Qiu Miaojin - Last Words from Montmartre

I think this question of escaping the unique despair and frustration of erotic desire is terrifying for you. I think it will be the cause of my death. Sooner or later I will die, and die again, because of this. I am frightened by this unresolved despair and frustration, I am frightened that I’ll die, and die again, from it, this vague and ambiguous pain that is difficult for me to describe. Yong was right. When I was in Tokyo, she said that our relationship could kill me. I suspect that when I showed her your photograph in Taipei, she could tell what you meant to me and maybe she understood this sooner than I did. In Tokyo she just said that you still couldn’t understand my passion for you, and that I would be lured to my death. I think she hoped I’d leave you and live in peace.

Sexual desire is both a perplexing and a critical part of love. In my prior relationships with Yong and Xiao Yao, the greatest obstacle was that I was under the mistaken impression that they didn’t desire me. I thought that sexual desire would eventually drive the deeper desire for love upon which a relationship depended. Unsurprisingly, Xiao Yao broke up with me and I felt hurt. Yong accepted me, but she always gave the impression that she wanted to be with a man, though she would never say it. Until this year, when she wrote me a letter saying she now knew what it meant to have a “male” inside her. I cried the whole day. Her letter was proof that I had been right about her. I had suppressed any sexual desire due to the “male versus female bodies” problem.

But actually I was mistaken. In fact it was the opposite. Yong later clarified for me what she had meant by “male.” In the end it wasn’t a physical trait so much as a personality trait, a matter of will, a sort of spiritual “masculinity.” What she meant by “male” was me. It was precisely the strength of “maleness” in me and the others she loved that enabled her sexual desire, while simultaneously negating her desire for others. Her love for me had to mature for three years before she could fully understand it. Then we became in tune with each other, our love and our sex reciprocal, symmetrical. The depth of her passion was what I had been needing for so long. I’m sure it was her love and our fucking that sustained me.

It was different with Xiao Yao, who finally told me “the most important thing for me to know” after I demanded she tell me why she didn’t want to be with me. The reason was sex. She said the summer I ran away, she could sense that I was afraid of my sexuality, and then she became convinced of it and thought about me every day until one night blood unexpectedly leaked from her vagina. After that night she started to hate me, and in hating me, renounced me. When she told me about this significant experience, I thought it was related to her first sexual sin and feeling unclean. Our story was a cliché of the guilt a woman feels after losing her virginity to her first love. I was the sacrificial lamb of Xiao Yao’s lost “virginity.” Seeing her later, I could tell that she and her new lover had a good sex life, but I also knew, without a doubt, Xiao Yao had loved me more and sincerely, and that she wanted me now. But it was too late — we had lost all intimacy and I knew I couldn’t love her enough. She was a better fit for someone else; we could remain distant friends.

Sexuality itself has never been the issue for me in my relationships with women. I’ve always been attracted to women, and I need sex with the person I love. Ever since I was very young, it’s been a 100 percent attraction to women. My desire for Xiao Yao was intense. As I’ve grown a little older I’ve only become more passionate about women. Yong was right when she said I possessed a strong “maleness.” My passion for women is so innate that it doesn’t matter if the one who falls in love with me is a lesbian or not. As long as she has no prejudices about genitals, love and sex come naturally. What matters in sexual relationships is the passionate coupling of “active,” or “yang,” with the “passive,” or “yin.” The women I long for most are always the gentlest, the most “passive” ones. I don’t think there’s a great difference between my desire for, and union with, a woman, and a “male’s” desire for a “female.”

I believe that sex and love at the height of passion are one and the same. I was lucky to meet you after Xiao Yao because my desire for both love and sex had matured by then, and you were a woman I truly wanted. My desire overflowed. Your “passive” energy instantly attracted my “active” energy. For three years, including the seven months in Paris, my feverish passion burned on and I longed for you with every fiber of my being. This was no ephemeral passion, no night-blooming cereus that each year only blooms for a single night. For me, you meant marriage or nothing. I could only belong to you. My passion was too strong for me to pledge fidelity to anyone else. If you were not the one in my life, I would tire quickly of another and live an unfulfilled life. Yes, there is no one else who can focus my sexuality and love with such intensity.

Another paradox: Often the one most plagued with lust is the one most capable of restraining it. The monk and the philanderer are likely to be the same person. I can remain chaste for you alone. I can give you everything you need. I love you by saving myself for you. It’s my necessity to love you so deeply and so unconditionally. I don’t know how to convince you that my longing for you means more than a wish to be loved and more than sexual gratification. What I long for is a whole life, the total convergence of body and soul. What I long for even more: “to find someone, and be theirs absolutely.” That’s something I wrote in an earlier letter, but now I see it even more clearly. This is exactly what I want.

Here in Paris you didn’t desire my body, you took no pleasure in making love to me, maybe thinking I was too heavy for you, maybe it was even harder for you to stand me in Paris because I needed to be your lover every waking hour. Our different ideas of “passion” were the main reasons you couldn’t live with me; in retrospect I can laugh about it, for what Yong said was so perfect, essentially that I had used you up and so you ran away. That more or less sums it up. Even Yong can’t stand the intensity of my passion sometimes, and she’s a naturally passionate person. She said that she could feel the desire emanating from my body even when I didn’t express it, and it was overwhelming. Ah, what she said is precisely my problem, and why you fled from me. You often said I was too serious, you said you wanted a lighthearted relationship. I hate myself when I think about this, hate my personality, hate that I’m too passionate and “active”; and I hate that I long for you and need you too much, hate that I feel so possessive of you, hate that I am too “male” (and I guess this hatred is driving me to become more “female”). I hate that my passion makes me sick and that it becomes so easy for me to injure myself, hate that I suffer so easily, hate that my excessive neediness causes you to worry causes you to suffocate causes you to feel oppressed. I hate anything about myself that makes you dislike me, unable to tolerate me, not want to come near me, causes our intimacy to die, causes you to abandon me, to betray me, and to be unable even to look at me. When you shouted “I can’t live with you!” on the phone, tears streamed down my face. Talk about hatred — I hate myself most of all.

P.S. I’m not brave enough to face every detail of the past three years of beauty and pain (the main plot of the novel). The beauty was too blinding, the pain too cruel. Yesterday I went to see Angelopoulos’s film Landscape in the Mist again. When the little boy witnessed the death of the donkey and kneeled on the ground, weeping pathetically in the center of the screen, I cried pitifully with him. I am that little boy, an innocent child who weeps over the death of an animal. Walking with White Whale out of the movie theater into the cool Parisian night’s faint breeze, she said that the movie was so beautiful she could die right there. And I replied that with someone by my side with whom I could share the beauty of such a movie, I could die that night too. Movies are like that, life is like that, and love even more so, no?