To: C, E, L
Dear all,
I am trying to figure out what literature has to do with my cunt, or what my cunt has to do with literature.
DCP
[29 August 2022]
To: C, E, L
Hi again,
I hope this is at least a little bit entertaining, but I’m going to go about communicating my research plans in a bit of a messier way for now, and see if this helps me become a more composed human being. These “cuntortions” seem to be the only way for me to go right now. So basically I am thinking about… producing a list of points for you… rather than a continuous argument:
I’m interested in a formalist reading of sexuality in a few authors from 19th- and early 20th-century Britain: Keats, Swinburne, Meredith, Lawrence. I am actually not sure if this will be the list but it helps me to name no fewer and no greater than four names. I am trying to be less expansive, trying to write about a few texts which have fascinated me once, as if in some intense struggle to fall back in love with territory in which I have defecated too many times. How does one clean up the depths of the dirtiest of minds, i.e., that of didi?
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Sexuality and knowing.
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Relationship between “blind spots” in the structures of poems and narrative fiction and the “blind spots” of desire.
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Question of sexuation.
This sort of mysterious thing has been the subject of much interpretation.
That “the attempt to contemplate sex also throws reason into conflict with itself” (Copjec 201).
The value of Butler’s Gender Trouble, she writes, lies in the way it “shakes off all the remaining bits of sleepy dogmatism that continue to attach themselves to our thinking about sexual identity.” (201). The same could be said for genre theory, whether it be the theory of genres proper, narrative theory, or lyric theory, any study of the structure or form of a name or label like “the novel” or “lyric poetry” will trouble the notion of a genre as possible to define completely or according to consistent structures or rules.
However, there is a reality to those traits which mark a thing as a novel or a poem, and I think it’s this “real” which could be reasonably allied with the “real” of sex. In Lacanian terms, the “real” is… In the lay-sense, I’m thinking of the “reality” of sex as a topic in the literary works I aim to write about. This could be expanded into a notion that writing “about” sex—or, in the successful instances, writing sex, puts the literary text in friction with the real, meaning that all sorts of complex phenomena in and arround the text seem to be charged with intensity: I’m thinking of Keats’s rhymes, Swinburne’s alliteration, Meredith’s enunciative apparatus, Lawrence’s insane narrative and stylistic repetitiousness, his almost off-putting preoccupation with sex and sexual difference.
Sex in the vulgar sense (or according to the OED) may be understood in terms of complementarity and twoness, maybe even reciprocity. It’s important to note that “division” figures in its definition, however, producing a knitting-point between the psychoanalytic notion of sex as metonymic, polymorphously perverse, linked to repetition, castration, floating signifiers, etc.
I’m pointing out here two alternative ways of thinking about sex, which Copjec recognizes as the “sex as substance, or sex as signification” binary (202). She asks the question if we are really stuck with these alternatives. I think it’s quite easy to see from the four authors I’ve selected that the binary of sex-as-substance and sex-as-signification seems to exist in such a unison that one starts to wonder if the imposition of those two strands of thought is not haplessly flawed. But how can we go beyond those two basic pathways? That’s the question I’m trying to address in my dissertation—how to talk about what is, for lack of better words, intense—
The stability of the male/female binary is not undone, however, simply by chipping away at the barrier that separates them, calling into question the neatness of their division. If the categories of woman, fem ininity, feminism cannot ultimately hold, Butler-taking a frequently advanced contemporary position-tells us, this is also due to the fact that these categories are crossed by all sorts of others-race, class, ethnicity, etc. -that undermine the integrity of the former list of categories. The very heterogeneity of the category of woman is evidenced in the oppo sition to feminism by women themselves. There will never and can never be a feminism unified in its politics. (Copject 203)
- Question of analogy, indexicality.
Kaja Silverman is a proponent of what she calls “analogical” thinking. In The Miracle of Analogy, or The History of Photography, Part 1, she delineates a problem she has with the notion that photography should be defined by its “evidentiary power” or its “indexicality.” The notion that the camera records something “which has already occurred” (Barthes) coincides with a kind of melancholia, a malaise. The value of this engagement with pastness lies in the notion that “an analogue photograph is the umbilical cord connecting us to what we have loved and lost, to what is gone because we failed to save it, or to what might have been, but now will never be.” But on the other hand, the evidentiary view “expresses and contributes to the despair that afflicts so many of us today: our sense that the future is ‘all used up.'” She engages next in a more historical discussion of how photography has in fact coincided with forms of fascism or commodity capitalism which are Benjamin’s concern, and which he addresses through the concept of “weak messianic power.”
I’m drawn to her observation that “Barthes’s mobilization of the future perfect in this and other passages in Camera Lucida renders the future as unchanging as the past. This account of the photographic image consequently both expresses and contributes to the political despair that afflicts so many of us today: our sense that the future is “all used up.””
But although there have been pitched battles between those who champion the evidentiary value of the photographic image and those who emphasize its constructedness, the former is only another way of overcoming doubt. If a photograph can prove “what was,” then it is the royal road to certainty—the means through which we know and judge the world. And if what we see when we look at a photographic image is unalterable, then there is only one thing we can do: take “what is dead” or “going to die” into our “arms.” Barthes’s mobilization of the future perfect in this and other passages in Camera Lucida renders the future as unchanging as the past. This account of the photographic image consequently both expresses and contributes to the political despair that afflicts so many of us today: our sense that the future is "all used up."
- Blanchot, the infinite question, …
Another way of thinking about repetition and the issue of voice is through Blanchot’s notion of…
literature as existing in between interlocutors,
I’d also note that Blanchot’s work has had influence on Ann Banfield
“The Name of the Subject: The “il”?”
[29 August 2022]
To: C, E, L
Close-reading exercise:
This, then: they read dramatic pieces during courtship, to stop the saying of things over again till the drum of the car becomes nothing but a drum to the poor head, and a little before they affix their signatures to the fatal Registry-book of the vestry, they enter into an engagement with a body of provincial actors to join the troop on the day of their nuptials, and away they go in their coach and four, and she is Lady Kitty Caper for a month, and he Sir Harry Highflyer. See the honeymoon spinning! The marvel to me is that none of the young couples do it. They could enjoy the world, see life, amuse the company, and come back fresh to their own characters, instead of giving themselves a dose of Africa without a savage to diversify it: an impression they never get over, I’m told. Many a character of the happiest auspices has irreparable mischief done it by the ordinary honeymoon. For my part, I rather lean to the second plan of campaign." (The Egoist 160)
Sorry, I have nothing to say—how the hell did Meredith come up with the remark “See the honeymoon spinning!”?!
[30 August 2022]
H,
I wrote the email to my mom about having my breasts kissed and then I deleted it. It didn’t feel truthful somehow. I think it was something about its mood—its aggressive hardness, its self-assurance. I almost felt that she didn’t deserve to receive something so earnest from me. I also deleted the message I wrote to you here about how you were making me so tired. It seemed so carelessly done. I wanted to make it emphatic. I would also like to put more time into figuring something out, so I can treat the subject with care and attention. Yet I’m too tired to do that, I can only speak with you—it is only when I am in analysis that I do not feel tired, but immediately after the speech-act ends, I lose reference with respect to language.
Oh, I had a thought. Maybe I’m afraid your milk will poison me—the milk of your attention, the milk of the analytic speech you squeeze out of me. Maybe I feel anxiety when I suckle at your breast. It’s so much, and I’m so tired when I’m done feeding, outside of analysis. The void produced in the act of suckling (the suction, the vacuum) is so real in how it pervades my time outside of analysis. That time is the time in which I inhabit the vacuum of suckling. It is more real than any ambient sense of depression or melancholia I have experienced in the past. There is no mood to it, nothing objectal about it.
I’m sharp enough still to produce a comparison. I know that my decision to write to you, and others whom I have never written to before and have no plan to write to, is mimetic of that vacuum-state. I produce a vacuum in my mind when I suckle on the address to the other because I have no sense of what I am doing by writing to these others. I suppose I do it with the intuition that writing to them will necessarily have some effect on them, on how I interact with them. In your case it is true—I can and have spoken about the contents of these fake emails with you. And my nipples are sore these days.
D
[31 August 2022]
H,
I wanted to write to A some sappy three-lined email about what it felt like to feel his presence:
stillness. it’s a perfect gradient, the way i wake.
i’m here motionless with each word unrecorded.
it stamps itself on my mind like an external body.
How do you understand the fact that I would need to bracket it like this, and send it off to someone else?
D
[5 September 2022]
A,
this poem about bibbles is hilarious.
bibbles was d.h. lawrence’s dog in new mexico.
“little black dog in new mexico,
little black snub-nosed bitch with a shoved-out jaw
and a wrinkled reproachful look;
little black female pup, sort of french bull, they say,
with bits of brindle coming through, like rust, to show you’re not pure;”
he hate-loves her because she’s too promiscuous!
“Don’t you love everbody!!!
Just everybody.
You love ‘em all.
Believe in the One Identity, don’t you,
You little Walt-Whitmanesque bitch?”
He also calls her “Pipsey”:
“That’s you, Pipsey,
With your imbecile bit of a tail in a love-flutter.
You omnipip.”
She wants to fuck the coyotes, too—
“So quick, like a little black dragon.
So fierce, when the coyotes howl, barking back like a whole little lion, and rumbling,
And starting forward in the dusk, with your little black fur all bristling like plush
Against those coyotes, who would swallow you like an oyster.”
D
[5 September 2022]
a sort of metonymic positing, where there’s no real vertical correspondence between the lines or the words within a line, no rhythm or rhyme or concordance or symmetry. that’s how i’d describe d.h. lawrence’s poems, the best of them at very least. lawrence is the guy whom other guys despise or disdain—nothing to see here, nothing to worry about—but the other guys’ wives see it, they see what they always wanted in him, so they leave their own guys in search of the man that lawrence represents, and in the process they don’t find him but they do form themselves into real women. I’m thinking about that lawrentian striving as a universal process—so I decided to write to you, A, to seize you as a potential imaginary addressee. I read Lawrence as a sort of primitive racist sometimes and I think about you being my racist, too. I want you to seize me in your primitive hands, knowing nothing, knowing nothing, as I succumb to a type, and look at you with inscrutable animal eyes, pupils turning into the narrow hyphens of goat eyes, or closed and creased in the inner epicanthus—a view I can’t see. ah well, none of this amounts to racism—the girl as a folded slit, an envelope like so many others, it is the sex of her you allow her to witness. Maybe this refusal of “vertical correspondence” is to avoid the permanent: “There is no rhythm which returns upon itself, no serpent of eternity with its tail in its own mouth. There is no static perfection, none of that finality which we find so satisfying because we are so frightened.” Lawrence is prefacing his New Poems here—the ones which don’t rhyme. It is poetry neither of the past nor the future, but of the “pure present.” In another prefatory note—the foreword to the Collected Poems, he talks about being haunted—of being afraid of “the poems that had the ghost in them.” He has edited some of the poems later not for “technique,” but “to say the real say.”
[10 September 2022]
H,
I spent a long time writing about meeting the new people in my department. I wrote that in a real email to lara.
I’m groaning now because I took a nap and it was so deep that I thought when I woke up I’d feel better.
I meant to tell you that I sobbed for a second time today.
I don’t know if I’m going to make progress in my writing here or anywhere.
Maybe I should tell people that I’m sick. At least I have this thick hair to stroke now.
From Mabel Dodge Luhan (first quoting from Leo Stein):
“I wonder which will give out first: his lungs or his wits.” Was he destroying himself instead of me, I wonder. In his struggle to free himself, did he find himself in Frieda, in me, and in the world around him? Oh, little Atlas, what a burden was on you!
The sobbing was triggered by reading something on reddit by a woman who said she didn’t understand how to deal with receiving love from a man she had recently started dating. She thought that something he had said meant something much worse than it did, based on what such an interaction might have meant in her previous relationship. I basically sob now in relation to Alec and the function he played in my life, he cut my life in two. He was like a dog or a child who picked up a knife and cut me with it and now I’m different now.
D
[11 September 2022]
H,
I’m reading another page from Lorenzo in Taos.
“It’s the broken snake that’s the most dangerous. The unbroken slips away into the bushes of life.”
“Never win over anybody!—there’s a motto.—I mean never conquer, nor seek to conquer. And never be conquered, except by heaven. And if you don’t set your will in opposition to heaven, there’s no occasion for conquest there.”
“But one can’t do more than live one’s destiny, good or bad, destructive or constructive.”
“To be born without any centre, any centrifugal I!—only this strange contripetal vortex of an ego. I think everybody is born with both: their souls go both ways, centrifugal and centripetal. But according to statement, yours was only centripetal: you only existed when something was pouring into you—some sensation, some conscious registering. Of course that’s not quite true. There must be a central you, or you couldn’t know. Most people don’t know. I believe the majority of people are like it. It’s only that they have no definite I, and they exist in the group consciousness; they are so tribal, so entirely group conscious, that they don’t need to have any individual consciousness. […] You happen to have been born an individual, even if you were only, in your own terms, an individual vortex. Those other swine revolve slowly in the vast, obscene social or mass vortex, and so of course they never realise their own null negation. Yours anyhow was a fierce, direct negation: as there are gods of pure destruction, pure in its way, and necessary as creation.”
Lawrence goes on to say something about making versus having feelings. I think I understand this—finding a way to be a receptacle for feelings is different from producing feelings through language or any other material apparatus. There’s no material support for becoming a receptacle—becoming a receptacle is pure form. I’ve decided that John doesn’t like me, arbitrarily, again, just like in April or whenever it was that I decided that he did not exist for me, and then we didn’t see each other for at least a month. If we can drift apart like that at my will it means he doesn’t care for me at all, and barely thinks of me, correct? I must ensure that this is true, I must make it so.
Perhaps the difference this time is that I would like to be direct with him about what’s been going on in my mind, and use that as a form of closure. I do not care to preserve decorum or continuity, I do not want to play with tensed strings, I shall simply dip off into my investigation of whatever Hilflosigkeit it is that I wish to investigate. Alright, more of Lawrence’s letters to Mabel:
“the strange focusing of female power, upon object after object, in the process of decreation: or uncreation: as a sort of revenge for the compulsion of birth and procreation: becomes in the end like a sandhill slipping down on one. Ce ne finira jamais! It is as if the hourglass of time were reversed, and the sands of an eternity were streaming backwards down on us. The struggle with the sands of time is worse than useless. Let the soft dry deluge continue, out of the reversed heavens. C’est la femme.”
It could very well be true that I’m doing just that—focusing on the process of decreation or uncreation as a sort of revenge for the compulsion of birth and procreation.
What would I say to John right now if I had to face up to this fantasy of decreation in his presence?
[12 September 2022]
To: C, E, L,
Dear all,
I’m afraid I need to extend this time of exploration out for a little while. I did make something of an introduction but not the rest. These have been times of dipping into primary texts again—and since they are novels, it takes time. And of course, I am still at least a little bit embarrassed about the changes. Today I began to menstruate, so that gives you an idea of the span of time I’ve spent in the luteal phase.
Didi