Couplets | Kathleen Stewart and Lauren Berlant (29.3)
1. It’s funny to see someone caught in a situation: how are they going to get out of this one?
It’s funny to see survival threatened if the injuries promise to be temporary, no?
That’s right. It’s a theory of judgment.
The first test of a situation is: how much trouble are you in? Or are we in, if we’re members of an indefinite set?
As collaborators, we try not to let each other jump the gun. We throw weight against shortcuts and fake foundations.
We go with our gut about what it takes to get into a thing, really inside its machine and spread. There’s a certain amount of hanging around with the matter that keeps putting pressure on sense.
Attention doesn’t prevent catastrophe, though. Just because we’re on the way to being inside of it, we don’t control the implication, the extension, the resonance, the humidity, the litter...
2. We try to nudge into the cut of a force field or an accretion without the consolation prizes of a stark choice or a one-way street.
Curiosity is a muscle and a release, a work that can be exhausted or find itself stranded out in the open.
I got stopped for rolling through a stop sign.
The cop was otherworldly nice; he had a timbrous voice; the teenagers were all ears, heads buried in their phones.
The next day cops kept coming up to me to chat, my doing I’m sure.
I had temperature problems; the metronome in my head studied the outlines of an atmospheric pressure like someone standing at a picture window watching the trees shake.
By the end of the day, I was sitting on a bench behind a cop car so my ride wouldn’t pull up in front of it and get a ticket for a missing tail light or something.
A cop wearing Wranglers and a sweetly faded eco-green polo shirt asked me formally if he could approach; “Sure,” but I had nothing for him; he bent to pet the dog, “Well, have a good day.” “Ya, you too.”
The airs of a day make rhythm promises and labor demands.
If you notice that much, the next question is what to do with all the swells and their remainders.
3. Strangers want to touch you for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes the emotionally bossy rap sharply on the door of your defenses.
When my father stroked out I whooshed there in bewilderment in case there was a last breath to catch. I’m still shaking my head that he died while I peed.
Suddenly, colleagues kept coming up to pat my head like it was a poodle’s. Inside, which is all I had at the time, I’m like, “Who do you think you are?”
I asked a friend why this sudden pet-companion intimacy. She said, “Because now you seem human to them.”
I’ll never stop resenting that I have to keep re-earning “the human.” It’s like a Post-it that always falls off.
Other caresses come later when people hear we share being moved—by the same song, cats and dogs, cancer or debt. Or caring for parents, or for that friend who has no one, no floor.
Sometimes a good touch comes in the ordinary course of things. Strangers rubbing shoulders on a rush hour bus or in a packed line: we’re murmuring at the world, speculating, eye-catching, nodding, looking at what’s happening in that group, just over there.
4. Or we’re just in it together like the people at the Comfort Inn in Tennessee, a mass not aging well, the hot tub stuffed with bodies holding super gulp drinks in plastic cups with lids and red straws.
Fox news is on in the breakfast room like that’s nothing and the woman in charge tells a little girl she can’t be barefoot in there, then tells the mother she’ll have to go get shoes on the kids. Someone says I told you, not a word from the pissed mother.
Five big bikers in the elevator have something to say, “How’s your day?” “Today was beautiful, but yesterday flooded big time.” “It did?”
A father coming out of a pricey aquarium asks his teenage son “How did you like that?” “It was sort of good.” “Well how about if I sort of slap you?”
Things bloat up, startle, or deflate with the delicacies of timing, attention qualities right on or a little off. If you’re a man, you don’t just put your hand on a woman’s hair to wipe off a bug when she’s floating on a raft in the pool, head turned away from you; when your teeth are really bad you have to watch your smile.
5. Paying attention is an honor system, and such a burden. The security-hungry system tracks you before you can decide whether you want to be known by it or by yourself.
These days you’re getting on the scale only at the doctor’s and facing other report cards of your inattention. You submit to a regime of care there but it feels like a punishment, because you know you can’t be trusted to follow through.
Then there are the humiliations you carry quietly and the light lies you use to try to get by.
Then there are the events of willed cheerfulness demanded by the job, scattered like gifts.
Scars are another document. Graffiti—you hope—of forgettable moments.
6. She’s 16 and trying to find a way in to the world.
She’s started cutting.
The repair is no different, rubbing on Vitamin E oil just means scabs to pick at.
Hospital gauze carefully taped around arms and thighs takes scissors, she keeps a pair under her pillow, the cracks between her mattress and bed frame are stuffed with band-aid debris and bloody cotton balls just a little bit dusty.
7. Someone I’ve known since she was a baby is cutting into her sweet brown arms. Crying over it says something, including that crying is so boring.
It is so boring. When Walter Benjamin hit the wall, how did he set his face?
I imagine a jaw becoming set at the suicide moment. I don’t imagine slapstick.
Maybe they’d be crying though or absorbed by the fine handiwork of executing intentions. Laura, Anil, and Patrick, friends I imagine in their final deadpan.
In Female Misbehavior, a young girl sitting against a bathroom wall cuts her arms and a high-powered lawyer woman eats candy and pukes. In Life is Sweet, a young woman eats candy, pukes it out, and commands her lover to spread chocolate all over her naked body, followed by licking it off of her tiny white pointed breasts.
Self-harm helps to bear desire. My friend’s daughter, a ball of fiery will since she was a baby, uses her ferocious gift to carve out her flesh, which she then takes to her mother to repair. The mother uses vitamin E.
Where did the daughter learn to cut, is what I want to know. Where do the mothers learn about vitamin E?
I learned disordered eating from my mother. I learned bulimia from a boyfriend’s mother.
He was the first person I knew who was mood-medicated. Later he sent me a department store portrait of his baby dressed in a bow-tie and hideous blue suit.
But I’m trying to write about tragedy. The child I’ve known since she was a slug is now carving herself to keep her mother’s care focused, fresh, and inventive.
They’d just gone on a college tour. In college the world is full of strangers who will take forever to love you if they do at all, and I think she saw that.
In college you substitute enthusiasm for love. You know it’s fragile but hope it isn’t.
So much sitting at other people’s feet. So much throwing oneself out there.
That poor kid. Another literalizer, another anxiety artist drawing herself into the rescue me world-picture.
8. Love takes you to a fleshy pocket of whatever, and you’re there for it, like it or not.
She’s floored, you’re floored, we sit on a plush new rug in her room, distracted by its glacial blues, not talking bodily decomp.
What happened when she found herself standing alone at some kid’s birthday party while the others ran around her, ditto at the prom, etc.?
In kindergarten they left her out on the playground one day because she was too quiet to notice and already pulling in on herself even then, when anxiety was still just a watery organ.
Now it’s her only worldly contact. The only other teenager at a movie shows up with a friend—“Oh, of course,” she says—and she becomes a hard-shelled clam; she makes one brave, loud attempt to say something at the last minute in the lobby before we pull apart, pulling up her sleeves, “I have these!”
9. I’m thinking about love on the page. Love draws you like a cartoon, that’s all I’m sure of.
Stories about love come mainly from the wallflower side of the room, the left behind or anxious side. The “so far, so good” or “so far so bad” sides.
Someone’s who’s been loved is dead and your love is a remain. Someone who’s loving rubs together her ambivalence sticks, setting fires where she desires.
Someone is somewhere but no one takes them personally. Crowded loneliness is such a thing.
Are you in the pack of dogs? Or are you heavy?
It’s not just late capitalism. It’s not just American modernity.
It’s constantly testing out whether the world can bear you. It’s feeling out what there is, and what kinds of connection you want.
It’s about building confidence. You don’t die when your bank account hits zero, unfortunately.
Getting and spending. Shrugging or crying out about how there’s no relief, just whiplash.
10. What presses in is the loose-change of things on edge, habits, no-go zones, matter already configured.
Like the wind picking up or more mechanical, like the revving of an engine down the block.
I drank for the first time when I was 15.
Walking home down Elm Street I took a pee on an elm tree.
Then I sat on the curb, butt-to-granite, a plain moment piqued, the night a stark posturing of roof lines and bushy shapes.
A teenage surge, then the labor to return through the partial inevitabilities of what endures, sheltering god-knows-what.
Fifty years later, my sister and I, passing through Vermont, decided to look for the house we’d lived in until we were six and seven, sensing out a track we didn’t know was still in us: up the mountain from downtown, right at the kindergarten, then right again and left and right following the drama contours of the landscape.
Then the house, so tiny, atop a granite outcrop up a long steep driveway we remembered in stories of accidents and sledding.
11. Often you don’t know if you’re lost or found—you just know you’re somewhere.
You look at someone and their gaze is flat, and you wonder how the encounter drained so quickly. What’s the tone of wondering minus wonder?
Sometimes you just hang around to see a process. Or you’re in the middle of a drama that is quickly tipping into a fatal theatrical flop—yet everyone has to follow through just because they’re there.
There, there: you’re absorbed, listening to the dissolution of many worlds. A heap of cinders is burning.
We drag the burnt odor of a sensed event into the next rooms we enter, which shifts the atmosphere of whatever’s happening. That is, if we matter there, which we don’t in most rooms.
Some days, that might be unbearable, like not having a shadow. Other days, you’re twirling in the basement, unseen.
12. This morning was a good one.
She went to school without a fight; he drove, hobbling on his crutches; I settled on the couch, the small dog snoring in my ear; the sun came out; there was hammering to conjunto at a slight distance.
Peg, visiting, was up making her bed, poached eggs, talking to herself and the cat—“all right, kitty, I’m gonna get dressed, clean up...Ok kitty gotta get my ass together, let me do that.” She breaks out in song: “Get to-geth-errrrr, right now, over me.. bum bum bum BUM, ba da da.”
I was thinking about the dreaminess of the impersonal, the compulsion to digress into animal videos or graphic speculations about the ends people come to, the staring out of windows, or going on a strange tear to learn how to hang glide or to turn your skin inside out.
Peg, coming out of her room: “OK! Let me get my shoes on and get the dawwwwgy.”
13. Today a friend calls who is a bigger bully.
They think they can say anything to me, and that it’s my job to protect and repair, which I’m doing here, please notice.
The poison of such a friendship is that banter fakes a scene of two people moving toward each other intimately.
We seem to care but they’re predatory and I’m desperate.
I’m furious at myself for taking it. I cry in the car as I rehearse being done with it.
14. My town in Massachusetts exploded yesterday at five minutes before five.
Sixty houses bombed by their own gas lines when someone coming home turned on the stove, or flipped the light switch, or not even.
Smoke and flames above the trees in all directions, people thought Armageddon even though they were mostly pretty vague about what that meant.
Just the gas company doing an upgrade, 495 gridlocked with emergency vehicles, hotels full up all the way to the beach, an 18-year-old sitting in a car smoking with two friends killed by the flying chimney of his own tenement house.
The so-called system has a sensational day looking for a figuration.
The peripheral vision of what’s going on in the ongoing finds stranded bodies, thank god it wasn’t winter, the hurricane rain is coming
15. My family house burnt down when I was seven, in second grade. I love telling this story.
I was in the tub and my dad knocked on the door: Laurie? The house is burning down, get dressed and get out.
I looked down in the bathwater and remember seeing the top of my hairless vagina. I remember thinking, I’m so glad I got undressed in the bathroom.
I buttoned my maroon corduroy shirt dress and went into the smoky bedroom to get my books and my guitar. I forgot to get shoes and left the house barefoot.
I sat alone on the lawn across the street with my stuff and watched the fire engines and the burning house. At some point I heard my mother screaming at my father that he’d left me in the house to die.
I was seven. The next day I cried in school during show and tell as someone told about watching the fire from her bedroom up the street.
It seemed like fake crying. It stood in for “I know I’m supposed to feel something and show it.”
My favorite thing in second grade was writing plays for Barbies. I’d turn over a table I could crouch behind, hiding as I bobbed them up and down and did the voices.
16. I was walking home from kindergarten in Vermont. The fire trucks were at my house and I saw the phrase “playing with matches” written across the blue sky but it was only the pine trees hugging the house that went up.
I remember a story about my friend sticking a pitchfork into the neck of one of his other friends. I didn’t know what that was about.
The words never seemed to be directed at me at that age, anyway. I knew about the rabbit the others were running around with in the basement but not whether my mother knew I knew.
Compared to the others, I was slow on the uptake.
Busy with some angle of where things might be going or a stray thought about secrets or repercussions.
My sister and I were playing with Barbies when my mother called up to see if we wanted to go shopping with her. I said “NO” as fast and loud as I could. But then they left me, trotting off together; I put some of the sad little clothes on the tiny hangers in the pink Barbie closet not knowing what else to do.
One year my wondering landed on tiny little people living in the oak stump in the back-yard. I told the neighbor girl who had already trained squirrels to eat out of her hand and she could see them too but then one night, walking in her sleep, she showed upstanding over my bed pointing a huge kitchen knife down at me, so that was the end of that.
17. The familial judgment was, I’d cut off my nose to spite my face. At least I didn’t cut off my noise to spike a noose.
I read a novel where a writer went to an island to write but hanged himself unsuccessfully: his daughter visited him out of love but they never became happy. I spent years looking out the window.
Once I almost dropped the dog out the window. Once the door blew open ten stories high and I caught the cat walking out onto the fire escape.
I still walk around seeing the puppy in a heap on the ground and the ginger cat plummeting down. Close calls are a heartache.
People need to feel chosen, pets too. Salt shakers can live on their own.
We awaken and try to gather ourselves into the focus life requires. Not because we control anything but because—I’m saying this flatly but I don’t mean it flatly—there are things that need looking after.
18. Even a walk to Walgreens can be a new line like pushing the hard return on a typewriter. Homeless men coming from Sunday Breakfast at the church at the end of the street walk too slowly; there’s no contact.
A super-yoga crowd moves through them toward their earth mother’s studio; she wears wraps and holds eye-contact for a long time; her EX, the co-owner, claims an energetic lightness in distinction from the rest of his gender and he touches.
Seems creepy but it seems to be something to sidle up to if you’re sticking with the intimacy of this self-work and that belonging.
At Walgreens, the pharmacist tech asks the young guy ahead of me to sign a form for Sudafed and then counsels him not to take the Sudafed-laced allergy medication with another one he’s also buying.
The customer spreads out on the counter a weird little collection of Halloween props and this was August—an orange plastic Jack-o-Lantern candy bucket, something black and scrubby, some rubbery monster figurines, the whole scene a little off in a way that seems ordinary now, including the half-interested questioning it sparks.
19. There’s a hinge where the pit of my stomach should be, if by “should be” I’m allowed to mean given what I expect of a metaphor. Things get caught in it, as though it’s hiding talons like a cat’s paw does.
It makes things moveable within constraints.
It needs lube to protect it from the elements.
We need confidence that our hinges can bear our weight. Because the body is a weight although it’s also lightness.
They keep you together, but not too together. I think of my small blonde friend kneeling in the garden with the chickens running around her laying eggs wherever they feel like it.
She’s doubled over in nausea, play, and intention, enjoying the noise of the world while her head’s bent, focusing on breathing. Sickness is a riot of multitasking, weed-grabbing, apologizing, effervescing, and bending.
20. In the pressure of the moment of survival it’s strange to call you a “she” when I’m in the habit of writing you notes about things that happened, including things that happened to us, though differently. I wait for your poem lists about cooking your chickens’ eggs in special plastic bags to get the shine on them, that luscious stove you chose after months of research, the kitchen remodel it prompted that was supposed to be oh so modest and easy but ended up in maddening months of high stress irritants you also saw the humor in, the characters unfolding, you eyeing the politics coming over the airwaves.
Chickens and eggs, every book there is on gardens, your white garden, the obsessions with fermentations for your white cells, the yoghurts and sourdough breads you perfected, the Kimchi and brined fennel, and all the other ways of going on in the company of delicacies. The Vermont stinky cheese trail, you a woman of purpose ending up in a dusty shed, windows overlooking fields, sills lined with bee carcasses.
The slow timing of stories interrupted and restarted without missing a beat of the narrative as we drove through the desert. Even your driving loops into detours, checking out the substantial waiting to be, the painted tin chicken hauled out of the trunk every time there’s a sight to witness, a cup of tea no charge because it’s really only water and a teabag to a teenager still learning to separate work from the social.
21. Our friend cowls under a blanket even when she’s in the sun: is she resting, thinking?
We look around as though there’s a corner and sniff the air as though listening up.
Once the sun lava flows from the top of my head I move into the non-space of thought.
In the quiet before the sun we each stay real with our singular noise.
Throw ice water on your face when you can’t breathe, a friend says. Write a friend a text because writing is breathing.
It’s true that everyone’s texting and it’s helping them ascend the broken escalators. The circulation makes us feel that we’ve flown through the air and landed back again onto a grandma’s couch, a cushion, a chair.
22. There are couches in a life. Penny, down the street, tore an old one apart with a knife looking for her daughter’s keys which she found multiple sets of along with lighters, joints, note books, whole slices of pizza, a desiccated mouse body, bras and underwear, somehow inside the cushions and the back of the couch, not just stuck in the cracks.
And dishes. Peg, downsizing, hand-washed all the handed-down china that had been cluttering her cabinets, untouched, for decades and put them out in the sun to dry, sparkling, and then had the idea to take them to an antique dealer to get a few bucks for them because they were worth something even though she didn’t want them.
23. Saved My Life: An Archive
Drugs
Poisons
—prescription poisons, see drugs
—bran muffins snatched from a rusty trash can
—room service dinner rolls, small jars of French marmalade, untouched
side salads outside the room on a tray
—coffee
—Red Bull
—Chips Ahoy
—other tinny aftertaste food that never touched nature
Habits
—that keep you on the straight and narrow
—that get broken
—that keep you on the queer
—see Projects
Events
People
Because: I couldn’t go home
I couldn’t get home
I needed to learn
how to self-organize
I needed to learn how to play
I needed to learn to attach to life actively,
and not just lumber on
Paying Attention
—to gestures and sugars
—to the startling hooks
—to statements about the literal
—to the mood-gasses
—to people and the logic of relation,
—for example, students, friends
—to side-eye, ricocheted eye, eyebrow
Pets
Being educable
Being focused
Being a runner
—and the elliptical
—and weights
—and the burpees
Accidents
An imaginative dentist
Gut
—my gut
—other people’s gut
—appetites
Hilarious mistakes
—Theory
—Art
—Writing
—Being adaptable
Vistas
—see Blue Sky Mind
—see any water reflecting a sky
—see the view from where I’ve been sitting
having a tantrum for thirty-five years
Work
—thank you, work
Took My Life: An Archive
Drugs
Poisons
Habits
Events
Passive Aggression
Aggression
Family
Work
—see soft patriarchy
—see snobs
Situations
Shortcuts
—bulimia
—shoplifting
—skimming
—actually I haven’t taken many shortcuts
I had so much life
Notes on contributors
Kathleen Stewart teaches ethnographic theory through writing at the University of Texas, Austin. Her books include A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in An Other America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), Ordinary Affects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), with Lauren Berlant, The Hundreds (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), and currently, Worlding (in preparation).
Lauren Berlant teaches at the University of Chicago. Recent books include Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); with Lee Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); and, with Kathleen Stewart, The Hundreds (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019). “Couplets” is part of their current project, First Responders.