Scaffolding

by Lauren Elkin

But who is our original true love, I think. And how can we return to them. And would returning to them really cure us of our desire for other loves? And what about that singularity that the person we love seems to possess, that themness, that no-one-elseness? Surely we can’t transfer it from person to person? When you have what you want there’s nothing left to want. But how do you have what you have?

look how inept she is, she can’t even turn on the television, how could she have an affair and keep it from me, and I go to help her.

There is something strange about a moment. We can’t ever live inside of it. We live just after it. We live the moment better in trying to relive it, than in living it the first time around. Inhabiting the same space as the moment, we hear its echo, sounding louder.

There is so much we will never know about other people, no matter how much we love them, or how much time we spend with them. We can know all of their mannerisms, know intimately their bodily odours, the schedule they shit on, recognise the very scent of their wind. Some people think this takes all the mystery, all the magic, out of a life together, but there will remain inexorably something unreachable about them. Try as we may, we grasp and can’t lay hold of their essence; there is always something that escapes.

every time he comes in me, I wonder, and I wonder, too, what kind of risky behaviour this is, the actions of a woman who wants out of her marriage, and into another one, or simply someone who has decided not to decide.

Everything in the culture tries to convince us that if we are truly in love with the right person, we will be as one with them. It isn’t true. We are always each other’s others.

Love is always narcissistic, he says, love is a recognition of ourselves in the Other, that is why we try to make ourselves into One, but this is impossible. Love, desire, the want we have for the Other is always a remainder, a trace, of what we have desired before.

Is it possible that infidelity isn’t something you commit but something that creeps up, a series of inoffensive doors you open, so by the time you find yourself in front of the one that counts, the one that matters, that changes everything, you are too far gone? You are so deep in it but you got so deep in a kind of innocence. I think for a moment. Maybe the problem is the word. Infidelity. I never noticed before but it makes you an infidel, believing in the wrong god. But really it’s another kind of fidelity – to yourself, to your dream of yourself, to the other people you love.

How can we live with each other, and enjoy our bodies, and each other’s bodies, when we know that desire is part of an endless chain? And that it is being in this chain that makes us alive? How do we live out our desire without hurting other people? What do other people need to know about our desire?

We are made of desire, he says, made of what we don’t have.

she’s in love with this guy and so much so – ah there it is, and she pulls out a copy of Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick – so much so that she is willing to debase herself by writing him all these letters! And so it isn’t really about him at all, it’s really about desire and daring to make art, and the importance, for a woman artist, of being blatantly narcissist in order to actually become who she is.

Desire isn’t lack, it’s surplus energy – a claustrophobia inside your skin.

it’s like some people plant this seed of energy in you, that loads of other people don’t. And as it takes root I feel like I’m shimmering with excitement, and need to get physically close to them, to share it, to feel their shimmer.

her reading of I Love Dick was a way of telling me I had been wrong, that I had misunderstood love, that he had chosen her in the end, and she had chosen him.

so the way I see it I’m part of this chain of women doing things and hoping it will have an impact, we’re all just trying to move forward in whatever way we can.