LUCKY STAR LOVE THEORY
The luckiness:
The luckiness that once I met Lauren Berlant. We were so happy! It was raining.... We were crawling on all fours and I smiled at them like the sick fuck I am. We’d passed each other on one of my walks before into the lake while they were stumbling out of it so we were both wet and would not have wanted to meet anybody new. A lake the size of Lake Michigan has an order to things just as much as a sentence or line for the bathroom, there’s usually someone who missed the end of the last quarter to be there, in front of you, staring you down with the eyes they keep strapped on the back of their head just to remind you who’s in front, and you’re the loser holding out for the guy in the next seat over to take you thataway to wait a long time to pee while the hot nacho cheese he spilled is burning into the insides of your thighs. Those orange streaks mark time spent immobilized by the order of things. They’re the closest you’ll ever get to really touching a man.
So I popped up crusted in seaweed and smelling rancid. I’m starving so I chew on some salt. I’m tired so I rest my eyes on a seagull. They might have been thinking solemnly down there in the water while I was folded over yakking up plastic soda can holders. If we would have met then, they might have said “hello,” “hi Professor, nice to meet you,” “you should buy a new perfume, the smell of desperation doesn’t suit you” “thank you, I’m desperate because I’m so wet.” I used to ride my bike to the water. I’d say “I’m going to the water, I’m going to walk in the lake today.” And a gust of wind would say, “Did I tell you you could want something?” Disobedience Makes My Brain Bleed.
The stuckness:
The stuckness between solidarity and anxiety. If I take myself seriously as a love theorist, it poses something noteworthy: To me, often, love is the stuckness, the stuckness between solidarity, anxiety—a looping question of how readily to accept the world as posed by one's union with others, how viciously to retreat from it. All this to say we’ve been stuck with each other, this missive and I.
The loveness:
Why love theory? Of all the disciplinary interstices Berlant inhabited, this was a language and love object they returned to. Maybe because of the jolt of perverting an institution like theory with something sentimental as love. These freakish bursts lashing out against canon in the name of liberation from drudgery. It’s a familiar comedic sleight of hand—proverbial little boy character kicking a can down the street gets bonked on the head and goes for a checkup at the doctor for hugs and kisses, and real life actress Reese Witherspoon goes to law school with her pink fur shawl still bleeding, it’s dripping pink blood down the Harvard tile floor, everybody’s cooing behind her cuz it’s just that crazy to see evidence of vitality in the reserves for corporate defense. And why love, because it’s glut…
…...........................glue….........
untenable, nasty, object of infantile horniness, occasionally dependable, object-oriented ontology, a reason people say they’d like to change. When the wind picks up it carries love with it.
Berlant conjures an image of love under threat of annihilation, either by misrepresentation or the inevitable encroachment of organic decay. The love and the images available for it are in a Thunderdome death-love match, yet we act as though affect could be held within a steady-state space like meat on a hook, or the image of meat on a hook, since actual meat turns green. It occurs to me that this language is somewhat uncouth, because love is not supposed to be murderous or vile. Judgment that occurs in the mouth,
what to love if not the decay itself. The FreakofNature images are lying to you. Attachment infects the body with word from the outside while denying that something so silly as an “inside” ever existed in the first place, while denying that something so terrifying as “outside” could possibly dissolve from view. Elsewhere, Berlant discusses a need to eradicate erotophobia—“thinking of sex as a threat to happiness, thinking of the appetites as a threat to sociality, when there is no sociality without them.” This is the science of the threat. Berlant’s writing is notorious for its footnotes, parentheses, displaced asides; praxis of keeping closeby what is threatening to coherency, narrative, and argument (all secondary expressions of the type of society whose demise we are told to militantly forestall). There is more than an interest in that which has been deemed fearsome—there is a desire to pummel oneself towards the molten horizon of social annihilation also called a belief in shared happiness. The accelerationist impulse to become intimate with and, in so doing, rewire that which exposes the fallibility of sociality lies in an understanding that that which brings me closest to death is, more than anything, a wink into another world. The contention of homeopathic medicine is that poison can be indistinguishable from repair. My pussy has never been smaller than it was when it contracted to accept that kernel of wisdom!
ProustProustProustBovaryBovaryBovaryAbelardEloiseCourtly. Love theory is NOT psychoanalysis. It’s not that love can’t stand for the same things we’re meant to be analyzing in one way or another—dreams, misplaced identification, sense of self, hatred, fear—it’s not that the classics can’t be wrong, it’s that they won’t be disgusting, and love theorists tend to have an aversion to the disgusting. In a world structured around not only the decay of time but the ceaseless appetite of State violence, fantasies like love tend to nurse the heavy burden of our desire for flourishing. This premise is latent in love theory, because, how could the object of theory ever be just good? And besides, that makes for flimsy inquiry. But
LIFE
is
not
all
JUST
BASEBALL GAMES
and
STORIES
and
BLOATED
THEORIES.
What’s necessary is a refusal to shrink from wretchedness,
and unwavering dedication to the imperfection of what is right.
Detachment on a good day, dissociation during the stressful ones, overwhelmed and awkward on the days that begin flooded, and when it works, a lot of imitative affect mixing optimism and protective coating so that, reliably, while the internal objects are splashing around the external ones are getting the best of it. The heart bursts, Nancy says, and love isn’t dialectical, some stupid unimaginative feedback loop. I find that part almost delightful.
I LOVE MY NANCY SO MUCH I SAY IT EVERY DAY
I WAKE UP IN THE MORNING
WRETCH A LITTLE
BLEAR AT THE SUN OUTSIDE
I TELL HER IM RUNNING LATE AND I SPRINT TO THE SHOWER
I CUT THE CLOCK IN HALF TO GET TO WORK ON TIME
DID YOU KNOW YOU COULD DO THAT?
JUST SHAVE OFF AN HOUR
AND THEN I SPEND THE NEXT HOUR GOING SO CRAZY
IM LIKE I LOVE YOU CUZ YOURE A THREAT TO
MY FAVORITE FEELING IS
BLINKING TWICE IF YOU CAN HEAR ME
AND THEN TO FINISH IT OFF I ASK
HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT DOOM
BUT REALLY
HOW DO YOU LIVE??
HOW THE FUCK DO YOU LIVE
SHE SAYS
MORE AND MORE AND MORE
I WANT EVERYONE TO TALK MORE
I NEVER WANT LESS
FANTASY
I ALWAYS WANT MORE
I NEVER WANT LESS CITIZENSHIP
I ALWAYS WANT MORE*
There is the question of what there is to be shared. Apostrophe is not only the condition of love but an ideal of self-encounter. Can the addressee make more of it than you can, is she you who waits for the sentence of your existence to finish and, inevitably, to miss its mark?
Aspiration chills, incoherence bewitches the thermostat, good little boygirl apartment tenants stand sweating uncontrollably next to the stove. There is something missing. There is the myth of a state of self-containedness, which is the rhetoric of the self-contained State. Love makes sovereignty not only impossible, but undesirable. In an organic state our resources are constantly skewing. Resisting Stateism also means being honest about the conditions for fearless offering in our assessment of interpersonal leaps of faith. Always a dare for always a coward, not charity, no, not stolen comfort, not hoarded suffering.
I sometimes feel dissociated from all my loves. I’ve got to get out of here. I’ve got to hitch a ride on the next lucky star.
A LUCKY STAR raining from the sky
A LUCKY STAR shining over the great grassy hill and the green grassy valley and the massive bowl of crackling earth. There is a cow delivered standing into a puddle. She mews on all fours, so we call her Good Luck.
Notes:
Fear of Kathy Acker, Jack Skelley p.42
“The Book of Love is Long and Boring, No One Can Lift the Damn Thing,” Lauren Berlant
“On the Risk of a New Relationality: An Interview with Lauren Berlant and Michael Hardt,” Reviews in Culture, ed. Heather Davis and Paige Sarlin