Thomas Dai’s essay, “Love on the Rocks,” appears in our spring 2019 issue. As a special web feature, we’ve decided to put the text online, complete with more of Thomas’s photos of lovers’ marks from around the world. Thomas also reads his essay for our audio gallery, found here.
Love on the Rocks
by Thomas Dai
A mandarin fell in love with a courtesan. “I shall be yours,” she told him, “when you have spent a hundred nights waiting for me, sitting on a stool, in my garden, beneath my window.” But on the ninety-ninth night, the mandarin stood up, put his stool under his arm, and went away.” –Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments
1.
There is a tree on campus where all the lovers go. They deface this tree, carve their names into the wood and kill the tree slowly, for love. The other night, I dreamed that we were there, and that you were as you always are—sylvan and cool, a little stingy with your words—while I stood beside you filled with shanghuo, that inner heat which my grandmother blames for my acne, my temper, my sleepy, bloodshot eyes.
In the dream, we did not know what to do at the tree. It was as though we lacked the proper tools or the proper sense of each other to act. When I awoke, sticky and unresolved, it was already afternoon, and you had texted me an invitation to swim. I thought about my first day in this city, how the desert air had baked me dry and how my key would not turn in the door of a borrowed apartment. On that inaugural day, I had sat on the welcome mat beside a green scarab as bright and dead as a bauble, watching unknown neighbors doing laps in the pool. Maybe love is always having that someone on the inside, ready to let you in; or maybe it’s the doorframe that swells in the summer heat, catching a dead bolt fast. Maybe it’s neither and maybe it’s both. Either way, I remember buying a cold Fanta from the vending machine, putting the can to the keyhole, and waiting for something magic to happen: a contraction in the frame, an answer to my open sesame.
2.
For years, there has been a folder on my computer called “Love on the Rocks.” Inside are JPEG files: photographs I take of lovers’ marks—the sometimes painted, sometimes carved dedications to love I find in places both public and private.
Most of the lovers’ marks in my collection are small, containing nothing more than a phrase or a set of initials, two letters connected by a plus sign or an ampersand. Some lovers enclose their first names in entirety, though rarely their surnames. Many even date the mark, as if signing a contract. Regardless of what country I find a mark in, it is often accompanied by a rendering of the English word love.
Going through my dossier, I see that the marks are, as a rule, messy and slipshod, as you might expect with illicit jottings made in the dark. As one friend comments, the marks always look like the effort of someone very young and madly in love.
3.
Each mark’s basic message seems clear: at this place, sometime in the past, X and Y were in love. Variations on this message abound, of course. X might be saying she loves Y unrequitedly, making any mark premature or wistful, or maybe Y is commemorating a relationship already lost, in which case the mark says: X and Y were together, but now no longer. Because the actual story of a relationship can only appear here cursorily—nothing more than a place, some names, a span of dates—the observer ends up with a lot of questions. I wonder where these lovers are now and if they are making the same marks for the same people. I wonder why here, on this wall, this slab, this piling of a dock. I wonder if the mark’s placement is premeditated or if it arose out of convenience. I wonder what it is about love that makes vandals out of romantics, and what it would mean to join that incorrigible crowd, to leave my version of a love story strewn across this earth, out there for everyone to see.
4.
I have often had the experience of looking at love from a distance, of knowing it more as a concept than as the warm, embodied feeling it is supposed to be. I share this not to elicit pity but to tell you where I’m coming from with love, or maybe to explain the camera always hanging at my side, this collecting I do of others’ love symbols. An observer may watch a scene for many reasons, but one of them is probably hope—the hope that a stranger’s excess of feeling might spill over and make up for his lack.
5.
Excess is part of what I see in the marks. Like other forms of marginalia, they are gratuitous, a text which never needed to exist. As linguistic acts, they remind me of Roland Barthes’s amorous “figure.” Barthes’s book A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments contains eighty such figures, arranged alphabetically from s’abimer (to be engulfed) to vouloir-saisir (will-to-possess). These figures are “gymnastic” acts, performances of a lover’s language rather than attempts at defining what love is or isn’t. By avoiding conclusions, Barthes’s text ends up reading less like a dictionary and more like a densely annotated script: the romantic “Image-repertoire” of one rather erudite Frenchman.
Like the figures in Barthes’s Discourse, many of the lovers’ marks I photograph are “outlined (like a sign) and memorable (like an image or a tale).” They are tangible, cut by makeshift chisels or limned in colorful pigments. They demonstrate Barthes’s idea of the figure as a “scene of language,” a linguistic thing created and shaped by the love-sick, laboring body. (“Language is a skin,” Barthes writes. “I rub my language against the other.”) Unlike the texts, e-mails, and other pieces of language we fashion to talk about love, each lover’s mark is found in a specific location. A city sidewalk. A scenic overlook. A backyard fence. The place a lover leaves his mark seems to say something, however indirect, about love’s placement—its situation—in his life. Maybe he picks a place because it reminds him of a current or past lover in some potent, inexplicable way, or maybe he simply wants this moment, this moment of marking, to carry more significance in his mind than usual, to be elevated above the other, more mundane moments of any relationship. Though I’ve never been that lover leaving his mark, I still like to imagine his motivations, his persona. I think of him as a hopeless romantic, a person often stumbling from one affair to another. “I am that Flying Dutchman,” writes Barthes, “I cannot stop wandering (loving) . . . .”
6.
For much of my early twenties, I moved around from place to place, traveling and working but also taking photographs of the marks. In Oslo, I found marks jotted in Sharpie on the arched spine of a park bench. In Osh, I found them cut, like permanent hickeys, into the rocks of Sulayman Mountain, near where the Silk Road used to reach its halfway point. In Nepal, the marks marshaled on a gazebo outside Nagarkot, and in Hawaii, they scarred the banyan trees in Ala Moana Park. On Borneo, one rainy season, I hiked for hours on flooded trails just to sit alone on a boulder by a mark left by some now invisible couple. “L + E” the sigil calculated, its grooves slick with algal green.
While I traveled, I thought of the lovers’ marks as evidence of a kind of love very different from the love life (loosely defined) I was then leading, a love life stitched together from brief flings held in many different cities. Though each of these encounters made its own little etching on my mind, it left nothing physical behind, no trace, no reminder. Sometimes I would linger about a person’s apartment or city, but most of the time I was adept at knowing how and when to exit a scene, and how to clear the stage for whoever came next.
Collecting such one-off trysts can get old, even monotonous, and yet I kept liking the specificity of that first and likely final encounter with a person, the way I could bracket him inside just a few telling details—S.’s whorl of auburn chest hair, D.’s juniper cologne, J.’s mélange of appealing accents—the way my love life could, with each encounter, begin again. Barthes also writes favorably of first contact: “Neither knows the other yet. Hence they must tell each other: ‘This is what I am.’ This is narrative bliss¼ In the amorous encounter, I keep rebounding—I am light.” This luminous, ricocheting space of “narrative bliss” is contrasted to the “long tunnel” of indecision and unknowing which follows an initial encounter, otherwise known as that period when you wait for a guy to call or to ghost. Barthes advises against dallying too long in this tunnel. Find someone new, he says. Swap stories and fluids. Rediscover yourself as light in their presence.
7.
I won’t pretend some switch flipped the night we met—gay, monogamous love settling like a spotlight over me. Sitting outside the bar, we talked electoral politics and smoked your Parliaments. Later, I remember noting the slim fall of your shadow, the nautical tattoos half covered by your sleeve. “He isn’t really my type,” I would say to my friends later, a dodge as much as a dismissal.
8.
To feel ambivalent about normative, long-term love doesn’t always imply a fear of commitment or a vision of tethering. Love doesn’t seem like bondage to me, but that doesn’t mean it can’t circumscribe me in other ways. Although I may wish my love to be a private territory—a lease shared by just a you and a me—I know love is also a kind of commons, a chamber we split with a them. Alexandre Kojeve writes that the history of mankind is a history of desired desires, which is to say we seem to want what other people seem to want. The dream of a pure, unalloyed love is just that: a dream; though that doesn’t mean that we don’t keep bumbling around, looking to hit on perfection.
Growing up gay and Asian in Tennessee, I didn’t have many options to figure out, let alone advance, my love life. My parents didn’t discuss love openly, not by word and rarely even by gesture, so I paid attention to television and the social ecologies of my school. Both these environments were awash in straight-white-people love, a love that looked light and glamorous but also occasionally vapid. I didn’t want to have to get dressed up in that love, the love of homecoming courts and Sex and the City, parking lot hanky-panky and Dawson’s Creek, and yet I also couldn’t deny how attractive I found straight love’s image, how enticing loving within the mainstream often could seem.
9.
The lovers’ marks in my collection aren’t afraid to be cheesy or trite. Maybe this is a lesson I should take from them—the need to shrug off my elitism, to try phrasing my love in words of the lowest common denominator.
However queer I act or look, I have always been partial to the regular and the basic when it comes to consuming love’s cultural signs. In the weeks following our first meeting, I would drag my friends to the dance floor whenever a Taylor Swift song played. Taking a piss at a café, I would smile stupidly at the bathroom door crosshatched by hearts and names. At the movies, I would watch a square-jawed actor emote to his shiny-haired love interest, and then I would bike to your apartment in the twitchy, indigo twilight, thinking I was the shiny-haired actress tonight.
10.
But the marks don’t always have to be so obvious. Some of them are strange, uncanny even—“I love you” messages composed in multiple languages; jagged hearts cut into a bus stop advertisement. Once, in Taipei, I took a bus to a grassy park above the city. On the hill, stone pillboxes lined a circular trail, cylindrical structures which the Japanese occupiers had outfitted with antiaircraft guns during World War II. Standing before one pillbox, I could see a series of hearts and numbers scraped into its side like lines of romantic code, a cryptogram whose meaning I couldn’t decipher, no matter how long I stood there and stared.
After descending from the moor, I went first to my hostel and then, as I knew I would, to Aniki, a gay gym and bathhouse I swiped into later that night. I had never been to Aniki before, but the process felt familiar: shucking my clothes in the locker room; walking through the red-lit maze of a dream as hands grazed my thigh, my ass; refereeing a threesome with a PhD student from Canada and a slim, local doctor; feeling like I had too many places to be, too many cushioned cubicles with condom dispensers built into their walls, too many times when I thought I might leave but then another hand, another graze. Something kept drawing me back in—my sex drive, perhaps, but something else as well. I felt possessed by the irrational belief that if I waited long enough, one of these encounters would develop into something which looked like romance. One of these strangers would stir in me something more than just a spasm of muscles. I would know him when I saw him, surely. He would press me against a wall, whisper words both sweet and confiding in my ear. He would leave on me a mark.
Early the next morning, still toiling in that maze beneath the city, I met a man named Sky who lay with me beside a one-way mirror to watch the nude parade scroll past. Sky’s distinguishing characteristic was the thermos of warm water he always carried with him. (Barthes, in his notes from China, calls the water thermos a “fetish object” of the Chinese.) After we cleaned ourselves off, he asked me to jot down his e-mail.
Got a pen? I quipped, one hip cocked in the neon light.
11.
Does my unflagging interest in the lovers’ marks indicate that I eventually want the encounters to end? Or does it actually mean the opposite: that I can feel fulfilled by a love life which is itinerant, even vaporous—each man held only briefly, a cirrus streak crossing my sky?
It seems important to me that many of my first experiments with sex and love happened while I was living out of a suitcase. Loving on the road can feel like what Alain Badiou calls a “tenacious adventure,” even if much of the legwork (for gay men at least) is completed via apps like Tinder and Adam4Adam. As I traveled, invitations would appear on my phone. The men who messaged me didn’t beat around the bush. After a flurry of pictorial exchanges to verify mutual interest, they would ask if I wanted to “host” or to “travel.” My answer was always the latter.
There were times when I felt like a sex tourist making an atlas of quick fucks. I worried that I was treating each lover like a prop and not the complicated person he surely was. In more charitable moods, I wondered if each encounter might qualify as yet another ambiguous window on whatever place I was visiting. In the name of love or really lust, I took many long walks with aliased strangers, letting them guide me around their hometowns and feed me whatever backstories they wished to offer. I learned from a young police officer in Jinghong, for instance, about the lesbian artist he planned on marrying as his beard, and I learned from a restaurateur in Mostar about his queer Bosnian friends who took jobs with international cruise liners to make money but also to get laid. In Copenhagen, I let a Russian photographer school me in skin care and lighting techniques, and in Trieste, I drank tea and listened to an exchange student from Dar es Salaam wax nostalgic about beaches and tan lines and the men with almond eyes lazing in the shade.
I don’t think I care if many or all of these tales were fabricated or embellished. My hope in any encounter was never to discern a person’s true essence, especially as my own self-descriptions were never wholly honest. Depending on the circumstance, I could be a Chinese native working in Beijing, a drunk American expat, a naïve exchange student, a wannabe writer on vacation—all accurate biographies to some extent. I found it was easy to slip in and out of a life when spending time with people I didn’t expect to meet again, easy to discard, if only temporarily, my accountability to the facts. Travel was like this constant game of figuring out what was real and what was fake at the local meat market, a haggling with identity I attempted but never quite mastered.
12.
What I can’t fake is the body—rail-thin and hairless except for the dark thatches under my arms; tanned, oily skin with acne on bad days; tattoos on my biceps and above my right clavicle. In America, this package tends to attract middle-aged white men with watery, Anglo features who refer to themselves—not unproudly—as “rice queens.” Even while abroad, I find I am usually going home with international business types from Kansas who carry pictures of blond nephews and nieces in their wallets. On train platforms and dance floors, I am more often than not drawing the same sets of eyes, the same polo shirts and messy windsors, the same thinning hair and slowly protruding bellies.
The few Asian men I met and slept with while traveling often asked me about American men, by which they meant white men. To them, I was a native informant, a tour guide to the average American male. These men inquired after dick size and eye color and hair that curled. They asked me what it felt like to be fucked by a man like that, taking for granted, as I do, that my preferences go that way. After these conversations, I would find myself asking a question of my own: How do any of us fight othering when our colored bodies seem exotic to us? When we trade upon their currency of difference, and are, in general, pleased with the returns?
13.
If love or its pursuit has been a means of propelling myself through the world, from mark to mark or tryst to tryst, then the motion must go, must cut, both ways. Just as I have tried to take brief excursions through my lovers, I have been, for some of these men at least, a short stay in an exotic land, like lying out on a veranda bathed in oriental sun. These men have toured me, and I have toured them in turn, each of us seeking some congress with difference. Love or its aura can help you pretend you have crossed a great and meaningful distance in touching your polarized body against someone else’s. In rare cases, the amorous encounter can even feel like an obliteration of distance as a concept, a means of saying OK, let’s meet: not tomorrow and not next week, but here and now and nowhere else.
14.
Are we sluts? Carrie Bradshaw asks her friends in an episode of Sex and the City. This is the episode when Carrie is blocked in her attempts to get into a new beau’s pants. Reflecting on her gung ho attitude to sex, she wonders what it means that she couldn’t even fathom a man wanting to wait before sex. “Romance!” Carrie crows to her friend Miranda as they stroll around Central Park. “I’m telling you it didn’t even occur to me, which is so depressing!”
Did I forget about romance, I ask, when I took you home after just a whiskey and a pickle back that first night? Or when I gave head to a bi-curious German in an Auckland bathroom? Or when a grad student in Somerville told me I looked like his Burmese twink dream, but I slept with him anyways? Did I forget about romance each and every time I let an affair fizzle out by not following up or never responding? And if I did, does that make me a slut?
I find it difficult to consider this question in the way that Carrie et al intend—as an inquiry into my moral condition, my prudery or my sin. To many of the gay men living and loving in the time of PrEP and Grindr, having frequent, no-strings-attached sex with strangers feels more liberating than degrading—a vote cast for “sleeping around” instead of staying put, for dispersing yourself, but also replenishing certain reserves. Without glamorizing promiscuity too much, I want to say that in loving this way, I have tested the scope of my freedom and that of others. I have tried and sometimes even succeeded at falling for the men who come and then go, those men who take you to sheer cliffs of feeling and then just leave you there, all breathy and out of sorts.
15.
At the end of each encounter, however, there is still a moment of retraction, of staring down Barthes’s posthookup tunnel. My limbs untangle from his. I wash up in the bathroom, get dressed, and smile because I’ve seen this scene of language before.
Let me be clear: I don’t think sleeping around is the only or even the best way to figure out what queer love is or can be. My encounters have, if anything, taught me more about what love is not than what it is, each hookup a glimpse into some unfeasible future. It wasn’t love (but an exercise in self-sabotage) when I got on the back of a married man’s bike in Shanghai one summer. It wasn’t love (but kleptomania mixed with boredom) when I left a Milanese man’s apartment with a beautiful postcard swiped from his bookshelf. It wasn’t love (but a reckless kind of loneliness) when I let a man twice my age pick me up beside a Montanan lake, get me very high, and fix me a TV dinner in his father’s trailer camper. It certainly wasn’t love when this man came, shuddering over my pliant, vacated shape, how the pot made me feel like I was slipping away through the air, my borders fuzzy and indistinct. Later, I would grope my way as if blindfolded through the dark of this man’s life. I would find the door, the fence in the grass, the road outside leading somewhere new.
16.
“Some lovers do not commit suicide: it is possible for me to emerge from that ‘tunnel’ which follows the amorous encounter.” Barthes writes from a place of hope. “I see daylight again . . . I begin again, without repeating.” In other words, the view at an encounter’s end is not always so bleak. It wasn’t love the night we met, but it didn’t preclude the option either. Nothing remarkable happened, no bliss, but no regret. Like two obliging weather systems, we developed in line with the forecast: a hipster bar, cheap drinks followed by dancing, the quiet walk at midnight back to my place.
After you left, I sat on my stoop, smoking and trying to remember exactly the way you had descended my body, how I had ascended yours in response. We had exited the room but left the door open. You would come back often, standing at my cusp, asking to enter.
17.
Perhaps my trouble with love is how much I like my wayward singleness, how stubbornly I cling to my own subjectivity, to the knowledge that these vignettes, these marks, are mine alone to inhabit and record. The stranger who is my lover retains always the status of a character in each encounter. I can sympathize with him, care for him, fuck him, maybe even love him, but he need never follow me out the door, back into what I want to label my reality—the life of obligations and strivings.
On the other hand, our time together is nothing if not a series of moments interpretable from both sides. This doubleness is part of what alarms me about spending time with you. I remember an early date when you came over and we watched Wong Kar-Wai’s Happy Together. Lying on the carpet of my unfurnished apartment, we watched that scene where the film’s main characters—two gay Chinese men—slow dance in an ocher kitchen. You were so quiet through this (for me) almost brutally tender scene that I needed to know right then how you were registering the moment. I wanted to compare notes, to be consenting adults in the way one of my college professors used to talk about consent. She would tell her students that consent comes from the Latin consentir or together-feel, and so to consent to a person is to agree to feel together with them, to be as porous to that person and their feelings as one person can be. I looked at you very close and began, tentatively, to frame a question.
18.
Engaging in consentir does not mean melding with your partner in a gloopy state of oneness. Love is not telepathy nor fondue. The centrifuge keeps on turning. We are separate even as we are together. But still, in love, the other is a person not easily shirked or dodged. According to Badiou, to love is to “construct a world from a decentred point of view other than that of my mere impulse to survive or re-affirm my own identity.” This decentering is demanded by any romantic love, a state of being which Badiou believes is at minimum two individuals trying to reconcile (but not necessarily solve) their disjoint experiences of the world. “You have Two. Love involves Two.”
19.
Looking through the photos in my folio, I realize that the lovers’ marks repeatedly appear in places where two entities meet in discord or unity. Romantic vandals leave their marks at the Grand Canyon, where red earth cleaves into blue sky, and at Niagara Falls, where Canada abuts America. The lovers go to Stanley Market, in Hong Kong, to sprinkle their names on the tide line, and they haunt the grounds at Dunkirk and Manassas, where opposed forces once met in mutually assured destruction.
I don’t know yet whether our doubleness needs such commemoration, if I should be getting out my chisel and my paints and going to that border, that wall, that place where often we like to meet. For so long, I have thought about love as a feeling which leaves no such traces, which lives and dies in the moment. I have thought about love through the words of philosophers like Barthes and poets like Ocean Vuong—Vuong who writes: “To love / another man / is to leave no one behind.”
What I have avoided thinking about too deeply is the hope I hold against these words, the hope that we will not disappear into or away from each other, that we will keep our separateness but stay somehow a unit, moving through the world not alone but in each other’s company, each other’s co-feeling. For some reason, I do not balk at the cliché this figure enacts—love as two people’s shared journey, a long march through city and fen. I think of a time long ago, in Manchuria, when I watched many couples casting red paper lanterns over a frozen river. There was a metal train bridge in that city, covered in thousands of lovers’ marks left by people from all over China. I spent hours picking over this bridge as carefully as I could, wanting to record each and every lover’s mark I could find, to bear witness, however fleeting, to all these collected love affairs, these different moments excerpted from so many strange lives. Standing at the bridge’s center one night, I looked out and saw a flock of lanterns detach from the river’s southern bank. The lanterns floated on unsure winds to the river’s other side, where I assume they fell into the snowdrifts as trash.
Chinese love is so often typecast as the honoring of a pledge or the fulfilment of a child’s filial duties. The lanterns over that Chinese river, though, said love differently. That love’s image was uncontrolled, the result of an inexpert heave made in the night. That love traveled, shaking on queer winds, flickering but holding.
20.
While Badiou writes that love may at first “assume a risky or contingent form” before settling into a “construction that lasts,” Barthes asks us how love can even be measured in such terms of safety or risk: “But how can you evaluate viability? Why is the viable a Good Thing? Why is it better to last than to burn? . . .”
There are days when I want to burn it all down, this flimsy construction we have made of ourselves, but there are other days when I want to lounge forever with you in these rooms, petting the shiny skin of your words, dreaming of a tree we might still etch. More and more, I find it difficult to believe in any of the binaries I have tried to see in the marks—these dyads of singleness and doubleness, adventure and fidelity—all we imagine and all that has been imagined for us. By trying (and failing) to discipline love into clear and legible categories, I have mostly just discovered something obvious: that both marginal marks and French philosophers make for poor romantic teachers, however elegant their formulations.
21.
Barthes muses at one point: “If I could constrain the sign, submit it to my sanction, I could find rest at last.” He writes of this task as if it were achievable—to take love’s signs and bully them into submission—but read in context, the line feels more aspirational than confident. The philosopher of language may hope for an end to his painful equivocations, to the trembling sentences and broken patterns of speech, but I doubt he sincerely thinks such peace of mind is coming.
In my case, it helps to remind myself that the marks I collect are made by lovers for their lovers, not for me, this voyeur in the future. What is being exhibited in each mark is more often than not private, an inside joke, a message meant for one person, alone. I love you, I love you, I love you, the photos on my computer say on repeat, and I go on believing they do not say this ironically, that the marks mean something, even if the complexities of that something remain veiled to me, a space I cannot enter.
22.
Once, after nearly two hundred days of constant transit, I came to a town in northern Xinjiang very near what geographer’s call the “Eurasian Pole of Inaccessibility,” otherwise known as the most inland point on Earth. There were no tourists in this town, just goatherds and truck drivers and people like me who came for the pleasure of passing through. I didn’t know where exactly in the surrounding desert the Pole was located, but like any hopeless romantic, I wanted to get as close to the inaccessible as I could. So I packed my bag with just a water bottle and a few packs of Skittles, chose a direction, and started walking.
After an hour, I came to a small but impressive rock formation rising out from the desert and decided to climb it before turning around. I expected that at the top I would contemplate my solitude while looking out over the vast and tawny desert. Instead, I saw smokestacks and train cars and the ragged edges of the town I had just left. I could also see, between tor and town, a giant, bilingual lovers’ mark which some couple had left there in all life’s heat and isolation, a sign meant for you, and for me, but mostly for them.
Thomas Dai is working on a PhD in American Studies at Brown University. His writing and photography have appeared in Guernica, Anomaly Literary Journal, and Entropy.
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