There’s a lot of drifting that goes on through the day, a great deal of it pleasant, and its is the content and form of this drifting which I wish to capture when I write. The attraction to the stranger on the train is the easiest form of this drifting for me to grasp and depict, but there are also much more vague experiences of space which I find no container for. I guess when the train came down into South Brooklyn this afternoon at a time when I’m usually not on it, I felt a certain luxuriance in the tree branches which are just now starting to grow their leaves. I guess it reminded me of Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Redwood City, San Carlos, Belmont, San Mateo, all those stops in the South Bay that I’d take when I was a very young adult, only for recreational purposes, on the way from Stanford to San Francisco. I generally had nothing particular that I needed to do there, I’d just go to peruse clothing and bakeries and to go to the park or the coast. I wonder why I didn’t do it more often. I must have been too busy writing.
But I recall always in the sun, always biking, always running, when I wasn’t doing academic work. I’d do real bike rides, at least 50 mile loops, around the South Bay, sometimes doing the tough climb up Old La Honda road, one of the real intense difficult things I had done. This was one of the most beautiful portions of my life. I was absolutely celibate during this time as well and had no strong attachments. I was male then, and on a weekly dose of testosterone.
Anyway, this beautiful, ten-second moment of my train ride seemed especially “dreamy” to me today. I wonder if it’s because of the dream I had this morning.
In short, my patient kissed me, and I experienced it as a rape, a violation. But it was absolutely beautiful and terribly arousing at the same time. In waking life, I am not attracted to my patient, though she is indubitably good-looking.
In the dream I was so frozen with anxiety that it was as if I had detached from my body, the way victims of sexual assault sometimes describe the dissociative experience of a violation. Nevertheless, I was quite aware of what was happening, and the thought that what was happening was wrong or inappropriate kept on echoing through my head. I eventually managed to say, after she had decided to take pause from kissing me, that we could not continue doing this.
She smirked in a naughty way, like she was pleased to see how nervous and tense she had made me, and that she recognized the irony of saying something is not allowed when it has already happened. I had an impression, based on what she had said leading up to the kiss, that she had given up on analysis and therefore felt it was possible to change our relationship into a sexual one.
We weren’t in our usual room. We were sitting in a bright, large portion of a church with luminous, light-toned wood floors, a kind of space I’d never be in unless I was there to play the cello. My patient pulled her light plastic chair up next to mine, and leant and nestled into my side, before bringing her face to mine and kissing my lips very softly and tenderly several times. Her kisses were so “detailed.” I have never thought of kisses as “detailed” before, but what comes to mind is a fine paintbrush or the curves of a cello, maybe even the fine grain of wood on any cross-section of wood, the subtle curvature of xylem.
The content of the dream alone is not outstanding to me. I have a history of being raped by women in my dreams. The last time it happened, it was my analyst, who got up during our session and came and fingered my pussy on the couch. This was also an arousing dream, though of a different mood and quality. In another dream, she expected me to have fuck my previous analyst (a man) in front of her, by mounting him on a chair. He looked nervous and terrified, and I was simply concerned with the question of whether I should go through with it or what it would meant to do it. I have never raped by a man in my dreams. I have never been raped in real life, I have never gotten close to feeling violated by a man, though I have felt violated by my first sexual partner, a girl of my age. Everything was consensual, but the wetness and sensitivity of my body as we fucked for the first time overwhelmed me, and left me feeling disgusted.
When I write about this material, my response is to become aroused by this private theater of homosexuality, where the most terrifying things are also the most arousing, and also the most unlikely to happen. I last had sex with a woman about a year ago, and it was my first time really penetrating another cunt with my fingers. It was so silky inside, it felt like I was plunging my fingers into a smooth cut of lamb meat, I was delighted by the feeling of it and delighted to make her cum, to watch her cum, to hear it, to lick her nipples and observe her very different blonde pubic hair, and the very different scent of her underarms.
She was a terrifyingly beautiful woman, and I wasn’t sure she would accept me. It took four dates before we fucked, and then I felt accepted. I quickly realized that I didn’t like many aspects of her personality, and we stopped dating.
The night before, I dreamt that one of my psychoanalytic colleagues’s partner, soon-to-be wife, was a camgirl. She was doing a couples cam with another girl, and I was envious—I thought to myself, of course she can make all the right facial expressions, she’s an actor. She is, in reality, a theater actor. I also wanted to become friends with her, and was excited to know that she was actually doing this sort of work, which flew in the face of my impression of her as quite traditional, as in a very traditional sort of monogamous relationship.
I had been watching a streamer I like very much, but who only streams starting at midnight ET, so I’m rarely up to watch her. I suppose this streamer I like elicited in me a wish to become friends with her, but such a desire makes me anxious. I have trouble imagining friendships with women which aren’t sexual. I don’t think I could interact with her unless I became a big tipper on her stream.
Does my patient want to fuck me? It’s not really a thought I’ve entertained before. For someone who’s so intent on sexualizing everything or thinking about sexuality everywhere, it’s striking that I haven’t allowed myself to have the thought yet, especially with this lesbian patient of mine who sometimes refers to her “mommy issues.” I have a second patient who is also a woman. This is the most contact with women I’ve had in a while, honestly, through my two patients.
Homosexuality doesn’t bother me much. I feel like I know where I stand with women. That it’s just too hard, and not worth it, to think about women as potential partners, and that if I do end up with a woman some day it will probably be quite romantic, an accident that later seemed meant to be.
I have more romantic ideas about women than I have about men, but inside this romantic bent is an anxiety around merger, around finding a woman who mirrors me, who feels like a perfect equal. If I were to find such a woman, I’d fear I’d lose the ability to tell where she begins and where I end. But then I’d work with her to construct an idea of the difference between her and me. And this would give rise to a kind of beautiful experience of the physical world. Vivid kisses, vivid wood floors, the idea of wood (material, mater) becoming sound.
After the kissing dream, I had a dream in which I visited the luthier who is currently repairing a crack on my cello. I saw the plaster cast he had made of the top of th instrument, which will be used to support the wood when an indentation for the patch is carved out, and when the patch is settling in.
I have to work a bit harder to construct my idea of the boundary between me and a woman in order to have a relationship with her, I guess. With this patient who kissed me, I tend to feel very academic, neutral, and serious. I want her to think of me as a hunched over older scholar, not as someone sexually attractive. With the other patient, I feel more like an older sister, someone who’s rooting for her.
I wonder if men feel a bit castrated to know this, that a woman out there claims that it is easier to understand the relationship between herself and a man as a ready-made form, crude and reproducible plastic or metal, and not something which has to be delicately carved out of wood by a master craftsman.
Many of my relationships with men have involved complimenting their wood floors. And ironically what seems most salient to me in the dream is the quality of the room it was in. This bright room with the kind of beautiful wooden floors which are hard to describe. They are not so light, nor so dark, and the grain of the wood is not so visible from a distance. It was a space in which I might be expected to play the cello, with booming acoustics, a kind of space I haven’t been in in years. I recall that the previous night I had been writing a bit about the wood floors of a room I had seen through a private show with someone on CB. Attractive floors, and an attractive man, and the confusing structure of remote sex work, in which the sex is never consummated through blind touch, but instead through the mirroring of gestures and acts and the sharing words.
I feel a certain kinship with my viewers, thinking about how we might all be dedicated to the experience of attraction. We prefer the experience of being attracted to the experience of consummating our attraction through proximity.
But my patient had given up on the work we had embarked on, and wished to sleep with me instead. She had given up on our distance and our strange form of work in favor of something far more conventional, a series of kisses.
Some viewers do want to meet me. When they ask, I wonder, why consummate the act when we could preserve and cultivate the experience of attraction itself? Perhaps because we hope to be able to move on to the next thing. That’s the only answer I can think of. To get off would be to get off easy, to get off is to get free.