folie à une

on the muteness of rejection

Soir Bleu, Edward Hopper (1914)

What does the reject tell himself in order to live?

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Tulathimutte writes devastatingly in “The Rejection Plot”: “Devotion…feels like empathy, but is actually the opposite. When wishful thinking becomes confused with reality, the real person vanishes.” At first I think this paragraph is smart because it feels so good to be taken down a notch. But then I begin to find my catharsis suspect, remembering that so much of life’s matter is fantasy:

Weeks after I return from Fire Island, where I couldn’t even catch someone’s gaze, a man atop me tells me I’m so fucking hot, and I gratefully allow him to re-inflate my ego.

When the UnitedHealthcare CEO shooter is revealed to be an abnormally hot but otherwise normal person, my friends and I race to identify any connection we have with him. I discover multiple mutual friends, that we lived in the same area for a summer. I imagine him falling in love with me. A few days later, my company’s chief executive takes the stage at our annual conference and, through sheer rhetoric, convinces me to instead devote the majority of my cognitive capacities to greasing the wheels of online commerce.

During the holidays, my sister accidentally leaves her bedroom door open while she is on the phone with her therapist. I overhear her talking about me, and righteous anger begins to ignite as I hear her say things that feel patently untrue. At some point, she shuts her door. An hour later, she texts me about a conspiracy theory: a man who died by suicide didn’t really die by suicide, a private investigator has disputed the police’s official narrative, it was all a cover-up to protect the corporate class. “That’s very interesting,” I text back, holding my tongue. There are cover-ups everywhere for those with eyes to see.

To make a living, to make living a little easier. The reasons for whatever it is we tell each other seem to me some of the only real things we have left. That narratives obscure as much as they cohere is a feature, not a bug.

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Work won’t love you back, people parrot, seemingly as a way to virtue-signal their moral superiority to corporate boot-lickers. But neither will art or communism. You are not guaranteed to obtain anything that is really worth pursuing. So then what was the point of wanting him? Ben Lerner: A poem is not about anything in the real exterior world, it’s about exploring the limits of language via its own interiority. How long can my attention last when wrestling with something it can’t fully understand? What does that teach me about myself? What was this fucking poem about? I over-read until the source material is so exhausted that it grows legs and jumps out my window into oncoming traffic.

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At some point, obsessing over him fucks with your ability to write. This situation with ___ is the most urgent experience of human subjectivity that you can have right now. Plus, it seems impossible to write anything true when your core assumptions about how a person should be are themselves being rewritten. When it ends, you tell him you learned so much from whatever this was; he says he didn’t learn anything, but it still meant something to him. It wasn’t meant to be one, but you take it as an insult anyway.

Looking through rose-colored glasses, you saw an infinite series of question marks stretching into a future unbounded; he peered through a telescope and saw only two terms and their finite difference. What is undecidable becomes proof you were undesirable — if he wanted to, he would, QED. The rejector is always right, but against all odds, you still hold out hope for a contradiction.

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A friend says during Rejection book club that perhaps one of the central points of the book is that whether you encounter rejection or not is beside the point, because it’s ultimately out of your control. Instead, it’s how you respond to rejection that is the ultimate measure of character. At the time, you thought that a person with character would get over it quickly, move on from this stupid thing in a normal amount of time. (At some point, you are in Napa retelling the whole story to a group of people you don’t know very well. Halfway through, hearing the facts leave your mouth, you pause before admitting: “From this point on, the situationship was mostly in my head.” Everyone laughs. You feel lucky your cheeks were already flushed from the wine.)

What aspect of character is measured by the speed of your return to the status quo? Self-sufficiency, independence, cool indifference? Perhaps your failure to move on is a revealed preference for other values; disinterest would be dishonest. You’ve always been maybe a little too comfortable lying to others, whether for social and familial “survival,” but lying to yourself seems like a far graver sin. You thought you were moving on, but you were merely treading water. A hamster burns empty calories by watching a video of a spinning treadmill on endless loop. Your failures of articulation are always ultimately failures of feeling.

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You hoped this would be the essay that wrapped everything up nicely and let you finally move on from all of this. (Was moving on the prerequisite for writing, or vice versa? Either way, it took forever.) Instead, you wrote it for the same reason you started writing, the reason that always cushions the pain of any loss, romantic or otherwise. You wrote it because people you admire are writing, because you see a version of yourself that is better for having written it, because you give yourself and your friends the best version of your thinking when you commit yourself to a sentence. Enough of question marks, of being the one who waits, first for him and then for healing. Stop micro-dosing revenge procrastination: the cost of avoiding revealing that you do, after all, still care, is robbing yourself of writing anything at all.

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The other night, I let a stranger into my bedroom, and when he leaves, I go for a run. It is the same route you and I used to run together, except completely transformed: it’s night-time, not a Sunday morning, and drizzling lightly. The raindrops, briefly given form by the lamplight, plummet like flies onto the pavement. Though the ground is slick beneath my sneakers, somehow I do not fall. The drizzle intensifies into a downpour, and soon every movement I make — inhaling, my feet pressing into the soles of my sneakers, even blinking — provokes a waterlogged response.

When the cold finally penetrates beneath my skin, it comes back to me. A sunny morning in the same park a few days after the final conversation, people strolling along with their various companions — dogs, children, grandparents. Jogging, I rounded a corner and was greeted by a vast expanse of trees positively bragging with their foliage, birds chirping loudly, a shock of pungent fresh air. Overtaken by the splendor of the park, I turned around, wanting to know if you saw the same beauty I did, and saw nothing but an empty road.

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In Tulathimutte’s fiction, the stakes are all-or-nothing. Jilted lovers become deadly incels to fulfill delusions of grandeur or alienate themselves so thoroughly from the world that they shrink to nothing. They craft stunningly detailed, auteurist pornography, at the cost of complete and total social annihilation. Or, as in Rejection’s final act, they reject the idea of personhood entirely: the only way to ensure you will never be rejected is to destroy the idea of individuation itself. Rejection: from the Latin to throw back. You can never throw me back if the terms “you” and “me” are rendered problematic.

Is there another way the rejection plot can end? Writing in The Paris Review, Tulathimutte offers a perspective informed by the protagonist of Bernardo Soares’ The Book of Disquiet:

If the price of love is losing yourself in another, then accepting unrequital is a special kind of self-knowledge, one that does not pretend that acceptance comes with any greater reward. Even if everyone would prefer the fulfillments of love, that doesn’t negate the virtue of its absence.

It is a kind and beautiful thought, a nod towards the aesthetic possibilities of failure. In other words, Tulathimutte thinks rejection might not be a story, but a poem.

I don’t think that the absence of love is a “virtue,” and I have never been a keen appreciator of poetry. Rejection, ultimately, is mute; a reminder that you would sometimes do well to shut up. Lerner, again, in Leaving the Atocha Station:

Not the little miracles and luminous branching injuries, but the other thing, whatever it was, was life, and was falsified by any way of talking or writing or thinking that emphasized sharply localized occurrences in time.

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I wanted to write you a monument. Something that would prove that these nine convulsant months were worth something. I failed, and instead I have only this image to offer you. A boy who thought he was a man comes to a standstill after running miles in the pitch-black rain. Frigidity pierces the bone, and he considers allowing it to go further. Weeks ago, you had told him he deserved better; despite knowing better, and without knowing it, he exercises this futile sacrifice in hopes of proving you wrong.

He could have stayed there forever, but his body decides before his mind can settle on the right story. His legs carry him away from this place of watery abjection, so far from home. It is obvious only in retrospect, and tautologically so: there was never any other way of getting himself back.