Falling

I like to write about sex, I say, whenever I want to come across as a slightly cooler, slightly more experienced person than I actually am. What I really write about is desire, longing and hope.

Where’s the queer radical revolutionary part, Harriet, my friends ask me, and will you talk about the crazy guy’s penis? I ask them back, isn’t love the same as falling in revolution?
Anticipation, desire, hope.
A total overthrow.

You.

And, maybe some other guys,
and maybe because I’m an alcoholic bourgeois academic, maybe Noam Chomsky.
Yes.
Tonight, I will talk about you, revolution, Noam Chomsky.
About falling.

You

Flirting would consist of a list of academic and cultural references, that only we get, because we, you and me, are a couple.
We’re different, you get what I’m saying when I talk about cyborgs and you explain Rebbeca Solnits essay to me in public just to see who recognizes what is happening right before their eyes.
When I say Eve Sedgewick, you know I mean that words can’t describe our experiences.
When you mention James Scott I know you mean you want to let me know that you want to creepily know me, know what I am doing and want to know who I am.
Enact I Love Dick — the book that is.
Because it is not sex, it’s more.
It is intellectual intercourse.

If only you would stop jerking off.

Revolution

A getting to know what is possible.
Opening my eyes to what I could not see before. Our friends were swept away not by a prince
On a white horse
By riot police.
Vulnerability, writes Judith Butler, is the precondition for resistance.
The precondition for love.

Noam Chomsky

When I fucked Adam, all I could think was
Noam Chomsky,
Noam Chomksy,
Noam Chomsky,
Every time we moved.
I used it as a mantra in order for him to come less quickly — and for me to come faster.
If I would go bourgeois academic again in a cheesy way,
Our sex was as empty as the promise of a better life,
A solution for everything.
Duct tape
But after the turn, everything should be open,
we should explore together, instead, I had everything colored in, without wishing to know him, Adam, for his PhD fitted perfect into my romantic anarchist ideal.
Until we discussed his thesis and he mentioned Universal Grammar rather than Occupy.

You

I fucking love you.
I’m dependent on an idea I’ve created of myself and of you.
An idea I created as soon as you said
you wanted me, not for sex, but for intimacy.
I projected and undefined future,
I thought rather than did, I jumped into my thoughts, disappeared in my head
Rather than jumping with you.
The undefinedness but intimacy, is in my head as coloured in as queer anti-normativity.
That we have no rules. That we aren’t dictated by society. That we do it our own way.
It’s my new mantra and it is as strong as any Disney narrative.

We might even be happy in the end.

Revolution

I fell for him but he only said he would catch me after we broke up.
There’s footage on the television of his tears when he is looking at me when the riot police appears.

As in love, I project things upon the revolution.
Is it you I’m looking for?
Is love a politics of fulfillment, of getting my fair share,
Is it identity politics, a getting what I deserve — I always want more but am never sure if I dare to ask.
Or is love a politics of transfiguration?
Do you even want to have conversations like this?

Falling, falling in love, does it even happen in real life, or is it all in my head? Did I really fall for Adam, my Berkeley PhD who was no activist after all?

Noam Chomsky

They always mention that I’m smart.
“You’re smart” or
“you’re an intellectual”, or, like when I was 16, with the student who went swimming with me in the lake by moonlight
We fell so hard, in love —
‘I love you, because you’re the most intelligent person I’ve ever met”.
I wasn’t only afraid that he would meet someone smarter
and it would all be over, I was afraid
that we couldn’t have sex, because
How can you be bodily, let go,
Relax and be overwhelmed,
If that which makes you attractive are your rational considerations.
How do I get lost in my body, how do you get lost in my body,
If you want me for my brains?

What is attractive smartness in the bedroom, but my idiotic obsession with intellectuals that made me repeat my Noam Chomsky mantra six years after the swimming?

I’m more theoretical than embodied,
but I’m falling.