contact
Returning to DeLillo’s Falling Man when a passage brings me up short:
He’s your ex-husband who was never technically ex, the stranger you married in another lifetime. She dressed and undressed, he watched and did not. It was strange but interesting. A tension did not build. This was extremely strange. She wanted him here, nearby, but felt no edge of self-contradiction or self-denial. Just waiting, that was all, a broad pause in recognition of a thousand sour days and nights, not so easily set aside. The matter needed time. It could not happen the way things did in normal course. And it’s interesting, isn’t it, the way you move about the bedroom, routinely near-naked, and the respect you show the past, the deference to its fervors of the wrong kind, its passions of cut and burn.
She wanted contact and so did he.
How he captures and complicates the passing of intimacy and time, shared past trauma, past knowing, in a few sentences. The density of insight in language that is rather loose, perforated. To repeat the word strange, the word interesting. As if there were not every word at his disposal. An ease, confident, admirable. Not showy, though. Deft.
It’s a low state, a few days of drifting, taking notes, reading, entertaining self-doubts. I know now, though it is a temporary state and one that is perhaps even necessary.
Also invoking Bashō,
“Even in Kyoto, I long for Kyoto”
then later,
“Even in New York, I long for New York.”
I’m restless. There is work to be done, all manner of reading to do, responding to student work, to various inquiries. Proposals to draw up, pitches to make, but I find myself vacillating between two states: A kind of restless buzz, I want to go, do, risk, launch, fly — or a soft-edged melancholy. An ache, familiar and sweet.
Who will I be, emerging from these days? All the lives I’ve lived, all the people I’ve been. Didion’s admonition to stay on nodding terms with the people you have been before. But will you recognize them? Or must you always meet them anew, an old friend returning from decades of life you can no longer even imagine?
We’ve turned inward, so many of us. It’s not surprising. We exchange long, introspective letters, question our past motives, past desires. I wonder what this time would be like if I were twenty? Or thirty? These times feel so particular, so highly-charged, so belonging to these middle years of high-stakes reinvention, of profound letting go. Derangement of a quiet and essential nature.
