For some time, we have wanted to try and find a way to talk across our research in bodies, queer lives and intimacy. Both situated in the King’s College London English Department and with desks next to one another in a small communal postgraduate research room, we have been speaking about how intimacy, its pleasures and its discontents, has long preoccupied the work of writers and artists.
In Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, for example, intimacy is a locus of change, growth and transformation: 'there had risen up a lovely tree in the brisk sea-salted air of their intimacy (for in some ways no one understood him, felt with him, as Clarissa did)—their exquisite intimacy'. Through intimacy, Woolf radically connects feeling to knowledge and self-understanding. However, intimacy here is also elusive. For the two former lovers, it is part of the air, atmospheric and ineffable.
The intricate dualities of intimate experience create emotional, political and subjective ambiguities that demand critical engagement. How might intimacy institute, as queer theorist Sara Ahmed might put it, ‘shared forms’—collective forms of space and exchange? What forms might intimacy take and how might these unsettle normative approaches to (not) touching, feeling and inhabiting? How do queer modes and intimate affects challenge heteronormative, cisnormative and violently hierarchical models of feeling? How does an investigation and interrogation of intimacy open up other modes of being and doing (together), which might in fact operate beyond the human? And how might certain structures foreclose intimacy? In close we want to look to intimacies that are shared, that challenge, that negate, and that allow other, alternative, marginalised histories to be told. We look to the unexamined relationships between partners, lovers, parents, animals and homes, and invite writers to ruminate in the messy terrain of affect and emotion.
We wanted to draw together a community of writers we admire, and whose work we find explores these topics, to release a monthly TinyLetter—a peculiarly intimate public. As such, close publishes a monthly essay, poem or story, delivered directly to our subscribers’ inboxes. These will cohere around intimacy, intimate lives, objects and bodies.
With regards to the editorial and publishing ethos of close, we aim to work across disciplines and genres in order to provide our readers with innovative and exciting new writing. With a particular focus on improving the visibility of queer, trans and non-binary voices, writers of colour, women and working class communities, we want close to serve as a platform, as writer Isabel Waidner puts it in the introduction to Liberating the Canon, to promote intersectionality against the grain of normative publishing.
We are really excited and humbled to announce that we have essays, poetry and writing from Sophie Mackintosh in May, Bridget Minamore in June, Jesse Darling in July and Helen Charman and Daisy Lafarge in August.
For our first letter, however, we wanted to begin with us, to take some time ruminating on what intimacy means: its ambivalences and its appeal.
Ellie:
Intimacy. I close my eyes and imagine if the word itself was an object, to be played with in my hands. Tiny worlds, glassy marbles? Too cold, perhaps, too hard. No, at a touch, it closely resembles gossamer, organza, tulle. It is porous and soft. It can cascade. At the same time, intimacy is almost edible; the cloudy stickiness of candy floss won for you at a fairground. It is a gift.
Intimacy is difficult to explain, though I am starting to know it when I see it. Or should that be feel it? Experience it. I am drawn to artists that use the quotidian in their work to grasp at the way intimacy impresses itself on our lives: Frank Ocean’s ‘you text nothing like you look’ in his 2016 song ‘Good Guy’ is a devastating line of poetry on the fragility of digital intimacies. For another Frank, O’Hara this time, all he needed was a Coca-Cola and the warm New York 4 o’clock sunlight to immortalise the rush of a love that felt celestial.
It is no coincidence to me that the most fluently versed speakers in the language of feeling and emotion are women and queer artists, who have been forced to pick up the debris of the margins as the tools of their craft. Papery and delicate, art concerned with intimacy is often the outcome of a bedroom production, a passion project conducted with do-it-yourself verve. Intimacy sounds like a demo. Of course, it would be totally wrong to say that glossy and excessive pop cannot carry what it means to feel or to know intimacy—how many friendships have been built within the sacred space of ‘Like A Prayer’? And how can we talk about virtuosos of modern intimacies without SZA or Lorde? Pop Artist Pauline Boty understood better than any other male painter of her generation the way that pop culture, emotion, and desire converge. Her painting My Colouring Book references a song of the same name, performed by Barbara Streisand in 1962. By narrating the lyrics in bright collage and penciled vignettes, the work demonstrates the ways popular vernacular can be turned inside out and repurposed to communicate deep, private longing and aching sadness: ‘This is the boy, the one I depended upon / Colour him gone’.
I have often wondered whether intimacy, by its nature, is predicated on the existence of at least two bodies, two subjects. Can you feel, or know, intimacy alone? What is the connection between intimacy and loneliness? To be intimate with a lover or a friend is always exposing, and the openness that intimacy calls for can be, paradoxically, an isolating experience. For this reason, I am drawn to material which deals with the singular; the vulnerable one. The music video for Blood Orange’s ‘Time Will Tell’ (2013) deals with the processes of inhabiting your own body, and the patience this task demands. Devonté Hynes appears, disappears, reappears, as he dances in front of a mirror, pulling and undoing a curtain across his reflection. While we know that this is performance, it does not feel performative. The audience is irrelevant, at least to him, and he moves for himself with determined flair. We all know the cliché to ‘dance like no one is watching’, but with such a beautiful exposition of, and justification for, its meaning, who cares about clichés? Hynes dances with the spectral weight of his vulnerability, and they mutually impress upon one another, like a kiss. From this view, intimacy might just be possible.
For you, perhaps, intimacy is not captured by any of the concepts I have grasped at, nor the objects I have listed. I think about the list as a form, and I can see now why Susan Sontag found it necessary for her ‘Notes on Camp’ (1964). Like campness, intimacy’s shapeshifting qualities are part of its endless appeal (and its elusiveness). It can reside anywhere. It is wholly personal. The relationships we have, with people, objects and ourselves, can and are distilled into incongruous forms, and often in surprising ways. Intimacy is socks hanging on a washing-line. It is a pair of slippers, waiting at the door. A photograph, a pebbled shore, an anonymous embrace. Intimacy resists explanation and yet remains an affirmatory presence. It animates our lives with the possibilities of new meanings, gently nudging us to remember: the worlds we build exist, and so do you.
Bryony:
Recently I have found the word ‘close’ flitting into conversations with cool nonchalance. Sometimes I find the flippancy of words hard to bear, that something so singular and small can cause such a murky flare-up of feeling. As if words, once uttered, had epidemic qualities, spreading, catching up and multiplying with all the other ways that word has been given to you, in anger, in haste, in kindness. Appearing to me as if it is leaking into light, only, in the act of doing so, revealing how it has secretly shadowed me for some time.
And that is not because we have begun a project with the same name. No, I have come to know intimacy by a striking feeling that I am somehow not good at intimacy—how do markers of success and failure cohere in intimacy? ‘close’ has often waged war in conversations with people I love: excoriating remarks about how seemingly inhibited I am, how I distance myself from my family, from those who love me, and don’t want ‘close’ relationships. ‘Arm’s length’.
I, however, like the gesture of arm’s length, how it distils the complexities of a life lived in intimacy. The stretched out, backwards longing of an arm both tender and cautious. At the moment, this is principally because I enjoy legal metaphors that bleed into the mundane and everyday, that emanate strange and beautiful poetry without their realising. At arm’s length is also to discourage contact or perhaps to delay familiarity. It is one of the reasons that Ellie and I both began wanting to begin a project like this one: the jostling, peculiar uncertainty of relating to others.
Bridget Riley’s Kiss: the impossibility of a not-quite, a relation that reaches, holding its hand out, warmly and starkly in monochrome. For me there is no other image that speaks of a longing so presciently felt than Louise Bourgeois’s 10 am is When You Come to Me. Those silly long limby hands, slender and desperate. I think about arm’s length and how the desire to reduce contact, to keep someone distant, can often inhere in a desire to keep someone close, and how sometimes this persists regardless of how much you stand to lose. I think about those conversations where I, and someone I love, have danced around that mournful suspension of never wanting to quite let go. One more drink. A moment to coolly place my hand on your knee perhaps. Ruthless words in lieu of countenancing the heartbreak of admitting a world without you.
Claude Cahun’s I Extend My Arms is the incarnation of a life lived at arm’s length. A body concealed and entrapped by stone—imperturbable and introverted, perhaps—reaches and gestures in desire. Those openly spread fingers, like the soft, vulnerable despair of a baby, holding out, pleading for something or someone. Simultaneously, the parodic melodrama of the gesture also strikes me—the delightfully confusing contradiction of a gesture at once expiatory and urgent yet mocking and overwrought.
These images have always reminded me that I am sometimes too proud. They also speak to times when I have offered vulnerability naively and loosely, making myself foolish despite my best intentions of remaining tough. Yet as soon as intimacy provokes feelings of caution, Bourgeois reminds us of that tender, inimitable moment when you hold someone else’s hand for the first time: the fleshy, clammy, pink skinness of it all. The moment you wake up to the arms of someone new wrapped around you lazily, both bathed in expectant morning light. Bourgeois’s image reminds me that despite distance, and regardless sometimes of nocuous sentiments said in anger, there is still an arm that holds—there will always be an arm that holds.
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Kindly supported by the London Arts and Humanities Partnership
Design : Daniella Shreir
Editors : Eleanor Jones and Bryony White
Editorial Assistant : Erin Cunningham