Do Everything in the Dark

Review

February’s book club pick. I felt excited to vaguely engineer the polls such that we could finally cover a Semiotexte title, not to mention one that I was certain would be weird and gay. The certainty proved well-founded, because I more or less am not sure what happened in the book, but I enjoyed every page, such that some of these very sad paragraphs can be enjoyed.

Gary Indiana’s book is at least faintingly autobiographical, though who's to say just how much. Some parts seem so clearly translated from real people that I refuse to believe their synthetics. I did not read the introduction before reading the book so became educated that at least one character seems to be directly inspired by Susan Sontag, which I found just delicious.

What do I like most about it, is it that there is some relatively horny writing about men fucking? Perhaps. Though a lot of the fucking in this book is less than thrilling. Jesse, in particular, has a lot of encounters with strange men (strangers, I mean) and sex with strange men can be fun, can be deeply annoying, or can be a little scary. After all, you don’t know who this person is. Jesse has an counter with a strange man in, I think, Istanbul:

Jesse steps between the waiter’s legs and turns around facing a mirror over the sink. He lowers himself. The waiter pulls him closer, steering Jesse’s ass toward his penis. The position is useless. The waiter stands, pushes Jesse to his knees, sticks his cock into Jesse’s moth. Jesse gags, expelling the penis.

“Look,” he says, fed up, “there are two beds in the other room. We don’t need to do this in here.”

. . . [The waiter] flounces on the bed farther from the windows, knees raised, legs spread. Jesse takes off his clothes. He kneels between the waiter’s legs. He sucks the now half-hard penis with grim concentration. Seconds pass. The waiter springs to his feet, pulls Jesse into dog position at the mattress edge, stands behind him, spits on his fingers, greases his cock, and accurately rams it in. He fucks Jesse’s ass for about thirty seconds. Jesse tightens himself around the pounding, slippery meat. He feels pleasure, even ecstasy, for the half-minute or so that it lasts, he craves an abundance of this stranger’s need filling his willingly surrendered flesh, for the man to take him with some insistent demand for love. The waiter pulls free. Slips into his pants and shoes with absurd haste.

Jesse’s encounters here are increasingly risky, and it is difficult to divorce this clear risk-seeking behavior (he is not hooking up with guys on Grindr, he’s walking around an unfamiliar country bumping into strangers and sucking their dicks) from the idea of the AIDS epidemic, particularly for this group of characters who make reference to it, who lived before, during, and “after” (in catastrophic quotes) the most lethal of those times.

“‘I’m already devastated,’ I say. ‘Aren’t you?’ A recurring subject. ‘We have no dreams left. Nobody cares about equality, or any utopian anything. We’re all just fucked. The guys who own the world won’t let anything happen anymore.’” Gary’s written self utters this depressed summation of the world about 30 pages later. Can one divorce the transformation of sex during those years from fun times and expressions of love and lust to a primal need that has the distinct possibility of punishing you for it a fearful and isolated death? I don’t think so. I think these things are deeply related.

—

Though that makes it seem like I had an idea of what was happening as I was reading, which I barely did. The back cover proclaims this to be “a chilling chronicle of madness and failure, success and disappointment, and the many ways love dies in a world people find increasingly unlivable.” Fair enough. Looking back having finished, particularly with the Caroline & Denise and Anna & Malcom lines, the descent is clear and affecting. But much of this I felt when looking back. One member of my book club said they’d like to go back through with a character map, the better with which to keep them all straight. I agree. I felt around page 150 that I’d need to immediately re-read this.

—

And there is just a lot in these pages that I can relate to, the yearning and the worry. Characters are anxious, heartsick, worried that they are already dead and spinning and spinning. The tangibility of these emotions and their sensations make the “plot” a little secondary to the sensation of experiencing art. What a snobbish thing to write. Here’s a better translation: I liked it, I saw myself in it, and while I can’t express plainly whether for ineptitude or a sense of self-protection, even when I did not understand, I liked.

—

The ending chapter has a line from a poem, and I looked this poem up because it felt desperately true. It’s from Robert Desnos and I could tell it was translated from French just looking at it. The French is worth reading if you can, even as rusty as mine is now. But the English translation (though I give some pause to the phrase, “baiser sur cette bouche” which seems commonly translated to “kiss your mouth,” depending on if this euphemism was common in the 40s as it is today, may be better said as “fuck your mouth” though in reading the context I think this doesn’t make sense. Though I will tell you if I wrote a poem like this and it had a possible double entendre like that, it’d be intentional, if perhaps a little differently objected.)

I Have Dreamed of You So Much
I have dreamed of you so much that you are no longer real. Is there still time for me to reach your breathing body, to kiss your mouth and make your dear voice come alive again?

I have dreamed of you so much that my arms, grown used to being crossed on my chest as I hugged your shadow, would perhaps not bend to the shape of your body. For faced with the real form of what has haunted me and governed me for so many days and years, I would surely become a shadow.

O scales of feeling.

I have dreamed of you so much that surely there is no more time for me to wake up. I sleep on my feet prey to all the forms of life and love, and you, the only one who counts for me today, I can no more touch your face and lips than touch the lips and face of some passerby.

I have dreamed of you so much, have walked so much, talked so much, slept so much with your phantom, that perhaps the only thing left for me is to become a phantom among phantoms, a shadow a hundred times more shadow than the shadow the moves and goes on moving, brightly, over the sundial of your life.

—

I think there is a real chance that this would be a 4-star book for me on a re-read. It is probably a little too entangled for me to ever truly love, but I enjoyed it.

Notes

• p43 - I am writing these notes in the depths of the fait accompli, in no special order. I hardly need to tell you that the worst has already happened, is happening now, will happen tomorrow, and next month, and a year from Sunday.
• p58 - Lyle arrived on the scene at sixteen, a Puerto Rican fuck bunny, towed by the witty, fantastically cruel, grossly effeminate barge of a poet who wanted to be esteemed as Baudelaire Junior, feared for his evil nature and worshipped for his ready tongue. You wouldn’t have inferred that this steamy love machine named Lyle (we learned his family name when the poet let go of him, after months of messy public scenes involving thrown food and jewelry ripped from clothing and body parts) was a bossy bottom by predilection, who only topped as an onerous chore when a date got his signals crossed.
  • TB: Hahahahahahahahaha
• p63 - I know Chrissie rather well. We skirl each other warily at public gatherings. She pretends to adore my work and I pretend to adore hers. Chrissie is a genius at bonding with people incapable of emotional detachment from the objects they covet, the people they envy. She has an infallible instinct that tells her when a sycophant is about to flip over into a lifelong enemy, and a thousand proven methods of getting rid of them a week or two before the Awakening.
  • TB: this catty style of writing is just very, very, fun to read.
• p82 - When Jesse arrived in the winter of 1983, the Marais hadn’t yet become Homosexualville. It was still a languid district of hushed streets and absurdly narrow sidewalks and previous few agreeable places to eat. He phoned up Adam, who rushed over as if he’d been offered a winning lottery ticket. Jesse threw himself into Adam’s arms, imagining they would fuck immediately on Donna’s gray wall-to-wall carpet. For months, Jesse had carried a mental image of Adam’s penis engulfed by his eager rectum, a film loop cresting in the kind of synchronized orgasm that often spells forever-after romantic bliss for characters in movies.
  • TB: acidic writing. Fantastic.
• p96 - What does it mean to save yourself?
• p101 - Oliver could end up a footnote. He vacillates between terror and placid acceptance of this, but his preocupation with it either way has moved him further and further out of the world of other people, he’s not a social human being anymore, and when he drinks, he’s morose and bitter and even less present than when he doesn’t.
  • TB: Sounds familiar.
• p126 - . . .Caroline went on, staring at her tea, unable to shrug off the vibe of a losing battle, “I’m a mess, I should probably be in a hospital. I know I’m slipping over the side. People don’t stay this way this long and get better by themselves. You know I try every day to get a grip on this, this spiral of shit, there’s moments when I remember crawling out of holes in the past, I almost believe I can crawl out of this one. The thing is, I don’t think I can. I mean, I don’t claim I can see anything objectively. I can’t, that’s the trouble. I know it’s going to go too far if I just try to weather it out on my own. I hate what it’s doing to you. I don’t have the right to inflict this on you.”
• p131 - He now has the garden to himself. He watches the barman’s white shirt move through mottled reflectiosn in the windows of the inside bar and wonders why almost any bartender or waiter in a clean white shirt amkes him think about fucking. He ventures to say, in a whisper: “I really am so alone.”
• p132 - He gets excited, aggrieved, sad, stupid. Jesse needs clarity. He hasn’t thought about where he’ll go after Rome. If he drinks beyond a fixed threshold, in the wrong place, he knows he’ll start to perceive himself as an interesting person, and want to involve a stranger in his subjectivity. This would not be dangerous in Rome, as it might be in South America, but it would be obnoxious. Jesse has become economical about giving himself ugly memories.
• p157-158 - Deliberately excavating anything from the sediment of my apartment, anything of more than two or three months’ vintage, on a brutally hot day, could usually reduce me to a muttering blob of regret for every decision I’d made in my life, or not made, since everything in the apartment pointed to a systemic disorder, an inability to discard what I no longer needed, some perverse tendency to cling to messy clumps of never-to-be-revisited past. . .
• p172 - Jesse steps between the waiter’s legs and turns around facing a mirror over the sink. He lowers himself. The waiter pulls him closer, steering Jesse’s ass toward his penis. The position is useless. The waiter stands, pushes Jesse to his knees, sticks his cock into Jesse’s moth. Jesse gags, expelling the penis. ¶ “Look,” he says, fed up, “there are two beds in the other room. We don’t need to do this in here.” ¶ . . . [The waiter] flounces on the bed farther from the windows, knees raised, legs spread. Jesse takes off his clothes. He kneels between the waiter’s legs. He sucks the now half-hard penis with grim concentration. Seconds pass. The waiter springs to his feet, pulls Jesse into dog position at the mattress edge, stands behind him, spits on his fingers, greases his cock, and accurately rams it in. He fucks Jesse’s ass for about thirty seconds. Jesse tightens himself around the pounding, slippery meat. He feels pleasure, even ecstasy, for the half-minute or so that it lasts, he craves an abundance of this stranger’s need filling his willingly surrendered flesh, for the man to take him with some insistent demand for love. The waiter pulls free. Slips into his pants and shoes with absurd haste.
  • TB: I don’t note these ¶s for the sex writing, certainly this is not a fun or truly pleasurable encounter. I think it captures very well the frustrated mismatch of intention and intensity that can happen when one has sex with strangers. Jesse wants to feel pleasure, but he also wants to feel that he is giving pleasure, that the person is aching for him and can only express that with lovely savageness. The unfortunate bit of Jesse’s encounter is that men, especially strange men, are often selfish dickheads, in that they are not interested in anything except their dickhead. Selfish dickheads and assholes (or any other hole for that matter) don’t get along.
• p188 - “I never said I was going to Portugal,” I said. That’s it, I thought: nobody really listens to anybody, we never pay attention to each other’s plans, and so we eventually feel like balls of matter spinning alone through space, colliding at random intervals. Days become confused with weeks. I can’t even tell if something happened a year ago, or ten. . .
• p193 - “Where I stay,” Shamir continues, “not so nice hotel. But man at desk from Adana. His house in Adana, close by my house, I know him, you come there, is no problem. Pay for room, maybe you sleep, maybe I come in your room, maybe you come in my room. No problem. I like you, no problem. Drink, no problem. Friend, no problem. Sex, no problem.” ¶ Jesse doesn’t understand why people all over the world have such a thing about saying “no problem.” He does not think there would be no problem with the scenario Shamir is describing.
• p202 - “I’m already devastated,” I say. “Aren’t you?” A recurring subject. “We have no dreams left. Nobody cares about equality, or any utopian anything. We’re all just fucked. The guys who own the world won’t let anything happen anymore.”
• p204 - The few authentically educated, earnest people in the art world wake up contemplating suicide five mornings every week.
• p210 - I think Leon stands a fair chance of nailing him, since they both speak Spanish as their first language, and Ernesto might as well have BOTTOM printed across his green silk shirt.
  • TB: Hahahahahahaha
• p214 - [After Miles takes the narrator to a shadowed area near a gallery and “we attach each other so hungrily…” resulting in Miles coming in his pants…] “It’s a beautiful story,” I lie as he rolls off me and staggers to his feet. I stand up and try to smack dirt off the seat of my pants. It would take nothing for me to burst into tears. He’s going to throw himself away, I realize.
  • TB: This is one of the saddest moments of the book, I think.
• p226 - “But Dickie’s basically right. Until you learn to love yourself, you can’t really love anybody else.”
  • TB: This little bit of fortune-cookie therapyspeak, so beloved in the intervention settings, the terrible and annoying condescension that everyone that’s ever said it enjoys offering to the recipient. What a load of horseshit. My extreme bitterness at this dumb lyric probably betrays an enormous and boring self-hatred.
• p228 - “I expect I’ll end up alone,” I said. “I think you get used to it. Some parts of it you even get to like. It’s depressing to have to take care of everything in life by yourself, but you also have your freedom. . .”
• p254 - “Great. Thanks. Incidentally, I’m sorry I’ve been out of touch.” ¶ “I miss you when I don’t hear from you,” I said. “But obviously, you’ve had your hands full.” ¶ And when you didn’t, I thought, I still didn’t hear from you. I wondered again if there was something about me that people chose to avoid, except when they needed help.
• p258 - ==Was there an element of calculation here, an aspect of expedience? To answer that you would need to define what a good person is, and whether purity of heart requires having only one reason for doing anything. What constitutes a good person? Answer that.==
• p263 - I know, too, that Edith Eddy is suffering. I have only now realized how little difference it makes if we engineer our own unhappiness or have it inflicted on us.
• p277 - “I feel dead,” he whispers. “I feel like I’m already dead.”
• p284 - I have dreamed of you so much—I can’t keep the Robert Desnos line from enunciating itself in my head—that you have lost your reality.
  • TB: emphasis in original (author is quoting a lyric, I suppose).