About a year ago, I reached the painful conclusion that intersubjectivity is a myth. Not from intellectual insight but for deeply personal reasons. A relationship that meant the world to me came to an end. The whys of course are simple. Without love, desire dies.

So it ended, but along with it, this faith in the idea of mutuality, shared experience, collective intentionality, and erotic communion. One can live a lifetime thinking that someone is within someone’s sympathetic orbit only to find that they were an impenetrable island unto themselves.

So where now? What path forward? The island of the other is not as impenetrable as first thought. There are seepages, after all, tiny eruptions of thought, emotion, feeling that break through and combine with your own. There is, in other words, a trace, discovered only in the other’s ABSENCE, their non-being, that this sense of mutuality can be appreciated, if perhaps not consciously understood. Il y a toujours un qui baise et un qui tend la joue. Out of these seepages we construct a portrait of love, a composite of mutually shared affections and infections. But it is deeply intuitive, and deeply unstable, hence all of the madness surrounding Eros. Live long enough with someone, share their mental and emotional state long enough, and these seepages will be strongly apparent.

It is the same intuition that lets you know at the precise moment, the exact second, even when you are separated by hundreds or thousands of miles in distance, when your partner is in the throes of a wild passionate embrace with someone other than you. Not a fear, not a phobia, but an undeniable certitude. This sudden onset of your own desire kindled because the seepage has carried over and penetrated your own. And this is possible because we are describing a space created by pure geometry, a pure mathematical expression prior to form, where space and time are only emergent qualities generated through the incessant laws of thermodynamics and entropy.

But if this is true, then I have no objective frame, no reference, no map to guide me, no up, no down, no forward, no back. No here, no there. There is, in the end, the frolicking play and dissipation of heat. And upon this radiating force, we are asked to construct our idols, palaces, gardens. God could do no better.