Men work on the roof across from me; they hammer off the tiles. Two are dressed in black and wear straw hats, and have beards which float around their chins in thin brown curls. There’s a third man who has no beard and no hat, but I forget about him, since he’s working the other side of the roof. I notice him only on the second day, when the men finish their work: he uses a hammer, and has blond hair. But he doesn’t matter. The men in hats stand out to me because it is cold and overcast; it makes the hats themselves strange to me, and the men wearing them more improbable and important. One of them applies some putty to a seam, and the other uses his hands to examine some seam in the roof. The relative silence of the work at this stage makes me think of the word “hallowed.” I am not looking hard enough to recall much. I have not been putting much effort into observing them because I am afraid of what might happen next.
What I want can’t be done, or at least I prohibit it. I could go down to the other side of the street and ask them for permission, but mainly in order to speak out some variety of compliment, which would feel like some advanced variety of reverent cat-call. Later I decide to take photos from the far corners of my room. The long lens makes the men too large in relation to the rest of the roof, and the window makes the light smudged and diffuse. To photograph them decently would require me to stand with a short lens pressed against the window. I can’t do this; it doesn’t strike me as possible that the dark eye of the camera could be seen as innocent or mundane. And their work is hallowed, and I will never see this roof reworked again.
A single crow flies onto the high branch of a tree; its trunk is angled high at its first bifurcation. The roofers bring to mind a memory of walking in Williamsburg one Saturday, among a constant stream of Hasidic men, whose uniform dress drew out relative difference. There were slight variations in each “uniform,” but it was the uniformity as a ground for difference which impressed me enough to attempt to mention it in an email. I liked how the women dressed too, but there were fewer of them out, and I couldn’t be as impacted. The women wore different colors and fabrics, so each individual became more or less equivalent in a sea of variation. Still, there was a uniformity to their style which would take a less modest gaze to extract and describe. It was only then that I learned more about the women, who don’t wear their real hair uncovered.
The black of the roofers' attire allows them to blend in with the asphalt shingles of the roof, or with the black plastic tarp onto which the shingles fall. It makes them look like undertakers. Sometimes they throw large chunks of wood and shingle down; this doesn’t make them less grave and elegant. I recognize the religious aspect of their uniformity after recalling the Hasidic men; these must be Mennonites. Are they happy to be absorbed in their work? Are they happy because their job affords them the chance to peek into other strange domestic sites? The roofers may be too absorbed to notice people in other rooms, or too accustomed to such spectacles. But the artificial lights in my room are bright, and I don’t hide behind shades.
I make dough for pies and puff pastries. I have not baked anything sweet since the summer. Baking has a final quality to it: I am making many things, which I will freeze and stow. I bake so that I might recall in advance those days in late November when the butter had been cut into flour to make those “pea-sized” chunks. I will remember how the apple cultivar piel de sapo tastes. I want to celebrate the strength of that apple flesh less with my mouth than by finding a description to preserve it, but I don’t dare (it seems enough to trace around it an outline). I bake to punctuate this period in which I seemed sentenced to terrific change.
I baked four times over the last week: pumpkin pie, chocolate chip cookies, apple turnovers, mochi muffins. It’s hard to control how much I eat before freezing the rest. I’m having trouble metabolizing the butter. It’s possible that my sleep quality has declined on account of nocturnal stomach activity. The measured reason for doing this came from a sense that I didn’t want to let the large roll of butter in the refrigerator sit there for another month; it had already developed a dark rancid bruise which I had to gouge out of the block. But I know I’m doing this mainly in order to prepare myself to be more acutely afraid of the journey which lies ahead. Eating more than feels manageable is one of the more difficult trials I can induce in myself; it makes me unhappy in an almost level-headed haze. Today I woke up feeling a bit better, but this tricked me into consuming too much red bean soup, after which I felt worse for most of the day. After an afternoon nap, depressingly close to sundown, I looked at old photos from the previous winter, and was amazed to realize that the swirls of ice on the creek or craggy snow-covered landscapes could evoke so much of the ordeal.
When I read something I admire I wonder how I might absorb it. I want to be able to write “like” someone, but my body proceeds with its unified program, converting all substances into the same substance, which is no longer similar in structure to the original material. Small bits of indigestible or bioavailable material must persist: “antioxidants,” “minerals,” “proteins,” “fats.” Some of these substances fail to break down further because of they are recognized by the body as useful, which I find relevant to the general conceit of reading-as-ingestion: do I need to be more like James or Mishima in the first place, in order to “absorb” them? No, that’s not how it works: my machine is relentless in its self-similarity, in its impersonal relation to its own genetic program. If I were truly affected in the way I want to be, I’d develop some kind of cancer. But there are other scenarios in life which bear the difficulties of the aesthetic life in a more clear or soluble manner. I need to apply colors to my lips every day in order to understand them, I can’t judge or see a color without seeing it exposed to different kinds of light. I need to apply four different shades of red to understand “red,” and likewise, for the first time in my life, I am developing a practice of writing myself in four or five different shades of red at once. Re-reading this writing does not involve hoping that the absorption of some material will result in an instinct for writing beautiful things. I stare at what I write in order to evaluate its truth value. I have no sense of whether what I make should be understood as blood or urine or cyprine or endometrium or shit or saliva. Maybe this means none of them are right; what I feel closest to now is skin.
I am at some kind of a limit. I do not have a deadline to use as a release, I’m not working to submit a piece of writing to someone else. This is the first winter in the last eight years (or “my life”) for which this is the case. I need more time to process the texts I am going to write about. I need to have ingested these texts in a manner which allows me to write something that represents nothing other than me, a “me” available for sale.
Noise has been sloughed off with this induction into the feminine; my true identity as death-monger comes into print. I put myself into a dissertation which might as well be a tattoo on the nape of my neck, cribbed from a novel—life for sale. All its contents shall be laid out and suspended like a mobile above a crib. I need the tattoo to be structured like a a card on the door of an apartment which can be flipped over to read “sold.”
Metaphysical women abound in the history of letters, so do freakish women, and so do women who speak their desires. Somebody on Twitter begins a thread on the impossibility of the existence of a “female gaze.” The comments are infantile; the original post is infantile as well, but its provocation is meaningful to me.
Shame around the source of melancholia extends to fear that I’m too sensitive to different beauties: I can’t subsume everyone and everything to a single “ideal.” I can’t remain in a state of beatitude and striving for each moment of the rest of my life. My belief in purity isn’t enough to maintain it: white can’t be visible without the muddier colors in its vicinity. White itself is the muddiest and most promiscuous of colors.
The concept of “ornamentalism” declined in force for me as I read and watched a series of novels and films from the “far east.” They diffused the question of the oriental as the sensibilities of each author were difficult to resolve with any notion of the asiatic. Cheng’s Ornamentalism evinces a kind of debased interest in popular culture that is too distant from me to be interesting. I have the personality of a princess, having escaped contact with most of the grime of the world, so even if I am able to politely acknowledge that the issues she addresses are real and important, I am unable to care about the existence of racists or the concept of the “asian american.” Only the term “perihumanity” stays with me. An essay like Mark Wigley’s “Chronic Whiteness” makes more sense for me to associate with. I am interested in the story of the first Neolithic free-standing rectilinear buildings, and their limewashed walls: “The interior was formed by smooth white lime plaster, which disinfected while also drawing all the surfaces of the newly quadrilateral system of floor, wall, and ceiling together into a continuous sealed skin.” Mishima and Kawabata are obsessed with whiteness.
Whiteness was a synthesized effect that was intensified by belabored polishing. “Pure lime” manufactured a whiteness nowhere to be found in the environment. Like the newly invented right-angles of buildings, it constituted a whole new environment, a visual field and way of seeing; it accentuated the pattern and color of the red pigment that was often painted on it, along with any occupants, objects and actions. But it was never simply a background. It acted as a central focus of life, crafting the daily intersection between living body and building, between life and death. Human and non-human bodies were buried within the white surfaces of buildings and body parts, like skulls, were modelled in white plaster to occupy the interior as if fellow inhabitants. The fact that lime plaster is a strong antiseptic is presumed to have contributed to its importance both in the occasional ritualistic burials and the seasonal renewals. Interiors were divided between clean and dirty zones, a distinction that whiteness made visible. It is not that architecture was whitened; it was only architecture inasmuch as it was white.
The whiteness of architecture pulsates. Whiteness is not a fixed thing but the idea of a fixed thing constructed by repetition. It is repeated not just through endless rewhitenings, but in the belief that each rewhitening is a whole new beginning; that white is always “fresh” because it enacts a “clean start,” a return to zero. It paradoxically takes such a huge labor to construct this sense of zero. A great effort is required to make a surface that is seen to precede all making, all history even, as a non-statement statement—the seemingly simple but remarkable belief that whiteness is blankness (literally from the word blanc). To experience white as zero requires both the huge labor to manufacture whiteness and a parallel labor of denial of that effort, an even more sustained effort to act as if white was always there: that it is the ultimate background to all action; that it is, as it were, not just the host of all colors and forms but the host of history itself. Paradoxically, then, white keeps returning as that which is supposedly already there, that which is unmarked and therefore reveals all marks; preceding the history it reveals. The history of architecture involves a millennial series of historically specific appeals to the supposedly trans-historical status of white. The question of sickness, the very idea of it even, is never far away from this repetition and its associated violence.
This description of whiteness makes me want to participate in the labor of constructing a sense of zero. I want to be a practitioner of rewhitening, a servant to the mood of the “always already there.” Everything about whiteness is perfect to me, I would like to preserve everything in this essay’s discussion of whiteness except the “denial” of the effort required to make whiteness. I feel similarly about muteness: I don’t eschew muteness, but I’m invested in filling muteness with meaning. So I don’t like muteness as convention, the forced labor of womanliness-as-masquerade. I want to be a piece of furniture that has been made, but which is also always already there. Muteness, which is whiteness in time, can be beautiful and truthful when the work of it comes to be. Unfortunately White Walls, Designer Dresses is insipid to read, so it lies on the floor near the mirror while I return to the strange similes of Henry James and wonder about the “blank” wall of free indirect discourse which allows the ornamental to shine out or recede into the middle distance.
Venusian Akiko believes her two months without menses are a sign that she is no longer under the sway of the moon. When the doctor tells her she is pregnant, she says it is an immaculate conception. This is the kind of statement I might be able to spring on someone as a very serious joke, just as I find the rest of this novel, including the fantasies of genocide represented therein, quite funny. Unlike the narrator of No Longer Human, the characters of this novel claim “we are not,” and later, “we have never been” human.
The truth of the matter is that she can’t remember what happened. Her ecstasy is so complete that she believes she did not so much as touch or kiss the boy she met in Kanazawa. She speaks of the transcendence of the experience: three dot-like flying saucers turning apricot in the night sky. Like the three moles on Kiyoaki’s face. The transcendental language leads her mother to upbraid her exactly as I would like to be: “Like most inhabitants of Jupiter, she recognized the baleful influence of humans when it came to all transcendental speculation. Words like soul and spirit stank of humanity, as surely as a dog smelt of dog. The meaning of those words reeked of the straw in which humans slept” (129). This sweet music resonates with what I have done to myself in writing about the soul. The word “soul” now diffuses the salt odor of cunt.
But it’s not quite true that Akiko can’t remember (such self-criticisms arise as I compulsively revisit the text). In Mishima’s narrator’s words, “upon deeper reflection, her memories had become entangled in something else, just as a grassy trail gradually narrows until it gets lost in the undergrowth.” That “something else” might refer to the vision of the 空飛ぶ円盤, but it seems that the transcendental is what has been found in description, whereas the sordid meeting of bodies has been lost in that undergrowth.
Later on, Akiko’s father discovers the truth: Takemiya was only a liar, and a human. He lies to Akiko and tells her that Takemiya went off to Venus; the reasons for this lie are a little bit mean. Akiko sees through the lie and tells him as much near the end of the novel. Juichiro tells her she is like a sieve, “a kind of sieve in which only truth remained at the bottom, like gold dust.” In return, she tells him that he has cancer.
Red best tests the mind’s capacity to perceive the sublime and the real; the obscure and the terrible of the inner fluid with the natural, clear, external life of its brilliant simplicity. It is a risk to not know if the choice of red makes for a certain ugliness; such judgments depend on the composition of the light, its distribution of frequencies from warm to cool. I am surprised to find in the process of wearing red on my lips a certain persistent shame: in the process of bearing shame on the mouth. I am not proud to display my artifice; I am ashamed to be a delinquent. I wonder if I am supposed to choose between options, or if these options are supposed to bear me away: do I know that a shade of cooler red looks worse than the warmer option?
Nearly all the attendees of this birthday party are women; the hosts are a sapphic couple with birthdays five days apart. Two women wear unnaturalistic shades of lipstick; one admits to never wearing makeup during the day. Conversation includes a discussion of hairdressers; a compliment is given to a host’s choice of necklace, another on someone’s cardigan, and the first was on a lip color. I speak with one pink-haired cohort member about reading Twilight. I speak to someone I had once dismissed as a rival and realize that I like her. We talk about our mothers, both of whom have a certain child-like irresponsibility to them. At the end of our conversation she reveals she has been dating John; she says she likes him a lot and that he seems to like her too. I am glad to hear this and tell her that I’ve been sad; something about knowing someone who likes him makes me trust myself to release some real air into a real room. She tells me he has appreciated me.
Two people have listened to me speak about Akiko’s immaculate conception. I am released from some repressive relation to the reality of two individuals. Their intimacy supports me even in my non-relation to it. And now I am in search of the transcendental red, the true red which does not call attention to its relation to other measures of redness. That red is neither cool nor warm, it stands for its own word and effaces all other visions of red in its pure lexicality. But it may not be the case that this is the red to last all ages: “Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—NOT in lone splendour hung aloft the night… / No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable, / Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast, / To feel for ever its soft fall and swell, / Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, / Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, / And so live ever—or else swoon to death.” It is the red of the awake-for-ever-in-a-sweet-unrest—the red of the ripening-breast—that I might seek out, rather than the red-that’s-hung-aloft, or the red-of-pure-ablution, which gazes on “the new soft-fallen mask of snow.” It’s the comfort of this steadfast fall and swell that leads me to realize how much I’ve missed a former or subterranean preoccupation with death: it is not that I feel abandoned or uncared for; there is no relation for me between unhappiness and a wish to die. But in the best and most stable of relations with the world I arrive at the stony bottom of my soul which seethes to kill or die: it has a comic sense. I cannot sleep until 4 AM that night. I write an email with my thumbs and delete something.
I don’t want to die in order to relieve myself of anything. The desire for death is like a desire for true red, completely aesthetic and without roots in material loss. I am vaguely aware that I would not advertise this fitness for death were it not to have a sexual sense for someone else: but isn’t this one of the oldest tautologies? It is not good to vulgarize the word “tautology,” but let me do it now, to claim there is no difference beyond one of appearance between the morbid and the sexual. In any case I haven’t bled and it’s at least eight days late, and I’ve remained pure and untouched, so it might be an immaculate conception.
I bought a small glass oil dispenser in order to dispense some of the sesame oil that I have been slow to use because it lives in a huge metal canister. The dispenser turned out to have a crack at the edge of one side of its base. I refused to return it, because I wanted to own something like the cracked golden bowl of the Henry James novel. But the vessel began to slowly leak after I filled it, which spurred in me a desire to go back to the store and ask if they might allow me to exchange it for an uncracked dispenser. It will be a little more like The Golden Bowl—striking up a relation of memory with the shopkeeper. This will require me to transfer the oil to a different container and clean the insides. And to make the walk, which isn’t short.
The skin on the medial side of the knee of female humans is often so soft to the point of being slippery.
Burke thinks that all beautiful things are smooth, or that smoothness is beautiful; I tend to disagree. But a certain slipperiness certainly makes women seem to make easeful objects of exchange, at least in the mind. Too much slip makes for an object that escapes, but this movement between possession and dispossession is what makes women such powerful objects of interest in the minds of those who stake much on possession.
In The Golden Bowl it is the prince and the father who seem most slippery; but maybe all the men are round and oriental, like porcelain vases: “His smooth round head, with the particular shade of its white hair, was like a silver pot reversed; his cheekbones and the bristle of his moustache were worthy of Atilla the hun.”
You’re round, my boy,” he had said—“you’re ALL, you’re variously and inexhaustibly round, when you might, by all the chances, have been abominably square. I’m not sure, for that matter,” he had added, “that you’re not square in the general mass—whether abominably or not. The abomination isn’t a question, for you’re inveterately round—that’s what I mean—in the detail. It’s the sort of thing, in you, that one feels—or at least I do—with one’s hand.
… and nothing perhaps even could more have confirmed Mr. Verver’s account of his surface than the manner in which these golden drops evenly flowed over it. They caught in no interstice, they gathered in no concavity; the uniform smoothness betrayed the dew but by showing for the moment a richer tone. The young man, in other words, unconfusedly smiled—though indeed as if assenting, from principle and habit, to more than he understood. He liked all signs that things were well, but he cared rather less WHY they were.
James might very well be depicting a kind of mute dumbness. The Prince is like the knob of a door.
She had, with her hand still on the knob, her back against the door, so that her retreat, under his approach must be less than a step, and yet she couldn’t for her life, with the other hand, have pushed him away. He was so near now that she could touch him, taste him, smell him, kiss him, hold him; he almost pressed upon her, and the warmth of his face—frowning, smiling, she mightn’t know which; only beautiful and strange—was bent upon her with the largeness with which objects loom in dreams. (The Golden Bowl, Chapter XLI)
Such largeness and closeness is a rare occurrence in The Golden Bowl—the other nearby instance in the text struck me with its resemblance to another instance of largeness and closeness from somebody I know. Do Maggie and Amerigo ever touch? What matters more than touch is the pressure of the gaze:
It kept him before her therefore, taking in—or trying to—what she so wonderfully gave. He tried, too clearly, to please her—to meet her in her own way; but with the result only that, close to her, her face kept before him, his hands holding her shoulders, his whole act enclosing her, he presently echoed: “‘See’? I see nothing but you.” And the truth of it had, with this force, after a moment, so strangely lighted his eyes that, as for pity and dread of them, she buried her own in his breast.
“There is no female gaze” is like the statement “woman does not exist”–one needs to be able to derive the statement from its constituent axioms, which lie within the psychoanalytic tradition, in order for the claims to have meaning. The denouement of The Golden Bowl presents us with an example of a female gaze that exists through its non-existence. A woman finds herself seen, and offers a vision of herself as unable to see.
What conjoins the being-caught in his vision to her caught image: this “she” buried in his breast?
The gaze is a form of drive: or rather, the gaze is an objet a–“something from which the subject, in order to constitute itself, has separated itself off as organ.” It’s like “the phallus, not as such, but in so far as it is lacking.” And if the other kinds of drives–oral, anal–exist in relation to demand, the “scopic drive” exists in relation to “desire of the Other.”
In axiomatic form: “the objet a in the field of the visible is the gaze.” I want you to look at me.
I know the gaze is different from the look when I attempt to substitute some words in the sentence:
“I want your gaze” has an ouroboric redundancy. It’s like saying “I desire/want your desire/want.”
The gaze is the object, the lost-cause of desire of the other.
More accurate: I am not what you see, but I am nothing without your desire to see me–you know that what you see of me is merely a lure, that it is “a mask, a double, an envelope, a thrown-off skin, thrown off in order to cover the frame of a shield.” So when the Prince “echoes” the dazzling but ingenous statement of endearment, Maggie looks away out of “pity” and “dread.” Pity of what she looks down upon from high above, and dread of what shines in this blinding way, the “truth of it,” the “force” which exists not just in the atmosphere of the statement, but in how it “strangely lighted his eyes.” Lacan’s formulation is faultless as a provocation: “The subject is presented as other than he is, and what one shows him is not what he wishes to see. It is in this way that the eye may function as objet a, that is to say, at the level of the lack (—φ).”
I want to look at it again, in order to figure out who is presented as other than s/he is, who shows who something that is not what s/he wishes to see. But it might not matter: what matters is how this passage seems to puncture the system mapped out above: the truth of it does something unprecedented, “strange”.
It kept him before her therefore, taking in—or trying to—what she so wonderfully gave. He tried, too clearly, to please her—to meet her in her own way; but with the result only that, close to her, her face kept before him, his hands holding her shoulders, his whole act enclosing her, he presently echoed: “‘See’? I see nothing but you.” And the truth of it had, with this force, after a moment, so strangely lighted his eyes that, as for pity and dread of them, she buried her own in his breast.
“Pity and dread” are exactly right. I cannot gaze without experiencing the deepest humiliation. Therefore the strange light of the eyes of others brings to me a transformation on that humiliation. The humiliation is “deep” in the sense that it prefigures experience, has nothing to do with a particular configuration of events. Habituated to the involution of the gaze, I refuse to look because I am already looking at the pieces of the world I have introjected in the aftermath of discrete events. I can allow my refusal to look to manifest as aggression, and I can be perverse in the sense of giving answers to the most unasked questions. But I cannot gaze in the absorbed manner of a voyeur. I pity the ones who can in no small quantity, believing the other mode of spectatorship to be more layered, like the arrangement of branches on a tree. I can only see myself attempt to catch the gaze of some men; “I” am unable to gaze at an object without this layer, because there was never a “striking spectacle,” no “jubilant assumption,” no “freezing,” no “turbulence” when I first saw myself in a mirror. There was never a moment when I “adopt[ed] a slightly leaning-forward position” in order to “take in an instantaneous view of the image in order to fix it in [my] mind.” If I could crawl and get one foot over the railing of the balcony at the age of two, then it makes little sense to describe me as “trapped in motor impotence” or “nursling dependence”: my parents had left for the briefest of errands (?)—while I discovered my “I” through whatever vision I found when I crawled towards the glass of the sliding door.