Sludge Utopia by Catherine Fatima

Author:Catherine Fatima
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BookThug
Published: 2018-06-17T22:15:58+00:00

“Thought is a moment of solitude,” someone said during one of the seminars, and I agree. It’s been a very special week at the residency, but I didn’t get what I thought I’d get out of it. I never found the seminars totally enthralling so I participated in only half of them. It is a place that operates under an ethic of freedom, but nevertheless I have a stifled feeling to be so close to a group of others I feel the pressure to be present for. We’ve all elected to be here. We’ve all nominated ourselves as each other’s contemporaries as open, creative people. Supposed intimacy is immediate: it doesn’t have to be won. I feel guilt when I just don’t want to be around, when I’m just not interested in something. I don’t think I’m very clearheaded when there’s an ethic of pure communicability. I don’t want to share all my thoughts! I want to fortify them in private. I articulated with Noah that I think I’m at the point where I’m really splitting open what social anxiety means to me. Guilt has sometimes pressured me into claiming anxiety when, in fact, it’s often that I choose against things. I reject things, and I don’t want to take responsibility for that choice. You get more sympathy from suffering than you do by rejecting.

It’s not as though I’ve disliked this week—I’ve just reached limits whereafter I want to be elsewhere. I don’t know how it should be that I, so intellectually interested in public intimacy, should want it only by piecemeal when it’s right there to be indulged in.

Slept with Noah again last night. We were near each other at dinner, had some wine with Ruby, and then split off to be by ourselves—I asked him to show me the unfinished and uninhabitable wings of the building. I have splinters in my palm from feeling my way under the wooden beams in the dark. I get along with Noah, but I don’t know if I would have initiated sex if he hadn’t. I feel unattached to the idea. How I felt yesterday, giddy upon the cultivation of joy from twin miseries, it was just: right, I’m familiar. I know exactly what is happening and exactly what proceeds to happen if you consecrate the object with whom you share your distaste for the world. You become vulnerable to it. I can tell Noah anything, and I kind of do—that I’ve never had a relationship lasting more than a few months, that I have hugely stilted and erratic attachment patterns, that I think I have a way of understanding and practising devotion that is different from 99% of the world. That I’ve never come with a partner. That I have a weird interest in mommy porn. If he’s hard or not because he has intimacy issues, too, I don’t care at all. I have to explain to him that if I laugh during penetration, it’s a good sign. He likes being

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