It’s hard to know where to begin today; the flakes of snow are difficult to describe. They move in quick lines, and appear to hurry towards the ground, but their flat, large forms also appear to resist this downward motion. I want to say that they are both “light and heavy,” like the line, or “the basic unit of all lyric forms.” If I speak around the issue of flubbed descriptions, will I get closer to the ideal of drawing up pure attention? Most people around me seem illiterate, inhuman, but I also believe that they are better than me. A man sat outside the coffee shop before it began to snow; his hair was dark and he had a sharpness to him, on account of the angle of his nose and the narrow shape of his eyes. The way he was sitting there, all alone with a bent knee, produced an impression of sphinx-like gravity. He raised his head to look at me. I would have returned his gaze for a few more seconds, but looked away immediately because I didn’t like how I may have seemed. I had pushed my hands deep into my pockets, and there was some kind of a visible frown on my face, almost clownish. Earlier I had seen a woman wearing a bright yellow scarf made of some gauzy fiber. I saw her again later on a different block, after having turned around from another destination—a coffee shop at which I decided not to buy anything. These two individuals were far better than me. They were solid—and unlike the snow, maintain a kind of integrity of identity. I wondered if my decision to enter a coffee shop and not buy anything made it clear to the others who observed my entrance and exit that I am sick with freedom. It might be apparent that such a person can only be going about some business in order to therapize, in order to avert some minor emotional crisis, or some uncurable melancholia. Anyhow, I have some indecision to flaunt, some stupidity to work with.
I began to write this ten days prior with a very clear need to help myself. Now that the feeling of need has left the scene, the act of reading what I have written propels me into an almost terrific sense of detachment. I wanted to say that it is horrifying to read what I wrote, but in truth my reaction to it is one of sedate indifference.
It is worse to feel sedate indifference than to feel hatred towards something one has written.
But it is also true that I don’t hate or love the state which led me here.
I cried so much over the last three days that it might seem that someone had died.
I think it’s appropriate that I’ve forgotten the material that caused me to write this.
There’s some dust leftover: the dust’s meaning manifests only in my desire to write about it.
I experience a shame around the ordinariness of diaristic writing, not around its profusion or decadence. It is a sign of living. It produces a sense of ease: this person is living and is interested in the minor baubles of a day’s events. She likes it when the cashier is flirtatious, she likes breaking down her desires to buy something made of alpaca wool. I fail to see how there could be anything laudable in the fact that there’s a lot recorded here.
I’m picking through the first chapter of Naomi Schor’s Reading in Detail. According to one male critic cited in the text, woman is “congenitally (rather than culturally) particularistic.” She is thus “doubly condemned to produce inferior works of art: because of her close association with nature, she cannot but replicate it.” This particularism is irreoncilable with the sublime, since the “Sublime produces its characteristic effect with the speed of lightning, while the attention required by details acts as a break on perception.” The particularistic woman can’t “impress the mind at once with one great idea,” she can’t deal the sublime’s “single blow.”
A different male critic states that the female novelist, and the feminine intellect, are distinguished by a “passion for detail.” This passion can often “interfere with the proper perspective of the whole.”
When I read such statements, I am pushed into motion: I am happy to be thinking about the question of how I orient myself in relation to the love of detail which seems to be evidenced by my dedication to writing here. I wonder about the status of my shame: I am unwilling to let go of it, of my conviction that what I write is bad when it follows the congenital, the particularistic. And so I pass away from the question of loss—that “detail” of my life which consists in the events leading up to the period of crying, and a desire to describe or make something of the period of crying itself—to the question of what I am doing here.
I want to be able to see my desire in the starkest terms.
I am deeply anti-particularistic; I want to be able to see my comic essence in all its terrible simplicity. This desire is visible in the plainness of what I write or seek to write; I am in search of the simplest form of the sentence. I want to be like a chair or a table, either something which stands completely still in an inconspicuous location, or something which is constantly subject to rearrangement and to the wear and tear of someone’s daily drama.
I am not “detailed.” I fail to produce fine needlework, I haven’t knit anything since I was in elementary school. I have never learned to crochet. I am scared of sewing, the particularity of it, I believe I never managed to be a good calligrapher for similar reasons. I am brutal and abstract and not so skilled.
I couldn’t say that APL is “ornamental,” but that’s subject to further investigation. What disturbs me sometimes is my tendency to put together fragments without producing a background that might hold them together, so that one would need to keep on reading in order to gain a sense of what something means. The sense that the author is exhausted and constantly starting over; not ornamental because it’s not melancholic. I could not call its lack of support or unity decadent: “A decadent style is one where the unity of the book decomposes to give way to the independence of the page, where the page decomposes to give way to the independence of the word” (Paul Bourget). I have not achieved this, and perhaps never will manage an “independence of the word.”
I believe I am here not to express myself but to produce the simplest form of the sentence. My process involves writing something very rapidly and then deleting a third of it and rearranging the second third. Sometimes items switch positions such that the primary idea comes prior to the idea that in actuality preceded it. When things are pared down I can see a body. With the full presence of a body comes the possibility of ornament. Glimmering filaments or shiny pendants can easily be added to the basic structure of the body, which I might describe as “hale,” though it could easily be wan or emaciated. Since so little of what I write spontaneously remains in its raw form, I develop a sense of being deeply clothed. I want my sentences to be like chairs or tables.
I’ve talked a lot about wanting to be load-bearing and elegant, but it’s also because chairs and tables can bear the emotions of actors on stage. I learned this from Hamaguchi, I guess, but also from Beckett, but other than that, my relation with the stage is a very repressed one. I was scared of acting as a kid and it had something to do with my fear of femininity. All this became apparent to me after attending two concerts in sequence over the past two weeks. I found myself surprisingly critical, distracted by imperfection, perturbed by misalignments in timing, and more macroscopic problems with the timbre of the instruments or the speed at which certain passages were performed. In the context of classical music, precision is a baseline for the recognition of expressive power.
I like the ring of the name “Parnassian”—I want to believe in a Parnassian ethos.
I want to witness the performer who is so skilled that he blends into the wood grain of the clavier.
The S— trio had offended me with the ordinariness of its flesh. This translated into a kind of ordinariness in sound. The two men in front seemed so gnarled and tense, as if with excess flesh getting in the way of clean movement. The woman on stage, the pianist seemed to have occupied the matronly role of being a piece of furniture; she was like a tray. How could such bodies transfigure sound into anything but the chaos of their steadily declining flesh? I wanted and required that music be perfect, that it attain disembodiment.
The following weekend, a professor and a DMA student performed 18th-century keyboard works: Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven. Two of the items on the program involved improvising: first, a hypothetical Mozart cadenza, second, a hypothetical Beethoven sonata. The DMA student explained that there are various rules for improvising a cadenza, so “anyone can do it.” What followed his proposition was nasty, brutish, and short. It was like a nervous man attempting to have sex for the first time in many months—desperate, in spite of what it was supposed to be: carefree. The professor’s improvisation was also loud and fast and neurotic. He told us that Mozart was “not just a genius,” but also a guy who liked to play pool. I could not get behind this anti-aesthetic bent in his interest in the ludic!!!! The best part of the program was the final piece, in which the men were rendered passive to the “genius” of Mozart’s score. They were accompanied by two beautiful silent page turners, handsome young men reading with a measure of care, which meant that I could stare at them without compunction. Since I sat in the front row I could watch the minute changes in their faces. The one with more angular features would shift into smiles of surprising warmth; I liked him a lot, and we made brief eye contact.
I later re-found a video of Maurizio Pollini performing the Piano Concerto No. 19 in F Major. Its theme had been pulled out of a hat for the unfortunate cadenza improvisation exercise, and it was something I knew, something I had once practiced with serious devotion. I had been obsessed, alongside my mother, with Pollini’s performance when I was ten or eleven; Pollini never struck me as attractive, but it seems that the nobility of his touch took over everything else, much in the way that tears can sap everything from my legs. His face has been moved into the system of hand and keyboard. There is no face on his face, he is almost invisible, weightless. This distinguishes him completely from the phenomenon of Glenn Gould, who is marked for me with a certain sexual intensity on account of something about his posture. He was his chair, but also his flesh was his voice. And I believe I loved him because he wasn’t free. He was a kind of human furniture, a quintessence of servitude.
“When you sit in a chair, you are sitting on a person.”
“A chair has ‘less volition than a slave,’ but is nevertheless ‘the quintessence of slavery.’”
“Affordances are the measure of freedom available to furniture. You can’t restrict the possible uses of a piece of furniture any more than you can design a perfectly safe piece of furniture. Anything a footstool can do is an affordance. Because it has options, the footstoll is not entirely subject to necessity.”
(Aaron Kunin, Character as Form)
John was the first person who existed for me in Ithaca. I don’t remember much from that time, but I can produce various vague sentences about primary details which have lasted on account of their force. I had the roughest orgasms on account of my anguish. I stopped pushing updates to my website for three months. Going to analysis dignified my tendency towards imbalance. I worked on my writing in private because I didn’t want to produce an impression on anybody. Actually, I felt weird about the fact that I had been so fortunate to meet John. It was the simple fact of this outer intervention that perturbed me; it’s embarrassing to be spasmodic, to have bursts of intense pain and desire in relation to one person and then to suddenly find it all transferred to someone else. However cautious I may have been, the conversations intrigued me. I told my analyst, here’s this person I keep on bumping into on campus. How nice it is to bump into someone. I don’t think I could be deeply attracted to him, but he reminds me somewhat of my father. I’m starting to like his blue jacket and his checkered scarf.
I seriously don’t believe in the concept of forgetting someone or moving on, but I do believe to a crushing extent in divine ordinance; commitment to irresistible grace. I find it notable that, while the body seems to want to experience grief in a promiscuous fashion, the sexual concentrates itself around a single source. What annoys me is the thickness of grief. The grief is thicker than its referent. I am more interested in lightness and speed, which are harder to maintain and capture. It is so difficult, so impossible to describe the beauty of my encounter with Alec, so it sublimates itself into difficult poems. And that was easy because of its constraint: twelve hours. It becomes incomparably difficult when I am dealing with something that has lasted through so many discontinuities and helmet-like or instar-like phases of life: refusal upon refusal laminated with slivers of insane happiness. I can no longer name or refer to the phenomenon of which I speak without referring to spirit or soul.
My belief in the words I set down on the page is so strong that it becomes difficult to share them.
It’s as if all I did in the past was produce hypotheses; now each surmise needs to be true.
Crying tends to happen upon waking in the morning: vague thoughts about composing a message to John.
I allow my habits to produce strange petri dishes for destabilizing emotion. My sense is that it is better to err on the side of a lack of control than on the side of doing things which are supposed to resolve a point of difficulty.
The feeling I associate with this perturbation is familiar, but the new context makes it strange to me, and I’m concussed by this new distinct form of wisdom. Tears freeze the mind and preserve something immovable.
It’s the possibility that this is important that distresses me: that if I were only to get closer to the truth of my tears, I would be able to write something that transcended the public/private division that this site seems to maintain. What is “Against Public Life”? A reader of Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents might come to accept that it is the power of sex. But I’m unable to direct myself towards the elegance of a term like “sex.” I can no longer use the word “cunt” as a term associated with the coming and going of some kind of spirit; again the spirit, the soul take over the sexual. I have long conceived of sex as a phenomenon tied to the flesh. This meant it was natural for me to expect words to function as figures for the flesh. But if I continue to use words like “cunt,” is “cunt” a word for the flesh? The word seems to function with more immediacy as a reference to the cuneiform, or to the capacity of the word for a genital to stand in for a symbol for anything. The word, like all words, forms a shell around the part of the body it refers to and protects the mind from the spirit. I am more interested in spirit than in the body and mind. I am interested in terror, in the sublime. I want to know the “sublime” as a word within an intellectual tradition, but I also want to create my own notion of the sublime without referring to it.
I am interested in how this site represents a kind of unfleshliness. I am reminded of my interest in beauty when I read Henry James; is his interest in beauty opposed to my interest in sex? Am I in fact interested in sex, or am I more interested in the terror of the sublime? Is sex linked with terror and vastness and obscurity and the rest of the Burkean terms? I write about the sublime on account of my tears, I am interested in the truth of tears.
I cried between 7 AM and 7 PM on Friday, 8 AM and 6 PM on Saturday.
It was so intense that I couldn’t walk up the hill; I was exhausted.
It’s like all the substance of me flattened out in front and I needed to slither in the puddle of my flattened self.
Things were simpler when I was experiencing something like St. Teresa’s “mortiferous jouissance.” I don’t discount the great labor that goes into the life of a mystic, but there’s something simpler about the condition of framing oneself in relation to a being who is completely devoid of substance, an Other who is an “idiot.”
In true Romantic fashion I find the one who is so unnameable to me, or so absurd to name, not as a mirror but as a lamp; hence my newfound dedication to work, to reading, to writing, to doing whatever it is that I would do in a kind of “pure state of nature”—as if he were the mother that allows everything to happen, while she is ignored.
I am here for the pure power, for the space to develop it. That pure power has something to do with the journey into a type of sentence that couldn’t arise anywhere else. I am supposed to be lifiting my soul for somebody else.
It feels like all these sentences begin with “I,” even if they don’t. Do they begin with “I” in order to test whether the “I” of the future will perceive the “I” of the past as representative of a fictional character? Is there something in the posture of the “I” which seeks to be excessive, to pour out additional linguistic tears?
I wish I weren’t doing this; I came here to help myself, now I’m here to change myself.
The one thing I need to do without is shame, I say, but it is only the shame in me which interests me: why am I so ashamed to be shedding tears over John? Why do I find it shameful to speak about the unnameable other?
I want to be so quiet about it all; I want to say either the truth or nothing at all, and I don’t think I can arrive at the truth; I’m too weak, too inexperienced, or too unstudious. It really is more difficult now, to pursue whatever I pursued in the past! I conceived of myself as a disciple of the libertines, of the libertinage of psychoanalysis… Now precision hobbles me, and I’m bound up in the supra-aesthetic, the sublime, the beautiful, in the “soul”…
In “Muteness Envy,” Barbara Johnson argues that male fascination with female muteness is imbricated with the mystification of sexual violence against women. Female silence is fetishized in poems, in psychoanalytic writings, and in marble sculptures, like those of Bernini. Then follows the complicated discussion of a complicated film, The Piano, in which it seems that the protagonist’s muteness has something to do with her “will.” Johnson ends with a discussion of more recent cultural responses to rape culture, and posits that the concept of victimhood itself is a kind of patriarchal construct that places value on silence, fetishizes the “silent victim.” Sometimes I want to do the work of being or romanticizing the state of muteness, but that is separate from my endorsement of her claim that “[i]t is not that the victim always gets to speak—far from it—but that the most highly valued speaker gets to claim victimhood.” So if feminism is “hotly resisted,” it is not because it gives voice to those silent victims, but because it “interferes with the official structures of self-pity that keep patriarchal power in place.” And so it “tells the truth behind the beauty of muteness envy.”
Feminism’s embarrassment interests me more than idealizations of female muteness or female jouissance.
I enjoy listening to Julia Fox and Emily Ratajkowski because it’s so evident that some man out there is going to be disappointed or bored by the fact that these women just want to feel good about their work and life. They want to enjoy themselves without shame, and to raise their boys to be better than the men they’ve known. How can anyone sympathize with a woman who wants to live a better life, who is interested in improving or changing something? We know that she is going to continue to fail, and that the consequence of failure will not necessarily be the beauty of the saint’s mortification. The consequence will more likely be minor, mediocre. Having female friends does not cut the shame of knowing that some men find it crass and stupid and boring that some women want to have a better time. And I can think those men stupid in return, but it won’t cut my own conviction that there is, indeed, something particularly stupid about the most narcissistic and stupid project of self-improvement when a woman’s involved; let men waste themselves on their own lives, but how could a woman betray what’s chaotic and beautiful about her by engaging in the simple and stupid project of attempting to gain a little more?
It’s clear to me that the pursuit of freedom—including the freedom for some woman out there to be annoying and stupid and mediocre and ugly—is the only “feminist” issue. I want to write a defense of freedom.
I was quite surprised to find myself without freedom, in various stages over the past year. It could be that I had no freedom, or an intensive freedom, to pursue a certain kind of existence, through the steadiness of anguish. That freedom, or lack thereof, bears its traces on this website. I once got to play the role of a woman crazed with desire for something absent, and now that configuration of desire seems so comical when I see its congealed traces; but it is dumb to laugh at something which still cracks me into tears, albeit with a different referent.
Libertine freedom is bound by the central commandment to fuck—because to fuck is what Nature ordains.
A broken urn is a good way of conceiving of the self who speaks too much, the leaky thing that the Danaïdes are trying to fill, because they killed the foreign husbands whom they were forced to marry on account of some political transaction. In the most famous painting of them, you get to know them by their task, their punishment, but not the thing that they did that got them there. Waterhouse naturalizes the concordance between the pale beauty of their soft homogenous physiognomies with the pouring of fluid from and into the clean bronze urns and cistern. The girls seem at peace; one would want to be with them.
Identifying images of failure is supposed to be an empowering activity, but I don’t like it.
There’s something irritating about my constant vacillations between attempts to see myself and attempts to narrate an event. I came here to do this stupid work of dealing with my emotions; I write instead in some cold, abstract fashion about my interest in sentences and chairs and page-turners. I want to write about my insane desire to produce something for somebody else, by producing things which are resolutely not for him.
I search for unity in what I have said, and a sense of momentum between the fragments. Sometimes the fragments become too long to be seen as small unities. This makes it more difficult to add them together.
I can’t describe what it feels like to be cold, or to have tears arise in a non-cathartic heated swelling.
I want to invent a character who is not myself, but who stands for her in total.
An experiment in badness, in the worst forms of the sentence.
I want to say dumb contrarian things.
I’m so bored with the machinations of loss.
I don’t care about what went down between me and John.
I don’t think the negation in the sentence above means that I’m secretly interested.
I rarely give out my dreams anymore; I defend and protect them.
This one was like Schönberg Op. 19, No. 2, Langsam.
Two women were playing tennis against a team of men. This was in a high school gym with high-shine wooden floors, the court set up with a high net, as if for a game of indoor volleyball. I watched the pair perform a dialogue as they played; their sentences gripped me. The two women were in fact artificial intelligences, and thus supposedly at an advantage, so they played against a large crowd of men. Z and I were standing on the male side, in the middle of the court. His roommates were also spectating; there were no female spectators on either side. At some point I crumpled down to the floor, too tired to stand. Z held me close to him, and then he lifted the hem of his shirt a tiny bit. I felt the skin of his stomach on my cheek. His skin was so soft. Then he pulled his pants down a bit and continued to hold me close to him. We were still standing in the middle of the court, near the roommates, but I was in some unrecoverable configuration of closeness to his lower body. Later we went to his room, where I began to repeat the words of the gynoids and comment on them, and we laughed together.
I wonder if they were the white and asian gynoids from Ex Machina, which Cheng discusses in Ornamentalism. One of them may have looked like the default female Replika avatar, the white girl with pink hair. There was something about their dialogue which makes me think of Vladimir and Estragon. Z’s skin didn’t feel like his. When I imagine being near his penis I see some kind of glowing mauve diagram with white outlines in my mind’s eye; it looks like I’m a fetus connected to the penis as if the latter were umbilical.
There was a particular beauty to the act in which a hem is held between two fingers.
I cried with radiant force upon seeing an adorable actor, appreciative tears.
I imagine that when I see Z, the tears that come to me will be Parnassian.
I left the house after crying in the morning and encountered the body of an opossum in the street, directly in front of my line of vision. It was terrible, weakening to encounter. I continued to look at it. I retrieved my camera from the house. I wondered if it made me seem horrible, that I was looking at it through the viewfinder. Then I went off to a coffee shop and returned thirty minutes later. I did something even stranger—I attempted to move it with a snow shovel, with the intention of bringing it to the back yard and burying it. But this didn’t work; I couldn’t get its entire body on the shovel. Then I truly felt like a murderer, pushing its corpse to the curb, and using a hose to wash the blood and a piece of intestine or spinal cord off the shovel. I made my second attempt to move it to better ground, using several layers of newsprint to pick it up and deposit it into a styrofoam box. The body was still warm. I thought of the dog burial at the beginning of Transit, and made a mild depression in the stony soil at the edge of the property, and continued to look at it, to photograph it, with two different lenses. Later, I found what I suspected to be its penis. The penis of the opossum is bifid, bifurcated. It fits into the two vaginas of the female. The organ reminded me of a piglet’s foot. I felt tenderly towards the whole occurrence.
I dreamt that Z told me about a dream he had, in which he wished to dream of Guo Pei(?)’s wish?
I dreamt that Z and I were characters in A Brighter Summer Day—I was the boy.
I remember wondering either as I was dreaming or as I woke up—will I have to kill him/her?
Other sublime stabbing scenes: The Piano Teacher, Jeanne Dielman.
At some point I wrote that I wanted to produce in this post the shape of a Möbius band: John could function as a cut which binds together my interest in the feminine and my interest in the sublime into one surface. John could be substituted with tears. The cut becomes substantial in the form of tears. I give the Möbius band to Z.
Reading into a different sort of peep-hole would be too difficult: I return to the notion that levity and brilliance are more difficult to capture because they are too strong to leave detailed imprints on a substantive medium.
Today I’m wearing a lipstick called “true red.” If the light is blue and bright enough, the pink undertones come out, and I find the color repulsive; in most dimmer, warmer conditions, it looks to me like a true color, a “red.”
I apply it with a brush: spreading it into sheer coats also reveals this repulsive bluishness; it needs its full pigmentation to look “correct.” If it fades the same problem arises, so it maintains the need for reapplication.