I’m not a fan of amplexus, the placid act in which the toads press their cloacae together and therefore allow sperm to flow to the egg—but I do like seeing the string of fertilized eggs come out during amplexus, like a bike chain or conveyor belt, redolent of some form of industrial manufacture, and I do like the ear-splitting resonance and volume at which the toads make their calls. I took copious videos of this and other sex acts on my phone—males pushing other males off of the female, males with the bulging globular membrane of their throats. It was at Alex’s birthday party in the owner’s garden pond, where there was also a dead turtle on the inverted metal lid of a trash can. Lots of little children got together for a Bahá’í Childrens Day and the sons of the owner said something about how the frogs were “mating.” In conversation with Alex’s coworkers I made note of this: that the children know and call this process “mating,” but don’t refer to it as “having sex.” Alex then asked if I had called it “having sex” as a child and I admitted I hadn’t. When his mom had told him how humans do it, he told all his classmates and none of them believed him, or found it disgusting. John had a similar story to tell: he couldn’t believe it, found it disgusting. Cynthia didn’t share her side of the story. I said that my mom hadn’t given me a straight answer when I asked her how “humans mate”—she said I’d learn about it later, which I did, from a textbook, like how Joe sees a diagram of sexual intercourse in her father’s medical books in Nymphomaniac. I think, when I read about it, I found it a bit disappointing. I was not born into circumstances which would have made it natural for me to search for an answer online, but I may not have pursued an answer because I was not interested in finding out. The way grasshoppers or beetles mate isn’t all that interesting to observe, and does not produce fantasies. I hadn’t seen animals copulate in a way that involved erections or thrusting or any particular signs of violence or unrest. Nothing is less erotic than the fitting together of the insects and amphibians. Such animals don’t kiss, either—the kiss of course is the ultimate human perversion, and has something to do with the prolonged dependence of the infant on the mammaries—if I had grown up around more suckling mammals, uncastrated ones who like to fuck or lick, I would have had an earlier sense of the relation between coitus and eroticism, which remains fresh and novel for me now. The toad waiting for his turn is the only representative of desire in this species’s mating rituals and there is nothing erotic to be attributed to the female. I can’t see even the slightest sign of a soul in the female form of this species; maybe this is a fault of my imagination, or a political refusal of her inertia.
The transfer of pollen in the case of the maple tree, with its aggregate blooms that come out at the same time as its leaves, causes Alex to sneeze into a handkerchief in long incessant chains of internal irritation. He looks at the handkerchief often, after having sneezed. I didn’t notice this until he remarked on it: he asked if he might be looking for something unusual to come out. I suggested: nuggets of gold. It would be nice if he were a magic goose that laid eggs of gold, only through his nostrils and in response to the pollen of maple trees. We spent a long lazy morning sitting on the porch drinking tea while I sat on the floorboards, head at stomach-level. The boys came by and one of them told the other to squirt us, but the boy contemplated us and didn’t; he instead ran up the stone steps and shot himself with water, on the head. I said to Alex that that gesture—of shooting us with water—must have had a sexual meaning; I meant that kids like to fuck with that which resembles a primal scene. They may find it cool to watch amphibians having sex, but a woman sitting across from a man with her head near cock-level and her feet somewhere past his feet is a little too much to bear. Serious intervention is needed. Theories of sexuality blossom in their heads. I felt somewhat penitent when I looked into their eyes—I knew I was less a person to greet than someone to observe, to shoot water at. It was as if we didn’t even speak the same language: “Shoot water at them!” was declared about us within earshot, as if we would not understand. Before it became too warm that morning, I spent several hours on the porch wearing nothing but shorts and his unzipped jacket; he kept on glancing at my chest, smiling, and eventually told me to make sure not to flash the neighbors. I walk up the stairs in that house past the large window facing theirs naked, pretty regularly, but this tends to happen before 9 AM or after dark, when the kids aren’t out. If there hadn’t been children running around or the grandmother doing yardwork I would have been a bit more licentious, I would have walked around naked, smelled him, done a mammalian act.
I told Alex that I had another secret, which of course means something I was bursting with desire to tell him. After I tell him the secret he smiles, and says it’s okay if I keep some secrets from him. It’s funny to me that these “secrets” of mine provoke some vague current of jealousy. Zane texted me. Zane’s writing made me come. He asks if I had been thinking of Z when I came, but I say no, I don’t remember anything; I only know that it happened after I read it, on account of it. He teases me about how he can be in Newton in 5 hours.
I am not sure what to do when it comes to making friends—but Alex has done well to make me a friend. I am able to act bitter and hateful towards him without being punished for it—he seems concerned, but not near a state of panic. I complain to him about how I don’t like spending time with him that much, that I become bored and irritated when he doesn’t speak or when we walk too slowly. “We’re out of phase,” I say—and he doesn’t seem to have a reaction, because he hasn’t thought so himself. This is because I submit to his way of life. I slow down to walk with him, I look around with neutral affect as he looks for birds. He pulls out the condom when he wants to penetrate me and I allow it whether or not I am feeling aroused—he comes and I don’t, he falls asleep before me, when my desire hasn’t shut off, I wake up earlier and with more desire, and don’t always get the morning sex I want. We pass time in his house, in his car, with his books. I tell him that our relationship is at its core sexual, and that maybe we shouldn’t spend as much time together if it isn’t more sexual, if what we’re doing together isn’t helping the sex. He has no response and it isn’t even a stony disturbed silence, he just seems to be digesting something like a seal. I even tell him that I like him because he’s dumb—not stupid, but dumb—and he seems to resonate with the elaboration I furnish. So I feel good about sitting at his feet for several hours of the morning and missing a session of “The Untreatable.”
Alex’s coworkers are for the most part hard for me to engage in conversation. I listen and don’t talk until near sundown, at which point I start to engage two different men in conversation—one is a spouse and PhD student with a funny name that sounds like “Jersey” (Jerzy) and a Kentuckian accent—he has a bit of a pugilistic face, a mild fatness which makes him seem unrefined. The other was a sort of prototypical attractive “silver fox”—he used to work in sound design, and studied music, and is now a web designer. He mentioned having shot film a lot in the past, really slow film, and prompted me for authors I work on—he’s read some of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, has attempted to read some Henry James. Later Alex tells me he had been imagining which of the guests I’d have sex with, and I tell him I was thinking the same thing. When I ask him if “M” is married, he tells me that he’s gay, and then the subterranean sex of his gaze and speech made sense. So does his massive project of building a house. Maybe this is why I refused to try harder to socialize—I felt like too much of a pervert to talk to most of the men and all of the women, because I sense from most women a kind of distance from sex—moreover, I sense that I will be sniffed out as obscene if I talk to women at length, whereas the men will either enjoy finding out or remain oblivious. I didn’t speak at all to his former roommate, another “John,” because his dog was so cute, and because I kept on wanting to knead or fondle him [the dog], I felt too ashamed to face him [John], like a child who becomes embarrassed and shy when she’s introduced to an attractive friend of her parents. Shes bows her head and is accused of being “shy” and runs off to play with her toys or read a book, which is what I did at one point, entering the house to read Vvedensky. And so it was refreshing to know that Alex was also thinking about my sexual relations to his coworkers; I felt I had in fact found someone a little different, who understood me.
I’m writing all this to pass the nice warm afternoon—an early spring which feels identical to early summer. I’m writing it to convey to Zane the extent to which he’s cucked. I saw the text from him after I reached over the side of Alex’s bed and picked up my phone after waking up around 6:15 the next morning. If I had been alone I probably would’ve seen a message sent at 11 PM, but I wasn’t alone. I walked out the door with nothing on except for Alex’s jacket and received the second text while sitting on Alex’s porch—and here’s all the information I can provide in one continuous effort about this man and the time I spent there. Well, of course I left out all the sex this time, which isn’t usual of me, but maybe there isn’t much to say. He came right when I was starting to feel something; I hated him for leaving me hanging. The next morning I hated him for not waking up sooner to touch me; he said he felt like a “trainwreck,” i.e. a bit hungover. Then much later, close to or after noon, he asked me on the porch if I wanted to have sex, and I told him he needed to seduce me, or that I would need to seduce myself. It was enough to sit on him, in fact. I was aroused enough to leave a trail of slime on his underwear, and his cock felt like a lot inside me; then he came too soon. I made him finger-fuck me for a while, and felt a plateau of sensation that would never come to closure. But the quality of our time together that morning, the hearing-out of this and that, the movement into other territories of speech, some of it speculative, had made for some internal sensation. But after all that time in the sun he had lost his scent; the sun had killed off what I liked most, and perhaps made him weak.
Dylan is more deeply in love with B— now that she’s become more separate from her husband. They’ve gone off into a little cabin and done MDMA together, he talks about how he’ll soon get to spend time with the son. For some reason when I hear about their love I feel bored. It seems like a kind of haze, to be in love, to imagine a future life with someone. To “nest,” to have a “primary,” to have a partner who might solve his visa issues. It also seems like a male thing—to be able to be satisfied with a single or primary partner—I’m sure I’d get bored and frustrated with anyone, or equally satisfied by anyone. I think he misunderstands the complications of sex for me—the predilection I have for things not working out. What was radical for me with him was the surprise of it, not the fact that he could make me come, not the fact that his short refractory period and ability to fuck for a long while would make orgasm a kind of statistical matter of course. Even his warmth, his positive traits, his verbal capacities, all this contributed to a sense of ease, a prolongation of ease in time, that made me come, but making me come doesn’t seem to mean anything now that it has happened a few times. It’s not that I’m not interested in love, but I can’t love without maintaining the fracture of the “casual”—I love so-and-so but I know that we could break apart at any point in the future, that I have reasons to hate or be bored with him, and moreover that all the reasons I have to hate or be bored with someone have to do with sex. Sex makes us aware of how we’re enemies, or at least how we don’t fit, and this is the cause for our mutual resentment. At first I don’t resent you for it, the fact that I don’t come, but because you are the only witness to my lack, I begin to resent you for not witnessing my lack in the right way. Then you might come to resent me for the resentment. But the second-order resentment of a problem whose contours can be stated in words—she didn’t come—isn’t like the inarticulate resentment of a woman, which often comes out in tears. She has to blame God because there’s no other way of placing it. The resentment is asymmetrical. And this is why Bersani was right when he wrote, “There is a big secret about sex: most people don’t like it.”
“I find it funny that you only like me for the sex when you can’t come from it,” said Alex.
I loved him for this simple comment, this recognition of a truth which I don’t think can be accounted for through some notion that desire is based on lack. I might as well recognize the fact that my self-constitution as a sexual mental construct would fall apart if I were more satisfied. Even with Dylan I wasn’t satisfied. I was almost disappointed when I found that orgasm could be so bathetic of a somatic experience—not convulsive, not memorable, not congealed in aesthetic suspension like the long rippling orgasms that come after reading. I don’t want to be satisfied, and I don’t want to be in love if it means I’d be comfortable.
I watched a few movies about female perverts this weekend—rewatched Polanski’s Bitter Moon and saw Female Perversion, which stars Tilda Swinton as a cruel but neurotic judge who spends a lot of time looking impeccable on screen. It struck me as a film that had probably been made by a woman who might be a little stuck. I really didn’t like, it basically—what kind of woman is that neurotic, and why didn’t they give the kleptomaniac sister more screen time, or the butch child, etc. But the Emanuelle Seigner of Bitter Moon continued to captivate me as she had when I saw her dribble milk out of her mouth onto her naked chest in 2019. There are some femme fatales who strike me as hopeless—figments of fantastical tales designed to moralize about the dangers of being a woman of a certain kind—and then there are the ones who seem to exceed the fictive scene, the ones who are powerful unto themselves, and therefore saint-like.
Usually what I like about such women is the fact that they tend to avow that they’re a complete fantasy. Then they’ll say something like you’ll never have me to the man. This is probably what I want to say about myself: less the “you’ll never have me,” than the fact that I don’t really exist, that there’s nothing to me beyond the fantasy I seem to represent. You can have me, for sure, in this form, as someone who doesn’t exist—I don’t wish to exist more, to be more real or concrete, but you can have the illusion of that if you’d like: real me.
This morning’s dream brought me a lot of pleasure. We were on the floor in the middle of a large room with thin wooden floorboards, like the multi-purpose room on the ship in Bitter Moon. It wasn’t a crowded floor, and it seemed to be lit with daylight coming out of the high small windows. I had my eyes closed for most of it, so I couldn’t tell if anyone was looking at us lying there and making out. We lay on the sheepskin I sleep on, with the blue sleeping bag forming some kind of a lateral wall, and some tall pillows stacked in front of our heads, obscuring them from view. In the kissing I experienced the sublime defamiliarization of not knowing what was touching what—I described this to Alex the other day after his kisses had elicited sharp sighs. Before that, in the dream, we [Z and I] had been talking, and he was more cheerful than usual. It seemed like the tall pillows were enough to at least produce an impression of hiddenness—wait, no! According to the voice memo, there was a laptop or a book open in front of our heads. We may have been discussing some writing, or reading something together, before we began to kiss. Then the dance floor was illuminated with purple or blue or red light, and there were various streamers and balloons around the room, like in the party scene of Bitter Moon, but the floor was still not crowded. Zane stood up and went away and came back in the form of John. When he lay down he returned to his previous form and asked me if I wanted to know if he had met anyone new from Tinder. I hesitated for a while and then said I didn’t care to know. This seemed to be a rather calculated lie. I wanted to say that I didn’t mind either way, but instead figured it was more important to produce the impression of being covetous in relation to him. Then I stood up and saw Xinyu sitting curled up wearing some cute outfit of puffy satin in pink and blue. The dance music became loud, too loud. I lay back down with Z. Then I turned my head away and saw a stinkbug on the ground.
I didn’t care that much about the stinkbug being there, it was totally random, but of course it provoked some anxiety—will I accidentally crush it? The stinkbug sort of feels like the navel of the dream. I could think of it as a sort of thing that shouldn’t be crushed, no matter how much one wants to get rid of it. Since I woke up after seeing the stinkbug, it must have provoked some amount of anxiety. The dream seems to have been set in a substitute for the gym floor where we did once sit with my laptop. The dance floor in Bitter Moon stages the male protagonist’s castration-anxieties. The stinkbug felt less like an infelicitous portent than a sign of peace—that I would be neutral in the face of small infelicities, which are not even clear to me as infelicities.
Other associations: I’ve found that Alex seems a bit more jealous when I mention Zane, and he sometimes tells me that I don’t have to tell him all my secrets, meaning he might not want to hear about other men. In the past I’ve wondered about how to describe or introduce Xinyu to Alex, after the movie screening or to Zane, in writings from November. I want to wear pink and blue, but have a hard time wearing these colors. The mistake with the pillows has to do with Alex’s tendency to sleep on a rather tall stack of two pillows.
That, Cassat’s “Little Girl in a Blue Armchair,” is exactly how I feel when I’m with Alex, sometimes: bored and resentful, desirous that the heap on the armchair would wake up and look at me with need, that it paw at me and lick me, and most of all, that it learn to talk to me with words. It could certainly represent how I’ve felt around Zane. Of course there’s nothing wrong with the dog for enjoying his sleep, or for failing to talk. The girl knows she’s ridiculous for wanting so much from him, and she envisions how cool she could seem for the frustrated demand and ennui that “dogs” her. So it pays off to be seen as ennuyée. She suspends her frustration in a pose, in a fantasy of how she’ll be remembered. And men will want to be the dog for her!
There’s a certain arousal in her recognition that she can’t get off unless someone else intervenes. She knows it would be futile to masturbate, or she’s too aware of the taboo around child sexuality, of the fact that adults wouldn’t be able to listen if she were to narrate to them her various desires and fantasies. Maybe she can tell a story, at least—a story in which sexual content is sublimated or defamiliarized in forms that could pass the censors of adults. But doesn’t that interpretation add too much to the picture? Doesn’t its value lie in the fact that it represents a person who doesn’t know what to do, and who, at the same time, hopes that the world will do something for her, will tell her what to do, what to do to obtain some specific lost cause of desire?
I’m at home, wearing a white cotton shirt-dress with aggressive ruching and non-functional buttons. It’s a take on an office-worker’s shirt, but it’s too short (mid-thigh length) and too tight around the waist to pass for work attire. There’s a discreet zipper from the armpit to the hip on the left side, without which it would be impossible to wear. I put it on after stopping by my house before a meeting with a student whose name is Kagan—the Russian version of Cohen. She wore a dress too, a simple pink slip made of some soft cotton textile—it looked like a girl’s nightgown. I like it when women wear whatever to class, when the weather gets hot out—whatever looks like underwear, whatever would have been prohibited for most of the previous century in the relevant countries. The shifts in norms for women are entirely coincident with shifts in norms induced through the widening use of various technologies; this remind me of how strange but normal it is that this website exists: this is like a dress, mass-produced, made of textiles that may or may not be made of highly refined and extruded oils, or some form of industrial labor that involves the highly efficient growth of cotton, and various servers that host the website “thereformation” or “therealreal” or “no6store” or “sezane.”
It’s a bit unnatural for me to think about my place in the larger designs of the world, because schooling has taught me that almost everything that can be said about history and the world must be followed up with some process of research. Something I like about writing is the fact that you can do it without doing research. It can be distillation, abstraction, sublimation, and not reference and experience. The “world” and “history” are massive reifications of a patchwork of local discourses that try their best to get at a sort of truth, but the story a historian tells can never exist with the independent reality we accord to a woodchuck or an elm tree. I’m less afraid of saying something incorrect about history than of failing to know how to extend on a matter. Emma moved me to think of my position in the world-historical order because of her name, because I’m sometimes in the house of a Jewish man who told me that Jewish surnames were all neologisms of a sort. I was also moved in part by her serious engagement with the concept of the “law,” her interest in the relation between law and poetry, and because she liked Gertrude Stein and Ben Lerner, but most of all because of the pink dress she wore. What bothers me most are the truisms which are hard to contest, but which lack some degree of detail. We know women live different lives now—there’s chemical contraception, condoms in the grocery store, hospital abortions, tinder-hinge-okcupid-bumble-feeld, and that these are the reasons why women behave otherwise, and that these are reasons why anyone should be aware that your life now is very different from what it would have been before these technologies were in wide circulation. But does anyone feel affected when they hear the grand narrative, when they hear what they already “know” but don’t in fact need to know in order to live a functioning or happy life? What would Emma Kagan be like if she lived in Russia before it happened that she would share surnames and initials with a U.S. Supreme Court justice?
Chekhov wrote “A Boring Story” in 1889, and the story seems to me to be centered around several women; the boring wife and the boring daughter with the boring fiancé, and the girl who isn’t his daughter or lover but sort of occupies both positions: Katya. I found the book on the shelf after talking to Zane for the first time in a while, about how I was bored and couldn’t remember what I had done that week. I’d talk about whatever, and then fall silent for a while, make some reluctant meta-comment on time, all in order to produce the impression that I had a vacant mind, which was true, but the reason for wanting to portray myself that way had some motive which I haven’t yet formed a theory around. I mean, there is the obvious motive of wanting to portray myself as utterly safe: no more Hörigkeit, no more strange fits of passion. In olden times, women had no way to make a living without becoming bound to someone for sexual use, so it would make sense to either convince she had some bond with that she either loved him with a great passion, or that she was of a kind and devoted constitution, that she was “constant.” Katya tries to take her life after some kind of disillusionment with a man. She’s driven by passion, she wanted to be an actor, she respects art far more than the professor does, she’s given birth to a child out of wedlock, a child who died early; all this makes her disreputable in the eyes of the wife and daughter. Katya’s the predictable savior for everyone’s boredom, but I like how Chekhov portrays her as “indolent,” too—he sets her on a Turkish divan in the third section: “As usual, she’s lying on a Turkish divan or couch and reading something. On seeing me, she raises her head indolently, sits up, and gives me her hand.” The dialogue which follows is nice enough to linger on. There are little superfluous elements which contribute to an atmosphere of boredom—the “and” in “and you’re always lying down,” the need to repeat what wasn’t heard (“eh?” “what?"), and the insertion of comments with no necessary relation to what came before (“why don’t you get married?"):
“And you’re always lying down,” I say, after pausing briefly to rest. “That’s unhealthy. You ought to find something to do!”
“Eh?”
“I said, you ought to find something to do.”
“What? A woman can only be a menial worker or an actress.”
“Well, then? If you can’t be a worker, be an actress.”
Silence.
“Why don’t you get married?” I say half jokingly.
“There’s nobody to marry. And no reason to.”
“You can’t live like this.”
“Without a husband? A lot it matters! There are men all over, if anybody’s interested.”
“That’s not nice, Katya.”
“What’s not nice?”
“What you just said.”
Katya lives off of an inheritance as she lies on her divan or couch. She then shows the the professor a “small and very cozy” room furnished with a writing desk; “you can work here every day and bring your work.” In other words, he can come be her father-concubine. It’s the funniest little inversion, making him sit for her. I wonder what she wears during that scene, if it would have been possible for Chekhov to describe this without making the professor seem too prurient. I happen to be searching for a dress to inaugurate the season but I can’t seem to figure out what I want. And then I tried on these inexpensive Patagonia dresses that were on sale at Backcountry and they made me feel I was beyond society—one of them I wore to bike back to Alex’s house, and it was a bit stressful. I was sure that too much of my thighs were visible, so I biked very fast and reminded myself that some people would refuse to look precisely because it was too clear that I was wearing a dress that was too short to wear on a bike. I didn’t know what I looked like. I don’t know how to connect this with odalisques or with married women. I was biking in a short dress to the vacant house of a man who isn’t a sultan or a husband, in a college town where young women are often seen wearing short dresses. But almost never does one see a young woman wearing a short dress while in that very horizontal position that a road bike necessitates. I started to feel somewhat furious, but remembered that if I got too furious I might get in an accident. And nobody was going to stare at me ride a bike in that ridiculous fashion so long as I didn’t fall. When I arrived at the house the wife of the man who built the house backed out of the driveway to take a kid somewhere. What a weird girlfriend I must appear to be. I washed what I could of the sweat off my face and began to read and cook and eat as if nothing had happened; several hours passed, I took a shower, and then I went to sleep in the bed of the man who had fucked me there once or twice each week.
Chekhov faded from mind as I listened to Ben Lerner read his recent stories, published in the New Yorker, out loud. He reads them as incantations, as prose poems, without those inflections and pauses that make narrative events more contrastive or suspenseful. I liked “Café Loup” and “The Ferry.” I could no longer sense Alex’s smell on the black jacket I had worn to and from his house on a few occasions, and the scent of his bed was fading or becoming mixed with mine. That night I fell asleep for 30 minutes on the couch while reading Michael Pollan’s book “How to Change your Mind,” the one on psychedelics, which was terribly boring. I was full of the sourdough pancakes I had made for dinner, but it seemed that it was the book that had made it possible to doze off. I found after regaining consciousness that Alex had messaged me to tell me that I had been there, in his trip. I hearted the message and smiled and wondered if I had appeared like an abstract computer graphic in empty space, the way Pollan had described his trip as a bunch of computer animations—which sounded like a deserved result of Pollan’s own extremely unimaginative and conservative and boring brain. It comforted me to realize that Alex would never be as imbecilic as Michael Pollan even though he claimed to like the book. Unlike Michael Pollan, Alex would never write a book, so he’d never write a book so dull. The previous night I found some notes he wrote at the back of War and Peace: a few lists, related to relocation to Ithaca. It was a short list, and all on a single page. And a few days before that, I rifled through his notepad, which has ten or fewer occupied pages; several of them were used to draft a poem. The handwriting was difficult enough to decipher that I didn’t read much of it, but I could make out “licorice” and “spiral staircase.” He had rewritten fragments of the poem over the course of two or three pages, a sign that he had been trying to revise it intently—all the hesitation over this small block of text!
Anyway, it’s very important that some people write boring books and some people write no books at all, and are therefore saved from the fate of writing something terrible. It’s also important that there are two types of women: the ones who are indolent and desired and somewhat wretched, and the ones who on account of their station, their surnames, or their lack of attractive qualities, haven’t fallen into the gutters of indolence.
I dreamt something about a mockingbird or a catbird on its nest, and a rat which ran out of the undergrowth covered with mud and twigs and dead maple leaves, such that its fur was entirely obscured. I don’t know how I knew it was a rat, but in any case the rat hurtled down the lawn, as if terrified of me, and then reversed directions and hurtled towards me, as if to attack. I tried to jump to the side, or I tried to run away—I don’t remember which, I was probably too scared to decide on one course of action. And the bird, as I envisioned it later, was a carolina wren, not a mockingbird or a catbird. I had been staying in a cottage which didn’t resemble this one. In a separate segment I went for a walk and John was beside me; he pressed his hand into mine and seemed to have changed his mind about our relationship. He came to my place and left it and we talked a lot. There are other elements which I can’t recall, elements which I believe were fascinating. I think Zane was there but in an earlier segment that I don’t remember. I don’t often think of John now, or even desire him when we do talk, as we did after the talk earlier in the week, and I had just spoken to Zane, so I presume this entire dream had something to do with Zane or Alex, I can’t figure out what the rat or the carolina-wren-catbird are associated with, except that I hear the calls of the carolina wren often here.
And then I had another dream, and another one, and they each involved Zane or Alex, but I have forgotten the details. In this state of boredom I am capable of coming up with vivid dreams and incapable of recording them. The boredom of attempting to talk to Alex’s coworkers was a sharper boredom than what I experience now. In the conversation with Zane it was a more rotund boredom—not quite boredom, too much calm in it, an actual idleness, too much red in the cheeks from the hard cider. And I remembered all the items to look up afterwards, which entertained me. Boredom can slide into languor in some situations, or into abstracted prurience. I think I had sex with Alex in one dream, and I was bored. In another dream: undercooked meat.
Madame Bovary’s greyhound had run across the field. They had whistled for him a quarter of an hour; Hivert had even gone back a mile and a half expecting every moment to catch sight of her; but it had been necessary to go on. Emma had wept, grown angry; she had accused Charles of this misfortune. Monsieur Lheureux, a draper, who happened to be in the coach with her, had tried to console her by a number of examples of lost dogs recognising their masters at the end of long years. One, he said, had been told of, who had come back to Paris from Constantinople. Another had gone one hundred and fifty miles in a straight line, and swum four rivers; and his own father had possessed a poodle, which, after twelve years of absence, had all of a sudden jumped on his back in the street as he was going to dine in town.
Flaubert writes well about boredom.
He also writes down the colors and names of fabrics: blue merino, black barège.
The ending of the novel is a bit too ridiculous for me—the double deaths, the arsenic.
A crime I could commit: slashing into the upholstery of Alex’s couch with his knives.
Earlier this week, in class, we re-watched the scene in which Erika Kohut stabs herself.
My cunt had a convulsive response to the scene; the slow spread of that spot of blood was so good for it.
The slow interior death and the voluptuous sleepiness of menstruation. Once I fell asleep with the lights on while Z went out; it was a real lacuna, I had started menstruating. The whole visit had been a profound experience of confusion, exhaustion, and that was where at least some of it reached its climax of irresolution: I was about to stain the bed. I can remember how normal it felt to knock on his door. I can remember how natural it was to lie with him. Now I wonder if I’ll ever be able to access that innocent seriousness again; it all seems so farcical. When I read a novel all I do is smile at the sentences I find: “No sound was to be heard save a mill-pond trickling hoarsely through a hatch, and suggesting gloomy possibilities of drowning by jumping in.” And there’s a lot that’s not funny, there are sentences that feel just like having one’s hair stroked. Another week passed. The oat-harvest began, and all the men were a-field under a monochromatic Lammas sky, amid the trembling air and short shadows of noon. Indoors nothing was to be heard save the droning of blue-bottle flies; out-of-doors the whetting of scythes and the hiss of tressy oat-ears rubbing together as their perpendicular stalks of amber-yellow fell heavily to each swath. (Hardy, FFTMC.)
Why should this memory be recorded, or rather, used as an exercise for the mind?
My desires are far simpler than language can afford; I can lie down and construct a bower of boredom, but all I want, through this fetish of boredom, is that which would convulse me, or at least that which could convulse me. What’s real to me is this blood, this food, the indolence which allows me to read, the torpor between each act, the bike rides and sudden runs around western Ithaca, the scent of Alex in his clothes.
The more I stare at these simplest of facts or declarations the crazier I become: no longer bored but fixated without end on immovable sentences. It is an abstracted prurience, to behave this way, to write about what I don’t feel. It is a frozen sadism to declare what has no action, what has no capacity to convulse the mind which produces declarations. I would like to be able to repeat without compunction certain sentences or notions. I would like to be self-similar, and made of accident. I would like for myself to be known as someone who is capable of producing effects through unoriginal methods, to be thus known as the most redundant. I appreciate an association with the self “lensed” with hyperbola or hyperbole, I shall be the most abstract, the one who is most against specificity, who is alive and athletic and at the same time, asystole. Asystole and gurneyed. There is one reason why I want to be choked or hit or burned, which is that I am bored. I would like to be more bored, and I would like to challenge men to witness how bored I can become. The more punishment I receive the more bored I will be; the more experience I gain the more insensitive I will become to the former drama of love. I wish to transcend a need for variegation and to become one of those pure colors that defines some season, only one season while it lasts, a color of fashion, like “patina.”
Patina green will be forgotten, I’ll lose sight of this hue which suddenly seems to define all that’s novel for me. It is not unlike the color of those shoes. I wear a new t-shirt in this color, more commonly referred to as some sort of “mint” or “sage” or “laurel,” though “patina” is the most accurate representative of the color that associates with certain lichens. I refuse to place copper first because the color I refer to is less blue than some of the patina I find on oxidized copper, but oxidized copper is precisely what “patina green” refers to.
What a vacuum was left there: I can pretend to remember, but I don’t feel the traces of that time; all I know is that I am bored and that I want cock, because there’s a certainty in cock, a certainty that I can’t experience. Who knows what I feel, who knows what will come about. A cock is a line which cuts uncuttable time.
I refer back to December, I refer to it. I’m so bored that I think about the time I am least capable of saying anything about; nothing can be reconstructed of it, and that’s probably for the best, but now as I draw out the desire to remember I tremble a little. A novel, The Temptation of St. Antony, is open to the right of this screen; it is a little lifeboat. The Queen of Sheba calls: “Ah! Fine hermit! Fine hermit! My heart swoons!” He will be so bored at the end of this; she has such gifts in such great numbers: I have teams of gazelles, elephants harnessed in fours, hundreds of pairs of camels, mares with manes so long that they tangle with their galloping hooves, and herds with horns so huge that the woods are chopped down in front of them as they gaze. I have giraffes which walk about my gardens and stick their heads over the edge of my room when I take the air after dinner. Of course reading this is stimulating me; it stimulates me to think: Oh, I convulsed in fits of laughter on the floor this afternoon, thinking about those two mormon missionaries who came to me on the street. The blond one was handsome; he asked if there was anything in particular I wanted a prayer for; I told him coyly that I was bored. And with that drawl of his he prayed that “she be excited, that she find something that excites her.” Oh boy, I was excited. He gave me a Book of Mormon with a very Aryan-looking Jesus in it—what fun it will be to tell my semitic boyfriend about this. That’s a memory, that’s one I made.
The book no longer helps me, now that I’ve become absorbed in it, absorbed enough to put it aside for a little while. I wish he’d seduce me, seduce me back into a state of weakness; or rather I wish he was here. Take me out of the text. Stop me from thinking about the way the young mormon said the words “excite” and “her” in reference to me, but not to me. It was for God. He said what would have been unspeakable because he meant it for God to hear. God wanted him to seduce me. God wanted me to be bored, so that I could make some stranger excite me. What else could one think of in relation to the naughtiness of the word “bored.”
I had told him I either wanted to be less bored, or to make peace with my boredom. He asked me if I believed in God. I guess I do believe in God, if God is the dog opposite the girl in the blue armchair.
I love O’Hara’s use of exclamation marks, she said.
I don’t know where he finds such an ear for it. It must come from his training as a classical musician. I don’t know if his exclamations come out of boredom or from an entrained sensitivity to the world. I suspect he’s more of a bored man than an enchanted one, even if he is sensitive to details and able to craft his records.
My nails are messed up, by the way. They get soft and pliable when I wash dishes or take a shower. But they got especially torn up after I fixed my bike’s flat tire this weekend. I like looking at the forms produced when the paint chips, like little made-up countries. If I use a polish with glitter the nailbed gets rugged, effaced.
I think I’m filled with a sadness I can’t accomplish; I can’t feel this sadness to its logical end.
I ate all of his bread so I’m making a new one, also with sesame seeds and sunflower seeds as inclusions.
Here are some notes on boredom—in the form of a list of terms—
lishnye lyudi or “superfluous man”
In thus avoiding archetypes and seeking neutrality, Chekhov began to create a new stage type based in a clear predecessor: as John McKellor Reid has argued, Chekhov was renovating the “stereotype” or “national psychological type” of the lishnye lyudi or “Superfluous Man” (77; emphasis in original). The superfluous man was a comedic character, a type of dandy ruled by his interest in aesthetics and pursuit of philosophical truths who, finding satisfaction in neither sphere, turns from self-worship to paralyzing self-analysis. The resulting detachment and frigidity express themselves, Frank Friedeberg Seeley writes, “inwardly as spiritual impotence, [and] outwardly as spiritual isolation” (101). (Elizabeth M. Phillips, “Chekhov, Boredom, and Pathology as Dramatic Technique”)
“bed rest”
In the early twentieth century, boredom was articulated multiply and understood along surprisingly gendered lines. Educated men had access to a culture and a set of practices that allowed them to produce themselves as nihilists, pronouncing God dead and the world empty of meaning. Women, without a shared culture of selfhood, were bored, without viable selves to access truth or meaning. Bored women were put under the care of medical professionals who diagnosed them as neurasthenic, pathologically unfit to pursue their own interests in the world, and prescribed bed rest—more boredom—as a cure. (Allison Pease, Modernism, Feminism and the Culture of Boredom)
“a void, a lack”
Woman finds “no possible way to represent or tell the story of the economy of her libido… the libido is masculine, or at any rate neuter.” Woman is “a void, a lack of all representation, re-presentation, and even strictly speaking of all mimesis of her desire for origin. That desire will henceforth pass through the discourse-desire-law of man’s desire.” In Irigaray’s logic, woman is always bored, or melancholic, as manifest in the absence of libidinal activity, her lack of effort to master the external world, her inability to love herself or other women, and the inhibition of all activity displayed in her pure passivity. (Pease 6)
“bliss seen from the shores of pleasure”
Text of pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading.
Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language.
It can’t be helped: boredom is not simple. We do not escape boredom (with a work, a text) with a gesture of impatience or rejection. Just as the pleasure of the text supposes a whole indirect production, so boredom cannot presume it is entitled to any spontaneity: there is no sincere boredom: if the prattle-text bores me personally, it is because in reality I do not like the demand. But what if I did like it (if I had some maternal appetite)? Boredom is not far from bliss: it is bliss seen from the shores of pleasure.
(Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text)