We were engaged in something called competitive solitude.

You sat in your sour-smelling room.

I stuffed figs into the front pockets of a white cardigan.

Sun would stream through the window in the library stacks.

The crease of red corduroy jeans held a white fountain pen with a gold nib.

A blue wall accompanied paintings of maps and a blue cover enveloped book.

The profundity of bourgeois elegance was realized.

Nausea.

Outdoors, solar.

The effects of citric acid on teeth.

Something about bergamot, an ignorance of tea.

I gave you a green fruit. It fit like an egg or a stone in your hand.

Teach me to be elite. I will teach you to buy expensive clothes.

Our politics snarl with individualism and regressive femaleness.

Apricating cat held on your phone during
apricot-colored sunset, squeezed into the
time during which we sat on a wooden porch.
I ran prior, beatific, watching the arrebol.

You in a room, in the dark, or reading...
Mobile solitude, memories kept in address
to you, mostly fallen through the sieve.
Portola, Sand Hill, Los Altos all asleep?

Something happened at the SHC.
I wore white culottes, as if
newborn. Elder whites spoke
to elder whites. An air of
brilliant senescence.

Pinning pomelo rinds. "My wife,"
the inflorescence of a date tree.
Everything better if pale yellow.
The senselessness of calling anything
green. California and the dread of
prematurely entering heaven. The will
to die by selenium. Depressed walks
involving shop-windows and skunks.

So upsetting, quiet, precise.

Upbraid my sloppy and poor management of memory!

I was dissatisfied by a lack of coherence.

I failed to accept your offer to buy you an orchid.

I'd pass by the yellow puffs of acacia,

Put my nose against them, in late winter,

I told you that life was good, or better, alone.

Just me and the flowers and my legs and my feet and paper.

The sun turned visibly, we tracked it through the windows.

I desired your silence, your impish soul, everything a clean astringent.

I took walks in which I felt nothing but heaviness.

I imagined dissertating without internet in Cuba.

We discussed your interest in living far away.

And green fuzzy almonds.

There's something thick about solitude. Perhaps it's like fasting. One experiences pangs or waves of loneliness. For her, solitude was the sea, a site of nausea but also of deep comfort.

The punning of laurel and lar.

The wavelets of laurel leaves (their margins)

, compared to the concavity of his upper eyelids.

I remember flakes of snow moving near my eyes in winter.

In many K-dramas, snow arrives with romance.

Two years of absence, redirection, reconstitution.

Estranged from a love I sent pictures of yellow flowers.

In the Fall of 2020, I began to write in a “Blue Notebook,” a pages document on my computer with a blue background, set to small dimensions and a large font. The words are simple, in a sense stilted and laconic, as if I had suffered from a blast and was dealing with creative tinnitus. I circle around the same topics: teaching, entertainment, my search for meaning, papers that I was writing on literature and money, attempts to connect myself to the world of venture capitalism on an aesthetic level. I witness my intellect coming upon the walls of isolation, or a kind of emotional flatness, a recovery into blue.

In describing a disappointing return visit to his home-town of Prague in 1911, Rilke calls himself a “rocket that has ended up in the bushes, huffing and puffing but to no one’s enjoyment.” In addition to “Rilke the rocket,” there’s Rilke—in his own words—“the sad and repugnant caterpillar,” “the chrysalis in its cocoon,” “the tree in winter without a single word-leaf,” “the deaf mountain, quite rocky,” “the photographic plate that’s been exposed too long,” “the student of life who is held back a grade for failing his classes.”(Ulrich Baer)

Went to Dewitt Greenstar, bought sweet potatoes, two onions, blueberries, discount heirloom tomatoes from mexico, and discount celery. Made toor dal with celery, one onion, half the tomato. Ate the blueberries raw. Thinking about how I should run on the earlier side today, though technically I could do so between CAPS with Ted and the new group CAPS orientation. Making baeksaemi rice right now. It’s this blend of brown and sweet rice that is quite nice with soy sauce added. Bitcoin is approaching 50k right now. The stock market is up. It’s at 47,835.78 right now. Last night I tried to write poems hastily before sleeping. (2/11/21)

I think writing to S— about Gong Yoo has changed my relationship to him; I’m now becoming more intellectually aware of what’s going on here. Everyone likes a man with concave upper eyelids, upwardly smiling ones, because it is precisely like a little smile, a positive lilt, as Rilke described the waves on the Laurel leaf.

I am cracking this concave egg
Membranous and wet, and red
“Am I good enough for them?”
The mind is an ecumene needing
a clearing for the animals to drink
in and from which to see the sky?
Getting paideuma vibes from the
end of Der Bildverlust

I could not concentrate, in truth, while sitting alone in the library.

I saw dust motes and felt the crease of my pants digging in.

What did you pass by? Did you tell me, and did I ask?

Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,
That she (dear she) might take some pleasure of my pain;
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know;
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain;
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe,
Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain;
Oft turning others' leaves, to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburnt brain.
But words came halting forth, wanting inventions' stay;
Invention, nature's child, fled step-dame study's blows;
And others' feet still seemed but strangesr in my way.
Thus great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,
'Fool,' said my muse to me; 'look in thy heart, and write.'

Love's arrows involve a change of hands.

February 28, 2020

It's very gusty here with brief snowfall and bulbs cracking the ground and I'm so happy despite having gotten maybe four hours of sleep; everything's crispy and diaphanous and light, silver indeed. I seem kind of serious and melancholy on the outside with my dark eye circles from last night’s feverish rereading of old letters but secretly I'm bursting with a quiet bliss. Your email to A— and some of the earliest ones to me are currently serving as little vignettes of how I feel or want to feel when I am not quite there yet. I'm looking for writings outside of myself to ground me. I wonder if you still primarily remember me as sort of stern and severe and cold and rigid. Or soft and scrunchy in some particular way. You're right that I probably haven't changed much at all, ever, in spite of the fact that I am suddenly way more sexually excited at times and always have evolving and different academic interests, things I eat, beliefs, and the like. My face probably still wrinkles up in the exact same way it did seven, eight years ago. My language even conserves the same rhythms, even if I write quite differently. As much as I enjoy living hermetically, I am tired of writing solely from myself. Not because I dislike myself but because falling out of my automatic mania is painful. I fall in love once a year and send you something about it, but that doesn't change the fact that none of these people were ones I felt like I could say it too or build anything with or truly care for. I insulate myself from pain and rejection by making men often much older and inaccessible into my little playgrounds of linguistic sex and this time that's not the case, so much so that I feel as if I'm betraying my sexuality again, becoming queerer, which is always a desirable mutation.

My feelings towards you have so many different colors. While I read about Miu and Sumire, the narrator and Sumire, I remembered one feeling I have towards you. It feels like holding tiny, iridescent insect wings in between your fingers. Also like the air is rippling slightly. It’s so delicate, so sensitive. This is sweeter than the overflowing chest, pressing against it (hugging the universe). This particular feeling is unique to you. I don’t remember this from anywhere else.

I suddenly had a lot of water come out of my eyes. Yes, crying, but it was so fast that it was almost like a sneeze — extremely sudden and cathartic. Cold tears, sort of like the ones that come out when your eyes water after yawning. All the tears that I wish would’ve come out when I felt especially touched by music or pieces of art but couldn’t physically manifest that glowing feeling in my gullet just came out at that moment. I am so touched. The words, the consonants, sound so beautiful. I felt so much in that moment. A splash of color. A silvery sound. I am really grateful for that moment. It was so wonderful. I spent the first three weeks of the year making a letter which turned into a book, and for those three weeks it was just me in my apartment alone with a printer, camera, flowers, walks, paper, glue, tape, notebooks and some sort of hunger to create. The tome was skeletoned around a series of self-portraits I made in december at home—a prolonged striptease, orchidaceous nudity. It was a manifold object, filled with pieces of paper stuck onto others and wrapped and folded within. mini-books hidden within the accordion. graphic imagery of my genitals coyly covered with oak leaf sticky notes. It developed upon my interest in sex, as pertains to all forms of biological chiasmatic reproduction, and neoteny: multiple photos of my journal from 2004. The book was my bowerbird’s nest, my creative dowry. I maybe haven’t felt such a prolonged contentment and stability in my life. I felt a low and cozy frequency of happy. When that was over, I fell over, however.

The previous three weeks of my life have been rather scary in terms of the extent to which I felt my life to be worthless. I have somewhat lost the conviction that I'm not allowed to die or kill myself because I haven't yet produced enough good work. It is more of a why-bother and why-accord-importance-to-my-projects sort of thing. I have lost faith and conviction in the idea that my interests and projects will sustain me singlehandedly, and I have realized how traumatizing my increasingly heightened manic enthused periods can be. Every written object my petite mort. My correspondence with Z— has never let me down but recently I felt particularly useless. I have been held up by movies which I see on the big screen of Cornell Cinema and reflect myself exactly: Melancholia, Joker, Dolor y Gloria. I write to him about these instead of my life. We ended up on Skype this past Tuesday. I have never seen him seem so alright, maybe even jubilant at moments, or just cracking the slightest smile after having awaken from a long slumber. I think we like each other and cannot hide this in the spontanaeity of laughter. I have never felt more happy for someone who I am so much more worried about than attracted to, someone who moves me to tears and laughter but whom I barely know as a body. I do not sneeze at him, I do not know his nose. The last thing we spoke of, however, was body temperature. He felt hotter, as in after having taken an exam. I felt lukewarm as the terrestrial seas when the first eukaryotes began to develop. I think we want to make things together always and further than what has been done before. I have never felt like it was necessary to declare I loved someone since I knew you. I see in my past letters with Z— many veiled declarations, some entirely explicit but grammatically oriented towards the past and more ambiguously towards the future. And I wonder if I was too callous to perceive them as real. If I have been too slow to say anything or fall for this thing we have been making slowly and in discrete chunks. Maybe this is all an oasis in the distance, phantasmic, and come next year I will have another email written about an entirely different experience. For now I can say in full faith that I am in love and that it takes me everywhere.

I am still a little bit scared, however. I am trying to remember what it felt like to first tell you that I loved you and not be sure if that was okay.

When I could read, I boasted of my self-sufficiency.

Forms: α. Old English–Middle English hwonne, (Old English huonne), Middle English wonne, Middle English whonne, 1500s Scottish quhone. β. Old English–Middle English hwanne, Middle English wæne, quanne, ( quuanne, ȝwanne, ȝwane), Middle English wane, Middle English whanne, wanne, quane, Middle English huanne, 1500s whane, Scottish quhane. γ. Old English hwenne, hwænne, ( hoenne), Middle English wenne, Middle English hwenne, weonne, Middle English whenne, Middle English quenne, qwenne, quene, Scottish qwene, qwhene, Middle English–1500s Scottish quhene, Middle English whene. δ. Middle English hwon, won, (Middle English wȝon), Middle English whon, Middle English qwon. ε. Middle English hwan, (Middle English quuan, quæn), Middle English wan, quan, Middle English–1500s whan, (Middle English van, Middle English whann), Middle English–1500s Scottish quhan. ζ. Middle English hwen, Middle English wen, Middle English quen, (Middle English qwheyn, Middle English qwen, qwhen), Middle English–1700s Scottish quhen, Middle English– when

γ. late Middle English–1600s coulde, late Middle English– could, 1500s–1600s cold, 1500s–1600s colde, 1500s–1600s coold, 1500s–1600s cowld, 1500s–1600s cowlde, 1600s coulld; Scottish pre-1700 cold, pre-1700 cowld, pre-1700 cuild, pre-1700 cwld, pre-1700 1700s– could, pre-1700 1800s culd, 1900s– coold.

Forms: 1. Present stem. a. Infinitive Old English radan (rare), Old English rædan, Old English ræddan (rare), Old English rędan, Old English redan, Old English reða (Northumbrian), early Middle English ræde, early Middle English ræðed (imperative plural, transmission error), early Middle English renden (transmission error), Middle English rade, Middle English redd, Middle English redde, Middle English rendyn (transmission error), Middle English reyde, Middle English ride, Middle English ryd, Middle English ryde, Middle English–1500s reed, Middle English–1600s reade, Middle English–1600s reede, Middle English–1700s red, Middle English– read, Middle English– rede (now archaic: see rede v.1), late Middle English rude (probably transmission error), late Middle English 1500s rode (probably transmission error), 1500s rid (in senses of rede v.1); English regional 1800s redd (north midlands, in senses of rede v.1), 1800s– rede (northern); Scottish pre-1700 reade, pre-1700 reyd, pre-1700 rid, pre-1700 ride, pre-1700 ried, pre-1700 ryd, pre-1700 (1700s in sense 1a) reed, pre-1700 1700s–1800s red, pre-1700 1700s– read, pre-1700 1700s– rede, pre-1700 1800s reid, pre-1700 1800s reide, 1700s–1800s redd, 1800s rad, 1800s redde (in senses of rede v.1). b. 3rd singular indicative.

wenne, quhene, hwænne, qwene, hwen, quhan, quhen i coulde,
cold, cowld, cwld, culd, coold rede, reed, reyde, ryd, red,

I cut my finger.

I wore blue and red.

I touched a fruit with glochids.

I loved myself through you.

I was happy, and I thought of my embarrassment.

O Solitude!

A butterfly flaps to death
in a net of plastic mesh.
the colors fade
there is a ripping
desire for it

the pink corona
scar, the starry precipice
of follicles releasing,
carpets becoming
lanugo in sun. even so
time seems to ensure an
operation of change but
this speck of static
animates
a dust-entity
who fails, even in his
plenitude, his musky
weightless being,
to step apart from
the mirrored clarity
of a rippling wind.

the itchy effort of hearing. the scent
of seeing a number on a page, imagewise.

what is the largest number you can perceive
without having to count. what is the number

of days you can go without washing, the length
of time it takes to train for half a marathon

and then to run the full twenty-six miles?
can you see twenty-six and feel it all.

can you feel grey. can you feel vacated.
can you feel the length of the days.

seven. it has been seven. it has been
seven-and-a-half days.

the itchy effort of hearing.
a genital stench. a clearing.

the slithering musk
of an armpit,
brambles

the yellow globe
blazoning
the morning

sheets smelling of
atrophy
of muscles, clasped

lips
reject a
wet tongue

in favor of
dry heads
shivering

upon each
    other

it’s got a crackled sense—
     pendulous undereye.
like post-coital whispers
the sun arises and gray turns to gold.
it can’t be good, but it feels and
seems good. good as the scent
of a long disillusioned love
hiding in the interstices of sheets
getting over the heat of censure
smells like yourself too—

(10 December 2017)

When you left me I felt a terrible pain.

It was not enough to spin inspiration from the thread of pages.

We needed to spend time breathing the same air.

Heart stops at the sliding screen of letters.
The door cracks, a sliver of light bisects
his face, a salutation. Who are you?—
I cannot ask—I wait, I loaf intensely.
Paging through a book I search for hidden
presence—a moment of divine discourse,
of magic repetition. Paging through, I say:
Liberate me from difference. Be a leaf
that falls, trisect this divine monotony.
I will not call you. I'll wake at night. I will
sleep behind the curtains of mid-day light.

We went to this place.