A Long, Rambling Affair

"The rain on my car is a baptism, the new me, Ice Man, Power Lloyd, my assault on the world begins now."
--Lloyd Dobler, Say Anything (1989)

PART TWO. The Lover Speaks to His Beloved.

Now. The night. And your every thought---- the open window ----- and your every thought swallowed up by the open window of your bedroom. The window like a gigantic mouth. And your every thought breathed in --- that my heart could tell you ---- your every thought breathed in by the wind that sucks your life through that summer aperture far out into the warm enchanted wilderness of the world. I can't breath. My mind in a cast. And my heart gushing. And what I need to know is this. If you have ever felt that this life was far more vast and terrible than they were telling you. And that no moment of your life has been or ever will be near-equal to the infinite sum of all your wanting. What do you say, in those moments, in THIS MOMENT, when your heart is telling you that you are standing close to that rare and sacred fire of the infinite? What do I say to you, Cindy? In this moment.

I will greet you. I will greet you because human relationships can be all-but-collapsed into salutation. In our beginning is our end. And I will greet you in that off-hand way our hippie parents taught us to salute. Casual. Laid back. With little moment. With no celebrity or affect. With no formality or contrivance of courtesy, with nothing of society or court. And yet you will see in my eyes some glint or spark of that high-gallantry of ages past. Beneath my smile will burn the heat of passion so pure, so white-hot and blue-flame, that my face will shine for just a moment, the full measure of its virtue raging in the fire of its devotion. And that half-ironic, stilted way we have of greeting each other sometimes Good evening Miss Smith will become by virtue of my feelings the undisguised equal of those ceremonies of court.

And now I reach the great zero hour of the human mind. When the self which knows itself only by means of other things struggles to ascertain how it appears to another. When I will begin to wonder how I seem to you. This wonder will begin in the antechamber of my unconscious. It will resume, hours after I have spoken to you, as part of a conscious line of internal inquiry. It will continue for days and days until the next time I see you and/or have hatched a plan to arrange between us a seemingly coincidental contact. I do not embark upon affaires du coeur so easily because every woman whom I have ever loved has left the architecture of my affect shaking afterwards for years and years. Vibrato of the heart, tremulo of the unconscious and conscious minds. One time, my college girlfriend referred to me using varieties of the German word for sweet for two straight hours during a late-night long-distance phone call. "süß. am süßesten. You süß." I did not know what these words meant. As they were continually repeated my lack of knowledge became a black box of sweet pain. To this black box an overwhelming number of repetitions were continually added. "You're a süß." The thrill of pure sex dropped down through a trap door of ignorance. And I would ask her, "What does this mean?" And she would say only, with great feeling and tremendous invitation, "You süß." Throughout that night my whole being gradually entered realms of ecstasy from which I have never recovered. I could cry thinking of it now.

We have spoken for two or three minutes, Cindy, and I can already assure you that you have affected me profoundly.

What do we discuss, you wonder. Well, what does anyone ever say? We will speak of weather, current events, food, the latest gossip, what we're watching on TV. And when the initial kindling of conversation is consumed but just before the fires of a true conversation have been set aflame, my mind will conduct a panicked inspection of itself for some topic to continue. And if the Muse has supplied for me some gracious words --- O memora me musa! --- what we speak of will not matter at all. Rather, our words will be a dance. The music to which they dance can change. But the movement of our dancing--- this will be everything. I have already forgotten about the food, the time of day, or what I was planning to do this afternoon. This room is moving around me very slowly like a carousel. Your face is all I see.