Love Dog

Last year, I published the video essay Lost Highway (after the David Lynch film) on Ryeberg.com

In the story, a song is playing in the car while me and my ex (W.) are driving in the middle of the night. We are driving to California from New York City, but our first stop is North Carolina.

Lost Highway is about the ontology of the road, but it’s also about the way that reading is like driving, so the text is a road too. That’s why the video clip is meant to play while you read.

The Bowie song, “I’m Deranged,” which narrates the textual road trip is from the movie Lost Highway. But “I’m Deranged” was not the song that me and my ex were listening to while we were driving that night. That song was “Fevered” by The Stills.

We were gliding, in the clear, when the song came on. If you read the piece, you’ll know what I mean by that. That the song is called “Fevered” makes sense, because we were. And the album is called “Logic Will Break Your Heart.” That makes sense too. What we were doing wasn’t exactly logical, but after ten years in the making, it was finally right and it was time. In the end, logic (his) did break my heart. Suddenly he became relentlessly logical, so nothing was ever the right time again. Sometimes logic not only breaks, it kills.

When “Fevered” came on, we reached for each other, and I think we both said we liked the song, though neither of us especially like the band. We were honestly happy to be alive. To have the road to ourselves, like a room to ourselves. We both had a lone wolf thing. That part of the drive—the last 45 minutes or so—were like end credits to a horror movie. We had survived the killer cars on the road.

Here is another road movie by my friend Elaine Castillo.

Elaine’s drive takes place during the day. While we were on our way to California, Elaine is already there, only I don’t know her yet. Won’t know her for years. My ex and I made this trip many times. Often at dawn, on the way back from an all-night date, when the misty hue of everything is dyed green and looks like the movie Vertigo, which is set in San Francisco. In October 2004, we went on drives and all-night adventures around the Northern California coastline. Less than five months later I moved to California to be with him. He did his field work in Santa Cruz and it almost always looked like this there.

Elaine shot this film on Highway 1, at various locations between Half Moon Bay, Monterey, and Carmel. She used the songs Ruben Tagalog’s “Ikaw ay Akin” and a version of Zazen Boys’ “Cold Summer,” which she edited herself.

When I asked Elaine about her song selections for Highway 1, she told me:

“The title of the film is Ang katunayan, sana’y pakinggan, which comes from the lyrics of Tagalog’s song; it means, ‘The proof, listen to it.’ It’s a love song, so he’s telling his beloved that the proof of his love is in the lyrics of the song he’s singing. It’s so cheesy.”

Elaine and I often send songs to each other as “proof”—shorthand—for what we’re talking about or feeling. In our emails to each other, we often include lyrics, or some part of them, to a song. The songs fill in the blanks, add, say everything. Say it to the point of over stating. I think we both like that though. The excess. The hyperbole, because honestly, if not in music, where else are we going to come that loose? What else is going to let you have it like that?

My ex and I had some of our first dates in Santa Cruz and Half Moon Bay. We once we stayed in a lighthouse called Pigeon Point that we had all to ourselves. The lighthouse and its location looked like it belonged in Vertigo too. Instead of sleeping in the two wooden bunk beds we paid for, we pushed all the couches together in the common area and slept there. We also drank tea on the kitchen counter, half naked, after we had sex for the first time.

It was often foggy on our drives. Sometimes you couldn’t even see what was in front of you. Sometimes the fog was so thick you couldn’t see anything at all. The world disappeared. Softened up. In David Lynch’s Lost Highway, the male double Pete/Fred disappears, transmogrifies, splits—vaporizes on the road. Turns into fog. Something happens when you drive. Something happens on the road. When I was a kid driving around Europe for hours and hours with my parents, my favorite thing was to be in a car at night. And it still is. It’s like being a plug in an electrical socket. Few things are more thrilling, comforting, or sensual to me. Driving at night is as close as I can get to a power source. The long yellow band that stretches across a highway is like a vein or a life-line that runs through your whole body.

When did I exist? Then? Now? Not then, not now? Does love make you exist?

In Santa Cruz (from Spanish and Portuguese, Santa Cruz means “Holy Cross”), we parked the truck in the woods, by the beach, and slept there a few times. Smoked cigarettes and talked. Ate dinner. Had a lot of sex. Made up for lost time. Ten years worth. Never slept. We asked ourselves how we would ever be able to do anything but be together? Being together, we both agreed, was something you could spend a life doing, if life and love are one and the same for you. The way you can spend a life just reading or watching movies. But as Jean-Luc Nancy points out in God, Justice, Love, Beauty: Four Little Dialogues: “Even the truest love can be lost. It is never guaranteed. If a love were guaranteed, it would not be love.” Given that love cannot be guaranteed to last, you have to risk loving even more, which means you risk losing love even more. Derrida makes a similar argument about forgiveness, which is of course also tied to love and risk, as well as loss and grief. Derrida states that if forgiveness isn’t impossible (a form of insanity), it isn’t real forgiveness. I lost love even though it was guaranteed to me; even though I guaranteed it myself, and forgiveness is still impossible. Mostly, I don’t feel anything about my last relationship. In fact, I often compare it to a dead nerve or a lost tooth. The catheterized roots take you with them.

Looking up the lyrics for “Fevered” I am surprised to discover that the first few lines of the song are:

“Strange light skin that I believe in
It stretches over bone and smells like honey on the wind
Oh so strange I can’t remember
Where the heartache ends and the fever ache begins.”

I didn’t know the words to “Fevered” that night in the car, nor did I know them when I wrote Lost Highway. About the moon’s light on the road in front of us. About finding a face you can believe in. That can’t be replaced. What Elaine always refers to as, “the face that is for you” when we talk about the face I love now, which means, to quote Emmanuel Levinas, that the face that is for you is also the life you are responsible for.

A couple of weeks ago I kissed a man at the OWS Verso Books party, a week before Christmas. He was a good kisser. Yet afterwards, as I looked at him while he talked to me on the subway, I knew he didn’t have the kind of face I really wanted or needed to look at. His face just wasn’t for me.

But somehow faces are the first thing I forget once a person is gone. They become a blur—foggy—because they have to. Because it’s too painful and burdensome to carry a face (a life) you knew so well—a face that was for you—around once it’s gone. A face you took that seriously. It can drive you crazy. I’ve been driven crazy by things like this. Love and faces, and responsibility. To the other. In this way, writing is not only a substitute for love, it’s a substitute for the face (life) you’ve lost.

From the womb of the 80s, woman is a mother-dream. He makes her up. He builds her from scratch. He wishes her into being. He invents the feminine. Him and his friend, or him all by himself. He talks to her the way no one else can. He’s the only one she talks to. The future is all these images in his head. In a magazine, on TV, in the deep blue sea. Men give birth to women.

Here are three different versions of “Love Will Tear Us Apart” by Joy Division. For the full effect, for a complete chorus, play all three versions at the same time. Have them overlap and talk over each other, some versions finishing before others. Some dragging on.

“It is great when the poet, presenting his tragic hero before the admiration of men, dares to say, ‘Weep for him, for he deserves it.’ For it is great to deserve the tears of those who are worthy to shed tears. It is great that the poet dares to keep the crowd in awe, dares to castigate men, requiring that every man examine himself whether he be worthy to weep for the hero. For the waste-water of blubberers is a degradation of the holy. — But greater than all this it is that the knight of faith dares to say even to the noble man who would weep for him, ‘Weep not for me, but weep for thyself’… A man can become a tragic hero by his own powers — but not a knight of faith. When a man enters upon the way, in a certain sense the hard way of the tragic hero, many will be able to give him counsel; to him who follows the narrow way of faith no one can give counsel, him no one can understand. Faith is a miracle, and yet no man is excluded from it; for that in which all human life is unified is passion.’”

-Kierkegaard

Last Saturday, at a friend’s Christmas party, I talked to this one man for hours. We ran around together like teenagers. We hit it off immediately. One of the things we talked about was love. I told this guy I was trying to give people (men) a chance, “but…,” I started to say and then didn’t finish my sentence. “But…he’s not your boy,” he said. “No,” I concurred. “He’s not my boy.” How did he know? What does it mean for someone to be someone who’s yours? Who can’t be replaced. Not in the sense of belonging to me, but in belonging together; cut from something that is the same, similar, of one piece. In her book Eros: The Bittersweet (which can and should be read alongside Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse), Anne Carson reminds us that the Greek word Eros denotes ‘desire for that which is missing.” If that’s the case, at least it is in mine, what is missing is also who is missing (that is, the who who represents the what, as well as the what in you). I am not missing or in need of everyone or anyone. Therefore, not just anyone can spark desire or be tied to lack. My particular lack. “When I desire you a part of me is gone,” Carson writes.

In the preface to All About Love, bell hooks writes:

“When I was a child, it was clear to me that life was not worth living if we did not know love. I wish I could testify that I came to this awareness because of the love I felt in my life. But it was love’s absence that let me know how much love mattered.”

Like hooks, I’ve always believed that life is not worth living without love, only I came to this conclusion for the opposite reason. It was because of love’s presence (in my family, between my parents); because I had always known love growing up, that I could not bear its absence. That I didn’t know how else to be or live. Love matters precisely because love has always mattered.

Last Sunday, I was finally able to watch the Aryton Senna documentary, Senna, in its entirety. In the scene where Senna wins the Brazilian Grand Prix in 1991 (after he won the race, Senna actually passed out, so great was the anguish of his ecstasy. Victory.), he suffers unbearable shoulder pain from the tremendous stress of the race. He is literally pulled out of the race car and driven off the track. He can barely move. But when Senna sees his father, he calls over to him, “Dad, come here. Come here.” His father hesitates, but Senna insists. “Come here. Come here! Touch me gently,” he orders. His father, much taller, stands beside his son, as Senna rests his head against his father’s chest for a moment. When he starts to walk back, Senna tells everyone else (even before anyone actually touches him; even if no one is trying to touch him at all), “Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me!” He commands everyone but his father to get away from him. This scene, which is the difference between touch me gently and don’t touch me at all, between everyone else and you, between a son and his father, beloved and not-beloved, can also be read as a love story. Your boy as opposed to every other boy. Everyone is not you, X. Everyone can’t be (On a side note: The day Senna won the Brazilian Grand Prix, he was wearing a red racing uniform and the Brazilian flag, which he waved when he accepted his trophy, was green. In almost all of the film’s footage, Senna is wearing either red or green. At one point he even has a red watch on. The older he got, the closer he came to death, the more he knew and the more he understood—about the sport, about the world, about life—the more red and green Senna wore. See my other posts on red and green: One-minute lovers, The Whole World is Actually Red and Green, Red and Green Redux).

As Senna demonstrates in the scene with his father, sometimes we are so sensitive to love, to the one we love, it allows us to know exactly who we don’t want love from. In a series of lectures for children called God, Justice, Love, Beauty: Four Little Dialogues, Jean-Luc Nancy explains: “We are captivated by this person because of his or her absolute uniqueness…What I receive in love or what creates passion is what we call the uniqueness of the person. It’s him or her, and that’s all that matters. There is a word for this, the beloved [l’élu]. Perhaps you’ve heard of the expression, ‘the one my heart has chosen [l’élu de ma cour]’…But the élu in love involves a choice that is not made by a majority. Choice means that a person is chosen, distinguished or set apart from all others.”

A Tarot card reader once told me: “There are 200 hundred men, right now, in New York City, who you could fall in love with. Who could make you happy,” which fundamentally goes against all my core beliefs about love. How can so many people all do the same thing? And, according to the Tarot reader, at the same time and place, no less. How can so many men all make me feel the same way? And if that’s really the case, if love is one-size-fits-all, what makes love so rare, so unique, so hard to find—so difficult to recover from? If there is something that makes someone singular and unique—for you—then the inverse must also be true: everyone else cannot be singular and unique—for you. Having a beloved, that is, knowing who is beloved, means that one is also acutely aware of and sensitive to who is not-beloved. That the beloved and not-beloved are not simply interchangeable or reproducible. That the beloved is outside the economy of the love market, or love as market, as Zygmunt Bauman notes in Consuming Love.

This may also be the difference, as this same Tarot card reader pointed out, between love and soul mates. “You want a soul-mate,” she scolded gently, “and soul mates take fifteen years to recover from.” Soul mates are hard, if not impossible, to find; impossible to shake, forget, let go of. Whereas love is something you can have with 200 people, right now. All the time. Love is something you can go in and out of, unscathed—an economy with concrete value. Value you can manage, control, and exchange.

After I wrote the above paragraphs, I saw a poster of this Rumi poem on the street:

Like the scene between Senna and his father, the visual texts below, by the artist Jenny Holzer, can be read as the ultimate love letter, if a person were also a love letter. A thing that walks around in the world telling a story about the person they love—to themselves and to others. Becoming not just a body in love, but a text on love. I am writing something on the wall as much as I am the wall on which love has been written. By someone. Engraved. Inscribed. I am stone with light carved into me.

Using Holzer’s images I’ve composed a love letter. The love letter I already am to someone. For someone. For, as Carson points out, “Mix-up of self and other is much more easily achieved in language than in life…Selves are crucial to writers.”

“[Phantasm], like many low-budget horror films of the period, seems to take place in a land where it is always late summer, the streets are strangely deserted, and the parents strangely absent.”

-Jed Mayer

Where do we live? Only in these houses. What are these houses but surrogate families. We are alone or with each other in this American sprawl the size of California. Watching TV, acting like movies. The world is packed into these houses, or left out. We barely ever see our parents. Things come down from space to love and parent us. There’s this sense that there is no society—only us and them. Us and whatever strong-arm this movie is about. These houses are lost like we’re lost. Lost in America. But it’s not sad because you don’t have a father, because you’re stuck with a mother. It’s sad because you don’t have a world. No one’s around. When we meet, it’s like ghosts.

Here is an interview I did with Stephen Boyer about my book LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film as well as my thoughts on cinema and my work in general.

You can read it here: “Via The Screen”.

You can also read another interview I did with Mairead Case in Bookslut.

“What you should do, said Socrates, is to say a magic spell over him every day until you have charmed his fears away.”

-Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy”

After I posted my red and green essay the other night, I watched a documentary on the Swedish cinematographer Sven Nykvist, Light Keeps Me Company (Ljuset håller mig sällskap), which isn’t very good at all, which doesn’t show what it tries to show, but was full of all sorts of red and green mise en scene, both in the documentary itself and the films within the film. The films that Nykvist shot and lit with Bergman, with Woody Allen, with Polanski. Red and green seemed to follow Nykvist around.

Here are some stills from Light Keeps Me Company, (directed by Nykvist’s son, Carl-Gustaf Nykvist), which opens with a story (Nykvist’s favorite, Siddhartha) about the green of the world. Green is both textual and visual here. Onscreen and offscreen. Incidental and intended. It’s almost like surround sound.

Later in the documentary, red starts to appear—in Light Keeps Me Company, in Bergman’s Cries and Whispers and Autumn Sonata. In these instances, Nykvist makes the red—chooses it—himself. Surrounds others. But sometimes, red simply pops up on its own and surrounds him: in the film crew, at award ceremonies, at his home, on a farm, in the movies he lit. The last still is from a speech and language test that Nykvist took, which ultimately diagnosed him with a rare form of dementia, aphasia.

I wonder what Nykvist’s relationship was to color when he wasn’t looking through a camera. Did he see it? Need it? Did it matter to him? As a person, as a man, Nykvist seemed recessional. So starved of light and color. It might be that after he got divorced and lost his older son to suicide, much of the color in his life faded, or was drained out of him. That any light or color he had left (in the film, Nykvist comes across as pale in every sense of the word), or had ever had, was put into film. But, the documentary tells us, like Bergman (with whom Nykvist can be seen holding hands while strolling through a garden on set), long before his marriage ended, and his son committed suicide, Nykvist had made the decision to separate not just family and work, but life and film, dedicating all his time to movies. At one point, Bergman tells the camera that his “feelings for light were the same” as Nykvist’s. In this case, light is another word for life, or more specifically, a man’s historically problematic and dangerous relationship to everything and everyone outside his work.

It’s hard for me to imagine that kind of stark contrast between life and work. Life pallor and cinematic (artistic) vibrance. Why were the films so bright and saturated and his life so wan? So washed out. Was the film color because of a muted life, or was a muted life desirable—tolerable, bearable—because of all the film color? Where does one store or hoard light? Everyone in the film—actors, directors, friends—kept saying how light and airy and warm—easy-going—Nykvist was, but I didn’t see the signs. I saw someone who seemed mostly detached, sad, reserved; even closed. In the film, whenever there is color around him, especially green and red, Nykvist is the palest thing in the room. In the picture. A wallflower, almost.

80s formula 1: You have no one. You win everyone. You lose everyone. You win everyone. You realize you only want the right people.

For the past four months, it’s been all about the colors red and green for me. It all started with Robert Bresson’s Lancelot du lac and Elaine Castillo’s blog post on red and green in Bresson’s film. Elaine and I talk about red and green all the time. Of course, these colors are especially prominent right now, with Christmas coming, so I’ve gone out of my way not to photograph anything that has to do with the holiday. Once you start to see it, to look for it, to notice it, it turns out that everything is red and green. Money is green and car lights are red. Red is the color that alerts you to danger. That tells you to stop. Green is the color of signs. The color that tells you to go. Graffiti and signatures are often red. Buildings and stairwells, green. Doors to houses are red. The door to my first apartment in London was red and someone kissed me against it one night after a party. Green is also the color of forests—or the feeling of being lost in one. The growth of feeling; the budding of love and coming into being. As the poet Fanny Howe writes in her poem, “After Watching Klimov’s Agoniya:”

“Love is the green in green. Does this explain its pain?”

When I looked for the poem to re-read it, these lines of Howe’s were in the poem too:

“Since love came over and knocked me down
Then kicked me in the side and fled,
I have suffered from a prolonged perplexity.”

Lancelot du lac is filled with forests and the bodies of armored men who bleed through their metal. Into the ground, as though blood were water.

The colors almost always go together.

For the past two days, red and green have literally been everywhere. I see people in red hats and green book bags. Red lights glow at night. When I take the elevator to and from my apartment every day, the numbers in the elevator are red. For years my door in New York was green before management painted it beige. But the paint is chipped by the lock, so there are flecks of green there, still. Netflix, which I use every night to watch movies, is red. And tonight: an elderly man at my gym had ten little red hearts tattooed all over his left arm.

And on and on.

Red isn’t possible without green and green isn’t possible without red. One (green) comes from inside, and one (red) is an expression of it. Green hurts, shocks, aches, vibrates and hums—perplexes, as Howe notes. Red pours over everything. It’s how you express the green. How the green comes out. So if red comes, it comes after green. Green is first. Red second. Everything starts with green because green is onset. Red is feeling deeply—deeper—and losing something or someone deeply, too. So red has its violence. Its trauma. Its horror. It explodes and spills. Saturates.

One of my favorite Dario Argento films is Deep Red, but I’ve always preferred the Italian title, Profondo Rosso—profound red. Because that’s what the color red is, profound. In the same way that green makes your eyes water because it thaws you. Wakes you. Is your awakening. Green allows things to grow and live again, if they’ve died—if you’ve died, if something has died in you—and also if they’ve never been born before or yet. Red and green alert you to the world, and so they are the colors of being alert.

“If I drive for you, you give me a time and a place, I give you a five-minute window. Anything happens in that five minutes, and I’m yours. No matter what. I don’t sit in while you’re running it down. I don’t carry a gun. I drive.”

-Ryan Gosling, Drive.

In Drive, driving is a modus operandi and emotional schematic. Driving is also a way of steering manhood. Driving keeps this driver in line. Puts the breaks and hits the gas on desire. But we know that drives and desires are not the same thing. He’s a get-away driver. He pulls stunts. He crashes, escapes. Driving kills time, the circuit of time, his time, by keeping it (himself) on a very short leash. The designated and deluxe “Driver” is like the grim reaper—the designator of life in relation to time and time in relation to desire. With him, whatever happens on either side of time—the time he gives you, the time he sets aside for you; where he waits and will wait, for whatever happens, for wherever you need to go; the time during which he is “yours,” completely—is also the difference between life and death. Ethics. Whatever happens, before or after the five minutes, have nothing to do with him. He’s no longer on your side. He’s no longer responsible. That’s the deal. Time has expired. Everything is what happens in the middle. Everything is in this small window of time.

“I often talk about love as one of the few places where people actually admit they want to become different. And so it’s like change without trauma, but it’s not change without instability. It’s change without guarantees, without knowing what the other side of it is, because it’s entering into relationality. The thing I like about love as a concept for the possibility of the social, is that love always means non-sovereignty. Love is always about violating your own attachment to your intentionality, without being anti-intentional. I like that love is greedy. You want incommensurate things and you want them now. And the now part is important.”

-Lauren Berlant (from “No One is Sovereign in Love: A Conversation Between Lauren Berlant and Michael Hardt”)

“How can I be in love so that I can live?…I have a one-track mind. That’s all I’m interested in…is love.”