Not very long before Eve Sedgwick died, I went to her apartment. She needed me to bring her some materials from her office to her home; she'd be teaching her class from home; she was having a hard time leaving home. Not very long after Eve Sedgwick died, I was diagnosed with cancer. It seemed somehow kismet, fit, and although not fun, the damnable irony made it feel better. Very long before I knew Eve Sedgwick, I felt compelled and fingered by her writing. I applied to the Graduate Center to work with her, in a year she chaired the admissions committee; when I was accepted, and accepted to work with her, I was so paranoid, I probably thought this essay was about me. Very long after I knew Eve Sedgwick, I read an article about a man who wanted to be a student of hers, and how that was a kind of virtual kinship with a text-as-corpus that sustained and inspired him, and I thought, whatever other ambivalences grief, and its long long half-life and its sheer cliffs of fall, continue to convey across quantum timespace, I have a right and a need to mourn my relationship with her. Long before I knew Eve Sedgwick, I read her piece on gay uncles; on triangulated desire; on reading relations; on paranoid reading; on axiom one: people are different from one another; on therapy and therapeutic relation; on mutual care; on theories of love; on love; on love; on love; love. Not long after I missed Eve Sedgwick, I learned to love and then had to learn to miss another tremendous woman who taught me as much with fewer words about love and its sundry obligations. Not long after I met Eve Sedgwick, I read her article on teaching/depression. It left a profound impression on me, in part because I thought it was about me; sheer narcissism but the times/lines up. Not long after I lost Eve Sedgwick, my therapist pointed out that my single greatest motivator seemed a compulsion-to-honesty, a kind of compulsive parrhesia. It was a flattering and anxiogenic reading of me, and in some circular way it comes back to what I loved, and wanted to be loved by in, Eve: that Buddhistic sense that if we have the luxury of living a life of thought, that it came with certain responsibilities to self, self-care, to principle, to presence, and to present. o the mind, mind has mountains cliffs of fall frightful, sheer, no-man-fathom'd. A while after Eve Sedgwick died, I read another mentor, Wayne Koestenbaum's, impression of the impression of Eve: To say it plainly: in Eve’s presence, I felt stoned on the cannabis of her smartness. A while after Eve Sedgwick died, I thought of affect, and being affected by. I cannot remember what we talked about that last time we met in her apartment. We talked about rubber stamps. And her cat. And feeling tired. And I want to say, but it would be apocryphal, that she told me about death, her death, mourning, what it means to mourn, what it means to have mourned, and what that means when you're melancholic.
But I honestly can't remember everything about the last time I saw Eve Sedgwick.
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AuthorJames Arnett is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga. Archives
February 2019
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