I Love I Love Dick (and music)
The reading of Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick is recommended but not totally necessary for this “article.” For your life…
“Does analogy make emotion less sincere” (54)
“Letters” - @
“Fearing is all but love/ Tell me will I ever be the same?” & “Hey can we share now/ Secrets are for losers, I want you/ In my truth and in my arms”
@ is a band named as inconveniently as it is due to their conception: the duo meeting online and forming through distanced correspondence, usernames and email handles becoming a third, fourth, fifth member. One would never sense this due to their unbelievable sonic cleanliness, an enveloped precision, distinct yet blended. But I guess some bonds evade understanding.
“And isn’t every letter a love letter? Since I was writing to you, Dick, I was writing love letters. What I didn’t know was that by writing love letters I was writing letters to love, and timidly reawakening all the dormant powers in my rather repressed emotions.” (95)
By believing she is in love with Dick (and I don’t doubt she is), Chris learns of a capability of love that renders her reborn. Her old self obsolete, the one that chose to be loved rather than loving, she now finds the offshoots of desire burst through her body without any sign of stopping. Dick insists this is delusion. She asserts it is love. And if not love for Dick (it is), love for love, love for writing, for living, communicating, participation, and love as shame as pride.
‘“(Through love I am teaching myself how to think)-Looking at the text as the way in.” (116)
Chris wishes to know. Consistently she bemoans her lack of intellectual capability, she the failure “well-read” plus-one to her academic husband’s university guest lectures. The obvious fact is Chris knows something that Dick and Sylvère don’t know, and cannot. Her fury-fueled polemic on the rhetoric of “female” interests (feelings, desire, the illogical) meets its thrilling peak on page 180 after lamenting the misconstrued legacies of the “crazy kike witches” that came before her: “Because emotion’s just so terrifying the world refuses to believe that it can be pursued as discipline, as form.” Logic would insist Chris is not actually in love with Dick, after all, by the end of the book she has only met him in person around five times. But since when did love need to meet a quota?
“I’m sensing that the farthest point of synchronicity is fear and dread.” (130)
I do not know if love and synchronicity are synonyms. Equivocally, this is surely not out of the question. At the least, they are on the same side of the equation, and I know the side that I would prefer to live on.
“Crush” -Ethel Cain
“Something’s been feeling weird lately/ There’s just something about you, baby/ Maybe I’ll just be crazy/ And piss him off ‘til he hates me” & “Can you read my mind/ I’ve been watching you” & “Good men die too, so I’d rather be with you”
This song is a bit of a stretch for I Love Dick, except ultimately it isn’t because it’s the sexiest pop song in at least five years, if not fifteen. It is total desire: watching, pining, praying with no glimpse of reciprocation, but what is reciprocation when the fantasy is so sticky and forbidden in your head? But then you remember it is in fact just a fantasy, right after the glow of this three-minute pop song fades, and you fall face-first into that anxious anguish of an impossible belief. All or nothing, baby.
“Love and sex both cause mutation, just like I think desire isn’t lack, it’s surplus energy- a claustrophobia inside your skin-” (223)
I think this is the only explanation as to how this song can exist- the product of excess beating within its form. I’m a firm believer in pop music that inspires agony. Lady Gaga writhing on the floor, teaching me “I don’t wanna be friends” as an affirmation when I was 9. Madonna down on her knees in total want, ready to receive and on the precipice of when hunger becomes fullness but suspended mid-air. It is so beautiful to me. In “Crush” her voice soars upon reaching the chorus as if she has been split open, instantaneously revealing hope and confession. The same as when Chris says, “As if the only possible reason for a woman to publicly reveal herself could be self-theraputic.” In fact this is just the opposite, but maybe if you dig so deep you eventually find a new surface.
“Wake Up Alone” -Amy Winehouse
“It’s okay in the day, I’m staying busy/ Tied up enough so I don’t have to wonder where is he/ Got so sick of crying, so just lately/ When I catch myself I do a 180” & “He’s fierce in my dreams, seizes my guts/ He floors me with dread/ Soaked in soul, he swims in my eyes by the bed/ Pour myself over him moon spilling in/ And I wake up alone”
Amy is one of the key players in my lineage grouped by “seemingly wretched but indisputably profound femaleness.” That wording is impossible to be accurate and obviously limiting, but basically there is an amount of struggle and genius present, and the struggle is often perceived to be the fault of the woman, and while this may be partly true, to suggest it is solely her fault is evil. I have written thousands of words on this genius (predicted book in 10 years) and so I will refrain from much more right now, and instead present “Wake Up Alone,” a song of violent desire and graphic verb choice that feels a little like drowning. (And as always, let it not cause us to think of how she died.)
“I wish that I could dabble like you do around romantic myths. But I can’t, because I always lose and already in the course of this three-day totally fictitious romance, I’ve started to get sick.” (12)
It is Sappho’s sickness- the limb loosener- and I have never known how to not to be afflicted. I always think its a great idea to have a crush[es] until I remember what it entails, which is often the complete suspension of my certainty and physical comfortability. It is never light, always doom. Chris is right there with me, even if she is fully married at this point, for she knows what’s coming. It reminds me of when I knew a past relationship was ending so I developed what felt like a visceral crush on my line cook co-worker twice my age. A story old as time. (See: Nina Simone singing “you are life itself to me.”)
“Shame is what you feel after letting someone take you someplace past control- then feeling torn up three days later between desire, paranoia, etiquette wondering if they’ll call.” (154)
The performance of not caring to one’s self (etiquette) is the silliest, but a necessary charade. Chris insists on a sort of an anti-debasement in this text, and that to be so expository yields a bravery beyond shame, which I appreciate. But of course it creeps, and despite her best efforts, there will always be a faint image of a woman waiting by the phone, drinking and “writing” in the thin light because she has to pretend to be thinking about anything else. They are long nights, mostly because the thoughts are not derailed, even when morning comes. (See: “I would also avoid using the vacuum cleaner or the hairdryer as they would have prevented me from hearing the sound of the telephone. Every time it rang, I was consumed with hope, which usually only lasted the time it took me slowly to pick up the receiver and say hello.” -Annie Ernaux)
“Paper Bag” — Fiona Apple
“I was having a sweet fix of a daydream of a boy/ Whose reality I knew was a-hopeless to be had” “And I went crazy again today/ Looking for a strand to climb, looking for a little hope/ Baby said he couldn’t stay/ Couldn’t put his lips to mine and a fail to kiss is a fail to cope/ I said, “Honey I don’t feel so good, don’t feel justified/ Come on put a little love here in my void,”/ He said, “It’s all in your head,”/ And I said “So is everything” but he didn’t get it” “Hunger hurts, and I want him so bad, oh it kills/ ’Cause I know I’m a mess he don’t wanna clean up”
A dire anthem. What could I possibly say about “Paper Bag?” Besides that it will always be perfect. I wonder what her and Amy thought of each other.
“‘You think too much,” is what they always said when their curiosity ran out.” (139)
I might start saying this to men I am bored by. But, of course, it will be rendered a compliment.
“‘As soon as sex takes place, we fall,’ she wrote, thinking, knowing from experience, that sex short circuits all imaginative exchange.” (35)
The notion particular to a writer, as the eroticism of the poetic potential is as worthy as the pleasurable one. When Chris and Dick eventually do fuck, it falls flat, despite being probably as good as she could hope for, because the peak has been reached and now the only place forward is downward. She has to move- Dick wants her to leave- and now she has nothing: no promise, no possibility, no future. The best hope is to abandon the “project” swiftly, but this is nearly impossible. You have to leave the country or fall in love with someone else. She does the former. It’s a tough spill to clean. But, of course, the result is this book.
In Closing:
“No matter where you go, someone else has been before.” (228)
