. . . .

To: pedalferrous

[26 August 2022]

I’m caught in paroxysms of laughter.

Swaying his head, like the Oriental palm whose shade is a blessing to the perfervid wanderer below, smiling gravely, he was indirectly asking his dignity what he could say to maintain it and deal this mad young woman a bitterly compassionate rebuke. What to think hung remoter. The thing to do struck him first.

Michelle and I were discussing hookups and how what matters is not in fact “attractiveness” but the sense that something is very “real.” That when you’re with someone and it works, it’s because you feel like the two of you are much more “real” than anything beyond or before you; if I may put my own words to her mouth—that all the narratives of what it means to be a good citizen of the world, a person engaged in public life, is all unreal, in comparison to the moment you are sharing with the person who is beside or on top or below or inside of you. This came from her citation of a passage from Second Place, which I pulled up then and will pull up here and now:

Tony also awoke me, but to the presence in myself of a fixed male image, to which he did not correspond. To see him, I had to use a faculty that I did not entirely trust. All my life this image, I came to realise, had in various forms caused me to recognise certain people and to consider them real, while others remained unnoticed or two-dimensional. I understood that I should no longer trust it, and the mechanism of not trusting and not believing and then being rewarded for it came over time to supplant my actual trust and belief: this, I think, more than Tony himself and more than the geographical distance from my previous life, formed a great part of the gulf separating me from the person I had been.

Then there’s a rather difficult passage which did not take part in our conversation, but now I’d like to study it:

I have often wondered, Jeffers, whether true artists are people who have succeeded in discarding or marginalising their inner reality quite early on, which might explain how someone can know so much about life with one side of themselves, while understanding nothing about it at all with another. After I met Tony, and learned to override my own concept of reality, I became aware of how widely and indiscriminately I was capable of imagining things, and how coldly I could consider the products of my own mind. The only experience I had had of such a phenomenon in my previous life was the luridness with which, at a certain point, I had imagined doing some violence to myself: it was, I suppose, at this very point that my belief in the life I was living and my inability to live it any longer were fighting a sort of duel to the death. I believe I glimpsed something in those moments, a horror of or hatred for myself, that was like the threshold to a whole underside of personality: it was a monster I saw, Jeffers, an ugly, thrashing colossus, and I banged the door on it as fast as I could, though not fast enough to stop it taking a big gouge out of me. Later, when I came to live at the marsh and looked back on my memories, I found that I viewed myself in the cruellest light. Never have I yearned more to be capable of creating something than at that time. It felt as though only that – to express or reflect some aspect of existence – would atone for the awful knowledge I seemed to have acquired. I had lost the blind belief in events and the immersion in my own being that I realised had made existence bearable up to that point. This loss seemed to me to constitute nothing less than the gain of perceptual authority. It felt as though it was an authority beyond language: I was so certain I could visualise it that I even bought painting materials and set myself up in a corner of the house, but what I experienced there was the opposite of release, Jeffers. Instead it was as if a total and permanent disability had suddenly taken hold of my body, a paralysis within which I would have to live wide awake for evermore.

As Sophocles said it – how dreadful knowledge of the truth is, when the truth can’t help you!

I’m curious about the presence of the monster—the need to produce a clearly “figurative” figure for whatever it is that constituted that horror, that “whole underside of personality,” suggests that the thing can’t properly be described with symbols. What’s the “big gouge” it takes out of her? And I love the word cruel, used like that. the cruellest light. Is the light emanating from this screen the “cruellest light”?

To whom does one “atone” oneself when one creates? I think of God, naturally, but then the devil. The devil is in this book.

What constitutes “belief in events”? I believe she is talking about fate, about a belief in narrative continuity.

But most of all, I’m curious about this “truth [that] can’t help you!”

More later,

diid

. . . .

To: pedalferrous

[27 August 2022]

I’m thinking about how Lara used to tell me about her hookups when she was a senior in high school, with girls from her school, and later in college. I liked reading about these encounters, her descriptions of bodies and of how they reacted to different kinds of touch. I liked knowing how they were different from or like me, because it was interesting to know that bodies were comparable, that the act of comparison held interest for her body, that it had effects on what she liked or what made an encounter awkward. I suppose I felt like a neutral but interested observer, or like a child hearing bedroom stories—they had a formal continuity which made them comforting to read—and I imagine a kind of freytagian triangular structure was embedded in them—rising action, climax, falling action.

It was when I developed a crush on Danish that things got difficult, because what I had experienced with him was ongoing—a series of encounters which would accrete and perhaps lead somewhere, though it would be ideal if it had led to an event—not events, those events whose impact on me led on to an openness of experience which was impossible to capture in observational terms. I wrote to her about him in what felt like exclamatory sparks, rarely descriptively. You could tell I found him precious by the way I wrote about him, and she told me that it was this quality of worship, of adoration, which bothered her the most. I took this as both a sign of jealousy and as objective statement of fact. I wondered about that, about the ugliness at the core of my adoration.

A dissertation needs to be an encounter with an end, and I’m struggling to understand its structure in terms of the structures I’ve encountered in my relationships with people. It doesn’t make sense to think of a dissertation as a one-night stand, but it’s the first of the various forms of encounter I can think of. Perhaps it is like being trapped in a room with someone you thought you’d just fuck once.

I am thinking about how these emails were initially meant to be fake or fictive—I had written them in a document on my computer in January, called “The Notebook of Failure,” a title which I don’t completely understand or hope to justify—and now that I am typing them up for the first time here, and labelling with real dates and real addressees, it no longer seems that they are fake, or figments of “failure” to communicate with the recipient at hand. The night after I dreamt of you being here, of showing you a movie in which a Korean couple lay on the ground, the man screaming, a real person came and slept in my room, but he didn’t scream. I lay quietly, not quite asleep, for three hours that night, before the two of us woke up. It was barely matutinal at 5 AM. I moved, and found it beautiful to lie beside someone in the middle of my room, the wall of books separating the center from the edge deconstructed, to look at the ceiling as if stars might be visible, though there was in fact a glimmering shadow, an interesting shape. The last time I was so unable to sleep, I was lying in the middle of your room, and I listened to you sleep. I know someone’s asleep when I hear them breathe deeply and regularly, and sometimes snore. You, this man, my mother, my father, my sister—I have heard these people snore. Nobody snores forever, so the sound can only be intermittently raucous or difficult. It’s otherwise endearing to know someone is asleep and breathing in that strange way. When I moved my sheepskin next to his and lay beside him, I felt I was camping on a meadow. I liked how he moved and how he touched me, sudden and light, like a bat with strong wings—I’m touched and moved by that morning’s τύχη.

When he mentioned that he would be gone soon, that he was nomadic, I told him that I wasn’t looking for anything “serious” either. I think it’s funny that the thing I take most seriously coincides necessarily with the declaration that something isn’t “serious.” I spent some time reading about how monogamy takes a toll on female sexuality the day after, and thought about how so many female friends or acquaintances of mine seem to take so much stock in continuity, in the reliability of accretion. Of course this includes me, at least it did. But I was drawn to think from the pleasure of this encounter that I was de facto no longer and truly no longer interested in monogamy.

Lara asked me if I had “piv.” I said that my genitals had not been aroused, that my vagina would not permit anything to enter, and that I had “only experienced the desire to indulge in that extreme kink with zane.” But as his absence mounted so did my desire to feel the shape of my canal around this cock. I wondered about the meaning of this desire, especially now that I have taken the time to clear myself of the neurosis of desiring pregnancy and parturition and a child. I want now to know the shape of the “face” I cannot see. I have felt some of its strange ridges and filmy contours with my fingers, and have even seen its wound-like hue in the mirror, but I sense that like a human face it cannot be known through such anatomization, that it must be known with the immediacy of a separate perception. This—the object or the viewer—is the devil which Cusk’s narrator was talking about, I think. Because the penis is visible it cannot occupy this satanic analogy, but it aids in the “seeing” of the woman’s satan, in that immediate way with which a baby views himself in the mirror. When A comes back from his brief trip I will ask or tell him that I want his cock inside of me, the way I told you this in the orange-inked letter. I wonder if he will indeed be able to see anything through the act, or if his necessary failure to see will make it simply one more of many failures to see. I wonder if I will see, if I will manage to know something “in the cruellest light.”

From Meredith I learned the word “Melusine”:

Looking upward, not quite awakened out of a transient doze, at a fair head circled in dazzling blossom, one may temporize awhile with common sense, and take it for a vision after the eyes have regained direction of the mind. Vernon did so until the plastic vision interwound with reality alarmingly. This is the embrace of a Melusine who will soon have the brain if she is encouraged. Slight dalliance with her makes the very diminutive seem as big as life. He jumped to his feet, rattled his throat, planted firmness on his brows and mouth, and attacked the dream-giving earth with tremendous long strides, that his blood might be lively at the throne of understanding. Miss Middleton and young Crossjay were within hail: it was her face he had seen, and still the idea of a vision, chased from his reasonable wits, knocked hard and again for readmission. There was little for a man of humble mind toward the sex to think of in the fact of a young lady's bending rather low to peep at him asleep, except that the poise of her slender figure, between an air of spying and of listening, vividly recalled his likening of her to the Mountain Echo. Man or maid sleeping in the open air provokes your tiptoe curiosity. Men, it is known, have in that state cruelly been kissed; and no rights are bestowed on them, they are teased by a vapourish rapture; what has happened to them the poor fellows barely divine: they have a crazy step from that day. But a vision is not so distracting; it is our own, we can put it aside and return to it, play at rich and poor with it, and are not to be summoned before your laws and rules for secreting it in our treasury. Besides, it is the golden key of all the possible; new worlds expand beneath the dawn it brings us. Just outside reality, it illumines, enriches and softens real things;—and to desire it in preference to the simple fact is a damning proof of enervation.

This passage makes me laugh because he had told me that just fifteen minutes into the date he had seen my nipples and that it had turned him on; I marvel not only at Meredith’s abstruse way of saying something prurient and simple but because of this wondrous equation between desire and enervation; I have been enervated, I have been knocked hard, teased by vapourish rapture.

. . . .

To: pedalferrous

[27 August 2022]

Haha, I think it’s weird how this technology allows me to write multiple messages a day and not feel guilty about it.

I’m clearly “working on” getting through something in a way that feels still a bit pathological. Last week when I was talking to my analyst I started to speak very fast and it felt like I was “rolling down a hill.” He seemed quite responsive to it, based on the frequency of interventions. I wonder if I had tapped into some human side of him, some countertransferential transparency; here was a transparently hysterical analysand, a young woman trying to figure something out, which had been witnessed countless times in the past.

The contrivance of sexual desire is odd because of its flickering. I experienced a mounting desire to be fucked through the entirety of Friday which could not reach a resting place until I managed to masturbate myself to orgasm that night. And now I’m not sure I really want or need to see A again. I also wrote it down on a piece of paper: “Next time we meet, I may want your cock inside of me.” And then I didn’t feel a need to send that message. I wondered if he had very quickly managed to orgasm after our leave-taking. I imagine him sitting in his van or his office with his eyes shut, sitting up, jerking off, falling asleep, waking up, moving on to his research. I wonder if ejaculation is enough to close off memory or any desire to remain on contact. I don’t know why, on the other hand, it takes so long for me to relieve myself of this uterine sensation, why it has to “grow,” why I am forced to ruminate on it. I have no idea if I will still feel this need in one or three weeks. I don’t know if he has some reason to not want to see me again. I have only one possible explanation, if this is the case, beyond satiety: that I remind him too much of his ex, whom he described as too intense in her demands for signs of love—she also liked Freud. It was primarily my physical features which were aligned, though, and I don’t think I projected any atmospheric scariness. In simple terms, I am wondering if I am being ghosted. I am wondering about the asymmetry of needs, of the supplementary desires of woman, if there was something aposematic about me, and if I am having the good sense to find myself healing from a kind of trauma, vaccinating myself through repetition, being so lucky to find once more a glimmer of sexual truth becoming null.

It’s hard to express the texture of this sadness, as insistent and ephemeral as it is. I had spoken with some surprising eagerness to A about my recent duels with immortality and transience and novelty and repetition, and I think that discussion provided an unexpected cushion of a notion for what our sexual encounter was—it is a proof of my allegiance to transience, or an exercise which ensures the muscularity of my ability to mourn—and also some kind of a grommet which reinforces that desire for the hard edge of immortality that does still exist in me. I feel like I am using language in a speculative way, which is also “muscular,” and which belies the actual flimsiness of my feelings. I guess there would be nothing heroic about promiscuity if one wasn’t faced with one’s awful finitude in the process.

Dd

. . . .

[27 August 2022]

hunter,

here’s another very fake email to you—perhaps it will have no effect on my speaking, which would be ideal.

i feel like we are undergoing a sea-change. i cannot be your analysand properly if all i do is tell you stories.

how am i to talk about what happens? what if i spewed extemporaneously composed poems at you?

for some reason explaining to A my varied investments in the poem made me want to write poetry.

there was something particularly lovely about how our textual interactions played out.

a three-pronged message:

(1) let me know about the future

(2) but here is one acceptable reading of the past

(3) and here is what i want if you want to be present

it got me a proper nice response. i’m not interested in rehearsing the details here.

i just think about how crazy it might’ve been to see what i said in (3).

(ok fine, i said the cock thing, and he sent a smile, and said he was sure we’d meet again.)

what i want to talk about though is the thread of the structure. like what do you make of the fact that i responded to michelle’s voice messages and then lara’s with voice messages of my own? and as i spoke of my mother’s “betrayal” (or the moment in which i had lost respect for her) i began to feel more emotional. what have i done to myself by crying with my fingers all the time? when i received A’s response i went to the tub to wash some clothes, and while doubled over i began to sob. it felt so sexual, like i could see myself seeing myself. i thought i was like the woman in the wyeth painting, christina’s world. i have not sobbed like that since 2020, when i was virulent with strange apoplectic angst with respect to zane. but even then i don’t think i sobbed like this. i’ve sobbed like this only in high school, once in response to something my father had said or done, and i ran outside, and walked laps around the neighborhood block in the dark. i remember once when i told my mother of my intention to quit the cello, early in high school, after having ruminated in some existential mode on my “true purpose.” she told me to quit, angrily, and for some reason this triggered an intense fit of sobbing.

the underside of psychoanalysis is suggestion and hypnosis, should we enter a cathartic structuration of desire?

I now understand why she entertains me so often with animal scenes and pictures of corpses. My therapy consists in wiping away these pictures, so that she is no longer able to see them before her. To give support to my suggestion I stroked her several times over the eyes.

(Freud 53, Case 2. Emmy von N.)

Dd

. . . .

Hi A,

Here’s something I discovered today about “genital desire.”

Freud tells us—anatomy is destiny. You know that at certain moments I've taken a stand against this formula over its incompleteness. It becomes true if we give the term anatomy its strict and, if I may, etymological meaning that emphasizes ana-tomy, the function of the cut.

(Lacan, Seminar X, XVII - “The Mouth and the Eye,” p. 237)

I think these grape seeds communicate what Lacan means by the “function of the cut.”