On Forgiveness — SPILL 180

BEANS

QINGYUAN DENG
ON FORGIVENESS

Two things can be true at the same time...all it takes is somehow managing to pay the price needed for maintaining a conviction and knowing.

Saint Augustine tells us that forgiveness is reciprocal—forgive others so you will be forgiven by God. I have always had a hard time believing in the primacy of God, and I am suspicious that I will ever feel his presence, even when directly encountering the sublime. Still, I generally find forgiveness a beautiful exercise—with its own limit, nevertheless. So here are my lists of conduct: forgivable and unforgivable.

Being under the influence of love is always permissible. Recently, an art magazine asked me to write about Paul Thek and I wanted to revisit sections of Aliens and Anorexia (2000) where Chris Kraus conjures up Thek’s homosexual, HIV-positive, and Catholic body. But then I realized I had gifted my copy of Aliens and Anorexia—signed by Chris herself after her recent reading at the Poetry Project—to my ex last year, along with some fine china my mother instructed me to send to an important gallerist who signed my visa letter. I said “if you read this, you will understand who I am.” Now I am too embarrassed to ask for it back. I wonder if he could truly appreciate how unruly Chris’s writing is. More importantly, I recently realized I’d do it again if I were sent back in time—not because I fetishize being a martyr for love, but because, admittedly, failure is often more beautiful than success. Love gives time a legible account, defying the fraught mythology of historicity at each disjuncture.

Love gives time a legible account, defying the fraught mythology of historicity at each disjuncture.

Weaponizing low emotional intelligence is never forgivable. A 35-year-old marketing executive I went on a date with last week said that my sweatshirt, printed with the branding of a defunct psych ward in San Francisco, is worrisome and not funny. He then professed that he finds a politics of truth in children’s literature and declared James Joyce’s short stories about Ireland unsuitable for my literature education. For the longest time, I felt oppressed by being 24 and believed that 35 was a desirable age to be. I fantasized that these men in their mid-thirties have learned something I simply couldn’t from reading French Theory. Yet the truth is: a 35-year-old former writer—or anyone who thinks art is unrealistic, removed from everyday life—has nothing to offer, burdened as they are by the cruelest aspects of life rather than delighting in them. Perhaps low emotional intelligence is just a fear of affect.

Bad grammar is more than forgivable. Language is a prison anyway.

Flip-flopping is forgivable; no one wants to go near the end and realize there’s no coming back.

Writing autofiction isn’t fabricating an ideal self, excusing bad behavior, or indulging a victim mentality. The gravity of getting closer to the topology of unconsciousness outweighs the low-stakes writing about places and people a writer has no connection to, which I find inadmissible. Everything is autofiction, dare I say?

I am not sure why Baudrillard on his deathbed spent so much energy laboring over the question if everything has or has not disappeared, and I am not here to psychoanalyze him. Two things can be true at the same time, as my ex used to say. I did not believe him back then. And now I do. All it takes is somehow managing to pay the price needed for maintaining a conviction and knowing another opposite conviction is just as real. Or better, render everything equally true and false at the same time. Taking a position might be admirable, but it makes one unforgiving. I learned this from producing videos of my ex last summer. They are fractured kaleidoscopes of faces, places, and objects that would remind me of him, propelled by the rightful predication that things were coming to an end. In making these videos, I realized that remembering trivial melodramas of the personal is a more mounting task than forgetting to suffer at all. One amendment that makes the process less punishing is that the best thing a video could aspire to be is a symbol.

One video, as if commissioned by a shadowy think tank with a fixation on alternate histories, is my ex’s recorded monologue: with a knowing, almost tender malice, his lips moved silently, mouthing words I couldn’t quite decipher, with shallow gasps between increasingly strained chains of signification, with practiced detachment from the emptiness, and with mechanical devotion to the emptiness itself. A Hungarian psychoanalyst once told me every archive is a tomb. A tomb has a destination—unlike the act of filling a hollow vessel with water only to watch it leak away, which more accurately describes the constructed nature of memory.

Flip-flopping is forgivable; no one wants to go near the end and realize there’s no coming back.