Equations: Dialectic Form (2021)

#21
Lisa is convenient for me and vice versa: we work together and, contrary
to popular belief, sometimes it helps to eat where you shit. Lisa has big
moon eyes, shoulder-length black hair, skinny, medium height. There is
no specific mark to raise her looks above the ordinary. Our life together is
founded on the maintenance of routines, rituals. We always smoke this
much pot, have this many drinks, listen to this many albums per night.
Where sex is concerned, we please each other, simply and without fuss.
There is no universe but the visible one; nothing goes down or up. But
how much of this is nothingness? I’m not pushing deeper into anything;
she’s a solid mass, someone substantial that doesn’t have to take me
anyplace. Through a year and a half, this is the way it is. Then, I hear a
siren call in the distance. It has spirit traces in it, a sense of romance. I
learn that I cannot be a slave to routine; there is too much in me which
craves the exceptional. I begin putting Lisa off: small ways first, then big
ways. Another night like all the others suddenly feels consonant with
horror. Shock, says Freud, is the necessary precondition of orgasm. While
the orgasms I’ve had with Lisa have been pleasant enough (she’s been on
the pill for the duration of the relationship), I’m shocked into an
awareness of Otherness through sex. The problem is that, strictly
speaking, Freud is wrong; sex is (as most eventually learn) usually a
domestic sport that holds no surprises. But (unfortunately) domesticated
sex leads to bad art. So when I followed the siren away from Lisa, I was
following a trail to more words, more images. Is this mature? Where sex
and art are concerned, there is no maturity; there are just two imperatives
in one puny body, with not too many breaths left, in this universe of a
billion years.
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