vi. pleasure and knowledge
winter, 2000
Fifth installment of an epistolary series I’m writing as part of a larger fiction project
Helene,
Pleasure is one of the most confounding things to me. When I was a less developed student, I thought pleasure was unscientific. An immature view, of course.
As I started my graduate studies here, I discovered that I was overly concerned with human error, a preoccupation that betrayed something personal about me. Something about the reasons for which I do what I do and live the way I live.
I wrote a paper about this epistemic break I had, intending for it to be an exercise to jog my enthusiasm for this work. It devolved into a multi-chapter manifesto in which I explored every thought I’d ever had about pleasure. At one point, I went on a tangent about my high school girls’ lacrosse team and how we used to kiss each other when we were drunk at parties after away games, then act as if nothing happened when we got on the bus home the next morning. I wrote about five pages (of a 20-page paper) about how this experience represented the disconnect I registered between the realms of pleasure and knowledge.
It was completely unpublishable, not even fit for submission as a school assignment. But I had written it, and I wanted my supervisor to read it more badly than I wanted anything else in that immediate moment. I needed her to read it. It was not a sexual or romantic drive, but it was a fervour that wrapped itself around my throat with a power equivalent to that of romantic love.
That’s perhaps not a fair comparison to make when I’m only speaking from what I have read, seen, and observed about romantic love. I’ve been stepping on toes since before I could walk, and all I know about love, just like everything else, comes from my observations. And like with everything else, I thought that science would make it tangible for me.
I love humanity and can’t participate in it, which is why I became an anthropologist, I think. I love creation more than I love God. Maybe that makes me just like any other sinner.
-E
masterpiece of a snippet