Crooked Lust

(drawing by Jason Sho Green)

listening to: Crooked Lust, Bowerbirds.



My views on desire and what it constitutes have been so shaken this past weeks, shattered completely, thrown to the floor. It has been awkward forceful contact. We have dismantled its composition, placed it in a whiteboard, made arrows between terms and terms and now a feeling so distinct and precise has been written, preserved into pages of spiraled notebooks. Jacques Lacan considers desire to be the central trait of a human being. This is the most important. Human beings desire. This is a sign of something that has been lost, it is desire the movement, the motor of everything. But there is always something that escapes this, that resists to language, the colonization of our bodies. there is always something that words don’t seem to grasp. This is what cannot be captured by language, since there is something in experience that is impossible to be translated. It has to do with the material experience of the body that exceeds the microcosm of the symbolic and its significances. It goes beyond ourselves and I wonder if the highest manifestation of this is an orgasm, if our first brush with it, is the first tiny flickering light resting in the first kiss, and that particular rush of hormones running around the corners inside your body, rushing and stepping and tripping over each other. I remember how I felt after being kissed for a first time, being overwhelmed with a pulsing, steady panic of losing that which I had had just a glimpse of. I remember trying to reconcile the fact that It made no sense the fear of that void, the persistent ache of memory, as if it had been activated automatically right after. Looking back at that, I guess that was the case. That this had always been alive, and it was that action that made that memory self-aware of its existence, born a ghost, triggering the paranoia of losing it because I knew I knew you before I did. I knew how I wanted you to kiss me before I was kissed. Midstence, hands bording the outlines of my jawline. With Lacan desire is always a story, it is always a ghost. He says there is no sexual relation. There is no sexual relation that is not mediated by the fantasy that each person has inside of them. Physical contact is mediated by the fantasy that interposes between these two bodies. What comes between them is captured by a ghostly dimension. There is always a constant, bittersweet struggle between the body and the ghost. Even now, after all these time, i can still say that i never really liked my body as much as i did as when it was naked, next to yours. The terrain had never been so traveled, and now i understand that what i loved was on the outside of my own conscience. It was the moment my hipbones rested concave on your bed that i was constituted, materialized. I was desire too. This gives you being. It is as if the cells that constitute your materiality are awaken once they are being seen from where you want them to be seen. How is it that there can be a point of convergence between these ghosts, so carefully crafted, built in your own particular experience, brewing in your own body, and it is because of the impossibility of these ghosts that never fully coincide, and in that sense, argues Lacan, two bodies never really touch each other.

There is no symmetry, no perfect fit, no two bodies, no two fantasies could ever really be the same. Even logistically, you will never see me from where I see you. How can the vision, the small glimpse of your back in the dark could spell desire for you too? We didn’t fit together perfectly, and no, Two bodies are never really one. Don’t whisper that during sex. Say instead you like this place you are in because it makes me feel like a good (g)host.

The ocean during winter. He zipped up his jacket and then remembered how miserable he was a couple of years ago, he recalled, moving his head from side to side. And this recall for this sadness of the past unglued me, made it almost impossible, the most challenging thing in the world, to control just how much I wanted to kiss him. How much i wanted him despite the age difference, the impossibility of the situation. He is brilliant, impossibly brilliant and here I know
my heart by now, I know its careless and that it has been down this road before. And I wonder if he can tell the overwhelming presence of desire, its infinite quality because it has a trace of that which cannot be described by language, and a satisfaction only derived from hurt and pleasure, something so strong and majestic that it takes you whole, that it voids you because in front of this there is a deadly conscience that there is no possible control over it.
Fantasy being built by memory, memory being fed by the grasps of something outside the regular symbolic orders. There before your awareness of it, like sleeper terrorists patiently, quietly resting inside of you until they come out all pipe-bombs and dynamite, blowing up the very center of your foundations. And to place it even closer to the precipice, add attraction and this lust, this crooked lust.
D.H. Lawrence once said even animals get sad after ejaculation. Is it because they know too, that what they had for that brief second is never permanent, is always derived from a loss?

Close your eyes now, sleep well. Our bodies never really touched.