Mom asked me, after a vituperative call which caused me to hang up on her within fifteen minutes, if I had written anything I could share. Of course not! I wanted to refuse to grant her the satisfaction of knowing that I was working hard in some contexts. And I knew she didn’t want to hear about the men. There was the conference paper on lyric sadism, but it wasn’t for her—and besides, I wasn’t invested in that sort of work. I wasn’t interested in making work that would be circulated, shared, or recognized—I wanted to be a psychoanalyst: to sit in the most private of spaces and listen to the most private of speech and to do nothing with it. I’d spend hours with unrecorded materials and make what I wanted of it in the moment. I’d respond, and care about people, and knew that I cared, and it would be nobody’s business. My mother, I understood, had a phobic relation to this sort of profession; she needed her failure to be validated in the public sphere of American sciences and letters or through her damned romantic life to be plugged up with success in mine. And so she told me, for the first time, at the age of twenty-five, not to become a man’s financial dependent, not to become a housewife. It had never been necessary to mention this to trans man me; now she sensed that dependence on a man, for the first time, was an actual possibility I needed to be discouraged against. She then asked me what I felt was most important to accomplish in life. I said like taking time to read and think. She mentioned my move away from the study of literature in foreign languages, and when she said that literature in English was “extremely limited,” I told her that I didn’t think she had read much of anything and then hung up on her. My ire was unironic, total. Everything she had said referred to a basic truth, except for that one thing about English.

I had in fact been fantasizing about becoming a wife, the kind that lives in a house. I did in fact have “too many boyfriends” and they were taking me away from the solitude I had previously needed to work. And I suppose I found it alarming that my mother was so alarmed, that she had panicked upon seeing me and taken my transformation into a “long haired person” as an indicator of some weakness or inauthenticity. It meant I had “changed so much,” and it was true: I was bored. I was spending long hours watching birds or drinking tea on his back porch or going for swims in the lake and washing his dishes after he cooked for me. I was baking a lot of bread and spending time writing about him in private. I became weak with anguish when I felt unloved, and would cry in front of the men I was having sex with. But above all, I loved the fact that I was experiencing something different, an emptiness that I had not encountered before, a tendency to be complaisant and to follow, to mold myself in the habits of a man I wouldn’t have admired before. I loved it because it meant I was following the modernist directive to make it new! And as I had discovered some years prior, Pound’s slogan came from an engraving on a bathtub in a Confucian text, where the verb was “renovate,” so it meant, in context, wash yourself!

So I believed in the novelty of loving men—of loving a random man for sexual reasons. I was ready to admit to it, to make art out of this fact. But I couldn’t stand my mother’s denigration of English literature. I love Swinburne, Meredith, Lawrence, James. I love Donne and Herbert. I love Cusk, Berssenbrugge, Heti, Leilani, Gaitskill, Davis. I love writers who don’t write in English: Chekov, Mishima, Flaubert, Dazai. I love recently, too: I recently love O’Hara. I probably won’t be reading him in a couple of weeks, but I love him RIGHT NOW! And I might not love all the authors I mentioned above forever. I might be an inconstant and unproductive and promiscuous spirit, but I am proud to be well-read, and to love some writers. Before the age of twenty-two I didn’t feel well-read at all, and then I met people I liked who read more than me, and copied their habits. Reading a lot meant emptying myself out and becoming receptive. It also involved following the afflatus of want. My movements in and out of different traditions came from a hunger for texts that had no place in my program of studies; I made a canon without foresight. I was later punished for being promiscuous: the committee told me to stick to something, to stick to one major argument, to reverse-outline, to read less of the literature on a subject. I think I lost a lot of interest in academic life when I started to realize the promiscuity of my reading. But mom didn’t understand, mom just knew that she didn’t like where I was going, even if I didn’t tell her the details. But it was true: I loved men, and I wanted to write about it, and it was related to my readings.

I love men. I think it is an indirect way of saying “I love you” to all the men I’ve known, but it wouldn’t be accurate to say that hidden in the words “I love men” are a bunch of directed declarations to individual men. It is necessarily a general statement and it is in fact meant to blur distinctions.

Loving men, did it make it new? It did make me new, but it didn’t “make it new.” I wanted to renovate the self—not my my-self but the the self, and the way to do that was to spend a lot of time emptying that self out. To be woman was one method; I was confident that in becoming stamped out with the feminine, the feminine as it’s recognized in culture, as kind of confused and submissive, I was learning something essential, and that the only area in the history of letters I wanted to contribute to was the feminine one. Nothing but a cunt was one slogan of my own, a perversion on Pound’s tacky Dichtung=condensare.

I seem to have beliefs about love; at the age of twenty-five, I am more congealed around beliefs. But unlike a true adolescent I don’t spend time mulling over them. And like any other adult with a formed sense of self I don’t have good reasons to try to do this, as I seem to have an embedded sense of why I do what I do. With a man I slept with for four months I managed to orgasm twice. It was on the first morning I slept over at his place; the last time was near the end, before I became so suffused with anguish that I could not have sex. I loved him because he was nice to me, and because he couldn’t make me come. I suspected that his penis was just a little too short. It was an elixir of lack; had he been more “satisfying,” I doubt I would have felt the same dense undergrowth of feeling for his saint-like beatitude, his smiles of satisfaction after his own ejaculations in my cunt, which tended to be tight, as it had no reason to want to be at a full yawn in advance. But whatever occurred there I loved the fact the cunt was what annealed him to me, that if I hadn’t had a cunt he wouldn’t be there kissing me and cooking for me and driving me to places that would be hard to access without a car. I liked how I could cry in front of him and each time he would seem concerned but happy, happy that he had made a girl cry for him, and happy because, as he told me once, I looked pretty when I cried, and that he wanted to have sex with me.

So he would do what I wanted: comfort me, treat me like a child, and then we would have sex. Perhaps I’m too quick to infantilize myself, but this is how I felt—I was a girl who didn’t know what she wanted or why she felt so bad, and he, because he never felt bad, and seemed to have all the answers. He had, moreover, a habitat, a way of life, a way of being in the world which seemed natural. I love nature!

I liked to write down the words God hates me after I had sex. It meant that I had felt nothing, that I had not only failed to come but felt no sensation at all during the act. I said that I liked loving men and knowing that I’m not loved back. It made me want to think more about that cunt of mine which causes men to be with me, but which isn’t enough to make them care about me when I feel intense, bad, distant. While I read what I write I push my fingers into the cunt and feel its strange familiar silkiness, which is like that of the glue I used to use to stick the signatures of books into the spine. It feels like the satin lining of some expensive wallet, or like the material used to make the shoes of ballerinas. I think of the words “purse” and “slip” and “vellum.” I like the fact that it has so much attractive force, the cunt.

“What are you thinking about?”

“Sex.”

“I know it’s a little weird that I’m thinking about it, since we just had sex.”

“But are you thinking about it in an interested fashion?”

“No, just thinking of the word: sex.”

He’s sitting on his throne on the back porch and I’m sitting parallel.

“I love men” wasn’t something I had managed to tell him, but I had planned it out: instead of telling him that I loved him, I’d tell him that I loved men. I tried to imagine it in reverse: him saying to me, “I love women.” I think I’d feel nice, it would serve as a point of identification. I thought about all the men I had known and how it was important to me that they had slept with others who I deemed attractive. And I liked the notion that I was a stand-in for a real wife, that I was someone he could not feel passionate love for—for then I could be the most truthful representative of what love isn’t. This made me think of what I preferred to be, in a passage from the story “Tiny, Smiling Daddy,” in which the narrator—third-person omniscient, focalized through the father—describes the estranged daughter first as a “beautiful, happy child,” then as a “homely, snotty, miserable adolescent,” then as a “martinet girl with the eyes of a stifled pervert,” and finally as a “vibrant imp, living, it seemed, in a world constructed of topsy-turvy junk pasted with rhinestones.” The phrase vibrant imp resonated in me as one that I would like to have stolen from the text. I knew I was a “vibrant imp,” especially in relation to A, but also to H, my psychoanalyst.

Things I hate about men: that if a man brushes any part of his body against mine, it can be the most untethered sensation, the most incomprehensible event. It tells me that I am vulnerable to the wrath of God: the wrath of God as it makes the flesh tender and sunburnt, enmeshed in a whole ecosystem of birth and fornication and rape. And God won’t let me sleep, he won’t leave me sated. I feel so much and then the cock feels like nothing inside of me, no matter how much I felt prior to the moment it enters. I feel a lot sometimes, and arrive at a plateau of heightened sensation, like what it feels like to read Swinburne.

I like wearing a shirt of eyelet lace with nothing underneath except a leopard print bralette. The old man next door stared at me and then waved; he looked serious in a way that signals prurience. I felt so good, having chosen to walk to Petsmart to buy crickets for my tarantula in that shirt and pinkish lipstick.

It’s no surprise that I want to be a prostitute, but of course I won’t become one. I don’t know how.

After A implied he didn’t love me, I started to talk to another man on Tinder. He was 6'5" and I wanted to see if he had a huge cock and if that would be a problem, or if he could crush and suffocate me.

These are timeless clichés, but not mythographical or folkloric. For some reason myths don’t talk about these things in simple language. Instead Zeus becomes a beautiful white cow. The tall man was also a fourth-year PhD student, in machine learning, and he seemed sweet, he read books and talked about nostalgia for CA. He was bisexual. I wondered if his measured dedication to academic work meant that he was less sexual than someone who didn’t have much to do. To me languor is essential.

These reflections feel prefatory to something else. I am waiting to burst from the rafters like a white dove. I will report back if and when I sleep with the tall man and if and when I get married. I will tell you what it’s like to be in my 30s or 40s and to have sex with men born in the 2000s and 2010s.

My friends think I’m talking about this because I think no one loves me. Or, no one loves me.

“I don’t love men—I love someone.” That’s what the civilized friends would like to hear me say, or that’s what I should be able to believe when I attend a dinner with colleagues. But I’m working on a website, and the website was built for someone I felt I loved. And in the greatest perversion of love ever to exist in my short, personal history, I turned a project of faith into a project of promiscuity. I’m like a Catholic in reverse. The more sex I have, the better I understand the Church. God hates me because I love men. But God loves the fact that I think, the fact that I have such a strong potency for worship.

Mathematicians think about lines, draw lines, and otherwise experience lines as a kind of material for their work. But does anyone ever imagine what it would be like to be the outline?

Cusk does this in her Outline trilogy: she imagines what it would be like to be an outline.

The narrator’s son calls her to tell her that he had spent a lot of time reviewing materials on the history of representations of the Madonna; the first question on the exam was on the very subject, and so he had so much to say that he forgot he was in an exam. “It was actually a pleasure. I couldn’t quite believe it.” He should believe it, I said, since it had a concrete explanation, which was that he had worked hard.

In schematic terms, this dialogue consists of a male nonchalance around the will’s role in his success, and the female’s desire to remind him of will’s role, her investment in will’s role in narrative events. The female point of view destroys the pleasure around the fortuitous and presents a challenge to how we perceive cause and effect. Cusk believes that the pleasure of fiction would fall apart if we ceased to believe in the pleasures of chance, and that in place of this would be a pristine and cruel objectivity, which to her is the goal and office of (female) art. But we should also challenge the female point of view: isn’t it true that the boy had been lucky to receive a question about the history of representations of the Madonna on his exam? Isn’t it possible that the narrator put this coincidence in the narrative in order to make a point about hard work? Indeed, the appearance of that question on the exam and the presence of the orgasm are both matters of luck and coincidence, and the problem with luck and coincidence is that they can be understood as either pure chance or pure design. But it is the distance, and the possibilities of friction between the two points of view which engenders a different sort of pleasure; it seems to me that Cusk has willed that this precise configuration arise in the text, and the willed nature of the passage doesn’t diminish the fact that the friction between the two points of view becomes immediate and felt.

It’s not true that no one loves me. My analyst has a daughter who I think is between six and eight years old. I assume he loves me because I act like a daughter. Once I told him I had gotten a thick book from the library and he said to me that he imagined me slicing it in half. I said, “what?” He repeated it. This was a sign that he loved me, that he was constructing in his head a thought about who I was. And he was sharing, this superfluous construction, about me the lyric sadist slicing a thick book (Oates’s Blonde) down its spine. Z once told me he was in love with the image of me sleeping facedown in a book, the book was Bolaño’s 2666. This love has nothing to do with men. What am I doing talking about it here?

I feel like a sheet of gold leaf being pounded out. I feel strength in the form of the outline. I like the words “leading edge” and “boundary” alone, and in relation to a block of stone that doesn’t exist. I’m aware of how immaterial the “line” or “edge” is, that the notion of the edge, surface, or boundary is supplementary to most people’s experiences of the block, unless the block is represented as a diagram.

It’s as if I have become that line—that immaterial boundary that no one cares about but which everyone needs to draw in order to denote a block, in order to conceive of a block as an object with a true physical reality, with a true identity, as a thing you can pick up and throw or hold or use as a support for something else. I think about the strength of those lines when I think about who I am when I fornicate.

But sex feels imprecise and immemorable—and that’s what I like so much about it.

It occurs to me that having a lot of sex (but not enough for me) once or twice a week with a man I cannot talk too much has turned me into a “borderline” case. I’ve lost a sense of who I am, as cliché as it sounds—I am nothing but a line. But that’s a lot to be, isn’t it? In any case, I am faced with the fact that I would not leave a note if I decided to leave—I simply wouldn’t care about how I was remembered.

Here is where neutrality ends.

Today I revealed this to my analyst, and he asked that I promise something, and I said I could not promise this. When I refused to promise this, he asked that I promise something a bit different, and I still could not promise. Then I promised what I was asked to promise, but with a limited time frame attached. This was not good enough: this would still pose a threat to the possibility of analytic listening.

I cried through most of the session. It felt unreal, to be commanded to promise something.

It’s true: there is a limit to where speech can go without I’ve become more potent than before, in that before I never looked into the mechanics of how one could die, and didn’t have a sense that I would take action, in part because I felt too ashamed of ending life so soon, when I had nothing to show for it.

Now I feel that I have no concern at all for what I leave behind, for what my life “looks like” afterwards. And I have no idea how I got here, except that now it seems that I have no moods, I have no sense of whether this mood or that mood is attached to me, it all floats around and I don’t care, don’t feel guilt about this sense of life being not only not worthwhile but possible to end on a random whim. I am becoming indifferent to what used to cause me extreme emotional anguish—the kind of anguish which would cause me to reach out. And I am writing this with a mood of neutrality, which is a bit scary.

There is no representation—no narrative—that can hold what I felt, that can explain what it is that got me here, and therefore show me some way I might move somewhere else. I am thinking, anyway, of clothes I’d like to buy, apartments I’d like to move to, and other logistics for packing up and leaving Ithaca. I am thinking of what I’d like to read and what I’d like to write—but the fact that I can’t seem to work in relation to my dissertation is making all this feel substantive, like some core to the meaning of my life does in fact lie in the dissertation, and my lack of connection to it is a lack of connection to my entire life. My feelings are not directed towards A or towards sex; I haven’t had sexual sensation in my cunt since at least a week ago, and cannot think about how I feel, do not want to think about it.

I mean, this is interesting to me—this sense of complete disconnect between who I was and who I am, or who I am and who I might be to or with others. Having sex with a man who I could not connect with? But I connected with him! Someone I could not talk with? But I talked with him! But there was an intuition that connection was fraught—that it would have to consist in the material elements, in the familial and domestic play of sleeping in his home, eating the food he had made, spending long silent hours of child-like boredom with him, living in his house while he was away: all these behaviors seem to have broken me down, infected me with ennui and a sense that I have no life. It’s so sudden, this belief—but it had been initiated each time I stayed, for a while, while not sure why. There’s something morbid now about all the times I said while sitting in A’s house, “well, I have nothing left to say.”

Shards of glass sound nice in words, but shards of glass on the floor need to be swept up immediately, as shards of glass sink into the skin and aren’t felt until they are nearly impossible to extract without gouging out more flesh and infecting the wound. If I cry, there’s an erection, and then the crying becomes annealed to semen. I have loose boundaries and strong convictions, I tell one man. Adorableness coincides with anger. I mean not mine, but that for the viewer, cuteness coincides with a desire to squish or destroy, and I imagine this is nowhere stronger than in the case when I have pouted and left a potluck dinner because I was “bored to tears,” and wanted him to watch me and talk to me and make with me a little death. I’m prickly and clingy, because barbed objects are often shaped such that they will break at the edges and stay, or sink deeper into the skin because of the asymmetries in the tapered structures of the barb, the acute lever-force. Again, it sounds good in words, but in action it’s indescribable.

During some bad moments in the past I have received emails or messages from Z, and this is happening again, and it is a sharp sliver of life for me, to know that he’s there, just as it was a sharp impact to hear Hunter tell me that he wanted me—required me—to stay alive, to contact him if I was about to act.

I want to love Z and not be apologetic about it—to make something banal and old fresh and mysterious, and to make what was fresh banal. I’ve decided, or rather my body has decided for me, that I cannot have sex with A. I’m frigid as hell. This has not contributed to my former desire to write about the sentence “I love men.” But in a way, it has contributed a great deal—for at this distance, I can edit what’s here.

The air feels wet now, and it isn’t hot, but I wear white culottes that I wear about twice a year, and only last summer in Chicago did I obtain them back, because my mother had decided to pack them in her suitcase. I had left them at home after college, because they were not a practical garment for a grubby little boy like me to wear around Ithaca. They were from NYC, from Acne Studios on Horatio Street, on sale for what came out to something like 270 dollars, an extremely expensive purchase for me then and still for me now. I call them “ripolin pants,” after Le Corbusier’s favorite white paint, and I remember writing at some point about limewash and maybe not preserving what I had written. It was a block quote from Mark Wigley in Artforum, and I am recalling this all from memory, and now I’ve found it.

I am unable to care about the existence of racists or the concept of the “asian american.” Only the term “perihumanity” stays with me. An essay like Mark Wigley’s “Chronic Whiteness” makes more sense for me to associate with. I am interested in the story of the first Neolithic free-standing rectilinear buildings, and their limewashed walls: “The interior was formed by smooth white lime plaster, which disinfected while also drawing all the surfaces of the newly quadrilateral system of floor, wall, and ceiling together into a continuous sealed skin.” Mishima and Kawabata are obsessed with whiteness.

Whiteness was a synthesized effect that was intensified by belabored polishing. “Pure lime” manufactured a whiteness nowhere to be found in the environment. Like the newly invented right-angles of buildings, it constituted a whole new environment, a visual field and way of seeing; it accentuated the pattern and color of the red pigment that was often painted on it, along with any occupants, objects and actions. But it was never simply a background. It acted as a central focus of life, crafting the daily intersection between living body and building, between life and death. Human and non-human bodies were buried within the white surfaces of buildings and body parts, like skulls, were modelled in white plaster to occupy the interior as if fellow inhabitants. The fact that lime plaster is a strong antiseptic is presumed to have contributed to its importance both in the occasional ritualistic burials and the seasonal renewals. Interiors were divided between clean and dirty zones, a distinction that whiteness made visible. It is not that architecture was whitened; it was only architecture inasmuch as it was white.

The whiteness of architecture pulsates. Whiteness is not a fixed thing but the idea of a fixed thing constructed by repetition. It is repeated not just through endless rewhitenings, but in the belief that each rewhitening is a whole new beginning; that white is always “fresh” because it enacts a “clean start,” a return to zero. It paradoxically takes such a huge labor to construct this sense of zero. A great effort is required to make a surface that is seen to precede all making, all history even, as a non-statement statement—the seemingly simple but remarkable belief that whiteness is blankness (literally from the word blanc). To experience white as zero requires both the huge labor to manufacture whiteness and a parallel labor of denial of that effort, an even more sustained effort to act as if white was always there: that it is the ultimate background to all action; that it is, as it were, not just the host of all colors and forms but the host of history itself. Paradoxically, then, white keeps returning as that which is supposedly already there, that which is unmarked and therefore reveals all marks; preceding the history it reveals. The history of architecture involves a millennial series of historically specific appeals to the supposedly trans-historical status of white. The question of sickness, the very idea of it even, is never far away from this repetition and its associated violence.

Then I say that this description of whiteness makes me want to participate in the labor of constructing a sense of zero. I want to be a practitioner of rewhitening, a servant to the mood of the “always already there.” Everything about whiteness is perfect to me, I would like to preserve everything in this essay’s discussion of whiteness except the “denial” of the effort required to make whiteness. I feel similarly about muteness: I don’t eschew muteness, but I’m invested in filling muteness with meaning. So I don’t like muteness as convention, the forced labor of womanliness-as-masquerade. I want to be a piece of furniture that has been made, but which is also always already there. Muteness, which is whiteness in time, can be beautiful and truthful when the work of it comes to be. Unfortunately White Walls, Designer Dresses is an insipid read, so it lies on the floor near the mirror while I return to the strange similes of Henry James and wonder about the “blank” wall of free indirect discourse which allows the ornamental to shine out or recede into the middle distance. I like what I’ve written here, even if it’s a bit dense.