#62
Jade, like Trish, likes to zap me with past lovers. Brian, at one point, was a music industry bigwig whose appetites led him into lethargy and destitution. Jade learned all the cocaine tricks she knows from Brian— sleep quotients, food quotients, how much to buy and when. The thing that irks me about Brian is that she speaks in doting terms of all his failures— the lechery that sapped his energy, the laziness that assumed too much. Jade’s reverse mountain psychology has strange quirks— she only dotes on failures that have as their backdrop absolute material success. She loves the rags to riches to (almost) rags scenario, but she notices (and this is the crucial bit to her) Brian is cared for. He won’t starve, struggle, or implode— his material life is secure. Jade loves that for all the motions and maneuvers that have defined Brian’s existence, he’s pretty much the same guy he’s always been. That interior sameness is something I don’t particularly understand— how a human being can develop this sort of negative integrity and maintain it over long periods of time. But I notice that Jade really does change and is often stymied by her own alterations. Each new role to play effaces the last; and how many roles can one be compelled to play in one’s lifetime? Jade, like me, bears the burden of absolute sensitivity— everything lost or gained creates a new mark on an already over-marked consciousness. If Jade has a hard time doting on me, it’s only because I show her a mirror image as warped, deceptive, and evanescent as the one you see in a circus mirror, that may or may not be moving towards a new height or depth.
#63
I have the challenge set out before me: to accept my own hollowness, as I watch Jade perform her daily tasks. There is a sense that I am watching a series of multiplications: first Jade is this person, then that person. All of this signifies that Jade sees my own multiplications when we touch. But if there is no stable center inhering in either of us, who are the two people that fuse their physical energies, in such a way that the world is briefly effaced? Multiplications can be taken two ways— as a destruction of stable centers, or the creation of variegated parts that form coherent wholes. Because Jade needs her drugs more than I do, I feel her desperate edge of a woman hovering above an abyss, a woman who cannot look down. I’m past the point of believing in myself as savior or personal Jesus; Jade must live with her crosses and bang through them on her own. My own cross is the vision of multiplications ending, simply because each ephemeral self expresses the same desires, tastes, fixations, and foibles. Jade and I can’t give each other that much— Trish could never teach me this, because our basic, shared presumption was that nothing existed but what we could give each other. As I make love to Jade, there is a charity I feel towards her predicated on her own unacknowledged autonomy— that she has more than she thinks she has. If we persist without knowing yet what our equation is, I know that much of it has to do with shared charity, expressed in a context of basic and final separation and singularity.
#64
One night, just for amusement, I showed Jade all my mementos of Trish. I have stills of all of Trish’s early pictures; shots taken of us on vacation in Montreal (us in the botanical gardens, looking like hippies with Chinese lanterns us); notes Trish wrote to me at different times; and the shirts Trish bought me as birthday gifts. It was funny to watch Jade’s reaction; she sees in Trish a vast amount of frost, a frigidity that sullies her beauty. How did I stay with a frigid woman for so long? Maybe it’s because I enjoy crashing through ice; maybe I’m a masochist. But it’s amusing to me that I never completely acknowledged Trish’s frigidity. Perhaps I thought she could be thawed over time. I get a sense in all this of how myths are created and passed along. Is myth the final equation for the human race? Is that the only way information can be passed along? We live in our pasts, we live with the myths that have shaped us, and if there is a place for truth in myths, it is a self-created truth that can hone and separate. In truly lived moments, myths are moot— they are established afterwards to amplify and consolidate these moments. It seems to me that Jade and I are deliberately evading the mythical in our mating— there’s nothing to hold, nothing to latch onto. It’s just that the persistent ache in our bodies needs to be assuaged; whatever remains of our souls hovers around us uncertainly.