Tuesday January 30, 2007

Literature by
Anne Boyer
© copyright Anne Boyer 2004

Tuesday 30-Jan-2007 17:23

RETORT MAGAZINE ISSN 1445-7164

Trans Dopamine

A friend wrote me that the words lanky farmer reminded her of two favorite words, fuck and larme. When I read her words, I thought not of the correct translation of the French larme, tear as in teardrop, but tear as in tear, rip, rent, split. Lanky farmer means sex and disaster, that roller coaster of dopamine wreaking expensive havoc on the nervous system, ripping the self in two.

After a hit of dopamine the pupils dilate, the heart hurts from jumping, the lungs feel as if they are bound up in twine, the blood rushes the flesh, the brain’s hemispheres stop talking, and intoxication can override any will towards rational behavior.

I prefer to behave rationally. I prefer to have my hemispheres speak to one another. I prefer to be able to speak, too, and not just mumble about the snow. Instead, my voice is choked way down in the place my chest hurts and every syllable, every uttered phoneme is a miracle.

Given that I hate when I am compelled to act irrationally by an old-fashioned evolutionary force, one would think I would avoid the lanky farmer who reminds me of fucking, tearing, and tears. I wouldn’t constantly throw myself in the path of pain, cast a hook and worm for pain, lure pain with small dishes of food near my back door. Yet under the influence of dopamine, my instinct for self preservation has become Ophelia, passing out the posies and choosing a frilly dress perfect for floating in the stream.

I had been warned that this lanky farmer enjoys provoking strong women to fall for him and then cursing them for their weakness. I’ve taken the effort out of the game for him: I am a strong woman who curses myself for my weakness. I hate the vulnerability of limerence.

Limerence is a word for that feeling that one has to swallow someone up like a snake swallows a mouse. Limerence is not simple monkey sex. Limerence is interspecies. Limerence is predator and prey. Limerence has nothing to do with love.

I read that this feeling of limerence goes away with familiarity – thus the marriage started with soul-shaking lust turns stale by year two, the perfect woman becomes nothing but needy by month three. I’ve been married ten years. If limerence is about dopamine – the nuero-chemical of opiates, lust, and runner’s highs -- married love is about tryptophan. Married love is eating turkey and taking long, comforting naps.

It is not, however, my status as a married woman that makes these feelings for the lanky farmer so hard to bear. This appetite is ugly beyond its adulterousness.
I hate watching myself in the role of amorous predator. I hate that the farmer watches this too, that he is probably amused by my crude want. I don’t even think it is a performance for him, maybe just an old dance I’m doing for mother nature. I suspect my ridiculousness may have less to do with the object of affection than the chemical reaction to the object.

Sometimes I imagine if I act on this impulse I will look like a snake who has swallowed prey, and that the prey will be a visible lump in me, a thing that the whole world can watch pass through. Everyone will see the farmer where they once saw me. . But the world has no interest in watching me, lumps and all. There are better, more entertaining shows than a bullsnake and her field mouse.

There is a back story, a moment when the body started dumping out the sense in favor of sexual possession. What this man did, and does, is no justifying provocation, unless one considers pretending to be a scared starling around a hawk provocation.

I have been in perpetual resolution that I should not see him anymore or speak to him unless the whole world would soon find out I am nothing but a lust-mad woman willing to toss herself on the tracks just to feel the wonder of a train-wreck. I wrote him emails, than considered putting a block on his address to my account because I couldn’t handle his reply, or lack of it. I arranged excuses to see him, then spent hours dreaming up ways to cancel.

When the farmer did show up I could barely speak, at most just moon into his eyes hoping he couldn’t tell that my heart was double-dutching and my breath was so stuck I might just explode.

The farmer reminds me of a Joan Mitchell sort of painting – not beautiful or precious, just out of scale and not quite within reach, a not quite landscape, with almost grasses and not-really flowers, and big blocks of things that certainly weren’t skyscrapers, but could have been. I have to keep my hands bound in my back pockets to keep from touching, from making sense of what isn’t quite there.

I have known what I thought was lust. I feel for my husband what I know is love. I have been subject to the intensity of others predatory desire. I don’t think I’ve ever felt this.

To seal the casket of my rational self, my lanky farmer has finally proposed something to me, something slightly wicked and involved, a shadow of reciprocated desire.

This proposal has had the effect of at once inflaming and sating me. Since this proposal, I feel the balance of power shift ever so slightly in my direction. I feel myself able to inhale a little deeper. His offer seems a logical extension of him, desirable even as it is unknown, just another way to satisfy this craving, an expansion of this already incomprehensibly huge desire.

There is lingering over this unfolding arrangement a pregnant feeling, something that quickens like disaster. I still hear a tiny voice of that rational self warning me from stepping one more foot down this path. I take care of my child, make love to my husband, cook a roast for dinner, volunteer. I dream I am on a small dark planet, one with monsters and licking flames. I dream I am surrounded by long arms and legs and flesh smells. I am trying to learn to live like this. It is only biochemical, I assure myself, but so is hunger. I mumble lanky farmer, fuck and larme, alarm, lick, rip, help, knowing that what was once this self will soon be nothing but tears.

Anne Boyer
© copyright Anne Boyer 2004

Bio: A.C. Boyer was raised by farm refugees in the middle of Kansas, just south of the world's largest ball of twine. She lives in Iowa now, west of the Grotto. Her work regularly ends up in New Letters, 13th Moon, Twist, Freefall, and other little magazines