gloomy fucking morning. The worn-out raincoat you were wearing reminded me of the record that you’d played the night before, The Greatest Hits of Leonard Cohen. It’s geometrically impossible to arrange a group of three in anything but a straight line or a triangle. Sylvère sat next to you, I sat across. The conversation circled nervously. Sylvère was elusive, you were cryptic. I could hardly eat my oatmeal. Finally you focussed sharp and looked at me and asked “Are you still anorexic?” An allusion to my second letter. “Not really,” I demurred, hoping you’d say more. But then you didn’t, so I blurted out: “Did you read them? Did you really read my letters?”
“Oh, I glanced through them,” you said. “Alone this morning in my bedroom. With all this rain, I found it very film noir…”
I wondered what you meant (I didn’t ask) but now I’m right there too: shuttling urban & alone the night of April 5 between the airport and the rental car, the car and the motel…fixed points on a floating grid. The motel phone, the ashtray. The stupid Heidi-in-Bavaria waitress costumes at the restaurant party, a Tyrolean horrorshow, the dregs of food, the conversations. Taking foolish stabs at girlfriendhood to Michelle Di Blasi by burbling on about the problems of my film. CUT-CUT-CUT. Robbe-Grillet meets Marguerite Duras and suddenly you’re nowhere. Dennis Potter’s Singing Detective stumbles up out of a basement bar sometime in the ’70s and rounds a corner into wartime London. Paint it Black, Noir. Time’s an unsealed envelope and crime’s a metaphor for anguish, private symphonies of intensity exploding in the dark.
