Notes on jouissance / death drive / annihilation / Stalker / body existence:
Me and lover are at a bar on new years eve. I get a Rainier and whiskey and she gets a seltzer and bitters. She just watched Stalker (Tarkovsky), and she reminds me of the mysterious deaths that happened after filming on top of the Chernobyl infected landscape, the zone. We talk about “the meat grinder” aka the cave where the three characters: the professor, the writer, the guide all face their innermost desires, which may actually be a self-destructive nightmare. I wonder if the director's death was in accordance with his deepest desire, to die, to enter something else, to have only his films to exist now, only his films to breathe and speak for him. (Sympathies to family and cast of course but let me indulge a little here…)
Nodding and talking with friends we agree upon the same deepest desire, to exist without a brain, without a consciousness, but not dead. Exclusively body-living. Body eat body sleep body breath body sex body body body living.
I am reading Barthes Lovers Discourse, which is meant to be read only when in love and newly infatuated. I read the chapters title and definition:
“I am engulfed, I succumb
(outburst of annihilation which affects the lover in despair or fulfillment)”
And think yes this is exactly what I crave yes. To be engulfed so fully in a bodily-feeling (pleasure, pain, sadness, hunger, fullness anger, joy, arousal, etc. etc.) that I forget my wet squishy brain and can only think about wet squishy stomach or wet squishy vulva or wet squishy heart. A complete surrender of will to God which is body. Annihilation of the brain-self.
“Engulfment is a swoon without killing self, gentleness of this abyss: I have no responsibility here, the act of dying is not up to me: I entrust myself, I transmit myself (to whom? To God, to Nature, to everything, except to the other…I drift outside of the fatal couple which links life and death by opposing them to each other.”
She bites the side of my stomach so hard I am only a nerve ending. I almost give up but I persist and feel the pleasure of being released, of bodily arousal and pain combining into the same inextricable color.
I think also of the term coined by Lacan, joissance: “the term jouissance connotes jouir 'to come' as in sexual parlance and has the meaning 'orgasm' in French. Beyond the pleasure principle.[3] Beyond this limit, pleasure then becomes pain, before this, initial ‘painful principle’” Hélène Cixous expands it further and uses the term jouissance to describe a form of women's pleasure or sexual rapture that combines mental, physical and spiritual aspects of female experience, bordering on mystical communion: "explosion, diffusion, effervescence, abundance...takes pleasure in being limitless".
Lately I have been interested in my own body’s threshold for pleasure into pain. Bruising, biting, hitting, etc. I am finding it very murky of course. In my past lesbian relationships it has been all softness, tenderness, smooth cotton sheets, warm cups of tea and massages and oils and candles and lingerie. (Which please don’t misunderstand are beautiful). However, I tell my lover my craving for mild violence is my boyhood coming out, sex ala toxic gay male dynamics (ei. Siken, ei. Vuong, ei. Greenwell) ((Not to say these dynamics don’t exist in cis-lesbian of relationships!!! I just find they are explored in my own relationships less and certainly in literature less….okay im going to stop with side comments now))
On the plane a few days before new years I am listening to Garth Greenwell talk about gay male sexual dynamics (with regards to his novel Cleaness). Often these dynamics involve violence, shame, defilement, name-calling, etc. Audiences could confuse this with perpetuating the cycles of hatred given to them by parents or abusers. Greenwell argues otherwise, he states that shame and violence can actually be reclaimed to produce pleasure, that it is stigma transformed. Pain to rapture. Disrupting the cycle by taking over the narrative that was used to repress. Now pleasure blossoms.
At My Fathers Place I just got off the plane, she picks me up and I am having a BLT and potato salad and am repeating this quote to her: “Consensual-ritualized violence can affirm the limited body and the limitlessness into which it leaps” (Foucault). The feeling I have after I think I cannot take anymore pain is where I begin feeling limitless.
Her eyes are focused on me and her mouth is parted and she is clearly not entirely listening which I do not mind. (I do not mind…what an interesting phrase…and in truth the mind was not there).
She writes on top of my notes: “Soul and spirit // and limitless // and body and // … so much pleasure! // I can’t read because all I’m doing is staring // and vice versa…ah…I just want // to jump over // the table and // into / your / arms //// your // beautiful arms! // The language of god! // You make me feel so much inside, / you talk +2 :)))))))))”
We go back to her place and are annihilated and I wake up in the middle of the night and hear snoring and heat and sleep again and blood continues and I think nothing.
