Chris Kraus - I Love Dick

Sylvère thinks he’s that kind of anarchist. But he’s not. I love you Dick.

But after finishing these, Chris and Sylvère both felt they could do better. That there were things still left to say. So they began a second round, spending most of Friday sitting on their living room floor in Crestline passing the laptop back and forth. And they each wrote a second letter, Sylvère about jealousy, Chris about the Ramones and the Kierkegaardian third remove. “Maybe I’d like to be like you,” Sylvère wrote, “living all alone in a house surrounded by a cemetery. I mean, why not take the shortcut? So I got really involved in the fantasy, erotically too, because desire radiates, even if it is not directed towards you, and it has an energy and beauty, and I think I was turned on to Chris being turned on to you. After awhile it became difficult to remember that nothing really happened. I guess in some dark corner of my mind I realized if I wasn’t going to be jealous, my only choice was to enter this fictional liaison in a sort of perverse fashion. How else could I take my wife having a crush on you? The thoughts that come to mind are pretty distasteful: ménage à trois , the willing husband… all three of us are too sophisticated to deal in such dreary archetypes. Were we trying to open up new ground? Your cowboy persona meshed so well with the dreams Chris has of the torn and silent desperate men she’s been rejected by. The fact that you don’t return messages turns your answerphone into a blank screen onto which we can project our fantasies. So in a sense I did encourage Chris, because thanks to you, she’s been reminded of a bigger picture, the way she was last month after visiting Guatemala, and we’re all potentially bigger people than we are. There’s so much we haven’t talked about. But maybe that’s just the way to become closer friends. To share thoughts that may not be shared…”

Chris’ second letter was less noble. She started off by rhapsodizing once again about Dick’s face: “I started looking at your face that night in the restaurant—oh wow, isn’t that like the first line in the Ramones song, Needles & Pins ? ‘I saw your face/It was the face I loved/And I knew’—and I got the same feeling from it that I get every-time I hear that song, and when you called my heart was pounding and then I thought that maybe we could do something together, something that is to adolescent romance what the Ramone’s cover of the song is to the original. The Ramones give Needles & Pins the possibility of irony, but the irony doesn’t undercut the song’s emotion, it makes it stronger and more true. Søren Kierkegaard called this “the Third Remove.” In his book The Crisis In The Life Of An Actress , he claims no actress can play 14-year-old Juliette until she’s at least 32. Because acting’s art, and art involves reaching through some distance. Playing the vibrations between here and there and then and now. And don’t you think reality is best attained through dialectics? PS, Your face is mobile, craggy, beautiful…”

By the time Sylvère and Chris finish their second letters, it’s the end of the afternoon. Lake Gregory shimmers in the distance, ringed by snowy mountains. The landscape’s fiery and distant. For now both of them are satisfied. Memories of domesticity when Chris was young, 20 years before: a China eggcup and a teacup, painted people circling around it, blue and white. A bluebird at the bottom of the cup, seen through amber tea. All the prettiness in the world contained in these two objects. When Chris and Sylvère put away the Toshiba laptop it’s already dark. She fixes dinner. He returns to working on his book.

Crestline, California

December 10, 1994

Dear Dick,

This morning I woke up with an idea. Chris should send you a short note breaking out of this stuffy, referential delirium. Here’s how it should read:

“Dear Dick, l am taking Sylvère to the airport Wednesday morning. I need to talk to you. Can we meet at your place?”

I thought it was a brilliant coup: a piece of reality shattering this twisted hotbed of emotions. Because after all, our letters were so self directed, marriage a deux . Actually that’s the title I thought of for this piece before I went to sleep and I wanted to communicate it to Chris as soon as she woke up. But it had the opposite effect. After last night’s brainstorming, she’d somehow put aside her infatuation with you. She was back on the safe side—marriage, art, the family—but my concern reignited her obsession and suddenly we were thrown back into the reality of unreality, the challenge at the bottom of it all. Outwardly it has to do with Chris’ apprehension about turning 40, or so she says. I’m afraid my letters have been too high-minded and patronizing. Anyway, let me try again—

California scrubjays screeched outside the master bedroom. Sylvère sat propped against two pillows, typing, looking out through the glass doors across the deck. No matter how many times they tried to change it, so long as he and Chris slept together their days rarely started before noon. While Chris still dozed, Sylvère would make the first coffee of the day and carry it back to the bedroom. Then Chris would tell Sylvère her dreams, and after that her feelings, and Sylvère would be the best, most subtle and associative listener she’d ever find. Then Sylvère would go to make the toast and second coffees. As the caffeine hit, the conversation shifted, became more general, ranging over everything and everyone they knew. They dug each other’s references and felt smarter in each other’s presence. Sylvère and Chris were among the five most well-read people they each knew, and this a constant miracle, since neither of them had been to good schools. She felt so peaceful with him. Sylvère, Sylvalium, accepted her so totally and she took little sips of coffee to clear her head of morning dreams.

Sylvère never dreamed and rarely knew what he was feeling. So they played a game sometimes that they’d devised to tease his feelings out: Objective Correlative. Who was Sylvère’s metonymic mirror? A student at the art school? Their dog? The Dart Canyon Storage man?

Fully awake around 11, the conversation usually peaked with a passionate discussion of checks and bills. So long as Chris continued making independent films they’d always be juggling money, thousands here and thousands there. Chris spent time buying or acquiring long-term leases to three apartments and two houses which they kept rented at a profit while holing up in rural slums. She kept Sylvère apprised of the status of their mortgages, taxes, rental income and repair bills. And luckily, beyond this primitive foray into acquisition, with Chris’ help Sylvère’s career was becoming lucrative enough to offset the losses incurred by hers. Chris, a diehard feminist who often saw herself as spinning on a great Elizabethan Wheel of Fortune, smiled to think that in order to continue making work she would have to be supported by her husband. “Who’s independent?” Isabelle Huppert’s pimp demanded, spanking her in the backseat of a car in Sauve Qui Peut . “The maid? The bureaucrat? The banker? No!” Yeah. In late capitalism, was anyone truly free? Sylvère’s fans were mostly young white men drawn to the more “transgressive” elements of modernism, heroic sciences of human sacrifice and torture as legitimized by Georges Bataille. They scotch-taped xeroxes of the famous “Torture of a Hundred Pieces” photo from Bataille’s Tears of Eros to their notebooks—a regicide captured on gelatin-plate film by French anthropologists in China in 1902. The Bataille Boys saw beatitude in the victim’s agonized expression as the executioner sawed off his last remaining limb. But even more inexcusably, they were often rude to Chris. Going out to Exchange Ideas with Sylvère Lotringer in bars after his lectures in Paris, Berlin and Montreal, the Boys resented any barrier (especially a wife, and an unseductive one at that) between themselves and the great man. Chris responded by milking money from Sylvère’s growing reputation, setting ever-higher fees. Would the German money and the $2,000 from Vienna be enough to pay her lab bill in Toronto? No. They’d better hit up Dieter for per diem. Et cetera. Around noon, after Coffee Number 3, too buzzed to think about anything but money, they hit the phone.