To: C, E, L

Date: 1 January 2022

Dear all,

I am here to inform you of my imminent resignation. I am no longer interested in the questions which used to stimulate me.

I admit that I have not examined myself enough to know if the questions that drive my research in fact bore me. I spend my time cooking, writing, and exercising. I read novels and sometimes dramatic poems, nothing which could be construed as nonfiction.

I don’t think the love for literature can be easily shared, especially as it sharpens to a fine point. It is like a high-pitched sound from a violin, intense to the point of inducing irritation. It seems reasonable and unavoidable for scholars to all feel vaguely irritated by each other and by themselves. How dissatisfying it is to write about your favorite author. You will never measure up! The gap between the text admired and one’s own can be devastating. There’s a reason I never review my old work, always feel that I can’t build upon it.

I appreciate literary criticism. I remember the pleasure of opening certain books. The thought of returning to them is like the thought of re-entering the womb. I think of nothing but admiration and respect in relation to Swinburne, Hardy, Meredith, Lawrence—and this feeling is inextricable from my appreciation of various monographs dedicated to their works, which still lie in stacks around my bed. There is so much to love in those books. It strikes me as precious that the love of a literary critic has for a text goes beyond love for a person. It has an urgency specific to the fact that what one loves when one loves a literary text sources from something which is dead and finished. The text seems so effaceable when it doesn’t have live limbs or leaves to move around or feed with. Critics are so beneficial.

Isn’t the problem with academic writing—as a style—quite simple? The author stands at the virtual lectern and delivers sophisticated beliefs. We take it for granted that what she says is what she means. There’s little to no irony involved in this process, and I don’t believe most academics think much of irony as a part of their working life. I certainly used to find it difficult to conceive of the world in terms of irony, and often needed to consult the dictionary to remind myself of what it meant. That’s probably because I spent so much of my undergraduate years believing in the academic essay. I’m not sure if there’s a way around it; I’m not supposed to joke about things?

To: C, E, L

Date: 5 January 2022

Dear all,

As you can probably tell, that last email was left undone. I am in a state of consternation because I did not attack the real substance, namely the question of what my specific research interests have to do with that generic desire to quit the academic profession.

I told you that I was interested in the figure of the child in lyric, or the importance of the child to the development of the western lyric, and that is what I tell strangers if they ask. It is a convenient shorthand for an interest in something else. This shorthand has not changed, despite my prevarications. Sometimes I admitted to you that it was really “voice” I was interested in, or “suspension,” or that I wanted to create some sort of a poetics of the language of narration that might help me form a bridge between the lyric and narrative. I also said I wanted to study the Romantics and the Victorians, that I was interested in the 19th century, and in specific authors. I didn’t mention something personal, because I didn’t even knew how to speak about it with my closest friends.

I’ve essentially been interested in getting pregnant since my second year of grad school. My interest in the child, which really bore its first tiny fruit in the spring of 2021, has been a conscious endeavor on my part to conjoin my life with my labor. I believe that whatever I write will prepare me in some sense to become a mother, and that this preparation will be particularly important for someone like me who has repressed the possibility for so long, as early as the age of six or seven, or whenever it was that I first heard from my parents a kind of prohibition on marriage and procreation. My father was essentially an anti-natalist, and though my mom never discouraged me from having a child, she did often call me a “bloodsucker,” which was shorthand for “ungrateful,” but which did, in any case, produce an impression that I (however valuable I was) was a drain on my parents. The notion of having a child has always felt subversive and perverse and even more so now that I’ve lived for six years as a biological male (at least through the injection of synthetic testosterone). For nearly all of my adult life, nobody has thought of me as a potential mother. I have hewed close to the notion that I will leave behind nothing but my works, and have been quite dedicated to writing as a mode of permitting myself to die once that work has been finished.

I liked the idea of being crypto-female, a crypto-mother. I liked the idea that my future motherhood would be anything but natural, that I would need to study my impulse to want to be a mother quite carefully. I didn’t think I’d need to telegraph my fertility in the mode of living as a woman or becoming biologically female, fertile, etc. until various things happened in the last academic year.

The first was the sterility of last summer, which I sublimated into an even more zealous interest in raising my plants. I started a private website which I thought of as the beginnings of hub for studying the aesthetics of orchid culture so that I might begin some kind of orchid-breeding business in the future with a cultural landmark to go along with it. I wanted to be known as the most serious orchid-blogger to ever exist, the one that fused a kind of high literary mode of thinking with respect to plants with a business-like practice of using cultural artefacts and beautiful language to sell orchids in a way that might be completely unprecedented.

But then I lost interest in the orchids. I became interested in love, instead. I was in Female Complaints, that seminar I have often mentioned, in which we read many early modern sonnet sequences. We were so fixated on the question of how men’s obsessions with women could create so much poetry, whose value seemed to come less from a sublime notion of beauty but from its silliness, its flayed-out impotence, its awkward pretensions towards immortality. It really was an impressive set of writers. I also mimed this course in my personal life, by “falling in love” with someone and with the experience of anxiety that went along with it—I wanted to suffer.

I had a crude sense of what I was doing—“sublimating” my asexual desires for creative immortality in the form of writing into an actual love for a person, who in turn I thought of as a person who might give me the sperm that would give me a child. I wanted to be as self-effacing as possible in the process, and there was an opportunity there—since he and I had experienced a massive falling out which was largely driven by my own misplaced ire, I was able to perform an apologetic oblation. If he seemed suspicious and unable to return my affections, it was only reason for me to become even more obsessed with my failure to be of service to the distant lady.

Does it sound like I am trying to produce an intellectual biography? I sent a similar email to a famous professor I had never taken a class with in undergrad, and he said to me that I had marked out the beginning of a marvellous intellectual biography. I found this flattering, but was also a bit suspicious of my own desire to take the compliment at all. Currently I sense that these aren’t the right pieces of information to reveal, because there is no way that these facts will lead me to figure out a clearer path with respect to my studies.

To: C, E, L

Date: 12 January 2022

Dear all,

I’m sorry that I keep on sending unfinished emails.

I’m just not sure if I’m supposed to say everything, because I think everything is important, but you probably wouldn’t agree.

I want my dissertation to be about loving a voice, what a voice is, what love is. The particular voice I want to know is the voice of the child, the infans, which is the voice we love. I’m not interested in the child as an emblem of my potential immortality, or as a harbinger of value. Isn’t love about something that could fade away or die? I want to write about the reason why people call their partners babe.

To: C, E, L

Date: 21 August 2022

Hi Cathy, Elisha, Laurent;

Sorry about the bother last week.

Here’s an actual prospectus.

I’m also here to inform you that I’ve become a girl.

Didi

[10 January 2022]

Dear Z,

I’m drenched. I am wondering about the population of humans who wander the earth at lonesome dining tables reading the smut of a dead Japanese man named Kawabata. What an alien face, with those wide and looming eyes and slightly avian curled nose. He reminds me of a diatom, a fish, of algae. He doesn’t look like a pervert, he just looks immensely observant, and innocently infantile.

The novel I read was called 睨める美女。I wish I could translate its title well, because then our language would have gained something; “Staring at Beautiful Women” doesn’t sound very good. It’s missing the lack of tense, the vacant and pared manner of the Japanese language. The infinitive, let’s start with that: “To stare.” But we don’t want that literalism, we want the idiomatic equivalent, hence the progressive tense. But I don’t like the word “beautiful woman.” We cannot reduce it to just “woman.” Gazing at maidens. Gazing at beauties. Glowering at woman. There’s an extremely stupid scene in The Queen’s Gambit where the boy rejects the girl because she’s too obsessed with chess: he has nothing to teach her. Nothing in his face suggests humiliation; he seems disgusted by her skill. I think this is related to Kawabata and the fact that I’m ashamed to write to you about his erotic novel. I don’t know exactly how to parse the analogy, just that I don’t want to feel this way, like there’s something disgusting about me making jokes about Kawabata’s avian facial beauty.

Anyway, I want to be able to write perfect Spencerian on an iPad.

Did you know that there’s a hand called Zanerian?

Dd

[20 January 2022]

Zane,

I was relieved. My sprezzatura (studied carelessness) masks my own neuroses, which aren’t as simple as the language of mood disorders suggests. Sometimes when I try to imagine explaining to my mom what’s going on in my life I resort to the word “miraculous.” I had a funny time chatting with a friend about your writing once, how I could only forgive you for causing all this pain if I found your writing sufficiently lovely. And when he asked why that mattered I laughed at how ridiculous it was that I put so much weight on the beauty of something. And I admit it was only possible to eject you last time when I decided that I didn’t like how you thought, which has a kind of cruel objectivity to it that I can’t see as anything but traumatic to be on the receiving end of. But what I didn’t like was what I had in me that I couldn’t see. And do you know how tough it was to realize, after many therapy sessions and time alone, that all the negativity I had projected onto you could find ample sustenance on my own failures and carelessnesses? So being in that state of negative self-evaluation (or simple boredom with the self, which manifests on a daily basis as anhedonia) was what I tried to escape by re-meeting you in the fall. I am trying to explain to myself why I felt so much fear of the possibility of losing you in the fall. I must have sensed that I had already lost you. I was afraid of my inability to recuperate something and of the possibility that even if I tried I would still lose. I was afraid that I would not have learned anything from my attempts to recuperate you, too, and that when it was over I would return to the same place—a hermetic, isolated, sterile solitude, no longer as resplendent in its solar pain as it was during my last two years as a rather severe undergrad. The procreative business is an offshoot of something more turbulent. It’s just another form of sublimation—taking some desire I can’t name and making it as prosaic, visible, nameable, simple as possible. I want to be literary and literal at the same time.

Hatred of my home could also be another factor influencing my current strange relationship to procreancy. I know that I want to live a life very different from that of my mother, and recently it has been more useful for me to define myself in opposition to her, while as an undergraduate I had mostly been trying to mend the wound that was my decision to transition. It is a strange turn to see myself move from the placid and affectionate mother-son dyad to the antagonism of a mother-daughter one, which I don’t think I ever properly was as a kid. Is this femaleness thing a passing intellectual fascination for me, or is it something I have to act on? In a perverse logic I wrote down the following sentence the other day: “I should remain male to demonstrate to the world that female trans men exist.” I guess I could formally detransition, but it doesn’t seem right to do something just to be more concordant with the symbolic order of gender. I like being on testosterone. But it would also be nice to wear dresses and fuck random straight men. I am a “he” to my students and advisors, but I am not a “man,” and that my sense of myself as female is in many ways more important for me, even if it is private. I would prefer to live a life in which the sexed aspects of me can be legible as part of a historical tradition, as I am fascinated, for aesthetic reasons, in types and the evolution of types. I guess in literary parlance this is just “genre studies.” The limit case of gender for me would be to become pregnant of course, in which case I would transition in the hormonal sense, in which I would plan to do so, etc.

I like how your new profile picture resembles the photo you took of us.

Dd

[30 January 2022]

hi zane,

here’s some comic relief from yukio mishima:

The only woman’s body this marble youth would touch with his hand now had inserted in it two dried-up, cool, lysol-scented fingers of a man, like the fingers of a gardener thrust into the soil while transplanting a flower. The other dried-up hand was measuring the mass of internal organs externally. The root of life, as big as a goose egg, was touching the warm earth inside. Next, the doctor, as if he were picking up a shovel to dig in a luxurious flowerbed, took a uterine mirror from the hand of the nurse.

didi

[31 July 2022]

To: tlinklywroad

hiii

it’s been strange to arrive back in ithaca.

i actually felt immediately anxious and not that relieved, maybe because my plants didn’t grow all that much.

i would say that i miss you but it feels like an awful dumb thing to say, not appreciative enough.

on the bus i scribbled some things in a shaky hand about how i had wanted to say more about my heterosexuality.

i liked being with you again because it was really generative for me in terms of my thinking, both academic and general.

it’s true that when you said “i gave birth to you” it aroused me, and though i didn’t know what you could do to make me arrive at a resolution, i suddenly felt like maybe i would actually reach orgasm in your presence and through your actions. it was interesting to realize that what i needed was for you to barely move, as if the experience of being sent to coventry had to be converted into a sexual act. it recalls the concept of “edging,” but that implies a motion which leads one closer to orgasm before it is withheld. this was the opposite; the experience of nothing would be enough to generate everything out of the slightest ripple.

my sense of you has always primarily been one of admiration, for better or for worse. if all men are somehow fallible because i’m so attracted to them, then the opposite is true of you—there’s something more “objective” about sex with you, which is partly why it’s so nice in a “casual” sense but also why it’s hard for me to imagine becoming a lesbian in a daily sense. i always thought that if i could be as near to you as possible i would have access to all the powers in the world. and of course i was disappointed later on because you were just as inchoate as me as a teenager and it was dumb of me to expect that power and beauty would appear for me in the forms i had come to expect as a young child with the mother whom i have come to see as so problematic.

i don’t like telling you that i like cocks because it just seems hurtful. but i also don’t like saying it because it makes my relations with men seem truly farcical. i’m going to quote lacan out of context: the intervention of a seeming that replaces the having in order to protect it, in one case, and to mask the lack thereof, in the other, and whose effect is to completely project the ideal or typical manifestations of each of the sexes’ behavior, including the act of copulation itself, into the realm of comedy. the idea is that the phallus is a floating signifier, it doesn’t even stand for the real organ of the penis. men don’t have the phallus, they pretend to have it. women act as the phallus, are the phallus, for men. this is based on the scene of the male child and mother. the child realizes the mother doesn’t have the phallus, thinks she wants the phallus, that the father took it away from her and can give it back. the child wants to be the phallus for the mother, but doesn’t actually have it or can’t actually be it. the reason why it’s so embarrassing to talk about liking cocks is because it overinvests the penis with a capacity to satisfy a desire when in fact it’s something about the penis’s lack which i’m invested in. i mean sure, it might be a nice object, but my interest in it and affection for it is completely bound up with linguistic, symbolic games—the notion of being plugged up isn’t enough to get at how it is. i think the thing i like about men lies in this notion that men have been ejected from a sense of completeness. i want to “be” the phallus, or the site in which someone roots, the place where someone is able to experience a temporary sense of having returned to nursling dependence. i want to be with someone who’s been castrated.

i just made that up as i wrote it. not sure how much i believe it, but it’s probably not totally inaccurate. i have this separate idea that straight women are just so damn transactional, so impatient. life sucks so bad so we need to know that if we get fucked and give birth, we’re ready to die. there’s a script for how to die, and it exists simply in relation to men, whose desires are seen as simple. it’s all so good, to be so simple. life needs to be nasty, brutish, short, at least in order for me to want to live, but being in your bed makes me imagine a life which is the inverse of that and which is still desirable. i want to bring this knowledge to my relations with men.

i remember telling my analyst fairly recently that i have little to no desire to receive oral, though i did want to hold a penis in my mouth. what do i associate to when i recall your face between my legs? a mom witnessing the brilliance of her mode of creation, parturition? or is that me, seeing your head as that of an infant i have just given birth to? what makes the sensation so intense in part is the fear that you will eat me, that you will castrate me. but what makes it even more intense is the possibility of your narcissistic enjoyment of my cunt, an enjoyment that i don’t think a man can have. i thought of your five fingers each secreting sperm, like a cow’s udder or like the feet of a spider.

diid

[1 August 2022]

To: tlinklywroad

I’m so preoccupied with “setting up my life” again.

And I happen to be more nervous about zane again though my mind is too busy to ruminate on that.

I don’t know if I should be taking a break. There are obviously things to write about as a way of taking a break.

I want to talk to someone about you, but I don’t want to talk to anyone except for you about it.

Here’s what I like: being so completely under your sway that I become a blank slate.

So you did give birth to me; the evidence is that I forgot.

diid

[1 August 2022]

hi hunter,

it would be nice to capture you in your office, if you know what i mean.

didi

[2 August 2022]

laar,

i’m feeling cruel again, but i’m not sure this is right.

the erotic dream i had today about john seems to be a transposition of earlier erotic experiences with you.

there was this transparent foreskin surrounding the tip of his penis, which was leaking urine and a spot of blood.

he also turned into a tree somewhat.

diid

[3 August 2022]

zane,

i’ve been thinking about the concept of “masquerade” and also that of “imposture,” the former being the notion that women pretend to be something that has nothing to do with themselves, and the latter being the notion that men pretend to have something they don’t have. i might interpret your slowness and silence as a kind of profundity or power, and believe that it’s your cock that i want to be plugged up by, while understanding that these are all effects of imposture. my masquerade, in any case, might be one of needing you. the notion that i need your cock inside of me, the notion that i desire you because i believe you have something i don’t have. maybe it’s the notion that you’re quite good at imposture that turns me on. so good that it makes the ratio between what you appear to have and what you don’t have so large—it’s a division by zero. my cunt has never been so dilated, thinking about taking in this imaginary phallus, which measures a thing over zero. ah, and that cunt has nothing to do with me. this reminds me of the way the speaker of your story on separation anxiety has a “sigh kink.” the trouble is that when i become feminine in a sudden and obvious sense, it seems that i’ve somehow made femininity so clearly a masquerade that everything i do seems fake. it would seem that everything that signals a desire for you in fact has nothing to do with my “true” desires. every time i say that my cunt starts to get so wet thinking about you it seems less true, just as the phallus, a floating signifier, comes to free itself from your body. it’s not the organ that i think about so much as the fact that i can metaphorize over it. now i want to describe to you what it feels like to be a woman—it feels like being shingles of fabric that flutter easily in the wind. and if you blow on the fabric the body becomes reactive; the shingles vibrate in a way that seems completely governed by the air’s fluid dynamics but in fact all motion has been mechanized by some other means—there is no wind.

diid

[4 August 2022]

john,

hope you’ve been well.

when are you coming back?

didi

[4 August 2022]

Hi Tracy,

I hope your summer has been going well.

I wanted to share with you a sort of update on my research.

Didi

[10 August 2022]

hey

i’ve enjoyed the intensity of last night’s insomnia, which led me to write an email on my phone to lara.

john came back and it was sort of incredible to be around him given that he seemed so shell-shocked. we just stared at this snake peeping out of the water for over an hour; the first time we noticed the snake it was swimming and it brushed up against his foot and he cowered, entered a sort of seated fetal position. it’s nice to see someone behave like a frightened child, or an armadillo. then he recovered and it came back it went under the ledge and we observed it. i think he wanted to cuddle with the snake, he kept on extending his hand out towards it, and of course i could have touched him, but i didn’t want to violate his separate trembling being. at the end of our encounter we hugged and that was the first time we made any sort of intentional physical contact. i’m sort of craving a more intense way of being around him, even if it messes up something. i want to lick his face and his entire body like i am the mother of a stillborn calf. i want him to flinch and be afraid of me. i wonder if my intention is to mess up our relationship. the idea of having complementary encounters with multiple people still seems strange to me; i already feel shame or guilt or embarrassment over the fact that some time spent with one person can wipe out the excitement or happiness associated with another, though this is a temporary effacement, and does nothing to impact the strength of the independent and non-intersecting effects different people have on me. anyway, there was something so intensely heavy and sweet about that space of silent contemplation of the snake.

last night when i wrote the email i thought first about licking, and then about the trauma of kissing, which is for me the utmost horror—because when tongues are wrapped around each other they seem to lose all sense of reference. the lack of friction, the notion of these two slippery tongues rotating around the other, it freaks me out, but it was sending this thrill through my uterus, and was not so hellish in that way, like a light illuminating me from within. i only wanted you in that way—even if for a brief minute. and i wanted to have your body in my mouth, all of it, to watch it crumple into a flattened little fetus, desiccated, and compress it into a little ball of paper that melts upon contact with water. i’d “watch” with my eyes closed, gazing at nothing but the redness of blood vessels pressed against my irises.

the previous day i had been excited by a book, which included 19th-century essays on erotomania and monomania and hysteria, including the piquant tale of a woman whose portrait graces the wikipedia article on the first term, and when i became too suffused with it to read on, closed it and pressed it to my stomach, and felt it blocked by the top of my hip bones. then, putting it between my legs, i was so satisfied by its weight and thickness that i could not move any longer, and simply rested with it. the motionlessness of the book and my body reminded me of what it has felt like to experience you between your actions, but somehow i feel ashamed of the superfluity of explaining this or even describing it—all that matters really was the surprise involved with realizing that a book could not reach the soft tissue between my hips because it was too rigid. and that i was aware of the symbolic nature of the encounter overdetermining my pleasure—which brings me to the question of what it is like to receive these gimmicks, these manifestations of me as a sexual automaton fanned into artificial flame. this is not a question i am brave enough to ask, in truth, because on some level i recognize this as a purely academic exercise—but i am also curious about the experience of seeing oneself represented as the object of an action.

diid

[18 August 2022]

in my dream i talked to z on the phone and then lay with him in atsugi, and asked all the basic questions about his daily routine; he said he only went to campus once a week and otherwise went to the zoo often. i imagined a scene from panda go panda, a very stark image of him wandering between an empty village and the austere bars of the cartoon cages. i asked him if he had met anyone new, and he said that he had, she made a wonderful model of electrons in motion once, he told me, and then he asked me if i had ever seen electrons, for if i had it would be useful to tell her about it. i told him that i had sensed having seen electrons once. i saw in my mind’s eye the little sparks moving around empty black space. we kept on pressing against each other, i was lying on top of him, he would press my face to his and then release it, and it would go on like that. i thought about times in the past when i had been ashamed of being jealous.

[18 August 22]

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

[19 August 22]

Somebody who chooses to study both sentimentality and sexuality to this degree—who chooses to use almost all her cognitive resources and bodily health for the purpose of exploring such a fundamental knot—is undoubtedly hateable. She is neither a deific mother nor a verbal whore, and the failure to split the dense object into dark and light makes it not reprehensible, but completely absent to the senses. It is not hypersexual, it is not sexless, it is a complete absense, a complete absence, a complete absence of sense, an absence of knowledge, an absence of non-knowledge. No attention can be produced around the object. The attention flees without awareness. Neither a sense of omnipotence nor a sense of abjection account for this scenario—the whirlings of wit cannot bring her forth nor under.

And so she knew by this that these notebooks truly had a great deal to do with her, though it was hard for her to understand, and troubled her to try to understand, just how they had to do with her, how much they were of her and how much they were outside her and not of her, as they sat there on the shelf, being what she knew but did not know, being what she had read but did not remember reading, being what she had thought but did not now think, or remember thinking, or if she remembered, then did not know whether she was thinking it now or whether she had only once thought it, or understand why she had had a thought once and then years later the same thought, or a thought once and then never that same thought again.

She feels a failure not because she has not developed emotional competence but because she has overdeveloped it. Her feminine anxiety to demonstrate excellent emotionality bars her capacity to see a lover more complexly, over time. Her knowledge can only produce happiness in knowledge itself, in the products of its “sharp observation”: because different knowledge styles dissolve the very bonds of intimacy that lovers’ misrecognitions also generate, she keeps from falling apart by shifting between hypervigilance and inattention. This enables her to remain close not to her lover but to the situation of love and the promise of exchange, which is the low bar of reciprocity figured here in Davis’s formalism.

I could speak about these things I read ad libitum instead—in the absence of the text—about how they make me feel happy. I could theorize that this is because they appear to give me attention. I could say something simple about how I feel that what “she” does is what I do here—produce a notebook which truly has a great deal to do with me, though it is hard for me to understand, and it troubles me to try to understand, just how they have to do with me—how much they are outside of me and not of me. Was it being done to produce placid enjoyment in one and slicing debasement in the other? How did the active one profit from her activity? Was she aware of the shape of the world she had built through her mind, designed to grow its own asymmetric form in a non-telescoping sequence which appeared to grow smaller and smaller, though, in fact, it never could be said to decrease or increase at any point at all?

[20 August 2022]

Things have indubitably lightened up on account of my graphomania; apologies for the disturbance.