Tag: intimacy issues

HOTELS

lunchboxpoems:

In the semidark we take everything off,
love standing, inaudible; then we crawl into bed.
You sleep with your head balled up in its dreams,
I get up and sit in the chair with a warm beer,
the lamp off. Looking down on a forested town
in a snowfall I feel like a novel—dense
and vivid, uncertain of the end—watching
the bundled outlines of another woman another man
hurrying toward the theater’s blue tubes of light. 

C.D. WRIGHT

Trauma impels people both to withdraw from close relationships and to seek them desperately. The profound disruption in basic trust, the common feelings of shame, guilt, and inferiority, and the need to avoid reminders of the trauma that might be found in social life, all foster withdrawal from close relationships. But the terror of the traumatic event intensifies the need for protective attachments. The traumatized person therefore frequently alternates between isolation and anxious clinging to others. […] It results in the formation of intense, unstable relationships that fluctuate between extremes.

Judith Herman in Trauma and Recovery (via psychologicalsnippets-blog)
Source: psychologicalsnippets-blog

Louise Bourgeois, The Couple, 2003, installed at Mass MoCA, personal photo

“Fabricated in cast aluminum, the two figures in Couple (2003) are meant to hold on to each other for eternity. Bourgeois suffered from a lifelong fear of separation and abandonment, a dread rooted in the events of her early childhood. Made out of various materials and at different scales, and sometimes hanging precariously together from a single wire, Bourgeois’s many couple sculptures express an anxiety defined by the potential loss of the love object. The suspended sculptures also have the capacity to spin in opposite directions, existing in a perpetual state of fragility and ambivalence. Spirals, which abound in Bourgeois’s work and are echoed in the movement of the rotating figures, have duality inherent to their form:

‘The spiral is an attempt at controlling the chaos. It has two directions. Where do you place
yourself, at the periphery or at the vortex? Beginning at the outside is the fear of losing control;
the winding in is a tightening, a retreating, a compacting to the point of disappearance.
Beginning at the center is affirmation, the move outward is a representation of giving, and giving
up control; of trust, positive energy, of life itself.’”

Like me, the Alien is anorexic. Sometimes we talk about our malabsorption problems. Everything turns to shit. Food’s uncontrollable. If only it were possible to circumvent the throat, the stomach and the small intestine and digest food just by seeing. After several weeks, the Alien decides that he will no longer make love to me because I’m ‘not the One.’ Aliens spend their lifetimes on this planet testing, searching. They get dewy-eyed, nostalgic about hometown virgins.

Chris Kraus, Aliens & Anorexia