on anticipation (trains, and scotland)

For two hours the train follows the coast of northern England and then Scotland. Lighthouses. I had the thrill of seeing it, blue just beyond the berm. And then, alighting in Edinburgh, the smell of the sea. And someone with red hair waiting on the platform. We spent the day in the city and then took the train to Dundee. The night before, I could barely sleep--I was so excited to take the train (and for the meeting-up in Scotland). The hours shimmered.

There is a particular tension innate in the idea of the promised. This tension is distance: temporal distance, as I do not know when the promise will be made true (or that it will, but either way I will only know that in some future, not in the now); distance in difference—between what I expect and what I find, what I need and what I receive, what I hope for and the conditions of the world and my relationship which are beyond my control; most importantly, perhaps, there is distance between myself and my beloved. Judith Butler, in Giving an Account of Oneself, writes about narrative in a way that is useful also for thinking the relation of tension between the lover and the beloved. Narrative, she writes, is not only “a means by which information is conveyed, but…a rhetorical deployment of language that seeks to act upon the other, motivated by a desire or wish” which takes an “allegorical form” in the scene of the address (51). The distance between what I want and what I think you want, or what you think I want and what I do want create “an opacity that is not fully ‘illuminated’ through speech” (51). Butler’s identification of the ‘you’ as “variable and imaginary at the same time as it is bounded, recalcitrant, and stubbornly there” (51) is useful in terms of this tension, too, and in terms of the contradiction that is, if anything, the essence of what it means to ‘know’ another person, or to love her. My beloved is, to me, what I imagine her to be. But she is also what she is, and it is possible I will never actually access that what completely. Distance. Longing.


When I feel the beginnings of love, I am caught in anticipation which is wholly based in imagination: I cannot, unknowing of my beloved as I am, know what, exactly, I anticipate. As infatuation is replaced by an informed love, I anticipate, paradoxically, a return to what was—a return to a beginning in which I anticipated what would come later.