Don Quixote, Which Was a Dream (7 page)

Right now the first girl is thinking about the man she wants to fuck. 'We can,' she says to her friend, 'by fantasizing, increase our possibilities and joy in living, more important, understand how things work. Why's this? Examine these two events: 1. Last night I fucked with you. 2. I'm fantasizing fucking with you. But these events are now only my mentalities. Therefore there's no distinguishing between the two of them. But what if we hadn't fucked? Take another example: We don't love each other. Is it possible that by fantasizing we love each other, we can love each other? Possibly? Fantasy is or makes possibilities. Are possibilities reality?'

The other girl lay in her red bed and crossed her legs. 'There're always possibilities,' she said. 'I always prefer drama.'

'I fantasize I desire and know what desire is. This's how

fantasizing allows me to understand. Every possibility doesn't become actual fact. So knowing is separate from acting in the common world.'

'I'm caught in my own trap cause every event for me can only be my mentality.' The girls looked at each other.

'I know you know a good many of my New York friends and I've always wanted to talk with you about your work.' 'Come inside.' 'Are you reading Husserl?' 'After college I was a political theorist. Then I worked for Austin.' 'Ooo. What's he like?'

What did we talk about?

'What's the relation between practice and theory in your filmmaking? I mean: does writing criticism stop you from making films?' 'They're just two different kinds of activities.' 'But they're also two different ways of thinking.' 'When I make a film, probably partially because I always work with other people and also due to the film's economic situation, I know even before I start to make the film exactly what I'm going to do in the film.' 'Ugh: If I knew what I was going to write before I wrote a book, I'd be bored.' 'It's a different business. When you make a film, you have to consider who's going to see the film the popular culture.' 'Why do you care so much when you work how other people'll judge your work? I first consider my own pleasure. Do you think there's

something fishy in the semiotic theories, especially in Deleuze's and Guattari's?' 'There's a gap now. You have to realize that semiotics hit England before it hit America. We got Lacan and Althusser, rather than the later semioticians . . . Derrida . . . Foucault . . .' 'Foucault isn't really a semiotician. He was always on the outside. Who, then, 're you reading now?' 'I have a theory that we're at the end of a generation. Semiotics's no longer applicable. At the moment there's nothing.' 'I remember in New York when semiotics came only it was Sylvére who brought it over, what it really did was give me a language with which I could speak about my work. Before that I had no way of discussing what I did, of course I did it, and my friends who were doing similar work we had no way of

talking to each other. A critical way of talking about my work allowed me to go one step further in my work. Now it seems, as in the pre-semiotics days, practice's prior to theory.' 'The age of theory is over ...''... absolutes ...''... so there's only what I do at any moment.' 'Pleasure. Even Baudrillard in his new book . . .' 'He's a semiotician and dead.' 'Not anymore. . . . says our language is meaningless, for meaning - any signs - are the makings of the ruling class.' 'But he's still using meaningful signs to say this.' 'Oh, the black plague. Is it good?' 'I've read all about plagues.' Kiss. We don't stop kissing each other now. Your physical touch is incredibly gentle. But I can't physically feel anything cause I've been through a six-week relationship at the end of which the man kicked me out as fast as possible cause he decided he didn't know what he wanted. I must be shy of getting hurt. I think you're intelligent and lovely. Your face is keeping changing its shape. Maybe I'm hallucinating? It's not possible I can feel again after a winter and spring of no sexual love then for the second time in five years I moved in with somebody. That failed violently, forcibly.

4. The Mystery

'How, exactly, does my body feel pleasure?:

'I'm remembering fucking Eddie: I'm remembering situations of power. This's the way he likes to be fucked best: I'm on top of him. My arms reach straight to the pillow on either side of his black head. My legs slide from a sitting position straight down inside his legs so that my inner thighs nearest my cunt're rubbing his cock and so that I rising up and down am fucking his cock with my cunt. As I do this I think to myself that he likes this position more than I do. I don't come as easily in this position as when my legs're sitting on top of him because I have to be accurately acutely aware of his reaction to make sure his cock stays in my cunt and, I can't let myself fully go. I reach over Peter so my mouth is on his nipple. Or my wet tongue is flicking his nipple tip. This makes me excited more subtly than when I'm being touched: I don't come as much as violently, but I'm sort of coming all the time. I'm sort of coming all the time. Other times I stick my right hand's third

finger into Eddie's asshole. It easily enters. He bucks and looks at me with surprise and openness unusual for him. Openness makes me open. My finger is reaching up and toward his cock. That opening. As his thighs're reaching up for me, Sometimes I coldly turn him over, spread the asscheeks, stick my tongue into his asshole. I don't mind doing this though I usually mind doing this on men. When I do this he groans very loudly so I know he's receiving tons of pleasure. Peter's asshole's too tight for my finger to wiggle up and I don't want to force anyone to do sexually what they don't seem to want to do. When I once mentioned, innocently?, that I had a whip back in New York and he said "I'll have to try it", I was surprised and thought maybe it's a go between us.

'Peter's sexually scared for instance he never comes with me cause he's trying not to be in love with me cause he loves his wife or cause maybe he doesn't want to come. Whenever Eddie comes, I instantaneously come he usually turns me over I've been fucking him. He's on top of me. Now I remember. My legs clasp his waist and touch each other because he likes this. I can't come in this position. Legs open up so feet rest on outer sides of ass. Rubbing bone above clit against cock-bone. Come. So as he about to come he almost stop moving. First my arms have to curl around his neck as tight as possible clasp each other. Soon as he about to come; now now, almost no movement. I'm not going to come even though I've come. Soon as he starts to come and there's almost no movement, I automatically come.

'How, exactly, does my body feel pleasure?' The girl's telling the other girl about her former lovers.

'No no. I can't talk about anything directly.'

'There's a definite difference in my physical being or body between when I'm being fucked and I'm not being fucked. How can I say anything when I'm totally uncentralized or not being fucked?'

'There's no sex anymore. I'm not going to have any sex. I'm not going to open up. This is me: the image. A man's suit. Look at me. I'm a woman who looks like a delicate boy and I'll never change. You can't touch me. I'm impervious. This's the way I'm happy. I'm totally elegant.'

'You're out of your mind.'

'Better than being laid, then sticking razor blades through my wrists.'

'Living isn't so black.'

'Living is a present. I'll never say otherwise. I wish I was together enough to say or do something.'

'Touch me. An open quivering clit. The little red animal wiggles.'

'Art, since its very beginning in prehistoric caves, has been, in our present ways of speaking, conservative.'

'Art's more interesting than sex . . .'

'More rewarding. We ARE getting old,' the fourteen-year-old says. 'At least art doesn't end up with razor blades stuck in the wrists.'

'. . . only according to the art critics and they only lie about dead artists.'

'I've lied down for enough artists cause I prefer men who hurt to men who want to own me.'

'No one sexually owns another person. That's the province of art. Provenance. Roman art made dumb Roman politicians into gods. Christian art justified or rationalized the controller belief system. So what's my sexuality apart from all that's been shown me?' The other girls throw up their hands in disgust.

'Then who's responsible for the human violence in this world? Those who make. The artists.'

'Who's this person I'm fucking?'

'If I'm just reflecting, I don't know. When I'm making love with you, my loving is seeing your face. The only thing I'm seeing my only identity is you.'

5. Deep Female Sexuality: Marriage Or Time

'When Eddie was kicking me out of his house, I put a razor blade into my right wrist in order to stop Eddie from saying "You don't know how to love. No man will ever love you." The people who saved me from death're my friends.

'Two men are fighting each other with cudgels. They're standing knee-deep in water. There's an overwhelming monster whose waist and hips are so soft, he looks like a woman. His

right arm doesn't look like an arm. The man is puking against my building's corner wall. He doesn't flinch as I watch him. A man as he's facing out from this wall masturbates. He has a typical grin across his ugly face. I have to tell you how I get sexual pleasure. The women, rather than turning away from him, look at his exposed cock and laugh. Toward the point of death.

'Therefore I love you. Knowing that in the face of about to touch absolute darkness, there is the one rescuing that happens between two people and in the face of full knowledge. Of not only pain and incomprehendable evil and death: The real knowledge is that I want this I want to die. Horror! Knowing this - what're our jealousies our endless sexual maneuver-ings our social deviousnesses compared to this: we know what love is?

'What's the function of darkness? Of being ignorant?

'You said, "Light light. Those who survive must learn mathematics." For me there's just love, I'm scared of love. I run away from any immediacy.

'One of my legs is extending outwards. You're owning me. A sky of hot nude pearl until . . . crickets in these sheltered places . . . the wind ransacks the great planes. You are taking over control so I can relax. I'm alone on an island. I'm all by myself. Here, I'm waiting for what is to follow my collapsed dreams. I'll be more precise: I'm waiting for you cause I can't know anything and everything's whirling. His hand put itself on top of the clitoris and pressed. It didn't move. Her own hand was resting on her clitoris. His hand pressed down, through her hand, on the clitoris.

'I'm alone again ... on this island. I've my books around me. I don't know why I feel lonely. This is my life, if you put it that way. You know what I mean. My life has been hard. I'm not easy and I've been, probably irreparably, scarred. People say that someone who lives like me, in this much nothing, is sick. I'm at ease.

'You're owning me. You've touched me and I'm scared because I've decided to love you so now I'm trying to break this ownership: I phone you you're a malicious beast: I know in the past years and now you fuck lots of women and tell

them you love them madly. You can't love everybody madly, (I do). You're doing the same thing with me. I can't mean anything to you. I'm not special. You're shitting on my face. I hate you. I don't want to need you because I already, probably most, probably one-twentieth of me, is needing you. So after I yell at you for being as sexually romantic as I am, the next day I tell you "I love you" when you don't want emotion. I want to die and not have responsibility.

'"I'm only interested in abstract thought." But what do you and I do, not so much with our bodies, but with our needs? I remember waking up. First, I see your head. I see your eyes're open and you're looking at me. I have to smile because your obvious love for me makes me smile. My thumb and second finger my left hand hold between them your nipple, my bones. Your right hand's fingers're on my left nipple and my right hand's fingers're on your left nipple. My right hand's fingers're pulling back the extra skin of your cock tip and your lips're contorted from the scream that's coming out of your mouth, as your head turns right as I lift my body so that your cock finally hard is entering my cunt and you have to scream I remember waking.'

The women are shaving their heads.

TEXT 2:
THE LEOPARD:
MEMORY

It was a long hot summer. She lay moaning on the fields where the straw grew. The sun's blaze was so hot it had turned the grass into straw. One of her hands crept down to the pale printed old material as a slight breeze fluttered under it. Her hand was resting on her knee. She wasn't aware of what she was doing. A slight restlessness made her turn her knees, bent, just to the right. The sun was blazing her face. She felt that. Placing her hand on her cunt hairs, she cupped the slope; then, raising her hand, the third finger tip running lightly up the flesh turned to the inside. The flesh was as red as the burgundy of the country.

Behind her the hills were yellow. Not the color of gold but a

yellow that is greenless: dry shrubs tiny little animals who have nowhere to hide long dusty roads minute hills roll up and up so that before each hill there seems to be one long upward rise then roll; the real hill equals the roll, the rise of the earth's breast. Its nipple is dry yellow-as-dust holding-shrubbery-tossed-together-with-stones; but nothing's visible except the rise, for light almost blinds the eye. A carriage would be lost to human sight: a tiny black speck. Speck among specks. Another stone. A slingshot caught among rocks. It goes on and on. There're no decisions. Rising part way up one of the hills, in the middle, there's a carriage. Three brown wagons follow the closed carriage. They move around a curve, then aren't seen again by the non-existent human eye. The human eye sees again always new.