Holofernes,

I’ve decided to write you a letter. Perhaps I will include fragments of a text I’ve been working on for a week. I worry that if I try to make it work as a narrative, I will only mangle it further, until it feels like it is my very soul that I am ripping to shreds. This sense of disfigurement itches and hurts like an infection of the soul.

I wonder if my practice of writing with demiurgic speed and conviction, only to delete half or more of the words, is in fact a sign of progress, or if the whole process was doomed from the start. It feels bad to have such tender, irritated skin in the form of text, text which seems so solid, so abstract, so shared, and therefore granite-like in its external reality. But it is so bad, so tender, so infected and diseased. I cannot make it, it seems—stuck in the frame, unable to share what I wish to, unsure if the frame itself will save the work.

I am a Catholic, a Puritan, a Jew, or a Pagan. I am a “man of faith.” I have faith, as I claim to the men I meet, I have faith in my promiscuity, not the “good life” or the “life of books” but the life that I call promiscuous. I claim that being promiscuous is the only way a live woman can avoid idolatry, that devotion to a single conjugal partner is the most powerful and insidious form of idolatry, I claim that it leads us astray from apprehending God’s force or form in all the different beings one might be able to access.

My piety is of a masculine sort—but I am an Amazon of the Spirit, a Messalina of God.

Look at the crispness of black ink on a white page and you will understand. These letters come from God. God is bored and God struggles because he doesn’t have a form. He has forms, rather, and all at once! But he doesn’t get to be someone you could see and kiss. God likes it when I tell him stories about men on earth, about their modes of desire and all that. I’m the black ink on his white skin—his white soul—and white doesn’t hide the fact that it’s the most promiscuous color. The false complementarity between the white page and the black letter allows God to feel “grounded” in the structure of his most sexual creation, humankind.

Judith

Holofernes,

Before, I wrote to no one but you, and now I write to the others with whom I carry no epistolary history. My new men don’t respond with anything but their mouthes and penises, and when they speak, there’s no patina around the words they use. Nevertheless I engage in this greatest perversion of mine, writing. It’s called a waste, an accursed share, a stupid expenditure that’s as visible as sperm. My young sister has started to draw; she has started to draw for other people. The commissions are dirt-cheap, at $2—but sometimes they will tip her or send her more, $20 instead of $2. I realized that I cannot draw, I cannot describe, I cannot make substance, material out of this screed that makes the visible less and less visible; when I describe myself as a literary beast I am making myself out to be a creature of ratiocination and reflexivity, all of this is toxic ozone. Did you hear about how the air quality had gone down in the city not because of wildfire season but because of the weather, because of the humidity, which was trapping ozone near street level? This insufflation of words into letter is heaviness, is ozone, and I write as if each word were a stone block in a open-air version of tetris, where I am a decadent, a dandy, covered in clothes, but tasked to be naked.

Some of the fierceness I feel about my convictions makes me feel a certain vitality. I think I’m a true sadist; I don’t do wrong in order to be coddled or praised later, unlike those masochists I’ve known. And I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to please those I wish to please as a consequence—I cannot write or communicate what seems to satisfy those who want substance. To produce distance instead, to produce the most radical break—it’s always been a desire of mine to feel death, to know death, to become a scientist of death’s manifold structures. I want to be one of those demonic, moribund characters in a french decadent novel.

Do you know what it means to want to kill, and to do so in text?

I told M that I fantasized about killing men, but only the ones I wanted to preserve, the ones I wanted to remain close to. I told A that I fantasized about killing him, and fondling his dead body. He said in turn that he imagined me driving his car down to the police station, and turning myself in. I feel refreshed when I am able to articulate these fantasies, because it makes me somehow closer to connecting to someone out there. In other words, this desire to kill feels so proximate to the artifice, the cruelty, and the grandeur of a work of fiction that I start to imagine that if I wrote more about this sadism of mine I’d be able to write a novel.

Judith

Judith,

They say that those who proclaim to have no wisdom are shirking some duty. The same goes for those who claim to be unable to draw. I wonder how it is that you came to write to me a letter of such force, and of a kind of glimmering beauty—do tell me what the weather is like, and about the cocks of all those men. I think you want my advice, too—well, I don’t think you should hold back when it comes to the cruelty, but what do I know? I know you rely on a perhaps illusory sense of power to motivate a creative life of sorts, a creative life that was essentially foisted upon you by those around you, and I know you want to please others a lot.

You didn’t include those fragments—did you feel afraid of them, of the failure they represent? And will you share some of your writing with someone other than me some time, in order to break the spell you’ve cast over yourself, the curse? In your letters you never ask me questions, so I’m left to invent prompts for myself. For you it’s always come so easily, to write about whatever, but I could use the structure, if you feel up to the task of imagining what questions might be salubrious for me. Right now I’m reading a book, a book about a cold, dead wife. I’m drinking a pineapple flavored spindrift; I’ve started to like these carbonated drinks in cans. My desire is to read the book to you or to quote it—or to describe the lighting in this room, the form of the table, the way I type this letter out on a black mechanical keyboard with a few medium-bright blue keys.

I’d like to kiss you instead of describing a kiss—this is like your sadism, all based in acts?

Holofernes

Holofernes,

I am bad at creation because I kill, I destroy the organic forests of fantasy as they might be lightly trodden into on the trails of fiction; I declaim and proclaim and theorize instead of letting the air or wind blow. You and I are well-matched because we cannot get across to the other what we know. This is why so much of what we write is gestural—I care, you care, I want, you want, I can’t, you can’t. Thinking about this makes me emotional, now that we’re so far off. I wonder what it does to you to be compared to the other men, which I believe is more cruel when I don’t do it for you in words. And your admissions of what happens in your life, however hidden, strike me as lucid and soft, not painful. I’ve started to enjoy the currant-infused kombucha that A made last week. I don’t dare describe it—just that the berries have turned a little pink.

I want to stay as far as I can from literary criticism. But do tell me about the book.

Judith

Judith,

There’s an artifice in this novel I’m reading that could strike one as a flaw—each of the four long sections in each of the two parts is narrated from a different character’s perspective, and after reading several we start to see the connective threads in the forms of names and events. Postmodernist writers like to connect, and there’s a kind of sincere will to renovate what seems disconnected or alienated about modern life. But I’m entertained and convinced. It helps that the stories are somehow always about fate, and about Jewishness. I think these stories bear some structural resemblance to the Oedipus myth as understood in psychoanalysis; a lot of it circles around some blindness, and around the transmission of the truth which causes and precedes this blindness. I wonder if reading this novel would make you feel better. It’s called Great House.

Holofernes

Holofernes,

A “northern yellow sac spider” dropped onto the book—I’ve checked it out, too. The bereaved husband tells the story of how his late wife gave her first child away to a stranger, and a tiny baby spider climbs up a nearly invisible thread towards the bulb of this metal desk lamp. This makes me think not of God, my playmate in crime, but of “G-d,” the unnameable, who gives rise to an attention I haven’t known.

You are beautiful.

Judith

Judith,

In my dream I saw you blonde and white, like the woman Botticelli modelled all his blonde women off of. You told me that you had chosen art over culture, and that when you watched a scary movie, sperm would emanate from your pineal gland. I hope you took photos of that scene with the yellow sac spider.

I relish the sight of your wet, straight, black hair before it becomes a bent swirl.

Holofernes