tension and flow

fun as an imperative

Liu Xiaodong, NYU, 2020

I have a lot of writing to do in November and I was wondering if anyone wanted to get on a giant Zoom call a couple of days a week and write together silently for an hour as an accountability thing? I know a lot of you have told me you want to write more consistently but have trouble summoning the focus. If this is something you’re interested in, you can let me know here and I’ll email you!

Flirting is about tension. It took me a while to understand how prevent flirting, as in, when someone’s flirting with you, you keep the line slack so that they can create no tension. The most common ways to do this are by looking disengaged and avoiding eye contact, or—this can be hard to master—emitting a vibe of perfect, friendly neutrality, so that your pleasantness functions more or less like a wall. You can also do something I refer to as “pulling your energy inward,” which is hard to explain but basically instead of projecting your presence out—around you or directly into the other person—you keep it tightly contained within the boundaries of your body. Done right, this should ensure that no one talks to you. (There’s some anecdote about Marilyn Monroe that describes her doing this.)

Now, it’s not uncommon for people to flirt constantly, often in primarily non-romantic contexts—think politicians like Bill Clinton. I have many friends who prefer to keep a certain level of tension in all their conversations, whether they’re talking to a server or a colleague or a stranger at a party. It’s about engagement, not necessarily about intent. (Though I’m sometimes lovingly exasperated with them—like, stop flirting and let me order my dinner in peace.) Most people who flirt have no goal of acting on it—they simply want to create a moment of connection with another person.

Now, though flirting is about tension, it can also be about flow. Some people are primarily receptive instead of combative. They don’t challenge or tease, they just pull your energy into theirs through listening. (I recognize “energy” is an inexact term, but, sorry, it’s what I’ve got.) In my opinion, the people who are best at it do both—they combine challenge with warmth.

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Writing, too, is about the interplay of tension and flow. You wind up a plot point, and then you let it go. So is intimacy. Another way of describing tension and flow, of course, is play.

In Tokyo my friends were talking about how women report wanting to feel ravaged during intimate encounters, as in, feeling like their partner is overcome with desire for them. And then we were talking about how, wait, actually guys want that too. Unfortunately, there’s too many people who want to be ravaged, and a shortage of people who want to do the ravaging. Why write the book when you could just read it?

To love someone, I think, is to want to surprise and delight them. That’s why I could never resent people who constantly flirt, because on some level they want to surprise and delight the world, and I’m always charmed by the vitality implied by that. And it is, at the end of the day, not easy to surprise and delight someone. You have to pay obsessive attention to what they’re saying with their mouth as well as saying with their body as well as thinking but not saying. You have to keep hitting the ball.

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From Against Botticelli by Robert Hass:

The myth they chose was the constant lovers.
The theme was richness over time.
It is a difficult story and the wise never choose it
because it requires a long performance
and because there is nothing, by definition, between the acts.

He goes on to contrast the difficulty of monogamy with the romance of, uh, anal sex. What a guy. Anyway, I’ve thought about these lines constantly since I first read them. I believe that romantic relationships are really difficult because you are trying to surprise and delight someone over a long period of time, and most people don’t really have the attention span or the stamina for that. Or, honestly, the psychological acuity. And it’s not just about dedication to the person—over a long time, in order to be interesting, you have to keep pulling from the external world. Like how you want to arrive at lunch with your best friends saying: Guys. You will not believe the gossip I have for you. You have to remain generative in order to keep things interesting.

Another way to think about it: a lot of people can write the opening of the book, but how many people can write the next 80,000 words? I mean, think about that line about how when the writer has fun, the reader does too. It’s so hard to keep having fun, to keep up the interplay of tension and flow, word after word, sentence after sentence, chapter after chapter.

Is it your responsibility to be fun? Certainly not. But is it your responsibility to have fun? No one else will tell you it is, but I guess I’ll be the one to say it. If you do not remain alive to the world, the world will not remain alive to you.

This is fundamentally what’s so striking to me about The Power Broker. Robert Caro keeps going for 700,000 words and he absolutely at no point takes his foot off the gas. It’s completely electrifying for the reader. We are lit up by Caro’s attention, absorption. The way he describes Long Island made me tear up. I don’t care about Long Island, like, at all. Do you see what I mean?

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People fall out of love when they lose faith in the story the other person is writing. You wake up one day and think: why am I trapped inside this narrative? I don’t even like your prose.

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This morning I was at the post office and this guy was so excited to see my dog, who was looking extremely handsome after his wash. He dealt down in the middle of USPS and started scratching him in that spot dogs like above the tail and kissing Akko on the snout. He was just so happy about his existence. It was, honestly, sort of off-putting and weird, but also the most endearing thing that’s happened to me in a little while.