Yea, the ability to backtrack through time,
The crossing out of letters which vanish as if
imbued by life with a program for death,
And no questions were posed for posterity.
They knew they would need to replicate
the process themselves, testing rhyme
like a picture cut in two, but never were
the edges equidistant from the center:
The cookie had been nibbled so as not
To fit some supposed complement,
as tiny transparent cubes of sugar
littered the counter: neatness seen,
but not experienced. Likewise we saw
that nibbling a breast was not the same
as licking sugar; yet this banal statement
is not meant to disavow the work of
representation, for that split too
lives off cells barred like letters.
I do believe in the rapid composition of poems
I do believe in the pressure of silent, vacant rooms
I read a tract on Swinburne—I continue to read it
Here’s a secret—I imbibed the word “yea” from Swinburne
I wrote his name as Swimburne, and “master” as “masture”
These legs are twisted and twisted when the words are good
I decided that the next post would be called “Brane” not “Brain”
Do you know the etymology of “brain,” of “brane”?
Have you heard the former’s root cognate “harn” before?
Membrum is a word for flesh
Sex is the stumbling block of sense
Yea’s abstruse affirmative
[13 September 2022]
Hi Hunter,
I am menstruating at last. I am relieved to know a fact correlated with my tiredness—currently reading about how higher levels of progesterone decrease gastrointestinal motility. I could take magnesium next time, the capsules I bought for restless leg syndrome. Right now my digestion seems to work but I am still dead tired. In the last email I sent to Zane, on the seventeenth of August, I speculated that I was in the luteal phase. Now I can assert that I’ve been in the luteal phase from August 30 to September 13. This marks the week when I felt stuck in analysis, and another week in which I felt senseless. But I cried twice. And I was also quite aroused over the course of these two weeks—I don’t believe for a minute that sexual arousal is determined by one’s cycle, but a low mood can clearly cast a shadow on the sexual drive. Today I was fogged up and very aroused, making it difficult to take naps—how awful! It’s not really possible to define when I started the follicular phase given that I didn’t menstruate before. I could try to base something around events, or when I was most aroused. My arousal grew from the 18th and peaked on the 26th-27th, the two days following my encounter with Alec. I was fertile with him!
Didi
Hunter,
It looks like I ovulated on Thursday, as there’s a faint tint of red to my discharge which I believe I first observed on Friday. If so, this works like clockwork—let’s say I ovulated on the 29th (the same day as the moment of “rapture”). Then my follicular phase lasted 17-18 days, with 4-5 days of bleeding, and if the luteal phase was in fact 14 days, then I did indeed ovulate on the 28th or 29th of August. I have likewise gotten into some sort of rhythm of having one significant encounter per month. Beginning of July: Dylan; End of July: Lara; End of August: Alec; Beginning of October: K.
To: tlinklywroad
I met someone from feeld who made me curious last night. We had spoken a bit about architecture in the chat and I decided to ask him to meet the same day. He didn’t have any full pictures of his face, but judging from what I could see of his body and nose and mouth he seemed quite attractive.
He seemed very serious and very focused on his work. Calm and a bit of a slow talker. There was a certain quality of interest to our conversation, though it was a bit subdued, like something dense was suspended in it. I felt that we hadn’t gotten to know each other at all, but that everything that had been said could lead off into a knotted forest. The conversation had to it a mutual slow politeness, an emotional reserve or distance, caused in part by the noise produced by an adjacent party which was celebrating a birthday. I felt that I couldn’t read him, or even read myself, but I was satisfied with the fact that I was comfortable enough around him to not insist on quickening the conversation with questions. He is doing an MA in architecture and studied sculpture at Pratt before that. I liked his accent—he is from Trinidad.
We spoke about our respective houses and rooms. I said a bit about my frustrations with Tao Dufour when I took the Climate Imaginaries course, and about my website. He said something about how he’s doing some sort of processual design, using code to draw or produce architectural models. He said it was hard to connect with other students in his program because they are all so young, many want to be “starchitects.” He said he would prefer to design a bus stop, that he finds them interesting. We talked about the mortise and tenon joint on the beam of the bottom of a long table. I asked some questions which are usual of me to ask, near requirements at this point—about dreams, about the use of dating apps. He said he dreams often, very strange dreams. That he very rarely uses dating apps, hasn’t met anyone off of an app in Ithaca, and just downloaded feeld today. He said that when he is on dating apps it seems to come from some edge of boredom or loneliness, and that today had been a slow day, so he had been hesitant to meet. I said my day had also been a bit slow and that I was moving towards a kind of solitude and absorption in my work, so it had been a surprise to me that I had interacted with him today and met. He said he had been surprised too, and had had reservations about meeting, because he hadn’t been productive earlier in the day. We only talked for about two hours before he said he was going to go home to do some work. This was a little disappointing, but it felt reasonable, consistent with what he had told me. He asked me if I would like to meet again. I walked back to his house with him and we hugged before I left. I liked the hug. He said something about having coffee or tea at his house some time. He told me to text him. We interacted a bit on the app afterwards, he asked if I had gotten home safely, and I shared a picture of a toy skull in a car window that I had seen on the way back. I knew I was already nervous because I felt I had liked him a lot and was bracing myself for some form of rejection or abandonment.
I had a dream that was vivid and beautiful and it involved catasetum orchids, a reference to the fact that my feeld profile says one of my interests is catasetums, and to the fact that I had talked to him about growing orchids.
The reason I was so invested in him is that he reminded me of a past version of myself, more ascetic and rigid and involved with solitude and rigor and aesthetics, as in 2019, when I took the course that involved a trip to Trinidad.
Blandine Rannou’s Goldberg Variations. Something about the texture of the soft notes on the harpsichord. I’m thinking about how poetic utterances are often constative. I’m very tired. Recently my cunt feels stretchier. I read Michelle’s piece on her copper IUD’s toxicity. I want to get more involved with photography again; I want to make photographs which respond to the ones I’ve made in the past, the ones which were preoccupied with the “erotic,” with the “fold,” with “surface.” I also want to want to be a poet again. I want to make books with my hands. I want to print things and pin them on the wall and stand up and stare at them. I want to be careful.
Banfield on Benveniste: The aorist tense in the third person is what qualifies narration (histoire) as distinct from discourse (discours). (US 148)
James’s pluperfect is a tense but it is a past tense combined with perfect aspect. It “establishes a deixis […] and places the action relative to the deixis (before it).” The aorist involves a perfective aspect; its Greek root ἀόριστος means “indefinite” because it refers to the unmarked version of the verb with no implications of an imperfective or perfect aspect. (Wikipedia)
Does the pluperfect entail that every perfect action has occurred before a specified event? Here’s a random sentence from The Golden Bowl:
She had thrown herself, at dinner, into every feature of the recent adventure of the companions, letting him see, without reserve, that she wished to hear everything about it, and making Charlotte in particular, Charlotte's judgment of Matcham, Charlotte's aspect, her success there, her effect traceably produced, her clothes inimitably worn, her cleverness gracefully displayed, her social utility, in fine, brilliantly exemplified, the subject of endless inquiry.
This sentence doesn’t subordinate or refer the pluperfect to an event before which it happened. All the other verbs are in the progressive tense and mark actions which occur during the same span of time in which she had “thrown herself.” The aspect of the action of the verb throw doesn’t seem to matter. In any case, there’s some sense of suspension in all this, of what Banfield calls the NOW: the “moment of the act of consciousness.” The event to which the past perfects are subordinated, to which they deictically refer, is this unspoken, unspeakable “act of consciousness” on the part of Maggie.
If we replaced all the pluperfects with simple past tense verbs, then we’d experience her as throwing herself in the moment: “She threw herself, at dinner, into every feature of the recent adventure…” It would be as if the narrator had observed these events only shortly before recounting them, and is focused on recording the actions in sequence. Not enough time has passed for the narrator to “reflect” on the scene. Certainly not any time at all for Maggie herself to be reflective. I’m sure someone has written about this—I’m going to read Hisayoshi Watanabe’s “Past Perfect Retrospection in the Style of Henry James.” Yes, this is very nice. And I’m seeing some possible connections to masochism, too: “Drama takes place in James’s novels when the equilibrium of the internal world is broken by an action from outside-when the sensitive mind undergoes a new experience” (177).
MAGGIE
“Oh she was going, she was going—she could feel it
afresh; it was a good deal as if she had sneezed
ten times or had suddenly burst into a comic song.”
“Her grasp of appearances was thus out of proportion
to her view of causes; but it came to her then and there
that if she could only get the facts of appearance straight,
only jam them down into their place, the reasons lurking
behind them, kept uncertain, for the eyes, by their wavering
and shifting, wouldn’t perhaps be able to help showing.”
It was a worked-out scheme for their not wounding her, for their behaving to her quite nobly; to which each had, in some winning way, induced the other to contribute, and which therefore, so far as that went, proved that she had become with them a subject of intimate study. Quickly, quickly, on a certain alarm taken, eagerly and anxiously, before they SHOULD, without knowing it, wound her, they had signalled from house to house their clever idea, the idea by which, for all these days, her own idea had been profiting. They had built her in with their purpose—which was why, above her, a vault seemed more heavily to arch; so that she sat there, in the solid chamber of her helplessness, as in a bath of benevolence artfully prepared for her, over the brim of which she could but just manage to see by stretching her neck. Baths of benevolence were very well, but, at least, unless one were a patient of some sort, a nervous eccentric or a lost child, one was usually not so immersed save by one’s request. It wasn’t in the least what she had requested. She had flapped her little wings as a symbol of desired flight, not merely as a plea for a more gilded cage and an extra allowance of lumps of sugar. Above all she hadn’t complained, not by the quaver of a syllable—so what wound in particular had she shown her fear of receiving? What wound HAD she received—as to which she had exchanged the least word with them? If she had ever whined or moped they might have had some reason; but she would be hanged—she conversed with herself in strong language—if she had been, from beginning to end, anything but pliable and mild. It all came back, in consequence, to some required process of their own, a process operating, quite positively, as a precaution and a policy. They had got her into the bath and, for consistency with themselves—which was with each other—must keep her there. In that condition she wouldn’t interfere with the policy, which was established, which was arranged. Her thought, over this, arrived at a great intensity—had indeed its pauses and timidities, but always to take afterwards a further and lighter spring. The ground was well-nigh covered by the time she had made out her husband and his colleague as directly interested in preventing her freedom of movement. Policy or no policy, it was they themselves who were arranged. She must be kept in position so as not to DISarrange them. It fitted immensely together, the whole thing, as soon as she could give them a motive; for, strangely as it had by this time begun to appear to herself, she had hitherto not imagined them sustained by an ideal distinguishably different from her own. Of course they were arranged—all four arranged; but what had the basis of their life been, precisely, but that they were arranged together? Amerigo and Charlotte were arranged together, but she—to confine the matter only to herself—was arranged apart. It rushed over her, the full sense of all this, with quite another rush from that of the breaking wave of ten days before; and as her father himself seemed not to meet the vaguely-clutching hand with which, during the first shock of complete perception, she tried to steady herself, she felt very much alone.
Hi Zane,
I want to be as objective and synoptic as possible. I don’t have much of a mind right now. I want to write to you in order to fix this. My suspicion is that if I release a synoptic statement on the state of affairs right now I will be absolved of whatever is weighing me down.
There’s no center here. I wish I could release a single text that would produce a center. Or maybe there’s too much center, and it’s hard to ascertain what’s objective from so many “I”s addressed to several different addressees. The “I” can’t produce a center.
APL is inadequate as a mirror, and inaccurate as a trace. I do not think it is a canvas for “creative work,” either—that would get me caught in a concern with closure and aesthetics, which isn’t the thing I’m supposed to be preoccupied with, according to some interior law.
The posts from the spring and summer involve some attempt to identify with a symptom. That symptom, nearly equivalent to sexual desire, had caught me by surprise in 2020 and re-emerged from a period of repression one year later. If sex is the breakdown of sense, then that is precisely what it was that caught me in the Fall of 2021. In the aftermath, there were various incursions from the outside. I have met various people, whom I might list in the order that I met them, so as to do away with questions of relative importance: John, Hunter, Danny, Vishal, Dy, Vieno, Alec, and some more forgettable ones I respectfully leave unnamed.
I discovered that meeting new people was a welcome distraction, even if the persons in question could not sustain my attention beyond one initial meeting or several. After meeting two men from the gay side of tinder, and after various sessions with my psychoanalyst, I determined that I would detransition. Then I wrote my exam papers, with zeal and suffering, and found the reception a bit disappointing, which produced a delay of sorts—losing some attachment to work. Intensified “work” on APL, instead. In the summer the experience of meeting Dy/Dylan intensified my attachment to Zane [I must refer to this version of you in the third person], but also freed me in a certain sense—I saw that an encounter could be eventful, interesting, whether or not it caused me to clench up. This also applies to Vieno; Vieno was ultimately not interesting because I could see he was less invested in sexuality, upon which nothing can be built, that in earning millions of dollars. Lara changed something bigger, making me “forget” or “lose reference” to Zane’s body, though I was still becoming aroused and happy every time he returned a message. I thought this was time for something to grow, or for me to let go of some of the old fears, but I did the opposite, becoming attached once more to the notion that Zane had met someone beautiful in Japan and that I would become attached to him in spite of his absence once again; but this became the last time I fostered a sense of abjection in relation to him. It was as if I wanted him gone, and figured it as the opposite: a sense of abandonment. I knew this is what I was doing, too. And when I met Alec I was tired, wanting very little, but it turned into something reverberatory, and I left those twelve hours with my life “split.” Am I still exhausted, three weeks later, from that experience? Well, I found thereafter that it was sex that was my motor, and I had come to believe by then that this was not something I could share with Z, not on account of distance purely, but on account of a fundamental misapprehension that had taken root a long time ago—I was no longer male, I was no longer a sublimator, I no longer believed in work for work’s sake, in leaving public traces, in becoming justified and justifiable. I believed that becoming a woman meant destroying my relationship with you, even if you were the person who caused me to become a woman. In some sense this is single-sided, but I believe it—becoming a woman so far has meant being both more intensely attached to the experiences which affect me, and more promiscuous, more inconstant, more willing to forget.
So long as I can collect something, though.
I have such difficulty continuing with my professional duties because of this change?
It’s getting colder and harder to bask, though it’s not harder to take a nap.
I don’t see how my structural promiscuity will work, but I trust my sense of pleasure.
John remains a question—it’s possible that I won’t be neatly rejected by him. It would be so much easier if I were dumber, more capable of creating fantasies which might be neatly stripped away. But I don’t seem to have many illusions about him. I know that if he accepted me, brought me closer, it might not lead to some form of success. Is it a sense of being loved which constitutes success? And if I have that, does it matter very much if it lasts a minute or a year, since this sense of being loved can be destroyed so definitively, by time?
It doesn’t really matter what is happening in the dark recesses of another person’s mind. I am quick to give in to the desire to fill it up. The acts which replace absence with presence do not necessarily sate me, but this is not a problem, so long as I am with other people, exposed to strangeness. But I am so tired. Sometimes I wish I could just stop moving. It doesn’t actually feel so good to know that one phase of life has ended and that another has begun. I want to act with courage, but there is no courage without immediate fear of pain. I can expect even worse things to occur sooner or later, worse than this tiredness and fear, or whatever abjection I’ve felt in the past.
I’m glad I wrote this, even if I don’t feel good.
[17 September 2022]
I dreamt I was scrambling in a sort of quick desperation up a stairway that was composed of many thin slabs of clay. They were soft, medium-gray, and not visibly connected by any structure: suspended in the air. I felt some kind of horrible existential dread as I climbed them; I was desperate to get away, I paid little attention to how high I was going, or of how delicate the structure may have been. Near the top I got to a section that was so thin it wavered like a string, and it came loose, whirling and twisting around another section of the staircase, the whole structure being like a maypole, with many cords of cement blocks softly hanging from it. I grasped this thing which was moving so quickly, off of which I was sure to fall, bracing myself against the centripetal force. Eventually I managed to skid and slow the movement of the “cord” onto a pond-like flat structure, which was also the entrance to a subway station. There was a man there, whose name was Balthasar, with dark curly hair, who looked like Serge Gorodish from Diva, and he was annoyed that I was impeding the turnstile. After I woke and returned to sleep, I dreamt I was walking down a boardwalk, by the ocean, with a warm sunset on the horizon, talking to Savitri about love and relationships. I spoke to her about my skepticism with respect to monogamy, or perhaps my skepticism of my skepticism with respect to monogamy, and she seemed herself skeptical. Alec showed up in the dream somewhere, as the subject of conversation, or in some messages.
[18 September 2022]
This strength of the taste of this dream feels like crying; the cloying sweet-saltiness of the sea in an inlet on the coast of LA, with bright teal waters. I was visiting the UCLA campus, trying to find a place to sit in a large cafeteria adjacent to a gym. It seemed like I was on a meal plan, they were serving some kind of beef in a red sauce. I was supposed to sit with two asian girls. I had trouble moving the water, I kept on finding myself submerged, and would periodically put the phone I was gripping in one hand under water to help me stay afloat. But this didn’t have any effect, I just kept on bobbing up and down, slowly. The water was so salty it tasted sweet; this taste was so thick that it was both sickening and hard to experience as sickening on account of its fascinating strength. There were several other young people swimming around me, many of them asian. It was very difficult to move through this water. I also saw a silver van get submerged and reëmerge from the water, as if it were buoyant enough to float. Earlier, I was looking out a window with someone and we were talking about how different names or moments in some novels—George Meredith’s Crossjay, for instance, were references to different corvids. The person pointed out a grackle outside; I made some connection between the grackle and part of a Henry James novel. Later, when I was walking around in LA, I passed through a rose garden, which was sort of labyrinthian, probably like the Getty museum’s hedge garden.
[21 September 2022]
I keep on ripping out new pages from this notebook in order to start something new. I am going to enter a longish dark period, a kind of depression marked by a texture of existence: weakness, lack of sexual sensation, fatigue, dizziness, threat of fatness, etc.—this is as necessary as the changing of the seasons. I will be cruel to people I’ve often liked and accorded some kind of special value to, by wresting from them all forms of attention and presence. I will dream almost every night and be too exhausted to notice anything.
Today’s dream activity was immense. (3) A man’s dick was in my mouth and it ejaculated into a thick torrent of white water, like a fire hydrant or a waterfall. (2) My dad wrote an email in which he relayed his decision to read three books. The first title amused me and produced a strong impression, as it seemed relevant to “my condition”—but I immediately forgot it upon waking up, as if my desire to possess it pressed down too hard and disfigured the memory. The second was a text by Simone Weil (no title), and the third involved the words “blue” and “satori.” He wrote near the end of the email that he would “no longer be merely crunching numbers.” This email was open on his phone, which he had tossed to me with a playful smile on his face. When I scrolled up, I saw that it was a response to an email from my sister, in which she had written about a dream: “We tried to kiss each other, and then I tried to levitate according to the laws of [another word I have forgotten].” Before reading the email I had been vacuuming a large rug, and trying to get cat hair off of the blankets which the cats were sitting on, but the blankets kept on getting sucked into the vacuum head. The cats also refused to move, and my mom was yelling out advice on how to better go about my task. The space was expansive, like the floor of a school gymnasium, though it seemed to “refer” to my family’s living room. My sister was also in the vicinity. I was amused to find out that she had written to my father about this sexual dream; it implied that they were secretly lovers, which I nearly expected. (1) I was walking around a dark neighborhood, and then I tried to go for a run while holding a hand broom. Though I was running, I could barely move. I saw the man from Tinder who wants to fuck me enter the driveway of the house next to mine, and later drive away with two African men. Then I passed by a tall woman with brown hair nursing a baby; she had a long nose and elegant features, and was sitting sideways on the front passenger seat with the door open and her two legs propped on a particularly curved section of the curb. She ridiculed me for trying to run with a hand broom, for being old, and for having bad skin. I acknowledged that two of these statements were true, but asked her how old she was, and then told her that we were both twenty-four. She then told me that she believed that plastic surgery was the world’s greatest accomplishment, and that she wanted to have a procedure done on her nose. My vision cut to an image of her on a bed with a metal brace on her nose, and then to a view of my facial skin being replaced with a thin, translucent, wet piece of paper; on it were various grey splotches, which marked the shadow or substance of the blemishes that had been removed.
[23 September 2022]
In the dream, my mom was directing me by text to go to the Lincoln Center in order to catch some kind of transportation, either a flight or a bus. I was in DC, walking past the National Gallery, towards the Kennedy Center, and was quite afraid that I would not be able to find the place, and that I would be late. I kept on checking my phone as I walked, with a suitcase handle in the other hand. I passed through a cobblestone back alley and a man was hauling along a large red truck, the kind that’s used to tow cars, with a lot of open space in the carriage’s structure. I walked under the structure, between the wheels, and accidentally punctured one of the many tires with some metal wires that were bundled to my backpack; the wheel deflated without delay; I offered him my phone number so I could Venmo him later, but he refused in a friendly way. When I got to the Lincoln Center and entered, I looked at a green sign to see where the bus or air terminal was, but couldn’t find any words related to transit. I had entered what seemed to be a museum or the atrium of a government building, with almost no one there. My mom misleading me is an interesting wish; I think of this dream as an actualization of “missed experience.” I didn’t just miss the bus or plane, I failed to find the opening to the transit system, and I never got to find out what kind of transportation I was looking for, or where I was headed. And because I woke up, I failed to reach a point of resolution: who knows if I eventually found the terminal, if I was in the wrong building, or if the thing I was searching for was in fact there. Perhaps my mom was being sadistic, commanding me to do something and inducing anxiety in me simultaneously; or maybe she “just” made a mistake, as the Lincoln Center is in NYC, not DC—the Lincoln Center is near Columbus Circle, but the Kennedy Center isn’t a very good landmark for reaching public transit, though it’s reasonably close to Foggy Bottom, and I used to use that station with my mom to go to concerts.
This recent disavowal seems pretty real. I do think my attraction to John served a specific purpose which no longer exists. He showed me a different form of sociality, one based in speech and humor, and I cathected to it in a reasonable fashion—who wouldn’t like liking him under such circumstances? And now I don’t think I like him much beyond the moments of laughter we share, but Praveen is just as funny, if not funnier, and maybe sharper in mind, and Xinyu is likewise a great fount of laughter now and then, and if not that, some sort of insight. I feel like I’m moving into a new terrain whose texture and material qualities interest me; it conjures black ribbed cotton and lettuce hems and a boat neck and exposed seams. I actually like using the word “actually” and I like using the word “feel” combined with “like.” I wrote the last two sentences yesterday, and I write this between engagements—about to go back to campus for the keynote by Joan Copjec for this psychoanalysis conference. But then I wrote the first several sentences here hours after the keynote happened. I want to write to Zane again, now that the tension has loosened. The sum of our interactions forms something eminently hilarious.
[24 September 2022]
I was in a dark park, a smooth field with some mild undulations, a bit like a golf course. At the far edge there were a few trees and a bench. A man and a woman were standing under the trees, about to engage in a sexual act. A few young, college-aged girls around me were pointing them out and expressing their disgust; one of them said “He’s jerking to.” My memories of the scene are blurred, but I do recall seeing the man take out his penis. There were several other couples having sex in the park, but I don’t remember what they looked like. I believe the couples were all heterosexual, though it seemed like a gay cruising spot. This dream appears to me as a relatively clear wish-fulfillment—I do wish that a place, like a golf course, could become a site of public sex. I’m not sure why the girls were there to jeer at what they saw, but I like the fact that one of them produced this substitution of “to” for “off,” thus producing a crossing between the phrases “jerking off” and “coming to.”
[25 September 2022]
My mom told me to remove my tonsils, or rather, she just took them out of the back of my mouth. They were large and bumpy, about as long as my palms, and looked like fish egg-sacs or lungs, each connected to the back of my mouth by fleshy pink or whitish tubes which were coiled tightly into corkscrews. At first it hurt to have the “tonsils” dangling out, because they were heavy, and the corkscrews wouldn’t unravel without some manual aid, but I managed to unravel them so that the tonsils could sit on the bathroom counter. The sacs then transformed into two large plastic animal figurines, the first of a green brontosaurus and the other of a bat with its wings outstretched, each about twice as large as my hands. I was in my mother’s bathroom in Virginia, which I never used much. I woke from this dream around 4 AM and went back to sleep. Right before waking around 9 AM, I dreamt I was walking with a tall young man with glasses, down the little road by the creek that takes me to Gimme Coffee, sometime during the day. We saw a huge crescent moon taking up at least two thirds of the height of the sky; it was jagged and distorted at one end, like part of the white was melting off. The moon reminded me of a blurred film still, like the pictures I took of the eclipse in Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century. The tonsil-organ seems to be nothing other than the ovaries connected to the oral cavity by fallopian tubes. I’m suddenly remembering a missing part of the dream, in which I was in some kind of boarding school, but I’m not sure if I can go further with that. In any case, I gave birth to two plastic animal figurines by way of the oral ovaria.
1, 2, 3, 5, 7,
8, 9, 10, 13, 14,
15, 16, 17, 18, 19,
20, 21, 23, 24, 25
I’ve remembered my dreams on twenty days of the month so far.
February: 9
March: 11
April: 9
May: 11
June: 14
July: 11
August: 19
September: ?
Instead of going out last night, I drank two pots of white tea with some honey. I did one set of twenty pushups. I took a shower, and I looked at my entire naked body, which I hadn’t done in a while. My naked form is a source of mental stimulation for me in that the thing I see is so clearly a formation built by processes that go beyond my control: that the pelvic bones grew wider at a certain age connects me to the genetic program of a species. But the thing I see is also resolutely mine to see and mine to allow others to see, so it is comforting to watch it. I told my analyst that I believe I should look at myself in the mirror more often, that after seeing Patricia Arquette’s body I came home to look at mine that Thursday, and that there’s something life-affirming and essential about doing so, and that I fear the cold weather will make it an infrequent practice, so I will have to wait until the summer again before I can become intelligent—maybe I should move back to California. I have gone at least six days now without experiencing any hint of arousal; I am disconnected from the sense of expansion I associate with genital feeling, the thing which seems to open me most reliably to something new in my mental life. Some people drink in order to write; I get wet in order to write; in the absence of arousal, what am I able to do?
I’ve been thinking about the transformations in my life over the past year. When I try to explain to people my recent fatigue and inability to work, I find myself unable to furnish any sort of an explanation, and wonder if it wouldn’t be appropriate now to work a little harder at trying to understand this blur. I want to be direct, I want what I say to be unmistakeable, I want it to flow down a throat like water.
My lust for interchange is so intense that it throttles my enthusiasm for text. I find it impossible to read, at least not with total engagement, and this condition, which seems to have lasted at least a month, persists with such strength that it threatens to change my relation to reading for the rest of my life. There is a richness to a conversation with a person which outstrips the acts of reading and writing, so I have learned to devalue the activities which once formed both my core and my superficial habits. But it is also true that such intercourse makes for a deeper sense of loneliness in the absence of an interlocutor. I have nothing of a person I have spoken with except my subjective memory of the encounter, and this memory does not serve to connect us, since memory has no trace of the touch of the other’s touch, since the other does not work to fabricate it. The other may think of me and what I have said in my absence, but without a trace of this, I have no sense of the other as a person—they become nothing but an set of impressions. To produce a person out of a set of impressions is an active process. It involves thinking of them, which necessarily perturbs memory and forms it into something closer to a truth about who that person may be in relation to one’s values, to one’s desires, conscious or unconscious.
The risk of choosing to think of someone in their absence: that’s perhaps the most meaningful act one can take in this world. It feels safe to address you now that I acknowledge this. The distance produced by time between exchanges has no effect on the solidity of the exchange as something which has happened. I am not interested in desire right now. Earlier I acknowledged that the desire I have experienced for or around you has been completely effaced, and I thought of this as grounds for a total disconnection. But I didn’t consider the claim of a kind of safety that exists between us. And to have such a sense of safety, lurking somewhere, seems to be an incredibly important foundation for the exploration of the not-safe. The risk of thinking of you thus rises out of an underlying safety.
I do not know why my body wishes to shut out the world right now. I feel affection towards you, Praveen, Hunter, and Xinyu. I hope for ardent and inspired friendship with Xinyu and Praveen. I’m grateful for the game of listening that exists between me and Hunter. Perhaps a similar game of listening exists between us, but regardless of whether or not it exists, what has existed has been enough to revive me.
I do not know why my body wishes to shut out the world right now.
The simplest answer would be that it is experiencing a failure to mourn something.
My inability to mourn seems related to my investment in preserving something which I don’t wish to remove from my body’s memory.
I sense that they can do work on me so long as I don’t think of them.
And yet I say that they are lost to me. I don’t remember what it felt like to be in the lurch of sexuality. I cannot bring the individuals I appreciate into language. I am not stimulated by anything. My current state is simply one of fogginess, even self-hatred.
What’s the risk of representing them?
Am I suggesting that my sexual attachments are so weak?
I mystify the unconscious by valorizing its silence. I underestimate its power to persist and grow around the disturbances of analysis. I look away from the scene of “analysis,” of “interpretation,” because it is ugly to me, and I forget how much I value value.
These throbs scarce expressed however the impatience of desire, any more than they stood for sharp disappointment: the series together resembled perhaps more than anything else those fine waves of clearness through which, for a watcher of the east, dawn at last trembles into rosy day. The illumination indeed was all for the mind, the prospect revealed by it a mere immensity of the world of thought; the material outlook was meantime a different matter. The March afternoon, judged at the window, had blundered back into autumn; it had been raining for hours, and the colour of the rain, the colour of the air, of the mud, of the opposite houses, of life altogether, in so grim a joke, so idiotic a masquerade, was an unutterable dirty brown.
I am thinking, of course, of the one who is the unmistakeable cause of my writing here, as I copy down this passage from The Golden Bowl, of my incorrigible desire to expose to him what I find beautiful, to produce beautiful objects for him. I tend to debase this desire to produce beauty, believing that the practice of creating beauty for its own sake is a convenient escape from what is more complex in the real; I also think of beauty’s use as currency, as a cover over the prospect that I in my raw animal being have nothing to give, or that I need to repay a debt I have incurred through my unpleasant speech by producing things of beauty. In fact I believe in the collision of these possibilities: I want to remove my clothes and walk out onto a snowy field, a place inhospitable to both nakedness and work, and to do nothing other than be naked and work. I love the scene at the edge of the unimmolating cabin in Lost Highway, a seeming portal to the end, to the navel of the dream; horrifying, sublime, beautiful, disgusting, enviable, terrible, good, and romantic, like this gesture.
Charlotte Stant, at such an hour, in a shabby four-wheeler and a waterproof, Charlotte Stant turning up for him at the very climax of his special inner vision, was an apparition charged with a congruity at which he stared almost as if it had been a violence. The effect of her coming to see him, him only, had, as he stood waiting, a singular intensity—though after some minutes had passed the certainty of this began to drop. Perhaps she had not come, or had come only for Maggie; perhaps, on learning below that the Princess hadn't returned, she was merely leaving a message, writing a word on a card. he should see at any rate, and just yet, controlling himself, would do nothing. This thought of not interfering took on a sudden force for him; she would doubtless hear he was at home, but he would let her visit to him be all of her own choosing. And his view of a reason for leaving her free was the more remarkable that, though taking no step, he yet intensely hoped. The harmony of her breaking into sight while the superficial conditions were so against her was a harmony with conditions that were far from superficial and that gave, for his imagination, an extraordinary value to her presence.
It was as if he then knew on the spot why he had been feeling for hours in such fashion—as if he in fact knew within the minute things he hadn't known even while she was panting, from the effect of the staircase, at the door of the room. He knew at the same time, none the less, that *she* knew still more than he—in the sense, that is, of all the signs and portents that might count for them; and his vision of alternatives (he could scarce say what to call them, solutions, satisfactions) opened out altogether with this tangible truth of her attitude by the chimney-place, the way she looked at him as through the gained advantage of it; her right hand resting on the marble and her left keeping her skirt from the fire while she held out a foot to dry. He couldn't have told what particular links and gaps had at the end of a few minutes found themselves renewed and bridged; for he remembered no occasion in Rome from which the picture could have been so exactly copied.
What had happened in short was that Charlotte and he had by a single turn of the wrist of fate—"led up" to indeed, no doubt, by steps and stages that conscious computation had missed—been placed face to face in a freedom that extraordinarily partook of ideal perfection, since the magic web had spun itself without their toil, almost without their touch. Above all, on this occasion, once more, there sounded through their safety, as an undertone, the very voice he had listened to on the eve of his marriage with such another sort of unrest. Dimly, again and again, from that period on, he had seemed to hear it tell him why it kept recurring; but it phrased the large music now in a way that filled the room. The reason was—into which he had lived quite intimately by the end of a quarter of an hour—that just this truth of their safety offered it now a kind of unexampled receptacle, letting it spread and spread, but at the same time elastically enclosing it, banking it in, for softness, as with billows of eiderdown.
The intensity of my desire to produce beautiful objects which bridge all loneliness, that is something I want to return to.
The difference, this time, is that I would cultivate it with a new form of detachment from the notion that I should succeed.
It is only through these individuals that I have experienced a desire to write poems, and it is through them that I experience the terror of the failure of language in the face of the truth. But I can’t be so general, I have to acknowledge the precedence of the two I have valued for their sexual contact with me. So much structure has to be built before it can be said, if it can ever be said.
How I admire them! Not them but the them beyond them!
Sensation that spreads beyond me but unmistakeably through me makes me feel both weaker than nothing and omnipotent.
The animal randomness of his bat-like touch is a mark of genius.
Everything about him and him is natural genius.
The program which stultifies and makes generic is a mark of genius in relation to that being in relation to this being.
We all have to work to make the thing that’s latent a thing that’s present.
Ah, I have lost it again—I am weak in the face of the thing I fail to place in language.
More has to come again, and again, it has to come of being with what was thought.
Oh, it can’t be the act of giving a name, it has to spread as it does when it is happening.
Why does James say he had had to… instead of he had to…
Why is it that he hadn’t not done this or that?
1, 2, 3, 5, 7,
8, 9, 10, 13, 14,
15, 16, 17, 18, 19,
20, 21, 23, 24, 25
26, 27, 30
February: 9
March: 11
April: 9
May: 11
June: 14
July: 11
August: 19
September: 23
Faith subtended inconstancy and inconstancy now subtends faith,
I suspect this circle will continue drawing itself out, the drawing intricate.
