Fiction by Holly Combs, Spring & Summer 2013
*
It has always shocked me the certain philosophical theories do not make immediate sense to everyone. Considering that I was only vaguely aware of what the word philosophy meant before attending college, I did not expect to show a particular aptitude for the subject. Surprisingly, I came to find that friends and classmates—philosophy majors, even—were coming to me, copies of Thus Spoke Zarathustra in hand, asking, "Do you get this?" and I was responding, "It's easy!"
So, lately I've been thinking about philosophy and why it might be that these theories make sense to me, and I'm thinking that the reason is that I've got an honorary degree in feeling too much. Because when my professor first mentioned Hegel's master/slave dialectic, I understood intuitively. He'd barely gotten into the explanation and I immediately knew: the phenomenon that sums up all of my relationships.
We spent weeks on that one.
The class couldn't seem to get it, and I wanted to shout at them: Have none of you ever loved?
Loved in a fucked up way that consumes your ability to think rationally and turns your entire existence into a volatile power struggle where just because you're a dom in the bedroom doesn't mean that you have the power because in the back of your mind you know that you've found a really good sub and she knows that she's a really good sub, too, and at any moment she has the power to leave you, revoking your dom status and leaving you all alone. She's all too aware of this and uses it to her advantage when she wants things and doesn't want to pay for them, so she puts it into your head that if you don't go out at 2:30 in the morning, find a 7-11, and buy her a blue slurpee, it means you don't care about her.
Apparently I was the only one in my class who'd experienced true love.
A few weeks later, we covered Lacan. The professor struggled to break down objet petite a in a way that thirty half-asleep college freshman might care about. This was another one that I knew right away because objet petite a is every relationship that I never had. It's what keeps me up at night wondering if a girl I'll never see again, the one I sat next to on my flight back from Spain, could have been my soulmate. It's what makes me think about that guy I dated for five weeks in high school when Facebook informs me that he's engaged. It's the attraction to something unattainable telling me that there was something special about that guy that I couldn't fully appreciate when I was with him but now I can see it clearly, and I want it. I want it though I know that if I were to see him again his chest hair would gross me out, just like it always did, and I'd immediately start thinking that I saw something special in someone else. I'd start wondering if maybe the stranger at the next table, the one eating the Cobb salad, might be the love of my life. But even if I worked up the nerve to talk to her, I'd notice a hunk of lettuce wrapped around her incisor and the whole thing would be off, and I'd begin looking for that something special in someone else.
We got to Lacan's theories on language, and the professor told us that words are like webs and no two webs are identical. An exact translation is impossible. For example, in French, livre is the word that most closely translates to book, but book and livre do not have identical webs. In English, we say a book of matches, whereas in French the word livre would not be used to describe a book of matches. Therefore, book is not a perfect translation of livre; they don't mean exactly the same thing. This one took me a little more time to figure out. I was in bed reading about signifiers and signified when I got a call from the asshole I was dating at the time. He was drunk and angry, yelling at me, accusing me of cheating on him because I refused to go out and "party" with him. We'd had this fight before. I'd told him that I didn't like going out, didn't like being around drunk people.
"I got enough of that in my childhood," I told him.
And he said, "We're just havin' fun. C'mon," and urged me to be less uptight.
I couldn't understand how going out drinking was appealing at all. Lots of money spent, few memories made. Fights developed more readily. I'd heard his drinking stories. Someone always ended up punching a hole in something, someone always ended up topless and embarrassingly trying to make out with anyone who'd have her, by the end of the night everyone was crying and confessing things that need never be said aloud. But he genuinely loved it and did it often.
Despite my eloquent explanations for my reluctance, he didn't get it, and I didn't understand his insistence that it was harmless fun.
Once again, philosophy elucidated romance (or vice versa). For us, alcohol did not translate. We were using two different words with identical spellings and pronunciations but with two very different meanings.
For him, alcohol meant bro time. It meant charisma in a cup. It meant everyone looked good. It meant holding his ex-girlfriend's hair while she puked after drinking all of those margaritas. It meant Sausage McMuffin hangover cures. It meant feeling young and infinite and reckless and okay with that. Drinking was social for him, it connected him to a series of people he otherwise may have never talked to. If words were webs, for my boyfriend, drinking was the Worldwide Web.
For me, however, it meant something different entirely. For me, it was a spider web, too complicated, too sticky; it trapped me and terrified me and was never a good thing to be tangled up in. For me, drinking meant an excuse for emotional abuse. It meant that I would be going without food and peeing into bottles because I could hear my mother out there slamming things around and muttering to herself, and I couldn't risk being seen and targeted for an attack. It meant being dragged up the stairs by my hair because my dad left and she hurt so much that she needed to share some of her pain with me. It meant that my cousin was technically a murderer at age nineteen and that if he woke up from his coma he was going to jail. It meant holding the corpse of my pet kitten after pulling her lifeless body out of the dryer as my mother sobbed uncontrollably, insisting that it was our babysitter's fault, not hers, never hers. It meant being told that I was worthless, called a whore and a bitch before I made it through middle school. It meant being made to feel like I was the unstable one, being forced to go to psychiatrists who treated me like everything I said was a lie and who put me on pills to "stabilize" my moods. It meant an excuse for boyfriends to cheat on me or to verbally abuse me. It meant having my lip split open when all my lips ever did to them was kiss them.
To me, alcohol meant a lack of control, and I know that's the appeal for some people, but for me it meant my hands were bound and the people who were supposed to be loving me unconditionally were spitting in my face.
I let my boyfriend in on my revelation, but he was already passed out and on his way to a hangover. I hung up the phone and went back to reading. I am not sure that the tradeoff for philosophical aptitude has been worth it.
*
Holly Combs is a queer feminist/humanist poet and storyteller living in New Orleans. Her work has been published in Calla Lilies and her prose poetry will appear in From the Depths, published by Haunted Waters Press.