In the armpit of New York City (the subway in July) I spent several delicious hours reading Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark’s flirtatious 1995 emails, published under the title I’m very into you. Nursing myself an increasingly urgent crush, I found electrifying solace in how Wark speaks of their relating:
“It's like getting the rhythm to a waltz right. Only who's gonna lead? Does it always work that way? Is there always a butch/femme moment in every exchange? That's my theory, anyway. I always maintain that there's no escape from the b/f dialectic, but that anyone can occupy either pole if they know how, and that it can oscillate wildly if you let it/want it. I don't believe in the androgyne or the bisexual as the middle. If it looks that way it's because it's oscillating too fast for the eye to see/hand to feel…”
I love this passage, and I love it more for the varied responses it elicits in my friends. When I read it aloud to A, she mentions the Contrapoints Twilight video, quoting it with a grin and a handwave, as something like, “Maybe there always has to be a pursuer and a pursued, and the best we can hope for is to take turns?” Then, two hours into a call with R, I end up quoting it to her, too. She tells me her initial thought is that of resistance, and something in me lights up: I want to hear what she disagrees with and why; I want to get into the messy weeds and find the seam where I end and she starts.
We’ve been talking political theory, so in dialogue with that, she claims that there’s power in greater society but the idea is that it should be distributed in an egalitarian way. Like, if there is some distribution of labor such that I do task X and you do task Y, ideally the power I have over you that I derive from being able to make decisions about task X is counterbalanced by your power over Y, and vice versa. And that there shouldn’t be power in the intimate sphere.
I say, OK, I think that’s the aspiration, that love is the process of constructing a little room between you and your lover that can withstand the tidal forces of power pounding at the walls. But the power is still there. Like, A has power over me because she has a lot more money than I do. And I think the question is like, what do you do with that power? And I think there is something really beautiful in that the answer is: fetishize it, I guess. (I am grinning here.)
And she says, Well, I think that’s the good ending. There is also the Bad Ending. Like you can use your power over someone to be cruel.
It takes me a moment to process this, because part of me has literally forgotten about that possibility: Oh, yeah.
Love levels the playing field, or takes place entirely off the playing field, in a space where everything blooms green and wild. Distantly we can hear the referee call foul, or for points in either direction, but in this new lawless and unjust land we queer the terms: we trade jerseys, introduce new rules, discard them, kick the ball and then prick and deflate it, tackle one another, hold one another. The playing field purports a certain kind of justice that wracks every relation with power imbalance; out in the injustice of the weeds everything seems small compared to how we begin to really play together.
There is a Tumblr post I can’t find for the life of me but which I love dearly. In response to some tortured age gap discourse that was making the rounds: “Certainly there is the power someone holds over you because they’re older than you, but there’s also the power that derives from being different races, classes, nationalities, genders, sexualities. And even if you were the same as your partner on all these axes, there’s also the power they hold over you because you love them.”
Pairing this with Gillian Rose in Love’s Work:
“There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy. To be at someone’s mercy is dialectical damage: they may be merciful and they may be merciless.”
Here’s the thing: up in the little room of our love the walls could give in at any time. Up in the little room of our love, we instead leave the golden lights on, we keep the heating going, we draw the curtains against the easy violences of the world and turn to one another with tenderness, open palms when we could close our fists. Of course it could come apart at any moment—the magic of it is that it doesn’t, and that we wake up each morning and choose mercy, which is like swimming up a waterfall, for how insistently power seems to come knocking at the door, proselytizing its all-encompassing salvation with a silver tongue. Tonight, I am lying in bed, and because I am tired you answer the knock for us, and through the walls I can catch you politely saying, thank you, sorry, but not today.
wow i finally know who the people being referenced are