The Erotic Essay Not Written
“...my pleasure never felt done – even when I came, there
were parts stuck inside.
Pleasure clung to my stomach, it swelled up my throat.” (Tamara
Faith Berger, Lie with me)
I think it is not you I desire but how your mouth feels as I
say yes.
I find myself thinking, again, of the kind of erotic essay I’d
write. What kind of essay that would be. Perhaps because of this, I am
rehearsing the part where one body theoretically kisses the other body. There
are several versions of this, each one marked by subtle variations: a spot on
the neck where moans slip out of open mouths, lips pressing into lips, bones
pressing into flesh. The form isn’t logical or argumentative but associative:
one part links or leads to another. I have this image of you. You are leaning in. Your outline
is soft. I am thinking that because method also means path, kissing is a kind of pathology:
I imagine kissing you and where it might lead.
In different texts, I find
myself writing then erasing a kiss should
resemble nothing. In older notebooks, there are places where the paper
is thin and worn and pilling from the tiny eraser at the top of my pencil. In
those places, a kiss should resemble nothing is very soft, almost
transparent.
There
is very little that is actually transparent, especially not words, those parts stuck
inside. Even the invisible ones. It makes me wonder if longing alone makes them
exist, or if needing them, the way one needs them written down, is a way of
making them slip onto the skin, glistening. Se mettre à fleur de peau. In this
I seem to have transmuted the task of the essayist into pure obsessional
desire, which is arguably the work of poetry.
Lately,
each time I sit down to write, I stumble into words I had not meant to put on
paper. They appear there like old lovers who, walking in a city none of them
properly belong to, happen on each other at some street corner. Do you know I’ve been looking for you? If
I hadn’t called out you wouldn’t have recognized me. You haven’t changed.
I
find the words bifurcating into two performances, not necessarily simultaneous:
here the essay carries something outward – its fantasy is that of the caesura,
of a deep and audible breath / a withdrawal / each time thinking the arrival
will claim a new departure; meanwhile, there is always the hope that the end
will make everything that preceded it meaningful.
The writing was more monastic than
erotic. I woke up early each morning to write under the measure of a few
devotional hours. That part was easy until the darkness of the winter months
arrived. I sacrificed many words in favour of sleep. I have not measured this
against any feelings of regret even though, as a perfectionist, I tended to
think of sleep as a word-eater. At night I struggled to keep my eyes open long
enough to catch the end of a film, only to then lie wide awake. It was as
though in not starting my day with words I was somehow unable to end my nights.
Every day was different of course.
Some mornings the words came easy. Other days, I had to face my impotence and my whole body wringing itself
out to put one word in front of the other. Sometimes, if I were home, I would
take books from the shelves in the dining room; if already seated in the
library, I would wander into the stacks. This seemed a form of recompense for
not racing to the end of a line but allowing my thoughts to float as though the
contrast between the air in the room and the texture of the books, as I skimmed
through them or ran my fingers over their spine, would reveal which questions
to ask next.
Does it make it cinematic to imagine it happening to somebody
else?
There’s
one book in particular. The End of the Story.
I keep coming back to it. The constancy of my return resembles something of a
love affair. The novel welcomes this. It is itself about the measure of desire,
the measure of writing. I cannot tell if it’s because I am deeply infatuated
with the writing, but I often find myself thinking it is a perfect novel. I
admire the way Davis’s sentences seem to work toward a vanishing point. Like
they’re assembled around an empty middle, a husk or sheath or shell, which is
not really empty – more like what language cannot carry.
When
I go to a reading, I find myself distracted and imagining a lively dialogue
between us. You are saying something like what
are you doing, only you are saying it in French. Je pense
au roman érotique que je vais écrire. Mais pourquoi en anglais? Autrement ça
risque d’être trop sentimental. Tu ne trouves pas que l’érotisme se marie bien
à la sentimentalité? Non, je ne trouve pas. De toute façon en écrivant en
anglais je me tromperai moi-même. Ça sera un moi à côté d’un autre. Il me
viendra plus facilement de m’imaginer une double vie, même d’écrire contre mes
propres expériences. Quand je dirai je ce ne sera pas tout à fait vrai, et je
le ferai si bien que personne ne pourra dire que je n’ai jamais fait l’amour en
anglais.
Does it show that I want you? That I am writing around
the parataxis I’ve made of your body: a form of writing like kissing where the
mouth is its own kind husk or sheath with words inside. At least that
is my fantasy.
We
kissed each other for a long time. The simile dissolving.
I wanted to mark,
to write down a great deal more than what I’ve offered up here. This is not the
essay I imagined. I had wanted to make this, this text (except perhaps not the
one you are presently engaged in reading), a gift to all the others that have
moved me in some way. An essay that writes through and bows to what is not mine.
A writing alongside of. A lover’s essay. It was not a grand gesture. I wanted
the essay to be about love.
I’ve been thinking of Renée Gladman’s sentences a lot. Especially Calamities.
I have begun reading
each essay out loud, mouthing the words so that it takes time.
Geneviève Robichaud is a PhD candidate in the Département de littératures et de langues du monde at the Université de Montréal. Her chapbook, Exit Text, was recently published by Anstruther Press.
Geneviève Robichaud is a PhD candidate in the Département de littératures et de langues du monde at the Université de Montréal. Her chapbook, Exit Text, was recently published by Anstruther Press.
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