Betraying Gestures #21
boing goes the spring
It is the first time I live with someone who can be called a friend. M. lays at the sofa (phone), V. sits over at the table (laptop). It is spring in Copenhagen. Let me tell you, again, each letter typed with lust and despair: it is spring in Copenhagen. It is monday night at the studio, it is tuesday in the white room at Nordhavn, and I hear J. catch his boasting with a turn of phrase: "that's a lie".
Live, from New York, it's saturday night. It is New York at Milky Way Gallery. It is a 40 °C winter afternoon in São Paulo, probably. It is chaotic in São Paulo: dare not deny it. In all possible multiverses it will, indeed, be chaotic in São Paulo; physics does have its laws and hard limits. Meanwhile I choke on green leavery and punch my nostrils full of whitish petals, eating crude sun rays with my starving pores, their hungry little mouths gaping and gasping, at last exposed to the kiss of the crisp wind that bathes a city full of promise and summer night dreams.
I did live with a friend once before. Ruan was a psychologist, an immigrant and one of the most beautiful beings I have ever met. We became friends through the act, gesture, betrayal, or simple fact of living together. J. has an habit of editing what he says as the words slip out, another act, gesture and betrayal. I simply and cheerfully contradict myself. Often, obnoxiously, intentionally; we make our paths toward reality. Ruan and I would keep tabs on his flings and my fantasies, at one point he'd been flirting with a partnered man. Not one of his patients, but he did point out that often the cheating --- the betrayal --- appeared as necessary impulse, a mechanism containing both the marks of an unsustainable relational dynamic and the tools to surpass it. A slippage. Escape, solution, resolution, making way. Something tenses so another can release. The clinic is uninterested in judgement. Desire flows and we make ourselves attentive, we should make ourselves attentive, we are responsible to make ourselves attentive: no great offense or games of expectations, duties and rights; closeness and care rather than blood contracts, an ethics of blood flow and arousal. Sex, of course, also, too, but not only, mostly not. Betrayal as the moment something is offered, counsciously or not, intentionally or not, a revelation. Ops. I showed myself: this miserable little pile of secrets.
Last spring the newsletter Betraying Gestures sprouted out of a desire to hide less, a sentence that shakes the structure of the São Paulo I carry in my nerves: before landing in Copenhagen spring was a creature of myth, one more among the myriad suspicious flourishes of the velho continente's fantastical literature. Now my chest cranes toward the sun out of instinct, lungs fill with the buzz of insect wings as my mouth opens and thin strands of white rootlings reach out, eager to taste the blue electric that swarms the city and invades every aspect. Every aspect. You and I have met before. ("I've met myself", J. edits in his studio). Last season, you and I have met circa 1220 times (although a handful of them were with my friend I --- and another handful a glitch with the lower-case italic i --- when we took disposable cameras to the beach in Betraying Gestures #7). You've not met Harry, though, who despite being a good friend managed to evade publishing by Betraying Gestures. His middle name is usually elided, and revealing what few people know to be part of him helps me tuck him in writing while he tucks away in his garden with offspring and partner, cultivating whatever is necessary.
Their generous gesture allows there to be a we, now, here: we are living in his apartment for the season, and thanks to this shared space, these letters return to be news again. To move what had been stagnant. I hope by the next, new, end, Betraying Gestures will have gained a certain measure, will have wriggled toward complicit writing, narrow to life, gushing, even. Here, let me sow the seeds. Hamming up the spring metaphors has been fun. But alas, that's the danger of writing. The way words and sounds squeak together, their pleasures distracting, taking us away from we. What is necessary to cultivate? Here, at least, a writing that is to live. The challenge has been cast, Vinícius.
Dear readers,
it feels good to turn around.
Thank you for reading.