Some days she believes that language has no limits but today she believes only in the limits of language. Words are impossible and she thinks the most impossible words are yes and no. This year she has been trying to think more in pictures and less in words. She believes only in language’s limits. I write believe and I mean feel. I write feel and I mean see. I write see and I mean know. I write know and I mean want. She wants a word to contain all these things in one, not to simplify but to describe them in a dynamic motion with one another. Describe as in a geometric tracing not describe as in an account of language. See? He says: ‘Dominance is really old.’ He says that lizards have no limbic system and therefore they do not feel emotion but still one lizard will hold itself close to the ground – and here he imitates a shy upward glance from a lizard body pressed to the earth – and one lizard will hold itself tall and upright above it – and here he sets his arms outstretched and palms flat against an imagined surface – and one lizard, he says, will be like this physically above and one will be below and it is clear which is submissive and which is dominant. She realizes she is exhausted by the desire to be heard. She realizes, in fact, that she is exhausted by many of her desires and she wonders when this happened how the fuck this happened and what it would feel like for desire to be energizing again and not exhausting more like a relay and less like a trip switch and she suspects that the way to find out is by not thinking about desire not talking about desire not writing about desire but by desiring instead but that is not what is asked of her and is it even possible to desire without thinking is it even possible – for her – to desire without talking about it
And I am not a biologist but I picture myself lying on the floor and you stood above me but in this scenario I am the dominant one what would it take for this to read as that what story would we have to tell each other to disentangle ourselves from these evolutionary physical languages, to tell of my dominance and your submission in this moment? How long ago would we have had to start renaming these behaviours in our reptile histories so that I can see the lizard prostrate now and call it something else? Or what if we are both yielding to each other simultaneously or to nothing in particular even only embodying a state of submission side by side on our lizard bellies on the hot floor?
She is listening all the time about sex and violence and each conversation is about power and articulation and she is listening all the time about verbal communication and embodied communication and action in language and language in action and about speaking up and speaking out and leaning in and leaning out and taking space and giving space and sharing space and safe space and space created and space held and spacing out and space dispersed and listening up and out and down and I am washed with a vigilance of language. She is exhausted by wanting to be heard in this particular context it is important to add her voice to this dialogue and she does not want to and both things are true. I write truth and I mean feeling. I write feeling and I mean insight. I write insight and I mean knowledge. I write knowledge and I mean need. She experiences the rain not as wet but only as sound. Her body is an event. He says: ‘An alternative coherent story.’ This is the way to deal with the stories that are ancient and do not serve us, he says, it is to deconstruct them and present our own our new present an alternative story. And I am not averse to the work of it but I won’t do it alone I am not averse to the work of it but I am caught on the word ‘coherent’ because I am incapable or I do not know the processes by which one might achieve coherence or I do not want to have to strive for it or I am frightened honestly. I am not of it neither are my stories I’m not sure they are even stories I cannot or I am not it is hard to distinguish between the two. What is this demand really what is underneath it how do they go these processes of consistency like some kind of dark magic a purifying alchemy you know some- how it has a dirty heart. It is obvious that this is not the medium for these ideas language for resisting language. I enjoy watching two people fuck at a sex club and I have never before considered myself a voyeur. And when I tell this story not that I tell it often I say it was so intimate I suspect the intimacy is what I consider myself permitted to find exciting I rarely say his cock going in and out of her cunt was a turn-on or her cunt over his cock or what happened in my body when I looked at theirs I do not even know how to more honestly describe what that arousal was. Describe as in an account of language not as in a meteor in the sky. I’m not certain the words are even right I’m not certain how to position myself in relation to them her cunt his cock the event my body apart from behind that one-way mirror and does that mean I should stop talking or keep trying? You pull me in for a kiss and your mouth is cold. Your lips and your tongue are so cold and I think how is it even possible for this part of your body to be so cold how is it when mouths are such places of heat? She thinks maybe the biggest myth is coherence. She would like to be a person who can let things go – this simplest of suggestions which seems like a suggestion to simplify – but in actuality she is a hoarder she wants to gather it all close every pleasure but especially every pain and never let it be lost and this might be greed or might be ‘baggage’ or might be an entirely valid strategy for survival to have all the things coexist even if it’s possible that it is their multiplicity that is too painful to bear. Your mouth that is hot and cold your hand at on my sternum as if punching me against a wall your palm at against the underside of my jaw your body inside me holding me upright.
She has spent so long learning how to say no that she no longer knows how to say yes. I am awash with a vigilance of language like I am holding in the most cliché of ways a gun in my right hand and I want simultaneously to make sure the safety is on and to play fast and loose with it in this saloon or on this dusty and surprisingly empty street right outside of the courthouse and blow some holes into the whiskey bottles and the frosted mirrors and maybe even the fucking bartender. This image of washed feels apt or apt enough sort of this liquid abundance maybe an excess a rising I think of the flood – yes in the biblical sense or no not that – and the flood is not important not really but what comes after the flood if the flood is the deconstruction and the alternative comes after? Or what is the alternative if we cannot have a flood at all and we cannot start again and we have to forever use the same languages we have been using since we began and all of the language is contaminated already by our experience of being human and every shitty inadequate way we have used a word before? Or what is the alternative to the flood itself what if we are the flood?
Yes I
No I
Yes I
Yes I
She is exhausted by wanting to be heard, which does not equate to not wanting to be heard any more. He says: when a language is dying a thing that linguists do is write a grammar of it so that it can be understood by others in the future. Here I am fantasizing about lizards and what might become possible if we let this language die.