“Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you.”

(Frank O’Hara’s “Personism: A Manifesto”)

“Meditations in an Emergency” (O’Hara)

“Devotions: Upon Emergent Occasions” (Donne)

Variable, and therefore miserable condition of man! this minute I was well, and am ill, this minute. I am surprised with a sudden change, and alteration to worse, and can impute it to no cause, nor call it by any name. We study health, and we deliberate upon our meats, and drink, and air, and exercises, and we hew and we polish every stone that goes to that building; and so our health is a long and a regular work: but in a minute a cannon batters all, overthrows all, demolishes all; a sickness unprevented for all our diligence, unsuspected for all our curiosity; nay, undeserved, if we consider only disorder, summons us, seizes us, possesses us, destroys us in an instant. O miserable condition of man! which was not imprinted by God, who, as he is immortal himself, had put a coal, a beam of immortality into us, which we might have blown into a flame, but blew it out by our first sin; we beggared ourselves by hearkening after false riches, and infatuated ourselves by hearkening after false knowledge. So that now, we do not only die, but die upon the rack, die by the torment of sickness; nor that only, but are pre-afflicted, super-afflicted with these jealousies and suspicions and apprehensions of sickness, before we can call it a sickness: we are not sure we are ill; one hand asks the other by the pulse, and our eye asks our own urine how we do. O multiplied misery! we die, and cannot enjoy death, because we die in this torment of sickness; we are tormented with sickness, and cannot stay till the torment come, but pre-apprehensions and presages prophesy those torments which induce that death before either come; and our dissolution is conceived in these first changes, quickened in the sickness itself, and born in death, which bears date from these first changes. Is this the honour which man hath by being a little world, that he hath these earthquakes in himself, sudden shakings; these lightnings, sudden flashes; these thunders, sudden noises; these eclipses, sudden offuscations and darkening of his senses; these blazing stars, sudden fiery exhalations; these rivers of blood, sudden red waters? Is he a world to himself only therefore, that he hath enough in himself, not only to destroy and execute himself, but to presage that execution upon himself; to assist the sickness, to antedate the sickness, to make the sickness the more irremediable by sad apprehensions, and, as if he would make a fire the more vehement by sprinkling water upon the coals, so to wrap a hot fever in cold melancholy, lest the fever alone should not destroy fast enough without this contribution, nor perfect the work (which is destruction) except we joined an artificial sickness of our own melancholy, to our natural, our unnatural fever. O perplexed discomposition, O riddling distemper, O miserable condition of man!

(April 17 - Domingo)

Nothing would matter if it weren’t impossible!!

(April 14 - Quinta)

I’d prefer to become a stylite now.

(April 11 - Segunda)

I have avoided this keyboard for the last three days.

I dreamt that I asked him (in my house) and he said he was bisexual.

What’s the difference between a man and a woman?

For man, woman is a surface. For woman, the image drops out.

The core mystery for the heterosexual woman is—how did I get here, desiring not my own mother but this strange man? Is the practical difference between man and woman that the man strives after this image, grasps after what is already wrapped in impotency, and that the woman turns away so that she may listen to her own desire? Yet neither the man nor the woman require a man or woman of presence. Neither requires that the Other be “truly there,” whatever that means.

Being “truly there” means engaging in a dance. A changing of discourses. A reorientation of lines of sight… Switching places…

What are his dreams about laughter?

Suddenly thinking hard about health.

(April 9 - Sábado)

Long walk with John—the qualities have shifted?

(April 8 - Sexta)

Walked in the rain, devastating encounter

Finished Jude the Obscure

(April 7 - Quinta)

Intense orgasm, a long plateau of climax (a flat climax!)—mille plateaux! Saw Kieślowski’s Red before this—a warming film—

(April 6 - Quarta)

I’m still confused, but in a sort of lazy way—

Saw The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema

(April 5 - Terça)

Slipping and running with wet black socks on a nice wood floor, down a wide spiral staircase with shallow steps, into the middle of an unenclosed event. My green running shirt has burned out along the creases made when I wring the water from it, transparent like sheer velvet. I behold this in my mother’s bathroom mirror prior to the descent. At the bottom of the steps I turn and pass a table by the bottom side wall hiding a John bent over a book; I see the back and side of his long curly hair, and then I bump into Zane, who is smiling like a naughty kid, and I squeeze his arm and his cheeks and ask him what he’s doing there. I don’t feel anything, just surprise and curiosity.

(April 3 - Domingo)

I am teaching a boy child how to read, but I can’t seem to say a word. The only thing I can muster: “Be proud of your name, which has been used 130 times before.” The name is John. I do not know if I mean to say that it has been uttered 130 times before, that it has been given to 130 individuals, or that it has been written 130 times. The act is so intense that I wake up in a cold sweat. It is also tender—I know what I have felt in attempting to teach the boy to read is identical to falling in love. Is he my child, or at least half?

I began to read Jude the Obscure on the bus.
I began to read the Dora case study in the hotel room.

(April 2 - Sábado)

Attention, dilation, elucidation of objet a.

I am not perturbed by the way he bends down to touch a dog.

I am anxious about not being able to make use of someone affecting.

(April 1 - Sexta)

And that was the beginning—or the first half of the month, at least, and now I am thinking of how to present it, because it confuses me, and I don’t want to go further. I was rendered mute by what I believed to be something novel. It was novel, but I misplaced the object. It was a miscarriage of desire. That I write and stall here has something to do with that miscarriage; something in the center beckons and retards all else. Loss of vision that’s imperceptible, three of the four weeks affected by a hidden glaucoma of the mind. I seemed to have lost track of my relation to language and to my analyst. I lost interest in my object of desire, I saw that I was replaying something which couldn’t yet exist. I realized that I had better “lean in” to the transference relation. This improved things, but I still haven’t figured out how to write about it, let alone anything else. I couldn’t figure out what it was that made being around my family paralyze me so much at the beginning of the month. Perhaps it is this sense that I am repulsed by my mother. I liked being around my sister, and I am glad to have watched Kwaidan. There was nothing wrong with the visit, which made it harder, to recognize that there were no obstructions preventing me from making them more useful for my projects of self-understanding. A true failure of speech—nothing useful in speaking about my parents anymore, nothing more to say on why I dislike or like a habit.

The weekend after the last Lacan session led to a small suffering.

The meetings with Katie, however misaligned, provoked me into action.

It is possible that some of my sluggishness has to do with decreasing T.

I was capable of writing after that, made coffee for the first time on Monday.

Perhaps I miss writing emails. I miss writing to you, being in complete genuflexion to the desire for your attendance. What if this were the email, the genuflexion. Genuflexion being of course the position in which one might suck a cock. But I haven’t thought about that in a while, and I don’t desire what I miss.

More real to me now are the following fragments:

My narcissistic fertility with respect to clothes

Making red bean paste more competently.

Making doughtnuts and steamed buns.

Starting to run more, and see more.

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I’ve been encountering spiders in cabinets now that it’s spring, and in the corners of my room as I clean. I broke part of a web that was obstructing access to the flour in the pantry, but decided that I was mistaken, and avoided breaking the web later. Windows have a specific verbal significance for me now, and the gust of wind through the thin tall casement window in Katie’s office affected me enough for it to appear on April 24. Thinking about the pain of that last email doesn’t diffuse it at all.

(April 30 - Sábado)