Was doing in-person analysis in an old school building with linoleum tiles. I don’t really know how to describe the building, actually—perhaps it was like one of the rooms at NEC or Boston University when I went there to do auditions. I had two sessions with him punctuated by what felt like a fairly brief interval. In the first session I told him something “inappropriate,” like how much I loved him. In the second session there were two or three others seated in metal folding chairs beside him, to “attend” the session, but before it began he brought me to a storage room or office and pulled a binder and a thick rectangular file out of a grey filing cabinet and I said, “now we’ll never lose it!” Even earlier in the dream, I talked to Laurent while Laurent F. was away—perhaps about my detransition? His expression seemed neutral and curious. The room was quite small. // The filing cabinets are obviously A’s. // I briefly dreamt several hours later in illustrations, probably in the style of Maurice Sendak, it involved wrapping, being embraced?
I read a third of Lady Chatterley’s Lover until 2 AM last night.
There was a newt at the edge of a swimming pool. The swimming pool did not have any lanes. I was pointing it out and asking my dad how it could be alive with all the bromine in the water. Before this, we were being asked to fill out emergency contact information on a form. Later I had a dream in which someone was talking (lecturing?) about the act of taking up the symptom—which involved following men into bathrooms.
I come here like a dog returning to its owner. I pant in the morning, writing about a dream. This morning I woke up convinced that I hadn’t dreamt. I opened up my Lawrence, like a maligned housewife seeking escape or release through her romances. I thought about my impulse to watch a Pasolini film last night. And then it came to me. I had had a dream. It was so faded, dark, and still that it seemed impossible to see. I presumed I had forgotten everything but a picture of it, but maybe that was all the dream was—so dark as if the image were attenuated out of my mind. I don’t know why thinking of Pasolini made me recall this dream, which I had nearly lost, which had Zane in it, standing in a corridor, as mute and faded as a Gerhard Richter painting. Like Betty [425-5] but without color. Recently I’ve been wanting to go to the Ithaca Agway to buy a squeegee, the better to clean mirrors with.
To me there was something about him both primitive and thoughtful, and I suspected that anyone who googled him or saw him in the way he presented himself online would think of him as not much, but in this way he snubbed the various versions of people who appeared in static images much prettier or even more complex. The secret value of someone’s free associations, of the way one maneuvers space, all that I could feel I kept in my own time, my own space. Not a vaunted and vaulted space, like a dark gothic cathedral, but a tight, bright, humble one, a bit thin and blotchy like my post-testosterone face, or the rough skin of my flanks. I like the striations on the right side, which look like burns from lightning. Someone on one of the detrans subreddits made a post about feeling bad about her wrinkles and thinning skin.
I believe in a higher mystery, that doesn’t let even the crocus be blown out. And if you’re in Scotland and I’m in the Midlands, and I can’t put my arms round you, and wrap my legs round you, yet I’ve got something of you. My soul softly flaps in the little pentecost flame with you, like the peace of fucking. We fucked a flame into being. Even the flowers are fucked into being between the sun and the earth. But it’s a delicate thing, and takes patience and the long pause.
So I love chastity now, because it is the peace that comes of fucking. I love being chaste now. I love it as snowdrops love the snow. I love this chastity, which is the pause of peace of our fucking, between us now like a snowdrop of forked white fire. And when the real spring comes, when the drawing together comes, then we can fuck the little flame brilliant and yellow, brilliant. But not now, not yet! Now is the time to be chaste, it is so good to be chaste, like a river of cool water in my soul. I love the chastity now that it flows between us. It is like fresh water and rain.
When I slip a finger into my cunt it feels so silky, unhurt by the prosaic intrusion, and the finger smells like glue.
He was naked to the hips, his velveteen breeches slipping down over his slender loins. And his white slim back was curved over a big bowl of soapy water, in which he ducked his head, shaking his head with a queer, quick little motion, lifting his slender white arms, and pressing the soapy water from his ears, quick, subtle as a weasel playing with water, and utterly alone. Connie backed away round the corner of the house, and hurried away to the wood. In spite of herself, she had had a shock. After all, merely a man washing himself; commonplace enough, Heaven knows!
Yet in some curious way it was a visionary experience: it had hit her in the middle of the body. She saw the clumsy breeches slipping down over the pure, delicate, white loins, the bones showing a little, and the sense of aloneness, of a creature purely alone, overwhelmed her. Perfect, white, solitary nudity of a creature that lives alone, and inwardly alone. And beyond that, a certain beauty of a pure creature. Not the stuff of beauty, not even the body of beauty, but a lambency, the warm, white flame of a single life, revealing itself in contours that one might touch: a body!
There’s a certain luxury to not having to specify the addressee of diaristic prose. I had a syncope or seizure last evening, and then I figured that the only choice for me would be to go out that night. At first it was a bit absurd, sitting in the corner with my White Peacock epub. Impossible to parse the words to techno music, even with the sense of the glittering beauty of the words. There was too much empty, open space on the dance floor. Nobody was dancing at 8:30, one strange woman who looked old but who was in fact probably in her 20s or 30s at most danced alone. I think she looked old to me because of her long plaid skirt. There was a slim, dark-haired, sharp-featured man talking to a large, long-haired blond man and I decided that the former was of interest to me, he fit the lawrentian theme, but I didn’t interact with him or anyone, except as an object of the gaze. To me it’s attractive to see two men hang out together. I also saw a group consisting of three girls and two boys, who seemed to form a couple; something distinctly repulsive to me about their smiling homosexuality, in contrast to whatever reserve existed between the older heterosexual men. It was exciting to scurry out of the place at 11 PM and see them standing outside, I scurried away too quickly to be interpellated, but in accordance to whatever veneer of independence and athleticism I may have given off. I wondered if they had talked about me. I saw them look at the first woman who had danced alone and I wondered if they had stayed around so long, long after they had finished dancing, primarily to look at me. I realized that by closing my eyes I was essentially inducing a kind of stupor; I’d sort of fall and tense myself in a way that conformed to what was heard. The falling only became more intense, more muscular, and also looser, during the second hour. I compensated for my failure to run with those two hours. I don’t know if I would have been able to do that had I not gone alone. And of course it seemed that nobody there who danced wildly was with anyone else. To me dancing has to come out of a kind of frustration, and it has to express my separateness, even if I did go there in order to be seen by some man who fit vaguely into my conception of D.H. Lawrence. I believe he had auburn hair, like Dickinson, but I always conceive of it as dark brown.
This hair which I just tugged off is nine inches. I have no desire to record my conversation with Alex Fan, however fun and interesting it was, with his own narrative of sexual discovery. The bit which interests me is the question of whether or not I should talk about sexuality with my mom. My reasoning being that neither of us would be losing anything if I did so, because there’s no need to preserve the innocence of the mother-and-child relationship, if there is or was one. And that if I didn’t speak about it, I would be hiding pretty much everything.
It seems like an inevitability at this point that I will have my ears pierced, the impulse to have the procedure done hit me a few days ago, but I might wait until I’ve got an even lesser investment in swimming, or until after something dramatic happens, like a landmark in my dissertation, or the “loss of virginity.” One can’t deny, I confessed to Alex, that there is something special about being penetrated in a lower orifice, that the event should be shrouded around some amount of fear and mystery.
First was the hallucination—I heard a male voice say “Didi” and this woke me up. I thought that maybe Eray was taking a shower, but it was just the rain falling steadily outside. An unreasonable assertion, Eray taking a shower at 5:49 AM. Then I wrote down the rest of the events of the dream. The main image was of the brown floppy-eared dog, not long like a dachshund but similar to the one John and I encountered at the falls. The dog was demanding to be scratched, and I wondered if I would catch lice from it, or something else. I was intent on adopting it. We were at a park with a wondrous pound, me and the rest of my family, where we saw many “mudkips,” frogs, fish, ducks. I think the “mudkips” were some sort of amphibious fish. Mudskippers. There were so many of each kind of organism it was like the pond was an ark, with sets of exemplars stacked beside one another. Later I was in a white building with my mom, and a white woman, who was making glass enamelware with painted designs on them, like John Derian’s découpage. The white woman had created a set of green glass butterflies for us to paint, each about the size of a dinner plate, the surface of each butterfly knobbly and baroque. In the penultimate part of the dream I was in Japan, riding some kind of high carriage, sitting in the front. It was liking sitting on top of a very precarious cardboard box, very bumpy, I was afraid I’d fall or fly off. Then I was in an airport terminal with various restaurants and korean stores. After waking up from my name being called, I went back to sleep and had another dream, in which I was at a beach with my mom and sister. It was very beautiful, with rocky outcrops, and I was taking pictures of things in the sand. My mom directed my attention to a large golden fish which had flopped onto the beach, but when I approached it it turned out to be a red coke can. She was saying something about how having sex with Lara had helped me get over Zane, and I wanted to correct her, but the “fish” interrupted things.
I think this is a Lawrentian dream. The dog is Flossie, the pond is in Nethermere, or it’s the lake in which Diana drowns in Women in Love…
Impossible to write about, suffused with rain.
Here’s what’s actual to me: hair feeling thick and snakey. Activity in analysis so active that my forehead feels like it’s going to float off. Then there are the two dreams which strike me as impossible to write, because their impacts were much more deeply felt than the manifest content could possibly intimate. In the first I bought mayonnaise in Japan, and was disgusted by it. I believe A was in an earlier, separate stage of the dream. That was on the sixth. The next day I dreamt I was in a Barnes and Nobles with my dad and sister, passing time while waiting for mom. I collected various items that I wanted to buy, placing them in a cordoned-off area that was like a wall-less dressing room. After a while, I returned, and I found that the items were gone, they had been restocked. I went around the store looking for what I had wanted to buy, but couldn’t recognize or remember anything. Reader, I cried, finding all my items gone. The store started to look like an REI. So I left without purchasing anything, and went shopping with mom. An earlier part of the dream involved some kind of altercation, wrestling with various people I had planned to sleep with—no particular individuals I can recall, just imaginary future one-night stands. And on the sixth, I experienced a parapraxis after analysis: I forgot about my laser hair removal appointment, and arrived fifteen minutes late after receiving an email reminder. Francesca used a more focused beam this time, and now I’m self-conscious about my lip looking mottled with the dead hairs which have seemingly melted inward and will take a few days to fall out. This prevented me from having sex with a stranger the following day. It was the only problem inhibiting me. Is the first dream about Zane’s semen? Is the second dream about cruising?
I told John about my fake epistles on the fifth. I felt he was becoming a true participant in this project, simply because he had laughed at words I had recited to him from memory. I then tried to address him in a fake epistle, but felt myself faltering. I have been writing to Lara more frequently, during the stuck periods, a bit more free and verbose than before, and even in a business-like fashion, as I believe that too much work on this site without the contrastive efforts of truly private and directed e-communications will make my efforts here a little too totemic.
I told my analyst today that I wanted to make him sick, that I wanted to transmit to him a symptom. I speculated about how this might come to be. I wondered if he might faint, if he might get head pains, if I might make him aroused, frustrated, angry. At some point he asked me if I felt I was talking about analysis, after I had said something about my head and forehead getting hot and floaty. I think he was referring to something I had said earlier, something about John and a kind of sexual transmission through speech, about the intimacy of barebacking. I assumed he had an answer in mind. I can’t retrieve it, or maybe I just don’t want to. And what was that about, me being “just” a hysteric, as opposed to a pervert? He’s probably right—I’m invested in being a female pervert.
Pointing at green eggs in a film still. They are like the pair of eggs on the abandoned canada goose nest. The picture has the soft light of the grape-seed photos. The entire photo is tinted green and printed on a large piece of paper, but it could be the tint of a viewfinder. John says I’m smuggling something between my house and his. I told Hunter about this as I was waking up. I told John that I wanted to smuggle, transmit something, it was a joke about wanting to have sex. I told Hunter that I was going back to the dream and I said “THESE ARE GREEN!” There is some confusion towards the end as to who I was addressing. Later or earlier, I was with mom, we decided to enter a bright chinese restaurant in a sunny alley, part of an outdoor shopping district.
I know the source of the green. This is a dream about A being strange and beautiful at the age of sixteen, cavorting with two classmates in a short film they made, involving an attempt to study lizards by becoming lizards, wearing nothing but green body paint and white underwear painted green, basking on some mounds of dirt in rural Ohio.
Piebald rabbits and pied kittens. I was walking around “campus”—like an extended version of the lawns between Sage chapel and the Society for the Humanities—and kept on encountering a cluster of three kittens, black and white (one with tawny spots) and the same with a cluster of three rabbits. They must not be very wild, I thought with respect to the rabbits. I tried to tell someone, a girl, about it in something like a dorm room, at which point it seemed to be dark out. Perhaps the question was whether I would re-find and keep one of the rabbits or kittens?
When I open my Notes the first thing I find is a quote from Lorenzo in Taos: “Brett, on the contrary, sat in the doorway of life with her mouth slightly open, like a paralyzed rabbit, and imagined herself in roles of power and importance.”
I no longer wake up with an optimism regarding writing about my dreams; this one I woke from quite late, around 7:40, and I got out of bed even later, around 9:30. I refuse to go for a morning run—I believe I need to ruminate, I need to fail to be “healthy.”
Savitri and I were supposed to talk, but I started to read a book, and was ten or fifteen minutes late, and she suggested we talk the following morning. She had changed her messenger photo and looked very feminine in it, with long eyelashes and lipstick. She told me in messenger that she had lost 83% of her weight. Then I saw that Zane had gotten really into rope bondage and had posted many photos of himself at rope events, which were all happening in a bright dance studio with hardwood floors. In another photo he was at an origami event and his hair was long and straightened but it curled up at the ends and looked a bit frayed, like there was an electrostatic force attracting it to something. He was smiling and looked a bit like he did in that photo I took.
I keep on waking up and wanting to fall back down, to go to sleep. Do you know why the number 83 that appeared in my dream? I think it has something to do with the fact that 3 looks like half of an 8. But I don’t know why. A lot of my dreams have involved something split, but asymmetrically. Maybe it’s all about sexuation.
Slept from 2:30 to 7:30. No dream. Feeling somehow glad about these later waking-times, though I don’t promise to be more functional on account of it. Something aggressive going on with my unhappiness.
My lacrimal glands have been wettening now and then all day.
I keep on gripping my thighs, which comfort me.
I feel chilled, it is a grey rainy day out of Tess.
I write primarily about dreams here and about in-between thoughts. All the stuff of intensity requires an addressee. I am looser with respect to rereading what I write here. Perhaps I am dissatisfied. She wants to make everything into a novel, to make everything unfamiliar. I think John shed a hair on me last night just from hugging. It was frail, brown, kinky. I love hair, how different it can be. I’m relatively happy with how class went today, reading Donne’s “The Ecstasy.” I want to tell the students to look for internal contradictions. It can be awkward reading such intense poems with so many little people, but I feel I learn something. Writing here is like drinking coffee in order to wake up in the morning, and not in order to enjoy it. I have so many friends all of a sudden. Who is Xinyu but a romantic? How exotic to have a friend from China and educated in Iceland? Jellyfish have sex by emitting sperm from the buccal apparatus and ingesting sperm in the buccal apparatus.
I woke up dreamless, and went back to sleep, and then I was on some kind of Tinder spree, walking across the Stanford campus at night and into the neighborhood, where I entered the house of a man with long and curly dark hair, a bit ragged like someone from a metal band. He was just sleeping. I left and went to a store and chatted with a blonde girl who popped up in my matches out of nowhere, and with a former frat boy who said something racist. The conversation with the girl was interesting, but I kept on losing my internet connection, and every time I refreshed the app I was afraid I would lose her, until I eventually did.
A little bit of fresh blood, but I wish it would come flowing out of me in a way I can feel! Starting to remember what it felt like to menstruate earlier in life. Spent time reading about hemochorial placentation and maternal-fetal interdigitation. Watched Crimes of the Future alone.
There was a game involving four quadrants in my dream. Graph of sexuation? Some form of promiscuity? The four new students?
I went on a date which I soon wanted to get out of. It ended with the guy asking to kiss me in front of my house. I said yes, and it was very soft and tender, and I recoiled in an instant. I said sorry, and he said sorry, that it seemed like I didn’t want to be kissed, and I tried to explain that it wasn’t wrong that he had kissed me, just that I wasn’t really ready for it, the truth being that I wanted to test it out in order to confirm that there was absolutely no rapport between our bodies. I preferred the hug at the end. Before I went on the date, I thought I might invite him to my room to look at my plants, but it was clear from the first hour that this would not be appropriate. He had been in a relationship for nine years, and it had ended because his partner wanted kids and he didn’t. There was nothing poetic to say about his palentological exploits. It kills me a little when a scientist does something interesting but has no way of speaking about it. I spilled my drink on myself, it “tripped” over the raised rim of the table, and now my shirt smells like vermouth.
[Friday, September 16] - 42-71° F
This is all getting so difficult, I am thinking about deleting what I wrote here yesterday: Rear paper feed working now. More Golden Bowl. I dreamt about Alec and I told him that I did, I wonder if he’ll respond. I imagine him being off Tinder right now, in virginal completeness, at one with his work.
I woke up at 4 AM. I was watching complit people play soccer with a very small ball, like a yellow plum. I was reluctant to join at first, but then did, and found myself nervous, failing to kick accurately. Then there were armchairs strewn about the field, so we were kicking the ball under the pieces of furniture. And there was a part where I was menstruating, but I don’t know how it came about—I simply wrote down “menstruation” in my notes. After returning to sleep, I dreamt that a book was being read to me, probably a Henry James novel.
Mr. Verver then, for a fresh full period, a period betraying, extraordinarily, no wasted year, had been inscrutably monotonous behind an iridescent cloud. The cloud was his native envelope—the soft looseness, so to say, of his temper and tone, not directly expressive enough, no doubt, to figure an amplitude of folds, but of a quality unmistakeable for sensitive feelers.
I probably had soccer in my dream because F spoke about how he likes to play soccer, but there wasn’t anything more to it than that. I liked being read to, but I wish I could remember more. Was I part of the novel, as its sole addressee?
I’m depressed enough to want an hour to turn to the next. My genitals are completely inert. I’m thinking about Alec’s penis and how round the tip was, how I looked at it before “putting it in my mouth,” which I put in quotation marks because when one puts it in one’s mouth it isn’t exactly a matter of “putting.” First the tongue makes contact, or one lip, and then the other, or maybe the roof of the mouth, so it is always lateral contact, not “putting.” The hole becomes a variegated surface. It is tender, to have surfaces of such distinct curvatures become nothing but parallel planes. Alec’s penis meant nothing to me, but the act of taking it into my throat meant a lot, whereas the virtual feeling of Zane’s penis inside of my cunt meant something entirely different, and though all these questions of enclosure and of inner feeling fail to produce a hint of a sensation in any part of my body, I can say I like thinking about these things. And it depresses me, I guess, or merely disappoints, that I am doing this activity in the isolation of a little box. I didn’t come here with a volition, I didn’t want to say something about a penis, but out it came: I like penises, I like the act of liking penises, and I think rubbing a cock against one’s buccal surfaces is the utmost act of love.
The light went on too early this morning, and my dreams remain under some rock. I need some slick, ribbed, comfortable, black pants; I want to be able to wear all black again, for the blackest of days, at least as the edge of an option; the revelation of how poorly the clothes of this season fit the present mood is perhaps the strongest reason to live.
Had such a nice time with Lost Highway—why? Because I’m interested in my status as a pervert, in what I gain from inducing anxiety in an Other. I’m almost impossible to lubricate right now, but something about that film provoked my sexuality—I am thinking about the line “Dick Laurent is dead,” about Patricia Arquette’s body, and getting fucked; the windy weather, whether the date with the cairn-making cook will happen… I woke up cold, and while trying to return to sleep, conjured the heat of Zane’s cock—the heat of those genitals remains distinctive.
My dad sent me an email—this isn’t a dream. He explained that he had sent me various packages of dried Korean cooking ingredients. Some of them include Cirsium setidens, in the family asteraceae.
My mom sent me a Dyson vacuum several weeks ago. It’s a good device, but I didn’t like receiving the heavy box, didn’t like the silver plastic which seeks to emulate metal, didn’t like the fact that it makes a noise. The most satisfying thing about the vacuum is watching the dust accumulate in the transparent cylindrical barrel. It is a good device.
Why is my dad sending me some pretty little namul and why is my mom sending me a large machine? I would have an easier time desiring and being desired by people if my parents were not such inverts. I am pleased, anyway, to receive something from my father.
I look more and more like I did when I was in 8th, 9th, 10th grade.
I feel like an evil woman, playing some evil tricks.
No one around me knows what I was like in 8th, 9th, or 10th grade.
I think I find this activity of becoming a sort of mystic in relation to sexuality quite satisfying; I’m liking this recuperation of Zane which seems relatively absurd and uncivilized—uncivilized because it seems to imply that I’m going to valorize solitude and become conservatively antisocial, when in fact the return is always the most radical happening.
I keep trying to produce some contrast between the thing that’s straightforward, vulgar, and the thing that’s abstruse but truer, and I keep on failing. Why do I experience my hair as both melancholic and slutty? Why do I like the word “slut” so much? Why do I like the absurdity of Patricia Arquette perpetually in dark lipstick? Why am I insisting on doing the unnatural and unforgiving thing of writing and working hard? I just want to fun and be funned.
[Monday, September 26] - 53-64° F
I feel inordinately confident today, perhaps because of the interest I found in my dreams, which had to do with sexuation and partuition, and more obviously because it was fun to talk about Thomas Hardy poems of 1912-1913 in class. Wanting to go to class in the mornings is in fact going to improve my life.
(3) Somebody was telling me after a conference that my sexual experiences “fundamentally don’t make sense”—he was smiling, and I was gratified to hear this, as my presentation had been about “sex as the breakdown of sense.”
(2) I was attending an art exhibition, because I was trying to escape from or avoid someone in a nearby room. I recall entering a “peacock room,” and seeing a minimalist painting that consisted simply of silver or gold waves on a dark purple or red background. The gallery recalled the basement gallery of the Hirshhorn; most of the works seemed contemporary. It was all “Asian art.”
(1) I was in a guest house on a farm, sitting on a large bed among a collection of black-and-white piebald kittens of various sizes. I was supposed to take one, but had difficulty choosing between two of them, and even considered taking both, but didn’t because it would have felt like theft. When I arrived “home”—this seemed to be just another house on the farm—I had in my hands four or five eggs. I knew I was supposed to crack all but one of them, so that the final egg could hatch into a kitten. However, I was so absorbed by the process of deciding which ones to crack and cracking them that I failed to keep track of how many I had cracked, so I ended up cracking all the eggs. Yolk and egg white seeped out of each, no trace of kittens. After I cracked the last egg, I found a tiny, “premature” kitten with wet, matted fur—about the size of a chick. It was sandy and striped, not piebald. I thought it might die, but it kept on running and jumping with surprising vigor. I was slightly frightened to touch it, as I didn’t want to harm it or transmit to it an infection. I was also afraid that it would fall from a high surface or get smothered by another kitten, so I tried very hard to curtail its movements. Several larger kittens had appeared at this point, and they wrestled playfully with the little one. The premature kitten did indeed fall from a countertop or chair at one point, and lay stunned for several seconds, but then rolled over and seemed alright.
It seems like I was being punished for my indecision and had to choose a kitten according to blind chance, but failed even to do this, and therefore would not receive a kitten at all. I was quite disappointed when I realized my mistake—but the kitten managed to materialize, even survive. It didn’t emerge from the final egg—it just appeared, as if someone heard my wish and gave it to me in spite of a previous intention to punish me. I don’t know what to make of the scene in the museum at all, I think I’m missing something. Something a bit cinematic and noir-ish about having to escape from an unseen enemy by attending an exhibition. I suspect that the premature kitten was Zane, “sandy and striped.”
Extremely happy to see these pictures Alec just posted of himself, and his previous girlfriend, Misbah, whose name I mention because it is so likeable. He looks happy, she looks happy, she’s looking away from the camera in most of the pictures, there’s a shy tenderness to them which spreads over them a kind of universal beauty and they moreover produce for me the neatest and best possible of explanations as to why he never got back to me. I like her face, which seems to me modest, not intimidating but cute and interesting. She had drawn a series of pictures of him on a long continuous strip of paper hung near the ceiling of the van—had a substantial role in the creation of the van-office—they had broken up merely because of the distance, as he explained it—“a pity”—I am happy to imagine a slight or major expansion in both of their worlds as they come together again.
In my vague and nearly forgotten dream I was in a very bright room with low evening yellow rays of sun streaming through the window so that everything was washed out. I was talking to Zane, or rather we were standing together silently, and yet I knew we were or had been speaking about my plans to visit him, except that it seemed I was already where he was, so is that really what we had spoken about?
I insisted that the tonsil dream was just too good, that I wanted to make something of how good it was! And then out plopped my prospectus.
[Wednesday, September 28] - 50-60°F
I am overwhelmed with PDFs and I need to take break.
This reminds me of the premature kitten dream:
In man, however, this relationship to nature is altered by a certain dehiscence at the very heart of the organism, a primordial Discord betrayed by the signs of malaise and motor uncoordination of the neonatal months. The objective notions of the anatomical incompleteness of the pyramidal tracts and of certain humoral residues of the maternal organism in the newborn confirm my view that we find in man a veritable specific prematurity of birth.
How I imagine my sadism, particularly in relation to Z:
The victim is bored to death by the preaching and the teacher is full of himself.
The libertine may put on an act of trying to convince and persuade; he may even proselytize and gain new recruits (as in Philosophy in the Bedroom). But the intention to convince is merely apparent, for nothing is in fact more alien to the sadist than the wish to convince, to persuade, in short to educate. He is interested in something quite different, namely to demonstrate that reasoning itself is a form of violence, and that he is on the side of violence, however calm and logical he may be. He is not even attempting to prove anything to anyone, but to perform a demonstration related essentially to the solitude and omnipotence of its author. The point of the exercise is to show that the demonstration is identical to violence. It follows that the reasoning does not have to be shared by the person to whom it is addressed any more than pleasure is meant to be shared by the object from which it is derived. The acts of violence inflicted on the victims are a mere reflection of a higher form of violence to which the demonstration testifies. Whether he is among his accomplices or among his victims, each libertine, while engaged in reasoning, is caught in the hermetic circle of his own solitude and uniqueness - even if the argumentation is the same for all the libertines. In every respect, as we shall see, the sadistic “instructor” stands in contrast to the masochistic “educator.”
Day sliced in the afternoon: warm, vague, pleasing, slight orgasm.
Freud: “The Economic Problem of Masochism”;
Laplanche: “Masochism and the General Theory of Seduction.”
Tonight will drop to 36. Need to make perilla kimchi.
Apparatus (ad-parare) means to make ready for.
[Friday, September 30] - 34-60°F
Had a dream that woke me up at 2 AM.
Small girl in GS classroom grabbing me, hugging me, tickling me. It reminds me of my sister’s touch when she was a kid.
Larger girl of similar appearance (blonde, blunt features, serious expression, doesn’t remind me of anyone) maybe 18-20, trying to immobilize me with her touch; hugging me from around the back. She is acting “cruel” to me, “glowering” at me, it’s “really scary.”
Other students sitting around the table don’t seem to notice the commotion. Later they accuse me of being into femdom.
Then I’m on Twitter and being humiliated for posting a sequence of four landscape paintings (seem like pictures by Matt Furie or David Hockney, saturated medium greens and blues) because they “lack a narrative” and don’t prove anything about my assault. The paintings don’t have anything to do with assault, but one of them seems to have a secret image or text faintly visible through the top layer of paint.
Important that the negativity of the encounter involved being immobilized, and also being immobilized by the gaze. I don’t think she made a single sound as she was touching me. And none of the contact was of the form of a caress, it was all firm, the point was to capture me and pin me down. It somewhat reminds me now of the scene I had read in The White Peacock just before sleeping, in which the father of a boy dies in the quarry from a portion of the stone wall falling on him. I want to do close readings of this book. I want to push myself into it like my parent’s bed. I was thinking last night about how I couldn’t remember anything really about entering or exiting my parents' bedroom in Chino Hills, just being in it sometimes. There are only two memories: waking up between them in the morning, and asking my dad to kiss my stomach as he was drying me after I had taken a bath or shower one night. I don’t remember anything about the bathroom connected to the bedroom, only the one downstairs by the kitchen with the green tiles.
In a while, I too got up and went down to the mill, which lay red and peaceful, with the blue smoke rising as winsomely and carelessly as ever. On the other side of the valley I could see a pair of horses nod slowly across the fallow. A man's voice called to them now and again with a resonance that filled me with longing to follow my horses over the fallow, in the still, lonely valley, full of sunshine and eternal forgetfulness. The day had already forgotten. The water was blue and white and dark-burnished with shadows; two swans sailed across the reflected trees with perfect blithe grace. The gloom that had passed across was gone. I watched the swan with his ruffled wings swell onwards; I watched his slim consort go peeping into corners and under bushes; I saw him steer clear of the bushes, to keep full in view, turning his head to me imperiously, till I longed to pelt him with the empty husks of last year's flowers, knap-weed and scabius. I was too indolent, and I turned instead to the orchard.
The last person I spoke to on Tinder, whose best photo was a selfie with a brown foal, unfortunately doesn’t actually live here, and it’s only unfortunate because he looks a little bit like Lawrence, and I’m thinking about Cyril as that man but without any of the smiles staring at a swan stare at him until he longs to pelt him with the empty husks of last year’s flowers. And today the sunset was a uniform bar of rose that turned to flame orange. I cleaned my room, made neat stacks of books, vacuumed hair and dust, stopped by the Paris Baguette, met with Eleni again, submitted the NeMLA proposal, cooked tofu with green beans.
Hunter quoted something from Whitman today. It was a bit insane—I was talking about section 6 (“A child said What is the grass?) and how I had liked it before but now I was remembering that Whitman had given some answers to the question. And he was like, “the beautiful uncut hair of graves.” And I was like, “what?” and he repeated himself. Embarrassingly, I didn’t recognize it, as the line that had struck me was “Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.” It’s probably going to be the cutest moment between us for a while. He’s starting to talk back to me; this happened also earlier in the week when I was talking about Freud’s “Femininity” lecture!