Dear readers,
Step into our living room at H.C. Ørsteds Vej past 22h two nights ago, and you will find V. side-stepping and bending his twisting half-moons to the back, head held high, a glass of white wine (my preference, and the one he has to reach for if I'm to join) drooped low with gravity while a humming takes over, also the rug and the low light and Harry's upside-down world globe lamp that grants us permission to upend the order of things.
Welcome to our intimacy. Cue a garden metaphor. It grows and shifts and surprises us as we tend to it, rummage the soil, learn to look at each other in the eye and stumble into D.'s irrational attachment to kitchen sponges, experiment with silences, music and headphones, or discover V.'s fastidiousness in applying the handmade soap: gone, in just a couple of days. We enjoy having you here.
It feels easier to invite you over, than going out there out there out there all the way out.
I'm huddled in the corner of the corner couch, yes, my little tablet of a Windows Go computer propped on my knees and my JBL Go speaker in hand (all the parafernalha shouts: keep it up! carry on! sustain! go, go, go, go!), shuffling through his suggestions and my impulses of what to listen to next on Spotify. I've made it a kind of stubborn quest to expose him to, more than share, my past geeky pokémaniac days, with a forewarning: this is trash music, Vini. Not even trashy in a good way. Unfortunately affection is not moral nor judgmental; I want to be the very best and my body is possessed by lyrics that might as well be in my DNA, dancing with wild abandon even my best performances lack. I call it brainwashing (let's say I'm not proud of my origin story --- moving to Denmark provided me with a convenient and perhaps necessary fresh start), but what we are experiencing here in the living room is the expression of intense emotional bonds.
Vini highlights the rarity of own his performance. Woooo. He picks up a foot from the floor and bends the other knee, lowering his center of gravity and swinging his body in a way I find hard to imagine myself doing. I zone into this detail of his dance to become interested in it, to find complicity, and create a metonimic portal into the pleasures of this night. If you want to get Vini to dance, this is the song you play. It's a quirky song listing thematic and verborragic variations on a single color, the same color B. focused her graduation work on a couple of years ago.
B., if you are reading this, remind me to send it to you!
Over its first incarnation, Betraying Gestures tended toward transparency. When V. would address you, dear readers, daily gestures were described on a continuous surface rich with associations. You could keep up with thought processes, conversations, and recurring interests as they weaved together facts and appearances: D. and V. went to an indie bookstore, where they read two halves of Betraying Gestures (the first half of edition #13 and the second half of edition #24) in a collage that publishes a new performed edition. A certain fabric of who, where and what offers a platform for disparate elements. Can we please rename the "freudian slip", "ato falho", "failed act" to "betraying gesture"?
Disparities and associations still rule this newsletter, but opacity thickens around certain whos and wheres and whats. Is the song that makes Vini dance a secret pass to his vulnerability? Is it an artefact of our intimacy, and therefore not something that belongs to a semi-public space like this text? Even if consent has been established, it does not guarantee an ease of sharing a relational space. Are there things we hide when we host dinner for friends? This is also a source of confusion. In Brazil we play fast and loose with the term: friend is anyone we want to build a connection with, until proven otherwise.
Living together with V. has been the condition of (semi-)publishing parcels of our shared territory. Back in Betraying Gestures #4, I made an appearance as the friend who gave up on writing a newsletter because she didn't know how to start --- who couldn't even answer which language to write from. To follow in the footsteps of others has been an important strategy for my survival and growth. At the same time, seeing this newsletter as a commitment to our relation keeps me coming back each week, despite the tantrums my, yes, dubious relation toward writing throws up a storm along the way.
The no always comes first, but there is a yes hidden in there, that your tender gaze and curiosity are able to coax out.
It's hard to believe I've lived in Copenhagen for a good four years before meeting you. This whole thing started as a fever fantasy of unicity --- "are we the same person in different bodies?". But now that we are settling into our habits difference becomes the thread with which to weave: I'm awake having breakfast or typing these musings way before you emerge from the bedspace; you're going to clean and tidy up flat before disarray catches my attention; synching our rhythms to have meals together would be hellish, so we don't even try, but there is no need to have our groceries on separate shelves.
About the wine, I told V.: I don't take aesthetic pleasure in this. Wine was welcomed in my life just shy of two years ago. I'm not an enthusiast. But I like drinking with you. I drink because of you. Typing it out sends waves through my system: is it really ok to ever do because of a person? Admitting to take action, shape your behavior, on account of, affected by, as reaction to your apprehension, or desire for apprehension towards a living breathing human being, owner of their own agency, feels... off. Shit’s frowned upon, yo. We learn to do and act by ourselves, and that is all good, until that self cannot take place in the world. Something in me wants to take a step back, but I insist: I do it because of you and I want and am interested in bringing you closer and understanding you. That act of interest sustains our relational space, and relational spaces multiplied and interwoven then follow through to fabricate society. And you know what? There's no expectation on my part for the you in question to reciprocate, but acknowledging the way we affect each other, often with no conscious intentionality behind it, highlights an element of threat.
I took care not to evoke otherness. Or, I thought I did.
And all of this, I want to call love, a territory of availability and tending to that territory. The garden metaphor, with all its dirt and worms, and crawly creepies and excretions and decompositions. Then flowers and bees.
Before such classics as Que Pokémon que é você? mixed with Juízo Final and Obaluaiê streamed through Harry's green paradise of a living room (living! living!), the words “intimacy” and “intimidation” met each other in conversation. They looked at each other in the eye, growled a bit and then acknowledged intimidation's irrational attachment to the kitchen sponges and intimacy's fastidious use of the handmade soap before twisting into a brief dance and exiting through opposite sides. The subject matter was one more J., a ridiculously handsome and performatively homosexual, confident J., who we met at Super Books' 1 year anniversary. We dared to take up his open mic invitation: at last, appearance! (emergence in the world/emergence for a certain social sphere); Betraying Gestures' first public foray (or rather, a further step in a path to discard semi- from publishing).
Then, it started pouring rain. We used that as a poorly calculated outlet to sair à francesa. We came home and met you, you dear reader, here, right, we opened a bottle of wine and in conversation realized there's an element of threat in intimacy, which codes vulnerability. Your close friends are the ones who can hurt you the most.
I was surprised V. thought last week's fire text to be most intimate I've written here yet. That one felt like proper writing, the type of writing I want to write if I am to ever become a writer, a public, published, writer. No dawdling around or commentary; just emotional charge. As it is, the present edition of Betraying Gestures is a kind of hygge trap: a comfortable space where we can invite readers into our divan; but there is a certain energy contained under the surface; and I want to punch holes and make little volcanos out of it.
Recommendations may be trickier than anticipated.
Today’s strategy was to find something vaguely connected to friendships and perversions of intimacy, to menace. And to avoid the several TV series I would love to dump here; at the same time it should be something I’m deeply enthusiastic about and would recommend to most anyone (so, avoiding the extremely peculiar, for now).
So, please bring your attention to the absolute genius of Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared.
Best experienced with no context. Please watch them in order (this is important!) by sorting the videos from oldest. Or start here.
And remember, kids:
Green is not a creative color!
Thank you for reading!