It is no doubt one of the greatest follies to think that one—the self, anyone—has control beyond the minutiae of life. I have envied those who, from the time they were young, were in possession of a clarity in terms of structure and desire even if they appeared to me to be the most banal of wishes. Over the years there has been much time—too much, perhaps—spent ruminating on what I sometimes think of as my random choices, at others, a divine chaos. The latter is something I rarely admit; being so pragmatic and not a little cynical, it feels like a great romantic notion which results an internal blush. But romance, I mean in the sense of the unknown, is at times the only clarity or control I have had. Restless and unreliable, it is no less what has moved me and still moves me from place to person and even within myself.
Books one returns to have a way of rushing in the former selves of one’s life. And like a wind that blows open a door, it can be an unwelcome shock to see the dead leaves, the dust of the past at one’s feet and in the lungs again. I was already in the midst of what could be called a romantic disruption brought on by forthcoming changes: aside from a book to be published, what will be several international moves, and an encounter, or visitation of sorts. It struck me that the cause of everything was words, that all I have or do not have from 2014 to the present has been created or taken away by them.
In a rare fit of reading dissatisfaction, I had spent the past week or so rereading books late at night. I keep strange sleeping hours, so from 11 to 2-3 at night, I tend to read. How it is for others I do not know, but reading does not push out my thoughts, my mind a blank to only take in what is on the page. What I experience is sometimes a peace where I feel the conversations of myself pushing at the edges of someone else’s words, at other times they overflow, insinuating themselves until there is no boundary between myself and the book. When such boundaries disappear, the self and others bleed into each other, minute corpuscles and phonemes of memory rearranging each other until there is no thought or phrase that does not pulsate in both.
The last two nights were Parisian Sketches by J.-K. Huysmans. An odd chimera of a book, he starts with the expected vignettes of Parisian characters and places: the dancers and prostitutes, the working people. He then moves into himself: reveries of art and women, observation and experience which is sometimes brutal in the way that life is unintentionally so. In ‘Low Tide’ he views the various busts in a dressmaker’s window and speculates on the flesh they were modelled upon. Youth and aging, life and its inevitability are all accounted for, and though his observations depress as much as they delight, he stresses the beauty of them all above the marbled perfection of the classical busts in the Louvre. And on reading this again, I realised that the first time I had dismissed it with all the denial of, if not youth, then the denial that comes with thinking one is still clinging to the favourable side of it.
I moved on to a familiar vignette. Huysmans on scent and perfume is sheer eroticism: it is hard to read him on the subject without thinking that he must have written the passages in a kind of orgasmic frenzy, for he comes across as breathless in the way lovers do when exploring new bodies, every scent and sensation one of pleasure, each one building a precarious tower which will inevitably fall, but in that exhausted surrender that is carnal joy. It feels punctuation is only for the sake of propriety in literature, otherwise, he might leave all out, and the words left on the page would lay bare—only scent and flesh, so much for the unaware reader that they might avert their eyes and close the book altogether.
At this point I set the book down and turned off the light in futile search of rest. Expected as they always are, my thoughts moved about, Huysmans’ words among them. I considered my body at 28 and 48, the latter a newness which I thought I was indifferent. I considered my breasts and hips, my ass and my stomach. If I dissect myself, detach my head from my body in the way the dressmaker’s busts were incomplete women, it is because for a long time, I thought—think—myself incomplete in a similar way. Time and illness shift the body, sometimes in miniscule ways, in others, the sudden realisation a piece of land you have known your entire life has been irrevocably altered by nature; seismic. I know the fine wave marks where my skin has grown and retreated in a sort of shock, as my hips and ass and stomach have curved slightly more into a stubbornness which match my temperament. I look at the scars and marks and think, I know you, you who have done this to me. For all that, it is mine, and if it does not please me wholly, neither does it displease. The question of if it pleases others requires others to answer.
But if I am all those busts of the dressmaker, so am I Huysmans’ dream-scents. Can the two reconcile? I do not mean ‘these budding pubescences arouse in us that licentious impatience for things begun and of which desires the sequel’, but the midpoint when desire is no longer necessarily a visual certainty. When the sensory mind and its output, words, become fiercer—more direct—while the body starts its retreat, and you are left attempting to reattach a head to a bust which is not yours anymore. To find yourself on the other side of a divide where half of a self can arouse but the other may or may not. What is the woman who exists as ‘lips voracious, eyes gleaming, exhaling wild breaths composed of the sultriness of hot-houses, of allegro con brios, of shrieks and auto-da-fés … of conflagrations of colours and perfumes’ but whose body … yes, whose body is this that moves beneath and above, responding through those perfumes, because the body itself ______.
I stop there because I cannot finish, because, once again, the one who can answer that is not I. Am I complete, or am I not? Once I was an equation like others, now I am a theorem. Theorema. That long-gone perfume by Fendi, the decadence of spice and wood and flowers, what felt like cream, the overwhelming richness of carnality felt in the mouth. When the purity of that white liquid fills the mouth and falls from the lips; eyes on eyes in the rite of exchange. One gives, one receives. The mouth as the vessel detached from the body, the body on its knees … in prayer? Teorema, where the beautiful stranger brings ecstasy and transformation, then leaves. What we are left with is lingering scent and taste, the ghost of completeness which makes us feel evermore incomplete; desire becomes a template for the eternal self. But desire is a paradox where completeness is still insatiable, as Anne Serre writes in The Beginners, a story of a woman’s desire for two men. ‘It’s not easy to move from one body to another’, she writes. She means Anna’s emotional rift, but I, too, am moving between bodies and bodies. The line is still uncomfortably true for me, no matter the context.
What I was in 2014 was a ghost. Detached from the body, haunted by scent-dreams so vivid they left me in the state of a post-coital lover, with no hope of reuniting myself or connection to others. How does one reassemble, recreate, return? Through words, it turned out, divine chaos which nevertheless has a structure and a meaning even though it may be unknown to the writer at the time; automatic writing, dreams writ large. 2023, and the period in-between the body finds a kind of completeness, if the body can be said to be held together by twenty-six letters, limbs and morphemes pulled like a marionette’s strings. 2023, when transformations have come and gone, the restlessness of old back again. I am a vignette, an observation, the succession of dressmaker’s busts, the scent-dream that leaves one wretched with longing. Where to next, I ask myself. Is the body a destination, if not mine, then another’s?
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*Parisian Sketches by J.-K.Huysmans translated by Brendan King
**The Beginners by Anne Serre translated by Mark Hutchinson
Image: Tomoé Hill (from the National Archeological Museum, Athens)