You Have the Body

I was married - and how debonair and confident i was - 15 years ago today. I rose early, dressed slowly, went to Delhez, the fashionable Figaro, to be shaved and coiffed, and there my best man, Freddie Birkenhead, met me: I then entertained 15 ushers to luncheon at Buck's Club - I remember every detail. Today was different.

'Chips' Channon
July 14, 1948
Diary entry

What's this written over our heads? You say habeas corpus.

I say we care enough to be gentle with each other. You say more, many things like laws and news. Things that I understand without feeling.

I reply that we care - oh so sufficiently - to demand pleasure of each other.

You say we free ones shouldn't have monopoly of desire (I was about to say, care for a cartel?). You want those uniformed violators to fry too. You want them forced to drink the blood of their own families. Then you want to forgive them, set them loose again with the right to rifles and alligator clips. Restore to them their camouflage and keys. See if they'll pull the same stunts.

They will, of course they will, I say.

You say people are disappearing around us.

I'm glad you care. Then I tell you, what we really wish for them is not that they reappear; that would be cruel of us. But that they would be as invisible to themselves as they are to us. That they would not know the bone fact of their own detention. That there would be none of their hair left to pull, no more tissue subject to boot and voltage.

You say I talk too much. You say we're too solid to each other to understand.

This I recognize, yes. So I don't tell you that all I have's a wish to commiserate with their victims. None of the sympathy. Just the desire for sympathy. That's the extent of my truth. All I can in actuality do is hold your hand. You, of course, will not allow me this. So I speak none of it.

You say that I can't keep this up. I can't always just feel with my brain.

Voltage. I choke up the synapse: who said anything about brains? I feel through your skin. I say nothing, and I don't reach for you.