Fade-out

Ok. So we must start from somewhere. And it feels like there is only one place to start from: A Lover’s Discourse.

I read it the first time when I was 14. I was well into my Werther back then and the book was amplifying my pleasure or re-reading that other book…I’m losing track of my thoughts here, sorry, I have to focus.

So yes, A Lover’s discourse.  If I now think why I am bound to this book I immediately think of those days back at Uni when I used to live with S.

S. was, and is, one of those creatures condemned to charm people in a way that leaves them always in danger to be completely and desperately alone. When I met him I scarcely noticed, however, and it then turned out that he had been waiting to know me for a long time. No one can really connect with him, even though many, men women, friends or foes, somehow are dragged to try (and die trying). At least so I thought for years, although nowadays things are different, but this is another story.

So, as it happens, I got to live with S. and mere acquaintance became intimacy, then friendship, fairly quickly, and then…well and then we faced a wall. It must have been pretty much at that point that we started reading together, at night, out loud, in his tiny room, with piles of books almost crawling over that single bed. I know, what a lame way to spend our Uni days instead of making the most of the alcohol supplies…I guess if we really had a classic Uni life at this point I wouldn’t be here writing all this, so I’ll take the “lame” and I won't try to defend us.

We started reading together some books, fragments, diaries, as if we could just not say things ourselves. I always wanted him to write a song about me, I never told him so though. He wrote a song about my boyfriend at the time instead. Ironic.

So we read the Lover’s Discourse, and we failed each other in so many ways. Although now I know not in any important one. As it happens now I am friends with S. in a way I could have never foreseen.

When I finished Uni and left our house I made sure that I found an exact copy of the book, published in the 70s, to give him. It was the very same book as the one we used to read, one that belonged to my mum, on which he wrote his name just next to hers. The book I found had a handwritten quote on the first page. I wish I remembered it, because it was really fitting. Oh well….

I am going to read the Lover’s Discourse again, I’ll read it out loud to you, nobodies of the web, and to him, for when he will find this page.

The Lover’s Discourse is a book of fragments taken from many other books. It is about figures that we can recognize in our own discourses about love. “That’s so true! I can recognize that scene of language!!”, it is this form of recognition of meaning that builds up the book.

There is no order in which you should read it, it follows what suits you, and so I’ll start from where I think we should, because here is where we stand.

"Fade-OutPainful ordeal in which the loved being appears to withdraw from all contact, without such enigmatic indifference even being directed against the amorous subject or pronounced to the advantage of anyone else, world or rival. The other’s fade-out, when it occurs, makes me anxious because it seems without cause and without conclusion. Like a kind of melancholy mirage, the other withdraws into infinity and I wear myself out trying to get there.

[…]I am not destroyed, but dropped here, a reject.
 

Jealousy causes less suffering, for at least the other remains vivid and alive. In the fade-out, the other seems to lose all desire, invaded by the Night. I am abandoned by the other, but this abandonment is intensified by the abandonment the other himself suffers; his image is thereby washed out, liquidated; I can no longer sustain myself upon anything, even the desire the other might experience elsewhere: I am in mourning for an object which is itself in mourning (which suggests how much we need the other’s desire, even if this desire is not addressed to us).

[…] Nothing more lacerating than a voice at once beloved and exhausted: a broken, rarefied, bloodless voice, one might say, a voice from the end of the world, which will be swallowed up far away by cold depths: such a voice is about to vanish, as the exhausted being is about to die: fatigue is infinity: what never manages to end. That brief, momentary voice, almost ungracious in its rarity, that almost nothing of the loved and distant voice, becomes in me a sort of monstrous cork, as if a surgeon were thrusting a huge plug of wadding into my head. […] Freud, apparently, did not like the telephone, however much he may have liked listening. Perhaps he felt, perhaps he foresaw that the telephone is always a cacophony, and that what it transmits is the wrong voice, the false communication…No doubt I try to deny separation by the telephone – as the child fearing to lose its mother keeps pulling on a string; but the telephone wire is not a good transitional object, it is not an inert string; it is charged with a meaning, which is not that of junction but that of distance: the loved, exhausted voice heard over the telephone is the fade-out in all its anxiety. First of all, this voice, when it reaches me, when it is here, while it (with great difficulty) survives, is a voice I never entirely recognize; as if it emerged from under a mask (thus we are told that the masks used in Greek tragedy had a magical function: to give the voice a chthonic origin, to distort, to alienate the voice, to make it come from somewhere under the earth). Then, too, on the telephone the other is always in a situation of departure; the other departs twice over, by voice and by silence: whose turn is it to speak? We fall silent in unison: crowding of two voids. I’m going to leave you, the voice on the telephone says with each second.

[…] In no love story I have ever read is a character ever tired. "