Acrid

So, here I am again. It's 2:30 in the morning and I am unable to rest. Perhaps, during the past flu-ridden week, I managed to sleep so much that I must now work inversely to right my universe....

As I settled into bed tonight, my belly full from Angela's impromptu vegetarian feast (which I chose to attend instead of driving into L.A. to see an author's reading, once I realized that I lacked both the physical strength to drive out, but also the emotional vigor to attend the event as a third wheel), I again thumbed through Barthes' A Lover's Discourse.

And I wonder where desire goes.

As I listen to Barthes lament the absence of the body of the "other" (the desired) I think, too, that what is often absent is the desire itself. It is the realization that desire can absent itself (if we want to think of it as a verb) that smarts worse than the loss of the physical "other." How is it that desire, once so palpable you could chew on it, suddenly dissipates? Where does it go? It has been argued that absence implies a displacement while lack implies an eradication. If desire is absent rather than eradicated, where the fuck has it gone? At what point does desire become so top heavy that it threatens to topple not only me/you/us/him/her but itself? And once it has toppled and crashed in on itself, is it possible to reassemble it, to spark it back to cohesion or is it simply set into a permanent spin-out?

When the proverbial light has gone out and one uses language like a bat's echolocution to cut the darkness, an absent body (since it has not been eradicated, just distanced) will, as a tangible object, resonate and echo the language in some form, providing a sort of twisted reciprocity. But absent desire? Since it is not a tangible body, the language simply trails off and bleeds into nothing. Without reciprocity, the visceral longing attendent to language simply rings hollow. Resoundingly so.

It seems relatively easy to wrap one's head and heart around the absence of, and the longing for, a physical body, but the thought that desire can turn in on itself and dissipate without warning makes a train-wreck of my innards.

And I wonder why I can't sleep.