Letter Five, paraphrased

The I sounds her cries. “I am part of your fate. Whether our love is worth it or not is irrelevant. So what if there’s someone nicer than you or prettier than you–it doesn’t change a thing. Come and hurt me more. You still mean the same to me. I belong to you.” A passion of desperation. My lover, Xu, abandoned me. For her, I am “incapable of providing the qualities of tenderness and tranquility in a relationship.” Xu seemingly knows a certain burden of loving someone. The suffocation of a narrow, cramped love. So I threaten her. “But you can’t ignore what I mean to you; you can’t ignore our relationship. Even if I die, you’ll still be in this relationship.” A trap. I keep my draft of tears, as I am in the middle of demanding an answer. “So either love me unconditionally or have the courage to face me and tell me you want to separate forever and don’t want to love me anymore, that you forbid me from ever offering this love again–reject me boldly and then we’ll part forever. Only these two options I deserve.” I am angry. “I am sad, so much endless sadness ….”

Flaming Wound

It is painful to read “Letter Five” of Qiu Miaojin’s Last Words from Montmartre. It was painful when I first read it. It is still painful now. Not just because I read it as a broken-hearted queer but also because the sounds of her desperation are catharsis. The letter is in the middle of the book between “Letter Seventeen” and “Letter Eleven” as if it is a place of purgatory between earthly love and whatever comes before and after that. The order doesn’t matter. “If this book should be published, readers can begin anywhere.” What matter is the cry out. The I’s pain is a flaming wound, melodramatic and fantastic.

I don’t want to pathologize this pain. Neither do I want to romanticize it. I rather want to understand such pain. I want to know the grounding of lifetime scars because I believe in a shared affliction emerging from different specificities. I want to reckon with the adversity of moving forward when longing is not given, when staying is not a privilege. Heterohegemony condenses love and the erotic into a moral machine shoving away pollens of possibilities. I want to feel how a letter, like “Letter Five,” becomes a room of no one’s own. The I writer, the you reader, and the we others are wrapped in a litany of letting go.

Take a pause

                      Have a breath. 
"Here is my life bound. I am ready to accept my fate."
I repeat and you might 
want to chant. 
                     "Here is my life bound. I am ready to accept my fate."
                     "Here is my life bound. I am ready to accept my fate."
                    "Here is my life bound. I am ready to accept my fate."
                      "Here is my life bound. I am ready to accept my fate."
                     

Witnesses

Last Words from Montmartre begins and ends with “Witness.” Her friend, Yong, bears witness. “Yong, […] I’ve ripened, wilted, fallen. Yong, I’ve burned completely, I’ve already bloomed fully. […] I blossomed fully [… ] I am still alive. . .” And the lines from Theo Angelopoulos’s The Suspended Step of the Stork are the last witnessing words. “I wish you happiness and health / but I cannot complete your journey / I am a visitor // […] Forget me by the seaside. I wish you happiness and health. //” You wave your hand to her, to Xu, to Yong, to Bunny, to a brief figure of another lover Xiao Yao, to her words, to yourself.

Intimacy often streams to one’s consciousness awkwardly, in wariness. Sometimes, it streams through the residues of survival. Other times it streams through distance and walls of indifference. Last Words from Montmartre is intimacy coming from passionate impulses, dark and exuberant, in which the spiraling words of a young Taiwanese lesbian living and dying in France in the early 1990s swallow and give the joy of and to the world. I’m not sure whether I can “understand Qiu’s death as she wanted it to be understood: as a kind of speech act, as the ultimate means of sealing the connection between art and life.” What about the possibility of misunderstanding Qiu so I (or we) can letting go her means to seal such an art-life connection? Dare we say that even without her suicide, her speech already acts? Dare we say that her death is a closing, an echo of her life that allows us to fly away from her laments so we can live? May we let her love go?

“All I really want …”
“Really this was all I wanted …”
“I will try …”

I misread Last Words from Montmartre. Deliberate-ly. I want to be honest about my suspicion of Qiu. She is eternal for me, and yet my attachment to her works is an underlined blank ________. I used to think I understand the Last Words‘ narrator and her desire: sensual, unrequited, bursting, suffocating. They were familiar. But the longer I sit with her, the more I realize that her letters and diaries estrange me, disposition me. Her intimacies are particular, even when they travel out of their histories. Shared affliction, diverging roots. “I long to lie down quietly by the banks of a blue lake and die […] to an everlasting love.”

I call Qiu’s name before midnight like I whisper a prayer to a lesbian fairy.

The Prayer

Unholy Baby 
pray for us. 
Unholy daughter of passion, 
Unholy darling of tears, 
Lover of women,
Lover of the beauties, 
Lover of mercy, 
Lover of divine grace, 
Lover of hope, 
Lover most fragile, 
Lover most delicate,
Lover violate,  
Lover defiled, 
Lover most distant, 
Lover admirable, 
Lover of eros,  
Lover of our making, 
Lover of our survival, 
Darling most prudent, 
Darling most august, 
Darling most fabled, 
Darling most mournful,
Darling most desirable, 
Darling most gripping, 
Mirror of lust, 
Seat of resistance, 
Cause of our melancholy, 
Sensual vessel, 
Vessel of the fantastical, 
Plural vessels of sapphic devotion, 
Earthly lily
Tower of breasts, 
Bottom tower, castle top, 
House of soul, 
Ark of the promise, 
Gate of water, 
Morning moan, 
Refuge of curious straights, 
Solace of  trans* and queers,
Comfort of the confused, 
Help of lost dykes. 

Let us whisper
Grant, we beseech thee, 
O Baby Darling, 
that we, your witnesses, 
may enjoy perpetual pleasure of yearning and moving, 
and by the inglorious everyday of the crying fairy, ever green, 
delivered us from present violence, 
and may we obtain eternal adoration. 
In the name of sorrow and letting go.