When Jeff Alessandrelli handed me a copy of And Yet, which was reissued by Future Tense Books in April 2024, he noted the book was a work of speculative fiction. I recently described it to someone as Boy Bluets. When Nik Slackman, a digital editor at Fence, read an excerpt, he said: “I love this. Is he for real?”
And Yet is a book about shyness, celibacy, and self-love which I admire for its peculiarly bold candor. Rarely does one encounter a male writer so clearly inscribing his insecurities and reflections on psychotherapeutic treatment in a way that feels actually grown-up. And despite its unconventionally sexy subject matter—that being celibacy, a monastic gratification that can deeply enrich a life ;)—this is not writing that is trying to seduce its audience. Or, if it is, it’s like being seduced at a silent retreat by someone eating soup in front of you while making eye contact. This vulnerability is courageous, strangely funny, and a gift.
Alessandrelli’s prose itself is exquisitely crafted, a pleasure to read, and employs elegant formal leitmotifs, not to mention a plethora of cultural reference points ranging from Adrian Piper to Brian Blanchfield, Neutral Milk Hotel to Albert Einstein. And Yet exists somewhere between the poem and the essay, and in the spirit of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, it weaves together first-person narrative, art writing, and the philosophy of love. It reckons with choices made within a life, and lays bare that reckoning.
Speculative fiction: I’ve thought a lot about this designation in relation to And Yet, especially as I projected the Jeff I met and maintain correspondence with onto the book's “I.” Future Tense’s reissue of And Yet contains a prologue by Alessandrelli, who writes: “Although an emotional truth to the book exists, and all of the literary and artistic references and quotations/citations are completely true, And Yet is fictional in scope, with imagined people, places and ways of being.” The “I” protagonist in the book is, Alessandrelli writes, “at least 1 percent autobiographical. The other 99 percent, though, consists of speculation and wholly unverifiable creative ‘fact.’”
Is all re-narrativization of our lives a form of fiction, or of autofiction, speculative fiction, fauxtofiction? These questions are less interesting to me than the question as to whether all romantic relationships themselves are speculative fictions, and whether the experience of romance—“oftentimes [a] vast [source] of alienation and oppression for both those invested in [its] illusion and the wider world at large” (Alessandrelli)—is always ungrounded in reality. Or, to quote one of Jenny Holzer’s Truisms: ROMANTIC LOVE WAS INVENTED TO MANIPULATE WOMEN. And us all.
And yet.
— Claire Donato
Amtrak Quiet Car to WAS via NYP, 4/28/2022
Brooklyn, NY, 4/17/2024
from And Yet
*
Celibate that first year in the Midwest I felt relief from my libido and inherent male gaze launched outward. Leaking its covert imagination everywhere, especially on women, I felt relief from the (sexual) daimon constantly prowling along and inside me.
This isn’t to say, though, that I felt any more civilized or cultured. Rather, I somehow felt inappropriately intimate with my self, a thing I didn’t previously know was possible. No matter the reason, to be a chastely adult in a thoroughly sexualized world is to be a specific type of other, grasping for the austereness of a personal vision that the vast majority of people can’t fathom, let alone see.
*
Having first started abstaining in 1985 when she was 37 and her marriage was ending, seminal conceptual artist Adrian Piper’s celibacy helped her “to transcend the drag of the body,” giving her the restorative energy that partnered sex had so often depleted her of.
O if only, if only.
*
Inappropriately intimate as in thinking about masturbation with the same regularity as when I’d been uncelibate, but now fixated on the peculiar schisms of the masturbatory, momentary relief compounded by the innate aloneness. (“Masturbation will always be my favorite/ form of sex, although if I was a tree/ I’d just stand there in the breeze” writes Eileen Myles in their poem “Lorna & Vicki” but the longer one waits— gestural, frantic, immobile— the more they might soon shiver.) Inappropriately intimate as in constantly questioning the contours and constricts of the box I’d chosen to live within, an entombing creviced at every corner by illumination. But what’s to see when, standing in the darkness, all is blinding light?
*
“Instead of leaving the box, I shall enclose the world within it” imparts Kobo Abe’s box man in the author's 1973 novel The Box Man. When I was younger I didn’t know understand what that meant, didn’t know how one’s box could be less a constriction than a vessel for any number of successful ways of being and believing. At the time I simply assumed that nobody understood who or what was inside. As a result of this surmising, I turned into my self. Perfect risk, I lived like that.
*
Although his parents themselves were not religious, as a child Albert Einstein was devoutly so, attending a Catholic elementary school and clinging hard to the concept of faith. Einstein’s religiosity, though, ended abruptly, at the age of twelve. He later wrote, “It is quite clear to me that the religious paradise of youth, which was thus lost, was a first attempt to free myself from the chains of the 'merely personal,' from an existence dominated by wishes, hopes, and primitive feelings.” Denouncing religion, the scientist later remarked, had allowed him the freedom to slave himself to science, body and soul. “[B]eing in flight from the I and the we to the it” is how Einstein put it.
*
That flight from primitivity, from the ‘merely personal’—Einstein made it his life’s work and his many scientific revelations can be the judge of his success or failure. But even Einstein, Mortal among mortals, ended up fallible within his science-as-life enslavement. Both of his marriages were infidelity-filled debacles—discussing his relationship with his first wife, Mileva, in a letter to his eventual second wife (and own cousin) Elsa, he wrote, “I treat my wife as an employee whom I cannot fire. I have my own bedroom and avoid being alone with her”— and when Einstein’s schizophrenic second son Eduard died in 1965 his father had not seen him in thirty years.
E=mc2.
*
In death or in life, I, we or it, no one knows the circumstances of either the flight’s takeoff or arrival. “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity” was one of Einstein’s favorite maxims, said with hearty cheer. Of self or science, vanity. Vanity, making a religion of sex, celibacy or love.
*
Entails swaddling one’s self in endless theories about the self, all of which are fruitful without ever reaching the roots of the tree actually bearing said fruit, one of my own definitions of prudery.
*
“There’s never any center to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it’s not true, there was no one” writes Marguerite Duras in her acclaimed 1984 novel The Lover. And to try and be that someone you once were is to follow a center line that, at hard right and left angles, keeps zigging and zagging.
*
I’m selfish in other words, but only in relation to what I don’t know about my self, what I might not, in the end, want to know. And will not stop searching for as a result.
*
From his 1944 volume The Unquiet Grave famed British critic Cyril Connolly on equanimity in the face of desire: “Yet no one can achieve Serenity until the glare of passion is past the meridian. There is no certain way of preserving chastity against the will of the body.”
*
Constantly greedy for some type of satiation always in the distance, while celibate that year I was. Willpower had cured physically what unknowing desire, though, couldn’t contain. The calmness of a center eluded me the more I chased after it.
*
- Love is always a stranger in the home of avarice.
*
And yet.
*
In the essay collection that contains his tongue in cheek anti-happiness essay “Against Joie de Vivre,” that piece of Phillip Lopate’s is followed by one entitled “Art of the Creep.” In it, Lopate pontificates on what makes people, specifically men, creeps, assholes, good-for-nothing losers, etc. “To me, a creep is someone who walks around as if with a load in his pants…The creep would like to forget that he has a body, which only draws your attention all the more to his ungainly posture…”
*
Chastity is a pose (a mask) like any other and the taller one stands within it the more attention is often drawn to them. To dissect the various 21st century manifestations of creepery is futile, and surely not all of them entail walking around as if with a load deposited in one’s pants. Experience attests that there are different shades and textures, each affected by age and living location, social attitudes, proclivities and demeanors, and on and on. In my own purview, conscious, willful celibacy at the age of twenty-nine while physically fit and reasonably intelligent, attractive and composed turns one into a minorly creepy assemblage of disparate parts, especially if one is living in Columbia, Missouri. On learning the news, the inquisitiveness I received from others, regardless of sex, gender or age, no matter if I was at the bar or gym, coffee shop or university library, was deferential and often (Midwestern Nice!) respectful. Within the confines of that respect, though, lurked overtones of my weirdness, my untrammeled oddity, half-creepy in its self-aware thwartedness.
*
As one of my close friends at the time, T, put it, You’re kind of acting like a freak, dude, with this.
*
Although no doubt partially true, T’s attitude, a common one, belies what subsequent research has made clear to me is a more regular occurrence than might otherwise be realized. My own brand of (willful) secular celibacy was internalized and solitary; single, not in a relationship, I made a conscious choice not to have sex of any kind with anyone for a full calendar year. But, in passing, discussing what I was working on while emailing with W (a now semi-distant friend who I once lived with for a year during my early twenties) he mentions that between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-seven, for five whole years, he was in a sexless relationship with his girlfriend at the time, a woman who he was in love with and who he thought would become his wife. (It was on her initiative that they eventually broke up.) When asked about the specifics of their relationship dynamic, W writes:
Maybe it sounds pathetic, especially now, years later, but I’m not totally sure why. Early on we reached an unspoken impasse and then…it just continued. I knew that she’d been a born-again virgin before, had declared that to people. But that term never came up when we were dating. We just didn’t have sex and I did with myself what I did on the side. I wouldn’t exactly say I was celibate. Or that we were celibate. We didn’t have sex but I loved her and I did at the time question a lot. But I didn’t bring it up with her directly, not even at the end.
Another friend in a similar relationship for a much shorter interval, just nine months, writes, There are obviously a lot of ways to express love and affection without sex. There are way more of those than just plain sex, however you’re even defining sex here.
*
Obviously, yes. But beyond the clichés of the sexless marriage, product of some twenty-five or thirty-year partnership that was once filled with passionate ardor and now, so many years later, is simply a medley of familiarity and brittleness, the secular celibate relationship is rarely discussed or commented on. This might be due to its relative rarity; perhaps I’ve weirder friends than most. Or it might be due to the lack of rote segmentation that something like celibate-while-in-a-committed-and-caring-relationship-while-also-young-and-disease-free-and-unreligious-and-virile-and-capable-and-all-systems-go-ready slots into. Category-less, its category is its own.
*
It is not the actual enjoyment of pleasure that we desire. What we want is to test the futility of that pleasure, so as to be no longer obsessed by it states Italian poet Cesare Pavese in his diaries. Constantly rammed up against the futility of one’s pleasure, ever-obsessively desirous. Whole lives are lived like that.
*
“Song Against Sex,” the first track on cult indie rock heroes Neutral Milk Hotel’s first album On Avery Island, passes, in three verses, through a kaleidoscope of imagery, alliteration and metaphor, some of it deeply concrete, some of it disjunctive to the point of abstraction. At the beginning of the song’s third verse Jeff Mangum, Neutral Milk Hotel’s bandleader, famed for his lyrical childlike innocence, sings of attacking pleasure points and pictures ripped out from pornographic magazines. Before the song ends elsewhere, possibly hinting at suicide, Mangum declaims the societal lie that sex can be at certain times for certain people, a lie that hurts far more than it balms or gratifies. Asked in an interview after On Avery Island’s release if sex “grossed him out,” Magnum replied:
I’m grossed out about sex being used as a tool for power, about people not giving a shit about who they’re putting their dick into. I find that to be really upsetting. I’ve known a lot of people that have been heavily damaged by some asshole’s drunken hard-on. And that stuff really upsets me. It’s not against sex itself. All those sexual references are like...
About specific personal references?
Yeah.
*
Not against sex itself but against the personal references one has to, like it or not, ponder when thinking or acting sexually. Sex as a tool for power, to be sure, but also as something that loses imaginative luster the better one gets at it.
*
Orientation doesn’t seem to matter with regards to any of this hesitation or questioning either. Taken from his collection Proxies: Essays Near Knowing, Brian Blanchfield’s essay “On Frottage,” asserts: “It was at first a surprise to me at twenty-two, and then a kind of—like sex itself: repeatable, singular—discovery I came to expect, that the partners I found (finding me) in New York were, same as in [Blanchfield’s home state of] North Carolina, rarely expressly into penetration…All four longer relationships I had in my ten years in New York excluded anal sex altogether.”
In the relationships that Blanchfield is discussing in “On Frottage” satisfaction is claimed— “Frottage is a rather broad category of consensual, nonpenetrative, (usually) hands-free sex…” reads the author’s definition early in the essay—and the bulk of the piece is in fact devoted to the stark perils of being young, gay and full-throatedly alive in the unknown during the 1980s and 1990s. “I never had a sex life without having a status. The two were inextricable. My early fantasy of partnership was in fact sealed fast by HIV…”
For Blanchfield to be sexually non-penetrative when he was younger was a specific kind of choice based, in part, around safety. Frottage is not celibacy, perhaps, but, in keeping with the nearness of Proxies’ title, near celibacy. A kind of prudent hesitation (wisely prudish?) that still contains its own exclamation, impossible to misinterpret.
*
Further, that sex isn’t comprised of one single thing but instead a thousand and eleven wildly different things isn’t something I much considered at the time. My vision of sexuality and its attendant worlds was laughably narrow and static back then. I hadn’t read or engaged with any queer theory or theorists; didn’t understand that the standard happiness scripts that I thought I saw everywhere around me were, in fact, oftentimes vast sources of alienation and oppression for both those invested in their illusion and the wider world at large. Heteronormative to the core, unthinkingly so, I simply took my sexual desires to be everyone else’s. When you’re young, you’re young—it’s not an excuse so much as a lamentation. Even sadder, I wasn’t that young.
*
You’re kind of acting like a freak, dude, with this. But in various shades we’re all out here or were out here or will be, some of us contemplative, others ill-content, all of us closely examining our selves in one way or another. Each of us, of course, terminally unique.
Looking back, what I realize now is that my personal intimacy wasn’t inappropriate exactly. It was simply attempting to adhere to a self that, moment to moment, I could not place. Sexual and desirous but choosing to not have sex; outwardly social, even gregarious (soon after my arrival in Columbia, I began co-hosting a local literary reading series and, five miles from campus, my small ivy-walled house also became the go-to Friday night afterhours destination for some of my fellow student-friends and me) but yet deeply lonely; introverted by nature but easily extroverted on cue (at the time of my chastity I was teaching writing to undergraduates at MU, the biggest public university in the state, with each of my classes containing 25+ students).
*
As that first year of celibacy progressed to its end, though, I was happy in many ways! Magical thinking and (not) doing had made me a better communicator and a more diligent, earnest listener and confidante. If to a degree I was still shy and selfish I’d also worked on negotiating and owning both those aspects of my self, more cognizant and willing to give myself a break for them. Acceptance Now-Serenity Later became my Seinfeld-inspired unofficial mantra. Saying it under my breath while jogging or in the gym was a total joke, sure. And true nevertheless.
Still, without knowing what the specific underlying ailment is asceticism cures nothing, and to be anorexic (in my case sexually and romantically) is an attempt to misrecognize symptom for cause. But the power of a different perspective does have power and for me that willfully celibate year was a positive one. Masculine solidifier, my (shy, sly) mouth all those previous years constantly sealing or trying to seal itself atop a woman’s, my imagination’s positive qualities, its negative qualities, its relentlessness in terms of sex, daimonic, some perfect necessity or so I thought— that year of celibacy tempered my self’s semblance to a different timbre than I previously knew existed. Resisting, and in doing so became a particular variety of free.
*
And yet.
*
At her ninetieth birthday party my grandmother, walking into the restaurant, took my arm and said, “You get old and you have to recharge but if you’re lucky you don’t feel any different, you just don’t.”
*
I turned thirty, newly self-declared uncelibate. I felt younger than I had in a long while.
*
Googling the phrase “30 is the new 20” elicits, as of this writing, 12,060,000,000 hits. Some of those results argue against the phrase’s mentality, others for it. Regardless of any particular take, though, “30 is the new 20” is a universally ubiquitous saying and has been for some time.
*
One of my own definitions of prudery entails, having ridden before, fully understanding how to do so again, fully apprehending how pedaling connects with speed and where, on first approach, to put one’s body. To start, stop, slow down, the pressures and fluences that must be constantly calibrated. Knowing well all those things but, in an instant, forgetting them, falling down or not even being able to sit atop properly, let alone start moving. The easier it is the harder it can be.
*
It’s like riding a—
*
I myself cringe at that 30/20 phrase. Nor do I think that by denying the credence of a thing—in this case an age—can it be transmogrified into a state of existing that is, drop of a hat, more carefree or youthful.
*
Nevertheless when, four months into my uncelibate self-declaration, after my slow and instant realization that dating and trying to date in the Midwest is very different as compared to dating in the West, especially when, without truly realizing it, one has turned from a young into an OLD, that years-long process made, odd gray hair turned into a burgeoning clump of odd gray hairs, overnight, she approached me in the bar I, knowing little, knew what to do.
*
In his Shrinking Violets: The Secret Life of Shyness (2017) cultural critic and shy person Joe Moran writes that Americans “have a reputation for seeing shyness as un-American.” Moran cites Teddy Roosevelt’s speech “The Strenuous Life” as an example of Unabashed American Want that, then and now, has no time for reticent downward glances and surreptitious half-smiles.
*
Given in Chicago on April 10, 1899, Roosevelt’s speech begins:
I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph.
Un-American Shyness, then, is acceptance of ignoble ease; the willingness to pine, to imagine, but not actually get. A repudiation of the splendid ultimate triumph, shyness is a giving in to the unrealized self without putting up a fight.
*
On the other hand, in its egotistical self-absorption, its subconscious insistence that my I is preciously different than everyone else’s I around me, shyness seems to be inherently American. Actively not looking at you, praying to not arouse your attention, you soon look at me with curiosity.
*
And yet.
*
In the bar she approached and, recognizing her, I guessed her name wrong, once, twice, thrice. Wait, are you sure you know it? She smirked at that, nodded. Begins with a V? I rapid-fired. A Q? Z? Eyes wide, she smiled broadly. Heavens to Jesus! she said, her voice deep and seemingly astonished. That’s beyond amazing! Because my first name actually starts with a Q, my middle with a V and my last name is Zardar. She waited for my reaction before smiling again, this time in a far less affected way. Do you do tarot too? Or read palms? She was, clearly, fucking with me.
No, her name was M and now that we had an understanding we could talk without concern for meddlesome matters like social propriety and decorum. Could, heavens to Jesus, just pretend we knew one and other well already and in pretending a reality would soon surface. Born and raised in Missouri, M was twenty-six, a visual artist moonlighting as a flight attendant. It was also soon discovered that neither of us knew the last name of the mutual friend we had in common. I liked her immediately and I liked her more five minutes after that.
Walking home from Doc’s later there was the stir of neon inside me, something new. Our flirty favorite-comedians-and horror-story-comedy-club-performance-talk at the bar, the circumstances of her writing her phone number on my wallet (long story). Her early back door exit, my eyes trailing her body as she walked, the idiosyncratic red skirt and red fanny pack (when you’re young, you’re young) combo she wore, her shoulder length strawberry blonde hair—it’s all still there as I watch from afar.
*
What’s important for me to recall now, though, is that when, towards the end of that first night at Doc’s, M said she wanted to come home and watch a DVD with me I demurred, instead asking her if she wanted to go on a walk in the park the next day. When, a date later, she did eventually come back to my place, she left an hour after her arrival; we’d shared a semi-sterile series of kisses and nothing more. Postponed once, our third date was also our final one and, taking place at an empty bar, can only be described as anticipation-free enjoyable. The relationship hadn’t been anything to begin with but, a half-hour in, the nothing that was was clearly over.
*
- Every lover regularly turns pale in the presence of his beloved.
*
I’d liked M and she’d liked me. We’d desired one and other on equal terms. The difference between our approach to that desire, though, proved to be everything. In my timidity and unwillingness to be overt, M understandably assumed I wasn’t that interested in her. And with each subsequent date and Richard-Pryor-is-God conversation the more attracted to M I became the less I outwardly showed it.
*
From the diaries of Cesare Pavese—31st October, 1940:
Here is the proof that you are wholly made of pride: now that she has given you permission… you not only do not do so, but you do not even feel any burning desire to…If we know we can do a thing, we are satisfied, and perhaps do not do it at all.
*
Why? Heavens to Jesus why?
*
“…If you are truly in love and your lover says things which make you happy, you will lose the power of speech” is the canonical French author Stendhal’s declaration in his well-traveled book On Love (1822). Far from being a marker of deficient fervor, “shyness is a proof of love” according to Stendhal and for a true acolyte less is always more, incremental displays of affection and attention being far more significant than, say, making clear to your object of desire that you like her by sleeping with her on the third date, or straightforwardly letting her know at the end of the second date that you like spending time with her, want to see her again soon, tomorrow, more right now.
Writing in the early 19th century, Stendhal’s conception-of-love lineage could yet be tied to Andreas Capellanus’s chivalric tradition as captured in his 12th century treatise The Art of Courtly Love. Which is to say that both authors are, circa the 21st century, hopelessly out of date. “Modern love is meant to be the coming together of enlightened self-interest, with partners offering intimacy and commitment in return for the same…In an age that values emotional mutuality, unrequited love signals immaturity and low self-esteem” states Joe Moran in Shrinking Violets: The Secret Life of Shyness.
Surely Moran is right here, his logic and reasoning sound. Even if compared to previous generations Millennials sleep with fewer people and do so later in life, this is still the age of Tinder, Bumble and Chaturbate, of friends-with-benefits and pickup artists. Exclusively gaining one’s perspective on love from (male) authors like Stendhal and Capellanus leaves the contemporary love-seeker stranded in the past, panning for gold in some long-forgotten mountain stream while everyone else mines crypto in a humming din of advanced awareness.
Still, one point directly made by Stendhal (and indirectly by Capellanus) cannot be discounted, it being the balancing act that love (true and eternal) calls for; how its whole artistry “seems to… consist in saying precisely what the degree of intoxication requires at any given moment” and learning those degrees and their various intoxicatory properties can be an infinitely complicated process. Imagination is required, as is a fine-tuned sense of calibration. Promises are pointless, mere language particles, and failure or success can be difficult to gauge or predict. What’s dysfunctional or disjointed for one set of lovers is the bedrock foundation of understanding and attraction for another set.
____
Jeff Alessandrelli lives in Portland, OR. In addition to his writing work he also directs the non-profit record label/book press Fonograf Editions.
Recommended reading: A Natural History of Oblivion by Trey Moody, Beneath the Underdog by Charles Mingus, Watermark by Joseph Brodsky, A Phone Call from Dalian by Han Dong, Black, Brown & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora, ed. by Franklin Rosemont and Robin D.G. Kelley
