Crisis or opportunity?

The woman I'm in love with announced last night that she's "unhappy with the relationship".

This after my repeated inquiries over the past several weeks as to whether anything was wrong and repeated denials and reassurances that everything with us was fine. Maybe I'm too 'male' in my approach to these things - I want to find out what's wrong quickly, talk about it (not usually the male way, or so I'm told), and then work on fixing it. But this pattern of denial, reassurance, signal, detection, denial, reassurance, signal, detection, denial, reassurance, etc., is one I've seen before from a lot of women I've been involved with, so there must be something that I'm doing that makes it a safe or comfortable option for dealing with things.

It's maddening. I want to fix what is wrong. I want to talk about what might be wrong. I want to clear up misunderstandings. Isn't that what men are always accused of not being able to do? And yet.

The title is a joke - that hoary old cliche about the Chinese characters, blahblahblah. Yes, the Holocaust represented a wonderful opportunity for Polish Jews to rid themselves of their troublesome bridgework, offspring, mortgages, etc... Just the same way that the Cultural Revolution was a wonderful opportunity for the 'intellectuals' to experience famine with the peasantry after denouncing their parents to the Red Guards.

I think it's just a crisis.

Occasional confession II

Currently in the midst of a period of daily porn immersion. Why? Usually trying to avoid something...unpleasant realities. It's not terribly productive, to be sure. When I'm in the middle of one of these, I sometimes even wonder about the Asian philosophies that counsel retention of semen as a way of marshalling one's energy or qi or chi or whatever. Then I remember how much that sounds like General Jack D. Ripper's concern about women taking his precious bodily fluids and I return to the business at, uh, hand.

By daily porn immersion I mean at least one hour each night and usually a half hour each morning, before work. Currently it's old jpegs; sometimes it's old magazines, or DVDs. Some months ago I finished a heroic project; I converted all of my old porn videotapes to DVDs. I was quite proud of this, actually, in some childish way. It felt like I was planning for some sad, lonely future. How sad is that.

So what is this, anyway?

These confessions and reminiscences threaten at times to become highly literate Penthouse Forum letters. Remember those?

“I’m a student a large mid-western university, and I never thought I’d be
writing a letter like this, but that was before my girlfriend and her two
sorority sisters brought over a 12 pack, some bean dip, and the three-headed
vibrator weekend before last…”

Yet I insist on the truthfulness of these tawdry revelations, inspired to some obscure purpose by what seem like less tawdry revelations made by a friend. I’m working up to something, actually, but I can’t get there just yet. I’ve some things to figure out.

Of course the beauty is that I’m a veteran of therapy, much therapy, in fact, and several therapists, and I find it difficult to be fully honest with them about certain kinds of sexual matters and the motives, fears, and emotions connected with them. To be sure, I can be disarmingly frank about some things, like my sadomasochism; it’s easy for me to talk about that, because I don’t think it’s a big deal, don’t think it’s a pathology, don’t think it’s a problem, etc. But things that seem more…problematic? They get handled a bit more gingerly, if at all. I tend to avoid them, even with myself. And I hate that. I loathe my own moral cowardice (that's probably a redundancy), particularly when it comes to self-knowledge.

So I’m here, of all places, journeying back into the past, enacting the classic contours of the ‘talking cure’:

“All he did was to remember
like the old and be honest like children

He wasn’t clever at all: he merely told
the unhappy Present to recite the Past
like a poetry lesson till sooner
or later it faltered at the line where

long ago the accusations had begun,
and suddenly knew by whom it had been judged,
how rich life had been and how silly,
and was life-forgiven and more humble,

able to approach the Future as a friend
without a wardrobe of excuses, without
a set mask of rectitude or an
embarrassing over-familiar gesture.”
- W.H. Auden, “In Memory of Sigmund Freud”

So here's a simple truth, an obvious observation.

My thoughts, my fantasies, my speed-dial slots, my email address books, my Friendster bookmarks, my imagined futures, my idealized pasts -- all are filled with women. Best friends, former girlfriends, perfect strangers, porn stars, girls I vaguely knew in high school and liked, women I worked with and had vivid fantasies about 10 years ago, women I slept with in college once, former roommates, friends, friends of friends, coworkers, etc.

But this fullness is not a surfeit. I can imagine ways that I could spend the rest of my life with one of these women and then not have any interaction with her for months. I can have an explicit, even rococco sexual fantasy about one of these women and then see her a few days later and not even remember the sexual reverie of a few nights before. And let me hasten to add that I am not at all dissociative; it’s like the “sexual object K” has a completely separable existence from the “coworker K” and I never make the mistake of assuming that there’s an intersection. (I suppose this would be the same as making the mistake of assuming that there’s an intersection between the reality of the woman and the image of the web model/porn star that I wrote about a week ago).

It probably comes down to this: What do I want from them?