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I decided to write to nobody at all. It occurred to me that writing for nobody would be a way of giving up. It would involve renouncing my relationships with all individuals, but not out of any specific desire to avoid an event. I wanted to avoid the feeling of shame that arose from writing itself, from the grandiosity which engendered it, and the final disappointment I felt when it made no difference. I figured that it would be less trouble for the others I exchanged writing with if I transferred the effort behind the composition of emails into some kind of indirected writing. I could then insulate the world from what I would later discover to be ugly while developing some strands of beauty under more pressurized conditions. Even if I did continue writing to specific people, any emotional investment that went into the correspondence could be buffered by the fact that I was writing somewhere else, and in a way that showed I was concerned about the stakes of communication.

Perhaps I might even manage to connect with an undefined crowd of readers, who might affirm my presence after death. Maybe I could even use this place to pay for the costs of living while I was still alive. A career made through writing might even bring me into a new circle of friends. But it seemed more likely that making public works was a way of producing nodules of envy in near and distant readers. I couldn't imagine a scenario in which good writing would simply be enjoyed. It seemed that the only valid reason to write for a public was to become a minor celebrity, and I was not really interested in this. I simply wanted to admit to myself that I was not fit for maintaining lasting social bonds. My imperative would be to contribute to the creation of value for a dead self in the future, a self which wouldn't be able to witness or evaluate the fruits of its labors. It could at least be posited to exist, through sentences like these. So I resolved to give up on my ties to individuals. To behave otherwise would be to act on the desire to possess a person, to identify a person as a target of my hatred, inevitably accumulated along a line of successive failures, like enamel abraded by lemon-soaked cakes.

I was trying to choose good or evil, but neither option sounded real. I was more interested in giving up my ties to creation. Is creation anything but a form of accumulation? I wanted to create in a way which would contribute neither to my bank account nor to investments borne out of sexual desire. Perhaps I could write for the things that existed near me, like orchids. Writing might exist, then, in service of people and things; it would be expenditure. I asked myself if custodial work would be better than investing myself in the dream of uninhibited and unseen spaces and times to come. With the word “custodial,” I generalize over all activities which involve care of something immediately in front of you, whether it be the cleanliness of a kitchen or the care of an infant child. At the same time, I wanted to be bad. I wanted to revel in my antisocial condition, which I imagined would make me mute and sessile like a plant. In that way I that could exercise and make permanent my difference. I could turn my plant-like existence into a novel form of writing, a writing of blurred boundaries between the wilting pen and the deathless camera. That was the billionaire side of me. What could be more brilliant to investors than a totally passive object? Being passive was hard work, though, as it involved doing the very kinds of work that one typically associates with the entrepreneur. Passive cooling, passive heating. Think of a thing that is frictionless, an ideal machine. I liked the idea of lacking scale and therefore becoming omnipotent. But not relying on interpersonal or institutional stability required building a new house, which was my first move.

With that clarification, I felt comfortable returning to my original provocation, that all indirection is against direction. It's a stark accusation, but how could it not be true? The two parts form a pair so fundamental that they appear to be like the hydrophobic skin that sets water and oil apart. But the pair is misleading if we consider it fixed. One doesn't ever give up on either "direction." Work made for the public is indeed a distraction from private life; private life is indeed a distraction from public functioning. They do not work together. The two aren't in competition or in conspiration, they just happen to co-exist. Sometimes they exist in a symbiotic relation, but symbiosis isn't self-aware, an it isn't even the result of intelligent design. It's an accidental co-functioning of independent parts. That's how scientists see it, at least. A purely diagrammatic view of the situation would necessarily portray indirection and direction as occupying positions of equal importance, but the diagram says nothing about their awareness of one another as forces, as vectors of desire. The question is if we should allow ourselves to work against this natural equilibrium. Though I have purposely posed this in abstract terms, I would like to clarify: one can either be against public life or for it, never both. Indirection is a public phenomenon associated with scalability and capitalism, while direction is a service phenomenon, as when I wrote emails directly to particular recipients. One cannot do both at once. But one can do both in alternation.

I think it's more important to remember private life and to actively cultivate it. It doesn't go recorded otherwise. I also believe it is possible to do work on the private life without making it public, as in the work of writing. This is embedded in the psychoanalytic model of the “id” and the “ego,” or in Bataille's notion of the “accursed share.” Perhaps the imbalance is a consequence of our polarized economic system, where infinite profits over infinite time over infinite populations occupy the top of the value hierarchy. Taking care of children or plants inside a home cannot and does not reach outwards forever, so this sort of labor is not marked as labor, it does not earn one wages. I like the idea of giving up, or more pointedly, of being “against public life” because I want to highlight the undercurrent of direct and private orientations towards objects and people which nevertheless survives, exists. I'm not sure if I want to do this because I aspire to capitalize on everything, or because I feel choked out of current institutions. Perhaps this will become a public project at the end of the day. If it does, frankly, I am not concerned. My only duty is to “give up” at some point, in some way, and to some effect.

Turning “giving up” into a positive, I thought of love. I thought of a love that could be founded in a solitary being growing out of its native set of preferences. The loner remains the loner, but becomes extroverted through a series of retreats into the inner life of the house. She's not against public life, exactly. She just wants to build something new, and for me that means delving into what's currently unknown and private. Like all humans, the loner wants to “arise” in the form of a constant movement that becomes something solid and impermeable, but wants to “go under” in an immersion with the soul. Perhaps a community, a movement, and actions would arise from those who choose to tend to plants. Or it could induce the sole proprietor of this website to become “submerged” in small dealings with plants and words. All of us could otherwise be caring for animals, babies, tools, or anything else: little things, one at a time, of infinite local importance.

[8 August 2021]