Fertility

The problem feels like a dense knot, but its statement is simple. I like this or that thing. I speak but can't do it. Name the thing, how? Not listen, not speak. Out of the way of saying it. The problem is knotted up and simple. All my problems come down to the concept of fertility.

What I wrote was never what I set out to write.
What he wrote was never what he set out to write.
God gave the absence of what he meant to write value.
God needs to give the absence of what I mean to write value.

Blemishes on the skin mean something.
I’m older and inject a substance of death.

Half the population is going to die sooner than the other half, but for me it is pure artifice to belong to the first. It was a decision I made, and I make the decision, again each time I do it, each time I puncture the skin. The division that is made is a pure fiction. Once I told people to call me "he," and wrote that I "identified" as such. In the letter (and emails) I defended my choice. A lot of my decisions involved writing. In the letter to my mother I inscribed my identity; In the letter as such, I made it possible for me to find a fascination in the choice and the process, in the growing. I owned up to my fertility as an eventuality after having experienced the most intense orgasms. This was not writing. Orgasms are introjective. I mean this literally—something has been taken in. Not a real substance, but the feeling of something entering me. I thought this was private, unspeakable, and wondrous as a secret. A secret of a life, to push it out, to speak of it, would take a long time, and "never stop not being written." Do I need to own up to it otherwise, as a lifelong costume? What do I mean by that? Testosterone seems to accelerate the arc of life towards death; it is a kind of chemical expenditure, insofar as sex is also a molecular expenditure. I'm not "fleeting and vanishing," uterus uttering without a sound. A thick plush redness exists beneath. It must be inscribed.

Too much sebum and scarring.

Writing leads to not enough sleep.

You wouldn’t dare inseminate me.

You don’t even know that you can.

I’m impregnable whether anyone knows it or not.

I’m not impregnable if nobody knows that I am.

If I became pregnant now, I’d have to kill it.

I’ve made my body infanticidal by choice.

Neuroses derive from romance; my cunt is

streaming with attention, screaming at me

causes my cunt to stream with attention.

A white alkaloid powder in the coffee bean

comes to my attention as I take myself to

the store where a person interpellates me,

telling me something about my cleft shoe,

There’s a cut on my tongue and it’s sunny.

Cacoethes scribendi is the opposite of muteness.

Why does it matter to state that this is the case?

I hold it towards you like an urn, a plain affection.

I wouldn’t again go that far; you don’t have it,

You don’t have to honor me, to listen to this.

At the break of the summer I become a sexual automaton, meaning that I get wet with every due homology; breeze against my cunt as I lay down in a brick-colored dress, pima cotton for sleeping. Mallarmé with his fetish for the Virgin Idea, for Woman, for the Book, the objects of heightened attention capitalized to mark out the baseline erection of prosopopoeia. Valéry too is into his blank reveries. They hold their ladies in suspension, blank canvas for the pen. I told a man online that I had sublimated my desire to be bred into the planting of seeds in my garden, he told me this made him hard, that I deserved to be enseeded like that. I made that up. He said it was the poetic quality of the statement that made him hard. I like how men can make seeds.

pubic hairs become white

seeing one’s cunt is impossible

imagining god looking down at me

contemplating my butt and my cunt

having the breeze on my cunt

my cunt is a monster not meant for sight

it freezes men into ghosts once seen

ténèbres d’or / golden glooms

stress pussy as scaffold for metrical

something, bleating, forgetting,

pregnant orchids are cute

(Paul Valéry, “La Jeune Parque” / “The Young Fate,” trans. David Paul, in Paul Valéry, An Anthology, ed. James R. Lawler)

Loveless unknowns thrown into the dust.

I’ve joked about this tendency of mine, to insert block quotations everywhere.

(My analyst laughed very hard at this joke.)

The fact remains, that only once did it cause me cutting pain to hear about this.

I could talk about them like a sports commentator—Valéry’s got the wrong model of fertility: white spermatic purity….. Could anything be more boring and exciting at once?…. Valéry, you are a vapid as any woman you erase….. Let’s see if Mallarmé’s done any better…

I could pile up another thing, like a child who has made a mountain of laundry—

“The only general attribute of projected romance that I can see, the only one that fits all its cases, is the fact of the kind of experience with which it deals—experience liberated, so to speak; experience disengaged, disembroiled, disencumbered, exempt from the conditions that we usually know to attach to it and, if we wish so to put the matter, drag upon it, and operating in a medium which relieves it, in a particular interest, of the inconvenience of a related, a measurable state, a state subject to all our vulgar communities. The greatest intensity may so be arrived at evidently—when the sacrifice of community, of the ‘related’ sides of situations, has not been too rash. It must to this end not flagrantly betray itself; we must even be kept if possible, for our illusion, from suspecting any sacrifice at all. The balloon of experience is in fact of course tied to the earth, and under that necessity we swing, thanks to a rope of remarkable length, in the more or less commodious car of the imagination; but it is by the rope we know where we are, and from the moment that cable is cut we are at large and unrelated: we only swing apart from the globe—though remaining as exhilarated, naturally, as we like, especially when all goes well. The art of the romancer is, ‘for the fun of it’, insidiously to cut the cable, to cut it without our detecting him.”

“i don’t have judgement on this, in the sense of being made angry, or being made to feel trivial, though it can be strange, though this strangeness is again not always so separable from that coming from the lengthy lit-crit preambles to your more immediate messages. i don’t know if these are meant to be in dialogue with the vignettes you provide, or perform some sort of hypnosis, or merely conceal, as if under something weighty and sessile, a more jumpy lex. i sometimes find myself wanting to respond, though only to pieces, as if my nose were pressed too close to the muntined window giving out on something imbricate and sharp, and the thing that stops me from responding is not some sort of disgust or apathy or even depression, but something more like tiredness or distraction.”

Henry, YES—that’s what matters—“to cut it [the cable] without our detecting him.” That’s what I’ve always failed at, it’s too obvious when I’ve cut the thread. The things look like “preambles” when they are in fact “ambles.” I’ve often liked cutting, the word cut, the speed and brilliance it implies. But in the seedy woods of romance it’s not the thing to do. I seem to not be evasive, but I really am extremely evasive, evasive in the sense that I make everything way too clear.

I’m not sure if I can be redeemed: either I cut my relation to a critique which still makes my gut wrinkle in fear, or I accept it as part of the core of my future. Maybe the message is actually way more simple and random and diffuse than I am giving it credit for, I press myself against something imbricate and sharp, when it is in fact the product of tiredness and distraction. Anyway, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts, anyway.

I couldn’t continue. My past is limited. It’s important to become exchangeable, to be seen as a medium for something else. He was right, I have always been self-sufficient, or maybe flighty, this is my crime and my truth, and when I pretend otherwise, to genuflect, to oblate, I’m performing something ugly. I’m the lamprey in the dream. Is it “natural” for women to behave this way? It’s only natural to want to believe it’s natural, to want this so much so as not to talk about it at all. Why is it that we pretend nature is mute? But the notion that I would be living a worse life if I lacked a visible or readable “fertility” persists. I feel it’s important to become part of a general category of being, to be not just legible but immediately legible as female, to become a certain kind of object defined in relation to exchange value. To be an object which exists at odds with itself and with a tradition which it both loves and hates. I am grumbling in thin abstractions; I will have to make an announcement that is less of a riddle some day…

It seems like I can’t say it because I believe a statement on its own, one built to communicate a statement, should also explain something that goes beyond itself.

If I were a character that James chose to pick up in a novel, it would be clear how little I knew about myself, how deluded I was, and maybe this would make people more persistently interested in me and the decisions I made, and the thoughts I verbalized; so long as I write in the first person in the style with which I’ve become so well acquainted, I am nothing but appearances… Is this why it’s so important to pay attention to the body, whose appearance lies outside of volition, outside of what I’ve been bred to speak or do—this isn’t a question, this is unquestionably truthful.

When I’m in love with a person, I’m in love with what their appearance doesn’t tell me, and I read them with such a ferverent belief that what is written doesn’t mean what it would mean if it were said, that it represents something beyond speech, that it represents will and desire and volition and the desire to produce a particular appearance and a particular response in a recipient. Listening to someone who inhabits a suspension of reference is so beautiful when I am allowed to witness it. The sensory qualities of muteness, coolness, fluidity, suspension are not the true objects of my desire. What I desire is witnessing the throwing of the thing that’s thrown.

I find this so lovely. I want to leave behind something sweet. I want someone to know that when someone loves them, it’s probably because they felt someone else watching, and that that gaze is coming from something incredible that can’t be snuffed out. If you’re ever afraid that the loss of people involves the loss of a sense that you knew someone real at some real time just remember that the gods don’t disappear if you flee your life or if they flee theirs. The trouble lies in having proof of this process. I hope to cultivate this ability to provide a kind of proof, which doesn’t involve capture.

I’m trying to prove that fertility doesn’t have much to do with ownership. If you think about it, it’s really a process of renunciation, because making something true involves making something that contradicts expectation. When I decide to become a woman I’m flinging myself into a very mysterious place. I tell myself that I don’t know much about womanhood but when I try to do it I really feel the force of what I don’t know.

I’m supposed to separate my relationships with others from my personal identity, so that if I state I am this or that I obtain a quantity that’s not dependent on time. What if I said that my relationships with particular human beings were coming into being because a third person was watching me through them? The third person is impossible to apprehend, but knowing that he or she is watching me seems to change the course of my life. The third person is interested in seeing where I would go if I left something behind. When I first felt you inside my body you weren’t actually there, but I read what you wrote to me and it was like it was flung into my uterus which was rising. During these new forms of orgasm the organ contracts and rises closer to the exterior of the body, it’s vestigial levitation. Perhaps it would have happened anyway, but this is how it happened, and it’s what happened that makes me want to dedicate myself to whatever happens next, and to spend time in missed experiences.

Coelogyne mayeriana, March 16, 2022