Fiction
Deleuze & Guattari Disagree About Fucking
I met you in the kitchen at the squat - well, I suppose it's not a squat anymore because the city is offering to sell the building to the riffraff, rather than just sweeping in and taking it away. They could just come in and take it I suppose, but there would be trouble, there would be overtime, and the Rivington is really a bit too small to maneuver a tank on, anyway. But, for now, the kitchen is ours.
So I met you in the kitchen but you didn't say much, and I thought you were cute, but these days I think everyone's cute, so that's not really a surprise, and you didn't really say anything anyway.
That night at the party you asked if I was gay, which I always take as a compliment even though I don't usually get along with gay men, and I said no and you said I was beautiful and I said you were drunk and you said, yep, the ceiling's spinning, and I said we were outside, there is no ceiling, so you said lets take a walk.
And as we walked I recognized this as the moment where normally I would kiss you, we were away from the noise and the other people that we had been scoping out to mack with (and hopefully make all the moves on), but your head was spinning and you didn't really give any of those subtle move-forward signs, not that you did in the kitchen either, well, maybe just the tiniest gleam in your eyes. And besides, usually when I'm that drunk the last thing I want is a foreign tongue in orifice. And I certainly didn't want a unclothed human waking in my next day's bed and regretting being there. Best to know they at least think you are pretty when they are sober, even if they still would only make the moves when there are drunk.
Which you were so I walked you to the L and gave you a hug and returned to the noise and tried to flirt with someone who was lecturing a crustie on the finer points of Jacques Lacan, but she didn't even email me back the next day.
So later I met you in the same kitchen again, you in new Nikes and long hair and boxer shorts and everyone else in black and patches and spikes, incongruity is always charming but I had to run and I asked if you'd be at the party tomorrow, which you said you'd be, and so you were.
And I suppose we both knew we were going to the party to get laid, but neither of us did anything about it, not until it was 6 in the morning and enough was enough, so we went back to my place and had sex. And I never understood the appeal of one night stands, because people are always uncomfortable with each others bodies, and while you would think that perhaps they would be less inhibited with another with whom they had no history with and nothing to lose, that of course is not usually the case, and the sex was mediocre, maybe we were just tired, I hoped you weren't dry because you weren't interested, boys can never really know and I suppose a lot them don't really care, but, then again, I never really cared for most boys.
And we met again the next day after we both had slept some, and under dubious pretexts returned to my place. Our inter-being code was being developed, it was at once subtle and blatant - we could neither lie nor make loaded references, nor could we broach the question directly, but rather we would speak in neutral terms whose content we both innately knew.
This time I could feel your body in it's entirety, something I had missed the last time, this morning. Your swimmers muscles and revealing stance made for a certain wholesome charm, your speed in divesting clothing perhaps a symptom of little experience. Now we spent more time in contact, our whole bodies pressed against each other so the connection can flow. When only a penis is in contact with a vagina, there seems to be a serious shortage in channeling capacity. (Instantaneously I think of a hundred exceptions to this idea, but a hundred examples as well.) I learn more about you this time – where to touch your clit, how to make your nipples erect, how much pressure to exert in this place, where to position my leg at that time.
Now we are machines moving closer to the orbit of the other. We are beginning to understand the others machination and the finer points of tuning.
But you are leaving tomorrow and that is clear. Your lease is over and futures are awaiting. We say goodbye in the kitchen, a different kitchen this time, but another point of transpiration.
So you're going away, you're already gone even if you're still here, even if you're now only two blocks away headed for the 6, because I will not see you again, suddenly I'm getting all melodramatic and sentimental because I can afford to, because I have nothing to lose, because you were gone before we started, because there was nothing before, and now there is only the space you were in.
There was nothing before and now there is only the space you were in, the space which your corporeal entity flitted through and whose relief now burns in your absence.
Thank you for pointing that up. I was dying before, being bleed by my disconnection. Now I am haunted by it.
The television cuts up my writing. The television invades my process. The television indoctrinates, "Don't have sex because of peer pressure."
I agree.
Have sex because it is amazing and wonderful. This connection is amazing and wonderful and is an end in itself. Having sex for procreation is obscene. Having sex for domination is obscene. Having sex for collection is obscene.
Celibacy is losing energy. Energy is pouring from us at all times. It streams out and covers the ground, making libations to a vampire theology.
But with another, the connection remains whole, the current flows, the energy goes out and returns, it circulates through our bodies and ignites our nerves, causing neurotransmitters to fire off at random intervals and create a closed system that brings our awareness of ourselves and each other into a new relation... we are not two or one or united or elevated, we are... circulating into the other, like air being taken into our lungs, absorbed by capillaries and then exhaled into the others' lungs, we are now that breath. We are now that flow. We are now a system, and as such our functioning is no longer such as the systems we were before. We are a new system now, we are a system together with detachable but complimentary parts.
Despite protestations from the apologists of psychoanalysis, fucking is NOT a binary opposition.
Fucking is the creation of a new organism, of a new system, of a new machine.
Not fucking, celibacy, is the loss of energy. Energy is pouring out, is flowing, but is not flowing in a system, in a cycle, in a circulation, it's flowing like a fire hydrant onto a street. All is lost, all is lost in this energy exchange, and I can feel it, I can feel the drain in my system, I can feel that I have to replace this energy, that I have to redevelop these flows, I have to constantly divert my core energy allotment to the research department, so I can develop the ways to develop the energy again that has been lost just so that it can be lost again.
We were circulating. We were circulating briefly. Now we're not because you're gone, not that you were supposed to be here or needed to be here or promised to be here or even inferred to be here. Not that you should be here or I even want you here. Not that that matters. You are not here, and I am examining the space, not ripped from me like a sudden death, like a car crash or a dying parent, but which was pushed to the side, shoved away suddenly by your brief presence, the emptiness which was dissolved in your proximity. The space which has now reconstituted.
Please, don't be offended, but it's not that I miss you. It's that I miss feeling whole.
Now the energy is pouring onto the ground because you are gone, and my attention has been called to the fact that I am bleeding profusely, that my energy is flowing onto the surface of this world in front of me and I cannot stop it. And I am haunted by you like a phantom limb, like the torn half of an organism that has stars for eyes and rivers for insides.