The second person I meet at a different bar on Saturday. I feel at ease because I think I’ve been approached from the wrong angle. Just last week I’ve asked my doctor about reducing my T dose and getting an IUD; I’m basically a woman, I’m 5’2'', I’m wearing leopard-print pants, and I don’t know what’s going on with me and language, if I can ever connect with someone who doesn’t primarily exist through absence. The bartender compliments my pants, and my first instinct is to think about how she must view me as a not-man; I think my last-minute decision to wear these pants means I’ve given up on the whole homosocial enterprise, that I’m showing off too much of how small I am, too much of my knowledge of feminine things and how to acquire them.

V is an anthropologist. One of the first things he tells me is that he is questioning the notion of inborn sexual preference. He’s thinking about his best friend from high school and what would’ve happened had he been less indoctrinated with the rhetoric of a certain song lyric, but he’s also skeptical of the social constructivism ingrained in his discipline, STS. We talk about how certain facial features are racialized, and how we judge people’s appearances, and how preferences may or may not have to do with who one has known in the past. I tell him that my first partner was a woman; I tell him that since I’m 5’2'' I feel necessarily aligned with femaleness; I tell him that I used to believe in the Greek model, but I don’t tell him what replaced that. I do not feel female while talking to him, I feel like a man, because I am voluble and incisive and fearless and that it seems I live on the surface of ideas. He might be a little cowed by me, but if he is he also isn’t, seems just as invested in going hard, however soft he may be in voice and however long and pretty his eyelashes may be; I’d say he’s beautiful in soul and face and a delicate wonder seems to arise between us as we fan out our disagreements on multiple items; on the respective merits and demerits of Lynch and Trier, on anthropocentrism, on whether or not dogs are as interesting as people. None of this is eristic. If anything we both seem eager to please, or to simply sit in thoughtful silence, but who knows exactly what’s happening. These differences form the beating heart, the flicker of desire, the light of the encounter. He makes note of the fact that we are very different, in the tone of a compliment, or a fascination. When he reveals his lack of bookishness I think it only serves to underline the idea that he has potency, that there could be genius in such a leap, making up for what he may lack in institutional pedigree. He is the opposite of Savitri, but serves the same function, which is to transform me. But I know I should take him seriously when he says he is unsure about academic life—there is a real possibility that his sensitivity will be crushed by the trials of labor. I find myself liking the way he responds to me, drawing attention not to the surface content of the enunciation but the fact that I’ve observed or lived through something beautiful or interesting; I’m shaken out of the idea that one must respond to a claim with a response to the claim. This is, in essence, a poetic way of response. Or maybe it’s just flirtatious. It’s not unfamiliar to me, but it’s definitely audacious for a first-time encounter, and I’m surprised that I find it so tender, not off-putting like with that older ghostwriter who made his concussions seem so magical in 2017. I am reminded of the fact that V tells me, early in our conversation, that I don’t look like or remind him of anyone he knows. I am shocked in a delayed way by the fact that he is saying this to me, given what he has said about questioning his preferences, but I think what he says is beyond suspicion because it’s probably just objectively true. I am not perturbed by what would perturb me, not in a negative way, at least, and this is a fresh cut, a breeze. The evening ends with a walk in the dark, or more precisely with us standing by the bridge over a stream.

The last thing he says is that he is afraid of his own anti-social impulse. I wonder if this pronouncement impales me, if he is wondering if I am too intense or bookish for him, though the distant gaze and the literal wording of his admission suggests he is not. I tell myself upon arriving home that the encounter was so satisfying that the possibility of no future does not disturb me. Maybe this is anti-social of me. I send him a screenshot of the leveret passage from The Ordeal of Richard Feverel the next day, as it is quoted and discussed in Elisha’s book, and he doesn’t respond. I wonder if I’ve intimidated him or misjudged the encounter. I dream the next day that he puts me off from a second meeting, saying we should just message instead. Is this a simple wish-fulfillment—a wish to convert him into text, or to waylay the possibility of Z’s fading away? I can breed whatever sour grapes I need for this farcical situation, I can say that it’s still truly asexual, this fresh slicing breeze. It is like encountering a brilliant dog, speaking with V—I wonder if sexuality needs to be dark, a form of sobbing. I wonder if writing about him is also a form of eliding him, of defending myself against the possibility of his future growth in and around my psychic apparatus. My writing for the rest of the week is dysphoric and bland. I think I only care about regaining the libidinal impulse when I’m around the jokster friends, because laughter is a perversion of genital arousal. But I am once again presented with the problem of homosexuality. I wonder if it’s possible to be a conversion incarnate; both seem interested at least consciously in some kind of subversion of the default. This is some extreme shit; on some level I’ve done it, and but it didn’t work out. I forget that my failure to be bisexual doesn’t mean it couldn’t be the destiny of another. Lacan would approve! Sex could involve ever more abrupt misalignments of style and expectation. But everything going on here is so protean. Is someone going to come along and beat the signifiers out of me?

Ghastly afternoon dream.

The dream jolts me out of the sense that everything’s casual—

V is sitting at a round table in a breakfast alcove surrounded by windows and inside the kitchen with several female roommates, and Z. I am ripped out of the scene by an urge to speak to him, but everyone leaves and I’m left in the house alone. This process of disappearance is not seen. My desire blanks everything out, so it’s like I’ve shut my eyes to a blank page. When I open my eyes again I’m in the same place but nobody’s there, and I move into a room to the right of the kitchen. It’s my room, but so dark because it’s surrounded by trees; it’s summer, and the light filtering through the windows is tinted a bold saturated green, too green, too consistent. The atmosphere is suffocating, I’ve never felt so trapped by a color which would otherwise be quite paradisical. I want to call Z, but I don’t. This lasts a long time, it’s an infernal bower, it reminds me of the Hoh Rainforest, Keats, and the Sunbitch post which I recently updated with a few notes on the topic of Freud and exhibitionism.

I want anyone who threatens to replace him to speak to me in language, to fuck me up with ipsisimosity and signifiers and absence. I want to be horny again, I am aloof but I want to live in aloofness only in order to earn back his trust, and secondarily in order to dominate him or bask in his dread. And once I’m back in the position of the brachet-in-heat, I want him to impose something on me: an aggressive email, a necrotic story, the marble torso of his silence, my own specular fantasy of the cigarette burns, or something else smooth and desaturated; I don’t want to play around with the champagne of equality and convivial exchange. Recently I’ve managed to orgasm again, thinking about his cock, which in its vaporous absence seems most adept at taking the shape of its container: it’s empty space, sublime nothingness-water. I spill out onto something that’s dry and cool, I’m hot and wet. We’re hermaphrodites of crossed persuasions; according to Hippocrates, the male is hot and dry, the female cold and wet. Yet all these words and the imaginary they invoke feel virtual and forced and already collapsed. In other words, I am not wet right now. Moreover, I imagine his face in a perpetual expression of silent disdain. I look at all the blemishes on my face as a sign of my innate corruption. But there’s something vital in the evil of my face, in that weathering of suppuration and erection, in the chaos of ugliness.

Bernini, "Sleeping Hermaphroditus"

Lacan Seminar X group—we laughed a lot. Chaim thought I was a girl before I spoke (“Hi, Ladies.”). I was naïve but asked all the right questions. Richard had another good story about an analysand who needed to be reminded with light humiliation of the bike accident that had coincided with the beginning of the analysis; she had denied she ever day-dreamed. I said it seemed like these inflection points in the transference situation seem to have a lot to do with laughter. And that humiliation is different from embarrassment and from shame. Another good piece of ideation to chew over: that people come to analysis when the symptom is no longer working. This could mean a lot of things. For me it was like, I want to transform my symptom into something I can sustain, I want to maintain it, survive it. Now it’s more like where has my symptom gone? or what the fuck is my symptom? So I ask, what’s next, after one gets to the irreducible kernel of the symptom? Chaim suggests Buddhism, which elicits some titters. I am not going to go further with this, I just wanted to mark out that it was a nice meeting. Here’s my list of things to read and review:

• Lucia Tower, "Countertransference"
• Serge André, What Does a Woman Want?
• "Whatever the effects of turmoil, emotion, or anxiety attending the hysteric's disgust, if the analysis is to bear fruit it is absolutely necessary to make the subject realize that, paradoxically, feeling like filth, or like a rotting corpse, or a pile of blubber, is much more certain, and therefore much more comfortable and practicable, than seeing an ungraspable feminine identity constantly vanishing out from under her. The depressive mode in which the hysteric often presents for analysis must not lead to an error: saying that one is a wreck or a jellyfish is much more reassuring than having to confront the enigmatic hole into which the subject falls when she asks what it means to be a woman," that is, when she asks the question that leads to the lack of a signifier." ("The Hysteric and Femininity: Conversion" 126)
• Freud, "Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious"
• Freud, "Analysis Terminable and Interminable"
• Lacan, passage à l'acte, acting out, symptom, sinthome
• "Dora’s passage à l'acte happens at the moment of embarrassment she is put in by the trapline, Herr K.’s tactless trap, My wife means nothing to me. The slap she gives him can only express the following perfect ambiguity does she love Herr K. or Frau K.? The slap certainly won't tell us which. But such a slap is one of those signs, one of those crucial, fateful moments, that we can see rebounding from generation to generation, with its value as a junction where one's destiny switches from one track to another." (Seminar X, "IX. Passage à l'acte and Acting-out," 115)
• "In its nature, the symptom is not like acting-out, which calls upon interpretation, because, and this is too often forgotten, what analysis uncovers in the symptom is that the symptom is not an appeal to the Other, it is not what shows itself to the Other. The symptom, in its nature, is jouissance, don’t forget this, a jouissance under wraps no doubt, unterbliebene Befriedigung, it has no need of you, unlike acting-out, it is sufficient unto itself. It belongs to the realm of what I taught you to distinguish from desire as jouissance, that is, it steers towards the Thing, having crossed the barrier of the good this is a reference to my Seminar on ethics—that is, the barrier of the pleasure principle, and this is why this jouissance can be translated as an Unlust—for those who haven't heard it yet, this German term signifies displeasure." (ibid., 125)

[4:30 AM] - Smiley faces scribbled onto messages with V, at the corners of the chat bubbles, by me. Chat bubbles are possibly red. Then there’s a journey through an arid place with dad driving, getting lost. “Everyone too sleepy to note.” Is it an actual desert?

No recollection of what I did that day. I ran in the late afternoon, tripped while running, had a slow fall saved by wrist, no injury even to the wrist. Was having negative thoughts the entire time, saw the sun set. Thought of Richard’s story. Day-dreaming about V (possible rejection) and Z. I think I texted V to ask how he was doing, and said I had been rather lazy this week, but that it was probably fine. He has been reading a lot, but admitted to not having read the screenshot I sent. I want him to know that it doesn’t matter, but it matters so little that I don’t say it.

So I was in the Loeb Classics section for the first time and this boy entered the same aisle and asked me if I was a classics major, and said it was the first time he had ever seen anyone there, and eventually he got my number. We had a nice little conversation, I said something about the green covers, in reference to the time when I visited a bookstore in Cambridge and saw all the Loeb classics books in hard copy for the first time. And at some point he mentioned Empedocles and I was like, oh that sounds familiar, and he said something about a volcano. I just realized that Freud wrote about Empedocles for two pages in “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” which was the last major text by Freud that I read completely over the weekend.

Empedocles of Acragas (Girgenti), 2 born about 495 B.a., is one of the grandest and most remarkable figures in the history of Greek civilization. The activities of his many-sided personality pursued the most varied directions. He was an investigator and a thinker, a prophet and a magician, a ·politician, a philanthropist and a physician with a knowledge of natural science. He was said to have freed the town of Selinunte from malaria, and his contemporaries revered him as a god. His mind seems to have united the sharpest contrasts. He was exact and sober in his physical and physiological researches, yet he did not shrink from the obscurities of mysticism, and built up cosmic speculations of astonishingly imaginative boldness. Capelle compares him with Dr. Faust ‘to whom many a secret was revealed’. Born as he was at a time when the realm of science was not yet divided into so many provinces, some of his theories must inevitably strike us as primitive. He explained the variety of things by the mixture of the four elements, earth, air, fire and water. He held that all nature was animate, and he believed in the transmigration of souls. But he also included in his theoretical body of knowledge such modern ideas as the gradual evolution of living creatures, the survival of the fittest and a recognition of the part played by chance (τυχή) in that evolution.

[…]

The philosopher taught that two principles governed events in the life of the universe and in the life of the mind, and that those principles were everlastingly at war with each other. He called them φιλία (love) and νεῖκος (strife). Of these two powers—which he conceived of as being at bottom ‘natural forces operating like instincts, and by no means intelligences with a conscious purpose’—the one strives to agglomerate the primal particles of the four elements into a single unity, while the other, on the contrary, seeks to undo all those fusions and to separate the primal particles of the elements from one another. Empedocles thought of the process of the universe as a continuous, never-ceasing alternation of periods, in which the one or the other of the two fundamental forces gain the upper hand, so that at one time love and at another strife puts its purpose completely into effect and dominates the universe, after which the other, vanquished, side asserts itself and in its turn defeats its partner.

The two fundamental principles of Empedolces—φιλία and νεῖκος—are, both in name and function, the same as our two primal instincts, Eros and destructiveness, the first of which endeavours to combine what exists into ever greater unities, while the second endeavours to dissolve those combinations and to destroy the structures to which they have given rise. We shall not be surprised, however, to find that, on its re-emergence after two and a half millennia, this theory has been altered in some of its features. Apart from the restriction to the biophysical field which is imposed on us, we no longer have as our basic substances the four elements of Empedocles; what is living has been sharply differentiated from what is inanimate, and we no longer think of the mingling and separation of particles of substance, but of the soldering together and defusion of instinctual components. Moreover, we have provided some sort of biological basis for the principle of ‘strife’ by tracing back our instinct of destruction to the death instinct, to the urge of what is living to return to an inanimate state. This is not to deny that an analogous instinct already existed earlier, nor, of course, to assert that an instinct of this sort only came into existence with the emergence of life. And no one can foresee in what guise the nucelus of truth contained in the theory of Empedocles will present itself to later understanding. (245-247)

He was pretty and blond and wide-eyed, a junior undergraduate, vice president of the classics society or something. Maybe he’s not going to want to hang out with me since I’m a graduate student, maybe he thought I was a girl until I opened my mouth. In any case he was looking for some Homer, said he didn’t really like reading Homer in comparison to older Greek texts. Anyway I do think it’s important for me to read more Ancient Greek lyric poetry. I felt attractive after that, like so many sparkles on a charm bracelet.

“Sex,” “love,” “desire,” “jouissance”—I think we’ve talked about these concepts enough that it’s inevitable that we will attempt to experience some combination of the four eventually, almost as an experiment in understanding. Or rather, it will be done between us in some non-overlapping fashion, as “there is no sexual relation.” I’m thinking about the interior of his house, and how he’s started to let me in to things, into his doorway, through the living room and then the kitchen, and out into the back porch. The various threshholds we pass through are always narrow enough that one has to go in front of the other; there are so many occasions for one person to yield or submit to the other’s yielding; this process is in itself a kind of flirtation. I’ve been given mention by him of a breakup from two years ago, linked with the pronoun “she,” which feels gratuitous and trusting—perhaps it is being given in exchange for what I divulged last week. I mention newly that I’ve been thinking of living as a woman, for the past two years, which feels a little wrong to narrate in that way—how can I tell this story without saying that I was born female, though it doesn’t matter in the sense that having been born female and having lived as female for the first 15 years of my life doesn’t make it any easier for me to figure out what it would mean to live as female now? No, it does matter, otherwise I wouldn’t know so acutely how impossible it is to know what it means to be female. And I don’t know yet how to read his response, which was a flustered mixture of silent hesitation and the embarrassed offer to send me some readings if I’d like them. Maybe he realized he likes me the way I am currently and doesn’t want me to “become female” in a more substantive sense—well, neither do I. I just want to wear dresses and gestate a baby at some point. Why do I assume his silence was so significant?

I spent several hours cleaning my room in the morning. The plants are becoming wondrous to me again. I received two giant scrunchies and black linen tabi shoes. Cloven feet are wonderful in their reference to the devil, a reference which is also particular to Antichrist. Unfortunately the heel counters were too high and rigid, digging in to my ankles, but I must solve this problem rather than returning the shoes. When I walked to campus everyone was dressed up and everyone was happy, and I loved seeing Farah and John at the steps of Goldwin Smith in full sun, she was wearing pink and he was wearing a light print, beige or ochre on an ivory background. Margaux’s blue linen shirt was beautiful and surprising, everyone seems happy and even declares it.

Hunter was in a different room than usual, I could see two chalkboard easels in the back, the top of some large face scrawled by a child’s hand. There were no plants behind him, it was clear but nice. The session felt quite different, I spoke of how I was not saying what I wanted to say until I arrived at it, something about romance and dresses and dreams.

I woke up in a cold sweat, the time stamp of the last modification I made to the note is 4:22 AM. “Z cast spells” on me, he had taken my phone and texted my mother to tell her that I’d call her at 1 PM. It was long past 1 PM and he had taken my phone from me. I was distressed, thinking he had painted me as a liar, and I screamed in order to wake up. Before this, I was going on a walk with someone up a winding mountain path, it seemed to be an alpine meadow biome, in summer or spring. Or the hill in Antichrist, which the dead souls ascend and descend. When we arrived back “something [was] obstructed.” I wrote “I’m kept” in my notes, and “So afraid…” I wonder if the other person was V, whom I had a pleasant walk with yesterday, and if Z was trying to ruin it.

On Friday, I asked John what Lars von Trier he had seen. He first mentioned Melancholia, and said he found Antichrist amazing, and said he had seen Breaking the Waves, but a long time ago. We made plans to watch Nymphomaniac in a week. On the floor of his living room was a copy of something by St. John of the Cross (San Juan de la Cruz).

There’s so much going on that it’s a sweet exhaustion to do anything at all, so my waking life is a dreaming, and my dreaming life has the beauty of black lacquerware. I might make note of K, whose face is probably what draws me to this Botticelli painting. I showed it to her, I showed her what I see when I see her. This weekend I’ve managed to complete the paper which gestated first in Z’s room.

“So God’s from Califouurniaaa???”

“Why do you always seem to hate what I say?”

We haven’t yet read about Hainamouration, but “hate” is in the text.

The upshot is that one could say that the more a man can believe a woman confuses him with God, in other words, what she enjoys, the less he hates (haie) y the less he is (est) - both spellings are intended - and since, after all, there is no love without hate, the less he loves. (VII, "A Love Letter," Lacan Seminar XX)

“I want you to love me, I want you to love what I say.”

“I’m so attracted to your language that I glance over it in order to neutralize the dizziness it incites in me.”

That’s how I felt on the 24th—dizzy, and that beer tasted like pears, so floral, so sweet. And I wasn’t drunk, just a little heavy with sugary liquid.

I’m tongue-tied. My desire doesn’t appear recognizable.

I was talking to my mom about detransition. In spite of my disavowal of maleness I said that testosterone served an important transitory function in my development, that it served a cosmetic function that it made me leaner, and thus more in touch with the possibilities of beauty, or of soul and body following an ethos. if I had been a more attractive girl by my own standards I might not have transitioned at all. The law, in essence, was one of beauty. Disliking my position as female or feminine was a screen. I seemed to want to resemble the boys I was attracted to, I said, which I can’t account for now. She theorized that the reason for this had something to do with my practice of catching grasshoppers as a child. The leap was not sufficient as an explanation, but it was suggestive in proportion to how much we laughed. My family experiences some kind of hyperaesthesia; we place too much emphasis on the value of the appearance of things. The intensity of my desire to become a certain animal was distinct from the affection some other kids in school would express with respect to their pets. The hermit crabs, the grasshoppers, the various caterpillars, the millipede I kept—were of the sort that couldn’t gaze at you, couldn’t ask you for anything. My primary experience of animals is of their withdrawal, and if my father exerted any law it was to tell me that having pets was stupid, that animals were meant to be wild, and so what it meant to feel burning desire for an Other had to come in the form of entomological husbandry. So if I found myself attracted to a boy I would want to be him, and to be with him in bed, because I admired how the insects would connect—especially damselflies and dragonflies—nothing dirty about it, just a momentary and perfect toy-like connection. An usurping of the boy culminating in death. I knew about the praying mantises and black widows when I was seven or eight. I knew the lives of butterflies to be short. And that they became that way so they could mate. She also said that when I was somewhere between the ages of three and five, I’d talk to a professor she and my dad would invite over; I’d talk more than them to this adult stranger, and that my speech was coherent, answerable. I told her that I recalled wanting to mimic the speech of adults around that time but that I did not recall this interlocutor…

I woke up at 2:48 AM from a dream (last modified at 2:52 AM):

Right side of the neck turned right.
Think someone's prodding me or pinching.
Wondering if I'm being castrated...
... but I was proper?
woke up: moonlight

You all know what and who this is about—yes, the first letter of his name keeps on showing up in Lacan’s diagrams. It’s quite funny to me that this is the case, because it, the L-schema, is on how the relation between S and A is blocked by the imaginary relation… Anyway, I also woke up in a cold sweat from this dream. What a strange kiss on the neck, what did I mean by “I was proper?” It looks like I enjoy getting punished. There’s something very nice about having a fear dream which is in fact purely erotic.

When I was little, I asked my father to kiss me on the stomach. I had just taken a bath and was freshly dressed, which made me feel libidinal, and was rolling around on the bed and lifting up my shirt or dress, and he gave me a little peck on the stomach, and I was writhing and laughing like a little nymph, telling him to do it again, do it again.

Sonnet 18 (Louise Labé)

Baise m’encor, rebaise moy et baise:
Donne m’en un de tes plus savoureus,
Donne m’en un de tes plus amoureus:
Je t’en rendray quatre plus chaus que braise.

Las, te pleins tu? ça que ce mal j’apaise,
En t’en donnant dix autres doucereus.
Ainsi meslans nos baisers tant heureus
Jouissons nous l’un de l’autre à notre aise.

Lors double vie à chacun en suivra.
Chacun en soy et son ami vivra.
Permets m’Amour penser quelque folie:

Tousjours suis mal, vivant discrettement,
Et ne me puis donner contentement,
Si hors de moy ne fay quelque saillie.

I told V on Sunday about how I had asked my dad to crash the car, because he had brought up Ballard’s Crash, and when I narrated the story to him I couldn’t help but raise my voice and repeat the words, re-perform them—crash crash / crash crash / dieee THeN crash! / crssshshshshhs. I even mentioned the line which I have never understood since: don’t skip me agaainn. It’s a little like that line from the dream transcript, … but I was proper? I also thought about how that crash-demand scene was my first poem. I wonder if I can teach a child the work of inscription, of speaking in the more intense way that happens when the addressee is an attentive blank, such that she is able to retain early memories at an unprecedented rate.

Some ideas that I can’t get out of my mind:

• "Voice" is simply the object of "listening." "Voice" may even be the objet petit a of the listening subject, or specifically that of the reader/auditor of poems.
• Did Lacan really beat his patients? What's the full(er) story (source)? Do I want my analyst to behave like an "abusive mother"?
• "Lacanians talk about the Law, but in practice they forcefully and arbitrarily interrupt sessions. They talk of the primacy of the signifier, but don’t give people even the time to talk. What can one analyze in sessions that go on for perhaps five minutes? There is not even the time to recount a dream. They talk of the Name‑of‑ the‑Father, but they seem more like possessive and abusive mothers: “Love me! And be on my side!”" (André Green)
• Muteness envy is the cause or effect of phallic jouissance in poetry. Apostrophe as a figure of poetic vocation rests on muteness envy. Poetic meditations on abortion are meditations on the death drive and the fate of the drives.
• Lacan thinks analysts are like pots and vases—Seminar VII (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis), IX - On creation ex nihilo. I'm finding the reference from a page on lacanonline.com.
• "The potter makes a pot starting with a clay that is more or less fine or refined; and it is at this point that our religious preachers stop us, so as to make us hear the moaning of the vase in the potter's hand. The preacher makes it talk in the most moving of ways, even to the point of moaning, and makes it ask its creator why he treats it so roughly or, on the contrary, so gently. But what is masked in this example of creationist mythology—and strangely enough by those who use the example of the vase, which is so familiar in the imagery of the act of creation (I told you that they are always writers who work at the borderline between religion and mythology, and there's a good reason for that)—is the fact that the vase is made from matter. Nothing is made from nothing." (121)