Chris Kraus - I Love Dick

17. Because identifying so completely with someone else can only happen by abandoning yourself, the schizophrenic panics and retreats abruptly from these connections. Connect and cut. Connecticut. Schizophrenics reach beyond the parameters of language into the realm of pure coincidence. Freed from signifying logic, time spreads out in all directions. “Think of language as a signifying chain.” (Lacan) Without the map of language you’re not anywhere.

“Even if everything between us was 80 percent in my own mind,” I said, “20 had to come from you.” You disagreed; insisted everything that passed between us was my own fabrication. I wondered if that’s possible. Granted, fan-dom is an engineered psychosis. But what went on with us was singular and private. And by the end of 80 minutes the conversation looped around. You listened; you were kind. You started talking in percentages.

Schizophrenia is metaphysics-brut. The schizophrenic leaves the body, transcends himself, herself, outside any system of belief. Freedom equals panic because without belief there is no language. When you’ve lost yourself to empathy, a total shutdown is the only way back in.

And when does empathy turn into dissolution?

18. On Wednesday, April 5 I left New York to “teach for a week” at Art Center in Los Angeles, hoping I might see you. All winter, spring, I was shuttling between the rural poverty of upstate New York to Avenue D, New York, to Pasadena. That Wednesday afternoon I took a cab to JFK, upgraded my ticket in the Admiral’s Club Lounge, caught the 5, got in at 8 to Los Angeles. I picked up a rental car and drove out to a motel in Pasadena. My entire existential-economic situation was schizophrenic, if you accept Félix’s terms: schizophrenia as a paradigm for the internalized contradictions of late capitalism. I wasn’t travelling as Chris Kraus. I was travelling as the wife of Sylvère Lotringer. “You may be brave,” you said to me that weekend, “but you’re not wise.” But Dick, if wisdom’s silence then it’s time to play the fool—

That night I got lost on the 405, found myself driving towards your house in Piru. I turned around, cut back across the 101 to Pasadena. I didn’t have to be at school ’til Friday but I came in Wednesday night ’cause I thought it would increase the chance of seeing you. Besides, on Wednesday night I’d been invited to a party for my friend Ray Johannson’s 40th birthday.

At 10p.m. I checked into the Vagabond Motel on Colorado. I ran a bath, unpacked my clothes, then called you. Your phone rang eight times, there was no answer. I washed and styled my hair, then called again. This time your answerphone kicked on. I didn’t leave a message. I smoked a cigarette, then thought about an outfit for Ray’s party. Wisely, I decided against the Kanae & Onyx gold lame rubber jacket. But after getting dressed (black chiffon shirt, English military pants, black leather jacket) I reached another impasse. If I left a message on your answerphone I couldn’t call again. No, I had to talk to you directly. But could I skip Ray’s party just to sit beside the phone? Finally I decided to wait until 10:30. If you weren’t home I’d leave and call you in the morning. At 10:35 p.m. I called again. You answered.

“Lived experience,” said Gilles Dleuze in Chaosophy “does not mean sensible qualities. It means intensification. ‘I feel that’ means that something is happening inside me. It happens all the time with schizophrenics. When a schizophrenic says ‘I feel that I’m becoming God’ it’s as if he were passing beyond a threshold of intensity with his very body… The body of the schizophrenic is a kind of egg. It is a catatonic body.”

You didn’t sound surprised when I told you I was calling from LA. Or maybe you just sounded non-committal. At first your voice was cold, detached, but then it softened. You said you couldn’t really talk… But then you did, you did. I don’t remember which conference in which European country you’d just got back from. You said you were exhausted and depressed. Two nights ago you’d narrowly escaped a DUI driving on Route 126 and you’d decided to stop drinking.

“I feel clearer now than I’ve ever felt before,” you said, after 36 hours of sobriety. Waves of remorse pounded from my heart out to my fingers. I clasped the phone, regretting this entire schizophrenic project that’d started when I met you. “I’ve never been stalked before,” you said in February. But was it stalking? Loving you was like a kind of truth-drug because you knew everything. You made me think it might be possible to reconstruct a life ’cause after all, you’d walked away from yours. If I could love you consciously, take an experience that was so completely female and subject it to an abstract analytic system, then perhaps I had a chance of understanding something and could go on living.

“I never asked for this!” you said. And on the phone I was ashamed. My will had ridden over all your wishes, your fragility. By loving you this way I’d violated all your boundaries, hurt you.

Then you asked me how I was. Your way of asking ordinary social questions makes me think of Ruffo: it’s way past simple listening. It’s like you really want to know. Your attentive unshockability makes it possible to say anything. “I’m really fine,” I said. But I wanted you to know how much good you’ve done me. “It’s like—I’ve finally moved outside my head—I don’t think I’ll go back,” I said. Three days before I’d written in my notebook: “Since knowing D. my eyes have moved into my ribcage. My body’s turned to liquid glass and all the pieces fit…” And quoting Alice Notley quoting Donne: “No woman is an island-ess.”

And then again, remorse. I wanted you to understand I’d never use this writing to ‘expose’ you. “Look,” I said. “I’ll change the names, the dates, the place. It’ll be a past-tense narrative about cowboy love. I’ll call you ‘Derek Rafferty’ instead of Dick.”

You sounded less than thrilled. Was there any chance of redeeming things, this situation?

(A month before I’d sent you the first draft of a story called The Exegesis . On page 1 there was a line: “You were so wet,’ Dick ——’d said, glancing at his watch…” …You freaked. “But that’s my NAME!” you howled into the phone. And then you’d told me how, when you were writing your first book, you worked so hard to protect the people who you wrote about by concealing their identities. “And those were people who I loved ,” you’d said. “You don’t even know me.”)

My feelings for you were so strong I had to find a way to make love selfless. So even though I’d travelled all this way just hoping I might see you, if seeing me was bad for you, I wouldn’t. It was April, the season of blood oranges, emotion running like the stream behind my house upstate, turbulent and thawing. I thought about how fragile people get when they withdraw from anything, how they become bloody yolks protected only by the thinnest shell.

“So—” you said.—“Did you want to see me?”

And this time (if morality’s repressing what you want over what you think is right) I responded morally: “I think the question’s more, do you feel like seeing me? ’Cause if this is a bad time for you, I think we should forget it.”

But then you said: “Ah, I just have to check my schedule for the next few days.”

You said: “Why don’t you call me back around this time tomorrow?”

It was 10:52. My hand was wet from holding the telephone so tightly.

20. My hand was wet from holding the telephone so tightly. I was sitting on the edge of the double bed in the motel room. The bedside lamp glared back into the room against the windows.