Ananda wants to know what is happening with the Burn & Scar?
It is in its own niche, completely unrelated to anything else I’ve seen on the shelves. Sex, for instance: The perfectly innocent and ordinary impulse to procreate is fantastically twisted by thinking. And the tightening, dangerous twists have huge influence on the process of love, either getting or giving. So the idea that comes up this week is to think sexually to love completely. A new universe I feel I can fall in and out of, always dragging some brutal but lovely fantasy in my wake. People cannot do this; I want to. It’s dizzy, dizzy.
I wish I could see you. When I write like this, from this remove, the attraction of being intimate is of course knowing the color of your underwear, but also thinking about how I should articulate all my desires. How to do something for Lebanon, choosing the best picture of the baby turtles, telling the appropriate story about the fox in the city, describing your underwear to myself in such a way that touching it becomes literature months or years later, and most importantly listening to your version of the bridge in Norway, your memory of making love in the streets in Paris, your experiments in self-definition, your impression of what you have just read, or even just watching you see.
All these impulses should be distilled and presented in a way which arouses your interest, which pricks your curiosity. But then there is the other aspect of being closer to you, which goes back in some fuzzy way to my own infancy, of being able to listen to you talking about escape. Intellectually, between you and me, there will always be this iconographic fantasy of me watching you escape, by any means necessary.
To cook all this down into a potion other people can drink . . . This is my poison!
