Of novel flesh and strangers

It's been almost a full week since last I wrote here, which means it's been a busy one. Lots of academic nuts and bolts that aren't worth committing to (digital) posterity. And, as always, a good deal of reading: Of Grammatology, Dancing in the Distraction Factory, and the Phenomenology of Perception. Lately, my life seems to consist of three (and only three) activities: reading, the gym, and class (or something related to it). In the grand scheme of things, that's not so bad, though sex and naps on the beach would be nice additions.

Tomorrow, I'm taking a prospective graduate student out for lunch. I know absolutely nothing about him - not even what he studies. Last year my "guest" was for me a remarkable match: queer, into philosophy, fairly handsome, and immensely over-confident. He didn't end up coming, which wasn't much of a surprise to me. Just as I had done, he decided to stay at his undergraduate institution.

I'm not expecting such synergy tomorrow - and indeed find it rather curious that the organizers haven't told me what "Matthew" studies. Either they're not sure - or, and this is just as likely, they're not sure what I study, and so think such information irrelevant. And maybe, after all, it is. These lunches are probably not very important for the decision-making processes of those visiting.

Still, I find them exciting. They're like blind dates except with a vastly skewed distribution of power (that favors, of course, the host). Not only is the prospective prone to over-hasty indentification, but the departmental representative occupies an unusually solid position with respect to his or her own identity. And for me, that solidity is license to experiment.

I've been thinking a lot this weekend (since reading Jeehyun's blog) about what my position might be - my character, so to speak. This is a rather common meditation for me, but (as those who read The Library's Grain have probably noticed) one that has become increasingly insistent over the past couple months. Whether this means that its object has also become increasingly fluid is a question to which I don't yet have the answer.

In the novel I'm working on - currently titled (presumptuously) Work of Art - what I imagine as my identity gets split up amongst numerous characters, but finds itself incarnated mostly in the textual configurations of the protagonist, Stephen, and his "supporting actor," Square. The difference between the two is obvious but difficult to summarize. As originally conceived, Square was Stephen's Cranly, and their relationship was meant to mimic that which is described in Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Square has developed since then: Cranly's quiet self-confidence has been replaced by a schizophrenic jubilance, and his heteroglossic speech has taken on an occasional mean-spirit that (though not at all modelled after him) sometimes resembles that of Buck-Mulligan. Stephen, on the other hand, has departed in many ways from his namesake, but not with any real consistency. It may be that his great uncertainty (about who and how he desires) produces a protean character less predictable than Square's. Or it may just be that he is better able to project (and deny) his own qualities than any of the other characters can or would want to.

I, of course, have since the beginning of the Work's conception leaned most strongly in affection towards Square. He is, without a doubt, the linguistic configuration in which I feel most comfortable writing and thinking. But he's also whom I likely least resemble in my day-to-day existence. There's no darkness in Square, no secrets made sacred by the wards that forbid access. Sqaure is chaste, and unproblematically so. But Stephen goes without sex for reasons that only his Work can tell him. He is the scene in which he watches, from a distance, two other characters (Andy and Sarah) converse in all the dressings of attraction. He is the hand of Square's on his that draws him out the door for places unpredictable and bright with synaesthesia.

But that is prose, and they are letters, names that form and diassemble and form again on pages not all yet written. I am something else. Flesh, let's call it, in keeping with my recent reading. And tomorrow, it will be in flesh that I appear, in flesh that I am spoken, and in flesh that I will bait. And in flesh, I envy him, this Matthew who in title is undecided, a consumer of the identities myself and others like me proffer. Young that way, more known than knowing.

Such a metaphysics I've made here of - really - a very simple meeting! That's the way though - I mean Stephen's way, and mine so much as I am Stephen. Every experience, when given words, encompasses countless others. Words move the way flesh cannot; but flesh, being of words, moves itself as they do for those who trouble themselve to read.