“So yeah, I just am always drawn to these oversimplifications, I guess because I wonder if there’s something to them.

“The ‘Leary’ is actually Tim Leary, before the acid days—I can’t remember if I said that already. Anyway, one of the ideas associated with this theory is that Together behavior triggers Together behavior. And after I learned about this, for a while I was constantly trying to test that theory in practice. I think it held more often than not. But yeah, too schematic, right? I dunno. Sorry, that was a weird introduction. Um, I’m a Libra and I’m allergic to shellfish?”

E BRIEFLY COMMANDEERS THE NARRATIVE

I’m sorry for interrupting the introductions when they’ve hardly begun, but I’m worried this is heading down a path that will lead us to ruin. Dramatic, I know. Sorry.

Do you remember when I said, “Don’t be fooled by the present tense, the future tense, when they occur?” When I said, “This is a story about the past, it’s already over”?

Perhaps this—the story, its present form—is leading us not to ruin, but to ruins: to the past, or the historical past, at least. To the history of love and loss, the history of love’s foreclosing definition at the hands of commerce and adaptive cynicism, of the state and of vocabulary (marriage, romance, possession), which is to say the history of literature, philosophy, politics, theory, post-theory … Isn’t that exactly what we’re trying to avoid? Are we all just going to sit around the table, talking about ideas? Putting ideas about love—Love—on a pillar or a pedestal, then taking turns knocking them down? Or is that what it means—all it means—to interpret the world while also living in it?

I’m embarrassed by what I’m saying, yes. But I’m not sure I trust that this new narrator, without anything clear at stake, could have a sense of the frame. Isn’t embarrassment, which requires both humility and self-consciousness, the most powerful focusing device? Flawed, but at least it can be tracked. I’m thinking about Giorgos the Greek, his bald attempt to parse desire, his obvious internal references to characters (people, real ones) I would never know, even by description or name.

I’m thinking of the song my friends’ band, years ago, would play a version of to close each show, a dumb and delirious collision between Sappho “38” (“you burn me”) and Mellencamp ’82 (“hurts so good”).

I’m thinking, scrolling back just months (Or only weeks? I forget), of the capitalist’s nipples—of the name, if one exists, for the feeling he would have experienced in the precise moment when he grabbed my arm and froze me in the pull.