The Write Thing

An erotic proposition, when it brings uneven numbers into the question, is always a tricky one and therefore more exciting. Two young European girls arrive in Buenos Aires and decide they want to open their relationship to another player. They reply to her ad.

A few days later, they meet the potential candidate. First, there is dinner in Puerto Madero, and casual talk over a well-done lamb and three varieties of potatoes as a side dish. Wine is of course the obvious companion. Then there is the decision of going somewhere else for a drink, perhaps a disco, or maybe just a bar. There happens to be one nearby, a straight and cool lounge where they continue to talk…this time about the juicy stuff, sex, clubs, erotica and all the rest. They define their candidate as queer, and they seem to like the coolness with which she talks and expresses her mind. The night unfolds, and they are all a little drunk by now; tired, but not as much as they were before, when the conversation was much less spicy.

Looking at the young couple, it is obvious that their connection has all the elements of lesbianhood. They are totally out, as one of them prides herself in saying while she caresses her companion’s hand and plants her a soft kiss on the lips in front of an admiring crowd. They are kind of hot together, each keeping the boundaries a little open as they play their butch and femme versions of themselves. One of them leads, and this transpires in the long time it takes them to decide what food to order, or where to go. The leader will always have the last word. She later will voice her convictions about the gay community, with her militant past and her vast reading on gay-related issues as a banner of authority. Her partner will remain cool, her eyes betraying a certain admiration for her lover, which immediately precludes any counter-argument on her side (although she does have it). Meanwhile, their incidental guest is amused by the husband and wife scene, and she cannot help thinking that the subject will be a suitable platform for angry sex later on, a perfect remedy to efface the violence of the discussion and set the counter back to zero. In any case, it is already 4.30 am, and the three are too tired to solve the plights of the gay world in one night.

The game remains open for a next time, although some of the cards may have already been played. The potential candidate gets into her taxi and heads home, pondering on the power of classification as a form of security, the eternal dichotomy of men vs. women, gay vs straight, butch vs femme. A little disappointed, she sighs and right there vows that, even if it is a mammoth task, she will still be looking for that soul capable of escaping labels, that woman who will refuse to go by accommodating titles, the human being that will want to evolve beyond the typecast role of Blanche DuBois or Lara Croft. Il faudra continuer à chercher la femme, my dear, a voice seems to say…and a new day begins.

Halloween. Wikipedia decorates its description with the legend of Stingy Jack. It is a night that many children may have used to offer a trick- or-treat promise on alerted neighbors ready to meet the traditional demands. It is a night for playing, even when tradition is nowhere to be found in a DNA that is carved straight from the Pampas, where everything grows to look just as plain as barren land.

It was my night for literature. A group of shining knights in armor with a literary sword decided to organize a cultural soirée, reading short stories written by one of them in candlelight. We were entertained with a good lentils broth (or stew, for that matter, I’ll never know what to call it for sure), some pot-smoking and literature. My two escorts — beautiful ladies with a coincidental birth date — looked excited to be there, and so was I, enjoying a little bit of hippie life after a Doris Day hiatus. The stories were not really good, or perhaps it is simply the fact that the whole idea of oral transmission of literature is a double-edged sword, exposing the flaws of a story that does not flow all the more bluntly. It does not matter. It made me want to write about this Halloween night, which in my French days of yore I arbitrarily baptized with the heading that crowns this posting.

Halloween is a good set of instructions to abide by in a cool spring evening. Last year, at Halloween, I was in Rome, absorbing and saying goodbye to Europe as I once knew it. Today my Jack -O- Lantern is blind, and I like to feel that it can start anew. It is a night to breathe, to fuck, to pretend that the next day means something different, to feel the smell of a strange skin in the heat of a capricious, one-night fire. A night to lie to ourselves, consciously, for there will be a morning, but we will have left her room stealthily in the small hours, long before we could remember the contours of her face, or recognize — were we ever to hear it again — the sound of her voice as she called a fictitious, ghostly name.

I have not written on this blog for quite a while. It has been a difficult month, full of retrospection and introspection, with some good moments but, basically, lots of inner self questioning, if such a combination of words exists in the English language. There has been pain inside and also outside, in my “circle of trust”, and it has had a very strong impact on me. I hope eventually the whole experience will make me a more insightful human being and a better person.

So, if I had to choose poetry to illustrate the moment — I recall mentioning poetry earlier in this blog as my foie gras in a world of prosaic corned beef, or something of the sort — there should be some Emily Dickinson. Sagittarian, tortured, passionate and suffering goddess of illuminated seclusion, her writing dissects the anatomy of feelings in a methodically simple way. I would say it is the kind of poetry where each word weighs a ton, and there are so few that missing one single element in her compositions results in major loss.

I read on a website the other day that the poem I quote below was allegedly written for her sister in law, with whom the poetess was apparently infatuated. Perhaps associating lonely Dickinson (the typical Puritan spinster, at least in form) with lesbianhood is an oversimplification, but let’s agree that as we read her it is impossible not to perceive that certain component which denotes someone as being really sensitive to the female world. But no more words from me, let’s hear it from Miss Dickinson herself:

What mystery pervades a well!

The water lives so far,

Like neighbor from another world

Residing in a jar.

The grass does not appear afraid;

I often wonder he

Can stand so close and look so bold

At what is dread to me.

Related somehow they may be, –

The sedge stands next the sea,

Where he is floorless, yet of fear

No evidence gives he.

But nature is a stranger yet;

The ones that cite her most

Have never passed her haunted house,

Nor simplified her ghost.

To pity those that know her not

Is helped by the regret

That those who know her, know her less

The nearer her they get.

It appears that the lesbian code can be cracked by replacing the word “nature” in the poem with the name of the undisclosed destinataire, Susan Gilbert. Regardless of whether it was Susan or somebody else the poem was directed to, I cannot but marvel at Dickinson’s deftness in portraying the mystery of others, the hidden self, or selves, of le grand autre. The well (the other) is a mystery, a lonely, perhaps exciting mystery. Sometimes, paradoxically, the nearer we get to it — as to nature itself — the more unfathomable it becomes.