Something—some possession, some spell, the words are hard to use—occurred, and I began to lift my right foot. The effort this took was enormous.

As I struggled, another element entered my visual field, in the upper register, above my right eyebrow: a graphic scale of exertion, like those posters hung on doctors’ walls—a horizontal, timeline-style bar, glowing and hovering like a surtitle to the scene. The scale was an invitation to interpret my experience: it depicted, in increasing orders of magnitude, the amount of effort it should take to draw a foot from water; the amount it should take to draw a foot from mud; the amount from tar; from quicksand; the amount of effort that can be mustered only with a full-blown flight response, an adrenaline shot; the amount of effort on the face of women in videos of childbirth or of men in videos of the effects of taking PCP. At the top of the scale (its rightmost edge): the kind of effort that is so great it becomes invisible, as if to show it on your face would be to rob the muscles that need the body’s energy the most. Intuiting this, I remained impassive. I made the effort, raised my foot—I shocked myself. My left foot followed, less laboriously, and I dragged my lower half with my upper, leaning forward in a deep, hinged lunge, through three giant paces to the pool’s edge, which faced the vaulted double doors of the decaying house. There was a set of two shallow stone steps leading out of the pool; they nearly killed me.

Or, they killed me. In pain, I screamed myself awake.

S was there, but how, where, in what form? S as gravity or surface tension or the combination of both, challenging me like a coach would, to “find my inner strength”?

Or S as pond scum, sadistic, daring me to accuse them of something. (But of what? Of holding, of withholding?)

Or—the simplest interpretation, and the hardest to ignore: S as deus ex machina, as chemistry: adrenaline, PCP.

And what, neglected syllabus, does this have to do with Love?

AN INSTABILITY

The neglected syllabus, the one for Love (I never neglected Anti-Love; I was stalwart and read every word), which was hosted on the cloud and was unstable, with adjustments made weekly, contained these names in this order:

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Plato

Aristotle

Sir Thomas Aquinas

La Rochefoucauld

Danto

Milton

Goldman

Hegel

Schopenhauer

Lawrence

Stendhal

Rousseau

Nietzsche

Freud

Spinoza

Ovid

Shakespeare

Lacan

Klein

Deleuze

Bersani

Foucault

Austin

Barthes

Sedgwick

Kraus hooks

Leconte

Berlant

Badiou

It isn’t that I didn’t read any of it. It’s that I wanted, I want, a different syllabus. Not just different, but different in kind. And I get stranded in the gap between editing and starting a new file.