Chris Kraus - I Love Dick

This is a long story, Dick, and you’re the only one who I can tell it to. Emma’s love for you was the final blow to my sexuality. I always knew that however much we denied sex it would one day show its ugly head again, like a snake, and in a sense you were that snake, Dick. Here was a time, my friend, of tabula rasa: no desire, no future, no sex. But paradoxically this defeat opened up a new set of possibilities—that Emma, who for so long had been disinterested in sex, was now fantasizing about your prick, Dick, raised the possibility of renewal. If there are Dicks somewhere, there might be dick for us.

This is not mere sex therapy. I’m confiding in you, not in the position of a penitent with his tail between his legs, ready to assume the position of abject sinner. No, the Renaissance has come, and whether you have anything to do with it’s debatable. Emma’s desiring elsewhere enabled me to regain desire. How it happened remains a miracle. It returned suddenly about a week ago—the spirit of sex, like one of these little Roman gods, touching every part of my body, arousing them to the sacredness of pleasure. As if the veil was lifted and a new field of human possibility revealed.

I can assure you, Dick, that it was not a mere attempt to match your fabulous sexual powers that produced this change in me. You can call it denial, and take pride in the healing you’ve accomplished in our favor. But for this, Dick, you would’ve had to be in some kind of contact with us, which you’ve carefilly managed to make impossible. So don’t be too fast to attribute yourself with miraculous sexual powers, The Christ of Love. Emma and I created you out of nothing, or very little, and in all fairness, You owe us everything. While you flounder in your daily life we have built you up as a truly poweful icon of erotic integrity.

I dedicate this letter to you, Dick, with all my

But sex with Charles did not replace Dick for Emma. While Sylvère sorted through his manuscripts and boxes, Chris settled into a dreamy delirium that could only last another week or so. Next Monday she’d agreed to drive the windows to East Hampton; from there she and Sylvère would fly back to LA for his studio visits at Art Center. And then Sylvère’s job started in New York and they’d live in the East Village until May.

She read Harlequin Romances, wrote her diary and scribbled margin notes about her love for Dick in Sylvère’s treasured copy of Heidegger’s La question de la technique . The book was evidence of the intellectual roots of German fascism. She called it La technique de Dick .

Time was short. She needed answers and so like Emma Bovary in Yonville she found solace in religion. Loving Dick helped her understand the difference between Jesus and the saints. “You love the saints for what they do,” she wrote him. “They’re self-invented people who’ve worked hard to attain some state of grace. George Mosher, the horse logger on Bowen Hill, is a kind of saint. But Jesus is like a girl. He doesn’t have to do anything. You love him ’cause he’s beautiful.”

On Friday January 13 Chris’ friends Carol Irving and Jim Fletcher drove up to visit them in Thurman. They stayed up late reading Paul Blackburn’s translations of the Troubadour poems out loud. Jim’s deep midwestern twang soared over the one by Aimerac de Beleno—

And it occurred to them that love’s like dying, how Ron Padgett had once called death “the time the person moves inside.” Sylvère the specialist abstained, finding their earnest conversation too jejune. And then Ann called to read a passage from the new book she was writing. The night was perfect.

January 19, 1995

Sylvère and Chris checked in to The Regal Inn Motel in Pasadena Wednesday night. On Thursday afternoon Sylvère called Dick expecting to get his answerphone, but unexpectedly reached him. Mick and Rachel Tausig, two friends from New York, were visiting. Would Sylvère and Chris like to join them all for dinner Sunday at his house?

“By the way, Sylvère,” Dick added before hanging up, “I didn’t get Chris’ fax the day she sent it. It got mixed up with the Christmas mail so I only read it two weeks later.”

“Ah—a little Christmas present,” Sylvère chuckled.

“Well, it’s been some time now,” Dick replied. “I expect the temperature’s dropped.”

“Yessss,” Sylvère said uneasily.

On Sunday, January 22 Sylvère and Chris drove out to Antelope Valley in their rental car. She was carrying a xerox of the letters—90 pages, single-spaced. Sylvère doubted she’d be mad enough to give them to him. But the way that Dick embraced her at the door, a contact that was more than social, that might be even sexual, made her stumble. That was sign enough.

Dinner with Dick and Mick and Rachel, two curators from the Getty, an art critic and Sylvère was very hard. The atmosphere was countercultural-casual. Chris felt like a cockroach beside the poised and glamorous Rachel, who was the only other woman in the room. Dick sat next to Chris, across from Rachel. Perhaps Dick noticed Chris was silent and she hadn’t touched the food. At any rate he turned to her with a slight, complicitous smile to ask: “How’s the… ah, …project going?” Rachel, also smiling, was all ears. Chris gave up trying to find the right pitch for her reply. “Actually it’s changed. It’s turned into an epistolary novel, really.” Rachel rose to it. “Ah, that’s so bourgeois.” “Huh?” “Didn’t Habermas say once that the epistolary genre marked the advent of the bourgeois novel?” Chris flashed back to a breakfast she and Sylvère had once with Andrew Ross and Constance Penley at a conference in Montreal. Constance brilliantly corrected Chris’ bumbling appreciation of Henry James, touching every intellectual base. How articulate this woman was at 8:30 in the morning! But still she wondered to herself: Rachel, didn’t Lukács say it first?

At any rate the other guests were gone by midnight. She and Sylvère stayed for one last drink. It seemed Sylvère and Dick would never finish talking about new media technology. Chris reached into her purse. “Here,” she said. “What I was talking about.”

Well. Dick was gobstruck and Sylvère for once was speechless. But Dick was generous and kind. He took the 90 pages. “Chris,” he said, “I promise you I’ll read them.”

January 26, 1995

Back in New York winter, Sylvère and Chris drove up to Thurman one last time. On Saturday they’d close the house in time to drive down again for Joseph Kosuth’s birthday party.

On Sunday morning, January 29, they woke up woozy and hung-over, happy to be back in New York. Joseph’s party had been perfect, intimate and large. So many of Sylvère’s old friends from the Mudd Club days had been there. They got up slowly and had brunch at Rattner’s, heading for the Lower East Side. Sylvère’d be attending his first dinner soon with trustees from the MOMA to discuss the Artaud catalogue: surely he should dress the part.

The proprietor of the store on Orchard Street where Sylvère spent several hundred dollars on Italian clothes was a remarkable person, a true light. He lived in Crown Heights and studied Kabbala. Customers drifted in and out as he and Sylvère exchanged ideas about 17th-century Jewish mysticism, Jakob Franck and Lévinas.

It was late afternoon when they left Orchard Street, mild and sunny. They walked with shopping bags back through the freshly landscaped, newly curfewed Tompkins Square Park. Suddenly it hit Chris she was a stranger here and the East Village used to be her home. Her name last night had been missing from the list at Joseph’s party and yes, she’d never been part of any glamour-scene in ’70s New York. But she’d had friends here… friends who’d mostly either died or given up trying to be artists and disappeared into other lives and jobs. Before she met Sylvère, she’d been a strange and lonely girl but now she wasn’t anyone.