Desire

Recurring dream as a child: the girl infinitely wise, and who could speak of everything. The girl who spoke with absolute certainty, though I sensed she did not know what she said. Spoke without knowing, and whose certainty had been sent on an infinite detour. And my listening wandered with her; I followed her. Was it by chance I usually saw her as blind, as though her sight was wandering somewhere behind her eyes?

Later, a letter from a friend written with the same sybilline certainty. I smoothed down the page with my hand. What had I touched? Absolute writing. Blind writing, behind which she wandered. How could I follow her?; I could not, though I waited for her letters every day.

I think I have always sought that measure of blindness in another. Desire within desire – for a kind of pause, a waiting place, that opening beneath a starless sky. It’s always still when we go out for our walks, you said. As though everything were suspended, you said. Out of town, by the path only I knew; you’d looked for it, you said, but you couldn’t find it. I knew the path across the park and over the railway bridge. I knew the way into the interval, although it was only you who could summon me there.

Desire within desire, desire unlimiting itself in desire – I wanted to hear you speak, and to speak in turn. Wanted to hear the errancy of speech, to let speech wander, scattering itself across the plain. Later, when I’d come home, I would try to write from that silence, from that speech. It’s true you had beauty, that I was attracted to you, but that is banal. It was that desire undid itself within desire, explicating itself, opening into a kind of waiting.

To wait – but what for? Desire suspended, desire lost in wandering: your beauty belonged to that suspense. It was nonchalant, unowned, like the speech we sent up into the air. I always thought you were careless of your beauty, that it was taken for granted. But in truth, it was nothing you asked for and nothing you wanted. You would like your face to be totally round, you told me, the face of anyone. You would like to be like anyone at all.

And then you laughed at the way I spoke. Mimicked me. And then laughed at us both: who do we think we are?