So, it keeps coming up, doesn't it? What you think of as my failure, my moral failure; or when you're calmer and feeling kinder, my infection -- which implies weakness rather than laziness.
You track some deep change, a growing unrecongnizability, a listing toward being "an ugly American" and a lack of seriousness that rattles your cage but good. You're disappointed and angry. And I know how hard it was to write that last email because I know how angry you were. Which tells me how much you respected me before (which had not really registered with me for complicated psychological reasons most people take for a charming humility), and so prompts this reply.
My reply email to you did not take several tries, it came fast and sure, and expressed mostly my exhaustion with the whole thing. I had in fact been waiting and waiting to write it. I tried for an explanation. I missed. I defended rather than explained myself, and I did that because the real explanation is so much worse than the one you're thinking of.
That I am supported now by a lover paid by the US DOD is not the problem, the source of my months of dark humor, bad jokes, and generalized laissez-faire-ah-fuck-it attitude. I have no trouble at all with my lover's employer, current or previous assignments. I have always had massive, insurmountable, trenchant problems with the policies and their makers that have determined the course of history for the last, it seems to me now, ever.
You liked the me that had a lot of fight in me. The obstreperous me, the oppositional and defiant me. You read that, my faith with Adorno and Marcuse, my company with experimental poetics, with feminist philosophers of a very difficult and visionary stripe, as a kind of intellectual integrity. I had a lot of fight in me.
And for the last little while, and still now, I don't, and you think me intellectually compromised by my relationship because of my lover's employer. You think I'm feeling stuck because this good person has killed people in two wars, and yet I get angry that world class football treats young players as disposable humans. You think that I have blinded myself to the presumed disposable of the people killed in these wars so that I can have some security of my own. You suspect that I'm making too many compromises, have traded my obstreperous integrity for love and a roof.
If only it were that simple, that easily changed.
The gig really is that I have been toying with the idea of decadence, of giving up, getting high, indulging myself dangerously, and letting that stubborn stupid world eat itself alive like it clearly, and dearly wants to.
That's what the real trouble is. I have been having a very hard time shaking off the cynicism, the bleak, near total certainty that my good work and integrity, or yours -- or that of all the brave and shining souls who still inspire me -- is all for fucking naught because the sheer inertia of the complexity of the proliferating, I'll be frank, intentional meanness of the administered-military-industrial-society with which we all live is inexorable, perfected, and utterly disinterested in any outcome other than its own self-annihilating satisfaction. I mean have you seen the stock markets? There is no real reason for those numbers.
I'm not intellectually compromised by having the DOD for a patron indirectly and unawares. I'm tired, and scared, and pissed at myself for even being remotely tempted to just go get seriously stoned and forget it all. Because the shining souls are still there, inspiring and perspiring and generally kicking ass and many of them are my dear friends, and how, my word, how can I let them down?
So, what you have read as selling out, and that's what you mean to say, is not that exactly. It's a soul-cleaving ambivalence, and I haven't even resolved it enough to sell out.
That's the thing, the unnamed quake that has rattled your cage and made you suspicious of and worried for and so angry at me. And that's why all my apologies have rung false. I can apologize for saying asinine things, even if I said them ironically. The irony was inaudible because of this that I can't apologize for: I am struggling, very hard, not to give up.
