an orgy of responsibility

nonsensical written word

Carol Rama, Venezie, 1983

I am supposed to be studying for another exam on the 25th. I am supposed to be home, at the table with my father and my stepmother, eating a dinner that will ask few pleasantries of me. I am supposed to be dreaming. Instead I am in the park near my building and it is empty save for the slush of snow and the striking, irrational sadness that no one hangs their shoes by the laces on the telephone wires anymore. I once threw mine up there, mint green converse, and was obscurely proud of them. I remember the arc of them through the air, the brief triumph of release, an animalistic joy. I remember standing beneath them and feeling strangely immortal. They were gone by morning and I have never fully recovered from this. I have always nurtured an almost religious tendency to believe that the things I release will stay where I put them.

I have always been most alive at night and in empty places, in the gap between what I am supposed to be doing and what I am doing instead. This is the only hour in which I fully inhabit myself. The park at night feels hollowed, as if someone had excavated the interior and left the shape standing. Here, I live in outline of myself, of the world, as I have always wanted. I have read that it depends on where you observe from whether a concavity opens upward or down. I believe this is also true of suffering. Of grief, of desire, of most things vital to the human experience, all things worth understanding to some extent.

The birch trees without my glasses are impressionist gestures, merely suggestions of themselves, so in my imagination, I supply them with their white bark peeling in thin curling strips that remind me of dried skin, of the seaweed my mother used to feed me when I was small enough to be fed. I have loved being fed. I have never recovered from the cessation of it and the long series of transactions that succeeded it. Now I understand that growing up means accepting an ever-lengthening list of what you owe to the world, this beautiful, gluttonous world. I used to believe that at the far end of all this accumulation there was something waiting, a summit, the moment the body finally understands what it has been reaching toward. Though now I have climbed enough mountains to know that the peak is always a few steps ahead of where you are standing, and then you are simply on the other side, descending, and the feeling you were promised has relocated itself to the next peak, patient, unconcerned. It’s tragic, the never-ending chase towards the orgasm, of the final spiritual transcendence. Or perhaps, it’s a fall, a fall towards a pure existence, maybe that’s the mistake I’ve been making with each summit I complete, I forgo the fall.

I close my eyes and imagine a muscle giving out. Parts of the Earth would sag under my weight. There would be a soft elasticity to it when my body meets the Earth, the ground resisting me with the slow push of something that should not be soft at all, a mild and insistent will to return. And then I try not to think about it. I have learned not to investigate certain phenomena too closely for there are things and concepts that only remain bearable at the absolute edge of comprehension. Like love, or a meaningless existence, or, suicide.

Now every step through the park leaves an indentation that fades too slowly, the way dough rises after a hand moves through it. I think of suicide. I think of my grandmother's hands, small and apparently frail, that held enormous strength when she beat the dough. Falling and rising as one continuous thing, as one could not exist without the other. I have always wanted to be that kind of person. Someone in whom strength lives secretly and reveals itself only when something requires beating. I have wanted this for years and have not yet become it, and this too is a form of debt, the debt of the self you have promised yourself you will eventually grow into, one you suspect in your most private moments that this is a debt your unborn children will have to carry for you.

My coat drags behind me and the hem has begun to accumulate debris. Twigs, leaves, clotted clumps of dark earth, virgin snow. The pockets feel swollen. When I reach inside, the inside of the pockets are warm in a biological sense, there is an animal buoyancy to it, like placing one’s fingers in the mouth or an ear of a sleeping lover. Small fragments drift near my face; a sliver of a number, a thin θ, faint as a scratch on glass, casting no light and making no sound. They mean something I am willingly obtuse to. I find myself stagnant in a long personal history of deferring my understandings continuously, permanently, further and further in time until I am seventy years old and mindless, watching the meaning approach again and turning away from it until the approach has become so distant it would take a whole life to close again. A whole life I have been spending on other things, necessary things according to everyone else.

I steady myself against a nearby bench and the wood expands underneath my palms, a long inhalation, the surface warm and lightly trembling like flesh reacting to first touch, to the first intersection of sexes. I stayed like that for what felt like a long time. I closed my eyes and tried to remember the last time I had touched another person's skin. The memory was too far to recover. It seems the things we want most recede at a rate proportional to how much we want them and this seems designed. By whom, I’m not certain, I am never certain, I have trouble recalling any moment in my life I had truly been certain, perhaps I can say I am certain of my uncertainty, yet that in itself reveals its own kind of paradox.

In the far corner the trees have grown into each other, their branches intertwined at the canopy the way lovers make an arch of their arms for laughing children to run through. I pass beneath it and something cold grazes the top of my head, a lightness we forgo as adults, a finger trailing the surface of water, and then the world doubles, two transparencies laid over each other, and when I blink them back into one I carry the thin nausea all the way home.

By the time I reached my building, the sensation in my bones had idled. I unlocked the door, stepped inside. I pretended nothing had happened. But in bed, staring at the ceiling, I understood what waited for me everywhere I was not currently; an orgy of responsibility. The exam. The dinner. The dreaming I owed someone. The suicide. The orgasm. My father’s voice through the wall saying my name in the way that means he needs something I don’t know how to give. The theorems I had not yet learned to love. The proofs I had only half-followed and told myself I would return to, the way one tells oneself one will return to a person after behaving badly toward them. The books I was supposed to have read by now, the ones that would have made me someone capable of reading them. The thinking I had deferred and deferred until the deferral itself had become a kind of thinking, a negative space in the shape of all the ideas I had agreed to have later. The mind I was supposed to be cultivating, tending the way my grandmother tended dough, with that patient, unspectacular violence, and had instead left in a field somewhere to grow in whatever direction the light happened to fall. The writing that wanted to be written and was not being written. The work that was only mine and that I kept giving away the time for, bartering the hours off in exchange for the performance of a responsible person, a person who eats dinner, who studies for exams, who works, who sleeps. All of it copulating in the dark, every obligation breeding the next, endlessly generating new obligations I had not agreed to and could not refuse. I counted the shapes on the ceiling. I reached 56. I tried to remember again what it felt like to throw something upward and let it go. I find that I cannot recover the feeling. Only the fact of it remains, and the fact is not enough, was never the thing I was trying to keep. The shoes were there and then they were gone and I was proud and then I was not and this is, I think, the whole of it. This is, I think, the whole of most things.

---

Kind of a diary entry meshed with an old piece I wrote a while back. Nonsensical written word. As always, thank you virgins for reading.