Chris Kraus - I Love Dick

“Let’s go to But-ter-fly Creek!”

Walking up the dirt track along the still-green mountain, everything between us flattened out. You seemed so open. You told me all about yourself at 12 years old, a young boy sitting at the edge of a playing field somewhere in the English Midlands, reading stories of great emperors and wars in Latin. You’d read your way into the world just like my husband. You told me other things about your life and what you’d left behind. You were so unhappy. Emotional seduction. The sun was very warm. When you took your shirt off you seemed to be inviting me to touch you but I refrained. To yearn responsibly. You had the softest palest skin, an alien’s. “The Pacific starts here,” I said. The landscape on the hill reminded me of New Zealand.

There weren’t any butterflies on the hill in Pasadena. But come out to a clearing, and there’s a waterfall, and then I told you how I admired you, and you said or you implied that what I’d done had helped you burn through some things in your life. And everything seemed as pliant as a macrocarpa branch, fragile as an egg.

33. In the blinding sunlight of the Vagabond Motel parking lot you asked me if I’d call again before I left LA. Perhaps we could have dinner. We embraced, and I was first to break away.

34. Sunday, April 9: Writing in my notebook after visiting Ray Johannson in Elysian Park: Bliss.

35. And so I called you up on Monday night. I was booked to leave at 10 p.m. on Tuesday. “The schizophrenic reacts violently when any attempt is made to influence him. This is so because a lack of ego boundaries make it impossible for him to set limits of identification.” (Róheim) The schizophrenic is a sexy Cyborg. When I reached you you were cold, ironic, wondering why I’d called. I hung up sweating. But I couldn’t leave like this, I had to try and make it better.

I called you back, apologized, “I—I just felt like I had to ask you why you sounded so distant and defensive.”

“Oh,” you said. “I don’t know. Was I defensive? I was just looking for something in my room.”

I threw up twice before getting on the plane.

36. Dear Dick,

No woman is an island-ess. We fall in love in hope of anchoring ourselves to someone else, to keep from falling,

Chris finished writing Add It Up before the end of August. The next morning she accidentally cut her right hand on a broken glass. The cut left a bumpy scar. She knew that Add It Up would be the last letter.

Chris posted it to Dick after getting back from the hospital. She wanted a response, and fast, because things were finally happening with her film and she’d be travelling, starting in September. Perhaps the only reason Dick had never written back was she’d failed to express her feelings for him forcefully? Surely Add It Up would convince him. She waited for his letter, but by Labor Day, Dick still hadn’t phoned or written.

Once again her husband, Sylvère Lotringer intervened, phoning Dick and soliciting his compassion. “If nothing else, you must agree that Chris’ letters are some new kind of literary form. They’re very powerful.” Dick hesitated.

On September 4, Chris went to Toronto to put Gravity & Grace through the lab. Stumbling into bed after watching the final answerprint at 5 a.m. a few days later, Chris wrote to Dick: “This is the happiest day of my life.” She never mailed the letter.

She went back briefly to LA before leaving to premiere her film at the Independent Feature Market in New York. Still no word from Dick. Sylvère phoned again and this time Dick promised he’d write Chris a letter.

The Independent Feature Market was a nonstop trial of screenings, meetings, cocktail parties. Gravity & Grace wouldn’t screen until Day Four. On the first day of the Market, Dick left Chris a message asking her address. He’d like to send his letter via FedEx. The next day Dick left Chris another message, saying that his houseguest had accidentally erased her message. “This time I’ve instructed him not to touch the answering machine, so if you call back, I promise you, I’ll get your message.”

Dick’s Fedex arrived before 10 a.m. on the day of Chris’ screening. She stuck it in her bag and promised not to read it. But as the taxi rounded Second Avenue, she scrutinized the airbill, changed her mind and ripped it open.

There were two white envelopes inside the package. One was addressed to her; the other to her husband, Sylvère Lotringer. She opened Sylvère’s first.

September 19

Dear Sylvère,

Here’s the book on altered states and trance that I told you about. Georges Lapassade writes in Italian and French and I suspect this book also available in French. However it hasn’t been translated into English. See what you think. The other, more mysterious tract on tarantulism seems to have vanished for now. If and when it turns up I’ll send it on.

I apologize for being so resolutely incommunicado and for not following up sooner on this and other matters. I really didn’t want to cause either you or Chris unnecessary pain. A large part of the silence and awkwardness between us is undoubtedly attributable to what I still believe to be the unwarranted and uninvited aftermath of your overnight stay at my home at the end of last year when weather reports had indicated you might not be able to make it back to San Bernardino. In retrospect I feel I should have been absolutely unambiguous in my response to the letters you and Kris sent over the following months instead of opting for bemused silence. I can only say that being taken as the object of such obsessive attention on the basis of two genial but not particularly intimate or remarkable meetings spread out over a period of years was, indeed still is, utterly incomprehensible to me. I found the situation initially perplexing, then disturbing and my major regret now is that I didn’t find the courage at the time to communicate to you and Kris how uncomfortable I felt being the unwitting object of what you described to me over the phone before Christmas as some kind of bizarre game.

I don’t know how our connection stands now that you’ve both received this package. Friendship, as far as I’m concerned, is a delicate and rare thing that’s built up over time and is predicated on mutual trust, mutual respect, reciprocal interests and shared commitments. It’s a relation that ultimately is lived out, at least, as if it were chosen not taken for granted or assumed in advance. It’s something that has to be renegotiated at every step, not demanded unconditionally. In the circumstances it may be that, for now at least, too much damage has been done on all sides for the kind of negotiated rapprochement that would be needed if we were to restore the trust in which real friendship thrives. That said, I still have immense respect for your work; I still enjoy your company and conversation when we meet and believe, as you do, that Kris has talent as a writer. I can only reiterate what I have said before whenever the topic has been raised in conversation with you or Chris: that I do not share your conviction that my right to privacy has to be sacrificed for the sake of that talent.