Obsession Never Ends It Shifts Quotes

I will take you down my own avenue of remembrance, which winds among the hazards and shadows of my single year as a plebe. I cannot come to this story in full voice. I want to speak for the boys who were violated by this school, the ones who left ashamed and broken and dishonored, who departed from the Institute with wounds and bitter grievances. I want also to speak for the triumphant boys who took everything the system could throw at them, endured every torment and excess, and survived the ordeal of the freshman year with a feeling of transformation and achievement that they never had felt before and would never know again with such clarity and elation. I will speak from my memory- my memory- a memory that is all refracting light slanting through prisms and dreams, a shifting, troubled riot of electrons charged with pain and wonder. My memory often seems like a city of exiled poets afire with the astonishment of language, each believing in the integrity of his own witness, each with a separate version of culture and history, and the divine essentional fire that is poetry itself. But i will try to isolate that one lonely singer who gathered the fragments of my plebe year and set the screams to music. For many years, I have refused to listen as his obsessive voice narrated the malignant litany of crimes against my boyhood. We isolate those poets who cause us the greatest pain; we silence them in any way we can. I have never allowed this furious dissident the courtesy of my full attention. His poems are songs for the dead to me. Something dies in me every time I hear his low, courageous voice calling to me from the solitude of his exile. He has always known that someday I would have to listen to his story, that I would have to deal with the truth or falsity of his witness. He has always known that someday I must take full responsibility for his creation and that, in finally listening to him, I would be sounding the darkest fathoms of myself. I will write his stories now as he shouts them to me. I will listen to him and listen to myself. I will get it all down. Yet the laws of recall are subject to distortion and alienation. Memory is a trick, and I have lied so often to myself about my own role and the role of others that I am not sure I can recognize the truth about those days. But I have come to believe in the unconscious integrity of lies. I want to record even them. Somewhere in the immensity of the lie the truth gleams like the pure, light-glazed bones of an extinct angel. Hidden in the enormous falsity of my story is the truth for all of us who began at the Institute in 1963, and for all who survived to become her sons. I write my own truth, in my own time, in my own way, and take full responsibility for its mistakes and slanders. Even the lies are part of my truth. I return to the city of memory, to the city of exiled poets. I approach the one whose back is turned to me. He is frail and timorous and angry. His head is shaved and he fears the judgment of regiments. He will always be a victim, always a plebe. I tap him on the shoulder. "Begin," I command. "It was the beginning of 1963," he begins, and I know he will not stop until the story has ended.

But since we’re on the topic of identity and narrative voice - here’s an interesting conundrum. You may know that The Correspondence Artist won a Lambda Award. I love the Lambda Literary Foundation, and I was thrilled to win a Lammy. My book won in the category of “Bisexual Fiction.” The Awards (or nearly all of them) are categorized according to the sexual identity of the dominant character in a work of fiction, not the author. I’m not sure if “dominant” is the word they use, but you get the idea. The foregrounded character. In The Correspondence Artist, the narrator is a woman, but you’re never sure about the gender of her lover. You’re also never sure about the lover’s age or ethnicity - these things change too, and pretty dramatically. Also, sometimes when the narrator corresponds with her lover by email, she (the narrator) makes reference to her “hard on.” That is, part of her erotic play with her lover has to do with destabilizing the ways she refers to her own sex (by which I mean both gender and naughty bits). So really, the narrator and her lover are only verifiably “bisexual” in the Freudian sense of the term - that is, it’s unclear if they have sex with people of the same sex, but they each have a complex gender identity that shifts over time. Looking at the various possible categorizations for that book, I think “Bisexual Fiction” was the most appropriate, but better, of course, would have been “Queer Fiction.” Maybe even trans, though surely that would have raised some hackles. So, I just submitted I’m Trying to Reach You for this year’s Lambda Awards and I had to choose a category. Well. As I said, the narrator identifies as a gay man. I guess you’d say the primary erotic relationship is with his boyfriend, Sven. But he has an obsession with a weird middle-aged white lady dancer on YouTube who happens to be me, and ultimately you come to understand that she is involved in an erotic relationship with a lesbian electric guitarist. And this romance isn’t just a titillating spectacle for a voyeuristic narrator: it turns out to be the founding myth of our national poetics! They are Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman! Sorry for all the spoilers. I never mind spoilers because I never read for plot. Maybe the editor (hello Emily) will want to head plot-sensitive readers off at the pass if you publish this paragraph. Anyway, the question then is: does authorial self-referentiality matter? Does the national mythos matter? Is this a work of Bisexual or Lesbian Fiction? Is Walt trans? I ended up submitting the book as Gay (Male) Fiction. The administrator of the prizes also thought this was appropriate, since Gray is the narrator. And Gray is not me, but also not not me, just as Emily Dickinson is not me but also not not me, and Walt Whitman is not my lover but also not not my lover. Again, it’s a really queer book, but the point is kind of to trip you up about what you thought you knew about gender anyway.

Before, he could feel her emotions, but now she could feel his. Even though he’d taken both her pain and her sorrow, that wasn’t what he was feeling now. He felt desire. Desperation. Lust. Obsession. He wanted her. She was all he wanted. All he thought about. She felt it in the way the kiss began to shift from reckless and hungry to languorous and savoring, as if he’d considered this for a very long time and now he was acting out all the things he’d imagined. A faraway place that Tella tried to ignore told her this was all a great mistake – Jacks wasn’t really the one she wanted, Legend was. No matter what he did, or what he was, it would always be Legend. Maybe she could never actually have him, but she wanted him. If she was going to kiss one of the villains, she wanted it to be Legend, not Jacks. She needed to push Jacks away. But Legend never touched her anymore. Even if Legend had been there, he might not have held her, let alone kiss her. And it felt so good to be kissed, to be cherished and touched. To feel desire instead of pain. The sorrow was almost gone, and the kiss grew more intense. Or maybe now that Tella was no longer feeling crushing despair or seeing death, she could truly feel the entire kiss, and every inch of Jacks’s body as it pressed against hers. But even in her muddled state, Tella knew she couldn’t let it continue. She ripped her bleeding hand free of Jacks’s and ended the kiss. Jacks made no attempt stop her. But he made no further effort to move away. They were both on their sides, chests pressed together, legs all tangled. The pain and the sorrow and the hurt were gone. But so was all of her strength. She was boneless. Empty. There were splatters of blood all over her dress and her hands, and all over him. Something intimate, beyond the physical, had just passed between them. Red tracks ran down his cheeks, ghosts of tears he’d cried for her. She should have tried to leave. But her body was exhausted. And she liked the way it felt when Jacks wrapped his arms around her, holding her tight to his cool chest as if he wanted her to stay. After she regained her strength, she would go back to hating him. All she cared about now was that the pain was gone. ‘Thank you, Jacks.’ He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. ‘I’m not sure I did you a favor, my love.

When he shifted a few minutes later and lifted her against his chest, she did not protest but looped her arms around his neck, and that was a kind of trust too. He carried her to her porch swing and sat at one end so her back was supported by the pillows banking the arm of the swing. He set the swing in motion and gathered her close until she drifted away into sleep. Val stayed on that swing long after the woman in his arms had fallen asleep, knowing he was stealing a pleasure from her he should not. He’d never been in her cottage, though, and was reluctant to invade her privacy. Or so he told himself. In truth, the warm, trusting weight of Ellen FitzEngle in his arms anchored him on a night when he’d been at risk of wandering off, of putting just a little more space between his body and his soul; his intellect and his emotions. Darius had delivered a telling blow when he’d characterized music, and the piano, as an imaginary friend. And it was enough, Val realized, to admit no creative art could meet the artist’s every need or fulfill every wish. Ellen FitzEngle wasn’t going to be able to do that either, of course; that wasn’t the point. The point, Val mused as he carefully lifted Ellen against his chest and made his way into her cottage, was that life yet held pleasures and mysteries and interest for him. He would get through the weekend at Belmont’s on the strength of that insight. As he tucked a sleeping Ellen into her bed and left a good-night kiss on her cheek, Val silently sent up a prayer of thanks. By trusting him with her grief, Ellen had relieved a little of his own.