Qiu Miaojin - Last Words from Montmartre

From your perspective, total betrayal can’t hurt you. On the one hand, you never really cared about me or any of this. You never really cared enough nor have you really grasped how the monopoly of desire works. Yet you would still suffer if my soul betrayed you; you would never be able to watch dispassionately if I gave my soul completely to someone else and my tenderness toward you disappeared. If that day ever comes, you’ll pay a painful price. My soul is slipping away from you even as I try to cling to it.

(2) On passion and sex

Xu, it’s not that you don’t desire me; it’s that your body has not yet grown into its desire. Your corporeal desire still can’t merge with your spiritual desire; they’re incoherent to each other, they can’t cooperate. It’s not that you’ve stopped desiring but that your desire has not yet reached maturity.

It’s easy for the body to be open to desiring different people because desire wells up and demands to be satisfied. It’s easy to categorize corporeal desire as sexuality, but if it has no means of merging with spiritual desire, then a rupture will occur between spirit and flesh. For ultimately passion and sex aren’t only expressed physically but through a true union between two spirits. When the spirit can truly love and find contentment, both the body and other key aspects of life will fall naturally into place, working in unison, merging. Xu, one day, when your corporeal desire has matured — when you’re able to desire any body — then you will desire me, if, at that time, there isn’t any rupture between us, our lives are harmonious, our spirits remain in love, and our bodies can still satisfy each other. And you will discover that I’m the one you desire most profoundly of all, because your spirit loves me most profoundly of all. I’m working hard this time so that nothing can undermine the loving communion of our spirits.

(3) On my outbursts and your shutting down

Xu, you never really stopped loving me. You can never really not love me. But during this long, long year you sometimes acted as if you didn’t love me. You’ve done countless things that suggest this, but I never really severed ties with you completely because I could still sense your love for me, sense your thirst for my spirit, even though this love only manifests itself in the weakest and most distorted of ways.

This all happened because I started to “blame” you when I moved to Paris. How pitiful that a pair of lovers so completely enamored of each other chose to take such a journey! I needed you but couldn’t be satisfied. The suppressed and dependent sides of your personality along with your failure to understand my passion and your failure to deal with the pain caused by this passion… all these things led me to blame you. I felt so unfulfilled last March and April that my ubiquitous blaming tantrums caused you to start shutting me out…. Pitiful! After that the situation went from bad to worse, as I sunk into a pathological state of “outburst” and you sunk into a long-term “shutdown.” On the very same day you started shutting me out, your inner self started to become unhinged, lost. This caused yet deeper frustration and dissatisfaction. In the end you completely failed to express your love for me. Quite the opposite: You kept wanting me but repeatedly said that you didn’t love me, while I frantically continued to blame you and became trapped in a state of hysteria.

We made each other this way. My worst mistake was my “blaming” heart. That was the first of many mistakes. From the very beginning, the one you place your trust in, open yourself up to, and devote your passion and essentially your life to should be the one who understands you and accepts you unconditionally, the one who will never “blame” you for your immaturity or your failure to satisfy your partner; before coming to Paris, I was this person to you. Though you aren’t mature enough yet to satisfy the needs of my spirit and desires — and could not fulfill the requirements of a union with me — you were still somehow thoroughly devoted to me. Before coming to Paris, I was moved by the depths of your devotion and grew used to it. During that phase we were cooperating and communicating in perfect harmony with each other.

Everything seemed fine until daily life in Paris gradually started to sicken me with despair — a despair that you couldn’t understand, and so we stopped communicating… I blamed you even more, while your own secret self-loathing grew. All this blame frustrated you more and more and more until finally you simply shut me out. I lost your trust, your openness, your love, your devotion. But the most tragic thing is that my pathologically violent outbursts crushed your inner confidence and composure. Now you can’t even act with the slightest bit of honesty, trust, courage, or integrity toward me. Now you are someone who isn’t really you. (Honestly, Xu is another person. The Xu I knew well, whom I believed in and whom I loved passionately and to whom I prostrate myself in worship, is the total opposite of this one. She hasn’t degenerated and disappeared; she’s just hiding from me.) This month, my tragedy reached a peak with a total spiritual breakdown caused by my loss of faith in this deity!

Xu, it’s not that you no longer love Zoë or need Zoë anymore. It’s precisely because you tried so hard to satisfy him without success that you felt defeated and frustrated. At first, when you were completely open with him and madly in love, you did your best. Later on, when you were shut down and couldn’t love him anymore, you still tried to satisfy him but you were too exhausted, too frustrated, so you chose to abandon him. But even this proved impossible, as, after you had accepted his love, you never really stopped loving him, stopped feeling bound to his spirit; you could never erase the enormous space he occupied in your life, nor extricate your fate from his; you could never stop trying so hard to satisfy him, to grow closer to him. So what I must insist on telling you here is this: What you stumble over, what wounds the essence of your desire, is not loving. Xu, your first love cannot be compared to any other. You cannot erase all traces of it because your body and soul have been so deeply desired by me, so fiercely loved by me. How indelibly I inscribed your body and soul with the first perfect traces of a beginning! Those were the first indelible traces of desire in your life. As your lover I have given myself to you so completely, I belong to you so truly, can you really disavow the mark that symbolizes our desire’s consummation? Can you? Not unless you’ve shut your spirit down completely, as you’ve tried so hard to do recently.

To untie the bell you have to find the person who tied it. Your spirit can’t be released from its confinement unless it’s released by me. If you never communicate with my spirit again, if your life is never open to mine again, you’ll never leave the desert, no other can provide an exit. You will even lose contact with your own soul, turn into someone I hate and could never want, and I, like a kite with a broken string, will float away, never to return…. I want so much for you to talk to me again, to trust me and be as open as you once were; I want to free you from your state of shutdown. To do so, I must stop my pleading and stop blaming you. I must enable you to recapture your original memory of Zoë’s unconditional love for you; this is the unconscious need that’s central to your life and calls forth my desire. It’s all I can do. I’m trying to grow a little (though not too much), while keeping in mind my earlier ideals. I’m trying my best, trying to see how far I can get. For this homecoming, I could never ask you to make the first move, as it’s up to me to return to a place of loving you before I can expect you to quietly do the same. If I fail, then we surely lose each other, down to the final eyelash. I’m waging a life-and-death battle with my own destiny: I can only pray that you’ll help me, that you’ll never push me away with words (or at least a lot less) and actions that harm my desire for you, that you won’t push me off this cliff, nor thoughtlessly sever the cord between us that I want to strengthen because I love you….