The Erotic Fugitive

Fugitive Eros

They insisted that I explain every act. And wherever a rationale could not be fashioned, I bore the stigmata of having failed to narrate, of having falsified my story. They enthroned perpetual guilt and instilled a moralizing compulsion to explain every action. The imperative to explain has been overthrown but there remains still a sense of falling short. Every success rings hollow, while every shortcoming resounds.

I imagine a trial in which conviction is assured. I imagine myself as both defendant and prosecutor; the judge and jury: the idealized images of past lovers, whom I, in the past, had wronged. Absolution: Impossible - the future foreclosed; so this image proclaims.

In my weaker moments I imagine that the life I lead is that of a fugitive from this most intimate of tribunals. I've absconded, yet no other choice remained. What traces have I left, aside from a path littered with the detritus of discarded dreams? My despairing hope is that somewhere beneath the smoldering rubble lies some fond memory; that is all one can wish of the past.

I wrote these lines in the final months of a time of profound alienation from the world of action. These lines exhibit the depths of dispossession and a failure of narrative with such poignancy that today I have difficulty conceiving myself as their author. I found myself betrayed by identity and by narrative; their attestation was empty while they had become instruments of my oppression. Through unceasing narrative explanation of my actions I had thereby refigured a part of myself in the internalization of my persecutory other. Thus I renounced both identity and narrative, in toto, and yet something remained. Voluntarily deprived of identity and the ability to narrate, I remained, as did my faulty of imagination. The exigency of this image impelled me to record it in writing; writing that exhibits no action and no narrative and in which I found myself fractured into three identities: the self of imagination, persecutor, and fugitive self. I did not lose myself; rather I witnessed my own fragmentation. I say witnessed because I did not create or configure this image; for this image came upon me and I found myself refigured by this writing, a mimetic representation of self-dispersion.

The aura of memory is like love after the fact. It is a lie to myself by myself that I've forgotten was a lie. It is a metaphorics of memory and desire. I forget the failures, I forget the reality, I remember the eidos, the idealized image. If it really were this that I remembered the aura would never have cracked. I retrospectively falsify my memory to re-create the aura. The erotic afterglow grows with time's passage. I'm becoming trapped in my memories. Why can't I just believe a new lie?

The fragments have at last escaped me. I can no longer conjure up the erotic aura of memory. I can no longer re-create the aura. Eros was kidnapped by Mnemosyne who then turned fugitive and escapes me. The memories remain, yet they do not. They are still there yet their are denuded representations, lacking all form and all feeling. They are dead objects in my memory, monuments - memorial to times past. But was Eros really kidnapped? No. Eros at last escaped Mnemosyne, and so deprived memory of its erotic charge. Eros, now in secret solidarity with Thanatos, looks toward the possible and beyond that to the impossible - to the future that comes.

God?

I imagine the personal deity to be the ultimate figure of suffering. With each passing step taken in the

direction of omniscience, I realize this. I do not imagine that I ever will approach omniscience. But, with every thing I know indirectly my knowledge grows. At the same time, however, my power of action remains paltry in comparison to my possibilities and pitifully limited in its domain. With every knowledge beyond my sphere of perception my anguish grows. I remember as if it were yesterday, at a concert some years ago I found myself haunted by the thought that "I know she's fucking someone else, right now." It was not the mere fact of its occurrence, for I knew full well before and it had not lacerated me so. But rather it was that I was thinking that thought at the same moment! Had I any inkling of the profundity of this at that time, I should have instantly lost consciousness.

I imagine a personal deity as omniscient but powerless. Thus, knowing all, its anguish would be amplified to

infinity. It is no wonder then that there can be no such god. Such a god would have long since have died

from wounds of anguished desire.

To X, X(1), X(2) . . .

Past moments pattern and limn present-future moments, mobile and multiple, already immanent. There I can discover you, your infinite singularity and substitutability, that which I most love in you; I can love most, however, in the freedom of virtuality, possibility and in my future-imaginary.

Recoiling from actuality, remaining in a moment suspended, I withdraw from reality – distracted by a distant image of the future or one of a rapidly receding past, I squander time and miss the moment, and miss chance and possibility.

Dare I descend from the heights of my imaginary? Do I dare to grasp and to know, to seize the moment and make that passage into actuality? In imagination I can love and embrace possibility; in reality I dread its dissolution in closed, crystallized, cold impossibility. 

And yet, in this momentary passage into present-future moments of actuality, you are neither lost nor altered irreparably. What I most love remains in my imaginary as a place of an utterly singular possibility – a past-moment-pattern for my future imaginary, in which I'll rediscover your presence and singularity. 

I want-don't-want to know

I desire and fear future-reality

In your face I can see every other, in every other I can see yours:

I love the excess-absence of (im)possibility

Riot Muse

There are moments when, in the depths of alienation, some bond to the quotidian self is broken. Anchors raised, adrift, we chart a strange course we drift between Scylla and Charybdis. In solitude we are their prey. There are moments however when in the final, inevitable approach, we see in a flash an image of ambiguous provenance – a flash of significance in the image – an intimation of estranged immanence – a fleeting glimpse of a narrative of being. The supreme narrative that the image of immanence intimates can never be elaborated upon. This is because it is no narrative, but rather these flashbulb moments, even if initially overlooked, are later elevated to the status of absolute significance and the building blocks of a growing narrative. These are the events that constitute the narrative of our lives. These moments are the signposts of our lives and the tombstones of the past.

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