How close can we get to intimacy w/o touching? Cruelty can be intimate. Learning what agitates another person- not just eating w/ your mouth open but saying words that someone will hear in their head incessantly or lose sleep over- can be very intimate. All of the various ways that we provoke one another- through internet postings, taking each other's parking spaces, or fighting for a place in line at the store- are suggestive of a need for intimacy that cannot be avoided. We try to escape one another but can't. We try to thwart & hinder & better one another but only find ourselves constantly looking over our shoulders. W/o the ability to reason, our procreative urge would just produce more & more humans w/o considering why we need one another. W/ it, we sublimate our need for intimacy into all sorts of absurd & inhumane ways of being around one another. Accomodating is an attempt at intimacy. Flirting. Telling someone what you think they want to hear. But to irritate someone, you would have to be familiar enough w/ them to know what buttons to push. Any attempt at shared experience is essentially an articulation of the procreative urge. Whether or not the urge is articulated accurately determines the distance b/w violence & appeasement. Having no interest in mathematics, I have never assigned a value of quantity to the pathology that I must have accrued from 12 yrs of working in retail. Constantly interacting w/ others- answering their questions, solving their problems, scratching their various itches in various ways- yet rarely sharing any words or thoughts of substance & essentially failing to forge a single meaningful connection w/ anyone cannot be healthy. People buy unnecessary things when they are lonely. I cannot embrace my customers or let them cry on my shoulder. & I certainly can't fuck them. I can only sell them stuff. Lew McCreary's Minus Man has similar issues w/ intimacy. He sees himself as "a comet that no one knows is falling." He defines himself only in terms of the effect he has on other people. "For the millionth time I recognize that I don't have an actual life of my own. I enter and leave the lives of others like a virus, coming to know these people in the strangest ways. Who are they?"
McCreary's tragic character only experiences intimacy when he enters the lives of the strangers whom he kills w/ a poisoned flask of liquor kept in the glove compartment of his truck. "The hitchhiker does what anyone would do- what others have already done. He drinks from the flask and slowly becomes the silent thing beside me. He joins my life. We ride down the road together." Had he simply given the man the ride, the hitchhiker would have served himself & then left the Minus Man. Instead, they are a part of the same trajectory. In what may be the most important passage in his book, McCreary attempts a sort of intimacy w/ the reader through his narrator: "Almost anyone can hurt anyone. They just have to know how to wait for the moment, how to be calm, what to use. Everyone's momentum can be trapped and used like electricity, and added to your own." What of this discussion of intimacy, which I may very well be having only w/ myself? Do we have to hurt one another to be close? Is there someone sitting or standing or hovering or lurking near you right now? What would happen if you touched him or her? Would it be inappropriate? Would lines be crossed? Would it get you laid? Slapped? We are creating a world of little or no intimacy whatsoever. I recently wrote a something or other set in the future, when everyone's cellphone services are cut off simultaneously, but it takes us a week to realize it. During that week, we talk to one another, thinking we are on our phones.