Friday, February 3, 2006, 8:37 a.m.
Subject: how I woke up
My alarm clock is the kind that plays CDs. This week I put in Jouissance. I woke up every morning hearing you singing “Quiconque.” It’s so beautiful, that song.
I think of you often, sometimes with affection, sometimes with desire, sometimes with awe. Sometimes all at once.
CHAPTER 2: THE PURLOINED LETTER
Wednesday, January 23, 2008, 0:42 a.m.
Subject: fort/da
I forgot to thank you for the list of my “advantages,” for saying that I’m smart and my body is beautiful. Thank you. But when I said you should love me, that wasn’t why. You should love me for my peculiarities – for being strange, as I love your strangeness. You’re very strange.
I didn’t write anything about the Todd Haynes film, or that article in the NLR, or Pablo’s party, or the cigars, or Kurt Weill. Stop playing this annoying game of fort/da!
I spent part of January with the paramour. I think this was the closest we’ve been. We were together for a week, almost all the time. But as soon as I got back to New York, I got another one of those “I love you but I’m not in love with you” messages. It was really irritating. We’d already been through this before. My lover generously appended a list of reasons I would make an excellent life partner, and yet despite all these “advantages,” it seems that doubt lingered. I was a little too polite to point out all the potential disadvantages, from my own perspective, of our being together: Hannah’s understandable and yet still fairly terrifying volatility; the wrath of the ETA and Homeland Security; the smirking disdain of the youthful, media-crazed art world; and the seemingly endless parade of leggy supermodels. Oh, and there was also the little inconvenience that we lived on different continents.
When Santutxo got my abbreviated response, he wrote back asking what “fort/da” meant. I would have thought he’d have heard about this from his shrink.
Don’t tell me it surprises you that the paramour sees a Lacanian psychoanalyst.
Forgive me if you find this basic knowledge, but given that it had slipped even the memory of my erudite friend, maybe I should remind you: Freud tells the story in Beyond the Pleasure Principle of a little boy who’s always throwing his toys into the corner and under the bed. He’s a nice kid but this habit is a little inconvenient. Then one day Freud watches him playing with a spool. The kid tosses it away and shouts, “fort! ” which means “gone!” Then he reels the spool back and says, “da! ” which means “there!” And Freud figures out that this is repetition compulsion: the kid is rehearsing the big thing he’s learned to do, which is to separate from his mother.
So, you see, my message to Santutxo was not particularly subtle. It was kind of Freud with a mallet. When I reminded him of the story, he seemed vaguely disgruntled, but he said he got it. It was, I must confess, a pretty self-congratulatory interpretation of his pattern of pulling me close and then pushing me away. At the time, I basically believed that this was true – that he was compulsively rehearsing our separations so he could imagine himself to be in control of them. Of course I figured these separations were also replaying some trauma that well pre-dated me. But at this point I’m starting to take his rejections a little more seriously. I think they may be personal.
I don’t know if he took this up with his analyst. I suspect not. I have a funny feeling he’s pretty selective about what he tells his shrink. And you know, appointments with Lacanians are famously short. I’d love for her to read this manuscript. But obviously, that would tell her a lot more about my own neuroses than Santutxo’s.
She’s already got her hands full with him. When I wrote, “You’re very strange,” I wasn’t exaggerating. Of course, what would you expect? Pick your primal scene. He’s seen a lot of things nobody should see. His father’s bloodied mug with a black hole where his teeth used to be. Melitón’s fish eyes staring back accusingly out of his dead head. His own bruised, charred, punctured, zapped, and slashed limbs, first at the hands of GAL, and later the ETA. Luz’s bandaged stump. Here’s a shocker: Santutxo’s afraid of dying.
You know, Jacques Lacan had a very interesting way of explaining the repetition compulsion, and I’ve been thinking about it in relation to the e-mail that got trapped in my spam filter, and some other glitches we’ve encountered in our correspondence. I’m referring to the famous “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter.’” In this essay, Lacan analyzes a story by Edgar Allan Poe. In the story, which is narrated by an unnamed friend of the private investigator, Dupin, who unravels the mystery, the Queen is nearly caught reading a clandestine letter from her lover. The King walks in and she decides that the best way to hide it is to leave it lying, face down, right out in the open. The King is a little slow so this goes right past him. But the tricky Minister walks in, and he sees right away what’s up. So he nonchalantly lays a similar looking letter right next to the Queen’s, then coughs or makes some other distracting noise, I don’t remember exactly, and picks up the incriminating document and walks out. He holds onto this letter for a long time, and uses it to harass and politically intimidate the Queen. She gets the cops to search his house when he’s not there, and they look in all the most crafty, secret places, to no avail. That’s when they call in this Dupin character, who’s interested in the reward, but also harbors some resentment toward the Minister. He goes for an ostensibly friendly visit, and right away figures out that the Minister is playing the Queen’s game: the letter’s right out in the open, just a little crumpled and refolded with a new address. So Dupin returns the next day, producing a crumpled letter of his own. He creates some distraction, and does the Minister’s switcheroo. Dupin leaves a humiliating little message on his decoy letter for the evil Minister. He gets the reward, and the Queen gets her letter back.
Lacan points out that the Minister is compulsively repeating the Queen’s action. His interpretation of this is fairly complicated. It has to do with the way in which the subject is constituted by the symbolic order. Really, it doesn’t matter who fills that role – somebody has to. The implications are fairly distressing. You think you’re writing your own plot, but you’re really just getting plugged into a signifying chain. And Lacan asks, “And is it not such effects which justify our referring, without malice, to a number of imaginary heroes as real characters?”
Hello, Santutxo.
Lacan ends the seminar with the famous and perplexing statement, “a letter always arrives at its destination.” A lot of people have weighed in about what this means. It’s obviously nothing so simple as saying the Queen got her letter back and things always go this smoothly. Most people think it means that when we get plugged into that signifying chain, it doesn’t really matter if we’re in the “wrong” place – we’re just playing out our neurotic destiny. Jacques Derrida took issue with that last line, though. He liked the idea of the possibility of letters getting lost in the mail. That is, language that would get detached from a singular, true “meaning.” But Slavoj Žižek said Derrida didn’t get the point: it wasn’t that all letters got where they were “supposed” to go. He said a message in a bottle arrives at its destination the moment it’s thrown into the sea.
Tuesday, May 17, 2005, 10:56 a.m.
Subject: message in a bottle
I’m sorry that you lost two messages that you wrote to me, but I kind of like the idea of them having existed without my having read them. I think this is part of what I like about e-mail. It feels like a message in a bottle that might get swallowed up in the ether. It’s so abstract.
That was a message from very early in our correspondence. Obviously, there had been some problem with Santutxo’s server. He said he’d composed two long and carefully drafted messages but somehow they got lost before he could send them. That had also happened to me before. As I said in my message, I kind of like that about e-mail.
I’m having a flashback to that dinner party in New York, when Slavoj Žižek and Gayatri Spivak were standing there
politely chewing on my edible flowers while Analia Hounie poured Santutxo a Coke.
When I got the very first e-mail from Santutxo, I wasn’t sure I could believe it was from him. One of the things that seemed weird was that he had a Yahoo! account. On the other hand, what should I have expected? His own address at arranobeltza.com? Obviously I can’t publish his e-mail address, but it’s a kind of lame joke involving one of his aliases. Because he opens up the Yahoo! page to check his e-mail, he often reads the Yahoo! news. Every time he mentions something he’s read there, he refers to it as Yahoo!, with the exclamation point. You can see why this all seems kind of funny, coming from an iconic revolutionary figure. He seems to take seriously the news flashes he reads on the Yahoo! homepage. Sometimes they’ll prompt him to ask me for an update on political events unfolding here. He also displays a surprising curiosity about pop culture items. He says that Cameron Diaz seems like an interesting person.
So in a way, it would seem that Santutxo’s use of the internet for personal correspondence and general websurfing is like the average person’s. But every once in a while, one or the other of us gets a little paranoid about who might be looking in. These days, of course, he’s not planning any violent actions. Excommunicated from the ETA, even his broadcast political missives are what you might call ex-communiqués. Swerving unpredictably from the radical to the reactionary, nobody actually thinks they’ll come to any material end.
But it wasn’t always like this. He spent the ’70s practically running the ETA show from Mexico City. A lot of people would take issue with this account, and of course there was only so much he could help with in terms of practical strategizing for individual operations. But the Arrano Beltza’s broadcasts were the poetic heart and soul of Euskadi Ta Askatasuma, simultaneously the clearest and most lyrical expressions of its fundamental political philosophy. I’m talking, of course, about the ETA-PM, the Political-Military Front. Santutxo already had friction with the more militant faction, the ETA-M, but he had this uncanny ability to persuade even some of the most extreme to let go of their bloodiest dreams. He believed in “blood, when necessary,” but never civilian.
Still, 1980 was the ETA’s bloodiest year since its formation. It was a difficult time for Santutxo. Amets was supportive but she was getting increasingly frustrated by his emotional unavailability. She didn’t blame him – she knew it was for a higher cause, but it’s hard to love a saint, and Amets needed affection. Aitor was still pretty little, but even then, he seemed to know that as dedicated a father as he was, Santutxo’s idealism made him extremely vulnerable. To this day, I think Aitor feels protective of his dad.
Around 1983, the “anti-terrorist” terrorist organization GAL was formed to fight a dirty war against the ETA. Things got really scary. Santutxo knew he had to go back. Amets and Aitor stayed behind. It was terribly sad for everybody, but they knew it had to be this way.
For the next four years, Santutxo was back in the trenches. He didn’t carry out any actions himself, of course, but he was now deeply involved in the practical strategizing. He continued sending out communiqués, and you could see that while they still manifested his completely unique combination of lyricism, intelligence, and humor, the Arrano Beltza was starting to crack a little under the pressure.
In 1987, against his passionate objections, the extremist wing of the ETA bombed a supermarket garage in Barcelona. Twenty-four innocent people were killed. Santutxo was devastated. The ETA apologized for the “mistake.” There was a particularly sad story about a young girl who had survived the explosion. She was eighteen. She was a ballet dancer. Her left leg had been ripped off by the blast. Disguised as a hospital orderly, Santutxo began visiting her every day. Two years later, Luz was living with him in Donostia, pregnant with Bakar.
We were eating pintxos at Goiz Argi in the Parte Vieja when she appeared out of nowhere: an extravagantly beautiful, agonized woman in her 30s, with green eyes, dark brows, cascading black curls, and a prosthetic leg, screaming in Castilian that I was not the aging plain-Jane journalist that she’d been led to believe. And then came the Coke, and the violence.
I’ve been reading those letters from Simone de Beauvoir to Nelson Algren. In late November of 1947, it seems there was a postal strike in France. Their correspondence was interrupted both ways. She found this very distressing. She sent him a telegram saying, “STRIKE STOPS LETTERS NOT MY HEART WAIT PATIENTLY WARMEST LOVE SIMONE.” She kept writing, despite the clogged communication pipeline, and he did too. Eventually they got the backed up letters. It seems that during the hiatus, he wrote her about some other women he’d considered sleeping with. She refers to them as “the phoney blonde,” “the Jewish girl,” and “the older woman.” She says that she is dead set against sexual jealousy, though she can’t help but feel it a little. Still, she encourages him to go ahead and indulge his desires – just to be sure to kick anybody out of the Chicago apartment when she gets back to town.
She also talks about the people in Paris who are trying to seduce her: an “ugly lesbian,” another “Jewish girl,” and a velvety creep named “Puma.” She indicates that she’s also open to sleeping around. She seems to take some pleasure in cataloging their respective potential strange bedfellows.
Speaking of strange bedfellows, but in the figurative sense of the term, you might be interested in another of Santutxo’s complicated friendships – that with Baltasar Garzón Real. Garzón, perhaps you know, is often referred to as Spain’s “Juez Estrella” – the Rock Star Judge. He had a famous and pyrotechnic debate in 2003 with El Sup over the Basque question. Garzón’s persecution of alleged ETA operatives has been, you might say, rabid. He’s done pretty much anything he could do to eviscerate the movement, shutting down legitimate news outlets on the grounds of “terrorist” ties, intimidating community activists, and basically being a pain in every Basque ass. So what the hell, you may ask, is Santutxo doing cozying up to him? I have to say, I do have my own doubts about Garzón, but he’s nearly as complicated a case as Santutxo. He was the one who issued that arrest warrant in 1998 for Pinochet, for the torture and murder of Spanish citizens in Chile. He started a flood of suits over the disappearance of Spaniards in Argentina’s dirty war. He went after Kissinger over Operation Condor. More recently, he tried to get a European block to suspend Berlusconi’s immunity. And around the time he was having that row with El Sup, he was simultaneously blasting the US over human rights abuses in Guantánamo Bay and the Iraq war. I have to say, while he can be something of a blow-hard, I was pretty charmed by his public threat last year to sue Bush for catastrophic imbecility.
As you can imagine, Garzón has had to keep his friendship with Santutxo under wraps. The press – from both the left and right – would have a field day if they got their hands on this. But El Sup knows, and of course Garzón is fully aware of Santutxo’s history with Marcos. Frankly, I think they’re both a little jealous.
Monday, August 14, 2006, 11:22 a.m.
Subject: Lebanon
I’ve been thinking about your posture in relation to Lebanon, and Garzón’s reaction, and mine. It’s strange, that first night that we saw each other, you touched on the subject right away. I thought it was a little weird, but I didn’t feel like debating with you, and I wasn’t even really – I think – too disturbed, because in that moment, I could even kind of see your logic (without agreeing), but I knew that as an American I couldn’t ever assume that posture, it would be hateful in an American, but in you, somehow it wasn’t exactly – it was complicated, but it wasn’t frightening, because you from your position kind of have to assume a contrary position, in order to maintain some perspective on the complexity of the situation. But it’s not easy to hear. And then afterwards you described Garzón’s suffering – I thought it was beautiful that you saw he was suffering, and that you understood why he was feeling that, because he must love you a lot, and these things hurt – I asked myself if that little sadness of mine had anything to do with this also. But I don’
t think so. I think it was that other thing. But since you were talking about Bush’s religiosity, everything became confused – politics, personal pain, everything.
Here’s something funny: when Sandro woke up on Saturday morning, he said, “I had a nightmare. I was chasing two guys on a motorcycle, shouting revolutionary phrases. The two guys were pro-Bush. They were holding their fists in the air and shouting, ‘Go Bush!’ The strange thing was, they looked totally left wing. One of them was a Rasta.”
Santutxo liked this dream. He generally likes the things Sandro says, even though he finds him too predictably “politically correct.” One time I asked Sandro if he thought that he and I were hippies. This was in reference to that “antipathetic” comment I’d made in an article regarding Santutxo’s hippie image in the 1970s. Sandro thought about it for a while, and then he said, no, that he thought a better description of the two of us would be “clean philosophers with disturbing tendencies.” When I told Santutxo about this, he said he wanted to join our club.
But I began this chapter with a reference to misdirected mail, and I guess it’s time for me to tell you about the most significant glitch in our correspondence – the dead letter that almost left me dead as well. You may think I’m exaggerating.
It was only after that “cunt” e-mail went missing that I finally consulted with an IT guy and figured out about the spam filter. I honestly didn’t even know I had a filter. I get plenty of spam, and I’d sent and received any number of e-mails with naughty bits in them. The filter seems to be arbitrary, and weirdly selective. That’s why the first time this happened, I really didn’t have a clue. It never occurred to me that somebody could be sending me important information and it could get caught in that net. The filter, I later learned, traps suspect messages for a period of a week, and then automatically and permanently deletes them. So while I managed to retrieve the “cunt” one before it got sucked away into oblivion, I never did receive the message I’m telling you about now. (You can pause here to think about Lacan, Derrida, and Žižek, or not, as you please.)
The Correspondence Artist Page 6
