I'm writing again!

Hi, I just opened up the computer and started to type, and this came out - it might be a little dry...

I just came across a passage in Gravity's Rainbow succinctly describing, but only in passing (unfortunately), an idea that I’ve long held:

“She knows her own precarious thinness, her leukemia of soul, and she teases with it. You must want her, but never indicate it--not by eyes or move--or she will clarify, dead gone as smoke above a trail moving into the desert, and you’ll never have the chance again.”

In this case, the speaker (thinker, I suppose) sees a physical thinness, and associates with it a mental, emotional, spiritual, really just total overall thinness in the subject. It’s clear too from context and from the quote that he holds this against her, although her powerlessness is certainly not deliberate.
He thinks she teases with it. She is taking advantage of her lack of power, really flipping around the whole arrangement. As if there is strength at the rock bottom - because he wants her, because showing he wants her would be too strong, she would blow away, although interestingly enough Pynchon also uses the word ‘clarify’, as if there would be something left, something dead.

So she knows that a person might want her, and she knows that her power is that they cannot show they want her, for fear of destroying her (or at least their connection to her). She might not, however (although this is dubious), know that this particular person wants her. At the very least there must be doubt, in her mind, as to whether he wants her. The moment this doubt clarifies, she clarifies as well.

I’ve often felt a similar feeling while sharing space with people I desire. As if the possibility for sexual connection is always there, in fact is real (however tenuous), until the moment when I express my desire explicitly to its object.

Maybe the Beatles knew it too: “Hey, you’ve got to hide your love away”.

Until I read the quote above though, I never connected the idea to powerlessness in the person. I always saw myself at a disadvantage. After all, it was I who had to hide, and the outcome was never up to me, right? It must be admitted that every once in a while someone did clarify into love, after all, even if most admissions of desire ended poorly for me. But seeing only my own disadvantage hides the greater picture, that my disadvantage comes from the same situation as above. The girl in the quote’s powerlessness is analogous to the systematic oppression of female-bodied people worldwide, and any power I perceived the many objects of my desire to hold over me is analogous to the power the girl holds in the quote - the power of death, the power of a last resort, the power of having nothing to lose.