ëotherí to remain ungraspable is a love that dies. That is, a love that
tries to ëauffassení the ëotherí or delimit alterity, risks disallowing the
autonomy of the ëotherí or turning her/him into the same. To avoid the
ëcuriosityí or ëhope of knowledgeí that kills love, ëlove needs only to
retreatí.^35 Paradoxically, in order to love, one must not love; love is
based on a fixation that cannot be fixed: ëLove is, therefore, insecurity
incarnate.í^36 In the poem, the relationship between the couple moves
between security and lack of it, the foundational and the anti-
foundational, intimacy and estrangement, and proximity and distance.
It is poignant that in ëFacts About Waterí love for an ëotherí should be
associated with uncertainty, restlessness, nomadicity and uncontrol: ëIt
seems that love cannot survive the attempts to cure its aporia; that it
can last, as love, only together with its ambivalence. With love as with
life itself, it is the same story again: only death is unambiguous
[Ö]í.^37
It is therefore appropriate that what characterizes the male figure
(in love?) is his lack of stable ground: ëa man without the anchor
[even] of dreams.í With no dreams, the man implicitly has no
imagination about the future and no memory of the past:
He blinked in the sun, he hardly seemed
at home in his own set of bones.
I felt his uncontrol
reined in with a shaky hand.The man is unheimlich in his own skeleton and he is out of control as
his body shakes and this may have sexual connotations that connect
with ëloveís quavering noteí from ëHeartbreak Hourí (p.81). The
house of the woman also shakes as ë[t]rains run beneathí it. The home
of the body and the home of the house are both unsteady, and as the
couple living out their uncertainty travel through Berkeleyís poetic
landscape, they are rootless, homeless and nameless. The poetic lines
enact this lack of foundation as they are built on negatives, whereby
35 Cf. Max Frisch, Sketchbook, 1946–1949, trans. Geoffrey Skelton (New York:
Harcourt Brace, 1977), p.17.
36 Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, p.98.
37 Ibid., p.109.