Love Dog

“Long time jerk
Ohhh my heart
With that long time jerk.”

“I felt my heart, and now my heart will burst…” The Clash sing in this song (the B side on the EP “Rock the Casbah,” 1982) that I’d never heard until this Thanksgiving, while I was away in Riverside, NY. Staying with friends of friends in a little beach house that hangs over the ocean, which I could hear while I slept. I could probably live here, I thought. Write here. By myself. Write all the time, with no interruptions. Maybe not come back for a while.

I could do it because my heart is bursting, and also when it isn’t. And when it isn’t, I almost wonder if something is wrong.

We watched The Wizard of Oz, which all the adults loved and knew better than the kids. One woman knew all the lines. When the Tin Man’s solo—“If I Only Had a Heart”—came on, I was bursting like I’ve always wanted to burst when I hear him croon the words:

“When a man’s an empty kettle
He should be on his mettle
And yet I’m torn apart.”

It’s the Tin Man’s buttery voice and old show-biz accent, how smooth and free of rust it is. It’s the obvious fact, of course, that all four of them want what they already have so much of. It’s also the way the Tin Man tells Dorothy: “Now I know I’ve got a heart, ‘cause it’s breaking” when she says goodbye to everyone and goes back to Kansas. It’s the way they all say goodbye. The way they thank each other for things. For everything.

I danced to “Long Time Jerk” in these people’s living room. Guests took turns changing the 10 EPs on the record player. One song per album. Or two, if we played both sides. But often B sides are better than A sides. B is A’s well-kept secret. That’s what “Long Time Jerk” is. It’s the jerk that’s always been there, the B to the A. The jerk in someone sweet and someone sweet in the jerk. The jerk that makes your heart combust. That jerks you around. That plays you like a broken record. Like a nightmare you’ve grown used to and that’s grown comic. And then the song itself is also out there and clownie (the word jerk even has roots in American carnival slang). It sounds like some kind of reggae, country, punk-polka.

Playing records for two days, after I had just written about listening to vinyl in my radio monologue for Performa. The way a record crackles and trips—imperfect—alongside a song.

Joe Strummer’s voice is like the Tin Man’s. Even when Strummer was shouting in punk songs, his tough, flippant voice always sounded so vulnerable and impassioned, like it could crack at any moment. The jerk in his voice was so sweet. Then Strummer’s voice stretched wide open in The Mescaleros.

Although I couldn’t see the ocean out my window in bed at night (no moon), I could hear it playing in the dark.

I think I slept well and came back more tired.

I saw this as we drove back into Manhattan and then walked home by foot.

When asked about his 1976 film Cria cuervos, the Spanish director Carlos Saura said:


“Cria cuervos is a sad film, yes. But that’s part of my belief that childhood is one of the most terrible parts in the life of a human being. What I’m trying to say is that at that age you’ve no idea where it is you are going, only that people are taking you somewhere, leading you, pulling you and you are frightened. You don’t know where you’re going or who you are or what you are going to do. It’s a time of terrible indecision.”

As I wrote in my first post, in class Slavoj Zizek stated that Hamlet is about how the beginning of ethics is about trying to decide something, and deciding something involves procrastination and oscillation. Going back and forth. How an act always comes too early. How there is never a right moment for an act. The paradox is you can be too late and too early for something at the same time. So you have to begin with the wrong moment because it’s always the wrong moment and it will always be the wrong moment.

According to Wikipedia, the title Cria cuervos comes from the Spanish proverb, “Cría cuervos y te sacarán los ojos.” “This translates as, ‘Raise ravens, and they’ll take out your eyes’ and is generally used for someone who has bad luck in raising children, or raised them badly. It may also imply rebellious behavior or that every bad act will return to haunt you.”

In Cria cuervos, fascism is the ghost that haunts not just the house of the film, but the house of being. The mother is gone. And the father, a fascist military man, dies while making love to another woman. His heart has stopped.

What decisions do you have to make in order not to die? In order to really live? To not walk around as though you are dead? Hamlet paces back and forth trying to decide.

After Elaine sent me a quote by Victor Shklovsky this morning on “love being a play with short acts and long intermissions,” I wrote back and compared intermissions to time-jumps (more on the time-jump in a later post. At some point, I’d like to make a list of movies that feature time-jumps).

Elaine responded:

“Yes—the intermission as time-jump and time-jump as intermission. The intermission in a play, too; intermission in Hamlet. And how Hamlet is himself in a kind of intermission or entr’acte, between the acts, hesitating, about to act but not yet…”

When I was little, I couldn’t wait to get older. I felt as though everything was decided—controlled—and I hated going to school. Now, I feel that everything is decided—limited—in adulthood, and often miss not childhood per say, but its total undecidability. The way so much is left open. The way everything could happen. The way that’s the point.

I want the reason this love didn’t happen to be because you are between acts, “hesitating, about to act but not yet.” I want it to be because you X. are trying to decide. How to really live, and therefore, maybe, how to really love.

Even when we act like adults—like men, like women; even when we claim not to need anyone; that love is liquid and dissolves; that we have nothing to be sorry for; no one to be sorry to; that we can be in rooms by ourselves or with many others; that everything and everyone is replaceable, we can’t shake off the profound dependency of childhood. How much we need. How much we’ve never gotten over needing. How we spend our entire lives trying to shake off our dependencies. Our obligations to others. The way we started out.

Little kids acting like adults. Adults acting like little kids. Bodies at the wrong time and place. Bodies with the wrong people. Bodies too soon and too late. Time all scrambled up. Time at the wrong time.

“I could have been anyone.
You could have been anyone’s dream.
Why did you have to choose our moment?
Why did you have to make me feel that?
Why did you make it so unreal?

Oh! To be in love,
And never get out again.
Oh! To be in love,
And never get out again.
Oh! To be in love,
And never get out again.”

For months Hamlet has been floating around. Its book covers popping up everywhere. Non sequitur references during my classes with Avital Ronell. In other texts. In my letters to Elaine and in her letters to me. The other night, in my laundry room, someone left a copy on a shelf of donated books. On tables at work. I even stole one copy and took it home with me as a token, as proof.

Ronell says, “In Hamlet readiness is all” and “All of Hamlet happened in the ear.” A few weeks later, Žižek came to Ronell’s class and said that Hamlet is about the way the beginning of ethics is trying to decide something and decision always involves indecision and procrastination. How an act always comes both too early and too late, so there is never really a “right” moment for an act. One begins with the wrong moment because it is always the wrong moment.

A few days ago, Elaine sent me a quote by John Berger:

“In the minute that’s still left we have to do everything.”

The day X. came to class Ronell brought up Hamlet, again, and suddenly all the ghosts had a name, making them real. I couldn’t believe my ears. Yet even though we were finally in the same room together, how can you know what someone hears—(what X. heard)—when we never really know this about anyone.

When I asked a female acquaintance at the bar we were at if she thought X. had heard what I said under my breath the night we were together, she answered: “He doesn’t need to hear you. He knows.” The question is, how did she know? When I mumbled something cutting to him as he went outside to smoke a cigarette, taking a risk by saying anything at all, he asked me to repeat what I’d said. I pretended I hadn’t said anything and he pretended he didn’t hear anything. Denial is one of the ways cognition works. You’re just hearing things and You’re just seeing things are both spectral idioms. They are about the ghosts you see and hear as well as the ones you pretend not to see or hear. The spectral interrupts ordinary reality, puts you somewhere else. Somewhere in between. Somewhere you can’t prove.

There is what you see. There is what you don’t see. The knowledge that crawls into you. Knowing even when you don’t know.

Hamlet is also about a self-naming dog. It important to make a name for yourself in a world that calls you names.

When your name isn’t called and other people’s names are.
When you don’t even want your name called.

I walk around foraging for a heartland that almost only exists in movies now. Movies, which have taught us to be cynical idol worshippers, as much as they have taught us to believe in love. I now find myself running to movies more and more because in movies things still matter. People still matter to people. Love still matters, and readiness is all. In the movies, the world is still held together by more than just a string.

The Hamletian stance: you don’t let go of your object.

Of course you are a fool for not letting go in the 21st century, which is all about not holding on and always letting go.

A text can be a recurring dream. A ghost. A sound in your head like an alarm in your heart. The Great Dane that knocks Rousseau down and sends him careening in the Second Walk of Reveries of the Solitary Walker is also Hamlet, another Great Dane, Ronell says. By the time she said this on the first day of class (a class on the Debilitated Subject), I’d already been thinking about the relation between X. and Hamlet for weeks.

Ronell:

“If something is meant to happen, and it has the power and weightiness of destiny, then it’s no longer chance or an accident. It’s destinal…Rousseau’s physical harming is only secondary to the mutilation of his texts. He’s in the air when he falls—in a ghost-like pose.” In Rousseau’ case, the unforeseen, is something that breaks off with destiny and destination.

The Strokes (Take It Or Leave It)

“I fell off the track, now
I can’t go back
I’m not like that”

You, X., have become a book. The person for whom I read everything now and will write this year, making the “you” into a world (the you that came into mine)—an Event. I think all I’ve ever wanted to do is rise to an occasion, to answer a call.

The you will make this a love letter at times, or all the time. It will be a form of address. The you will make this intimate—you, close—but will also refer to the you that is never here and might never be. The you I am dreaming of. Calling forth. Writing to and for a you will make it easier to write. I need an imaginary person on the other side of the page—for a speech act, which is always for the Other. You. Both X. and not X. I need an addressee—someone to whom I write, and just one is enough—because everything I write is really just a letter to One. Elaine and I talk about this all the time, as we write letters to each other.

To whom do you tell things and to whom do you not tell things? The Web has collapsed all of these distinctions, making the reader—the intimate—anyone, everyone, and no one all at once. It also collapses the where and when of writing. Sometimes even the why. In the end does it matter if the you to whom you are writing, to whom you are dedicating, and towards whom you are moving in order to become, never or always hears us? I don’t know. There are different kinds of presence and absence. Silence and testament. Now disappearance and silence are tied to failure. But writers used to disappear all the time. Lovers too.