One,
Saturday
“Occasionally a moonbeam would trace out a suave ivory branch that the rabbits had gnawed quite bare in the hard winter. We came out of the woods into the full heavens. The northern sky was full of a gush of green light; in front, eclipsed Orion leaned over his head, and the moon followed.” (The White Peacock 136)
I can’t quite articulate the problem of the first-person narration in TWP. I guess the little bit of writing on the left could stand alone inconspicuously as a piece of description in any third-person novel, but we’re reminded by the “I” of Cyril that this is what he observes. And I guess the question is, how could this “I” observe so much at once? Did he observe this as he saw it, or long after the fact—and if so, how much of it is invention? What gives him the authority to poetize—is his method of describing the world relevant (to what)?
It is a truth not universally acknowledged that the name assigned the subject is not, contrary to common sense expectations, the pronoun “ego” or “I.” But ordinary language does not supply a name for the subject. Indeed, the nearest formulation for subjectivity has the grammatical form not of a noun phrase, a name, but of a sentence, one with specific grammatical properties: “cogito.” The Cartesian concept of subjectivity is thus not equivalent to either the sense or the reference of the first person pronoun. (Banfield, “The Name of the Subject: The ‘il’?” 133)
My question to Banfield would then be: how might we intuitively grasp the importance of the subject? What are we looking for when we look for subjectivity, and when we acknowledge that the “I” isn’t the right pronoun to designate it?
The answer (after having done the reading) is something like this: the Cartesian “cogito” places primacy on the immediacy of thought as it is happening—“indubitable” means we want it to be indubitable that thought is happening, that it is being experienced by a mind.
Dream was audiorecorded.
I brought Lara to Hunter.
I was showing her Chino Hills.
I was telling Hunter about Chino Hills.
I was searching for something in Chino Hills.
I think I was looking… I don’t know but I saw some animal…
Something about a rattlesnake
I said, “Hunter, here’s Lara”
I was looking for something else
I am beginning the day with this new bag of Sumatra ketiara coffee which I like so much and am thinking about the rhythm at which I push updates to this website, the urge to push an update corresponding sometimes with a sense of relief that something’s over, and with a desire to communicate.
I am also listening to the fifth cello suite’s sarabande, the one which, beyond its sense of lamentatation, sounds like a voice reflecting, investigating.
The "cogito" represents the point of cessation of doubt; "je pense" states all and only those things that can be said and hence known with certainty. What will define the object of our investigation are the grammatical properties of the sentence "cogito" that give it its indubitability. These properties link indubitability with linguistic subjectivity. In order for the statement on which Descartes's argument depends to represent certain knowledge, it must have the following features: 1) its grammatical subject is obligatorily first person; 2) its tense is obligatorily present; and 3) its verb is one of a class of psychological verbs with animate subjects. (135)
The statement “I am thinking” is not “impervious to doubt”… (137)
Why apply the Cartesian cogito to literature at all? Banfield is doing the opposite—she’s arguing that Blanchot’s interest in the “il” of narration is useful for addressing the philosophical problem posed by Descartes, Lichtenberg, Russell, etc.
I think moving in the other direction matters, though—don’t we also feel that the free indirect discourse in a novel by Henry James is “indubitable,” whereas the first-person descriptions given by Lawrence’s Cyril arent'? However fanciful the Jamesian narrator may be, we believe in the necessity of his statements.
I dreamt that I was running or biking down a sunny road in California. I descried the carcass of an animal on the side of the road; it seemed particularly gruesome, recalling the time I passed a squirrel which had been burst out into a pink array of guts on a rainy day; I would have taken a photo of it but didn’t, for some reason. When I stopped to look at the carcass in the dream, it was already gone—a carriage or car with huge pale wooden wheels moving in the opposite direction had “picked it up,” and there was in its place a very large catasetum orchid with dark red blooms and narrow petals caught in the spokes of the wheels, which held it up rather than spinning it.
Then I came across a man who was walking in the same direction as the car—he was ranting about how dumb it was that so many people liked catasetum orchids. People were ruining the planet and yet they wasted so much of their time and money and energy on catasetums. At this point I was certainly walking and he had started to walk next to me, away from the carriage, but without facing me at any point or otherwise acknowledging my presence.
In the last section of the dream, I was in a large bookstore with a coffeeshop inside, and bumped into Vishal and Bridget Park (who took the same bus as me in 7th grade). I first saw Vishal from behind and tried to avoid him, but the floor was crowded so I kept on having to walk behind him. At some point we turned and faced each other, and he started to speak to me about techno music. Bridget had joined the conversation, and said something about Spirited Away. I mentioned Nymphomaniac in response to something. Somebody (Vishal? or Bridget?) asked about why TV shows are so “hard to keep in your head” (“or something,” as I said in the voice memo).
Margaux said something about TV shows being a difficult medium when I bumped into her on Thursday. Vishal participated in or put together some kind of a techno show last night, but I didn’t go. I thought about telling Eleni to watch Nymphomaniac while running last evening. Applefest was very crowded, and K and I talked about having experienced it at different times on Saturday. It was so crowded at Gimme Coffee that he had walked into the crowd of Applefest, from which he had literally ran away.
I looked at K’s profile again after we met, and was pleased to see he how he had updated it: interests included “James Baldwin” and “Glissant.” My interests on the app are “lacan,” “lawrence,” “sheepskin,” “catasetum,” “techno,” “noise,” and “freud.” I spoke to him a bit about APL and how it had initially been conceived of as a place for writing about orchids, and since he’s from Trinidad, I looked at my orchids before sleeping in a slightly different way. I was reminded of my severe passion for solitude in 2019.
He is much more serious than my current paradigm would call for. It makes me understandably anxious to have met someone who seems so intensely dedicated to his work—moreover, in a way that interests me. K reminds me of a version of myself that I have repudiated, from 2016-2019. Severe, concentrated on aesthetics, ascetic, but epicurean. Being forced to confront this could be perfect for me right now. I wince at the prospect of coming to like him a lot.
The car slid sideways; the mud crackled under the wheels, and the machine went crashing into Nethermere. It caught the edge of the old stone wall with a smash. Then for a few moments I think I was blind. (TWP 194)
When I went to bed I looked across at the lighted windows of Highclose, and the lights trailed mistily towards me across the water. The cedar stood dark guard against the house; bright the windows were, like the stars, and, like the stars, covering their torment in brightness. The sky was glittering with sharp lights—they are too far off to take trouble for us, so little, little almost to nothingness. All the great hollow vastness roars overhead, and the stars are only sparks that whirl and spin in the restless space. The earth must listen to us; she covers her face with a thin veil of mist, and is sad; she soaks up our blood tenderly, in the darkness, grieving, and in the light she soothes and reassures us. Here on our earth is sympathy and hope, the heavens have nothing but distances.
A corn-crake talked to me across the valley, talked and talked endlessly, asking and answering in hoarse tones from the sleeping, mist-hidden meadows. The monotonous voice, that on past summer evenings had had pleasant notes of romance, now was intolerable to me. Its inflexible harshness and cacophany seemed like the voice of fate speaking out its tuneless perseverance in the night.
“Go on,” I said.
“Well—she was engaged to him——”
“Pah—you thought you were too good to be rejected.”
He was very pale, and when he was pale, the tan on his skin looked sickly. He regarded me with his dark eyes, which were now full of misery and a child’s big despair.
“And nothing else,” I completed, with which the little, exhausted gunboat of my anger wrecked and sank utterly. Yet no thoughts would spread sail on the sea of my pity: I was like water that heaves with yearning, and is still.
Something very vivid was said by C and I replied to it.
It’s like the dream consisted of two sentences.
In my notes I wrote “moon and sun?
Something about age?”
It was in essence the answer to the question of how he had determined that he did not want to see me again.
I should be more curious about my reply.
I don’t think I felt a single emotion.
It was pure constative language.
In the morning I wrote down that when poetry works, it’s magical—when it doesn’t, it’s worse than meaningless. It’s somehow comforting to remember that poetry not working is worse than C’s vanishing. That I can find that worse-than-meaningless feeling incarnate in a book that I refuse to read. I didn’t want to wake up, but I did, and teaching was fun, and I plunged into work. “I don’t know how to take a break,” I said.
“Sodom’s delights are as dear to him in their active as in their passive form.” (Philosophy in the Bedroom 188)
I can’t make out the first word of the recording, but I’ve figured it out—the reason being it stands for such an obscure figure in my life: Gabe had a girlfriend with dark beautiful hair, cropped, like the girl in Lost Highway. // I was looking in the library for some book by John Dowland, a music score. // My dad was in the hardware store with my mom, he was using this machine to make metallic tape, and other kinds of tape, masking tape. My mom criticized my dad for making the tape so badly, it was so crinkly.
I wrote an email to Lara and an email to Zane.
I saw Praveen and John by Zeus; there was a new pastry display with beautiful cakes and viennoiseries, it was nice to hear John laugh; everyone was going on a trip to Korea, and was waiting in a steel corridor to take an elevator, or something—I stopped by a tiny little bathroom, the toilet was so close to a glass shower door that there was almost no leg space. The toilet seat was korean, electronic. I woke up from the dream and got up to pee. Before I fell asleep I was thinking about a part of yesterday’s dream which was coming back to me; something to do with being in school, and I think I went back there in today’s dream.
I bumped into K (it is in fact K) right after leaving White Hall today. If I hadn’t had UPS packages to return, I would have left from the back of the building. He was talking on the phone, so we stood facing each other for a bit before he managed to ask the person on the other end if he could call back later. I said something about having just finished teaching, and he said It’s a different world up here. And I said, So, you vanished from feeld! – Yeah… I found it too stressful. – I thought perhaps you didn’t want to see me again! – No, no, sorry, that was abrupt. – You should take my number. And he typed it in. –Oh, I wasn’t sure if it was spelled with a K or a C, that spelling is lovely, it has “iron” in it. He said he had never noticed that before.
His middle name is “Curn,” which means “grain.”
“—’s Untitled 3, a project he presented for the scholarship, is a concrete slab weighing one ton. When electrified, the slab vibrates on a set of springs.”
[Analysis]
The corridor in the dream was the one in the art building
The sting of the bee, the bee who unscrews herself
Forgetting what the bee was supposed to analogize
Being disturbed by the fact that Sade turns me on
Sade’s funny excesses of instruction—too many words!
Hunter says I seem to be thinking a lot about K.
I was trying to catch an airplane between SF and LA, and had been arguing with my mom before I left, so I was worried about missing it. The “platform” for the plane was a metro platform in DC. Dad was there; I was yelling at him while desperately trying to repack some books and a folder in my backpack, which seemed almost like a cat carrier or some bag with an unusual rigidity and depth. Later, I was sleeping in a bed (not my room, somewhere else) and Adele and Hunter were trying to wake me up. Hunter was straddling my torso, Adele was trying to scoop me up from underneath. Hunter told me that he was waking me up like this just because he was thinking of what I could accomplish during the day if I woke up early. I’m actually unsure if it was my dad or Hunter, but I suppose it’s unlikely that I would’ve replaced my dad with Hunter if Hunter hadn’t really been there. In the last part of the dream I was in a dark used bookstore with carpeted floors. On the checkout counter were several tall stacks of books, and I was looking through them for titles I wanted to buy. The man at the cash register ended up ringing up all the books in four stacks; the total came out to $249. I examined some of the books and couldn’t recognize them, so I told him it was a mistake and found that the two stacks of books I had wanted were on the floor near my feet. By then there was a line of several people with only one or two items trying to check out, so I felt guilty about having him ring up my two stacks of books. Then I started thinking about how I wanted to look at the sections under certain authors: Lawrence, James, Handke, Lacan.
I want to write poems about my fear of K; I want to understand or spend time with the vocalization of fear, to know its effects on my body. My fear of K is related to my past fear of Z but it is also related to my fear of myself.
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angel’s
Orders? and even if one of them pressed me
suddenly to his heart: I’d be consumed
in his more potent being. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we can still barely endure,
and while we stand in wonder it coolly disdains
to destroy us. Every Angel is terrifying. (First Elegy)
Every Angel is terrifying. And yet, alas,
I still sing to you, almost fatal birds of the soul,
knowing what you bring. Where are the days of Tobias,
when one of your most radiant stood at the simple doorway,
partly disguised for the trip and no longer frightening
(to the youth who peered out curiously, a youth like him).
Were the archangel now to emerge behind the stars
and take just one downward step this way:
our own thundering hearts would slay us. Who are you?
For our part, when we feel, we evaporate; ah, we breathe
ourselves out and away; from ember to ember
we give off a fainter scent. True, someone may tell us:
You’re in my blood, this room, the Spring itself
is full of you… But why? He can’t hold us,
we vanish in and around him. And the beautiful ones,
ah, who holds them back? Appearance ceaselessly
flares in their faces and vanishes. Like dew from the morning grass
what’s ours rises from us, the way heat lifts
from a steaming dish. O smile, going where? O upturned look:
new, warm, departing surge of the heart—;
alas, we are the surge. Then does the cosmic space
that we dissolve in taste of us? Do the Angels
recapture only what’s theirs, their ceaseless streamings,
or sometimes, as if by accident, does a bit of ours
get mixed in? Are we blended in their features
like the slight vagueness that complicates the looks
of pregnant women? Unnoticed by them as they
swirl back into themselves. (How could they notice?)
If only we too could find a pure, carved-out, narrow / human place, our own small strip of fertile soil / between stream and stone. For even now our heart / transcends us, just as it did those others. And no longer / can we gaze after it into images that soothe it, or / into godlike bodies where it finds a higher restraint.
If only we too could discover a pure, contained, / human place, our own strip of fruit-bearing soil / between river and rock. For our own heart always exceeds us, / as theirs did. And we can no longer follow it, gazing / into images that soothe it or into the godlike bodies / where, measured more greatly, it achieves a greater repose.
I was in a Mitsuwa and thought to walk a bit further to a Japanese bakery, one which I imagined to be like Satura cakes, and arrived at a different shopping complex. The grocery store I entered was a bit like Whole Foods. I saw Tracy there, and mom also. There was a sense that the bakery might be closed on Sunday. Mitsuwa had given out a plastic clamshell of free samples of various cookies and baklava; I remember there being an almond or pistachio cookie, the round soft ones made of almond meal with a nut in the center that I used to buy at Sigona’s market at Stanford.
It’s odd to google my name and find some testimonies of my class on Reddit which involve being described as “soft-spoken.” My dad is described as “nice” on RMP, and also as “soft spoken”; and he “cares,” and he is “knowledgeable,” but he’s also a “terrible teacher” with an “accent,” and he is “dull” and “boring.”
Today might be terrible, anxiety-ridden, unfocused, wretched.
There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects. A certainty protects it from the shameful—a certainty of which it is proud holds on to it. But simultaneously, just the same, that impetus, that spasm, that leap is drawn toward an elsewhere as tempting as it is condemned. Unflaggingly, like an inescapable boomerang, a vortex of summons and repulsion places the one haunted by it literally beside himself. (Kristeva, Powers of Horror 1)
Perhaps my greatest fear is of the state in which I perceive myself and my world as ugly. That’s what I mean by “abject”—to have thrown myself away, outside of my orbit or system or infrastructure of the beautiful, the sublime, the intense, the sexual. But if abjection is a state of being thrown out of a framework with which I have worked to define, am I ever immune to being reincorporated by it? To be “filth” is to be… soil. Filth has its use, its attraction. Still, it doesn’t make the state of being identified with filth any less fearsome. Or maybe it’s the heaviness of the sediment which makes it fearsome—there’s a physical urgency to fear associated with weight.
The abject has only one quality of the object—that of being opposed to I. If the object, however, through its opposition, settles me within the fragile texture of a desire for meaning, which, as a matter of fact, makes me ceaselessly and infinitely homologous to it, what is abject, on the contrary, the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses. A certain “ego” that merged with its master, a superego, has flatly driven it away. It lies outside, beyond the set, and does not seem to agree to the latter’s rules of the game. And yet, from its place of banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master. Without a sign (for him), it beseeches a discharge, a convulsion, a crying out. To each ego its object, to each superego its abject. It is not the white expanse or slack boredom of repression, not the translations and transformations of desire that wrench bodies, nights, and discourse; rather it is a brutish suffering that, “I" puts up with, sublime and devastated, for “I” deposits it to the father’s account [verse au père—père-version]: I endure it, for I imagine that such is the desire of the other. (ibid.)
I’m highlighting the bits of language in which weight is involved.
I spoke about my love of caryatids with Hunter today—about Rodin’s fallen caryatid holding an urn. She hasn’t allowed the vessel to spill, it occupies the highest point of the sculpture. I called it a “jug” in analysis, and was just now tempted to call it a “vase.” That it is an urn gives it more of a funereal significance. In another version she’s carrying a stone. According to the MET label, “the variant seems less weighted down by her stone than by some insupportable loss or nameless agony of the soul.” In the label for the urn version cast in bronze, there’s a quotation of Rilke’s: the rock is a “burden … from which we can find no escape.” I wonder what occurs in the ellipses of this unremarkable statement.
I’m afraid my day will be completely torqued by the dreams I had last night.
[4:27 AM] Elías’s dog. This tiny, fluffy, black-and-white dog. Barking at me, growling, it seemed like it would bite. I stayed with it until it calmed down and became cuddly and affectionate; I pet its head and then it rolled over and I touched its belly. And then Elías asked me what my “goal” was, and I said “with what?” And he said, f-something (?) — it was the name of a kind of candy that had something to do with my research.
I was teaching at a tall and narrow waterfall. The students were lined up along a trail which went from the top to the bottom of the falls. I was on the opposite side of the falls, on a high ridge, looking down at them, taking attendance. I noticed an “older” student; he wasn’t noticeably older, I just recognized him as one of my first students, from two years ago—a blond boy. He looked like Len, so I called him Len, but then realized he wasn’t currently enrolled, and that the boy who was supposed to be there wasn’t there. We talked after class, at which point he turned into the previous student, “Brady Shelley” (Alec’s friend). He told me about how he lived down south, in central Florida. His high school was full of sand. He lived almost in or adjacent to a grove of old-growth trees, the most beautiful trees, but the best trees were actually in New York, in a botanical garden; they had been taken away. The trees left in the grove in Florida looked like they were about to die. He said he believed they would die whenever he decided he would die. I saw this grove of trees in the dream, just the mass of them, not the shapes of the individual trees. This student had composed something beautiful, a strip of horizontal text, which I also saw. When I returned to the scene of the falls the other students were laughing about the confusion of the names.
[6:06 AM] “Past paracord passations”—I was describing the state of walking around the block by the post office in the evening in a white cotton slip dress; I could barely do it. I was slightly afraid of men, of being raped. My legs were swinging, trembling, they lacked regular “muscle tone.” I thought of them as hysterical symptoms. I was relaying this to K, as if in voiceover.
I woke up with restless legs after this dream. I had to pee and drink water.
[7:58 AM] I was talking to Hunter about the tragedy of having two hands and two feet, rather than four legs. I saw an animal run across the “screen” of the dream—it certainly had four legs and moved with an absolutely continuous, stable gait. It was rather small, perhaps like the dog from the first dream, but completely white, I think. I told Hunter to do something, to touch me in some particular way, and it embarrassed me to have requested this, which may be why I don’t remember what it is that I requested. I remained with restless legs after waking up from this.
From Studies on Hysteria, Case 5. Elisabeth von R.:
In the case of Fraulein von R., however, if one pressed or pinched the hyperalgesic skin and muscles of her legs, her face assumed a peculiar expression, which was one of pleasure rather than pain. She cried out and I could not help thinking that it was as though she was having a voluptuous tickling sensation—her face flushed, she threw back her head and shut her eyes and her body bent backwards. (137)
We recommended the continuation of systematic kneading and faradization of the sensitive muscles, regardless of the resulting pain, and I reserved to myself treatment of her legs with high tension electric currents, in order to be able to keep in touch with her. Her question whether she should force herself to walk was answered with a decided 'yes'. (138)
Looking at her, one could not help thinking of the poet’s words:
Das Maskchen da weissagt verborgnen Sinn.
In the first instance, therefore, I was able to do without hypnosis, with the reservation, however, that I could make use of it later if in the course of her confession material arose to the elucidation of which her memory was unequal. Thus it came about that in this, the first full-length analysis of a hysteria undertaken by me, I arrived at a procedure which I later developed into a regular method and employed deliberately. This procedure was one of clearing away the pathogenic psychical material layer by layer, and we liked to compare it with the technique of excavating a buried city. I would begin by getting the patient to tell me what was known to her and I would carefully note the points at which some train of thought remained obscure or some link in the causal chain seemed to be missing. And afterwards I would penetrate into deeper layers of her memories at these points by carrying out an investigation under hypnosis or by the use of some similar technique. The whole work was, of course, based on the expectation that it would be possible to establish a completely adequate set of determinants for the events concerned. I shall discuss presently the methods used for the deep investigation.
Today has been lonely and difficult—perhaps being immersed in Henry James is causing this, but I also think it has something to do with my sense of this website—and of my mind’s—potential oversaturation.
When I walked back from Greenstar I thought to myself that the most important question was of whether I was ugly or hot; I decided that the only sustainable conclusion was that I am both ugly and hot. Also I came to the conclusion just now that I want to be a great artist, even if that means living a terrible life. This has less to do with immortality than with the desire to be a great artist at every moment of my being. I’m thinking of R.W. Fassbinder right now.
I want to be heavy: like a rock.
I don’t think I’m weighed down by K anymore: I’m fully weighed down by myself.
I was trying to plan a road trip to California while driving there. Saw tiny alpacas and thought about going through Colorado on the way there. Something about eating eggplants—a clear reference to the beautiful eggplants I saw at Greenstar, and my decision not to buy any.
I read the Elisabeth von R. case and was astounded by its sense of intrigue, its stepwise mode of accumulation, its relevance to my life. My recall of the rest of the day is poor. Began it by writing an email about sheepskins, and writing in my notebook about things I wanted to purchase. Became immensely immersed in research again.
Father administering GRE/AP test with various writing prompts.
Final essay was about eating fruit. I could only write a few sentences, but they formed a complete unit. My dad urged me to write a bit more, I didn’t.
I was unsure about what I had written, but in retrospect it looked a bit like a prose poem. I had fun during the dream, though I was also stressed.
Went swimming and the locker room was packed with blonde girls, some of them taking showers with their boyfriends. I entered a stall with some other girls and saw the curve of one butt. I felt confident about my body.
Everything is a haze today. Restlessness in my thighs, it must be a conversion of something? I took an hour-long walk, it didn’t help.
Worried about inability to convey to Hunter the importance of the gait. I mean how would I verify that this was affecting? To anyone besides K?
What mattered today was that I wore red lipstick, black mohair, black merino dress. I looked bad in the camera but good in the mirror.
Went to house of man who looked like Vincent Lindon, the “daddy” of Titane, who was caring for his dying father. He lived in the woods. I was supposed to deliver some drug; transit there was by bike, I guess, and this reminded me a bit of the catasetum dream. I tried to sleep with him, though I wasn’t attracted to him, by lying in bed with him. We stopped before intercourse; I rubbed my vulva on his penis. Later I found some brown crystalline but also somewhat molten substance on my cunt which had a drying effect; it stung a little. I thought it was “smack.” I didn’t have a strong emotional response to this or any part of the dream. There were some other young people at his house—a bit like the teenagers in Lost Highway—I thought he might be a drug dealer.
No dream on the twelfth!
Read most of (“gobbled down”) A History of an Infantile Neurosis last night. Legs were restless, woke up about an hour after going to bed to urinate. Thought about how the shower scene in the dream on the 10th had probably invoked Titane. I was reminded of this by Freud’s references to castration—the tail being docked off of the wolf like the nipple biting in the movie. I felt that my restless legs certainly had something to do with a desire for sex, that they had something to do with dizziness and falling down, that it was all a “conversion” of the earlier event: the fainting and tremors which occurred a few days before I met Alec. Vincent Lindon’s character shakes violently when he injects his T. This last dream was my version of “Irma’s Injection.” The wish is to be an accomplice to the birth of psychoanalysis and of the interpretation of dreams.
In the movie the characters dance—I want to see K dance—I dance to John Adams in my room. I remember how exhilarating it was to hear an electric guitar in a concert hall for the first time, emerging from the texture of a symphony or the orchestral part of a concerto. I’m not attracted to Hunter, but I want him to put his hand between my thighs and wrench them open—examine the “smack,” taste it, tell me what it is. Or I want K to take a bit of his lung out for me to submit to forensics. Black tar from La Brea. Anaerobic digestion, hydrogen sulfide. Eleven months of hair growth. I think the heroin is his heroin, not mine.
And the analyst is not—as is sometimes thought—the authority that simply refers the subject back to herself, pointing out how she is in fact responsible for what is so systematically “happening”to her; the analyst is, rather and above all, the authority that has to give all this “happening” the time (and the space) to come to the subject. This could be one of the main reasons for the long duration of analysis, for the precipitation of knowledge does not really solve anything: we can come to know what there is to know quite soon in this process, yet this insight of knowledge is not enough; the work of analysis is also needed, the work that is not simply the work of analyzing (things), but much more the work of repetition, work as “entropy.” (Zupančič, The Odd One In 18)
13
Restaurant with one attractive, mean-looking korean boy sitting in it. I looked at him from a distant table with seduction in mind. He briefly looked back and then got up to pay, aggressively, as if he knew my intention and needed to spurn me.
Trying to take a depression nap in a room where the only light is red, like a darkroom. Woke up, told Lara about my bad mood, conversation shifted to something else. The bed is a bit like the one in the Bed-Stuy apartment.
Various people in my department are also MFA students at Pratt, except it’s in Chicago. At a bright exhibition space with a corporate atmosphere, like a repurposed car dealership or clothing store. Students have posters up with their information printed on them. I see that Praveen is secretly a painter, and Amrita makes something too. Wondering if I should be a “writer or an artist.”
At a store, like the PS1 gift shop, with mom and sister. The store is selling a variety of tabi shoes, like the ones by Drogheria Crivellini. I try one on which is size 7 1/2. Another one is size 7 9/16, or some other number with an eighth or sixteenth.
14
Sister telling me about a dream in which frogs and toads jumped in and out of a large piece of excrement which was almost like a universe. I was lying horizontally in a sleeping bag with my legs on the bathroom counter and the rest of my body in the air. I adjusted the sleeping bag and exposed my lower body somewhat, at least my buttocks. She pointed with glee and said that “it’s bigger than yours!” She seems to have been referring to the shit as being bigger than my genitals. The implication was that I had a penis and she was discovering her “castration.”
I’m taking a shower thinking of going to Taiwan and Japan. Worried about it impeding analysis. Asking Zane if he will be there. I’m with Zane and just learned that his father died. I’m weeping bitterly, he’s an orphan now.
I almost lost June. I knew I wasn’t going to lose her. But I didn’t know that I knew. I hated that this was happening—she somehow managed to get out of the harness, which I didn’t imagine wouldn’t be tight enough. Followed her around the house several times, but figured any semblance of a chase was going to make things worse. Propped open the door and she went inside. It was very quiet, she was hiding under a bed. Felt the most immense sense of fatality; it was like I had suddenly become guilty of murder, and that if I did indeed lose her my life would certainly be over. I would deserve to be killed. What would I say? Would I have lied about it? Say that she ran out the front door when I was entering? I couldn’t live with myself if I lost June.
Being a pervert means I act like an answer. When June got loose I lifted my heavy camera and snapped some pictures of her, as if this was what was supposed to happen. I suppose I was petrified into submission by the sense that my superego knew that I wouldn’t lose her. My superego says you are the answer to the problem: just take your fucking pictures. My ego complied but couldn’t sustain what the superego asked of it—I only too a few pictures of her before my body forced me to put the camera down. When she ran to the edge of the property, the little “cliff,” I had to approach. But I approached from an angle so that I could appear at the border of the “cliff” and ward her in the opposite direction. I still followed her around, as if I had an intention of lunging at her, capturing her, dominating her with sheer force. But the fantasy was so vivid that it didn’t need to be enacted, I wasn’t curious about what it would feel like to feel her resist.
This sort of unruffled, nonplussed way of going about things was inherited from my father, from observing him interact with animals, and with my mother. When I was walking to Gimme Coffee I had to ask myself if my dream had my father in it. In some very obvious way I didn’t want to think about it. Connection between the “loss” of June and that other loss. Plainly speaking, I was feeling quite guilty about Zane’s father’s death, and the implicit death of his mother.
Woke up to email in which mom has bought tickets to Taipei: December 8-31.
I can’t believe I’m being made to go to Asia at this time. Would/will I ever feel some kind of organic need to go to Taiwan or Japan in the future? Probably not; someone would have to force me to go. Is there anywhere I feel an organic need to visit? Southern California? Nottingham? South Korea? What’s going to happen to me there? It feels like I am obliged to do this for my mother, because “time is running out.”
Pulling out the direct address: Zane, I’m going to be in Japan at some point in December. Somehow I doubt you’ll be there at the same time as me, and maybe not in a similar location, and even if we were there at the same time in a similar place it seems like it might be strange to meet. I have no sense of what you think of me these days or what you think of the proceedings of your life. What’s interesting to me is the fact that I’ll perhaps be in a similar place that you’re now in during a similar range of time.
Notion of not doing analysis for a month feels almost as terrible as the notion of losing the neighbor’s cat. I am probably just saying this about the present: why do I feel so terrible about analysis all of a sudden, like there’s something wrong with the way I’ve asked questions and created answers? “I don’t know what it would mean to touch you.”
When he said that I said, what do you mean, do you mean I don’t know what it would mean to touch you or what it would mean to touch you. And later he said I don’t know what that dream means, I don’t know yet. And it’s funny because it’s like I already told you what it means—it means I have your smack on my pussy and it burns and dries a little bit and I find the irritation not very significant but also a bit pleasurable as a memory.
Reading off the cane of a catasetum, text in black ink.
He (Hunter) said it was difficult, difficult to interpret.
Mom said something about something being annoying.
I saw Len in the street, crossing a busy road in a city.
He acknowledged me but kept on walking anxiously.
I crossed the street, as if to chase him down.
He said he really couldn’t meet, almost ran off.
I was working on—he was working on an opera, a ballet?
A cardboard box stage, the edges braided with thick red velvet ribbon.
Minimal backdrop, some stain of color, like The Rite of Spring.
I’m very annoyed about this issue with font sizes appearing erratically on mobile.
The piano teacher gave me the wrong score. I tried to respond to Laurent’s email, but he was in the same room. I was rehearsing for some sort of a performance. Danish was rubbing his feet together to produce some kind of a percussive effect. I was doing the same.
Hunter, Henry James. HJ = HR?
Was waiting in a store, the plan was to meet mom there.
Then I was in Henry James’s house, waiting for him to show up.
I came up with a typology of three types of dreams:
- You ….
- You …
- You meet and talk to Henry James.
I believe I told Hunter about this typology in the dream. If not, I simply thought it to myself. I’m guessing that the first two items were something like 1) You see Hunter, and 2) You do something with Hunter.
Students were invited to my house for a class. Only about seven showed up, and were hidden in improbably small spaces—between stacks of books in a bookshelf, in cabinets. Tried to show them different pans: cast iron, wok, etc. Found orchids I had been “rehabbing” doing well outside: prosthechea, lycaste, miltoniopsis. This was at the basement level of the house in Virginia, outside the screen door. Implied that my dad had been watching over them. The dream seems to refer in multiple ways to Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century and Memoria, I saw the latter last night. Also a simple anxiety dream about (1) Eray’s friend using my dosa tawa with a plastic handle in the oven, and (2) today’s class being a “workshop” or “work day.”
During the day I decided to have no ambitions with respect to my work’s fulfillment. I did errands related to potatoes. I looked at sweater dresses and velvet skirts and ribbed modal and merino pants. I hacked at the roots of white-flowered weeds—their stems were very strong and pliant like rope, and their root systems very dense and compact but robust. I hadn’t touched plants or the earth in that way for months, it seemed important and good. In the evening, I bought a slice of cheesecake, and then went for a harsh run up the hill. I saw many boys in red shorts and grey tees sprint up the hill in groups of three. I felt definitively weaker but it was good to feel the lump-like feeling in my heart as it tried so hard to support the easier movements of my limbs.
The dream involved some donkeys of different colors being herded into a dusty space in an arid region. I was taking pictures of them with my macro lens. I realized the different donkeys had different owners. There was a long table set up opposite the entrance, and two animals were on display, as if to compete in a show. There was a young canine that looked like an african wild dog with the coloration of a leopard under its head. There was a gray lamb to its right. The owners were talking about K-pop. The donkeys were not part of the show.
I don’t know that I’ll ever choose to write about the dreams of the eighteenth, or the events of the nineteenth, not here at least.
This evening I found a poem I wrote in an email to Z on January 11 2022. I was searching for one of the most distraught emails I have ever written, which was composed after having found the commit to faye that involved the birthday poem to E. I had been wondering if the line in the comment in the code, which included the words “thorough” and “loved,” had in fact been addressed to me, as I had assumed from the day I found it that it was not. I never made it clear to anyone besides Hunter that I was so sure about this, and wanted to verify from the email that this was indeed the case. It is a bit weird to imagine the page having been created with the expectation that the recipient of the poem look at the source code, and also a bit weird, but significantly less so, to imagine that it had been designed with a secondary viewer in mind, one who might see only the source code. It could go either way, but I’m just surprised that I didn’t seriously consider the second possibility until after my more fortunate encounter with watching github on the nineteenth.
I’m surprised to find my poem, which I like; I searched the title to make sure it hadn’t been cribbed from somewhere else.
FRESH AS A NOUN
This isn’t the limit, this isn’t the terminus of the novel.
It is an inflection point. it is true and right but it is a turn.
here’s my turn: hazy, middling and atmospheric :
the exquisite combinations of irreplaceable parts :
hard words like “never, not, nearly, almost, ever”
round words like “front, back, side, behind, around, under”
words like “waist, chest, neck, wrist, stomach”
a basket of dried-up elocutions,
“the most searing acts of exposure”
“dry velvet softness of the skin”
“I slough off this sloughing off”
“is uncreated seed of insight”
“the soul doing the opposite of dilation”
“the soul redeemed through sexual acts alone”
“shattering the desiccated film membrane”
“the gloaming is not a verb, but a noun”
“solecisms are sometimes more than cute”
“the morning is when I see what I lose"
“touch as the least fallen of the senses”—
there is a certain dormitive quality to it
as eraser, as eraser, as eternal fresh
I went to the PARG meeting and we discussed “Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason,” which I’ve read several times over by now. I didn’t have to leave the room, didn’t feel like weeping. I was composed, but activated, felt at my best as a listener and interpreter and questioner, and furnished objects around which the abstract could be scaffolded and manipulated. It was a small group: John, Praveen, Dror and I showed up. I liked how the discussion ended with the superego, I liked how stimulated John seemed by the page from Lacan’s Seminar VII on “You” and “Me” and “I” as instances of Das Ding. It was a good discussion. A jawful to think about later. I felt normal.
We have a certain chemistry or rapport when we’re talking about psychoanalysis, literature, words and concepts, John and I, but when we walked down the hill afterwards, with Praveen, there was a certain quietness which couldn’t be described as peaceful. John didn’t ask me about anything. Perhaps he was waiting to see if I would ask. I spoke more comfortably with Praveen. But there was some sharing: I liked the way John described the disgusting way in which the boys who had been sitting behind him in Klarman had been saying the word “bro”—like dogs slobbering over a large piece of beef, calling out to the other dogs to come eat. I told him about the description of the sound in Memoria with the concrete ball and the steel chamber and the ocean and the falling body’s impact on the ground. He asked a pair of boys throwing a football to throw it to him, and he caught it while holding a plastic cup of coffee, and then threw it quite far.
I’m definitely still freaked out by the whole thing, by the ghostliness of John, by the fact that I would rather not see him around anymore, which probably means that I might continue to have strange outbursts of emotion in dreams. It’s unlikely that I would be compelled to cry in his actual presence, but there’s something in me which hates him, and that aggressive instinct implies that if I didn’t destroy my mental representation of him, which would involve all my memories of him, then I would continue to be affected. It seems simple enough, to shut him away, to be polite where he does exist. But I doubt the efficacy of this turning away. In reality I am probably wishing for the continuation of these sudden turns by which the ghost reappears. Still, I’m quite sure that I’m not curious about him for his own sake, and only curious about how he’s processed me. I want to know about the tragic nature of our interactions, I want to witness its doomed aspect.
I am also thinking that perhaps it isn’t worth getting to know Keiron better, that I should focus more on my friendship with Xinyu, and remain open to more spontaneous and random sexual encounters with people who are easier to process and deal with.
I still want to ask John what I asked him in the dream: Why don’t we see each other anymore? Are we enemies now? It seems cruel to want just one thing from someone in this way. What I want from him is “the end.”
Tears fell again.
Anyway, I’m staring at the word 取り繕う.
It’s a difficult word to translate; the first kanji is so capacious, the other far more specific, but complex—difficult to project the possible combinations of their senses onto a single english word. Something about kanji seems to lay etymology bare, while in roman alphabet it’s easier to obfuscate the flavors of things.
(All this business makes me very happy, but…)
Dror doesn’t seem to know what I mean when I say I’ve been isolating myself. It’s not like I’m doing it in order to do something else—not consciously, at least. It’s more like an act of breathing, subtended by the memories I have of people, people who for the most part produce in me a concern with the fact that the connection so easily produced while with them is unreliable. I refuse people because I come to dislike them for not showing up. I believe that we should want a lot from one another, that we should feel upset when our conditions are not met. This isn’t equivalent to demanding that our desires be satisfied, that disappointment be avoided. I want to desire without an expectation of satisfaction, but I don’t want to live in a world where I deny my dissatisfaction. I do not believe in a protocol for “making things right.”
What I am saying is that I isolate myself out of a petty dissatisfaction with the world, but that I do it out of love for the things and people whom I want to support.
My dream [4:59 AM] was dense with transformations. In the very beginning I was in some building and Rafael said he needed a frog for a class project. I told him I knew where to find one. I took him to the web a large black widow had made in the corner of an outdoor arch, which was constructed in the style of a california mission. We kept on walking for a bit, and when we came back, the spider had caught something large and bolus-like. It looked like an apple at first, and then like a cattle pill, and then I saw that it was covered with fungus gnats, and that it was a large hornet. I captured the spider with a net and put it inside a glass carafé. It became a swallowtail butterfly. When we looked at it again, it was a spider. I told him about how venomous it is, since he was almost touching its abdomen—that it could probably kill a person. He was so shocked to learn this that he released it, and I was upset, perhaps because I wanted to at least return it to its web. Then I was at the shore again with my sister and we saw huge frogs in the distance, moving between the algae and the corals with round little eyes near the top of its head, but they were green and had yellow spots. They were like african clawed frogs, but gigantic. As I walked along the shore away from the area with the frogs, I discovered that D.H. Lawrence had written a poem, but he said he didn’t want to read it, because it had to do with friends of his who had died, H.D. being one of them. I saw images of him with H.D., who looked like an exquisitely pretty girl I knew in high school, who had dyed her hair red. He said something about murders and how they often fail to figure out how someone dies.
In the second dream [6:28] Hunter said he couldn’t meet until later, so I went and did some tasks. Later, I called him back—he was mid-sentence, saying something to another analysand: “There’s a sense in which…” The man, young with dark hair, wearing a button-down shirt, responded with some rumination which included the question “Am I a doctor or was I a doctor”?—at which point I said, “You probably need to kick me out."— Hunter kicked me out; I couldn’t see if he had seen me.
Xinyu’s recommendation: Gillian Rose’s Love’s Work
Xinyu’s story about abandoning a friend he disliked by hopping on a scooter with another friend and then later sending the friend Thomas Hardy’s “Hap.” I thought he mean that he sent it to the abandoned friend, but it was even more absurd that he sent it to the friend who was his accomplice in abandonment
Laurent Ferri talking at length about his taxidermies
Since he knows Latin he immediately knew that the genus name for the puffin, fratercula, means little brother—just like mine… But the bird actually gets its name from “friar”—since the coloration of the plumage resembles a french monk’s robes.
Enjoyed the strange length to which Laurent, Xinyu and I were able to sustain a conversation about phobias of animals and of insects in particular. Xinyu wants to be in a place with no insects—perhaps somewhere rather polluted. There are no insects in Beijing. And not anything really in Iceland. But if you simply continue to not wear glasses, and continue to be colorblind, as you are, then this isn’t really an issue, Xinyu!
Angel not recognizing me because of my detransition
After-conference dinner at Laurent’s house: talk begetting talk in a way that doesn’t seem fruitless but which isn’t so easy to transform into fruit, and which is thus supplementary to the normal way of silent living. My relation to X is so good that it is hard for me to think of it in terms of any particular structure. He feels more to me like a little beast. Our first e-interaction was him responding to the D.H. Lawrence “rabbit” poem; there are so many little rabbit figurines and prints in Laurent’s house.
I told him the joke about wanting to come back from Asia with a renewed sense of Asianness—meaning that I’d come back with blonde hair and blue contacts, because in Taipei at least it’s such a common fashion that there’s no real direct association with racial hierarchy associated with it.
I mean to be honest there is a thrill in that—I am basing this off of the memory of an incredibly attractive man I saw the last time I was in Taipei, on the metro, with hair so yellow it was golden and eyes of the turquoise blue you can only see as artificial.
I don’t think I could go blonde without very strange makeup.
X’s homosexuality somehow disturbs the stability of my interest in sexual difference. I would like to make a diagram of this.
I needed at least the last twenty-four hours to metabolize the fear I have surrounding seeing Z again. I am still metabolizing it. It’s true that I experience fear in relation to the things that are supposed to bring me happiness. To be less bashful about it: I’m afraid of how happy I was to be around him last November. It wasn’t even happiness—it was a kind of state of existence which is a condition for pure experience. It’s not right to call it neutral, but it’s definitely not worth associating it with colors. There was something perfect about it, like it was an outline. I think it’s like the nominative pleasure Zane seems to take in collecting objects, words, in learning the names for things. I think this has an animistic quality to it. It was so peaceful.
X’s comment was really funny. I mean how else can I describe it. With a stupid figure of speech? Was it a “bolt of lightning”?
I might be monotheistic—I might be patriarchal—I might be a primal daddy, the one who gets all the women and who makes all his sons jealous. So they gang up on him and kill him and steal his women. And then Zane could be eastern, buddhist, shinto, etc. I like pronouns and particles and he likes nouns.
It was a peace which couldn’t be cut into by the future events.
Xinyu’s comment on the latest gloomwaif post was on the line about pondering the bitterness of the coffee. He asked to clarify that the author is american, and followed with some incredulous noises, and then said, “no whiteman is capable of writing this!”
I wasn’t sure if this was meant to be kind of complimentary, or what it meant exactly. He confessed that he used to write things like this when he was a teenager, so he was resistant to it. He was resolved to show it to the most American man we might find—Teddy—and to ask if it was something he could conceive of writing. Teddy didn’t show up to the dinner.
I told X it could just be read as writing in the mode of Tanizaki. Since it’s prefaced by the thing about hiding (隠す), a sense of pastiche seems embedded in the text. I remember Eri telling me once that Zane had given them a copy of In Praise of Shadows while also disclaiming that the book was somehow shameful, that it represented a kind of orientalism internal to the author’s own preoccupation with the West. But of course, this is only a cover for the realness of it, its adolescent realness.
I brought it up because we were talking about questions, the absurdity of posing questions for texts. And so I wanted his perspective on the questions asked in the text, which for me at least hold a kind of embarrassing apostrophic address.
He read the piece first in Chinese and then in English.
Homophobic/Xenophobic instead of Homophobic/Homosexual
I’m so homophobic.
When I read Japanese I feel the pressure of the delay of the end of the sentence; so many particles in between clauses, which take on a thing-like quality. I’m glad I know enough to be able to segment out words and verbal inflections.
。。。が の の に な が と。。。
This post is an example of me enjoying thinking about my life too much, and not following the ways of Xinyu. I don’t care!
Somehow it seems very important to declare that all my man clothes are too large for me and that it’s a shame that I spent so long in them. I have gotten a bit smaller but it’s still a shame.
I made 8g/250 mL of coffee. It was smooth and aromatic and savory like an oily nut and somewhat acidic. I have a hard time perceiving the bitterness of coffee unless it’s roasted quite a bit. I did, however, eat two slices of milk bread that my mom had left behind more than a year ago—they were sitting like sleeping beauties in the freezer. And when I toasted them I burnt one side enough to be able to perceive the stony bitterness of them, not even the acid before that hits.
I got on my bike to buy crickets. I saw some mice. It occurs to me that I should name the spider only after it comes of age.
When I walk around in tabi shoes I notice people staring at my feet. Everyone walking around the commons seems to be hanging out with friends, with family, or on a date. Yesterday I saw a young asian woman wearing distressed red leather boots and a long black ragged-hemmed dress with strips of tulle; I told Xinyu that they probably cost at least $1000, because I recognized them as Guidi boots, which seem difficult to imitate.
“A lion,” Mitsutsuka nodded.
“Yeah. A lioness. Bare skin, no fur,” I said. “She’s in the middle of a savanna. Nothing but grass as far as the eye can see. Every now and then, the wind blows and cuts across the grass like a green wave. It’s so peaceful. And there’s the lioness. It’s not long after her hunt, so her stomach’s full, and there’s nothing for her to do. Nothing at all. She has no fear, no worries, no homework or any other work—those are just human ideas that mean nothing to her . . . Her body’s strong and so’s her heart, so no one dares to bother her . . . She runs through the grass, eats her fill, then curls up under the shade of a tree. That’s where she sleeps until her eyes open again. The breeze feels nice and the grass smells like home. Everything is quiet, humming with energy, her paws are full of power. Thinking about nothing, sleeping the whole day . . . When she sleeps, the lion’s entire world is sleep. So she sleeps . . . She gives herself to sleep . . . And nothing else exists, not a single thought, only sleep. It’s as if when she’s asleep, sleep and the world are one and the same.” I spun my neck around and blinked slowly. “That was how I slept when I was little.”
(Mieko Kawakami, All the Lovers in the Night)
When I actually woke up it was from two dreams, neither of which felt particularly important. Something about being in Laurent’s house, with Laurent F. telling me he had decided to paint a red room dark green. And another dream in which John was faintly there, and I had to go somewhere, run somewhere, transport something. I ended up running past all the most destitute and disfigured people in the city. But when I woke up I felt truly calm, and then felt my lower body engorging itself, and I saw on instagram an image of a dog with the smaller head of a dog attached to the top of its neck. It reminded me somewhat of the discussion of the soul from yesterday. Like the smaller dog was the anima of the bigger one. I thought it was a taxidermy, but read some comments about how disgusting it was, and found that it had been alive and that it was a surgical creation and that it had only survived twenty-three hours. I read an article about the russian surgeon who had performed the feat, and I said to myself I would collect some quotations and write about it. There was some relationship between the libidinal impulse and a desire to cry and a tenderness I felt towards the strange tragedy of the dog with a smaller, second head. Something else about the transplantation of the heart to the inguinal region, how it didn’t work, how the heart needs to be in the thorax to operate properly. Otherwise it starts using the rest of the body’s resources to sustain itself… In some ways this was the most vivid part of my day, and I nearly forgot about it.
coronary coitus.
I do not remember any dream from the night.
I woke up when it was still dark, during the sixth hour.
The previous night I had pondered some inconvenient departure and arrival times, and this morning discovered something better: Arrival at 17:30 on the 12th, departure at 13:00 on the 19th. I felt a sense of guilt, purchasing these tickets, it felt like a theft. I still have not sent my mother a birthday drawing. I did not even begin to seriously draw. I considered some subjects late at night but thought about how I believe in photography and writing more than drawing right now. I used that evening to watch the latest Claire Denis film, which transfixed me in my terror but made that terror soft. Whatever is written here is difficult for me to read. I don’t trust myself to chop out words when I’m in a completely different mood, but the garish colors seem to harm me.
In the morning I made coffee, and ate vada wrapped in perilla leaves, and shaved my legs below the knee, and wore the black merino dress with a new blue rain jacket. I did this in a heavy daze, and not out of happiness. Perhaps moved by the guilt into arbitrary activity.
I spent hours writing my mom a letter this evening and I am not done.
I need to read Kafka’s Letter to the Father in its entirety, soon.
I want to tell Zane that I am not terrified of the bad, but of the good.
Is this supposed to make one smile, or is it supposed to make one still?
Twice I woke up in order to urinate; both times I emptied the silicone cup, the second time it was not full but it was leaking. I washed my stained clothes with hydrogen peroxide, which foamed warm, and with yellow bar soap. I didn’t dream; I don’t seem to care to dream, but I dreamt on twenty-six days of the month. When I dream a lot I discover that most of the dreams do not interest me, and that many involve my mom, sister, and father. There were two that I didn’t record anywhere but remember. There is a third I didn’t record and no longer remember.
I like hearing Z report on sad men speaking at bars. I didn’t so much as look anyone in the eye this weekend, save vendors at the farmer’s market. I went for a nice run. I saw various instagram stories, none of which interested me. On Sunday I mostly felt it was absurd that about half of the population doesn’t menstruate, which added to my unwillingness to check up on other people. It’s a bit strange or perhaps totally symptomatic that in this period of interest in feminism I have no female friends and am besides becoming more picky about who I spend time with, more monological. It’s that veneer of force which is indistinguishable from madness; sometimes it’s cute and people like it (Kusama), other times it ends in a life of crime (Solanas)
When I returned home around noon, the menstrual cup was completely filled to the brim, and when I saw how much fluid had spilled into the toilet I laughed. The toilet is an unfortunate site of beauty because unless the hour is just right there isn’t enough light penetrating its waters to take a decent photograph. I wonder what my endometrium was like for the past six years. It seems like I’ve shed at least 88 mL of fluid. Does six years dormant mean I get to undergo menopause later?
I don’t know what “11-22.md” will look like.
I suppose I will have to fill it with the question of what it means to write diaristically. For some reason I am super enthused by the notion of Z registering things from the outside world while I become super involuted. I want to be 18, 19, 20, but female this time.
The “problem” with my feminism is that it would be about my love for men—both circumstantial, fleeting, and the more lasting kind, and both the stuff of fantasy and the stuff of reality; it wouldn’t be a technology for separation or separateness, but a technology for witnessing the knitting point between things (what things—difference? separation?)
The White Peacock is impossible to want to finish. But I am at the end today. A good little bit in “The Scarp Slope” has to do with the landscape “forgetting” him:
I wanted to be recognised by something. I said to myself that the dryads were looking out for me from the wood’s edge. But as I advanced they shrank, and glancing wistfully, turned back like pale flowers falling in the shadow of the forest. I was a stranger, an intruder. Among the bushes a twitter of lively birds exclaimed upon me. Finches went leaping past in bright flashes, and a robin sat and asked rudely: “Hello! Who are you?”
The bracken lay sere under the trees, broken and chavelled by the restless wild winds of the long winter.
The trees caught the wind in their tall netted twigs, and the young morning wind moaned at its captivity. As I trod the discarded oak-leaves and the bracken they uttered their last sharp gasps, pressed into oblivion. The wood was roofed with a wide young sobbing sound, and floored with a faint hiss like the intaking of the last breath. Between, was all the glad out-peeping of buds and anemone flowers and the rush of birds. I, wandering alone, felt them all, the anguish of the bracken fallen face-down in defeat, the careless dash of the birds, the sobbing of the young wind arrested in its haste, the trembling, expanding delight of the buds. I alone among them could hear the whole succession of chords.
Fishing up moments in which John Donne seems most loveable:
I had to look up Heath Ledger. He seems adorable.
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. (“Meditations”)
Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
Purpled thy nail, in blood of innocence?
Wherein could this flea guilty be,
Except in that drop which it sucked from thee? (“The Flea”)
Thy beams, so reverend and strong
Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long;
If her eyes have not blinded thine, (“The Sun Rising”)
Lawrence’s Cyril being a conflicted little proto-feminist, or merely jealous:
More pretty physiognomy:
“The race-horse, Bonny-Boy—Boney Boy I call him—came bouncing round like a spiral egg-whish. Then I saw our Georgie rush up screaming, nearly spitting the moustache off his face, and fetch the horse a cut with the whip. It went off like a flame along hot paraffin. The kid shrieked and clung. Georgie went rushing after him, running staggery, and swearing, fairly screaming,—awful—‘a lily-livered little swine!’ The high lanky race-horse went larroping round as if it was going mad. I was dazed.”
Like a tree that is falling, going soft and pale and rotten, clammy with small fungi, he stood leaning against the gate, while the dim afternoon drifted with a flow of thick sweet sunshine past him, not touching him.
The shape of this novel is as follows:
There is a skeleton, or frame, called Free Women, which is a conventional short novel, about 60,000 words long, and which could stand by itself. But it is divided into five sections and separated by stages of the four Notebooks, Black, Red, Yellow and Blue. The Notebooks are kept by Anna Wulf, a central character of Free Women. She keeps four, and not one because, as she recognises, she has to separate things off from each other, out of fear of chaos, of formlessness—of breakdown. Pressures, inner and outer, end the Notebooks; a heavy black line is drawn across the page of one after another. But now that they are finished, from their fragments can come something new, The Golden Notebook.
Throughout the Notebooks people have discussed, theorised, dogmatised, labelled, compartmented—sometimes in voices so general and representative of the time that they are anonymous, you could put names to them like those in the old Morality Plays, Mr Dogma and Mr I-Am-Free-Because-I-Belong-Nowhere, Miss I-Must-Have-Love-and-Happiness and Mrs. I-Have-to-Be-Good-at-Everything-I-Do, Mr Where-Is-a-Real-Woman? and Miss Where-Is-a-Real-Man?, Mr I’m-Mad-Because-They-Say-I-Am, and Miss Life-through-Experiencing-Everything, Mr I-Make-Revolution-and-Therefore-I-Am, and Mr and Mrs If-We-Deal-Very-Well-with-This-Small-Problem-Then-Perhaps-We-Can-Forget-We-Daren’t-Look-at-the-Big-Ones. But they have also reflected each other, been aspects of each other, given birth to each other’s thoughts and behaviour—are each other, form wholes. In the inner Golden Notebook, things have come together, the divisions have broken down, there is formlessness with the end of fragmentation—the triumph of the second theme, which is that of unity. Anna and Saul Green the American “break down.” They are crazy, lunatic, mad—what you will. They “break down” into each other, into other people, break through the false patterns they have made of their pasts, the patterns and formulas they have made to shore up themselves and each other, dissolve. They hear each other’s thoughts, recognise each other in themselves. Saul Green, the man who has been envious and destructive of Anna, now supports her, advises her, gives her the theme for her next book, Free Women—an ironical title, which begins: “The two women were alone in the London flat.” And Anna, who has been jealous of Saul to the point of insanity, possessive and demanding, gives Saul the pretty new notebook, The Golden Notebook, which she has previously refused to do, gives him the theme for his next book, writing in it the first sentence: “On a dry hillside in Algeria a soldier watched the moonlight glinting on his rifle.” In the inner Golden Notebook, which is written by both of them, you can no longer distinguish between what is Saul and what is Anna, and between them and the other people in the book.
This theme of “breakdown,” that sometimes when people “crack up” it is a way of self-healing, of the inner self’s dismissing false dichotomies and divisions, has of course been written about by other people, as well as by me, since then. But this is where, apart from the odd short story, I first wrote about it. Here it is rougher, more close to experience, before experience has shaped itself into thought and pattern—more valuable perhaps because it is rawer material.
But nobody so much as noticed this central theme, because the book was instantly belittled, by friendly reviewers as well as by hostile ones, as being about the sex war, or was claimed by women as a useful weapon in the sex war.
I have been in a false position ever since, for the last thing I have wanted to do was to refuse to support women.
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook, “Introduction (1971)”
Learned the word “contumacious” from Doris Lessing. I didn’t read The Golden Notebook earlier in life even though my mom explicitly recommended it and had a rather conspicuous copy around. I didn’t read it because I could plainly see it was for girls. I didn’t read Virginia Woolf in high school for the same reason.