Chris Kraus - I Love Dick

By the time I got out to Silverlake, 11:45 p.m., Ray’s party was already breaking up. Ray introduced me to Michelle Di Blasi, a writer-filmmaker who’d been all over New York in the early ’80s. Where are they now? (a favorite conversational routine among survivors, sightings of the once-famous waiting tables, picking garbage…) But Michelle looked great, and on the plane that afternoon I’d been reading one of her new stories. It was the kind of story everybody likes, about a tough girl who becomes a truer version of herself by uncovering her vulnerability. It was the kind of story people like because its universe is played out in the story of one person. It was the kind of story (dare I say it?) that women’re supposed to write because all its truths are grounded in a single lie: denying chaos. Michelle was nice: smart and open, radiant and charming.

The crowd was thinning out. Ray Johannson sat down and drank a beer with me and started to critique my writing. He said the “flaw” in all these stories is that I’m addressing them to you. I should learn to be more “independent.” Everyone was disappointed that Amanda Plummer hadn’t showed but I met another famous person’s sister.

21. Last January when Sylvère and I had dinner at your house and I handed you a xerox of my first 120 letters you said, “I’m gobstruck.” The other guests had all gone home and we sat around your table drinking vodka. The glass shattered when you poured Sylvère a shot. The three of us agreed to meet for breakfast the next day in Antelope Valley at Five Corners Diner.

Sylvère and I found you already sitting there at 9 a.m. and it was a gloomy fucking morning. The worn-out raincoat you were wearing reminded me of the record that you’d played the night before, The Greatest Hits of Leonard Cohen . It’s geometrically impossible to arrange a group of three in anything but a straight line or a triangle. Sylvère sat next to you, I sat across. The conversation circled nervously. Sylvère was elusive, you were cryptic. I could hardly eat my oatmeal. Finally you focussed sharp and looked at me and asked “Are you still anorexic?” An allusion to my second letter. “Not really,” I demurred, hoping you’d say more. But then you didn’t, so I blurted out: “Did you read them? Did you really read my letters?”

“Oh, I glanced through them,” you said. “Alone this morning in my bedroom. With all this rain, I found it very film noir…”

I wondered what you meant (I didn’t ask) but now I’m right there too: shuttling urban & alone the night of April 5 between the airport and the rental car, the car and the motel…fixed points on a floating grid. The motel phone, the ashtray. The stupid Heidi-in-Bavaria waitress costumes at the restaurant party, a Tyrolean horrorshow, the dregs of food, the conversations. Taking foolish stabs at girlfriendhood to Michelle Di Blasi by burbling on about the problems of my film. CUT-CUT-CUT. Robbe-Grillet meets Marguerite Duras and suddenly you’re nowhere. Dennis Potter’s Singing Detective stumbles up out of a basement bar sometime in the ’70s and rounds a corner into wartime London. Paint it Black, Noir. Time’s an unsealed envelope and crime’s a metaphor for anguish, private symphonies of intensity exploding in the dark.

22. Of course it’s no surprise when Félix Guattari talks about love in the same breath as schizophrenia. Here’s a passage that I found three weeks ago when I started writing this and now it’s August and I can’t find the citation, and anyhow it’s my translation, i.e., a cross between what he wrote and what I wanted him to say: “It’s like this: someone falls in love and in a universe that once was closed, suddenly everything seems possible. Love and sex are mediums for semiotizing mutation.”

I disagree, at least I think I do, about the “semiotizing” part (Dear Dick, Dear Marshall, Dear Sylvère, What is semiotics?). Love and sex both cause mutation, just like I think desire isn’t lack, it’s surplus energy—a claustrophobia inside your skin—

Félix goes on: “Previously unimagined systems unfurl themselves in a once empty world. New possibilities of freedom are revealed. Of course none of this is ever guaranteed.”

And now IT’S GETTING VERY LATE. It’s August and since July 6 when I started writing this I’ve been in an altered state, have lost 10 lbs, etc.

This morning when I took a walk I thought about a talk I’ll give next fall (I’ve been invited to your school) about poetics. I want to play video I edited two years ago for Jim Brodey’s funeral. Jim was a quote-minor New York poet who died of AIDS after living in the street. In the tape he talks about Lew Welch, a quote-minor San Francisco poet who would’ve drunk himself to death if he hadn’t suicided first in the ’70s. I want to hand out copies of Alice Notley’s brilliant essay Dr William’s Heiresses where she talks about how female poets like herself who externalize and twist internal daily life have hardly any female ancestors. The critic Kathleen Fraser thought that for not inventing some, Alice was a bad feminist. Alice Notley proved the possibility of writing poems no matter what; Kathleen Fraser is an academic. “No woman is an island-ess,” oh… The message is, IT’S GETTING VERY LATE. Be glad you’re in a California art school but don’t forget you live by compromise and contradiction ’cause those who don’t just die like dogs.

I have to find a way of ending this, of getting to the point.

23. I wasn’t really that surprised to get your answerphone on Thursday night when I called back, (April 6, 10:45 p.m.) the way you’d asked me to, just short of 24 hours later.

Desire, claustrophobia. If I left a message I’d have to wait in the motel room, wondering if you’d call back. So I hung up and smoked some pot and went outside. The pot was very strong and I started flashing back again to 20 years ago (I know, I know). Remembering what it felt like to be 20, overwhelmed by feeling and sensation, lost for words. While having lots and lots of words to talk about Douglas Weir and Ian Martinson, Angola, China, rock & roll—the host culture, male. My schizophrenia. Is this letter all about the past? No, it’s about intensity. R.D. Laing never figured out that “the divided self’ is female subjectivity. Writing about an ambitious educated 26-year-old “schizophrenic girl” in the suburban 1950s: “…the patient repeatedly contrasts her real self with her false compliant self.” Oh really.

That night I sat on a curb in sleeping Pasadena, stoned and spinning, writing notes about the bungalows.

Later on, I left this message on your answerphone: “Hi it’s Chris. Just calling back to see if you still want to get together. If the timing isn’t good for you, just let me know. I’ll be in ’til 9 tomorrow morning.” The normalcy of this message sounded totally surreal.

The philosopher Luce Irigaray thinks there is no female “I” in existing (patriarchal) language. She proved it once by bursting into tears while lecturing in a conference on Saussure at Columbia University.

24. According to Charles Olsen, the best poetry is a kind of schizophrenia. The poem does not “express” the poet’s thoughts or feelings. It is “a transfer of energy between the poet and the reader.”

25. The next morning—Friday, April 7—you returned my call.

26. It was 8:30 a.m. The Violent Femmes song Add It Up was cranked up on a cheap cassette and I was getting ready to go to school. “Hello Chris,” you said, “it’s Dick.” Your accent sounded strained and bitter. It was the first time I’d ever heard you speak my name, or yours. “Look,” you said. “It turns out I’ve got a previous engagement this evening. So how about the weekend? Why don’t you give me a call tomorrow morning around this time?”