Further to my email about the total stranger: Felix is our age, 29. If you want to know whether I’ve slept with him, I haven’t, but I don’t think that piece of information can shed much light on the situation for you. We did go on one unsuccessful date, which I told you about at the time, but since then nothing. I suppose what you’re really asking is not whether particular sexual acts have taken place between us, but whether my relationship with him has a sexual aspect overall. I think it does. But then, I think that about every relationship. I wish there was a good theory of sexuality out there for me to read. All the existing theories seem to be mostly about gender – but what about sex itself? I mean, what even is it? To me it’s normal to meet people and think of them in a sexual way without actually having sex with them – or, more to the point, without even imagining having sex with them, without even thinking about imagining it. This suggests that sexuality has some ‘other’ content, which is not about the act of sex. And maybe even a majority of our sexual experiences are mostly this ‘other’. So what is the other? I mean, what do I feel for Felix – who by the way has never even physically touched me – that makes me think of our relationship as a sexual one?
The more I think about sexuality, the more confusing and various it seems to me, and the more paltry our ways of talking about it. The idea of ‘coming to terms’ with your sexuality: this seems to mean, basically, coming to understand whether you like men or women. For me, realising that I liked both men and women was maybe one per cent of the process, maybe not even that much. I know I am bisexual, but I don’t feel attached to it as an identity – I mean I don’t think I have anything special in common with other bisexual people. Almost all the other questions I have about my sexual identity seem more complicated, with no obvious way of finding answers, and maybe even no
language in which to articulate the answers if I ever did find them. How are we ever supposed to determine what kind of sex we enjoy, and why? Or what sex means to us, and how much of it we want to have, and in what contexts? What can we learn about ourselves through these aspects of our sexual personalities? And where’s the terminology for all this? It seems to me we walk around all the time feeling these absurdly strong impulses and desires, strong enough to make us want to ruin our own lives and sabotage our marriages and careers, but nobody is really trying to explain what the desires are, or where they come from. Our ways of thinking and speaking about sexuality seem so limited, compared to the exhausting and debilitating power of sexuality itself as we experience it in our real lives. But having typed all that to you, I wonder if you think I sound crazy, because maybe you don’t feel sexual desire anywhere near as strongly as I do – maybe no one does, I don’t know. People don’t really talk about it.
At times I think of human relationships as something soft like sand or water, and by pouring them into particular vessels we give them shape. So a mother’s relationship with her daughter is poured into a vessel marked ‘mother and child’, and the relationship takes the contours of its container and is held inside there, for better or worse. Maybe some unhappy friends would have been perfectly contented as sisters, or married couples as parents and children, who knows. But what would it be like to form a relationship with no preordained shape of any kind? Just to pour the water out and let it fall. I suppose it would take no shape, and run off in all directions. That’s a little like myself and Felix, I think. There is no obvious path forward by which any relation between us can proceed. I don’t believe he would describe me as a friend, because he has friends, and the way he relates to them is different from the way he relates to me.
He’s much more removed from me than I think he is from them, and at the same time we’re in certain senses closer, because there are no boundaries or conventions by which our relationship is constrained. What makes it different in other words is neither him nor me, nor any special personal qualities pertaining to either of us, nor even the particular combination of our individual personalities, but the method by which we relate to one another – or the absence of method. Maybe eventually we will just drop out of each other’s lives, or become friends after all, or something else. But whatever happens will at least be the result of this experiment, which feels at times like it’s going badly wrong, and at other times feels like the only kind of relationship worth having.
Other than my friendship with you, I hasten to add. But I think you’re wrong about the instinct for beauty. Human beings lost that when the Berlin Wall came down. I’m not going to get into another argument with you about the Soviet Union, but when it died so did history. I think of the twentieth century as one long question, and in the end we got the answer wrong. Aren’t we unfortunate babies to be born when the world ended?
After that there was no chance for the planet, and no chance for us. Or maybe it was just the end of one civilisation, ours, and at some time in the future another will take its place. In that case we are standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something.
I offer one alternative hypothesis: the instinct for beauty lives on, at least in Rome. Of course it’s possible to visit the Vatican Museum and see the Laocoon, or go to that little church and put a coin in the slot to see the Caravaggios – and at the Galleria Borghese there’s even Bernini’s Proserpina, of which Felix, a born sensualist, professes himself a