the material world

I went to a dinner party last night at a house by the lake. The professor who taught me about a year ago threw something together, and asked if I was interested in coming. I was the only undergraduate, but that didn't turn out as bad as I thought it would be when I found a Uruguayan grad student, D, who struck up fascinating conversation with me. He talked about being an obsessive compulsive who frequented the Strand everyday, back in the day when it was really, a warehouse of a lot of unorganized junk and some buried treasure, accumulating 40 wine crates of books on royalty, and then, throwing it all away. I talked about how, disillusioned with the people I was going out with in New York, I took all their expensive graphic novels and a particularly prized jazz novel, and threw it all into the pile of 1 dollar books at the Strand. We shared more stories, and professed our mutual love for old things, Washington Square Park, preserved manuscripts, de Casa's writing. Then P, let's call my ex-professor that, disentangled himself from a conversation about de Man, came by with his beer, and looked meaningfully at me. "I've been dying to join both of you all evening," he said, "what have you been talking about?" "Books," said D, and we burst out in laughter. "And?" asked P. "Bodies," said D.

Now were three. And we found ourselves in this strange triangle, arguing about why books should be seen as physical objects. "Yes, Dawn likes that stuff," he said, "But frankly, I don't give a shit about materiality. That's ideology, too much of the "essence stuff," I go for that other thing," he said, too jaunty, all most setting out to test us, test me. "Which is equally of the essence stuff. How is that less of ideology and essence? " I said. "Yes, true. Good, good." "This isn't class," I laughed. "No, but it's hard not to see you as my student," he smiled, and I didn't know how to read his smile.

"So I refine what I say," he said, and took a gulp of his beer, "Maybe I am saying that you have a phantasmagorical relation to materiality, I on the other hand, have a phantasmagorical relation to that other thing," he said, "and we are all products of fantasies, and we are all bodies constructed and perceived within the framework of ideology. Bodies and fantasies."

When I first came to Cornell, P and I, we clicked. He recognized it. We both spent time living in the village, me for a much shorter time. I found myself falling deeper into the seductiveness of his love for theory. We were both lonely, I think, and trying to work out our love/hate relationship with Manhattan. Theory was a refuge. I took his graduate seminar, I asked him to supervise my senior thesis, till he took a semester off, and I realized that life post-P, post-theory, was lighter, happier, more fulfilling. One can get lazy with theory. It becomes a frame that locks you in. I changed my advisor, at the last minute. It was for the better. He was too intense.

We were having a punning competition about who would "get each other." Strange reading games to have on a Tuesday night. It was getting late, D rose, and said he had to go. I didn't want to be left there, navigating the labyrinths in this dark house by the lake. "I'll drive you home," I said, more of a statement of intent. "You sure you're all right with the drive?" P asked, pointing to the bottles. "I'm all right with the drive." There was a rough, sandpapery peck on my cheek, and a close hug. I don't think he smelled like anything. "I'm glad you came," he said, "I won't be in New York this summer, but email me." "I'm glad I came too. Will."

D and I walked out into the cool air. It was not yet summer, and it had been raining all day. Spring showers. We ducked to avoid the drenched boughs, "like Alice in Wonderland," I said, as crawled through a garden archway. I drove down the winding road that would bring us back downtown. "I worry about him sometimes," I say, "he lives in his head so much." "Stay in the material world," were D's last words to me as he left.