Yea, the ability to backtrack through time,
The crossing out of letters which vanish as if
imbued by life with a program for death,

And no questions were posed for posterity.
They knew they would need to replicate
the process themselves, testing rhyme

like a picture cut in two, but never were
the edges equidistant from the center:
The cookie had been nibbled so as not

To fit some supposed complement,
as tiny transparent cubes of sugar
littered the counter: neatness seen,

but not experienced. Likewise we saw
that nibbling a breast was not the same
as licking sugar; yet this banal statement

is not meant to disavow the work of
representation, for that split too
lives off cells barred like letters.

I do believe in the rapid composition of poems
I do believe in the pressure of silent, vacant rooms
I read a tract on Swinburne—I continue to read it

Here’s a secret—I imbibed the word “yea” from Swinburne
I wrote his name as Swimburne, and “master” as “masture”
These legs are twisted and twisted when the words are good

I decided that the next post would be called “Brane” not “Brain”
Do you know the etymology of “brain,” of “brane”?
Have you heard the former’s root cognate “harn” before?

Membrum is a word for flesh
Sex is the stumbling block of sense
Yea’s abstruse affirmative

Hunter,

It looks like I ovulated on Thursday, as there’s a faint tint of red to my discharge which I believe I first observed on Friday. If so, this works like clockwork—let’s say I ovulated on the 29th (the same day as the moment of “rapture”). Then my follicular phase lasted 17-18 days, with 4-5 days of bleeding, and if the luteal phase was in fact 14 days, then I did indeed ovulate on the 28th or 29th of August. I have likewise gotten into some sort of rhythm of having one significant encounter per month. Beginning of July: Dylan; End of July: Lara; End of August: Alec; Beginning of October: K.

[2 October 2022]

To: Hunter

I’m extremely fatigued this evening; have been all day, really, with a brief moment of clarity in the morning as I was harvesting perilla leaves. I took a nap around 4 PM and felt the inside of my sheath. Put three fingers in, triangular formation. My orgasms are much smaller than the sense of arousal that precedes them. This time I fell into an unconscious state almost immediately, even though the orgasm was small, and when I woke up I momentarily thought it was the beginning of the day. Around 6:40 PM I went up to the library to scan some D.H. Lawrence poems for my students. When I got back I was tired, not refreshed. Most of the early morning was spent preparing perilla kimchi. I stopped by Applefest around 10 AM to look for doughnuts but the stand wasn’t there, later realized it’s because they’re Amish. Instead I bought a doughnut from the coffee shop Hound & Mare, and stopped by Greenstar to get scallions—and a slice of blueberry pie, which ended up being decent. I enjoyed the doughnut. Processing the perilla kimchi was imprecise because I was too lazy to count the leaves and scale the recipe accordingly. I kept on cutting garlic in batches. Anyway, I managed to fill the large glass bowl I wanted to use with the leaves. Afterwards I wrote about my dream and read some of The White Peacock. I’m losing momentum with Lawrence and feel like I need to return to James. This fatigue seems to be luteal phase fatigue. If it is simply this, how should I go about making it better? I could spend all my time cooking, I guess, and then I went to the kitchen and fried the onions and tomato and basil and herbs and cut the kale and added it to the beans I had pressure cooked earlier in the day, and it indeed woke me up, and it felt good to eat some of it.

“Ah no—don’t pity her!”

This did, however, pull him up. “We mayn’t even be sorry for her?”

“Not now—or at least not yet. It’s too soon—that is if it isn’t very much too late. This will depend,” Mrs. Assingham went on; “at any rate we shall see. We might have pitied her before—for all the good it would then have done her; we might have begun some time ago. Now, however, she has begun to live. And the way it comes to me, the way it comes to me—” But again she projected her vision.

“The way it comes to you can scarcely be that she’ll like it!”

“The way it comes to me is that she will live. The way it comes to me is that she’ll triumph.”

She said this with so sudden a prophetic flare that it fairly cheered her husband. “Ah then, we must back her!”

“No—we mustn’t touch her. We mayn’t touch any of them. We must keep our hands off; we must go on tiptoe. We must simply watch and wait. And meanwhile,” said Mrs. Assingham, “we must bear it as we can. That’s where we are—and serves us right. We’re in presence.”

And so, moving about the room as in communion with shadowy portents, she left it till he questioned again. “In presence of what?”

“Well, of something possibly beautiful. Beautiful as it MAY come off.”

She had paused there before him while he wondered. “You mean she’ll get the Prince back?”

She raised her hand in quick impatience: the suggestion might have been almost abject. “It isn’t a question of recovery. It won’t be a question of any vulgar struggle. To ‘get him back’ she must have lost him, and to have lost him she must have had him.” With which Fanny shook her head. “What I take her to be waking up to is the truth that, all the while, she really HASN’T had him. Never.”

To: tlinklywroad

I met someone from feeld who made me curious last night. We had spoken a bit about architecture in the chat and I decided to ask him to meet the same day. He didn’t have any full pictures of his face, but judging from what I could see of his body and nose and mouth he seemed quite attractive. When we met I felt at ease, somehow. There was a certain quality of interest to our conversation, though it was a bit subdued, like there was something dense suspended in it. I felt that we hadn’t gotten to know each other at all, but that everything that had been said could lead off into a knotted forest. The conversation had to it a mutual slow politeness, an emotional reserve or distance, caused in part by the noise produced by an adjacent party which was celebrating a birthday. I felt that I couldn’t read him, or even read myself, but I was satisfied with the fact that I was comfortable enough around him to not insist on quickening the conversation with questions. He is doing an MA in architecture and studied sculpture at Pratt before that. I liked his voice, he is from Trinidad, so maybe it was the way he pronounced words which I was drawn to, more than his particular vocal anatomy.

He seemed very serious and very focused on his work. Calm and a bit of a slow talker. We spoke about our respective houses and rooms. I said a bit about my frustrations with Tao Dufour when I took the Climate Imaginaries course, and about my website. He said something about how he’s doing some sort of processual design, using code to draw or produce architectural models. He said it was hard to connect with other students in his program because they are all so young, many want to be “starchitects.” He said he would prefer to design a bus stop, that he finds them interesting. We talked about the mortise and tenon joint on the beam of the bottom of a long table. I asked some questions which are usual of me to ask, near requirements at this point—about dreams, about the use of dating apps. He said he dreams often, very strange dreams. That he very rarely uses dating apps, hasn’t met anyone off of an app in Ithaca, and just downloaded feeld today. He said that when he is on dating apps it seems to come from some edge of boredom or loneliness, and that today had been a slow day, so he had been hesitant to meet. I said my day had also been a bit slow and that I was moving towards a kind of solitude and absorption in my work, so it had been a surprise to me that I had interacted with him today and met. He said he had been surprised too, and had had reservations about meeting, because he hadn’t been productive earlier in the day. We only talked for about two hours before he said he was going to go home to do some work. This was a little disappointing, but it felt reasonable, consistent with what he had told me. He asked me if I would like to meet again. I walked back to his house with him and we hugged before I left. I liked the hug. He said something about having coffee or tea at his house some time. He told me to text him. We interacted a bit on the app afterwards, he asked if I had gotten home safely, and I shared a picture of a toy skull in a car window that I had seen on the way back. I knew I was already nervous because I felt I had liked him a lot and was bracing myself for some form of rejection or abandonment.

I had a dream that was vivid and beautiful and it involved catasetum orchids, a reference to the fact that my feeld profile says one of my interests is catasetums, and to the fact that I had talked to him about growing orchids.

The reason I was so invested in him is that he reminded me of a past version of myself, more ascetic and rigid and involved with solitude and rigor and aesthetics, as in 2019, when I took the course that involved a trip to Trinidad.

Today I noticed that he had changed his profile: he had removed all the photos of himself, so there was just one left with succulent leaves set on soil for propagation, and he had put himself in the New York core, and then later he moved back to his current location. And then around 9-10 PM tonight he terminated his account. Feeld leaves a marker when a profile has deactivated, or disconnected, but termination is different, as the account just disappears. I wondered if he had felt he was wasting his time, looking around at various profiles. We never exchanged any other form of contact, so I felt bad, bad enough that I impulsively decided to delete my Tinder account. How could I use any dating app after this event—how could I be open to anyone who didn’t resemble him, who didn’t seem as interesting? I know there’s a slight chance that he’ll return to the app and re-match with me later, but there’s something kind of off-putting to me about a person who feels so neurotic about something that he needs to delete an app, unless something else, something very intense happened. Or maybe it’s always intense, whatever’s happening to him. In any case, this particular familiar misalignment with something neurotic and dense in someone else feels both worth engaging with, worth mourning in the form I am enacting now, and not worth engaging with, which is why I am writing now: I am literally “writing off” the thing that disturbs me.

Anyway, I did have some reservations about his seriousness, and suspected that maybe he felt I was too young (he’s 36). The sense of deep abjection that happens to me when someone I want to know disappears is not something I wish to control. I don’t feel guilt with respect to it, or insecurity, or a wish to make the feeling go away, I just watch it, in paralysis. It never felt like I had a choice when it came to this abjection, though in the past I have felt worse about existing in relation to it. Now it fades from me as I write this and observe it. Perhaps it will come back in the form of a dream. I am thinking about how my recent happiness and plenitude with writing and reading and analysis has been inflected into a kind of fatigue and real sense of loneliness; I realized that my menstruation is really working with a mechanical rigor; it seems like I just ovulated a few days ago based on this light spotting in my discharge, so right now I am re-entering the thick of the luteal phase, and feel very much as I did when I was tired and depressed last month.

Recently I have withdrawn from a desire for encounters with strange others by establishing in myself a sense of affection for Zane, which is possible to trivialize as a series of wild acts of projection based on whatever I write or read or speak about in analysis. But I like how it is centered around a desire to produce beautiful things. It feels good to feel good about someone without wanting or needing them. After meeting C (it’s probably Ciaran, not Kieran, given that he changed his feeld name to “c” right before terminating), all that began to feel like some untenable. I feel suspicious of my construction. I feel suspicious of the security that comes from being absorbed in work. It seems more important to experience true loneliness, to be afloat in a single place, to learn how to live with actual solitude and actual hatred of life. I imagine that behind every “serious” and “rigorous” person there is a constant engagement with this fundamental hatred of life. You can probably sense that I actually spit on this position, and don’t want to have anything to do with my potential to exist with it. That goes along with not believing that anyone is consistent in their stance, that even the most rigid undermine themselves.

Blandine Rannou’s Goldberg Variations. Something about the texture of the soft notes on the harpsichord. I’m thinking about how poetic utterances are often constative. I’m very tired. Recently my cunt feels stretchier. I read Michelle’s piece on her copper IUD’s toxicity. I want to get more involved with photography again; I want to make photographs which respond to the ones I’ve made in the past, the ones which were preoccupied with the “erotic,” with the “fold,” with “surface.” I also want to want to be a poet again. I want to make books with my hands. I want to print things and pin them on the wall and stand up and stare at them. I want to be careful.

Banfield on Benveniste: The aorist tense in the third person is what qualifies narration (histoire) as distinct from discourse (discours). (US 148)

James’s pluperfect is a tense but it is a past tense combined with perfect aspect. It “establishes a deixis […] and places the action relative to the deixis (before it).” The aorist involves a perfective aspect; its Greek root ἀόριστος means “indefinite” because it refers to the unmarked version of the verb with no implications of an imperfective or perfect aspect. (Wikipedia)

Does the pluperfect entail that every perfect action has occurred before a specified event? Here’s a random sentence from The Golden Bowl:

She had thrown herself, at dinner, into every feature of the recent adventure of the companions, letting him see, without reserve, that she wished to hear everything about it, and making Charlotte in particular, Charlotte's judgment of Matcham, Charlotte's aspect, her success there, her effect traceably produced, her clothes inimitably worn, her cleverness gracefully displayed, her social utility, in fine, brilliantly exemplified, the subject of endless inquiry.

This sentence doesn’t subordinate or refer the pluperfect to an event before which it happened. All the other verbs are in the progressive tense and mark actions which occur during the same span of time in which she had “thrown herself.” The aspect of the action of the verb throw doesn’t seem to matter. In any case, there’s some sense of suspension in all this, of what Banfield calls the NOW: the “moment of the act of consciousness.” The event to which the past perfects are subordinated, to which they deictically refer, is this unspoken, unspeakable “act of consciousness” on the part of Maggie.

If we replaced all the pluperfects with simple past tense verbs, then we’d experience her as throwing herself in the moment: “She threw herself, at dinner, into every feature of the recent adventure…” It would be as if the narrator had observed these events only shortly before recounting them, and is focused on recording the actions in sequence. Not enough time has passed for the narrator to “reflect” on the scene. Certainly not any time at all for Maggie herself to be reflective. I’m sure someone has written about this—I’m going to read Hisayoshi Watanabe’s “Past Perfect Retrospection in the Style of Henry James.” Yes, this is very nice. And I’m seeing some possible connections to masochism, too: “Drama takes place in James’s novels when the equilibrium of the internal world is broken by an action from outside-when the sensitive mind undergoes a new experience” (177).

MAGGIE

“Oh she was going, she was going—she could feel it
afresh; it was a good deal as if she had sneezed
ten times or had suddenly burst into a comic song.”

“Her grasp of appearances was thus out of proportion
to her view of causes; but it came to her then and there
that if she could only get the facts of appearance straight,
only jam them down into their place, the reasons lurking
behind them, kept uncertain, for the eyes, by their wavering
and shifting, wouldn’t perhaps be able to help showing.”