#15
an interlude on irreconcilable desire & the lovers role
Mino Maccari
My roommate’s cat is dying. He’s old and apparently, very done. He has taken to laying in the bathtub to wait for death and, in this heat, who could blame him? We’ve got cockroaches in the bathroom again, and I wonder if the sick cat will scare them off.
Probably not.
I’m writing this from my bed, where I am shifting from one hapless position of surrender to another, flattened by the heat and heartbreak, my 2010 Macbook currently burning a hole through my thighs. I tried to watch porn this morning and ended up bawling my eyes out, triggered by a tender moment of hand-holding in an amateur video.
I’m uh, not doing great.
When in emotional pain, my instinct is never to run from it. If it were, I wouldn’t be a writer; I’d be a coward, a man, or whatever word you’d like to use here. No, when I suffer, I have to make sense of it. Go on some quest to extract the truth or gain perspective from something more significant than me, excavating myself from the suffocating smallness of my own pain. So I read a book.
In a chapter titled “The Great Transformation of Love,” from Eva Illouz’s Why Love Hurts, she writes of Jane Austen’s Emma, exploring the relationship between spoiled, nosy ass Emma Woodhouse and her only critic, George Knightley:
The only person who loves Emma is also the only one to see her faults. Understanding Emma’s faults is not incompatible with being thoroughly committed to her because both emanate from the same moral source.
She continues:
In contradiction to a long Western tradition that presents love as an emotion that overtakes ones capacity to judge and that idealizes the object of love to the point of blindness, love is here solidly anchored by Knightely’s capacity for discernment.
Emma’s eventual acceptance of this critique and this love reflects her ability to be wrong, to learn, to rethink. We could say that bitch contained multitudes, and George was acutely aware of all of them.
I made a mental note to re-read Emma, but mostly I was struck by how much my opinion of Knightley, who I had remembered as patronizing, had shifted. It reminded me of my own recent Knightley-esque plea and the crushing experience of wanting to reconcile the wholeness of someone and being punished for it.
What Illouz calls discernment, what I call observation, has now become an insult. Axel Honneth defines recognition as an ongoing social process that consists of backing up “the positive understanding [that people have] of themselves.”
[..] Self-image is dependent on the possibility of being continually backed up by others, recognition entails an acknowledgement and reinforcement of another’s claims and positions, at both the cognitive and emotional levels. Recognition is the process by which one’s social worth and value are ongoingly established in and through one’s relationship with others.
We can see this fragile sense of identity being exploited and sharpened by social media, of course, but this goes hand in hand with the cult of intimacy merging into a cult of narcissism, which I wrote about here. The concern now is the self, and this self is, to quote Illouz, “now essentialized, it exists beyond one’s social class. The sense of worth now adheres to the self.”
We have become entirely unable to detach from shallow but comforting concepts of Being Seen, representation and relatability, stand-ins and proxies for what we genuinely crave; that is to say, the rich, often painful, and profoundly transformative experience of intimacy, Being Known. The modern Emma would have simply rationalized some emotional bypassing, blocked Knightley for being toxic, and proceeded to order some Deuxmoi merch and an obscenely priced candle online.
The illusion of agency rears its ugly head again, too, assuming the form of self-care culture, in which the idea of self-preservation merges with capitalism to create a pervasive narcissism. Choose yourself. I write a lot about what reinforces individualism, what coddles the delusion that we exist for ourselves and not to interact socially, not to experience each other. This is just one facet of this ever-worsening social alienation.
The ego isolates the pain of being contradicted and rejects any nuance; like the now mainstream borderline mentality, there’s a constant and comforting narrative of self-victimization to run back to avoid uncomfortable self-reflection consistently. We believe the inevitable exposure accompanying being truly vulnerable should be sanitized and confined to therapy. Instead, we reduce everything to yet another binary: is the flag red or green? As Illouz puts it:
[…]“feeling good about oneself” has become both the cause and purpose of falling in love.”
I can’t think of anything bleaker.
My current personal hell, my little heartbreak, resides in the shift from confidante to antagonist . By questioning one part of him, I inadvertently challenged all of him. I made him “feel bad.”
Being asked not to do this, not to see All of someone, reminds me of the dynamics in James L Brooks’s 1987 masterpiece film, Broadcast News1. In it, producer Jane Craig, who has been clinging to her professional integrity as everything around her downturns into soft news, meets pretty boy newscaster Tom Grunick, who personifies everything she firmly believes is culturally and professionally dangerous.
In Tom, Jane meets the heaviness of a desire that contradicts itself. She recognizes the possibility for both wanton desire, doubt, and even disgust to co-exist within herself. She reminds us that these are not mutually exclusive feelings, that, in fact, it is these distinct contradictions that drive desire.
I feel like I’ve been Jane for almost a year now.
To initiate something is to play the fool.
Jane and I know this; we worship the same gods and ride the same high horses.
During their first conversation, she challenges Tom with one question:
“What do you want from me, anyway? Permission to be a fake?”
What a perfect thing to say.
I should have said that.
Later, a mid-movie Jane, beginning to allow herself to soften a bit, asks Tom:
“So…, you like me, huh?”
To which Tom replies:
“I like you as much as I can like anyone who thinks I’m an asshole.”
A complicated thing acknowledged.
There are two endings to Broadcast News.
In the one that made the cut, Jane’s uneasiness toward Tom’s professional choices and her inability to reconcile her feelings, due in part to Tom’s unwillingness to look at himself, lead to her leaving him at the airport and taking a cab home by herself.
Years later, they reunite and are friendly, but it’s clear that everyone has gone on with their own lives, their own individual realities, Tom having found a partner that mirrors back his preferred self-image, Jane having found a terrible new haircut.
In the alternate ending, Tom seemingly, or at least temporarily, overcomes his fears of being confronted with dissonant parts of himself and chases Jane into the cab.
“Look, you keep coming after me and then looking down on me, and it’s starting to drive me batty. I can’t help it that they like me, and I LIKE it that they like me! I think there’s a lot of this job that I do well. What do you think it takes to do this job the way they have it now?”
He continues:
“What I don’t know, I can’t learn, and what I know, nobody can teach! Excuse me for saying it about myself, but I think it’s true. What do you think?”
Jane goes to speak, but Tom speaks over her, “Never mind what you think! You drive me crazy, you drive me crazy, you drive me crazy! I’m supposed to be figuring this out for myself and I’m in the car with you! What is that?”
Finally, instead of letting Jane bulldoze over him with critique, as she has the whole movie, he speaks up; he allows himself to feel anger at both her and himself, simultaneously allowing for Jane to confront herself. Tom truly allows himself to hear Jane for the first time and react to it with passion.
This is followed by kissing, as these things should be, because, at some point, there are no other words. A kiss which Jane pulls away from for a moment and, forehead against his, whispers:
“I could fucking kill you.”
To which Tom replies:
“You sure could.”
Are we ever truly loved if parts of ourselves are overlooked? How can something be whole when we need it so compartmentalized? Is the role of the lover ever complete without its observer component? And, who does the confidante become if she can’t give feedback? A secret keeper, a silent bystander, a cheerleader? Is she, am I, doomed to be an antagonist?
There is something deeply tragic about losing the ability to trust in each other’s perspectives, particularly those we choose. Are we genuinely asking for permission to LARP with each other, to, as Jane would put it, be a fake?
In the end, I’m still in bed, still sweating, both heartbroken but comforted by the fact that I can still experience all of it, those fucking multitudes.
Early subscribers will remember #3 - a personal essay I wrote about BN. I’ve since taken it down, to repurpose here some of it here and re-work it for my book.
God you’re good
👌