1 - Objection

I don’t know what worries me in the texture of this dignified morning

Overcast and knees bent, head over a book of poems which move me to a lower warmth.

It’s a bad idea to write when you don’t have it done, set, ready for execution; one should write like Cusk, a mother: thinking advanced thoughts while and after feeding the horrible child. Writing should only occur after the plan has been pieced together, unlike Cixous at her giant desk, spilling things out in wet fountain pen continuously. But perhaps I have enough to say already if I want to say that I fail to know something. And maybe the sudden force of completion can’t be found without manufacturing a sense of completion in advance.

To Willy Apollon: There is no “knowing that takes her out of childhood” for me. Being a child and therefore not being expected to know or speak about it involves knowing everything about it, involves having more time than any adult to know everything about it. I was able to put my desire into language—to address the other through the poems I wrote, through the act of verbal confession to the “crush.” I was able to put it into actions, the teasing of “stealing” from a boy I liked in a game of soccer, or of surpassing a boy while running laps around the track. I was always very aware of my lust; I wrote about it constantly, on a daily basis, and spoke about it with friends, often in written electronic formats.

I am not objecting to your conceit of the four seasons, which is wonderful. I also do not want to deny the fact that there is a such thing as “coming of age,” or of “becoming a woman”—I essentially agree with everything you have to say about the desire that the father produce a gift, a private sign of love, which surpasses the maternal order, and that there is also in the development of femininity the second man, the one who makes the girl aware of her status as the object of fantasy. But I want to spend more time than you do with the shape of the passion that comes to the woman who has learned this, who has somehow moved on, at least for a period of her life, from the primal scenes. What is that fourth season, if it doesn’t involve a life of crime?

(“Four Seasons in Femininity, or Four Men in a Woman’s Life”)

I’m struck by how really truly vulnerable I seem when I’m in a certain position—fuzzed out in bed, about to sleep but unsure if I should release some kind of a reaction; I passed out for at least an hour and never came, the stimmung pooling into a desire to speak about it that was lost to the slumber. I should admit to a certain fear of anyone, anything that has that specific power over me: the power to make me a sensitive membrane, tympanic.

Louise Glück, Doris Lessing, a search for a feminist art history, Kaja Silverman on Henry James, Willy Apollon on the “Four Seasons”, revisiting Norwegian Wood, correcting a student on her use of the term “Madonna-Whore Complex” when the actual terms used by Freud (at least in Strachey’s translation) are “debasement” and “psychical impotence”

The Kawakami-Murakami conversation on Lithub is a bit of a trainwreck, at least when it comes to the discussion of sex—“There’s something really important to me about what you’ve been saying, this idea that in your opinion, women can go beyond sexualization, or exist wholly apart from it, and take the story in an entirely different direction.” What is that sexualization? The sexy oracle is mostly just a problem of epigonism—male fantasy becoming boring. But I think the real problem is one of writing “female desire,” which is probably messier than the configurations of desire which do exist in what I remember of his work. What do I mean by this? Do the male narrators get eviscerated? It’s much safer, pleasant even, to watch women do their strange things. Anyway, I ask why he is fixated on the “hairslide.” I am also interested in hair slides, u-pins, claw clips, barrettes.

2 - Return

I was going to start a new set of notes on my phone, the “female” ones. My sister came home for the weekend. There was some joke and I laughed very hard. Before that I was talking on the phone and I remember seeing a female friend who was not Savitri, but she was upset I hadn’t sought her out. She might’ve been Praveen’s girlfriend. I might add that I saw some very short epistles, one-line sentences, these were the jokes. Perhaps they had some sexual significance.

It’s possible that I need to read Henry James by copying each chapter of the Golden Bowl into separate word documents. What’s with me and Henry James, specifically—what’s with me that’s not there for others?

One groped noiselessly among such questions, and it was actually not even definite for the Princess that her own Amerigo, left alone with her in town, had arrived at the golden mean of non-precautionary gallantry which would tend, by his calculation, to brush private criticism from its last perching-place.

A single touch from him—oh, she should know it in case of its coming!—any brush of his hand, of his lips, of his voice, inspired by recognition of her probable interest as distinct from pity for her virtual gloom, would hand her over to him bound hand and foot. Therefore to be free, to be free to act, other than abjectly, for her father, she must conceal from him the validity that, like a microscopic insect pushing a grain of sand, she was taking on even for herself.

She was learning, almost from minute to minute, to be a mistress of shades since, always, when there were possibilities enough of intimacy, there were also, by that fact, in intercourse, possibilities of iridescence; but she was working against an adversary who was a master of shades too, and on whom, if she didn’t look out, she should presently have imposed a consciousness of the nature of their struggle.

I tried to work out something more about my readings in analysis. Then I went to Either/Or and reread the parts about Breton and Nadja. I said something about how Louise Glück engenders in me a strong sexual response; the fundamental experience of the writer is helplessness. I feel I am floating on the surface of my thoughts, becoming “cerebral” but also unbound to anything external. I know where the source of my cruelty lies. I wore the ribbed sweater dress over a more or less normal outfit and it was nice; sometimes unbuttoned, like a cardigan, other times in its buttoned clingy state. I tried on some tights for the first time since I was 15. Menstruation is comparatively minor but I still think about how the endometrium smells, how it horrifies and allures me, it’s so “alive.”

Are there two kinds of girls: sun girl and moon girl? I can get rabidly jealous of girls who are dumber than me, dumber in a particular way: “a poem should be palpable and mute, like a globed fruit.” I’m a sun girl, a yellow is the color of madness kind of girl, a mock orange girl, and I’m both proud and afraid. I mostly don’t want to be a sun girl; I don’t want to be a moon girl either. But reading Glück makes me feel like a different thing. Gravid, concrete, stone. Yesterday my dream involved some sailor moon figures whom I was fighting with; fighting involved shaking without making any contact. The tendency to vibrate while under great weight.

Brooding Likeness

I was born in the month of the bull,
the month of heaviness,
or of the lowered, the destructive head,
or of purposeful blindness. So I know, beyond the shadowed
patch of grass, the stubborn one, the one who doesn’t look up,
still senses the rejected world. It is
a stadium, a well of dust. And you who watch him
looking down in the face of death, what do you know
of commitment? If the bull lives
one controlled act of revenge, be satisfied
that in the sky, like you, he is always moving,
not of his own accord but through the black field
like grit caught on a wheel, like shining freight.

Parodos

[…]

to the dark nature these
are proofs, not
mysteries—

3 - Freeze

I wonder what is making me so tired. My mom cried as she spoke about the past, and Lara did too last evening. But it all points back to something that precedes the event. I find it hard to sympathize with my mother. I’m a cruel and soulless baby, I can’t feel a thing.

I have this sort of mute stone attitude towards visible bursts of emotion; meanwhile I think about how these poems are working on me. I have so much hair and it feels good. I’m a plant, growing. The insides of my knees feel slippery against each other because they’re smooth. My afternoon naps have an apocalyptic depth. I like how Glück and Rilke write even if they write the same poem over and over again. “O Lacrimosa”: “Ah, but the winters! The earth’s mysterious / turning within. Where around the dead / in the pure recedeing of sap, / boldness is gathered, / the boldness of future springtimes. / Where imagination occurs / beneath what is rigid; where all the green / worn thin by the vast summers / again turns into a new / insight and the mirror of intuition; / where the flowers' color / wholly forgets that lingering of our eyes.”

When I read Rilke I want to squeeze him. I’m obsessed with him. I’m obsessed.

I adore, I adore my analyst; I adore him because there is no more problem. No symptom, no desire, no lack, no objet a, just the happy enthusiasm of speaking about books and ideas with him freely, while feeling this secret growing in me, which bears no dreams. “That’s what it’s like to have a wife.” My mom thinks I have a boyfriend, but in reality I have a wife. My wife and I never speak except to coordinate the most basic things; otherwise she has various effects on my life, like a constant pressure. We exchange gifts somewhat regularly. Sometimes I tell her something. I tell my analyst about my wife: details that show I care.

I’m never going to have a partner; just the men I smoke like cigarettes, and my wife.

–

I found another type of woman today. Not sure how I feel about her.

She was deep within herself, like a woman heavy
with child, and did not see the man in front
or the path ascending steeply into life.
Deep within herself. Being dead
filled her beyond fulfillment. Like a fruit
suffused with its own mystery and sweetness,
she was filled with her vast death, which was so new,
she could not understand that it had happened.
She had come into a new virginity
and was untouchable; her sex had closed
like a young flower at nightfall, and her hands
had grown so unused to marriage that the god’s
infinitely gentle touch of guidance
hurt her, like an undesired kiss.

[…]

She was already loosened like long hair,
poured out like fallen rain,
shared like a limitless supply.

She was already root.

(Rilke, “Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes”)

What Type of Girl?

Some dumb girl with the face of an angry man, hallucinating the existence of her wife.

An ordinary bitch with an ordinary cunt; not extraordinarily appealing, not a fruit.

Psychopathic and cruel, predilection for murder, but murder is not art.

Weird and crude and pointless, but not even yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi.

Smarter and freer than you, and therefore allowed to say dumb things.

Actually completely subservient to you, and therefore allowed to be mean.

The type who knows exactly how her mother fails to love her father.

Louise Glück:

Descending Figure (1980)
The Triumph of Achilles (1985)
Ararat (1990)
The Wild Iris (1992)
Meadowlands (1996)
Vita Nova (1999)
The Seven Ages (2001)
Averno (2006)
A Village Life (2009)
Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014)

I have not given all full consideration, but I favor
The Seven Ages, The Wild Iris, Faithful and Virtuous Night.

From Nest (Vita Nova)

First I was at peace.
Then I was contented, satisfied.
And then flashes of joy.
And the season changed–for all of us,
of course.

And as I peered out my mind grew sharper.
And I remember accurately
the sequence of my responses,
my eyes fixing on each thing
from the shelter of the hidden self:

first, I love it.
Then, I can use it.

Imaginary Career (Rilke)

At first a childhood, limitless and free
of any goals. Ah sweet unconsciousness.
Then sudden terror, schoolrooms, slavery,
the plunge into temptation and deep loss.

Defiance. The child bent becomes the bender,
inflicts on others what he once went through.
Loved, feared, rescuer, wrestler, victor,
he takes his vengeance, blow by blow.

And now in vast, cold, empty space, alone.
Yet hidden deep within the grown-up heart,
a longing for the first world, the ancient one…

Then, from His place of ambush, God leapt out.

At once the wingèd energy of delight
carried you over childhood’s dark abysses
now beyond your own life build the great
arch of unimagined bridges.

Wonder happens if we can succeed
in passing through the harshest danger;
but only in a bright and purely granted
achievement can we realize the wonder.

To work with Things in the indescribable
relationship is not too hard for us;
the pattern grows more intricate and subtle,
and being swept along is not enough.

Take your practiced powers and stretch them out
until they span the chasm between two
contradictions… For the god
wants to know himself in you.

Now it is time that gods came walking out
of lived-in Things…
Time that they came and knocked down every wall
inside my house. New page. Only the wind
from such a turning could be strong enough
to toss the air as a shovel tosses dirt:
a fresh-turned field of breath. O gods, gods!
who used to come so often and are still
asleep in the Things around us, who serenely
rise and at wells that we can only guess at
splash icy water on your necks and faces,
and lightly add your restedness to what seems
already filled to bursting: our full lives.
Once again let it be your morning, gods.
We keep repeating. You alone are source.
With you the world arises, and your dawn
gleams on each crack and crevice of our failure…

4 - Flight

Dreamt that the student who had turned in his essay late had produced an arrangement of tropical plants in a little greehouse, and then completely modified the arrangement as part of the revision process. At first things were layered and dense and messy, then things were so neat, I almost disliked it. I put on red lipstick because I’m thinking about Emily Ratajkowski’s phrase “bitch era” and the pleasingness of her saying that she’s single and dating for the first time ever; yesterday read some of My Body and found that I didn’t dislike it; woke up this morning wondering why there isn’t some sort of a feminist reading group on campus, why am I in a psychoanalytic reading group on femininity that’s almost exclusively attended by boys?

From Persephone the Wanderer, Averno

Persephone is having sex in hell.
Unlike the rest of us, she doesn’t know
what winter is, only that
she is what causes it.

It would have been interesting to have acquiesced to Jacob’s desire early in high school. I still don’t understand why I had such a repressive relationship to my body for so long. I can probably go on blaming my mother for it, but this bores me.

I’m skeptical of Alice Notley’s craft essays, there’s something so American about the notion that if you knew something about your technique it would somehow help a poet or a reader. There are no craft essays for understanding the force of Rilke or Glück. The closest we get is a novel like The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge or the letters or “American Narcissism.”

From her “Women and Poetry”: What might be a true female poetry? … But the real question is, is that a real question? What might be another kind of poetry? … The question then perhaps becomes, What is it like at the beginning of the world? … Everything must change and very very soon. Women and poetry, is a joke—Where is the world? Where is the first world? We must find it as soon as possible.

This sounds a lot like something from Spring and All. I don’t really believe it. Why the “first” world, why the “beginning”? But I think the string of questions is good, maybe.

I should know Breton’s “Manifesto of Surrealism.” One item that stands out: “There is a man cut in two by the window.” This is his first surrealist vision, his first free thought.

He gets more heavy-handed when he moves from a neutral description of the free associative technique to the reification of certain qualities in its output: “the illusion of an extraordinary verve, a great deal of emotion, a considerable choice of images”—“a very special picturesque quality and, here and there, a strong comical effect.” “Poetically speaking, what strikes you about them above all is their extreme degree of immediate absurdity, the quality of this absurdity, upon closer scrutiny, being to give way to everything admissible, everything legitimate in the world.” So it’s all pointed towards some sort of plenitude, maybe some sort of bad infinity.

Surrealist practice sounds more like hypnosis or suggestion than psychoanalysis:

After you have settled yourself in a place as favorable as possible to the concentration of your mind upon itself, have writing materials brought to you. Put yourself in as passive, or receptive, a state of mind as you can. Forget about your genius, your talents, and the talents of everyone else. Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything. Write quickly, without any preconceived subject, fast enough so that you will not be tempted to reread what you have written.

“Soluble Fish” is fun. Even my cunt approves. It may get unbearably boring later on.

The prostitute begins her song that is more roundabout than a cool brook in the country of Cloven Garlic, but despite everything it is only an absence. A real lily elevated to the glory of stars undoes the thighs of combustion that is awakening and the group that they form goes off to find the shore. But the soul of the other woman is covered with white feathers that gently fan her. Truth rests on the mathematical reeds of the infinite and everything moves forward by order of the eagle riding pillion, while the genius of vegetable flotillas claps and the oracle is pronounced by fluid electric fish.

The Rilke poems from yesterday seem less afflicting but from this angle I can see that what impresses me in them is their torque, which always occurs in a buckling moment:

The child bent becomes the bender

Then, from His place of ambush, God leapt out.

Take your practiced powers and stretch them out
until they span the chasm of two
contradictions… For the god
wants to know himself in you.

to toss the air as a shovel tosses dirt:
a fresh-turned field of breath.

I resurfaced a bit today and it was somewhat traumatic.

I crossed pathes with the man whom I almost agreed to meet to have sex with on the street. He was very tall and pale with his bald head, and seemed more attractive than he did in his pictures. I am sure he must have recognized me, though I always assume my appearance is so protean that it defies recognition. Since I was talking to Dror I was mostly looking down and away and I suppose he may have suspected I was with someone I was dating.

Dror told me about his dislike of John and Praveen, and his previous pursuit of Amparo, which cooled as she cooled towards him. He seems to trust me and like me, and maybe he doesn’t sense that I find him a bit boring, though I don’t know him well enough to be sure. He’s seeing Josy now, who I also find boring, but Dror is okay to be around. He’s the first person I’ve met who doesn’t like John and Praveen.

Xinyu is so adorable and I want to touch him, but I don’t think he wants me to touch him.

I hate John, because it’s still nice to be around him. I can’t deal with the fact that I still have to deal with him. Perhaps this will all percolate into writing him some mean letter and dropping it in his mailbox. I hated how we could talk about books, I hated his purple sweater, I hated how he looked up at me while sitting outside the library with a cigarette, I hated how he asked me how I was feeling when I was sitting on that couch. I didn’t hate listening to him sing. I hope I never see him again. Having a social life in Ithaca bothers me.

I prefer making eye contact with strangers. I like watching strange men and women look at each other. I like watching congregations of girls, I like it when girls were short leather skirts.

6 - Broom

I ate too many small purple potatoes last night, and so I went for a walk in the morning, with my camera. It was slow, warm, and quiet. When I got back I found an enigmatic poem in The Triumph of Achilles, and read the rest of the collection. Many of these poems are too much. They need to be kept in a dark box and touched with gloved fingers, lest something erode.

I think the danger is in the way that something about John is now knit into my life, and I probably wouldn’t be able to extract the thing in order to understand it. So the thing will keep on rubbing against me, and I’ll continue to wake up sometimes and weep, but when I think about the other thing I am so wrapped up in it. I don’t desire John, but I’m confused about what it is that he did that helped me, and I’m confused about the notion that I used him, and maybe I want him to acknowledge that something strange went on, a kind of conversational rapport that was innately sexual. I can’t and have never felt precisely sexual around him.

I think if Zane felt abandoned, abject, lonely, dejected, I would feel that I shared his condition: that I knew it, that I felt bruised with him, that he was not in fact alone because his fragility would be so finely known to me that I could occupy the same space. But if I knew John to be abandoned, abject, lonely, dejected, I simply wouldn’t know how to describe or envision that space: I would know it existed as an index, like the number on a house.

I don’t know if it is very shameful to express something about how I feel when I think about Z—like I’m getting ahead of myself, which is the structure of embarrassment. It would only be acutely shameful if I conveyed the fact that my imaginary had crystallized into something both immutable and false: like a bad clay sculpture, a bad oil painting, anything bad that’s in progress but which couldn’t conceivably be edited or revised into the shape of something beautiful, which is how I feel about a lot of material on this site. Maybe I should be less sentimental about deleting stuff, but I don’t trust myself as a reader of myself: I don’t trust that what I see is as disfigured as I think it is, the way that when I look at a picture of myself all I can see is the blemish in the corner, or the outline of a distorted jawline, and not the “whole.”

I used the “clay sculpture” and “oil painting” as examples no doubt because such materials seem both impressionable and heavy; they also seem to be particularly pure elements, which took some effort to procure. Language when it fails feels like so much dust, or hair in the drain, or nail clippings, or dead skin cells which is what dust mainly is; I’m not sure if it’s so bad to accumulate filaments and scales, not waste of pristine materials but waste products which would fall off the body and accumulate somewhere no matter what.

When I look at pictures of my analyst I think I adore him so much even though he doesn’t have a very beautiful face; I thought about what would happen if my child was ugly; somebody might reproach me for disdaining this aspect of her, or someone might wonder if I feel badly about it, as I contributed to it: I’d tell my friend: Well, no, it’s not my problem.

A real problem: sometimes it’s just not fun, or not so vibrant, to always be toiling and listening; but I think if one gets burnt enough by the sun one remembers the comforts and joys of the dark cave—its paintings, its wetness, its stalactites, its bats. You know, both stalactite and stalagmite come from stalassein, to drip—

The final aim is the flower, the fluttering singing nucleus which is a bird in spring, the magical spurt of being which is a hare all explosive with fulness of self, in the moonlight; the real passage of a man down the road, no sham, no shadow, no counterfeit, whose eyes shine blue with his own reality, as he moves amongst things free as they are, a being; the flitting under the lamp of a woman [incontrovertible], distinct from everything and from everybody, as one who is herself, of whom Christ said “to them that have shall be given.”

And I can tell that I do not know it all yet. There is more to disclose. What more, I do not know. I tremble at the inchoate infinity of life when I think of that which the poppy has to reveal, and has not as yet had time to bring forth. I make a jest of it. I say to the flower, “Come, you’ve played that red card long enough. Let’s see what else you have got up your sleeve.” But I am premature and impertinent. My impertinence makes me ashamed. He has not played his red card long enough to have outsatisfied me.

The Embrace

She taught him the gods. Was it teaching? He went on
hating them, but in the long evenings of obsessive talk,
as he listened, they became real. Not that they changed.
They never came to seem innately human.
In the firelight, he watched her face.
But she would not be touched; she had rejected
the original need. Then in the darkness he would lead her back—
above the trees, the city rose in a kind of splendor
as all that is wild comes to the surface.

Marathon, 1. - Last Letter (excerpt)

When I tried to stand again, I couldn’t move,
my legs were utterly rigid. Does grief change you like that?
Through the birches, I could see the pond.
The sun was cutting small white holes in the water.

I got up finally; I walked down to the pond.
I stood there, brushing the grass from my skirt, watching myself,
like a girl after her first lover
turning slowly at the bathroom mirror, naked, looking for a sign.
But nakedness in women is always a pose.
I was not transfigured. I would never be free.

Marathon, 4. - Song of Obstacles (excerpt)

the ore, the unearthed mysteries: so I see
that ice is more powerful than rock, than mere resistance—

7 - Blade

I found last night chaotic and acute; I went to see Claire Denis’s other 2022 film which felt like some sort of a primal scene—if Stars at Noon was primal in the form of a question, then Both Sides of the Blade was like watching my parents fight, quite simply that, something of the past but relived in the present. I wasn’t moved by it, but I was battered.

Xinyu’s dismissive response to the film was easy enough to anticipate, but disappointed me nevertheless, because he seemed uninterested in talking about it, he couldn’t produce a critique that I could chew on. I chewed him out instead, told him that he needed to “listen” to the film. Rafael was looking weird, kind of dweeby and not handsome in the young Lars von Trier way that had initially attracted me to him; he was wearing cargo shorts or something and rimless rectangular glasses. But we had a good conversation, and he complimented me once on my harshness towards Xinyu, and another time on my maturity, so I felt I liked him in spite of the fact that he misgendered me so many times. I told him that I liked Xinyu a lot, but because Xinyu hadn’t had his heart broken in a while, it was hard for me to know if we could be close, or if he was just someone I could share a bibliography with.

When I first asked Connie and Rafael in that group setting whether they thought I was male or female, Connie had said male, Rafael said female, so why did he misgender me even after that first meeting, when I was very candid about my detransition? Connie met me on Zoom in the spring, he didn’t. Rafael’s misgendering probably comes out of a blanket understanding of me as some variety of trans (all trans people were born male, for some), but it also feels like a resistance to seeing me, something disproportionate. We’ve seen each other on dating apps a few times, presumably, so I feel like he must have the capacity to be attracted to me but is denying it, or it’s a simple case of me being invisible because I’m not attractive to him in the slightest. I don’t think I could fall in love with him but I used to imagine having sex with him once and either angering him or breaking his heart. But then we could have a conversation about what he said, that there are three types of women for him (non-overlapping categories): women he likes, women who like him, and women who don’t give a fuck about him, and whom he doesn’t give a fuck about, which means they might be able to be friends. I’ve never understood how men can be like that—I can’t sustain an attraction to someone who doesn’t like me, who doesn’t show signs of it in a renewed fashion.

I don’t understand Xinyu’s liking for Dror. The three hours spent at Josy’s place with them all last night was a strange pain. Obviously it’s because of Xinyu’s quickness to put me in the category of woman I didn’t want to be in: the non-sexual one. I’d rather be in the “annoying” category, I said. He couldn’t remember the third category, but was willing to put Gillian Rose in it. Juliette Binoche went to the non-sexual category. Later he said the third category was the category of women he didn’t think about at all, but he didn’t seem satisfied by this, and continued to try to remember what the third category had been. I find his declaration that all women are non-sexual to him (there is no “sexual” category) impossible, kind of repugnant, because even though I’m so heterosexual I can’t not see women as sexual, partly because I am one, I suppose, but also because I’ve always invested my friendships with a kind of sexual energy, even if I wasn’t at all drawn to sleeping with the friend in question. So when I told Xinyu we couldn’t be friends anymore, I was not joking; of course I can’t know if that’s going to be the case, but it’s a prediction.

I woke up in a cold sweat but only my underwear was soaked, and not with sexual fluids.

Last night I dreamt that Xinyu and I were in an empty auditorium, waiting for graduation to begin. I found a seat near my parents, but was wondering if someone else would need to sit by them because of something about the alphabetic assignation of seats; the space was a bit like the hearing room in Kafka’s The Trial. Today I had some dream involving the same people I saw last night, like a continuation of the conversation, but I don’t remember any of it. And on Saturday there was some similar vague dream with John and Praveen. My unconscious is dreaming but also telling me it doesn’t want to remember its dreams.

Next Wednesday is the next department social event, and then Friday is PARG, and then there’s Thanksgiving break, and then the two weeks before I leave. I wrote the letter to John but don’t feel like sending it—I’ll hold it until I feel like sending it. I wonder if I’ll end up at Lara’s place or not; there’s a part of me which just wants to tunnel and burrow and cut.

This is all usual young person stuff: being around people in order to figure something out about a self we believe to be still malleable. In this case it was a question of attractiveness: did we think so-and-so, in or out of the room, was hot or intelligent? I have not always been able to maintain an immutable sense of myself as hot or intelligent, but it’s hard for me not to feel that way about myself, as if it were a prerequisite for being alive. And it has of course something to do with the “hardship” I’ve been through, and the subsequent qualities of my experiences with different people, especially insofar as those people had some sexual relation with me. I was and remain immensely critical of my appearance and of my intelligence, which I’m realizing is more or less central to my concept of myself as capable of being creative. Perhaps my frustration comes from wanting my interactions with people to always involve a kind of sexual imaginary, a confrontation with otherness and difference: I want people who I’m not invested in to see me as having some possible continued importance to them regardless of the lack of a sexual rapport, as when I’m with strangers in public, strangers whom I haven’t exchanged a word with. So long as I make eye contact with someone, I am immediately drawn to think about their sexual lives, and this sexualizes both me and them, and this feels like a realer and more generative kind of intimacy or knowledge or curiosity than the one which comes out of intellectual conversations that are really just one species of gossip: gossip as empty talk simply because it skirts around the sexual.

Dror asked if John was hot, and this was in response to Rafael asking me if I thought Dror was hot. I think this was a corruption of the question of the categorization of women as likeable or not likeable, attractive to the gaze or not attractive to the gaze, since hotness is something far more total, and more subjective. I’m glad Dror deflected, otherwise I would have conveyed that I didn’t find him hot. And I said yes, John is hot, and Rafael had some sort of a reaction, a kind of surprised laughter on account of my boldness (Rafel has never met John). Josy said absolutely not: he’s neither hot nor pleasing to look at. I said that he’s hot but not necessarily pleasing to look at. I stand by my judgments, but am also not invested in defending them; people who disagree can go off and disappear from my head. I said that for me there are two types of women: ones I like looking at and ones I don’t like looking at, and two types of men: ones I like listening to, and ones I don’t like listening to. Rafael asked, “what kinds of men are we?” I said it was hard to answer because I was in the process of listening right now, but the truth is that I knew—I don’t like listening to Dror, I like listening to Rafael, and I’m not sure I like listening to Xinyu anymore.

I wonder how I came up with those categories. It probably has something to do with my sense that I’ve already always determined if I’m attracted to a man’s appearance, so the question begins with one of listening, whereas with women, I already know if I like her words or not, and I’m subsequently curious about what makes her worth looking at again and again.

I don’t have a way of accounting for Zane according to this structure; I have been interested in the question of what it means to look at him again and again, and in what it means to listen to him again and again; both are complicated by the mediation of text and pictures. I’ve had phases of my life in which I wasn’t attracted to him, though that mostly consisted in an absolute removal of attention. I didn’t look at him at all during the second part of high school, and didn’t feel anything when we met up during my last year of college. Being attracted to him would have involved ceding ground on everything: and it happened, but took some time. I had been skeptical of letters, of emails, of being seen or listened to. The whole thing that happened in the first year of grad school, the third year of grad school, was an immense shock, and now what I find more shocking is the degree to which I continue to trust him: meaning that I continue to feel right in exposing myself to him, not to test if he still wants to listen or see, but under the assumption that his interest takes on a life of its own with contours which are unimaginable to me. Still, I remain critical of myself, which means that I presume that anyone should drop me if my petals begin to droop, which could be a process sensitive to intelligent manipulation, or something absolutely not possible to control in the slightest.

What a mess this post represents. I was thinking about the hottest people alive and I found a new article on Rachel Cusk in The Atlantic: Juergen Teller took her photograph. She is 55 and has moved to Paris. Also thinking about the new Louisiana channel video with Ben Lerner in it; he’s lost some weight and looks a lot better now: more chiseled, precise.

It is urged against Thomas Hardy’s characters that they do unreasonable things—quite, quite unreasonable things. They are always going off unexpectedly and doing something that nobody would do. That is quite true, and the charge is amusing. These people of Wessex are always bursting suddenly out of bud and taking a wild flight into flower, always shooting something out of a tight convention, a tight, hide-bound cabbage state into something quite madly personal. It would be amusing to count the number of special marriage licences taken out in Hardy’s books. Nowhere, except perhaps in Jude, is there the slightest development of personal action in the characters: it is all explosive. Jude, however, does see more or less what he is doing, and act from choice. He is more consecutive. The rest explode out of the convention. They are people with a real, vital, potential self, even the apparently wishy-washy heroines of the earlier books, and this self suddenly bursts the shell of manner and convention and commonplace opinion, and acts independently, absurdly, without mental knowledge or acquiescence.

(Lawrence, Study of Thomas Hardy, Chapter III)

Scilla

Not I, you idiot, not self, but we, we—waves
of sky blue like
a critique of heaven: why
do you treasure your voice
when to be one thing
is to be next to nothing?
Why do you look up? To hear
an echo like the voice
of god? You are all the same to us,
solitary, standing above us, planning
your silly lives: you go
where you are sent, like all things,
where the wind plants you,
one or another of you forever
looking down and seeing some image
of water, and hearing what? Waves
and over waves, birds singing.

(Louise Glück, The Wild Iris)

8 - Waking

My afternoon naps continue to be horribly deep.

I couldn’t figure out how to recover from this one so I walked to the far Greenstar location listening to Emily Ratajkowski’s podcast episode with Julia Fox. I collected some unusual and decadent snack foods: black grapes, hachiya persimmons, macadamia nuts, dried figs, chocolate, cookies, apricot-peach bars. They talked about (not actually) hating men, and I was somehow moved by this. They talked about their sons: Julia Fox wants hers to know how to farm; Emrata has bought a doll and a tea set for hers; maybe this was a way to combat the patriarchy.

When I set the basket on the conveyor belt, the cashier didn’t move it. He didn’t reach for any of the items I took out of the basket. I supposed he was staring at me as I unloaded the items one by one; I took the persimmons out last, but placed them in front of all the others. It took a while for him to find the code for them, so I watched him then, and he glanced back, as if to apologize, but didn’t say anything. Instead of putting the persimmons back on the counter, he held them out. He had his hands on top of the calyces, and waited for me to extend mine before dropping them into my palms. The persimmons were long enough and my hands were small enough that our fingers didn’t touch, but I had to notice what they looked like. He did the same with other small items: a bag of macadamia nuts, a bag of dried figs. When that was over he looked at me and paused and said he liked my shoes. The appropriate response would have been: what else do you like? I was too depressed to shift my expression; I said thanks. He didn’t ask if I wanted my receipt, and began to check out items for the next customer. I thought about how he had managed to see my shoes—hadn’t I approached from a rather tight angle?

Those were among the most expensive shoes I’ve ever bought, which cost $299 with tax. They were on final sale, on the Rachel Comey website: basket-weave leather in a black-and-white snakeskin print, variegated or pied like all those animals in my dreams. I bought macadamia nuts because Emrata runs an ad on her podcast for macadamia nuts. I’m not very sympathetic to her typology of men (babies, monsters, baby-monsters), from the first episode. Deliberately sexual men have no special power, they simply affirm themselves. He was generous; he could not know that I liked what he did, and it wasn’t that he accorded value to me: it was that he made himself a spectacle. He affirmed what I already knew: that I prefer the company of strangers in brief, expansive moments, that I like to dress for the gaze of people I pass on the street, that I like to look and that I like to be seen, and that it gives me a particular pleasure to catch someone looking at my feet.

Savitri and I spoke after more than a month of almost no contact—it was nice.

9 - Apart

I ate too much of these strange snacks.

I saw the moon after the sun had risen.

I bumped into Amparo—potential first female friend here?

What kept me from seeing her? Merely my jealousy?

I didn’t go home after class. I went to Mann library, and sat next to the cactus which had accompanied me on the saddest day last November. Back then I had been immersed in Thomas Hardy. I read some article on the prosody of “Neutral Tones.” This time I finished Lawrence’s Study of Thomas Hardy, and now I feel like I have a big secret inside of me.

It’s super lovely to see young people dressed up. I saw a girl with white rippling balloon-like pants, and some boy with dark long hair that was impressively curly. I don’t remember what he wore, but he had a black kånken backpack which somehow managed to not look cliché.

I saw a beautiful tornado-like cloud, isolated on the horizon, during my run.

I feel distant from Hunter, or at least I find it difficult to convey something.

I’m no longer afraid of John; the writing of the unsent letter was perfectly apotropaic; it was important to admit to everyone that I love and adore him, this puts me at peace. I’m back to being afraid of myself in conjunction with Zane. I’m afraid of Claire Denis and Henry James. I reread an old email from last September in which I had attempted to confess to Zane that I had fallen back into the danger of being attached to him, and was afraid; the syntax, as I recall it, had felt “Jamesian,” though I hadn’t at that point read much James. Earlier in the thread he had described a dream about being with me in Washington state, and the house he described was so clearly that of the Cullen family in the Twilight movie.

Stanzas from Shelley’s “To a Skylark”:

With thy clear keen joyance
Languor cannot be:
Shadow of annoyance
Never came near thee:
Thou lovest: but ne’er knew love’s sad satiety.

Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow
The world should listen then, as I am listening now.

Such an incredible poem, discovered through D.H. Lawrence:

“The pure male is himself almost an abstraction, almost bodyless, like Shelley or Edmund Spenser. But, as we know humanity, this condition comes of an omission of some vital part. In the ordinary sense, Shelley never lived. He transcended life. But we do not want to transcend life, since we are of life. […] I can think of no being in the world so transcendently male as Shelley. He is phenomenal. The rest of us have bodies which contain the male and the female. If we were so singled out as Shelley, we should not belong to life, as he did not belong to life. But it were impious to wish to be like the angels.”

“A man who is well balanced between male and female, in his own nature, is as a rule, happy, easy to mate, easy to satisfy, and content to exist. It is only a disproportion, or a dissatisfaction, which makes the man struggle into articulation. And the articulation is of two sorts, the cry of desire or the cry of realisation, the cry of satisfaction, the effort to prolong the sense of satisfaction, to prolong the moment of consummation.”

An affirmation of a life of imbalance, of dissatisfaction, of disproportion.

11 - Crickets

I am interested in my dreams for the first time this month.

I was at the mall in Lansing to get a haircut. There were hundreds of trainees standing behind small tables, it felt a bit like a poster session at a conference, but also somewhat agricultural, since it seemed like the mall had become a barn. The hairdressers all seemed to be in their early twenties. The first person I walked up to was an asian female; she barely cut my hair. Then I turned the corner and chose between two boys, one was a non-descript asian male and the other was a handsome and smiling blond. The white boy was looking at me with such begging attention that I had to choose him, but I don’t remember if he did anything to my hair, and then I moved on to a latino man; I remember describing to him at length how I wanted my hair to look. I described Carly Rae Jepsen’s shaggy hairstyle. Then he cut my hair, very close around the back of the ears, a vivid and pleasurable sensation. While he was doing it I envisioned cutting my hair myself and how uneven it would be—but the hair wasn’t mine, it was completely straight. He also made me a “ghost cake,” a hexagonal thing with neat, thick lines of frosting and the shape of a ghost on top. I was very grateful but a bit concerned with how to carry the cake home with me. He walked with me out of the mall and told me he wanted to buy me clothing, because I looked great. I wasn’t aware of what I was wearing, and realized I had on my marimekko shirt with black striations. His name was Carlos; he wasn’t very good-looking, but I didn’t find him unattractive, and was impressed enough by the cake, and by the feeling of his scissors against the skin behind my ears. I wondered if he might be from the Southern Cone, or if he was actually from Mexico. I told him I couldn’t go out with him, that I was going to get on my bike and go home to work.

In the second dream I went to PARG; the reading was repellent to me for some reason. There was something about a hummingbird involved. I kept on moving from a computer in an office to the English lounge and it felt very rude of me to show up in the middle of the meeting, to leave, and then to come back. I felt really awful and felt that John could tell.

In the first dream there was a strong sense that I was taken, that I was occupied with something beyond my surroundings. So I kept on drifting, unable to get the simple task done. But Carlos knew this about me and had effectively made some sort of a wedding cake. It was not illogical that someone who could make a cake or cut my hair so well would also take an interest in me, but I also felt that he knew me without having to ask.

The second dream was simple: I wanted to cry but I couldn’t. It seems to snicker at the declaration, above, that “the unsent letter was perfectly apotropaic.” But it seems important that I was unable to cry; the dream doesn’t trouble me. When I woke up I was overtaken instead by wetness. I couldn’t resolve it; I was too wet and cavernous. The sensation of the scissors on my neck and above my ears had something to do with Z.

I made it to Petsmart and bought ten small crickets. It started to rain right after I arrived at my home street. The tarantula has been more active, and seems to be eating some of the fruit flies I kill and drop into the container, but not all. Today doesn’t feel auspicious. I am going to see the Smetana trio, alone, at 8 PM. I’ve never been to the Cornell concert hall.

I managed to look at Google Maps more intently today. I thought about how much I value some of my socks, including some that I’ve ignored. Some are from Hansel from Basel, others are from Tabio; these were all purchased last spring, when the weather was getting too warm for socks.

13 - Breath

Because of my weird mood I’ve been taking to lipstick more often; my relationship to the eleven samples from Kosas has changed since the summer. The only colors I am consistently repelled by are “violet fury” and “royal”—fuschia and magenta. Oddly my favorite is the dark purple, adjacent in hue to the other two—“darkroom.” It’s especially good faded. I’m still ambivalent about “vegas;” the light brown. The pinks I am least interested in; they are closer to true nudes: “rosewater,” “undone,” “stardust,” from lightest to darkest. Then there are the two bright reds, and the two darker reds: “thrillest,” which leans orange, and “electra,” which leans pink, “fringe,” which is closer to a brick red, and “phoenix,” which seems to me to be the closest to redness. Cooler tones seem to look better on me.

Yesterday’s dream was sweet. I was also sleeping in the middle of the room, because of the leak, so the whole process of going to bed and waking reminded me of Alec. In the dream I read Lara and Zane’s epistolē, written with black backgrounds and white Times New Roman. I had an urge to “reply” to them by editing the very same webpages. I don’t remember what they wrote, but Lara said something about neon colors.

Today I dreamt something that was like a continuation of Happy Hour. It’s nice to be a fan of someone. Michael Albert emailed me; I told him I had been recently looking at the Tokyo listings on Morphkey. I like the word 名曲 （めいきょく）。The characters are elegant and convey something about what I like about “classical” music or “western art music” without any of the baggage of a particular historical or cultural context.

Hamaguchi is a listener; what I said to Xinyu about needing to “listen” to a film feels more substantive now. I think it’s about listening to actors in his case. I think Denis is also a listener, and that it’s wrong to say that she makes films with a lot of talk sometimes because she’s French. In fact she doesn’t make films with a lot of talk—Both Sides of the Blade stands out. Her films aren’t like those of Rohmer or Cocteau or Godard (I don’t know french cinema well though). Her influences are Ozu and Wenders. And what matters too is that these directors have some deep interest in actors and what acting means. It’s exposed to the greatest extent in Hamaguchi’s work, where he films rehearsals, and readings. The flattest readings, the toneless ones, which enforce the act of listening, not just of hearing.

I believed my viewing of ハッピーアワー would enforce a pause in writing on APL; but there are so many unresolved questions.

The only reason I can imagine for temporarily leaving this place fallow is an abrupt sense of disgust: hatred and shame with respect to what I write, which coincides with feeling incapacitated by a fatigue which has something to do with the process of ovulation. For the first time in my life I am becoming serious about this, I am allowing myself to witness it. 恥。Now this is beautiful: ear and heart.

Other curiosities:

ねじの回転 (Turn of the Screw)

変質者 (へんしつしゃ), 異常者（いじょうしゃ）- pervert

淑女　（しゅくじょ）- graceful lady, pervert

雌豚 （めぶた) - female pig

歪む （ゆがむ）- to warp, to bend, to contort

曲げる　（まげる）- to bend, to crook, to bow

Why did I read about Protestantism the other day—and look at Martin Luther’s 95 theses? I was thinking about how I was interested in the Reformation, which is also now an icon of female desirability in the US—why and how did Yael Aflalo choose the name? What is a Protestant aesthetic? What did D.H. Lawrence say about Protestantism?

If we are to take the Nonconformist, protestant idea of ourselves: that we are all isolated individual souls, and our supreme business is to save our own souls; then marriage surely is a hindrance. If I am only out to save my own soul, I'd better leave marriage alone. As the monks and hermits knew. But also, if I am only out to save other people's souls, I had also best leave marriage alone, as the apostles knew, and the preaching saints.

But supposing I am neither bent on saving my own soul nor other people’s souls? Supposing Salvation seems incomprehensible to me, as I confess it does. “Being saved” seems to me just jargon, the jargon of self-conceit. Supposing then, that I cannot see this Saviour and Salvation stuff, supposing that I see the soul as something which must be developed and fulfilled throughout a life-time, sustained and nourished, developed and further fulfilled, to the very end; what then?

I found an article on protestant aesthetics; a poet mentioned was Donald Davie. Found his nice hard littoral poem, “Across the Bay”:

A queer thing about those waters: there are no Birds there, or hardly any.
I did not miss them, I do not remember
Missing them, or thinking it uncanny.

The beach so-called was a blinding splinter of limestone,
A quarry outranged by hulls.
We took pleasure in that: the emptiness, the hardness
Of the light, the silence, and the water’s stillness.

But this was the setting for one of our murderous scenes.
This hurt, and goes on hurting:
The venomous soft jelly, the undersides.
We could stand the world if it were hard all over.

The Protestant Calvinist aesthetic: “simplicity, sobreity, and measure.” See Isaac Watts, Seneca, the Quakers, Mark Rutherford.

Simplicity I take to refer not so much to the plainness with which a Puritan style is traditionally associated, whether in preaching, conversation or dress, as to sincerity and purity. [...] 'Purity of heart,' as Kierkegaard said much later, 'is to will one thing'. It is of a piece with that singleness of eye of which the Sermon on the Mount speaks, which enables the whole body to be full of light. Seeing things steadily and seeing them whole, we have no need for covering things up, either by deviousness and guile or by elaborate surface decoration which may possibly conceal defects.

Having courage through justification by faith to submit our inward parts to scrutiny by the light of truth, we can dare to let our yea be yea and our nay be nay.

'a sensual pleasure, deployed with an unusually frugal, and therefore exquisite, fastidiousness'.

Thinking soberly means doing so with a humble recognition of our creaturely status, and fallen creatures at that, who have the capacity to act creatively only by grace.

[…]

It carries a sharp warning against Romanticism, with its self-preoccupation and the claims it often makes to excessive moral privilege and the right to exploit others in the interest of one’s ‘art’. It can refuse to be mesmerized by ‘the poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling’ and will always check that he is not suffering from intoxication with another spirit than that of the Muse. If Peter had to endure such a check even on the day of Pentecost, those fired by lesser inspiration cannot demand exemption. With that most splendid exemplar of the Protestant aesthetic virtues in our own time, Marianne Moore, they will say to themselves, ‘Poets don’t make a fuss’.

On the importance of order:

If the order is an inadequate, oversimplified or spurious one, it becomes sentimental, or else it is oppressive, concealing disorderly and unconstructive turbulence or quenching creativity. This is why Reformed theology has to insist that the order which controls Christian measure is not that of nature or of political imposition, such as that of feudalism, in which ‘prince and priest and thrall’ are bound in a living ‘tether’, but that of the coming kingdom, an order which is never fully realized on this earth and which is constantly challenging and stimulating.

Church order is not primarily designed to keep the earthly camps of the pilgrim people of God efficiently administered, with careful attention to the fences which mark the boundary between the Curch as an institution and the world. Its main purpose is to ensure that the pilgrim people are kept on the move, with scouts moving ahead of the main body into unknown territory but also retaining contact, so that the main body does not lag too far behind.

To change the metaphor, it is more like a building site than a monument. But the discerning eye should be able to discern some of the ultimate glory of the building even in its unfinished state.

I should have some knowledge of Kawabata before I turn 25.

“In the midst of this uncertainty only the one hand, and in particular the forefinger, even now seemed damp from her touch, seemed to be pulling him back to her from afar. Taken with the strangeness of it, he brought the hand to his face, then quickly drew a line across the misted-over window. A woman’s eye floated up before him. He almost called out in his astonishment. But he had been dreaming, and when he came to himself he saw that it was only the reflection in the window of the girl opposite. Outside it was growing dark, and the lights had been turned on in the train, transforming the window into a mirror. The mirror had been clouded over with steam until he drew that line across it.

The one eye by itself was strangely beautiful, but, feigning a traveler’s weariness and putting his face to the window as if to look at the scenery outside, he cleared the steam from the rest of the glass.

The girl leaned attentively forward, looking down at the man before her. Shimamura could see from the way her strength was gathered in her shoulders that the suggestion of fierceness in her eyes was but a sign of an intentness that did not permit her to blink. The man lay with his head pillowed at the window and his legs bent so that his feet were on the seat facing, beside the girl. It was a third-class coach. The pair were not directly opposite Shimamura but rather one seat forward, and the man’s head showed in the window-mirror only as far as the ear.”

This reminds me of how I began to cry yesterday: the eye became a weirdly beautiful bit of phosphorescence on the sea of evening mountains.

Oh, how I want to be used! As a blank little screen, a stuccoed wall.

“The dusky green of the cedars seemed to reflect from her neck.”

Victorian physiognomy: “The high, thin nose was a little lonely, a little sad, but the bud of her lips opened and closed smoothly like a beautiful little circle of leeches. Even when she was silent her lips seemed always to be moving. Had they had wrinkles or cracks, or had their color been less fresh, they would have struck one as unwholesome, but they were never anything but smooth and shining. The line of her eyelids neither rose nor fell. As if for some special reason, it drew its way straight across her face. There was something faintly comical about the effect, but the short, thick hair of her eyebrows sloped gently down to enfold the line discreetly. There was nothing remarkable about the outliens of her round, slightly aquiline face. With her skin like white porcelain coated over a faint pink, and her throat still girlish, not yet filled out, the impression she gave was above all one of cleaness, not quite one of real beauty.”

20 - Buffoon

It was really cold today. I still don’t believe it’s right to consider any temperature above 20° F “cold,” but it’s possible that being on estrogen means that my body doesn’t heat up as well as before. The official range for the day was 22-34° F, with wind chill making 22 “feel like” 13. When I went for a walk in the morning, it was supposedly 29 degrees when I returned, and I don’t know what it was supposed to “feel like,” but my arms were cold, and my feet were cold, though I had been wearing a fairly impermeable rain jacket as a mid-layer to block the wind. It would’ve made more sense to make it the outer layer, but I couldn’t fit that many layers of insulation underneath. Well, I could’ve added one more.

I found out about this new Susan Sontag collection, On Women, from Twitter, so I found “A Woman’s Beauty” on “wheelersburg.net” (it’s a school district in Ohio). Greeks had a concept of the “whole person”—so it was surprising if someone intelligent and good had an ugly face—e.g., Socrates. Now we are “split off” and find it surprising when someone intelligent and good is also beautiful. I like the way her prose leads to hanging-off points, like abrupt cliffs, which lead on to a view. She doesn’t say anything that surprises me, but there’s something interesting in the way she presents the subject; it’s like going to walk a familiar trail but seeing variations in the landscape based on the particularities of the weather. Maybe I’m giving the tiny essay too much credit, but I think it serves as a reminder, and reading reminders, being reminded, is important. I was wondering, after reading the little thing, if it weren’t possible that the dissection of a whole into parts, some of which will be imperfect, could coincide with an appreciation of a partial beauty. I don’t know, it seems like wholeness is essential to the concept of beauty, but maybe what I want to propose is something orthogonal to beauty altogether—again, an “aesthetics” based on the “drive.”

I noticed I don’t cook much when I’m in the luteal phase because of the slowed digestion. Or I cook out of compulsion and can’t eat much.

21 - Adequation

I don’t know the history of this term.

The notion of doing work sickens me; I just want to read Henry James.

It comes from Sherman Paul’s For Love of the World.

It comes from Ponge—adéquation.

I have ideas now, and too many books to read.