Let me bare some terms for you, reader. With the hope that you'll find yourself allured by their openings, their rimmed but imbricated edges:

From The Oxford English Dictionary

1. Amar, v., Obsolete. To destroy, spoil, mar, squander; hurt, injure.
2. Amour, 1. Gen. Love, affection, friendship. Obs. 3. A love-affair, love-making, courtship. (Now only humorously of honourable love-making). 4. Usually, an illicit love affair, an intrigue.
3. Amorous, a., 1. Of person: inclined to love; habitually fond of the opposite sex. Also fig. of things: Loving, fond. 2. Affected with love towards one of the opposite sex; in love, enamoured, fond. Also fig. of things (both as subject and object of love).

From the Real Academia Espanol

1. Amar, 1. Tener amor a alguien o algo. 2. tr. Desear
2. Desear, (De deseo). 1. tr. Aspirar con vehemencia al conocimiento, posesion o disfrute de algo. 2. tr. Anhelar que acontezca o deje de acontecer algun suceso. 3. tr. Sentir apetencia sexual hacia alguien.

Tracing these terms: amar, amour, amourous into amar, desear with my students one fall day in class, I wanted them to finger for how to read through the possibilities of pronunciation, etymology, meaning. I hoped to open these terms to my students and to place alongside one another the signs of love and destruction and how, in their definitions within and across English and Spanish, in their being written into fictional moments by two Cuban women writers, and in their reenactment of themselves within our classroom discussion, these word-concepts (signifiers) have an intricate and heavy mutual presence in the study of the erotic, pornographic, obscene, and humorous: in the study of the significance of literature to living.

To historicize, the orchestrated advances of my classes at Stony Brook have always moved to enact a tedious and invigorating process of undressing my students with language. What I mean by this is that in the process of teaching, talking with ‘authority' about thinking through writing, writing to think, writing as thinking, I have chosen texts and given writing prompts that have the intention of provoking the students to explore some complicated spaces, bodies, thoughts repressed, beings discontented, writing explicitly or implicitly (about, from, toward) desire. Desire in its multiple human forms. Desire for mobility, to categorize, to create histories, to document oneself as a site with a voice within larger or other spaces, to gain entry into a nation, to move out of a nation, into an identity, out of one. Desire to put pressure on a text: to poke, stroke, question the self and bring it into a relationship with other penetrable objects and ideas; to analyze and take apart, seeing in everything an argument; and to constantly feel a pulse, an impetus to engage, whether to harmonize or beat out the most logical but cacophonic of disagreements, and to write this engagement into being.

Soon I will show you when everything in my class fell apart, I fell apart principally, and in conversation of sex and desire, only to see that this outcome of my literary-sexual-experiment makes real/theoretical sense within the fact of language's persistence. For to speak and to document are resistant, puzzling, indeed, risky-and risqué-businesses, caring as I do for languages while knowing how they can slip, fail, plop to the floor without any noticeable effect, or unfasten me entirely as a feminist site in a very public way, reminding me of what Foucault has taught us all: that a given power structure, while it is constantly producing something, often cannot control the exact outcome or product that results from its intersections.

The discussion for this one day was to be on interpreting obscenity, laughter and eroticism in contrast to "the pornographic" beginning with literature written in translation, for to read such is often perceived as an essentially vulgar act. Something like reading/seeing pornography, or detailed/descriptive/too-real sexual scenes in something so sophisticated as literature's walls. The two Cuban texts were the first chapter of Zoé Valdés' novel, I Gave You All I Had, and Ena Lucía Portela's short story, "At the Back of the Cemetery," which would surely challenge thoroughly and multiply the hetero-normatively sexed minds of a majority of my students, just as they would poke the reader into laughter ranging from soft to wild, always with an artful move into enigmatic prose at moments of great linguistic tension. I will document two paragraphs upon which my class's readings of the aforementioned concepts hinge in two clumps accompanied by my brief analyses of them for you to experience.

From I Gave You All I Had:

The Girl Cuca's brother, laid low by asthma and chronic Catholicism, was now settled in the damn-near-white mulatto's hole of a room, walled off by a wooden partition from the pigeonhole where his sister slept. Not that she was so little anymore, now that she had reached adolescence. It was a morning of pouring rain when the Girl (she'd only shake the name as a full-grown woman) heard something like the parched panting of a horse, the rustling of bedsheets, and the rip of yielding cloth. Twas not curiosity, but fear, the kind that chills and convulses the belly with a simultaneous urge to shit and vomit, that sent her spying through a crack. The scream she stifled dangled in her mouth. There was her brother, forcibly pinned down by his hair, all naked, all wet, slobbering, tied and scratched up, weeping and mumbling an ‘Oh my God! Oh my God!' beneath his breath. Buttocks glistened like tallow in the grid of moonlight sifting through the slats, the damn-near-white mulatto's peninsular penis pumped away, in and out, plunging with the ease of a Turkish saber into a heart. The Girl Cuca saw her brother's ass, chafed and raw, and that other one's cock smeared in shit and blood. She wanted to scream, call for help, rescue her brother, the Catholic laid low by chronic asthma. But the damn-near-white mulatto chose that very minute to come, to pull off the finale of the century, sealing his moans with a bite to the other one's back. Laughing and crying in one breath, the other one whimpered away-‘oh, my sugar angel, my mulattokin, my honey cock.' And then he was coming in some intergalactic orbit, and his lungs opened up and he breathed deep like a frogman, like an amphibian creature. The Girl Cuca looked on in pain and terror and saw only too well what pleasure her brother, the Catholic laid low by chronic asthma, had felt. From that moment on she began to learn silent suffering; she'd never play again. That rank spectacle with its asshole vapors would traumatize the Girl Cuca, and from then on and for the rest of her life, sex would fascinate and disgust her. (Valdés 6)

The plays of language, though in translation, convey Valdés' stylistic rawness in her descriptions of an erotic moment that imbricates into the pornographic, just as her language releases its firm grip from the reader to move into a prophetic description of the love and destruction or love as destruction that Cuca will experience throughout the novel. Cuca's life span serves as a timeline for the exaggerated, sex-filled, but painfully unfulfilled narration of moments of rising promises through decades of socialist-style decadence that mark "the" lived Cuban Revolution. But what is most significant within a reading of this passage is not the play on Cuca's brother's asthmatic, homosexual Catholicism, or that the church is symbolically being thrust into by a bisexual, rapist criminal, or even the playful insinuations of race-complications or hierarchies within a country whose (former/or now liminal) leader has declared that there is only one Cuban race, but the nearness of the elements of love, desire, and destruction that are deployed through a sexual scene. What Roland Barthes has called the "little deaths" of orgasm are not all that I mean here by destruction[1]. But that a thin wall separates Cuca from a man who had tried to rape her earlier in the story, who was now enjoying a pleasurable experience with someone she loves, her brother, and that this, her second sexual experience, is painfully close to one in which there is a love element, but only as much as there is destruction of love, emotions, trust. Like the walls of buildings around her, what are still warm, loved, dear spaces are also crumbling ones.

And from "At the Back of the Cemetery," Portela's short story:

Just like any other loner would in his place and in full possession of his mental faculties, as the saying goes, the boy would have listened quietly a while longer until he got an erection (big waves of pleasure stirred him to his feet) and a damp foreskin. He would have looked for an old brown paper sack under the mattress, captured four or five cockroaches, then sealed them up inside despite their struggles and their cheep cheeping in protest. His ear always alert to the events on the other side of the worm-eaten wall, he would have undone buttons with one hand to liberate what was already struggling to be liberated and would have stuck it into the sack. He would barely touch himself, since the fascinating thing was feeling, all the way to the tip, the scrambling of the bugs as they walked on it, soiled it, gnawed on it. A slow, minute pleasure [...] His ritual. That's the way it would have been. [...] The cold, metallic, pitiless feeling. Lisander felt like he was drowning, everything around him was turning black in a sudden, unrestrained amanuenses, a spark of memory that appears in a whirlwind of distorted features, cries begging for help, dangling silhouettes... of Mama and Papa. (Lucía 125)

We see a moment here that is, in a manner, grotesque, provokes the reader to check herself. Lisander masturbates, or rather, is pleasured by cockroaches as he listens to his sister and her lover having sex on the other side of the wall. The thematic parallel of voyeuristic incest is evident, though here Lisander feels pleasure, whereas Cuca encountered fright in the destructive happening of love being made. We read a move from the erotic (or pornographic, or both collapsed into each other) to the enigmatic, a fading out of consciousness between the character and the reader through the narrator's voice. A movement away from Lisander as a man to Lisander as a boy in the mentioning of his abandoned parents which precedes the turn toward a mentioning of love between Lisander and his sister. A sexual, parental, and sibling love bound within their one relationship, within their existence beside the cemetery (functioning, perhaps, as an allegory for Cuba itself). The paragraph that follows this one, that closes the piece, says the following of a gift that Lavinia, the sister, had given to Lisander, her brother, "She, in turn, had given it to him, to Lisander, to tell him in her own macabre, excessively subtle way, just like [...] the caresses, the heartbreak and the pleasure of receiving something so forbidden, that she still loved him more than anyone else. To tell him he was the most important thing in the world to her" (127). While out of context this may read as banal, it is a tender turn from the rawly sexual language that sustains an upright reader into a shift, a difference that sustains the narrative, and again raises the primary elements on which my thoughts on teaching these texts were focused: the nearness of love and destruction, of writing in a moment of humor, laughter, or shock to release the reader from the tension and shock of sex and obscenity, and through all of this to discuss yet another artistic manifestation of language's duplicitous power. I mean, what about the amorous love that passes between Lisander and Lavinia, a brother and sister in Lucía's story who essentially raised each other, determined their own set of norms for behavior, love, love-making? Or this other act of human or animalistic impulses, desperations, satiations, needs, fucking, that Valdés describes between the asthmatic brother and "mulatto"? How does this meet with my students' largely homophobic and Christian conceptions of sex and love? Yet another not so tacit point of these readings is also to argue the notion that obscenity is evidence of there being a pulse in language, that it is a living thing.

So here it begins, the moment when the earth stopped turning and I nearly fainted: Before class, one of my students, a young woman, stops me on the way into the classroom and explains to me, with blushed reticence, that she had a great deal of trouble "getting through" the Valdés chapter, particularly certain "bad parts" that were too explicit for her "tastes." I made a face at this remark, taken aback as I was, laughed in the way I do that does not mean I think something is funny but that I am trying to think through the strangeness of it, when she quickly added, "but I had my boyfriend read the chapter and tell me where I could start and stop around the good and bad parts." Disarmed to the point of speechlessness I stared at my student longer than either of us were comfortable with. My student's boyfriend censored her readings for her, by request, portions of a text that she describes as "good" or "bad" based on her "tastes," her moral judgments! Hearing this in that moment, half way through the semester, left me entirely undone, vulnerable in a way that I had not experienced as a teacher. What had I done in all these weeks if one of my best, most intellectually rigorous students upon reading something (note that it is not the text that explores the sexual "taboos" of sex between a brother and sister, as this is still, at least, heterosexual amour, but the text in which a homosexual scene is created) that challenged her cultural and religious sensibilities and prompted her to stop reading and ask for a male censor?

Baffled, I remarked somewhat automatically that one must learn to read and analyze a text just as sharply, not regardless of one's "morality" per se but even if the literature seemingly challenges one's concept of one's morality, as there are always layers of meaning at work in any one text, paragraph, word, especially in its having undergone translation, that demand attention. She asked that I not emphasize in class the paragraph that I have quoted above from Valdés-and I agreed. Now, however, I find myself not knowing why, as this is decision is entirely inconsistent with my approaches to the classroom. She didn't do the assignment and therefore should not have even come to my class. She broke the rules, broke our agreement as teacher-student, but felt able to do so based on the morality of her tastes. To this day I am disappointed in myself, my decision, my collapsing in principle under my disappointment in her.

Yet this-these paragraphs' present-absence from the class discussion-is exactly why everything fell apart for me that day in my efforts at framing a conversation. For one cannot be teaching obscenity, eroticism, love, or showing the brokenness inherent to norms through an act of selective-self-censoring, or through submission to the weight of aggravation. And one cannot expect that in the not speaking of these words in the class that they somehow disappear...

Pushing through class I felt increasingly physically sick, knowing I was performing a mass disservice to literatures I love, to a subject and argument that is part of my larger commitment to my class, to this moment in my teaching history, to things in which I believe and are therefore part of my own morality. To make a bad analogy, that day was like supremely bad sex. The ludic, the fluid, the play and firmness demanded by intensive language studies never found a place to enter, form, exhaust. After that class, though I have sworn to myself to never make the same mistake in misreading myself, to learn from my bad fielding of such a sincere but flawed response in a way that is consistent with my own demands for intellectual rigor, I was overcome by a sense of defeat, disgust, and a new conscientiousness of my obsession with the risks of language, and challenging these individuals, on all fronts, to think through things, ideas, for themselves, informed, while straining to hold together pre-conceptions, misconceptions and forging newly forming ones. Teaching and leaving nothing, not a damn thing out of the text of the class. Without apology.

Toward the end of I Gave You All I Had, the narrator remarks in an aside, "I try to be specific, because you can never be too careful with language around here-what with the official lingo and the sanctioned jargon and the street talk, the confusion can be something awful, you practically need an interpreter to move between neighborhoods around here. [...] [A]t least there is metalinguistic vigor and rigor [mortis]" (200). I use this literary expression to theorize this particular anecdote of mine, as it indeed exceeds its literary moment and enters playfully the real here. I think these words speak to the censorship and talking around it that occurred between my student, her boyfriend, the reading, and me. The falling apart that I experienced, as someone who does not feel bashful or negatively nervous about discussing any subject with my students, certainly not that dealing with the obscene or erotic, occurred because these particular passages act as prime moments within their respective stories of where love intersects, intercourses provocatively with the obscene. Because in my muting of these paragraphs, while I could not speak right through the offense I felt, and while this female student thought it would make the language "mortis," flat, moribund, easier to stomach, or mouth, it actually increased the virility, the penetrating presence of the scenes, the words, the sensations they aroused, and persisted over anything else being said that day.

Other students, however, who did not exoticize and distance themselves from an analysis of the readings, performed precisely what I had been subtly and overtly training them to do throughout those weeks: to take the "official lingo" of academia and the "sanctioned jargon" of literature, never forgetting the exhilarating and necessary and inescapable element of variety, so as to see heaven or pleasure or desire as things of real human difference and analyze the intense and enigmatic moments of language working, sexed, whispering and wailing, hiding. To analyze and discover that love and destruction are, indeed, the most mortal, ugly-beautiful of bedmates. To know that to write is to love destroying.

Echoing my mention of Foucault many paragraphs past, while I had conceived of a structured dynamic to my class's flow created through readings that I love and had conceivably well-researched, and through the writing assignments for that day, what I thought would be a product that I could work through in a very specific way as one functionary of power, was undone. Language altered the outcome itself, enacted the destruction of my own eased notions of how and who I meant to make uncomfortable in the classroom, as I seemed to have been excluding myself from this formula, to have voided the jarring possibility that my devotion to something could be blasted by someone else's reading.

[1] See The Pleasure of the Text.