Hunter,

I bought a slice of cheesecake from the cake store, it cost eight dollars. I like this store because its location makes it feel like a bit of a secret. It’s close enough to me that I can run out to it impulsively in the evenings, and they open until 7 PM. It’s also the only black-owned bakery I’ve entered in my entire life, which is a guess, but I have no reason to believe that it’s not true. So there’s something improbable about the store, which I like. When I first entered the other day, there were two latino delivery men in their uniforms. They were buying slices of cake to eat, for themselves, not to deliver. The second time I went, there was a south asian family with two kids and they were placing a larger order of cupcakes for one of their children’s birthday celebration. This was less strange because I assumed they were wealthy. I like thinking about this bakery because I know there’s an implicit racism in the fact that it took months after it opened before I chose to visit. I assumed that the store would not have beeen a good match for me, since it specializes in cakes. Internal to that assumption was some association between blackness and the heaviness of frosting or cream cheese, which didn’t fit with the crisp laminated sweet breads from the white- or asian-owned businesses that I tend to go to. Maybe I am putting too much stock in this story of racism and surprise. I am probably too invested in it because I am taking pleasure in the shame of racism—the more tacit, the more implicit, the more suspicious, the better. But this cake had precisely what I wanted, and something in excess of that, even—it has, unlike other slices of cheesecake available near me, a very thick crust which runs up the vertical of the border, with large pieces of walnut embedded in it. I attacked this crust at first in a bungled manner. I used an acacia wood plate, and accidentally punctured it a few times with my fork tines, before deciding to use a serrated knife instead. Some large chunks flew onto the sheepskin below, and on the floor; I fished them out from the tufts, picked up and ate some other remainders. The cake is responsible for making me write this; it is distracting me from a need for sleep. I didn’t take a nap until the late afternoon, and this “nap” consisted of masturbation, so even then I didn’t sleep much. I had two fingers plunged into my vagina, which felt like an inverted sea cucumber. It’s so spacious in there once you get past the opening, I find this cavernous aspect of the vagina quite surprising. It is sort of disappointing that I’m not able to have sex; I bumped into Keiron again and he told me that he had several deadlines coming up and couldn’t make it to Memoria, that I should text him, maybe we could take a walk sometime. But he seems to escape me as if he were Len in the previous dream. I am not interested in his standoffishness, he seems less attractive to me now, I can’t take an interest in him any farther unless he gives me more. I am far more interested in you, in what you might do next in my dreams. The postponed purpose in me coming here is to articulate some kind of a sexual schema in relation to you.

I am also feeling mildly attacked by what Freud said in his “Further Recommendations on Technique” about patients who get too caught up in preparing for sessions—which causes the treatment to “leak”:

There are patients who from the very first hours carefully prepare what they are going to communicate, ostensibly so as to be sure of making better use of the time devoted to the treatment. What is thus disguising itself as eagerness is resistance. Any preparation of this sort should be disrecommended, for it is only employed to guard against unwelcome thoughts cropping up. However genuinely the patient may believe in his excellent intentions, the resistance will play its part in this deliberate method of preparation and will see to it that the most valuable material escapes communication. One will soon find that the patient devises yet other means by which what is required may be withheld from the treatment. He may talk over the treatment every day with some intimate friend, and bring into this discussion all the thoughts which should come forward in the presence of the doctor. The treatment thus has a leak which lets through precisely what is most valuable. When this happens, the patient must, without much delay, be advised to treat his analysis as a matter between himself and his doctor and to exclude everyone else from sharing in the knowledge of it, no matter how close to him they may be, or how inquisitive. In later stages of the treatment the patient is usually not subjected to temptations of this sort.

“Leak,” I love the verb “to leak.” I like the idea of some valuable material escaping communication, I like the idea of it depositing itself into a kind of calcareous growth on my pelvic bones or elsewhere.

There’s something so pleasurable in remembering the dream of the “smack”: the mild burning sensation it produced, and the mildness of my respose. All the responses in that dream were muted—I had gone past a point in which I would have even been aware of the weirdness of the fact that I was delivering some packet of a drug to this Vincent Lindon, so that he could administer it to his bedridden father. I am thinking about that father as possibly a manifestation of my grandfather, the one who died of Parkinson’s disease.

Didi

To: pedalferrous

In that last email I deleted lots of stuff and it now seems a bit awkward to me. The effect of cutting was to produce something poorly cut. Like I was some kid who tried to cut a straight line with scissors but kept on realigning the blade so that there are all those little strips of cut paper along the edges. Like I was trying to be concise but what came out was nothing but the ragged edge of a piece of paper. Like when I bought a small tiramisu cheesecake tart from the new Paris Baguette but because of the slick paper liner it was placed in it slipped out of the tongs and fell on the floor and so I picked it up and bought it and bagged the tart myself, wondering if the cashier would notice how bungled it had been with the crust cracked and falling apart, with the espresso dust smudged off of sections of its substrate. While I was processing perilla leaves today, I thought about you calling me your “drunk wife” in the future. In this scene, you are sitting in a bar and telling a man about your drunk wife who cracks lewd jokes and doesn’t ever work, but who nevertheless manages to do something secretly impressive. The man is one of those types who is at ease speaking to you about anything because you seem unthreatening and receptive and also attractive enough to want to impress. You are the one confiding in him, however, in this strange perversion of habit—you have gotten so bored with the role of receptivity that you decide to entertain yourself through mimicry, which is a secret talent of yours that your wife happens to know a lot about. The perfect opportunity strikes when he finishes up a story about his own wife, not worth reproducing here. You decide to repay him with this little verbal gesture regarding your “drunk wife.” It’s not a story, though it could become one in a moment, but you’re really not out here to impress him with your storytelling abilities. You merely want to see if you can just say the phrase “drunk wife” and get him to conjure in his mind the possibility of all possible stories about drunk wives.

You know he gets it because he responds with a joke. He asks you whether she’s beaten you recently. It’s not a good joke, but maybe you only think so because your wife used actually used to joke a lot about beating you. You wonder if he was beaten as a child, or more recently, because he’s laughing a little too hard. He doesn’t seem to remember the last sentence, about her having created something, and you start to wonder if you regret saying it, and you start to upbraid yourself for the lame attempt to keep your wife away from insult. It’s lame because she doesn’t need the protection and wouldn’t have found it funny herself. Your wife is actually in the bar, watching from the end of the counter. She decides to approach, and whispers something in your ear. The man asks who’s that and his smile suggests that he believes you are cheating on your wife. Your wife appears quite pleased, but you’re not sure how to respond in a way which conforms with what she has just told you. So you just tell him that that was the drunk wife who beats me.

It is not difficult to see how this substitution of “drunk” for “gloom” should occur. Drunk and gloom are as well-opposed as black and white. But the substitution of “wife” for “waif” is a bit too close to not tickle me with its humor. According to the OED, a waif, n.1 is “A piece of property which is found ownerless and which, if unclaimed within a fixed period after due notice given, falls to the lord of the manor; e.g. an article washed up on the seashore, an animal that has strayed. Often waif and stray or straif: cf. stray n.1, straif n.

What do I look like, now that I’m your wife?

Since our common mammalian ancestor is supposed to be “shrew-like,” it feels important to ruminate on rodents, on how rodents of all kinds are touching to observe. I learned today that squirrels' nests are called dreys, how lovely. Then I looked at images of Juramaia sinensis, Eomaia scansoria—basal eutherian mammals—late jurassic, early cretaceous. The Eomaia fossil was found in 2002, and the Juramaia in 2011, which makes this all feel quite new. I am moved into a brief state of euphoria when I see drawings of these eutherians, especially the one of the Juramaia with its mouth open, which makes it seem like the illustrator was intent on showing off its sharp little teeth. What do we make of the punctum of the little sharp teeth? That this animal looks like a thief, a criminal in the rails of a subway station? Eutherians seem more excessive in their practices than passerines and reptiles. When I think of humans as descendants of eutherians, I am brought into a broad and immediate comprehension of our sexual dimorphisms and gestative mechanisms, though these ancient creatures had epipubic bones and no placentae. The soul of human sexuality lies in these little shrew-like beasts who look so much like thieves and miscreants.

Now I am thinking about the theory that milk was first produced in order to keep eggs moist.

I want to chew on something and know that the thing that’s being chewed on isn’t even feeling it. A thing which appears to be so permeable and soft and sensitive and complex, but which is in fact less woundable than a sheet of paper which has already been bleached and cut and rolled flat. I remember writing about the penis as a scroll once. There was a dream in which there was a penis about to drill into my throat from the outside of the neck and that image had been so special to me, so nice, and I sort of left it vague that it was JH sitting on my chest, like an incubus, because it was important for the experience to be extensible. I like the fact that my sexual response to your language has nothing to do with it. I mean it does, and I could derive some reasonable analyses of why that’s the case from the texts in question, but I have a more immediate and superficial concern with the possibility that I might fail to like my own sexual response to your language if I were to come to believe that you were unable to derive anything from it. If it is true, for instance, that you are “inured to some inability to experience joy,” then it would sort of ruin the perversion. I’d realize that I somehow cared about your actual participation. My first response to the problem, though, is to simply deny that it exists—to believe that the word “inability,” as you use it, signals that this is something you only say sometimes in order to ward off the “inability.” Feed me with your fear, with your cardiacish problems. Give me shit because I want this series of involutions—which I maintain have nothing to do with anything but the satisfaction of its process—to continue to reproduce themselves in the way we associate with meiosis.

I’m going to do a few more readings of your texts before I close the store for the night.

I am wondering about the person who refrains from almost everything, who bears horrible pressures. There is a wish for such a person implicit in the statement, a wish to be that person. Even if it is the case that the speaker is one such person, it is not evident that he would be one such person if the formulation didn’t exist. You may not have the traits of the standard sadist—the sadist is supposed to follow the imperative enjoy!—but the inversion of enjoyment claimed by this superego of refrainment (SoR) has its own despotism, and it’s cute to observe. I don’t think the standard reading of the line—that it expresses a wish to be punished, to be a masochistic neonate, is correct. The words in “horrible pressure” produce a sense that the speaker harbors a disinterested interest in supporting something low in entropy. Like, masochists are supposed to derive a sexual frisson from being sat on like dumb furniture, and the pleasure they derive from pain is supposed to buck the rules of the game, to show the one inflicting pain that she or he is not in fact in total power. But I don’t think you are trying to do that. I don’t think you are trying to show off how much pleasure you can experience while chilling in the core of the earth. That’s very attractive to me because it makes me think a lot. Hence the mounting pressure from within, the canal which asserts that in thinking about the structure of that phrase and what it could mean, I will arrive at the sheerest climax of the recent decade. The masochistic ego in me feels wrapped up in the demand of the superego of yours which spreads over its domain of influence and tells me to refrain from almost everything, to bear horrible pressures.

But what is the tiny sliver of stuff that lies outside of the domain of the “almost everything”? The SoR seems to express a law opposed to that of the superego of enjoyment (SoE). I believe I follow the SoE, I believe I follow a path of complete non-restraint. However, this law, when followed rigorously, degenerates into a state of total restraint. I want to be beaten for having failed to concentrate on the sexual with a greater force. I wish I had renounced more in order to focus on the anti-social and proto-eutherian responses of my body to the violence of the placentation to come. I want to be placental, in that the placenta is a thing which eats you.

Conclusion: I am in agreement with your SoR, even if my SoE seems to be in disagreement.

The other thing I wanted to investigate is probably more difficult to resolve. It’s on this sentence—But I think I am concerned that the things I refer to are not tethered to the right antecedent when taken in by others.

The thing I sometimes fear, or have feared in phases, is the notion that you have a certain belief in a more substantial kind of connection or coupling between people which I would never be able to satisfy. It is one thing to be aware of one’s desire for the fantasy of having a stable and loving relationship and of the impossibility of its satisfaction. It is another to not be aware of the force of the fantasy and to continue to grasp at it with a repressed sincerity. I know it sounds like I’m accusing you of something but in fact I think I might be the one I’m accusing of having a repressive relation to some fantasy of a relationship. But I think at the crux of this is the fact that I don’t understand the tender part of you much. It is because the sexual affirms my interest in you to such a strong degree that I get careless. I only seem to really want contact with you when I believe I’m low on E and high on P; in other words, if I think I’m in the luteal phase and really feeling it. Anyway, I think I realize that you are sort of like a black hole of care. You are someone who wants care and who can’t get enough of it. You are so “detached” because you are so attached to a demand for care. I like the idea of your demand for care being similar to the imperatives of the SoE. I may not care for you in a very consistent fashion—maybe my sexual drive overwrites my ability to care—but if I understand you as a set of symbolic transformations on my own basal structure I can insert your demands into it and operate in some way that’s basically different from how I naturally am. This includes the flickering fantasy of being mother. I love that one image you produced of the person using tweezers to remove the brilles from a lizard—but you called them calyces, as if the eyes of the lizard were persimmons. I’d like to clean the deciduous.

But that stuff might be beside the point—maybe what’s at stake here is a different kind of truth, based less in affirmation of one’s value than in the affirmation of a more transcendent ideal. What is “right” about the “right antecedent”? If there is anything I have learned from the phenomenon of vasocongestion, it’s that there’s no “right” relationship between people; that the surpluses of satisfaction which really keep people apart, which force us to recognize the impossibility of fusion, make for a rather good life. I sort of believe this is “right.” I believe in the rightness of my body’s response. A consequence of this is that I resist the notion that it matters if you are really there or not when I read your body of text—not because it is not a valid thing to wonder about sometimes, but because the response to the text itself is so total for me.

I think text functions as a strong obstruction, rather than as an “extremely weak” link. I’m not concerned with its capacity to produce intersecting, as opposed to “parallel” response. I like the vision of the horizons which do not cross. I don’t see intersection or comfort or stability as the text’s domain. This probably means I want to be with you sometimes outside of text and outside of language. Which I simply avoid needing by speaking to other people. But I am sort of proud of the tenacity of the obstruction. Not the tenacity of the people in the face of obstruction, but the tenacity of the obstruction itself. So, I am not sure I share your concern with a more stable or more shared notion of reality which I see as prevalent in these discussions of irreality and sincerity. If this sounds like a straight misinterpretation of what you have written, it is because I believe that in your various negations lie positive concerns. You can apply this rule of negation-as-repression to me. Also I realize I am spending too much time reading some things which you may not believe—but if it’s any comfort you can read these sentences as fictive constructions which I’m weaving to entertain with.

I might be trying to convey that I don’t think it’s a problem if antecedents aren’t being properly matched with the things you refer to as others understand them, but in reality it is true that this could be a problem. I wouldn’t spend so much time re-reading and editing my writing, wouldn’t be so close to unable to writing emails which can’t be retro-edited, if I didn’t feel the same anxiety about meaning and signification.

I do believe in beauty, which is different from the intensity of sexual stimulus, which is also different from pleasure. But I think there are some responses I have to these issues which signal that I know that something is somehow being produced through friction or through some kind of complicated symbolic manipulation, through processes which only computers could manipulate into anything sensible to humans. The comedic is the sign that some problem is being substantialized in a way that’s tangible and beautiful. This is why it is so important, I think, for me to attempt to be comedic, to attempt to be comedic through sexuality. I have faith that this investment in the comedic is also subtended by faith in the beauty and worth of the project of love.

I should therefore stress that the funny (as well as the subversive) side of a love encounter lies precisely in the fact that the other (that we encounter) is an answer to none of our prayers and dreams but, rather, the bearer of an unexpected surplus-element that we might only get the chance to dream about in what follows. If we lose sight of the fact that in a genuine love encounter we get something that we haven’t exactly asked for, then we lose the perspective of love, in both meanings of the word. What happens in a love encounter is not simply that the sexual nonrelation is momentarily suspended with an unexpected emergence of a (possible) relation, but something rather more complex: it is that the nonrelation itself suddenly emerges as a mode (as well as the condition) of a relation. A “happy” love encounter is the nonrelation at its purest or, perhaps more precisely, it is a nonrelation as redoubled. As in comedy, not only do we not get what we asked for, on top of that (and not instead) we get something we haven’t even asked for. The nonrelation is supplemented by another nonrelation, which can then use the thing that obstructs the relation as its very condition (and can function like the Freudian “incentive bonus”).

[...]

What is at stake, however, is not simply a question of how long something lasts; there are very long jokes and very short comic sequences (gags). The difference in temporality concerns the temporality of pleasure (or satisfaction): a joke is always final, it always comes at the end, which is thus also true for the pleasure/satisfaction produced by jokes. At the end, we are left with a certain amount of satisfaction, and what precedes it (the narrative of the joke) is a preparatory phase leading to and making the final “joke” possible. Comic sequences are not constructed in this manner. Satisfaction usually arises at the very beginning; instead of closing a comic sequence it inaugurates it, it opens it up and is then kept alive (with fluctuations which follow a certain rhythm) during the whole sequence. Satisfaction does not conclude the game (as it does in the case of jokes), it launches it.

Woke up with a bolus of gloom this morning; now I stare at the phrase and wonder if it’s proper for me to write it down. What does it mean to wake up with a bolus of gloom? I am thinking, perhaps, of the huge concrete ball which the main character of Memoria describes as the source of the loud noise she hears.

I have lots of student meetings today, and tomorrow and the next day there’s the conference that my soon-to-be-ex-advisor is organizing—will be important to attend as a kind of farewell and as a way to decompress.

Should I elaborate on the bolus of gloom? When I search the word “bolus,” not many of the objects which show up are even round. There are many syringes, or long, large pills. The jewish-dutch pastry looks the roundest. Albatross boluses are like cat hairballs; indigestible matter thrown up by juveniles. I think I am with a bolus of gloom because I know I will have to perform these unasked for close readings of your text and that the process of doing so will consume me for a bit. It will make me so energetic that I will be afraid of the subsequent crash. So I am preparing myself. I place myself in solidarity with your coffee habits by writing a lot; let’s see if I can elevate my heart rate just by typing something out very fast and re-reading it.

I am bubbly today because of the bug fair, but not so bubbly about attending Laurent’s conference, which bores me. I don’t like attending out of “politeness” and not paying attention. I filled several pages with kanji while sitting in the back of the auditorium; I could develop a little κυφός if I sat in that position too often. Just realized that the Lichtenberg of The Waste Books, of The Lichtenberg Figures, was kyphotic.

I bought a 2-month old Tliltocatl vagans from some professor whose lab’s instagram page had followed me last week. She let me pay thirteen, and not fifteen dollars since I was out of cash, so I imagine showing up to her office one day with two dollars in hand, or maybe twenty-seven, if I decide to buy some adolescent Neoholothele incei from her. These were the small ones which live in colonies, which appeals to me. Young tarantulas are called “slings” for some reason. I was late to the conference because I tarried with the purchase, and when I got there, I wasn’t paying attention because I was scrolling through websites on tarantula care.

I had some dream involving Tao Lin. My mom mentioned him during our long conversation yesterday. She was challenging my notion that I don’t have a connection with Asia, mentioning how I had recommended his book to her, on account of how I had liked the way in which he rendered his conversations with his parents in translation. When I woke up I started thinking about John again and wept with sobbing force. The mucus was so clear it looked like glass. I’m apparently developing a new fixation on arachnids and webs—I don’t see how far I could go with it, but even if the answer is “not very” it interests me that this is occurring.

Tliltocatl vagans is known for its role in a Mayan medicinal ritual—“A hierbatero kills it, then crushes it, mixes it with spirit alcohol and strains out any irritating hairs with a traditional cloth. The beverage is used for the treatment of ‘tarantula wind,' the symptoms being chest pain, coughing and asthma. The venom peptide GsMtx-4 is being investigated for the possible treatment of cardiac arrhythmia, muscular dystrophy and glioma.” (Wikipedia). I like this picture of an exemplar’s exoskeleton, I can imagine collecting these.

After talking to Xinyu I decided that I’m enjoying my life too much. He sent me a piece of recent writing for a class and it was so good, at least I felt I could say so from reading small portions of it, that I began to feel very sad. I’m too caught up in thinking about whatever interests me: my dreams, my feelings, my objects. Xinyu asked me if I have a distinct academic voice, and said he doesn’t write with a sense of separation between academic and other modes of writing. I said yes, that it’s important for me to take on or fit in to some structure, that I like the idea of being in caricature. But I still think I could write things that more people would appreciate it I let myself go a little. Why does this have to be about what other people will like, though? He also thinks that if I read more books I will have a wider variety of dreams. At first I was mildly incensed and now I wonder if I want to read more not because I agree with him, but because I just want to follow somebody else’s rules. I should take a step back and become a better and more serious intellectual. I should be lonely in the way that homosexuals from “third-world countries” might be.

I want to institute that structure of distance, or of “indifference,” in my life.

And not just as a phase, but seriously, as if I were married to it.

But he’s right, most people are such idiots.

I told him that I believed there were many people who were intelligent and beautiful in how they behaved, but not necessarily in the dead works they were able to produce and leave behind. That John was one of those people who was smart in his humor but not in his actual writing, at least not in a strong and consistent way, based on the paper he read for the PARG conference, and also on my inability to be impressed by some comments he makes in academic discussions. He said later in the conversation that maybe Praveen was like that too. I told him outright that he was one of the few intelligent people I had met in a long time and that it was refreshing, that what I meant by that was that he seemed to be someone who was also interested in and perhaps capable of leaving behind works which I might cherish in their absence.

You can see how the imperative to be creative and intelligent, or to use whatever faculties I believe I have, is itself prefiguring the failure of this project—I feel embarrassed by myself for having produced so much shit that’s ugly or useless, mere noise, merely because I enjoy writing and thinking and manipulating my objects.

Rules are always going to turn over, fall over, whatever. I need to be without superego, or I need to reinvent the superego. Better yet, I might live with a religious adherence to the notion of my innate ugliness, I must create for the thing that tells me that I am both unable to produce anything beautiful and good and that it is the only line of work I could possibly be employed with. My filth makes other worlds inaccessible.

Please watch me roll around like an animal.

I have started to menstruate in a total sense; the two “periods” on the 12th and 30th of last month did not require special equipment. Now I am capturing the endometrial tissue in a silicone cup and watching it pool and dry on a white plate; I have done this twice today and allowed the first round to coagulate until I cleared it for a second sample in the evening. The strange heaviness in my uterus keeps me aware of and interested in whatever escapes or supersedes the limits of language. It makes me more self-involved and involuted than I have perhaps ever been capable of imagining before, though this act of writing shows you that catamenia doesn’t engender a loss of mind. Though I found piquant apples at the farmer’s market and took numerous photos of them, most of my day has involved looking at photographs of menses. I have made small allowances for readings of Valie Export’s “Aspects of Feminist Actionism” and for editing some writing, but I keep on going back to the pictures; it makes me feel a bit sick, or rather intensifies my ambient sense of sickness, to look at that material, which fails to transcend itself, but I am uninterested in doing anything except taking more photographs as the menses dry, or of challenging myself to take photos of the samples when fresh and wet. I am probably a bit dizzy because of what it means to see the deciduous nature of the decidua. It makes me suspect that a metaphysical eversion could happen if I trained myself to witness and understand this. It can’t be accidental that I started to undergo a major shift in my sense of my life and of the writing that occurs here yesterday. I suspect it wouldn’t be more melodramatic than factual to say that this may be the last paragraph I write in this way. A lot of this activity is happening in a very familiar but intense isolation; but it also wouldn’t work the way it does without some of that outer presence. Anyway, the schematic is becoming more stable: I started shedding on the 29th, and may have ovulated on the 13th, meaning that the weeping of the 18th-23rd would have coincided with the middle of the luteal phase.