This is a misrepresentation of the past, a cleavage of truth, an uneven division of attention, I know that. But it really was a wonderful time. Then we were satisfied with the delirium of being together. With a midday hike up a little mountain, smoking cloves at the summit. Eyes young and limpid. We recognized each other’s handwriting and body odor. We slept inside Brutalist enclosures erected in the middle of a pastoral wet dream. We ate unlimited cereal. Undulated across the land. Wore hemp halter tops and flax linen wide-leg pants. With sincerity we concerned ourselves with the signifier and the signified. Our faces, beatific, watched interpretive dance, noise music, Brakhage. On holidays the boys from Los Angeles and Baltimore set off fireworks in a field. One of them once masturbated to a Fellini film in a public arthouse theater. Another possessed a wood-carving of his own penis, to scale. They were each in their own way happy to tell me these secrets. For her birthday I gave my friend an antique cigarette case full of expertly rolled joints. I still love her. Twenty years ago I was a proud atheist. An academic. I took notes. Semiotics, I wrote, subaltern. Jouissance and rhizomatic. I skimmed A Thousand Plateaus and The Sex Which is Not One. I read The Wretched of the Earth and Powers of Horror and A Season in Hell. What Rimbaud’s mother said of her son’s time in Paris: intellectual work leads practically nowhere. But it really was a wonderful time to rejoice in the abundance of our libidinal economy. We did not begrudge indulgence in metaphor. We did not gaze with mouths agape into bottomless black rectangles. The tributaries of our bicameral minds moved toward an oceanic feeling—consciousness was inevitable. We had fun.

Reading Recommendation: Trip by Amie Barrodale