Chris Kraus - I Love Dick

10. Last winter when I fell in love with you and left Sylvère and moved back alone up to the country, I found the second story that I’d ever written, 20 years ago in Wellington. It was written in the third person, the person most girls use when they want to talk about themselves but don’t think anyone will listen. “Sunday afternoon, again, again,” it led off. “The possibilities are not endless.” Names and actual events were carefully omitted, but it describes the heartbreak and abandonment I’d felt after spending Christmas Eve with the actor Ian Martinson.

I met Ian at a late night party at the BLERTA house on Aro Street. BLERTA was a travelling rock & roll roadshow commune—a bunch of guys and friends and wives. They toured around the country in an old bus painted with cartoons by Ruffo. Ian Martinson had just directed a short TV film of Alistair Campbell’s poem Like You I’m Trapped , and I’d reviewed it for the daily paper. I was the only girl who’d showed up at this party on her own, the only journalist, nonhippie, the only person under 21, all serious disadvantages, so I was incredibly flattered when Ian hung around the edges of the chair near me. Fane Flaws rolled around the carpet like a drunken centipede, Bruno Lawrence kept the party going with a string of dirty jokes. Ian Martinson and I talked about New Zealand poetry.

Around 3 a.m. we staggered up the road to my place for a fuck. “Aro” Street means “love” in Maori. Words left us the minute that we left the party. We were just two people walking up the street outside our bodies. Both of us were pretty drunk, and there was no way of making that transition, to sex from conversation, but anyway we tried. We took our clothes off. At first Ian couldn’t get it up, this pissed him off, and when he finally did he fucked me like a robot. He weighed a lot, the bed was old and squishy. I wanted him to kiss me. He turned away, passed out, I may’ve cried. At 8 a.m. he got up without a word and put his clothes on. “This must be the most sordid Christmas that I’ve spent in my whole life,” the Catholic Ian mumbled, leaving.

Six weeks later Douglas Weir , the first TV drama produced by New Zealand’s brand new second channel, aired. The aviator Douglas Weir was played with subtlety, brilliance and conviction… by Ian Martinson. Sitting up that night at the typewriter in my bedroom, writing a review for the Wellington Evening Post , I felt like Faye Dunaway being slapped by Jack Nicholson in Chinatown . I was a journalist… a girl… a journalist… a girl. Hatred and humiliation gathered, soared out from my chest into my throat, as I wrote ten paragraphs in praise of Ian Martinson. That year he won Best Actor.

This incident congealed into a philosophy: Art supercedes what’s personal. It’s a philosophy that serves patriarchy well and I followed it more or less for 20 years.

That is: until I met you.

11. On April 19 I called you at 10 p.m. and 1 a.m. from my apartment in the East Village. You weren’t home. The next night I tried again three times between 11 p.m. New York Time and midnight. Long distance bills fill the gaps left in my diaries. The next day, April 20, a Thursday, I left New York and drove upstate to Thurman. Freezing wind, stripped trees, gray thunderheads. It was the beginning of Easter weekend. That night between 9:30 and 11:30 EST my time I tried your number four more times but hung up on your machine without leaving any message. Every call to you, according to my phone bill, was preceded by a desperate phone call to Sylvère in New York City. These calls lasted for durations of 6:0, 19:0, 1:0 and .5 minutes. At 1:45 a.m. (10:45 p.m. for you) I tried again. This time your phone was busy. I sat and chainsmoked at my desk for 20 minutes. And when I called your number once again at 2:05 a.m. this time it rang and you picked up, I finally reached you.

12. In a science fiction story whose name and author I forget, a group that’s organized around utopian feelings sanctions, sanctifies group sex by describing elements of sex as Gifts from Aliens…“the touching gift,” “the whispering gift.” I am convinced that I’ve received “the writing gift” from you.

13. Schizophrenics have a gift for locking into other people’s minds. Direct current flows without any spoken language. Like the Star Wars robot that can unlock any code just by reaching into a machine, schizophrenics can instantly situate a person: their thoughts and their desires, their weaknesses and expectations. And isn’t “situation” such a schitzy word, both noun and verb?? “The schizophrenic…will suddenly burst out with the most incredible details of your private life, things that you would never imagine anyone could know and he will tell you in the most abrupt way truths that you believed to be absolutely secret,” Félix said in an interview with Caroline Laure and Vittorio Marchetti ( Chaosophy ). Schizophrenics aren’t sunk into themselves. Associatively, they’re hyperactive. The world gets creamy like a library. And schizophrenics are the most generous of scholars because they’re emotionally right there , they don’t just formulate, observe. They’re willing to become the situated person’s expectations. “The schizophrenic has lightning access to you,” Félix continued. “He internalizes all the links between you, makes them part of his subjective system.” This is empathy to the highest power: the schizophrenic turns into a seer, then enacts that vision through his or her becoming. But when does empathy turn into dissolution?

14. When my phone bill came in May I was surprised to see that that night—the night of April 21, the night of our last-ever conversation—we’d talked for 80 minutes. It hardly felt like 20.

15. No one, and schizophrenics least of all who do it best, can live in this heightened state of reflective receptivity forever. Because this empathy’s involuntary, there’s terror here. Loss of control, a seepage. Becoming someone else or worse: becoming nothing but the vibratory field between two people.

“And who are you?” Brion Gysin’s question, asked to ridicule the authenticity of authorship (“Since when do words belong to anybody? ‘Your very own words’ indeed. And who are you?”) gets scarier the more you think about it. In Minneapolis when I collapsed with Crohn’s Disease after realizing Sylvère didn’t love me I lay on a stranger’s couch feverish and doubled up with pain, hallucinating through swirling particles to a face behind my face. Before they stuck the tubes down through my nose I knew “I” “wasn’t” “anywhere.”

16. Calling you that night was torture that I’d pledged myself to do. “I have to let you know,” I said, “how I felt last weekend in LA after I saw you.” (It’d been ten days and my body was still locked up with sickness). “If I can’t tell you this I’ll have no choice except to hate you in my heart, perhaps in public.”

You said: “I’m sick of your emotional blackmail.”

But I went on, and told you how when I got back to New York that Wednesday, April 12, I had three different kinds of rashes: a rash that made my eyes swell closed, a rash across my face and a different rash around my body.

You said: “I’m not responsible.”

Somehow on the plane that Tuesday night I’d been able to exorcize the stomach pain that’d started in LA the night before, the night I called to say goodbye, the way you’d asked me to. Pacing in the tiny space behind the cabin, shouting down the Airphone to Sylvère as the plane flew over Denver, I’d barricaded myself against another Crohn’s Disease flareup but the somatic body won’t be denied, it’s like a freeway. Open up an extra lane of traffic and it’ll fill up too. On Wednesday morning I crashed with rashes, tears, a yeast infection and cystitis. A malady diffuse enough for Dr. Blum to write five separate prescriptions. I got the drugs and drove upstate. And now it was overcast Good Friday.