I had a dream that was more erotic than all the rest of the sex dreams last week.

Zane asked me to move in with him; he held onto me, hands around my forearm, through which I felt I grasped his arm, which felt like a field of grass, like that and all the pollen a field of grass gives off in the history of the planet, that’s the power it held for me. He held and implored and I was speechless and in heat and expansion underneath. I had arrived at this house by accident, as I was walking with a composer who happened to be in a seminar with me; some Asian man, the neighborhood was wooded and suburban, more like Northern Virginia than Ithaca. My parents showed up and toured the house and told me it was a good place to live. I hope that if he hears about this dream he will feel more perturbed than he has been or would be if I spoke only about other men and their repeated penetrations of me. I like this new plane of relation, seeing myself subtended between men, and I insist still on the importance of seeing myself as subtended between men or in or around men. I am NOT A GIRLBOSS and NEVER WILL BE or if I am one ever it is DIRT, that association between power and independence and good. I am sex-obsessed, and attribute whatever positive qualities I may have in terms of the intellectual or creative faculties to this obsession. But since sex structures the field of thought that I dedicate myself to as the work of public endeavor, there’s something particularly shameless about it. I wake up each day and do nothing but read and write about sex: this is my method of finding a convent or monastery in which to reside. It is purifying. Not just the frisson of touch but the bare act of fornication. The asymmetry of desires and of autonomic responses. The neuroses of the men with their deciduous cocks. And above all I like the fact that I don’t know what I want.

Last night I was on my knees and elbows and my back was horizontal like a table. A man was penetrating me, and I couldn’t see or feel much. I could feel not the cock itself as a shape with three-dimensional contours, but only the amplitude and frequency of its movements. He paused several times to ask me how I felt. I felt fine, but was unused to this lack of bodily contact during coitus. Neither of us came; I removed myself. Then I asked him how he was, and he said it felt weird, that it was weird because he was constantly worried about whether or not I was enjoying it. I didn’t think this was the true concern, as he wouldn’t have been so concerned if we had been face to face, even if I had been, as I had been, more or less quiet. I didn’t think of this at the time, but later I figured his discomfort came from an anxiety about seeing himself sodomized in the image of me. He had spoken earlier in the evening of his fantasy of being penetrated. I told him about the wolf man and later revisited the case study, memorized the latin: a tergo. It didn’t feel worse or better though it was too novel for me to become lost in, and his tentativeness made me think about what he felt a bit too much. And I was worried about what my back looked like, if the psoriasis around my tailbone was ugly.

The next morning I decided to watch the brutal film that had been assigned for class, the film I had initially planned to skip. It was supposed to be infamous for a nine minute long rape scene and I didn’t like the idea of watching a Gaspar Noé film in general. But I liked the film. Or at least I liked the rape scene, in retrospect. I didn’t like watching the man get his head bashed in with a fire extinguisher, but I probably liked that too, in retrospect. I don’t think I can recall the actual discomfort of watching those scenes because I became so aroused while watching the rape scene in that tunnel, which recalled my use of the underground tunnel in Taipei, in which a homeless man was living, and because I found the discussion of the film in class so full of stimulating provocation. The woman was lowing like a wolf, not like a cow. That low guttural whatever was how I imagined I could sound if I were to care less about the pitch of my voice, if I were not able to control what came out of my mouth.

“A” makes me more or less happy now, and I can even recall his scent at will, and the texture of his skull-skin, and the apple cake he made was incredible. The fact that I have to process this: I admit to liking the fact that I like his cooking, or his taste, or even the mere fact of his income, which means he owns clothing from somewhat obscure and stylish labels I can recognize, like Gramicci. I like that he has to host me because his house is so beautiful, and that he and I have conversations that tend to become very charged and interesting without me ever being able to predict that they could be that way, because he’s so reticent, and doesn’t seem to have many thoughts, but just enough of a few thoughts is enough. My impression of him was that he was neurotic, anxious, and too inhibited to have thoughts to contribute when I wanted to hear something, but now I feel he has some kind of aleatoric specks that are being dredged up through our sexual relationship. And I think he understands me as sadistic.

“D” asked me if I wanted to do a call; to this I acceded with fake enthusiasm; I’ve almost forgotten about him out of necessity, having accepted the fact that I cannot sustain desire for someone who’s so far away and whom I have the capacity to like so much. I feel more unhappy now when he talks about his encounters with other women. There might be more to him that I’ll come to encounter later that I either like or can’t stand, but for now I have to be distant and posit that I don’t know what this is and that I probably won’t ever find out.

John I forget in a similar way, out of necessity. He’s never going to satisfy me!

But he does. I like when he comes across me and we have an extreme rapport.

I suppose the dreams I have with J tend to be more erotic, warm, total, elaborate.

There’s also a “J” whom I decided not to see anymore. He video called me and I didn’t pick up. Then he said it was a mistake. Since he dialed twice, I don’t believe him. The whole “sorry it was a mistake” thing was pathetic. He also wrote a poem about our vacillations before the first touch. “J,” for those of you who don’t know, is a bisexual man who looks a little like Zac Efron, and I was the first woman he ever touched in a sexual fashion. He was homeschooled and seems to me to be too repressed for me. I might ghost him; no I won’t, I’ll be tactful but a little cruel and tell him that I don’t want to see him anymore. Why? Because I’m not energetic enough to sustain interest in someone whose skin is too hot to touch? Because I think his skin is too soft or because his penis is too small or because his bedroom depresses me or because his personality is tiresome for me to face, though I don’t doubt that I don’t know what I want and that my impressions of any person could change for the better after a while? Also I don’t like his poems or his taste in literature or what he laughs at.

Hunter is becoming a little more fun to me, it’s almost as if he wanted to be seductive.

I dreamt that he told me that sex with his wife was actually annoying every time. It’s fun to tell him about these: I always interpret the dreams in which he says something negative about his wife or his relationship with his wife as having something to do with my desire to not maintain too perfect of an impression of him: something about what Lacan says about how analysis does not involve simply identifying with the analyst as ego ideal. But most outsiders would think I want to depose his wife, enter his bedroom, ruin his life. I insist that I’m not attracted to him, but it’s true that I want to transmit something to him, to make him dirty.

The force of insight or the force of feeling around a hot orb-like knot of irresolution… That is the thing that makes me a researcher, an academic, etc. My non-academic sexual life is connected as a rachet is to the thing it rachets, i.e. to the knowledge production that I think will sometimes allow me to make a life off of, a public life and a private one… Freud bleeds into my interactions with the men, he is named and I stage through his the references I make to him the comic dimension of the encounter between me and the man…

Going to Niagara Falls tomorrow to present on “Lyric Sadism in Swinburne’s Anactoria.”

The conference was fun. Niagara is a town of kitsch, a particular inflection of corniness and the serious sublimity of the falls, which are beautiful on account of the depth of the whiteness of the condensation, mist, the cloudiness of whatever it is that comes out of the “horseshoe” falls. The panel organizers were strangely contrastive, a sort of ratty-looking tall homosexual from Pittsburgh and a small prim woman from central Deutschland. Almost everyone was a man; the audience was large-ish, the talks became more or less sexual during and after mine.

I liked watching the not very attractive professor who is apparently a colleague of Ellis’s spin such pretty sentences about venus (pronounced “venis”) as a “penis” and being served scallops with their hermaphroditic gonads attached while in England. He was a big fan of Pater and I appreciated his appreciations. I’m also a big fan of Pater, and a big fan of Botticelli, or at least I wished I had a second life as a Pater researcher. I liked how three of the men in the room were Swinburne fans or at least somewhat familiar with his work. It sort of reminded me of doing the classical music thing and was sometimes surrounded by the physical disarray of unkempt white men who would be the sort of norm as an audience for a particular kind of performance, the commonest form of “nerd” of “new music.” Matt told me about “Platonic Blow” by Auden during the Q&A and I can’t recall how it came up. I bumped into two NYC boys from the audience 10 minutes before boarding the bus to leave. Niagara seemed like a ghost town from 8:30-11 AM, which is when I walked around.

It was a long walk, 3.5 hours of walking around the Canadian side and then the American side, and stopping by a doughnut shop that opens from 5-23 o’clock every day. He accepted my USD and gave me a 1 CAD coin, a pretty golden thing with a loon on it–and I bought three doughnuts. It seemed Lynchian, the shop. The store is owned by a Chinese man who seemed to belong to the late 19th century and my AirBnB was also owned by a Chinese woman who seemed antiquated, probably because of the weird cute way she decorated the house. I think the Canadian Chinese are more “Chinese” than Chinese-Americans.

I found a number of mistakes in my talk as I read it aloud, and a number of mistakes in the section above as I reread what I had written on Wednesday. I think these mistakes are less markers of a bad or frazzled mind than of some happy change; the wind is blowing and rearranging things. On the bus back I had an immense sexual response to some lines of Swinburne’s “Les Noyades.” “The Triumph of Time” and “Hymn to Proserpine” and “Hermaphroditus” made strong impressions. Swinburne is good indeed, I should do experiments in durational performance; spend an hour or two each week reading aloud.

I slept at the very odd hour of 7 PM, by accident—it was supposed to be a brief nap—and woke up from a dream at 1 AM. I read some tweets, and some Swinburne, and eventually rose to make sourdough pancakes and apple sauce at 4 AM, which I ate around 5:30. I read more or less diligently until 9:30, when I took a nap, which began with an orgasm and ended with a dry mouth around 11:30. I dreamt I was in a large house and the ceiling above the toilet in one bathroom was so low that I had to lean forward while sitting on the toilet. I couldn’t turn around to see if the tissue I had used to wipe my ass was clean or not.

It’s 5:49 AM and I just got done with some chores—dish-washing, and adding water and flour to some leaven that’s been sitting out. The dough is in “autolyse.” I woke up a little after 5 AM to an email from the wife of my father’s friend saying that he hasn’t been on IRC in a week and that he’s getting worried. “My husband, Santiago, has been chatting with him more or less regularly, until only a week ago, when Jiseong seems to have suddenly disappeared. I keep telling my husband that Jiseong might simply be having a computer malfunction, or some other obstacle or inconvenience, or perhaps that he might have gone on a trip with Adele, to visit some college. But apparently their communications were so regular that now my husband is very worried. I have suggested to him not to bother Wan-Ying, but he might still write to her. Please let us know if you know something.”

Before moving on to the bread I expelled some quick, sharp tears, and forwarded screenshots of the email to my sister. I had gone to bed around 9:30 last night, and fell asleep not too long after; read some Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty, beforehand. There’s a post on my sister’s Twitter from 1:06 AM where she was taking a walk in the misty roads around the house; she could have posted it a few hours after the photo was taken, but why was she taking a walk after dark like that? And why didn’t my mom respond to the messages about Niagara?

Nothing happened to my father; he went camping and his phone wasn’t working. I had to wait four-and-a-half hours for my sister to wake up; too much of a coward to text my mom about it. Poor Santiago! Alex asked me if I wanted to go SWIMMING in CAYUGA LAKE.

The water temperature was apparently 43˚F. It was unfortunate to walk in to the water—my feet immediately felt like they had been dashed them down into oneness with the rocks, which felt numb and slick, as if covered in a blanket of ice. I huffed out some words—“I don’t think I can do this”—after having submerged myself a few times. That was after I had done four breaststrokes out; then I did a few crawls in before I clambered fast over the flat wide pebbles near the shore. Alex didn’t last either, said it had felt warmer on Wednesday and Friday, in part because there hadn’t been as much wind. The surface of my skin stung with heat after that, and even the mild wrapper of the towel felt like a luxuriant wool blanket. I felt brightened overall, and felt it was nice to be able to say I had attempted to swim in the lake in late March, even if it was a man who had compelled me to do it.

Sunday was long: stunned by the email on my father’s disappearance from IRC, the pride and shock of having swum a little in cold water, and the slight proud anxiety around wearing a bathing suit. Alex fed me some milky fish chowder and I chewed with a stunned face. It was super bright and light reflected off of the white paper of my copy of “Laus Veneris.” We saw a difficult, oneiric movie: Last Year at Marienbad, which I and most others seemed to find tiresome. Bumped into Josie and Xinyu afterwards and didn’t feel too conscious of Alex standing there; Xinyu didn’t seem to even notice him. Slow walk at some obscure nature preserve was slow and a little restless for me; stayed until after dark to listen to and watch woodcocks, a very strange small bird that seems to me to resemble an elephant somehow. He made a comment on how I blended in, as I was wearing wool in brownish tones, and then he teased me for being “bored” with the nice wool apparel, but I told him I wanted it to be warmer out so I could wear dresses. I think I wanted to get more language out of him during those hours, but it was good enough to know that he was comfortable and content to be finding woodcocks, whether or not I understood it—how to enjoy observing birds, which I’m curiously indifferent to, for the most part. I didn’t realize that the game of eBird involves counting the number of birds of each type one finds, which was a little comical to me.

I only understand his interest in bird-watching as having something to do with the fact that his father would make him watch airplanes take off as a child; he had found this activity extremely boring and unpleasant, and so now he likes to watch birds, which are of a very different design from that of the airplane. Anyway, at his house he snacked on and offered me an array of dried fruit, and I thought a little bit about Kafka’s writing about his father’s voracious eating habits, though I couldn’t recall much of what Kafka had said. There’s something superegoic about watching someone who has the ability to eat a lot eat a lot; I think of myself as the one who tends to eat in an uncontrolled excessive fashion, but here’s someone who outdos me, all the other men I’ve known were scrappier somehow and didn’t eat much, or at least not with this sort of repose, where everything he is eating is something he has acquired or made himself. And he has his own nice little cabin-house, and I feel a bit trapped and humiliated in it, but in a sexual sense. I don’t know what we spoke about, but I showed him the reply-tweet I had written in which I mentioned Greenwell’s article on Roth, and Alex recognized Roth and then Greenwell, which led to the later importance of Roth in our conversation. Now I’m reading Portnoy’s Complaint and Sabbath’s Theater.

He came after I had pulled out his cock and licked it a little, with that silliness of mine, in which I use a tiny bit of the tongue to make minimal impressions on some surface, and the supposed effect of this is to increase the power of each minor shift, to make a moment supersensual. I had been resistant to eating and tasting his skin up till then because of my strong impression of my lack of affection for him and associated giving head with a certain amount of overflow in my own emotions; sucking cock is a supremely romantic endeavor, and his own tendency to go down on me for some reason made me feel more cemented to a passive, receptive role. I like the difficult premature ejaculation with all its attendant embarrassments. He had told me something that made me feel rather expansively aroused, something to do with desire for the shikse, in relation to having related to Roth, who I later found to be well-known for his writings on shikse cunt. This discussion of the shikse had followed something I said on my relationship with asiatic femininity, and my “homophobia,” which had followed something about the humiliation involved for me in enjoying food and clothing, and I can’t trace the conversation further back than that, but I do recall noticing his erection after that. And it had all followed me speaking about my crush on John and how I need to either send a rejection message to Jacob or deal with the fact that I had ghosted someone after having been intimate with them, which seemed to go against some moral sense of mine, but which nevertheless felt comfortable and natural in this situation. In short I felt comfortable speaking to him about the other men, and this made me feel more comfortable around him. Each of the men know roughly the same amount about the others. John doesn’t know as much, but he does know something about most of them. It seems difficult for me to be like this, non-monogamous, without being able to speak of the others with each; even the slightest omission makes me feel that I don’t respect the one enough in order to truly enjoy him in either the acts of sex or in the listening and speaking which precedes sex. The one thing they don’t know is how I conceive of them or write about them when I’m not around them. Alex asked me if I thought we were similar, thus motioning towards this blind spot. Because I didn’t, I turned the question back onto him; he does think we’re similar, because we often happen to want to see the same films and both make bread, but I only started making bread again because his abilities had incurred in me a puerile competitiveness.

I don’t think we’re similar, I just think we’re both upper-middle class in a cultural sense: he knows who Schnittke is, who Dawn Upshaw is, who Elif Batuman is, and likes John Donne, and liked Thomas Hardy once on account of his education in Latin in high school, and has spent a lot of time studying a foreign language. I told him that though I didn’t think we were similar, we did seem to fit well together. The whole discussion of similarity made me feel like I had been showered with compliments, though it was just one: one of alleged “similarity.” His joke that I might tell Jacob that I didn’t want to see him again because I was afraid of becoming too attached to someone before leaving Ithaca also felt like a compliment; I read it as an admission that Alex was more in danger of liking me a lot, and that he was guarded about that, whereas I seem to believe that I could never fall in love with him, and that there’s nothing risky for me about this situation. But I happen to be doing the thing I only do when I have a crush on someone or really care for them: reading a book that they’ve read in order to get to know them better. And now I’m doing a lot of writing about him, because there is a lot to process: why am I so aroused by this concept of the shikse?

Then I had a dream in which I told Zane his fast walking annoyed me, and then he stormed off; it was an unpleasant dream, but so faint after waking. Maybe I was annoyed with Alex’s slow walking, and displaced some desire to make Alex speak more or walk faster onto Zane; but haven’t I too wanted Zane to speak more—isn’t that all I’ve ever wanted from any man: more speech, more stories, more jokes. And in the absence of that I become the nagging daughter, or I become a miscreant of silence myself, with a naughty grin that suggests to the man that I’ve got some inside knowledge that I can’t say aloud because it would be too painful or offensive for them to hear. I dreamt of Zane at Niagara—in one shot his bare torso was left unconvered as he slept on some futon on the ground, and before that we had spoken a lot about something. Alex dreamt about me twice; once I was with him on a boat, and he was nervous about leaving his stuff on the boat; the other time there was me and some joke that he thought I would like, but he had forgotten it. I made him want to have sex with me twice, and felt a little shameful and daughter-like: pressing his fingers between my fingers or digging into his fingertips with my nails, threatening to push him out of bed but simply snuggling into his torso, licking his neck with the very tip of my tongue in a way that implies i’m too small, weak, or indolent to do much more with more with it. And I stroke his arm hair, his body hair, like a curious child, not a woman-lover, because I don’t desire him with that rote sense of romantic self-annihilation, I don’t submit myself to some idea of him as a greater or more powerful spirit, I’m just there to prick or provoke him and trigger his oral drive, his appetite, his suckling, his mouth. But I’m not rote, I’m alert, until the penis is inside me, then it’s a little harder to not pretend that I’m enthralled and womanish, because it does still begin with that burning unsticking of the mucous membranes, and it feels best when I feel thrown forward with the movements, which includes how it “throws voice.”

A lot of time has elapsed. Alex has officially attained a higher status in me.

I think I’m becoming more annealed to some notion of this website as pure diary.

The previous section was written on the 29th, and the first was written after the 19th, so the intervening material spans ten days, during which I saw Alex twice, went to NeMLA, and had four dreams with Zane in them. Today’s the third. I like the possibility of making Zane feel good about his continued presence in my life even if we have no “actual” relationship outside of this website. Would be happy to continue to read his writing for the rest of my life.

It’s so nice to not be “in love.” And it’s so clear that I’m fickle. I shall be non-monogamous forever. I shall trick myself into breaking with this dictum and I shall be divorced. This represents a major shift in my work ethic: no more belief in trying to concentrate resources in one place for the sake of intensive revision. I don’t want to have a nesting partner. I approach the notion of a child with caution, because it seems ridiculous to claim that I could have a child and not be attached to it in a much more serious way. But maybe that attachment can be mourned well after a certain date. I don’t want to be like my mother, attached to the notion of the child that can fill in the lack of the husband. Someone will ruin what I’ve said some day.

The man I went on a date with on Sunday: he called the pictures of plums in my profile sad. “There is a sadness in that picture of plums.” I said anything pleasant is sad: “a lot of nice things are sad :)” He was at the fringe of a visit to a friend, had planned to leave that night or the next morning. We met at the Watershed at 8, after having started the conversation around 6:30. Dylan called in the mean time; when he does this I start to remember his scent and the shape of his head and the intelligence of his humor. I put on red lipstick, I felt confident. I had been stood up by someone earlier in the afternon, and had a nice if somewhat lonely walk around the botanical gardens where we had planned to meet. I had never seen this man before on dating apps, though he was a fourth-year PhD student, not a visitor. So I presumed he might be fresh out of a relationship, which made the absence acceptable, and entirely expected: he studied physics, wrote fiction on the side, and had wispy long curly blond hair, but was not at all like Zane in most physiognomic respects otherwise. I supposed he was a bit ambivalent from his failure to drive the chat. We had nevertheless set a date and time and place to meet, but there was no confirmation the day of and no response when I finally decided to send one. So I went from that one who didn’t show to the sudden sad man, Bazzett. He showed me nice videos of turkeys around his childhood home in Worcester. The home had been sold, and he was mournful around its loss. He had a bit of a nervous tic, moving his head in slight sudden motions as if it were difficult to catch what I had said, though he never had to ask me to repeat myself. I found this unattractive, anxiety-inducing. His energy was that of an older man; he was 30. After some of this neutral if neurotic talk about the sadness of Rutgers and NJ and the lack of “third spaces” throughout the US and a general sense of indirection and malaise we arrived at the story of his two interwoven situationships, which had been largely long-distance and begun during the pandemic. They resembled Zane’s relationships; he had trouble with commitment, with feeling, he claimed he said he did not feel he knew how to act well in relationships, the women would become upset when they found out about the other. He seemed to me to be a less accomplished and less intelligent version of Zane. He looked a bit like Zane’s father, which surprised me—nobody would claim this resemblance from photos, but once I noticed it I couldn’t rid myself of the belief. They seemed to be obsessional neurotics of a high-functioning sort, preoccupied with their capacity to control things and conflicted between a a desire to be in control, and a sense of guilt over self-diagnosed arrogance or narcissism, which all correlated with mathematical skill, with an interest in youtube videos of an informational sort—but because the world, i.e. women, kept on disappointing them with their unpredictable demands for love and punishing withdrawals they became melancholic. The first woman of the pandemic had made a dig at him in the caption of an instagram post of her and a new man; he had unfollowed her and removed her from his followers afterwards. He’s not aggressive, but aggression is turned towards the self: classical melancholia. Recalled for me DFW with his strange amalgam of self-pity and violence. I wasn’t attracted to him at all. He looked nicer in pictures. I couldn’t get myself to want to touch him or be touched, and I said this to him, the stuff about his resemblance to Zane’s father. I said this resemblance created for me a “blockage” which I couldn’t exactly understand. I said I didn’t have a sense of what he liked, what made him happy in sex. “Maximal skin-to-skin contact”—this dissatisfied me. We were at the dining table then. I had allowed him in after admitting to the problem of resemblance; I said what I thought improper to reveal, which had the effect of exciting me, of making me open to improbable events, i.e. the opposite of what I said: we can’t touch, meaning we can touch. I lit incense and it smelled and looked nice. He ended up telling me more about his father’s cruelty and skill. And then about his first girlfriend, who he soon found out was also sleeping with a somewhat older man, a “deadhead.” He said nothing of it, but it was clear that he found this inexcusable. Then she died. She had driven home from work late at night and collided into a tree near her home. They were estranged at that point, but he attended her funeral. He wasn’t sad. He wanted to tell people what she had done (to him). He was glad that he wouldn’t have to deal with her again. I asked him if he had spoken to her about it, and he told me that when he had spoken to her about it she had cried, and he had said nothing. A mistake, he said, but I told him that she could have said something too. It was 12:30.

The next morning I decided to text him the names of the songs that I liked and had mentioned: “Sleeping is the Only Love” and “All My Happiness is Gone.” He responded with a pair of messages on how he had only managed to sleep for one hour between the hours of 12 and 8, and that he was very tired, but had to drive. I wondered if he had wanted me to feel bad about not having given him perhaps the one thing that would have made him happy. I wondered if our final hug had left him minutely aroused, as it had for me: if he was pure dick then I would have been fucked by the dick, but he was a being of sadness. I wondered if he had failed to fall asleep because he was preoccupied with the sadness of his life as narrated to me, or by the potential repellent effects of having bared his life stories to me. Did he feel more doomed than before. Did he feel that my positivity had been feigned. Or that none of it mattered because I had refused to be kissed. I wondered if it would have been better if he had released some of this self-directed aggression upon me, if he would have been better off pinning me to the wall. Of course this aroused me. It felt healthy to desire this potentiality of his in his absence. This is the closest I can get to a true consummation of the fantasy of rape: a true collision between the no and the imagined negation of the no.

Zane is hotter than most similar melancholic men; one of my desires for him is that he meet more women, become profligate. Maybe he’s worried about not being right in whatever does or sets into motion—to which I say: women have the right to be harmed, to learn to deal with the consequences of the stress of knowing someone difficult like him. But could I possibly convince an obsessional to cede control in that way, to feel safe in the act of directing aggression towards unpredictable weak-strong women like me, who are so mixed?

John asked me out after all this time.

I said I had forgotten what I had done that weekend, when he asked. What strange reluctance to speak! I told him about The Birds. He bought an iced coffee from the corner deli, which was warm and wooden, like the diner in Twin Peaks. He told me about watching Avatar II, about the human in the mask. We spoke about the meaning of “love.” People had been asking me about that lately, I said—which triggered the slow unfolding of the narrative on Bazzett. We walked to Mulholland Wildflower Preserve. He told me about his father talking too much after Bobby’s death, at a dinner in which Amparo had come with him to the city a few weeks ago. From the vantage point of the clear section of the trail before it re-enters the shaded woods we saw a couple embrace. Two older men and a prolonged hug. There was a real tenderness to it, it was a hug stripped of cinematic convention. Near the end of the walk I told him about the pregnancy scare, and about the pleasant “dumbness” of the relation with Alex. I asked him how things were going with Amparo, and he said they were “okay.” He spoke of moments of excitement, and their dissipation, and about some his resistance to “domesticity.” About the regularity of their visits to the movie theater, which he once had to refuse out of this horror. He bought kombucha from the small Greenstar. When we arrived back at the park near the Commons it was overcast and just starting to rain. No one was there. The rain was fine, it was somewhere between 50 and 60 degrees out, and I was wearing cotton, not wool. After we arrived at a bench I asked him if he had ever sensed that I had a crush on him.

He answered in the affirmative. There had been an intimacy in our conversations back then, he said, which had been part of the reason why he never mentioned Amparo. I cried on the bench and it was sudden, and the rain was falling a little, enough to sit in for thirty minutes or so. I hadn’t cried since the weekend before the 20th. In truth I had not expected to have this response; the only thing that I could think of later was that I must have looked nice, I must have been pretty. The man who had come to do work on the ceiling complimented my hair.

When I cried he would ask me each time what I was thinking, which was either stupid or funny, as one might surmise that the tears came precisely at those moments when I had no thoughts, when the only thing I could sense was that my jaw felt like it was hanging down and becoming heavy and tuberous and frozen and falling at the same time. I couldn’t accept him, not that he was patient or that he was kind, none of it mattered, with the sudden sense that it was all done. It was like my soul was pushing him out. A real kind of jouissance.

I started to tell him, near the end, of what it was like to encounter him the first time, first at the bar in the accidental group formed by attendees of a Hong Sang-soo film, where he had called himself a clown, and I had related to him and even echoed what he had said back in different terms, which he said he preferred to his own, but I preferred his. And I had written about that in an email to Zane in October. That was the first time I had noticed him, I said. Then seeing him on the first day of class on a bench, then our progressive encounters, where I realized he resembled my father. I said all I could give him were these representations of himself, I said something about “throwing mirrors.” He told me that he had appreciated how I spoke what was on my mind, which tended to be different from what other people thought.

Is there some way of saying that I don’t want to talk without using the negation?

The vulgarity of this website consists in stripping my practice of aestheticism.

Today’s the next day, Tuesday. I’m eschewing emotiveness in favor of straightforwardness.

I woke up from a two-hour-long nap this afternoon and felt bad, and felt that I could sleep for several more hours, preferrably forever, but that doing so would make me more dehydrated, incorrigibly shrivelled and weak. I left the house in the morning, after analysis, to buy more flour from the bulk session at Greenstar—the local high extraction bread flour which I can’t get elsewhere, the stuff Alex uses, which is less expensive than some other brands. I also bought some other items, like black cherry ice cream, in allusion to my last date with Alex, and mayocoba beans, which are fat and rotund and yellow and nine-ninety-nine (per pound). Other unforeseen purchases included dried mango, because there were no dates, and a new bag of coffee, because I want to rotate between two varieties even though I currently have a lot of beans. The skies were overcast when I left, but became clearer as I returned; I thought Ithaca very beautiful, and saw a beautiful pair of cardinals, one of each sex, and found the brown striations of the female more beautiful than the uniform red of the male. I had worn the brown Reformation dress with large buttons down the front and flared sleeves, and a wool long cardigan, and white bloomer pants with black dots, and enjoyed the strangeness of that outfit. The previous night I had prepared two kinds of levain, one for pancakes and the other for doughnuts, while taking a break from writing, which had continued until near 2 AM. I pushed the update though I was not in a position to read what I had written carefully. This morning I felt ill-at-ease with what I had done, so though I did not particularly want to work on the material, I did revise it. In the morning I saw that someone responded to the part of my Hinge profile about how satyrs and fauns are different—he seems well-read, he writes book reviews, and is in the Law school. I don’t know if I find him attractive. He likes Rachel Cusk and Henry James and is from Sydney, Australia. I was voluble at 7:40, which is when I have analysis on Tuesday. Though I cried some, I left the session feeling happy about my narrative of what had happened with John. Most of it involved telling Hunter that I felt attractive. In retrospect this felt like the small chip of a beginning of something much longer and tougher. Does Hunter feel sort of seduced, interested, entertained to hear about the relations I have with all these different men, like I am a TV drama? I like the notion that the storytelling has an inordinate entertainment value, or that the way I convey my stories to him is in some innate sense “seductive.” These are the stories his daughter would tell him in the future if she could. I have true daughter vibes, and I’m slick and sticky, and I have a sucking mouth like that of a lamprey. The bare content of what I convey to him places him in a kind of imaginary sexual relation with me. I ended the session talking to him about what I wanted to do to Alex.

It’s still Tuesday. I took two naps, the first two hours, the second an hour. I just want to sleep.

I miss Alex. He went back to Monkey Run and posted a video of a goose. I want to take pictures of him and make him beautiful. He is only attractive in his photos on Tinder. I don’t have many memories of looking at him when I’m with him, but I did last time, when he was eating the salted caramel ice cream in front of me, licking the ball until it was sort of flat and sad, with skid marks. I prefer to bite my ice cream, when it’s hard, and let it melt against my tongue, to feel some of the ice burn as it melts. Whenever Alex penetrates me it hurts a little at first, with the walls being tugged apart at the back. He looks semitic, asiatic, slavic. He looks like his mother, who strikes me as beautiful. During our last meeting we walked at Monkey Run and it was more beautiful than I could account for; I could list the organisms I saw but it was something about the light and configuration of the trail with respect to the river that I liked. I liked how he walked the entire trail without shoes, and I wore the set of the cheapest clothes I own: silk culottes from a SF Goodwill, and the floral shirt Dylan gave me. I also wore sandals for the first time since the fall. It felt free, the clothes and the whole experience of being driven to a trail which is a little far by foot, a trail I had once encountered all alone in the fall, and never returned to. The longer my hair gets the more worried I am about looking like a woman, I was reminded of the vague pleasure, the ironic pleasure of being seen in public with a man and therefore as in a couple. I feel that most people who see me with a man will domesticate their concept of me to that of small asian woman instead of that of sadistic female imp. At the end of the walk he told me that he had been thinking of ice cream, just “ice cream and sex.” I said “great,” it had delighted me to hear this, the purity of it. When I pushed him on “sex,” he said he hadn’t been thinking about it much, mostly ice cream. He expected me to have been thinking of something more complex. I said I’d been thinking of how it was okay for me to walk ahead of him, faster than him, because I was like a dog being taken on a walk. For much of the walk I went ahead of him rather than tarrying and attempting to engage in conversation; he looked out for his birds, I walked like a restless sprite. I slipped and fell a few times in the mud, and wondered if this had produced a vague sexual current. In the middle of the walk we had sat at the edge of a cliff and it felt like the moment of Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” with the “west wind” as “breath of Autumn’s being”—“Drive my dead thoughts over the universe / Like wither’d leaves to quicken a new birth! / And, by the incantation of this verse, // Scatter, as from an unextinguish’d hearth // Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! / Be through my lips to unawaken’d earth // The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind, / If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”

Alex acts dumb (doesn’t speak) and watches birds. Walks around with mud between his toes and I slip and fall and run off into the bushes to urinate, picking out some of the threads in my cheap silk culottes. In the car he asks me if I’ve been to the compost piles behind the game farm and then he brings me there and there are lots of birds. It was a fertile wasteland. I ran like a dog and chased the birds off. He said there were fish crows. There were killdeer, which I like, strange little emergencies, bars or dots of energy in flight, with their calls like sharp emergencies. Then he drove down the hill to the ice cream place that I had always passed but never entered at Dewitt mall. The old brick building with a labyrinth of corridors. I was nervous about coming across graduate students, of being seen with him, because something about my life with him is so foreign to that of the one I’ve lived as a graduate student. While we were sitting at the iron table outside I noticed that the brown of his eyes seemed to be lighter than the brown of my own, and somehow more striated: hazel with a lower exposure. I compared them to the pools that form in the middle of the forest, with bottoms composed of decomposing leaf matter, and he brought up the amber jelly fungus. He examined my eyes and insisted that they were the same color, but I doubt it still—of course he couldn’t see what I saw, and I couldn’t see what he saw. It struck me that all the other eyes I had paid attention to before had been blue, so this shade of brown had excited me more.

It started to rain as we finished the ice cream. We drove up the inclined road through the warm rain and at his house I rubbed the dirt off in the bathtub and found a thorn in my leg, embedded in a small triangle of red; it was painless to pull out. Then he took a shower, and I examined his shelf, from which I pulled out a volume of the Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath. It was yellow and soft, second-hand, I hadn’t seen it before, and it made sense for him to have acquired it in the past several weeks. The first poems were from 1956. One was “Ode to Ted,” the other was “Tale of a Tub.” The voice coming from the shower was resonant and warm, and bore no resemblance to his speaking voice. When he came out I glanced back and saw him wrapped around the waist with a white towel. I turned my head back to the book.

He was steamed and humid and more naked than I was, for the first time; I shudder thinking of it, the eroticism of having to loosen the book from me, of being unable to look. I deleted the sentence in which I narrate to the reader exactly when I felt his weight. He said some words: I said some words: I said something about enjoying the tub poem. He asked if it had the same effect as Fever 103°, whose meaning I shouldn’t have to explain—but it was the poem which had produced a sort of orgasm as I sat reading it one afternoon, hands neat on the desk, not at all even thinking of sex beforehand. Pure? What does it mean? I don’t remember what I said, because he was on top of me. Then some line about “acetylene.”

I want the dumbest and I want to be second-dumbest.

Does it seem anti-dumb of me to think of poetry?

Reading the two great romantic autumn odes with more care and attention than ever before, in an effort to achieve dumbness, in an effort to escape the scourge of verbal intercourse:

CLEAVE themselves into CHASMS, while FAR BELOW / THe SEA-BLOOMS and the OOZY WOODS Which Wear / The SApLESS FOliAGE of the oCEAN, KNOW…

Today I feel better. A man on the commons who was at a few psychoanalysis reading group meetings waved at me and I didn’t recognize him until I came closer. He asked over text later if I’d go to a “(very small) reading group.” I looked him up and he’s engaged to a circus person. I was repelled whenever I had spoken to him in the past but now I’m indifferent.

I bought H.D.’s Hermione at the bookstore. Want to hear about her relations with men.

Alex showed me his rectangular, or “square” bread. Pullman loaves: why are they called “Pullman” pans? George Pullman: Pullman sleeping car. Rail car, train bread, efficiency.

Mandelstam likes acetylene too. I’m shy about these Russian poets in translation, but the small book of Mandelstam translations felt sharp and strong. I kept on keeping it open. Kept on going with it that morning as he made the omelette with asparagus. I washed dishes the previous evening, to his delight—he doesn’t like washing dishes, I had always thought a person who liked to cook would also like to wash dishes. I like the humiliation of knowing that I’m making someone a bit pleased. I’m pleasing him because I want him to be pleased, not because I want to pleasure myself with the pleasure of washing dishes. But he’d be even more grateful if I washed dishes and didn’t like it—this he said to me, almost to the letter.

On Tuesday I woke up crying from a dream in which I had screamed at my mother, twice. We were having dinner with Knausgaard at a dinner table that recalls for me the interior of the home in Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers. Knausgaard was sitting on the long side of a long table with his wife and three small children. He spoke a lot and I asked questions. I tried to redirect some of the conversation to his wife and children but they didn’t respond to any of them. After the dinner, my mother told me that I hadn’t been very respectful to Knausgaard, as it was clear to her that I was trying to get him to speak less. Then a thin frayed rope of a scream. Rough and at a constant volume, terrible power. Then I yelled out that I had been trying to get the others to speak. Then she appeared to switch sides, and criticized me for not having been successful in my attempts to make the children and woman speak. I screamed, and woke up, and cried for a while. The dream clearly had to do with John’s story of his father speaking too much at dinner with Amparo. Perhaps Knausgaard stood in for me and my way of writing here. Can’t I let my wife and children speak?

Today I became a hysteric with respect to Alex. Sex threw me into despair and I had to leave the bed. I knew I felt nothing because John had made me sad. The same had happened with Zane. John made me too sad to have sex with Zane. I was gripped with a desire for him to fuck me without a condom, and felt bad when he didn’t want to. I went to the bathroom and listened to Dylan’s voice memos and wrote some messages. It wasn’t at all about pleasure, it was about trust. The next morning I noticed noticeable amounts of fluid in the condom in which he had not come and told him that we really shouldn’t have sex without a condom; look at all the fluid! And then I asked him to put it in without a condom, this one time, and he did it. So I managed to make him do the irrational thing at the most irrational moment. But it did make sense. I demonstrated that I was honest and observant by reporting to him that I could see semen in the condom which I had chosen to observe. So then he could capitulate. I removed myself from the penis soon after finding that it didn’t feel different. All I had wanted to do was to obtain proof that he was willing to do something risky with me.

He admitted that he had come to believe that I had perhaps ghosted him the same morning—I had run out of text messages. I pay $5/mo for a phone plan that gives me 90 minutes of call time, 100 text messages, and 500 MB of data per month. The thing he had sent that had been missed: Public Domain Review’s post on Swinburne’s birthday. A comment: this is what salt water does to your hair. The funny cute thing being that Swinburne’s hair, in that drawing, looks like mine. And there were some other messages that I had missed that he wouldn’t show me, probably not anything particularly interesting, but I still want to seeeeee!!!! I like this intersection between Swinburne and our cold water experiments; last time we entered Cayuga lake, I had explicitly mentioned to him that I was doing it in honor of Swinburne.

Before parting I dragged him on the floor. I made him sit. Then I grabbed his ankles and dragged him towards the stairs. I loved that great perversion of my desire and of his: he tells me it’s time to drive me home, I attempt to delay him by sitting him down, but after saying a few words I become more occupied with the effort of dragging his heavy body. Then he delays my exit by having me drag him, by refusing to stand up. I drag him towards the exit, in reverse of what I want, which is to stay and talk. It’s not so different from Freud’s reading of the fort-da game—the child takes up an active stance in relation to a situation in which he was once overwhelmed and completely passive, i.e. the departure of his mother.

I bit the back of his neck before we parted, hard enough for him to emit a little “ouch.”

When I looked out the window for his car and saw no trace of it, I was overwhelmed with sorrow, and cried, and couldn’t read or write, but soon I began to write a report of an email to Lara, which began with the act of copying out some bits from a book I had once considered “dumb,” Lawrence Lipking’s Abandoned Women and the Poetic Tradition.

Women who live in “abandon” are capable of sudden dangerous turns. They become the objects not only of pity but envy, not only of fear but attraction. Moreover, since neither the protection nor the inhibition of the law applies to them any longer, they constitute a potential threat to a well-ordered society. Poets and respectable people do not always know what to make of them. Perhaps this helps account for their enduring fascination. (xvii)

So I suddenly had the experience of feeling that I was attached to the ghosts of men in the shell of Alex, that I both felt I desired him more than I could carry without great suffering—and that I also knew he was nothing, that he had nothing to do with the portent of abandonment I read in his post-coital nodding off. And I therefore felt a need to assert how abandoned I’d soon feel in the face of his eventual silence, or in the mere action of him bringing me home regularly, which produces now manifold scenes of clinginess.

Do I care to flatten and record a sense of abandonment that doesn’t have time to stretch out?

Later the same day after I had gotten absorbed with writing about the recent episode with Alex he asked me if I wanted to go for a swim. Call this a comic episode, a perversion of time: the one to whom I had clung was inviting me to see him again the same day…

A coworker and her partner would come, so a little less inappropriate. I capitulated, but went for a run first, and around 5 PM we entered Cayuga lake, which was cold, but not as cold for me as it had been last time. Everyone equally cold, equally quick to leave the water. Well, the man, the partner of the woman, stayed in a little while, and he looked a bit Dionysian. My feet were functional. The coworker was not so beautiful, but she was larger and rounder and her eyes were also large and round—I find it fascinating when women are strong and big. She had a very attractive man, but I didn’t think him “interesting”—too self-solid, too complete. Then we went to Alex’s house and ate his quiche; I felt I had nothing to say, and was more interested in seeing how Alex spoke with others. Next week I will see more of that.

To my surprise he didn’t kick me out immediately afterwards; we had a rather active conversation in which he stared at me. I said I thought it might be a bit dumb for me to be using dating apps, that I was considering becoming a saint. “You need to do a little more than not get laid to be a saint.” He wondered what my icon would look like, and told me there was an Orthodox icon of John Coltrane. He said he was asking himself if he should be scared of me. He said he couldn’t help not being a bit scared of me, but that I was, in fact, “nice.”

I like being examined, I like the humiliation of it. Thinking about this non-monogamy thing: I do think it’s a little ridiculous, now that I’m finding it increasingly easy to meet random men, to go through with the rituals of exhaustion that accompany meeting a stranger.

And he looked beautiful at the table, looking at me look at him looking at me.

I’m clingy now!

How do you feel about me being this way?

Are you clingy?

I was literally clinging to your leg—like a koala!

Alex is silent in the car, he must be processing all this new stuff.

Is it a big shock, that the sluttish one is becoming “clingy”?

The second time he drove me back, he said: now I’m the one who’s feeling clingy!

I said, that’s great, now we can switch positions!

I didn’t bite him this time, though I attempted to bite his hand, which he withdrew.

I told him that we could perhaps see each other a little more often for shorter spans of time, that we should see a movie this weekend. I fully intend to pursue the heights of niceness.

I’ve spent several hours writing this Friday—it’s nearing the end of spring break. The weather is too good to miss, but I like missing it from the sunniness of my room.

I’ve spent more time updating it on Saturday—similar good weather. After the comfort and resolution provided by the verbal intercourse yesterday I seem to have shifted back into place. Enjoying reading Tsvetaeva and H.D. and Swinburne and Lawrence; revisiting some Lacanians' essays on the symptom/sinthome. Thinking about what to write about my 2-hr call with mom, the first I’d had since last December. Perhaps the most surprising moment for me was the one in which she encouraged me to remain friends with Zane, because we’ve known each other for a while, in a sort of unique fashion—maybe she’s sensitive to the way he’s consistent with a core version of myself, the one who places everything in my life around the central will to create. She understands that coldness, loneliness, better than I do now.