Basorexia: A Rumination on Unrequited Love

Helen T. Abbot

This work attempts to simultaneously undo and re-build ways of loving. It is a contemplation of a specific relationship of unspoken intimacy and it sits with and within the space where language fails to adequately give full expression to feeling. More specifically, it depicts and is an unfolding of an experience I have had and continue to have with the feeling, basorexia. This instance of basorexia serves as the meeting ground through which amorous undoing/rebuilding moves.

Basorexia means the overwhelming desire, or sudden urge, to kiss someone. I explore this feeling by inviting the reader into my own personal experience with it that is conveyed through the form of event scores. My experience surrounds an unrequited love and is partitioned into six stages: Recognize; Contemplate; Fantasize; Writhe; Recognize Again; and Warm Irritation Starts to Quiver. Each stage is structured as an event score.

For readers who are unfamiliar with the medium of event scores, they can be understood, according to the artist Alison Knowles, as ‘…texts that can be seen as proposal pieces or instructions for actions’ which ‘involve simple actions, ideas, and objects from everyday life recontextualized as performance’ (Knowles). My scores provide poetic instructions that should be realized/performed in the performer/reader’s head. They are a recontextualization of a (nearly) everyday fantasy of my own as performance. Through this format, facets I have carefully chosen from my desire (not desire defined by a psychoanalytic theory or something like that) defined on my terms are distributed and shared in the space of fantasy the scores construct; subjectivity interacts with desire and (hopefully) resists then ruptures rigid categorizations.

I view each score as an expanded form of a love letter. Here, expansion of form is a consequence of the tension that arose when I realized this word cannot begin to describe the particular experience with basorexia I am aiming to depict and convey to my love. These scores not only attempt to convey how I feel, but also how I feel about not being afforded a space to ‘legibly’ feel. The latter is a result of the limitations of language as well as (and most importantly) how my subjectivity has been positioned in relation to the amorous dimensions of my mother tongue in the North American context of what art scholar Natalie Loveless calls ‘repro-mono-hetero-normativity’ (Loveless 2019: 62). As such, this work can be understood more broadly as an attempt to undo/rebuild ways of loving prescribed by specific, North American, patriarchal Capitalist structures/systems of kinship and love (such as repro-mono-hetero-normativity) that interfere with my ability to utter amorously.

Prelude

A specific rendition of this feeling that is directed towards an unrequited love (with whom you will soon be acquainted) has been emerging in my everyday life more and more frequently these days. It has been trying to fill me up and provide me with utopic energies and visions that approach the pathological.

It can be difficult to understand the nature of elusive diseases such as this one (if it is, in fact, a kind of disease). Dostoyevsky speaks to this difficulty at the outset of Notes from the Underground, when the protagonist proclaims:

I am a sick man…I think I’ve got something wrong with my liver. Still, I know damn all about my sickness and don’t know for sure what it is I’ve got something wrong with (3).

While this sickness seems to be happening to me in a way that might render its origin obscure, unlike the underground man, being an Underground Woman has a greater capacity, in my mind, to actually know damn all about seemingly indescribable sicknesses like this one.

Unpacking my experience with this feeling in such an open format could produce as many negative as positive ramifications. It could encourage me to navigate the space of absent love in a generative way, one that welcomes the presence of unspoken intimacy. However, increasing a collective awareness of such an absence could also intensify unwanted feelings of alienation and loneliness; awareness can catalyze actions and feelings just as much as it can paralyze them.

Maybe I am just making things worse by trying to force you to become diseased like me…But I like to think that even the negative ramifications could be sensually repurposed to intensify the positive ones and in turn plunge me deeper in love. Further underground.

While its linguistic construction appears to sculpt my desire as sickness, this particular rendition of basorexia feels too rapturously charged to exist so uncomfortably within the confines of such a term. Content and form here cannot seem to reconcile and I suspect that is partly because in the realm of love I often feel ‘my identity is only afforded a limited range of expressions through highly codified forms’ (Abbot 2022: 2).

In any case, I invite and expect you to experience this feeling with me through visceral allusions that are pitched in an instructional format.

 If enough people participate, perhaps the unrequited will become the requited.

The overwhelming desire to kiss someone, while perhaps somewhat objective at first glance based on this definition, can operate quite differently from person to person and as such is, like most feelings, subjective. I would argue its subjective nature largely depends on the meaning of the kiss at hand. The desire could mean a desire to simply have intimacy with a person, which could happen to take the form of a kiss. This kind of intimacy could be romantic, platonic, something in-between, and so on. Furthermore, while it could be potentially argued that kissing in many cultures might represent or be connected to some fundamental form of intimacy (such as sexual activity) different cultures and cultural conventions do also grant the kiss, in its many forms, specific functions and meanings.

Another way to understand the subjective nature of this feeling is to say that each instance of basorexia has its own telos. While I do not necessarily subscribe to the idea that emotions function along teleological trajectories or operate in isolation to one another (even if sometimes they might feel like they do either and/or both), I find the term ‘telos’ helpful in unpacking the variety of forms basorexia can take. The telos or teloi can be informed by a variety of factors, such as socio-cultural factors, the desired person at hand, the current relationship (or perceived relationship) between the person desiring and the person desired, and so on. I am more interested in the realm of romantic teloi versus platonic teloi of basorexia (although I am sure there are instances of teloi that exist within the spectrum in between, or somewhere else altogether that I am not speaking to). This is because the specific experience I am drawing on exists within the romantic realm.[1]

In the realm of the romantic teloi of basorexia, the intended goal of the desire to kiss someone could simply be the desire to kiss, making any physical manifestation of this desire undesirable. In this case, the person desiring may revel in maintaining the distance between themselves and the desired other. If the telos of the feeling is indeed a kiss, the kiss could punctuate the desire in a way that stops any further activity from happening. However, the desire to kiss could also articulate the kiss as a gateway to further intimacy, such as sexual activity, which is how the kiss functions in the fantasy I am working with. In this fantasy, the mouth functions as an erotic organ (I am using the term ‘erotic organ’ from Brandon LaBelle’s [2014] Lexicon of the Mouth) that both entices and incites sexual activity.

Furthermore, since the telos of my experience (or the felt telos) is sexual activity, I view the event score titled ‘Fantasize’ as the intended ending of my desire. This ‘ending’ has material and immaterial ramifications that place the desiring subject back on an unpredictable feedback loop of desire. Since ‘Fantasize’ is the most important aspect of the piece for myself, I want to make sure you know a little bit about it before you begin to read so the moment when you fantasize feels especially significant.

A variety of sensual mouthings (LaBelle 2014) are at play here and sonically structure how you are going to fantasize. How you will extend your body into my erotic space. An acoustic architecture emerges from these sensual mouthings which breed visceral renditions of a particular sexual experience that has yet to physically manifest in the world. In other words, the depictions of sensual mouthings function to construct a loose choreography of my fantasy through which you will move sonically.

As Brandon LaBelle puts it, ‘the lips promise entry into deeper pleasures, deeper intimacy’ (104). While I would add to this statement and say instead the lips can promise entry into deeper intimacy (even within the realm of sex), LaBelle’s statement is accurate in how the lips of my love affect me. Their lips entice, incite, and even further, are essential to the structuring and performance of sensual intimacy in my space of fantasy. Their lips will entice, incite, and perform on and with your body and lips, too.

While you of course do not have to read any of what I have crafted in the order in which I have presented them, I ask you to read them in the correct order out of respect. To do otherwise would be to exploit and disrespect the personal materials and erotic chaos I have so generously provided through deliberate construction and distribution. Furthermore, I truly believe that in this case, enforcing an order of reading could quite possibly function to grant my sexuality legitimacy. To grant my sexuality a life devoid of unanticipated shame.

Legitimacy could lead to agency could lead to real feelings could lead to love could lead to loves could lead to real love could lead to anti-colonial logics could lead to utopia …

(Warm irritation)

hhuhhh…huuuuhh…unnnnnhhh

gulpcoughgaspcough
glugglugglugglug
sputterspatterspit
chokegaspcough
GLUG

(Warm irritation)

…mmmmmmmm…..
uuuhhhhh….UUUUUHHHHH….
….hhhmmmmm….
hhhnnnnn….
….

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[1] The reason I am drawing attention to the numerous ways one can interpret the feeling by suggesting a variety of teleological trajectories is to reiterate that the creative exploration that follows this short prelude is a very specific unfolding of basorexia that is derived from my own experience. To only view basorexia as a romantic, and potentially sexual feeling, could run the risk of being ethnocentric. Additionally, such a reductive perspective could also be exclusionary to certain sexual subjectivities and the variety of ways these subjectivities may interact with this feeling. Therefore, I wanted to highlight the different ways one can understand basorexia to again reiterate that what I am depicting in the works that follow is not aiming to construct an average version of this feeling, which could easily imply that I am speaking to and/or drawing from how others may experience basorexia. The assumption that I could and should speak to others’ experiences without actually speaking to anyone could further run the risk of mobilizing patriarchal, colonial logics in which such exploitation and homogenization is necessary to their respective and/or collective projects.

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Bibliography

Abbot, Helen. “The Weight of the Amorous Utterance.” In …and this book is a straight line in space. Group Exhibition, Western University. January 7- February 3, 2022.

Acconci, Vito. Seedbed. Performance Piece, Sonnabend Gallery, New York City. January 15-29.

Acker, Kathy. “Critical Languages.” In Bodies of Work, 81-93. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1997.

Acker, Kathy. “Paragraphs.” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 28, no. 1 (1995): 87-92.

Cha, Kyung Hak Theresa. Dictee. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001.

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Notes from Underground. New York: Vintage Books, 1994.

King, Lethabo Tiffany. “Our Cherokee Uncles: Black and Native Erotics.” In The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies, 141-174. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.

Knowles, Alison. “Event Scores.” https://jacket2.org/commentary/alison-knowles-17-event-scores-where-they-happened.

LaBelle, Brandon. Lexicon of the Mouth: Poetics and Politics of Voice and the Oral Imaginary. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014.

Loveless, Natalie. “Polydisciplinamory” In How to Make Art at the End of the World, 59-76. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.

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Helen T. Abbot is a doctoral student and multidisciplinary artist at the Centre for Theory and Criticism at the University of Western Ontario. Abbot’s research exists within sound studies, music studies, cultural studies, and erotics. Her work explores relationships between sound, erotics, gender and sexuality within the domain of selfhood and resilience narratives. Abbot’s doctoral thesis is a sound studies project centered on the fictional works of Anaïs Nin.