Participation

ONE

TWO GROUPS

I never made it to Love, and now I hear it’s defunct.

Anti-Love meets regularly, though attendance is spotty. At least I’ve done most of the readings.

Love, by contrast, will be a recuperation project.

Anti-Love is not, to be fair, billed as Anti-Love. It’s billed variously as resistance, revolt, revolution. Sometimes it’s billed (tentatively or defiantly) as Self-Love.

Love bills itself as itself, eponymous and proud.

Without the beginning of the story, it’s enough to know that there is a drafty corner apartment, an all-night bodega out the window, a playground across from the bodega, quiet at night. There is an abundance of emotion—enough years, enough fucks and near-fucks and pseudo-fucks, enough expectations unanswered because unheard or unsaid—and it is that abundance that is known: a partial knowing, as excess is always, paradoxically, partial.

Without the beginning of the story, it is insufficient but still necessary to have a picture of the surround: not only the bodega and the playground, but the news reports filtering up from the apartment below. The news reports appearing at the top right of the screen, a stack of small explosions, almost registering, then, compulsively, swiped away.

There is a stack of books—on a coffee table, for example. An archive of future attention, or else a morgue.

Love isn’t defunct, exactly. It’s been reduced to a virtual form of itself. Flesh into type, an assembly turned list. I enter it, when I enter it, through a screen.

Don’t be fooled by the present tense, the future tense, when they occur, which they will. This is a story about the past. It’s already over.

When I say that the story is over, I mean that a merger has happened, which is not to say an acquisition. (This is a story about two groups.) I am also insisting on the safety of storytelling, to protect myself, and you, from a certain pain.

Story is a safe emergency.

One of the members of Anti-Love is a psychoanalyst, a fact rarely mentioned in our meetings, though the language of this fact—safe emergency—edges in. The psychoanalyst is from Buenos Aires, where an hour of therapy can cost the same as a burger; as a result, a large portion of the population is in treatment.

We absorb such unverifiable facts from conversation, and they become a part of us, they become us.

(Without the beginning, it is also necessary to have a picture of the second surround, some 150 miles away: a table in a room that is open to the public, dirty floor, a radiator that leaks. A village view out the window: gas station, neon lights, small mountain just behind.)

How are we to know who started things? At its peak there were ten of us in Anti-Love; we’d sit around the improvised wooden table, peer at one another over mugs of coffee or of beer. The idea for the group came from me, I’ve been told, though I remember it as always having been there. Not always, in the strict sense. It appeared when I needed it: an acquired taste. Tonight I met a man who was beautiful and tall, who wore capitalism like a well-fitting suit. Anti-Love recognized him, shone a light. For example.

Love was different. You wonder if I have a story to tell. I was invited to Love. The way salt is invited to the early-winter road.

I was invited and I said Yes, I said Send me the syllabus, I said I am only partially fluent in your language. I was told I was welcome nonetheless. Meanwhile, the neighbors were setting each other on fire. California was also burning—actually burning. The neighbors, aflame, sat on their stoops, extracting the burrowed tick of love from one another’s skin.

It’s everywhere in the news reports—swipe, swipe.

You don’t have to believe me, but you can.

FACTS

I can’t know what you believe.

I can offer you parable after parable, tale after tale.

I can tell you the one about Porous and Anemone, who came together over a shared sense of the word expectation. Anemone wanted things from Porous: a lack of friction mostly, but also small noises, an elbow extended into its vulnerability. Porous wanted everything to be decided (elbow in the ribs, far in). One day in the vestibule of one of their apartments, Porous had a change of opinion, which is not the same as a change of heart. The story ends there, with Porous leaking predictable tears, Anemone predictably backing out the door.

There is a theory of the psyche that claims life narratives are necessary to the formation of a coherent subjective self.

This theory has always terrified me. Maybe I’m afraid of stories. Or of selves.

Or maybe I confuse coherence with cohesion. The psychoanalyst once explained the danger of this mistake, of letting the left brain suppress what the right brain knows. The way we rush to make sense of things, invent airtight accounts, stories that follow. We depend on these unprovoked lies.

A cohesive story, the analyst clarified, may well lead to a desired result (we may get wrong why the bird crashed into the window, but the decals we put up save the next bird’s life).

When I was a child, I thought swooping sparrows were hunters, hoping to nest in my unkempt hair.

But coherence doesn’t come so easily, or have such immediate results. At this point in the analyst’s explanation, I began to disappear. My eyes and ears wandered, to a fly buzzing in a spiderweb strung between the radiator and the wall. A session of Anti-Love had just ended; the winter sun had dropped behind the mountain and the gas pumps; the street was empty and I was spent. I struggled to understand the challenge I felt: if cohesion was marked by false order, by a completionism that held chaotic truths at bay, then coherence (its corrective?) consisted of work I didn’t know how to do. What I recall about the distinction between cohesion and coherence is a feeling of desirous terror—or terrified desire—at the prospect of abandoning my attachment to the first before being able even to conceptualize the second.

What can be told, without inciting this terror? What kinds of stories, what narratives, invented or not?

Or are these the questions I’m training myself not to ask?

When dawn lifts itself over the corner apartment, the bodega glows. The playground waits for its portion of light. Late risers don’t know this, but there is always a moment, sometimes fleeting, when the clouds brim pink. In bed, angled toward uncurtained windows, I wait for it. When there are no clouds, the pink separates itself onto puddles, passersby.

I can’t know what has become me, what becomes.

Stack of unverifiable facts, archive of mistakes.

Some strays can attach to anyone, over and over.

WORK

This month, while work has stopped through no fault of my own, while I need to conserve what little funds I have (while I have more time than money), I will try to catch up; I will follow the syllabus of Love. I like to follow, but the syllabus has so many holes. In the beginning, I won’t try to plug them. I can’t make promises for the future—this being one of my failings, both in and out of love.

When I say work has stopped, I mean one-third of my work has stopped. I have three jobs, in two places, connected by a train. (I’m using the word place where before I used surround, though now neither term feels right.)

In one place, I work part-time in a café-bar that serves coffee, pie, and cheap wine in carafes. I like the job because the café-bar is slow and I can read; it’s so slow I wonder how the owner, whom I never see, covers the bills. I wonder if, after paying me and the other part-time worker, he breaks even.

I’ve done the math, and the money I earn at the café-bar just covers the expense of commuting to the other place (surround) to fulfill the obligations of my other two jobs: the expense of the train, some food and drink, and rent for the time-shared room in the corner apartment with the bodega/playground view. The job at the café-bar helps me break even.

I could just call the two places the village and the city, since that’s what they technically are.

My second job is different. My second job is as a mediator-in-training. When I get a call, I travel south to the city to assist my mentor with cases.

I can’t tell you about the cases; they’re covered by a confidentiality agreement I signed when I began my training, and which I sign again in front of each new set of clients. What I can tell you is that, to my mind, the work with my mentor is worth the hours I put in at the café-bar to support my commute. For one thing, the work is interesting; for another, it is the closest I have come to investing in my future: even at the apprentice stage, it pays the most of my three jobs.

But in the place where I am most often—in the village, where my life is manageable and where I work at the café-bar—it’s hard to come by employment as a mediator. Though sometimes working at the café-bar feels like supplemental training.

My third job, the one at which I met the capitalist, is a holdover from my former line of work. It’s a waged job, like the café-bar, but in the information sector rather than the service sector.

I don’t like my third job. I have arguments with its purpose. I would like, once my current obligations to the capitalist are complete, to cut back to just the two jobs. I have only one mouth to feed, after all.

Unfortunately, the work that has stopped through no fault of my own is not the third job, the one I argue with and want to leave behind. My mentor has vanished and isn’t returning my calls.

Now I have two jobs, but they aren’t the two jobs I want. Still, a hole in my schedule has created the opening necessary to catch up with Love.

A SYLLABUS

I’ve fallen twice for philosophers. The first one studied a fascist—still does. The second one studied, still studies, forms of love.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy sets out in classic triangulation:

—Love as Union

—Love as Valuing

—Love as Robust Concern

I recognize, from my Western philosophical formation, the triad of eros, agape, philia. I absorbed it as lust, altruism, friendship, often wondering in the intervening years how much damage that taxonomy, trivialized by time and lack of attention, has done.

The first philosopher and I never recovered from a betrayal. I succeeded, with the second, in transforming eros into philia, or finding the philia in eros—prying it out, over time. I sent him the syllabus to Love and he sent it back from his university post, annotated and marked. Love, stained already by Authority, History, Trust.

I messaged the list:

"Loves, I still haven’t met all of you in person, and I regret the demise of the IRL sessions. I did share the syllabus with my love