February

My sister was fed a great deal of softened kabocha as a baby. I don’t know when she started to eat solid food, but it must’ve been about half a year into her life. How was it processed? Manually perhaps, and with the help of a food processor later? My family has never owned a blender. I think I remember it being stored in small jars. Kabocha is not a food she currently likes, she prefers mashed potatoes. I rarely eat kabocha, I consider it an indulgence on the order of chocolate or sweet potatoes.

New worlds can’t come without a well-fed energy, at least not yet. I should only write about sustenance. Today I rearranged my space, I put the desk against the south-facing wall. It makes my room look smaller, but I prefer the orientation, especially at night. When I turn to the left, I see my bed and closet, so there’s more of a view, and I feel a little less isolated. And I deleted the first sentence of this paragraph, which I have now forgotten, and must paraphrase: “It’s dumb to write while tortured.”

Many readers of D. H. Lawrence complain that they just can’t keep reading after a while. It’s just too much. It was incredible at first, and then… We couldn’t keep up with him, … I couldn’t deal with… He’s difficult in that… It was just too much… The repetition… They are drawn in by the sex or the confidence of it and then leave it tired. They don’t want to follow him into the darkness. They are afraid of being converted, of becoming inhuman, because sex involves a certain touch with death. When I read him my cunt starts to leave slime trails on the seat of my underwear. I’m never not surprised. I’m tired too, and sometimes spend weeks, if not months, with his big red books untouched. I haven’t touched the poems since December. I think his poems are quite awful, and with a few exceptions, “not even worth reading.” I think what I really mean is that they’re only worthwhile for fans like me. But the prose is something different. Every time he uses the same word twice in the same sentence I do a double-take. I’m not surprised but I’m still incredulous and I feel hot. I feel hot and hollow, I feel the lines of blood darkening in me, I’d like to lie down with my belly to the sky, imagining that something will rain down on me, that the sky will leak its seed into my womb. I’m waiting, I’m waiting, and I consider you my destiny.

I have DHL’s corruption, I have soft kabocha inside my stomach, and I may just not run again, pretending that I have everything I need in me already. If all babies are cucks, and you and I are babies, then we better be cucks as well. I’m thinking about what would happen if I had met DHL in the early 20th-centry, how I would be definitely a girl, and how tall he would be, with his crazy eyes and dark beard. The portrait of him on Wikipedia was taken one year before his death—he was 43. He looks insane there, his nose washed out. I think you can tell he was a mad genius from any of his pictures, but when he’s smiling and twenty-one and blond and beardless, you can see how soft and bright and kind he may have been in private, you can see the girl in him. He was 27 when he met Frieda, and that must have transformed him into a man. He was 31 when he began work on Women in Love, and met a man farmer, W. Hocking, and it seems like they really fell in love, and fucked, which is interesting to me, because I had earlier discovered the “homophobia” in some of his writings, which seem to express a studied aversion to homosexuality as regressive. The fucking of the legionnaires is “like a snake which should turn and start to gnash at itself and destroy itself, because it is imprisoned or tied up by a cord…” (qtd. in Booth 106). I imagine he’s constructing too big of a narrative out of a few particulars. Or maybe Booth’s article, “D. H. Lawrence and Male Homosexual Desire,” insists too vehemently on Lawrence’s condemnation of homosexuality, at the cost of discussing how Lawrence seems to condemn the sexuality of women! What does he (as Rupert Birkin) say in the “Man to Man” chapter in Women in Love?

   He knew that Ursula was referred back to him. He knew his life rested with her. But he would rather not live than accept the love she proffered. The old way of love seemed a dreadful bondage, a sort of conscription. What it was in him he did not know, but the thought of love, marriage, and children, and a life lived together, in the horrible privacy of domestic and connubial satisfaction, was repulsive. He wanted something clearer, more open, cooler, as it were. The hot narrow intimacy between man and wife was abhorrent. The way they shut their doors, these married people, and shut themselves in to their own exclusive alliance with each other, even in love, disgusted him. It was a whole community of mistrustful couples insulated in private houses or private rooms, always in couples, and no further life, no further immediate, no disinterested relationship admitted: a kaleidoscope of couples, disjointed, separatist, meaningless entities of married couples. […]
   On the whole, he hated sex, it was such a limitation. It was sex that turned a man into a broken half of a couple, the woman into the other broken half. And he wanted to be single in himself, the woman single in her self. He wanted sex to revert to the level of the other appetites, to be regarded as a functional process, not as a fulfilment. He believed in sex marriage. But beyond this, he wanted a further conjunction, where man had being and woman had being, two pure beings, each constituting the freedom of the other, balancing each other like two poles of one force, like two angels or two demons.
   He wanted so much to be free, not under the compulsion of any need for unification, or tortured by unsatisfied desire. Desire and aspiration should find their object without all this torture, as now, in a world of plenty of water, simple thirst is inconsiderable, satisfied almost unconsciously. And he wanted to be with Ursula as free as with himself, single and clear and cool, yet balanced, polarised with her. The merging, the clutching, the mingling of love was become madly abhorrent to him.
   But it seemed to him, woman was always so horrible and clutching, she had such a lust for possession, a greed of self-importance in love. She wanted to have, to own, to control, to be dominant. Everything must be referred back to her, to Woman, the Great Mother of everything, out of whom proceeded everything and to whom everything must finally be rendered up.
   It filled him with almost insane fury, this calm assumption of the Magna Mater, that all was hers, because she had borne it. Man was hers, because she had borne him. A Mater Dolorosa, she had borne him, a Magna Mater, she now claimed him again, soul and body, sex, meaning, and all. He had a horror of the Magna Mater, she was detestable.

(I skip over the attribution of this Great Mother to Hermione, and back to Ursula.)

He saw the yellow flare in her eyes, he knew the unthinkable overweening assumption of primacy in her. She was unconscious of it hserself. She was only too ready to knock her head on the ground before a man. But this was only when she was so certain of her man, that she could worship him as a woman worships her own infant, with a worship of perfect possession.
   It was intolerable, this possession at the hands of woman. Always a man must be considered as the broken-off fragment of a woman, and the sex was the still aching scar of the laceration. Man must be added on to a woman, before he had any real place or wholeness.
   And why? Why should we consider ourselves, men and women, as broken fragments of one whole. It is not true. We are not broken fragments of one whole. Rather we are the singling away into purity and clear being, of things that were mixed. Rather the sex is that which remains in us of th emixed, the unresolved. And passion is the further separating of this mixture, that which is manly being taken into the being of the man, that which is womanly passing to the woman, till the two are clear and whole as angels, the admixture of sex in the highest sense surpassed, leaving two single beings, constellated together like two stars.
    In the old age, before sex was, we were mixed, each one a mixture. The process of singling into individuality resulted in the great polarisation of sex. The womanly drew to one side, the manly to the other. But the separation was imperfect even then. And so our world-cycle passes. There si now to come the new day, where we are beings each of us, fulfilled in difference. The man is pure man, the woman pure woman, they are perfectly polarised. but there is no longer any of the horrible merging, mingling, self-abnegation of love. There is only the pure duality of polarisation, each one free from any contamination of the other. In each, the individual is primal, sex is subordinate, but perfectly polarised. Each has a single, separate being, with its own laws. The man has his pure freedom, the woman hers. Each acknowledges the perfection of the polarised sex-circuit. Each admits the different nature in the other.

I don’t believe in the “pure man” or “pure woman,” but I do believe in the “perfection of the polarised sex-circuit.” What is more sexy than that turn of phrase? And the admitting of the “different nature in the other,” too, though I envision this as going far beyond sex difference. It’s more like style—A is solar, B is lunar, A is Apollonian, B is Dionysian, etc. —And I don’t believe that two people of the same sex are necessarily what they appear to be, i.e., the same, but I am rather heteroerotic myself. And I do believe there is something harsher about heterosexuality, the union of man and woman, with the seething possibilities of envy and hatred that come from the imbalance of it, from the woman’s potential as mother. Are we all like this, though? Seeking out the eroticism of risk? I am probably more like Birkin in the sense that I find the “horrible merging, mingling, self-abnegation of love” quite horrible, which is why I love my isolation, and the friction of my modes of communication, I guess.

And Birkin’s right about women, at least I feel myself to be like whatever he describes, magna mater. I am like Ursula, willing to prostrate myself before the cock and semes of a “he,” but I “worship him as a woman worships her own infant, with a worship of perfect possession.” In my recognition I delight and recoil. It is not good to be too powerful, I recoil at the notion of being in perfect possession of anything, a perfection which I take to be independent of time.

Frieda had very dramatic, bright eyes. In a sense she seems less attractive than him, but this could be a judgment based on my aversion to her later fatness. In the older pictures she looks quite amazing. And one doesn’t know what she smelled like, how she breathed, what her voice sounded like. All this matters a great deal. When David speaks against woman, is he speaking against her?

❧

Dream with Z

We were in a classroom. He was sitting in the back, and I had been tasked at standing by the teacher at the chalkboard. She was asking if anyone had a solution to a problem. How might you compute the area bounded by this irregular curved figure? It kind of looked like the cross-section of airplane wings pieced together. Z raised his hand and began to propose something; I was supposed to draw it as he dictated. I started to laugh, it was so brilliant (though in fact it involved changing the problem, changing the shape of the shape). He was telling us that you could just represent this part as a part of a circle; just draw the circle here, now draw a secant there, etc. I drew two circles, and that’s about all I remember. By the time it was done the diagram had become quite intricate. He got mad at me because I was laughing, which is to say he made a bitter comment afterwards about how I didn’t need to laugh, but I wanted to explain that I was laughing because I admired the solution. Some of his friends were looking at, observing the “chemistry” between us, and were wondering why we weren’t speaking. I thought about walking up to him in front of the red metal lockers and pulling him into a kiss. I don’t think I’ve ever kissed anyone standing.

The diagram in question actually exists. I realized this while scrolling through the photos on my phone. I had taken a picture of an especially ridiculous diagram from Lacan’s Écrits, from “On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis.” Here it is:

I do not mean to say this is identical to the diagram that I saw in my dream, but there are clear resemblances—the two circles, the presence of some kind of pairing of “wings.” And I think the picture was also related to the question of what an “oblong box” looks like, given that I had read Poe’s story by the same name the previous afternoon.

Now I feel a desire to explain the diagram, to “propose a solution” of my own. But I think that will have to wait several hours at least. I have not read the essay, only happened upon this diagram, and there are two other preceding it, upon which this one relies somewhat. There’s a 𝓛 schema and a 𝓡 schema. In the 𝓛 schema, we have a discourse between “S, his ineffable and stupid existence; a, his objects; a ′, his ego, that is his form as reflected in his objects; and A, the locus from which the question of his existence may arise for him”:

And here is the 𝓡 Schema, with Lacan’s explanation in the screenshot:

Forceful material for dreams. I’m trying to understand the material about the phallus and castration and the father. What is “the signifying function that conditions paternity” (463)?

   Indeed, concerning the state of beliefs in some Australian tribe, he [Ernest Jones] refused to admit that any collectivity of men could overlook the fact of experience that—except in the case of an enigmatic exception—no woman gives birth without having engaged in coitus, or even be ignorant of the requisite lapse of time between the two events. Now the credit that seems to me to be quite legitimately granted to human capacities to observe reality [réel] is precisely what has not the slightest importance in the matter.
   For, if the symbolic context requires it, paternity will nevertheless be attributed to the woman's encounter with a spirit at such and such a fountain or at a certain rock in which he is supposed to dwell.
   This is clearly what demonstrates that the attribution of procreation to the father can only be the effect of a pure signifier, of a recognition, not of the real father, but of what religion has taught us to invoke as the Name-of-the-Father. (464)

Schreber is the one who said “after all it really must be very nice to be a woman submitting to the act of copulation."¹ (qtd. in Freud XII, p. 13). He believes he “has a mission to redeem the world, and to restore mankind to their lost state of bliss. He was called to this task, so he asserts, by direct inspiration from God, just as we are taught that the Prophets were […] The most essential part of his mission of redemption is that it must be preceded by his transformation into a woman.” (ibid. 16-17). I quote the rest of Freud’s summary:

It is not to be supposed that he wishes to be transformed into a woman; it is rather a question of a “must” based upon the Order of Things, which there is no possibility of his evading, much as he would personally prefer to remain in his own honourable and masculine station in life. But neither he nor the rest of mankind can regain the life beyond except by his being transformed into a woman (a process which may occupy many years or even decades) by means of divine miracles. He himself, of this he is convinced, is the only object upon which divine miracles are worked, and he is thus the most remarkable human being who has ever lived upon earth. Every hour and every minute for years he has experienced these miracles in his body, and he has had them confirmed by the voices that have conversed with him. During the first years of his illness certain of his bodily organs suffered such destructive injuries as would inevitably have led to the death of any other man: he lived for a long time without a stomach, without intestines, almost without lungs, with a torn oesophagus, without a bladder, and with shattered ribs, he used sometimes to swallow part of his own larynx with his food, etc. But divine miracles (“rays”) always restored what had been destroyed, and therefore, as long as he remains a man, he is altogether immortal. These alarming phenomena have ceased long ago, and his “femaleness” has become prominent instead. This is a matter of a process of development which will probably require decades, if not centuries, for its completion, and it is unlikely that anyone now living will survive to see the end of it. He has a feeling that enormous numbers of “female nerves” have already passed over into his body, and out of them a new race of men will proceed, through a process of direct impregnation by God. Not until then, it seems, will he be able to die a natural death, and, along with the rest of mankind, will he regain a state of bliss. In the meantime not only the sun, but trees and birds, which are in the nature of “bemiracled residues of former human souls”, speak to him in human accents, and miraculous things happen everywhere around him.

It’s worth mentioning now that Schreber had been trying, but failed to conceive a child with his wife. (Is it a great irony that DHL never had any children?)

Back to the formula of metaphor, which I don’t quite get. What is this function?

I think the position of the numerator is that of the signifier, and the denominator takes up the signified. Lacan says as much in another text: “the formalism of the fraction that results from marking the link that exists between the signifier and the signified by an intermediary bar”. He also says that “[i]t is not absolutely illegitimate to consider that, at certain moments, this bar marks, in the relation of the signifier to the signified, the indication of a value that is strictly what is expressed in its use as fraction in the mathematical sense of the term. But, of course, it is not the only use. There is between the signifier and the signified, another relation which is that of the effect of meaning.”² And he maintains that “one can absolutely not, therefore, without taking certain precautions, and in as bold a way as has been done, manipulate this bar in a fractional transformation—which one could do if it were a question of a relation of proportion.”

These quotations are from “Interpretation to the Transference,” Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 248. The accompanying diagram is confusing to me, especially the left side. What does the parenthetical notation mean? Is F a function? What’s with the plus sign in parentheses?

I’m going to leave this behind for now…

Back to “On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis,” IV, “Schreber’s Way.” Recall that the following formulation of the metaphor literalizes it somewhat (465):

This seems more intuitive to me. Something in this metaphorizing function suppresses the mother. Maybe the parentheses denote a kind of equivalence: the Name of the Father stands in for the seme consisting of the Autre as signifier and Phallus as signified. This formula is followed by a discussion of three of Freud’s terms, Verwerfung [foreclosure], Bejahung [attribution, affirmation], Verneinung [negation]. The last two are defined in service of his discussion of the first:

I will thus take Verwerfung to be “foreclosure” of the signifier. At the point at which the Name-of-the-Father is summoned—and we shall see how—a pure and simple hole may thus answer in the Other; due to the lack of the metaphoric effect, this hole will give rise to a corresponding hole in the place of phallic signification."

Maybe what he’s saying is that the unsuccessful or broken metaphor takes us back to the scene of the Mother’s Desire; that Schreber’s psychosis goes against the arrow, that the arrow’s functioning is “foreclosed.” There are a lot of beautiful holes after this. The “lurch.” The “thinking nothing (Nichtsdenken),” the “most humanly merited of rests,” the “bellowing-miracle (Brüllenwunder), a cry torn from his breast that surprises him beyond all warning,” “his mouth suddenly agape before the unspeakable void, abandoned by the cigar that was stuck there a moment before,” “the cries of ‘help’ (‘Hülfe’ rufen), made by ‘those of God’s nerves separated from the total mass’,” “the occult zone of the perceptual field, in the hallway, or in the next room,” “the appearance, at the next stage, from afar—in other words, out of the range of the senses, in the park, in the real—of miraculous creations, that is, newly created beings, which, as Macalpine perspicaciously notes, always belong to flying species: birds or insects.” All of this culminates in a “halo effect,” a “flash,” a “nothingness”:

Don't these latter meteors of the delusion appear as the trace of a furrow, or as a halo effect, showing the two moments at which, from out of its darkness, the signifier—which has fallen silent in the subject—first makes a glimmer of signification spring forth at the surface of the real, and then causes the real to become illuminated with a flash projected from below its underpinning of nothingness? (468)

This is all leading up to that strange I-schema, the one that appeared in my dream, but before we get there I will share several more beautiful passages:

   Similarly, God's being in its essence withdraws ever further into the space that conditions it, a withdrawal that can be intuited in the increasing slowness of his speech, which even goes as far as a halting, stammered articulation of every letter of a word (S. 223). Indeed, were we to follow solely what this process indicates, we would regard this unique Other—with which the subject's existence is linked—as suited above all for emptying the places (S. 196 note) in which the murmuring of words unfolds, were Schreber not careful to inform us, in addition, that this God is foreclosed from every other aspect of the exchange. He apologizes for doing so, but however sorry he may be about it, he nevertheless has to observe it: God is not simply impermeable to experience; he is incapable of understanding a living man; he grasps him only from the outside (which certainly seems to be his essential mode); all interiority is closed off to him. A "writing-down-system" (Aufschreibesystem [S. 126])—in which acts and thoughts are preserved—recalls, of course, in a displaced way, the notebook kept by the guardian angel from our catechized childhood, but beyond that we should note the absence of any trace of the sounding of loins or hearts (S. 20) (468).

   It seems to me, then, that if the Created, I, takes the place here of the Law in P, which is left vacant, the place of the Creator is designated here by this liegen lassen, this fundamental leaving in the lurch, in which the absence that allowed the primordial symbolization, M, of the mother to be constructed appears to be unveiled, by virtue of the foreclosure of the Father.
   Between the two, a line—which would culminate in the Creatures of speech occupying the place of the child who doesn't come, dashing the subject's hopes (see my postscript further on)—would thus be conceived as skirting the hole excavated in the field of the signifier by the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father (see the I schema, page 571 below).
   It is around this hole, where the subject lacks the support of the signifying chain, and which need not, as can be observed, be ineffable to induce panic, that the whole struggle in which the subject reconstructed himself took place. He conducted this struggle honorably, and the "vaginas of heaven" (another meaning of the word Vorhöfe mentioned above)—the cohort of miracled young girls who laid siege to the edges of the hole—commented on it in the clucks of admiration wrung from their harpies' throats: "Verfluchter Kerl! One hell of a fellow!" In other words: What a great guy! Alas! It was by way of antiphrasis. (470)

The subject lacks the support of the signifying chain. What is he missing? What is being antiphrased? That he is “great,” or that he is a “guy”?

Divination by the unconscious no doubt warned the subject very early on that, unable to be the phallus the mother is missing, there remained the solution of being the woman that men are missing. (472)

Let me simply point out here—in the double curve that resembles a hyperbola except for the slippage of the two curves along one of the guiding lines of their asymptote—the link made palpable, in the double asymptote that unites the delusional ego to the divine other, of their imaginary divergence in space and time to the ideal convergence of their conjunction. And let us not overlook the fact that Freud himself had an intuition of such a form, since he himself introduced the term asymptotisch in this context. (476)

Z shows up...