She gets in the car to drive.

You find where

You aren’t vulnerable

You must do this now

The window I leave myself through.

I have to stay out after door’s locked

In order to find him tonight so I

Must memorize her window.

Yes I know he’s dead

I know it in this dimension

We’ll get in a car and drive north, or south

South if someone just died

North if I must be submissive

These are memories but not of what happened.

Extract of The Window to Fly Through by Alice Notley.

The City with Codrescu

At the City Light’s Bookstore in San Francisco, I saw Andrei Codrescu read. There were all but two expectations: the space would be cramped and the reading of The Posthuman Dada Guide would be a bit of a performance. I wasn’t far off. On the second floor—a space taken over by poetry and Codrescu—eager admirers sat on stools, Indian style on the ground, others leaned on the stairway. The evening began with the bookstore owner charging up the steps with an orchid balancing on his palm. Barely winded—though it sounded like he had fallen face down on the staircase—he paused and flew back as if ready to plummet toward his death. Then, down below, hysterical laughter. Increasing. Hysterical. Almost a behavior to be concerned about. Andrei wouldn’t begin until someone sat in the single empty stool. The idea was to prevent the woman who left from interrupting the reading when she came back. She did so anyway. That too was amusing.

Then Andrei began. It was all rather informal. As if he wasn’t sure he knew what he was doing there. In such a sense it was the very essence of the Dadaist, impromptu. He showed no embarrassment showing us that his copy of The Posthuman Dada Guide had a sticky note on every page. He read his notes, which makes sense. The novel really is less about imagination—invention—than it is with piecing together facts to create some fluid history—explication—of the movement. Mocking his brilliance, he said the only reason chapters went alphabetically was because it was the only way he could condense his excessive notes.

Over all, I was confused. You may say this was a language barrier. And this is true. His accent was thick, heavy, hard to hear. Bringing out my notebook was incentive to listen carefully. Otherwise, I can’t swear I would have walked away with anything, but the image of him pulling on the colored string crisscrossing the room like streetcars wired and saying, “BOING!” However, Andrei was most provocative in his rambling answers—insights—to questions asked by the audience. Here is what I have:

The library is a place to transfer one’s life.

Future burglars are the poets of the future. Thieves operate in this room.

Singing seductively wasn’t enough to fulfill an evening. She was high strung. His hackles made it easy to make her cry, to laugh.

The author breaks into memory so he can clean it out.

Perfecting the art of forgetting. Struggle of consciousness, leaving behind the weak.

This right now is a transitional moment, a post-human time. The track we are on for the future is remembering nothing but the box it came in. Now that we have become responsible, I don’t think it’s worth it to nod on to humanism. Who wants to be human? What’s so great?

Everything that isn’t war is cowardice.

Bahhhing like sheep right into their death. Bahhhing = Buying.

The difference between Futurism and Dadaism is, well, I’ll start saying there is a difference. Futurism is the love for machines. This is a love for speed, a speeding toward another war. Dadaism moves in all directions at all time. This question of time was very urgent to them.

But today what do you put into time? How is it perceived? This is the Postmodern pondering.

Surrealism was more of an idealism.

I created a guide because it keeps asking question.

Today there is a means of reading the thoughts of an artist before he has even conceived of their being born.

I mean, right now, there is at least six things walking around, that I almost thought of.

It took and still takes awhile for Dada to be on exhibit. There is too much juice in it. It’s still alive. Museums hang the dead. This is why it takes so much time, effort, strain.

There are no more spectators. You may be the last audience.

On a Side.

Wednesday I woke from the dream of destroying us. Maybe it's already destroyed, or rather was while sleeping, and the progression of dreaming worsened the already distant. Sleep has been a new activity for me, an activity I don't get more time with by any means but that - when there - am more involved with. And in that way, maybe sleep has been a sort of suffering, a way of having my concerns be filled. A self-service; a masochism.

In San Francisco, I tried revising the final fiction. As I feared, it was tedious, forced and unproductive. I did nothing, but doubt my life, what I am perceptive to, what I've been choosing to become. I was also sincerely overwhelmed and depleted of energy. Oh, I also saw in the morning that I had turned the male character into a ballerina. Well, the equivalent. One thing I didn't doubt was my desperation. I was too willing to eat everything, and was visibly dragging myself around. Face in hands, I slumped outside the graduate school, unwilling to walk in, not ready for anyone to ask me who I am, what I do, if I could possibly mean anything. Sometimes I wasn't convinced I could, forgot they already thought I did.

Of course, those were only tough times. Catastrophes I was creating. Or that is what I was told. The truth is, I leave out the juice. I felt ritzy, walked pantless, came home with two handfuls of numbers. And another truth? The first person you meet in San Francisco does make you want to stay.

Today I finally caught some wind, struck a pace, and heard the voice that may - hopefully - have made the story better, solid. At midnight I began reading Adrienne Rich's The Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society 1997-2008 and Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet. I'll post quotes along the way. It's always the same feeling; a suffocation and then the touch that calms. They write what's rewritten in my mind everyday. They speak what I want to share in dialogue. In dialogue damnit! It makes me feel empty, maybe hypocritical, or deceiving to read such prose and acknowledge everything I never write out. This neglectfulness keeps even me out of the known. I know it doesn't matter to you any which way, but my aim is for others to be vulnerable, and here I can't even do it. I can't be so pathetic. But if I really let it all slip, there's a good chance that's exactly what I'd be.

On a side. The common tale that if the sex is this [sensational] it means there must be more you are communicating, can communicate. I say yes and I think no. I need it to happen.

Also, a certain type of communication I admire. The one that risks being silly while being thoughtful. The voicemail:

Hey carrot girl, you know I was just thinking, you're my carrot and I'm your apple, I think together we'd make a great juice. Um, if you want to go for that walk, by the way, I don't know if you're in California already but maybe we can take that sometime. I'll be around, so you know where to find me.

Actions are far different than the Written.

As a follow up to my entry about being shunned in class, my confusion about his tone and overall reaction to me. I don't know. Life always arranges itself in strange ways (last night was an example that I will get into later). Confrontation that is. I always have people, particularly family, say I appear aloof. I don't like the sound of it. I also am just not sure whether it means acting above others, disinterested or just elsewhere, internal, in a peaceful realm somewhere within. It could mean none of those things. It could be really simple: I don't look like I give a damn or I'm a space cadet. Either way, I've had professors - men, if that makes any difference - react to me in front of entire classrooms in explosive sort of ways - not physically, but just behaving unlike themselves; as if I've truly conflicted them. I don't know why I am talking about this. But ultimately it must be because I want to understand the reactions I cause, so I know better what to and not to do. My sister always claims that she imagines I get defensive, abrupt, offending others; that the problem must be me, who I am, how I come across. Yes, we don't know who we are in the gaze of others, but I don't feel like I could let myself be that way to others. I think more times than not, I am soft spoken, firm minded, because I respond passionately and I try to give feedback that is hopeful, rather than criticism; if anything I am not critical enough and that is my own laziness. Absolutely. Aloofness, sure. But really, I am just a bit shy here. I don't really know anyone at school. It has never been that experience. I come and go. I resent this a bit. I have established a relation that will probably, hopefully, some day end up in a dedication. Looking back on last night, I didn't really see it then, only after as I thought back in the shower; standing on broadway, Burberry raincoats, her frail body, encouraging me, a sort of pep talk, as if she had watched me through elementary school and was now sending me off to middle. Victoria has certainly been my professor from the first day I walked into NYU, from there we went on creating independent studies together, she sent my recommendations to graduate school and she watched me through my colloquium. She read my first words and her guidance will follow me to my last. She shaped me. She helped me grow up. It wasn't my boyfriend that made me healthy again (though he did that in other ways), it was her without ever acknowledging my weight. At best she compared the situation to Virginia Woolf's struggle ("people forced food down her throat, trying to ripen her up, she hated them for it.") I remember when I came to that revelation. I remember the letter I sent her. Thanking her. And hoping she knew what I meant, but couldn't say directly. When I left for college, even before attending NYU in the spring of my sophomore year, I never believed I could/would read theory, philosophy. I thought I was all emotion; intoxicated my wine and romance, the cliches that are cliches for a reason. Last night I felt maybe Victoria was a second mom, guiding me, not through instruction, just telling me it was okay to try, showing me it was normal to just want to sit in the corner of the room and talk to one other about thoughts.

After every confrontation with a professor, I receive an email. I was scared to open it, but then there was this. Maybe?... it is all teaching me, that confrontation is how we establish our positions, how we show someone what they mean, and perhaps words are our chance to go back and explain ourselves. 

Thank you Chelsea. These were in my inbox when I got home last night. If you haven't arranged for N & C to receive your comments, please do so. And good luck on your colloquium. And I want to be clear about something. You bring a special quality to the class, which I value. You enter into classroom discussions with great independence and tremendous heart, and your own work introduced a narrative approach that I feel enriched the course dialectic for all of us. You've been a wonderful addition to our sessions. But the issues with the mundane exchange of class documents are not issues I've had with any other student, and it disturbs me that your carefully considered responses are somehow dropping into a void. I think it should concern you, too, and it remains your responsibility to resolve whatever has gone wrong. Any aloofness has been because I acknowledge my slacking and somehow I can't just resolve it. I've only felt guilty that I've been struggling with work. It embarrasses me. I need to break through myself. Off to San Francisco is a few hours.

Two Lips.

I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free--

Tulips, Sylvia Plath.

Nothing is over, even when it ends End.

After the end of the world
after my death
I found myself in the middle of life
creating myself
building a life
people animals landscapes

man should be loved
I learned by night by day
what should one love
I answered man
this is a man
this is a tree this is bread
people eat in order to live
I kept repeating to myself
human life is important
human life has great importance
the value of life
surpasses the value of every object
man has made
man is a great treasure
I kept repeating stubbornly

this is water I kept saying
stroking the waves with my hand
talking to the river
water I said
kind water
it is I

- extracts pieced together from In the Middle of Life, a longer Polish poem by Tadeusz Rozewicz.

*This is minimalism. I miss my Fall poetry class. It taught me how much I can cut. He taught me to speak backwards. But now I've forgotten. I've forgotten much. Apologetic, oh! I was petrifying to listen to, to watch - she tried, shifting The History of Sexuality from left palm to right - me stammering on about guilt, a dry anguish told through a dry mouth. She said no need. And fled. Some time between 7:30 and 8:30 pm I was debased again. Extraordinary! And no effort on his behalf. I am yet to meet a creative writing professor who likes me. I offend them, personally, this is my only rationale. It always appears as hate, but never does it feel that uncomplicated. I am ready to resign from spring. She recommended an incomplete, "Sit with Foucault for two or three weeks, then write. Your analysis of Mishima was superior, original, insightful. But here, around this red ink, you mistook Foucault, power, you said the opposite. Sit with him. Write." Until the end of May? I couldn't. I have to move. I'm guilty or I feel I am. "No need. He isn't your interest. I read your rationale, extremely interesting. Tomorrow? Let's work you out after." No need. No need. My colloquium is tomorrow. I still have so much to consume. I always want more. Checked two books out tonight. Found phenomenal existential psychoanalysts at 12:30. I want to add them too! I want to show them off to the world. I want them heard.. even if by only one or two people. I want people to read what I read. I want to know what you read. Recently I have received the most gripping messages in the mail, also quotes sent to me. Thank you. I am terrible responding. But they make me feel closer, they also open me up, encourage me forth. Last night, he and his umbrella. He could stuff a family of five beneath its girth. Time calmed, the city drenched. "If you hadn't shown up to your own invite," he decided, "I would have known you were suffering from anguish." Oh but I am, that's why I made sure to reach out to you, it got me here. And it had. I've been 'flaky' as ever. The existentialist will tell you, there is no excuse for your action. It is true, this is me at a certain time. I told him this. And he laughed along, "As if the world is exerting his stress on you." It was funny. I walked to the story of his "philosopher's walk". He told me it's the substitution to psychedelic drugs. "It's 420, I don't want to talk drugs." To me, it's stupid, but this doesn't have to mean or matter anything to anyone. So yes, tomorrow/today my colloquium. I've learned. I've taught myself. And really, thanks to these hours of making sense and not, of being and not being, I've had to acknowledge my habits, my years, fear. And all of this came from desire. The lack. Before, when I made this study up, I never would have taken desire to mean the missing, the insatiable, the impossible, the always present-absence. He said I know what I am doing, that at graduate school I'll come in with more than most. Something like that. Existentialism tells you to take responsibility of "I". Kierkegaard said, The self is only that which is the process of becoming. I'm a fan of him, but not of the notion of becoming. I am more focused on being. Not continuing to look out into the future. Becoming insinuates desire, the dissatisfaction, the drive toward the impossible, impractical illusory ideal. No thanks. But, yes, I take responsibility. This here is me in process of my self-project. There are periods where it does and will drag on, obsessively, indulgently inward, and other periods when it will venture elsewhere. I don't think I will change. But I know my tone will. It has, it does. All this, these months, maybe they were an effort to embody my undergraduate project, the human dilemma.

We must look elsewhere to know better.

E l'uomo
curvato
sull'acqua
sorpresa
dal sole
si rinviene
un'ombra

- from L'allegria on 19 agosto 1917
by Giuseppi Ungaretti

Overheard Gestures

Alarm! Do I not have you to wake me? Those three and a half hours of sleep couldn't have been that good. But they were, all because I was letting myself turn off. O! Now I am in trouble. With an authority that isn't even real. Odd, bewildering, amusing these confines, the rules I follow because I think, what?, I will be spanked with a ruler. And then? won't be able to sit on my ass as I've been doing many a day, my knee many a night. Kiddy's tail is looped around the curtains. Birds waking made it into my dream. And I kept sleeping to the to the to a tune. Wanting to go on. Knowing by now how good it tastes, those tasteless feelings, bedridden beneath blue. Never used to dream. Never kept them after the morning. But now! I meet everyone there. And they tell me many things, showing me all I can't face. A few hours ago, he showed up to tell me a thing or two about himself but really it was all about what I wasn't allowing.

"What you've said
you are,
everything you've told
me you'd like the man
for you to be,
I've done. I know
I have. You know
this."

Questioning or convincing? His startling awareness. And being all sleepy, I remember, this narrative. Remember that a year ago I was in a gallery and in it my show spoke to the notion that in dreams there are no words, that no one ever speaks, that we are infants, that we dream future memories and can't articulate them because they don't make sense to us without our experience of them, our subjectivity. I believed that. Only because I had never experienced the other. I made myself believe my only reality at the time. And these few months, all the talking. And being all sleepy, I remember him asking, telling me. He wasn't looking at me. Kind of a step ahead, to the side, gesturing as if to an audience. But I can't promise anyone was there to back him, supporting. He did not see me watching him as he spoke. He did not see, did not experience the way I took his words. He did not see my sobbed face, did not see me, a hysterical laughter. How well do the dreamed of hear?

In my dream, you did not find me. Always sitting, laying back. In my dream, I had to follow you. Together, accidentally finding ourselves. All these visions, if they are future memories or not, are the same: small and terrifying.

Indulgence

This is unfair writing. My apologies, but it isn't agreeable, this would be fair if the writing changed. Already a conscious decision to not make an appearance, and now, "This too!," as one we say, "unnamable." Everyone is named except anyone I speak of, talk toward. Look, you know already who I am. Chelsea's Claudelean. Chelsea first, forever. What do you think? Will he last forever? Who is you? I know. But can't say it, I, say it, Your's name, tells who I think of when writing you. Selfishness is never fair. You are right, on the outside I am not you.

Nice to meee, Nice to know you.

I have wanted, am still wanting, to do many things for him. Reminders of me, proof. But I've waited, and time appears to be late and I'm just walking, thinking how I've missed chances missing him, walking slower than my thought, getting no where I haven't been, hadn't imagined I'd see. In person, I learn all it takes to be me, to be for me. And between living and telling, I learn when I am so many arm lengths away, screened, lettered, I am not the extent of myself, I am other than who I intimately live behind. I act in step, in the silence, of that I oppose. Maybe I want nothing, but the wanting. That can't be it. Not this time, not lately. Is it the wanted I want? When the unspoken isn't said, still, I hold myself back. Because I don't believe. (It takes how little we are being). I believe. (I have what it takes).

*

In my ears, I am listening for the first time to what was given to me. I may only be hopeful, or had I? had I missed you? I am at fault, I read others the way I want to be read. I look for their message in the word. Maybe our meaning isn't there. Does it have to be? I've been avoiding this. My ex-boyfriend (I still hate this term, believing, knowing we are better than its implication; there is no need for reducing, we went on to become more, this was my hope) has shown himself similarly in another. And what have I learned? To go again. So many men met, many inside, in such short time and have I really wanted nothing other than to wake with this other one of resembling qualities? I am afraid of this likening. Knowing the possibilities, potential of becoming everything, feeling we have it all, or sobering up to discover I know nothing of I, having become wronged in feeling again.

At Best: An Inferior Infant.

It was night, only since he needed it so and I let it be. But I could feel difference in the reaction a body has to time. He gave me a feeling, the one of being rushed. And I take what he gives, have here all he gave. Keeping these slight gestures, unrecognizable, as to never betray us. I promised. The anonymity someone like him requires. We never meant anything, you’ll see. We, obviously, weren’t real, really there although we are in ways. At five the light stills behind a dangerous window left wide, kept open; alls quiet but his breathing on me. Reminders of time, convenience, ceasing: the very pulse of romance. He said the distance will be our desire. And had he said this desire will become distant, could it be thought, that I came first, that we are satisfying each other now? Would words have made us different? His breathing, I knew then would be the last trace remembered, the only thing I didn't want continuing. No one forgets whatever seems to say: We have these hours, few till we are forgotten, until we are no more. Hurry will you. And it’s funny really, in a sad, pathetic way, how maybe I seemed, if I judged myself on the outside. Hunched up, fingering the hole; my fluid will be digested just below here, I probably thought. And I went, crawling, wanting to taste him, trying to think of him too. You may deem us hopeless, sad, pathetic. That’s funny, because, really, I was trying.

but the blank screen blinked.

I am feeling empty. The other receives a blank expression. Hours upon hours planning, mapping out materials for my colloquium. I think it is all of two things. One, a selfish desire to be at one with my thoughts - while I still can before summer starts and academia ends - furthermore the selfish refusal to read anything outside of what correlates to my inner lack of knowledge, my inner desire to know myself more fully. Two, my determination/my need to master this theory I have put forth. Already, the applaud of my rationale; the gripping journey that hasn't been put forth in the past, but that my colloquium expects too much of itself. And really, there is so much and my compulsion to know more, to include more, to show more. I have two desires. One to reach a revelation - this is impossible - and two, to provide my panel with connections that haven't been made, relations that have not yet been associated. All my fictions are obscure. And I am absolutely fascinated by each one. Astounded. Thankful that above all I am leaving undergraduate having read these texts. And that this was my drive. That all this knowledge was because of my own curiosity, my own concern. (Sartre: It is relation to myself as subject that I am concerned about myself). On a side note, I've come to realize this insatiable curiosity is not that, but an insatiable concern that language will "reveal to me a being which is my being without being-for-me" - that is, I will recognize that I am always othered, always objectified in the gaze of the other, that I always body before mind. What has come from all my gathering is perhaps the issue of utmost concern - a concern I thought I could somehow avoid. And that is the crisis of the body's image. However what I have done is not included any psychology of eating disorders. This is a decision I've made for so many reasons, so many instinctual reasons. Ultimately, it is too superficial - too much a given, that gives the subject no deeper dimension, no inner explanation, no origin of desire - to say that the self's image is a lack because one does not see his body as it is, does not see his body as the ideal-I. Worse it is that the self sees his body and says, that this image does not embody how one knows himself. Therefore, one's image of himself (what will satisfy it and what perpetuates its lack) is thought. I think the body image is a philosophical dilemma and that the psychological comes after. Feelings are a reaction to thought. Language is the image of all things. By presenting the positions of philosophers, I want to show what I term The Desire to be in The Other. And through the fiction works how the self cannot escape the other (a partner's body, language which confines, constructs and others one from the start, the ideal-I seen in Lacan's mirror stage, Freud's castration, Kristeva's split subject, Derrida's trace, etc etc). My only hope is to show that I have been thinking and also that I don't know what to do; it is impossible to satisfy desire, and yet our thought and experience is conditioned by the originary lack. Contradictions are naturally embedded, obscurity is intentional and yet there is this calling - this urgency, this compulsion - to figure it out. Yes, I am the epitome of the subject with an existential dilemma. Not to mention I am so damn far behind on school work. I have so much to tell! Damnitdamnit. I'm going to San Francisco this Thursday to check out the graduate school. I hope the glove fits. I hope the city satisfies my desire so nothing any longer seems to lack, defer my desire to be. But this of course is impossible. Exhaustion!

Some word was trying to come to the surface of her being. Some word had sought all day to pierce through like an arrow the formless, inchoate mass of incidents of her life. The geological layers of her experience, the accumulated faces, scenes, words and dreams. One word was being churned to the surface of all this torment. It was as if she were trying to name her greatest enemy. But she was struggling with the fear we have of naming that enemy. For what crystallized simulatenously with the name of the enemy was an emotion of helplessness against him! What good was naming it if one could not destroy it and free one's self? This feeling, stronger than the desire to see the face of the enemy, almost drowned the insistent word into oblivion again.

What Stella whispered in the dark with her foreign accent enhancing strongly, markedly the cruelty of the sound was:

ma soch ism

Soch! Och! It was the och which stood out, not mas or ism but the och! which was like some primitive excalmation of pain. Am, am I, am I, am I, am I, whispered Stella, am I a masochist?

Stella by Anais Nin.

She, We.

She was cruel. She made you feel small. Dumb, naive, hopeless. She called her, she named me a romantic. She said you talk of losers. She made them small. Her hand was to her head. Her little body in that bed. Her eyes always that, yes, that red. As if, as if, yes we were hurting her. Her head. A fantasy world, Chelsea, all of you, your fantasies. She was cruel. She made you feel hopeless. She provided no help. "Get out." "Okay, yes, I will." "Get out." "I know, I am, we are, that tiring." This is a reason man and woman never get involved, never evolve. No one can be human. It would be much too much a surprise; a surprise for the better. But the boyfriend can take her glasses. Throwing them like darts. He can pull the curtains I left her. Pull and have the rod almost go through her head. And she can plead and he won't listen. And she can leave and he'll say she should learn to try. Try to understand what it means. What it means to be normal. Why was she never cruel to her? Never just real with her, as she imagines she is with me. And if reality made her feel small? Then stand on your toes. She made me feel stupid and made the people, the losers of my stories, the friend in my head, the man in my mouth out to be the same. And my feelings, she wanted them insignificant. She didn't want me and him to mean anything. And I don't want to be like her. Dismissive and alone every night.

It's strange. All this distancing we, people, do. The distance doesn't make me feel at all. I don't have the imagination for it. And yet every time I try to get closer to her, at times by trying to talk of him, she says WAKE UP.

GET OUT.
MOVE ON.

And I was
going to
I am
GOING
any
way.

(I
love you,
I don't
want to
blame
you, for this,
you can't
understand if
the boy is
never in you,
can't help this
when it's
never you
in him,
but you
care, you
care right?)

A Conversation in the Night.

He was in my bed, and too tall for it really. But without him or some body, it always felt empty. Maybe that was only me. As I laid my head on his stomach, he moved his fingers from one side of my scalp to the other. We named this gesture “the rake” and I’ve never not wanted such sensation in my head. With a turned face, I’ve lied like this for hours without sleeping. It’s never made me tired either; how little we sometimes speak. Not needing to make an effort to entertain was enjoyable, relieving. Four nights in a row now, I’ve watched the sky become ruby at four. And always wonder whether he likes it better blue. I can’t imagine he could.

“Would you say you’re always traveling or leaving?”
“Neither. I’m just often in the air.”
“What do you like better coming or going?”
“Commm.” And we laughed and I tried to bite the stomach he doesn’t have.
“You think it’s easy to know someone?”
“Ignoring intuition, never. But I think it’s easy to know whether you like someone.”
“To decide whether you like?”
“Right.”
“That isn’t too fair.”
“Nothing right off the bat is fair.”
“Yeah, yeah. It is what it is.”
“No. It’s how it is.”
“Blue or green?”
“Green.”
“Sailing or cruising?”
“Sailing.”
“Red fish or swordfish?”
“Red.”
“Godard or Antonioni?“
“Antonioni.”
“Antonioni or Bergman?”
“Bergman.”
“Freud or your father?”
“Both, together, at the same time.”
"To be or not to be."
"That isn't a question."
“If you could change anything about me.”
“What?”
“What would it be?”
“Your eyes. I like light eyes, but I don’t like them light.”
“That’s terrible.”
“Teaches you not to ask superficial questions.”
“Fine. But really, my eyes, you don’t like them?”
“What about me?”
“I love yours.”
“But what would you change?”
“What you consider home.”
“Ruby or blue?”

Attraction, I'm Afraid.

The sound of the lighter. The thumb raw from trying. Bubbling, so obnoxious like a bath, but the body isn't submerged, just the mind which is becoming less and less a pure and extraordinary thing. Then the breathing. And the repetition. And that bathroom wall. "I will myself to stop." Now the eyeliner has no color. But her nose has been looking red. Can't say it's from the outside. This is you. Can't blame what you see. Though what I see seems to be feeling less and less. And the skin is so pale. And it smells like shit. No I don't want to smell. Don't bring it to my nose. I said no. No I said it smells like shit I said. And they were fucked up all weekend. Like she was fucked up each day. I've tried for years not to be judgmental. And the best I can do is separate desire from a friend. I'll be a friend but you can't attract me. And what attracts me is the desire to be grounded, ambitious. I'm not talking about jobs. But yes, maybe what I mean is the job for yourself, the job to be good, to have a clear mind, the desire to teach yourself things, everyday to be thinking, to not always be escaping into a drug or a party. I cringe at my judgment, knowing no one is perfect, and knowing I don't want myself or anyone else to be, but I'm afraid consciousness attracts me and escapism is in no way what I am pursuing, even if I leave town every month and I write "fiction" everyday.

Who is it Tell me His name

Oh these weeks have been mind AND body hogging. Constantly reading, devouring texts for my Colloquium. The day after I leave for San Francisco. Then I have about a week - if I pass my Colloquium - to finish all the other three research papers and portfolio. Ep. Everything works out in time. Although I am a mad lady in the mind. Not so sure whether I have been taking the Colloquium too seriously oooor not enough. Whatever it is, it happens. As for today I read St. Augustine's Confessions Book X Memory, Samuel Beckett's Not I, The Unnamable, Cascando (But the entire reader is damn good and I need to seriously get in on that). I also finished Molly Bloom's soliloquy the last interior-scope in the final pages of Ulysses by Joyce. Yesterday was Lacan. And tonight I need to try and get a move on Plato's Phaedrus. So many words, so many texts referring me to other texts, other words, other poems, other quotes I need now always to share. I watched a PHENOMENAL video from Philoctetes Center Multidisplinary Study of Imagination with a panel (Arina Abramovic, Paul Campos, Sander Gilman, Marcel Kinsbourne, and Sabine Wilhelm) on The Body and Its Image. These issues merged with the study of my Colloquium The Desire to be in The Other has made me more aware, most awake. It has all been just before my very eyes. I feel like I've been reduced to terms, like I've been in an analyst's hot seat for months - days that don't die - and now I get it. And soon I will have to see if I can articulate it, reveal what I've done and how, yes, the clues have been laid out for me all along. I feel good. But extremely worn out. Too much school work I fear I'll never finish, but regardless I will, crazed and insufficiently. The ol' group went to Miami for the weekend and I couldn't go. A first. Miss that sort of pleasure. Went out for a bottle of wine Thursday, she even said I talk differently, hold my body differently as I speak in Miami. It made her sad and that made me sad. But it all really shouldn't be a sad thing. It isn't. I've accomplished a lot here. But yes, I'm just trying to meet deadlines always. Manic exhaustion, I admit. Can't wait for kisses and all of that and that and this and such makes me feel immediately well again. I can't wait to feel good. I can't wait to begin living again. To be a yes girl and not a no. Which leads me right into Joyce's Ulysses. He believed "Yes" was the female's word. The final chapter is referred to as "Penelope", after Molly's mythical counterpart (OTHER). One major difference between Molly and Penelope is that while Penelope is eternally faithful, Molly is not, having an affair with Hugh 'Blazes' Boylan after ten years of her celibacy within the marriage. On that note, this soliloquy is the damn funniest thing I have ever read - erotic, crude, the whole nine yards - it is damn good. I will include some of the passages from all the works at someone time but for now:

After that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldn't answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know.

I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

James Joyce, Ulysses: Molly Bloom

Sight Changes once Feelings Change.

Yesterday, the reality of myself seemed to change, or, at the very least, feel different.
Maybe I just finally let myself see things the way they are.

Q. Back to the mine? A. It's the only place I have to go.

When I met Chozo and the tea lady, for example, I took in everything they said without a peep - not a hint of my usual argumentative, self-assertive behavior. Of course, it would be reasonable to try to account for this by reference to the fact that I was starving at the time, but hunger was surely not the whole explanation. Any way you look at it, it's a contradiction. Here I go with the contradictions again. Never mind.

I have a habit of recalling the adventures I experienced back then whenever I have a few spare moments. It was the most colorful period of my life. Each time I bring back those images to savor, I wield my scalpel mercilessly (you can do this with old memories) in an attempt to chop up my own mental processes and examine every little piece. The results however are always the same: I don't understand them. Now, don't tell me I've just forgotten because it happened so long ago. I'll never have such an intense experience again in my lifetime. And especially don't tell me that the lines are tangled because those were the frantic acts of a confused adolescent. The acts themselves were confused and misguided, but the only way to understand the processes leading to those misguided acts is to examine them calmly with the brain I have today. It's precisely because I can now look at my trip to the mine as an old dream that I am able to describe it for some people with even this degree of clarity. I'm not just saying that I have the courage to write down everything that happened because the passions have faded; I could never have managed to put down even this much on paper if I didn't have the detachment to drag out the old me out to where the present me can see it and study every wart and pimple. Most people imagine that the most accurate account of an experience would be the one written at the time and place, but this is a mistake. Driven by the passions of the moment, a description of the immediate situation tends to convey preposterous misconceptions. If I had kept a diary, say, of my feelings just as they were at the moment, I'm sure the result would have been an infantile, affected thing full of lies - certainly nothing that I could have presented to people like this and asked them to read. -The Miner by Natsume Sōseki.

Present & Experienced.

Extracts from Being and Nothingness by Sartre.
All of these are sentences from the text that I have linked together.
And not the complete or actual passages themselves.
Although they advance as the text does itself.
Enjoy!

Language: by revealing to us abstractly the principal structures of our body-for-others (even though the existed body is ineffable) impels us to place our alleged mission wholly in the hands of the Other. We resign ourselves to seeing ourselves through the Other’s eyes → we attempt to learn our being through the revelations of language. Therefore it is language which teaches me my body’s structures for the Other. But it follows that even in reflection I assume the Other’s point of view on my body; I try to apprehend it as if I were the Other in relation to it. It is evident that the categories which I then apply constitute an emptiness or rather, a dimension which escapes me.

I am language. By the sole fact that whatever I may do, my acts freely conceived and executed, my projects launched toward my possibilities have outside of them a meaning which escapes me and which I experience. Seduction is the complete realization of language. In other words it can be our primitive expression. Thus I do not know my language any more than I know my body for the Other. I can not hear myself speak nor see myself smile. The problem of language is exactly parallel to the problem of bodies, and the description which is valid in one case is valid in the other. Seduction will perhaps determine me to risk much to conquer the Other-as-object, but this desire to appropriate an object in the midst of the world should not be confused with love. Love therefore can be born in the beloved only from the proof which he makes of his alienation and his flight toward the Other.

Cornered.

We sat in the corner as we had times before. It wasn’t habit, just a preference that never needed a voice. I felt bad, immediately; my noticeable nature, I was there but nowhere to be found. She looked into my eyes and I let myself pass further into the distance. I’ve become someone less. Engaged, she saw me for the first time and I laughed.

I wanted to ask her whether I looked sad or blank. But what would I have done with the answer? I didn’t know. I didn’t really care. For months, I’ve been looking forward to gaining my esteem soon. But I’m not certain it will happen. And if it doesn’t, I wonder how I’ll be, if I’ll excuse myself or just keep waiting.

She left for water. Hurt her back looking at photography on exhibit. Swallowing a pill for pain. Closed my eyes. Envious. “I have something, a small surprise.” Flowers. I hadn’t seen that amount of color in a long time. I was silent. “I’m so proud. You’ve made it happen.” I was silent. “Chelsea…" "It's just you didn’t have to do this. Wherever I am going, whatever becomes of it, and everything that’s already been written is because of you. I don’t deserve these." It’s impossible to decide whether words are the consequence of yourself or the other. But a writer lives for the touch, works toward the story that will say it all; doesn’t move until affected although a writer races and waits, races and erases. "Thank you for caring."

“I’ve been missing you and you’re not gone. You’re here and I’ve already.”
“Things haven’t been the same.”
“I’ve noticed. You’re scattered, exhausted from trying to do too much.”
“I don’t have anything to say.”
“That isn’t the case.”
“It has to change. I have to change.”
“Things already are.”
“California.”
“You’re suited for San Francisco. It had to happen.”
“So not LA?”
“It’s not a question. You know my first husband and I’s relationship ended because Los Angeles would never be me. You’re the same way.”
“This is certainly true.”

We talked about San Francisco. Neighborhoods. Where I’d live. Your’s, Mine and Ours. Ferlinghetti. The scale of intensity. Manhattan: 10. Berkley: 2. San Francisco: 6. Big Sur. Wine. Romance. Intoxication. We talked about Manhattan and if she’d ever get me back.

“I feel like I’ve lost myself.”
“How does that happen? People find themselves here.”
“Exactly. I did. I thought. In the beginning. But now I can’t remember anything. I have the worst memory you know.”
“All you need is summer.”
“But it became spring yesterday. It’s everyone’s favourite season.”
“You’re doubting yourself.”
“Exactly.”
“What’s happened?”
“I don’t like myself here. At this time I don’t. I’m that type of New Yorker giving the city a bad reputation. I walk in and out of lives. Meet you then I’m gone. And I don’t like doing it, but I do. Out of laziness? Maybe. People say I have priorities but that’s no excuse. People should be the priority. All my friends complain about dating here and I’m worse than men. They follow me home and once we’ve both been had, I ask them to please not try to reach me. They say they want to and somehow, somewhere inside of me, I find it okay to respond that this isn’t about them, it’s about me. I seem complex but it’s all rather simple. It’s Manhattan and I don’t have time.”
“Your honesty will always be admirable.”
“But I don’t think this is how I feel. And if it is, I don’t believe this is how I come close to feeling.”

Extra Extra

Finally checked out some clips from Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist and though it isn't in your face, you can actually see me. Especially 2:30, I walk in front of them and turn. It was a long rooftop night, and my fur was drenched. But it was an interesting experience and the money was damn good. I should have/be doing more of these things.

Relieved of the Obligation to Love.

"Don't you sometimes feel that, in times like these, to separate is normal and to meet is the miracle...that, when you think of it, even our being able to meet and talk together like this for a time is probably quiet a miraculous thing?..."

"Yes, I also..." She started speaking with some hesitation. Then she went on with an earnest but agreeable serenity. "But here when I was thinking we'd just begun meeting already we're to be separated..." I could not make a causal reply. The pain I felt in my heart was so piercing that it surprised even me. The feeling of ease I felt with Sonoko had given me an illusion, a belief that all our days would be spent together and that everything would remain just as it was now. In a deeper sense it was a twofold illusion: the words with which she passed the sentence of separation upon us proclaimed the meaninglessness of our present meeting and revealed that my present feeling was only a passing happiness, and at the same time as they destroyed the childish illusion of believing this would last forever, they also opened my eyes to the fact that, even if there were no parting, no relationship between a boy and girl could ever remain just as it was.
It was a painful awakening. Why were things wrong just as they were? The questions which I had asked myself numberless times since boyhood rose again to my lips. Why are we all burdened with the duty to destroy everything, change everything, entrust everything to impermanency? Is it this unpleasant duty that the world calls life? Or am I the only one for whom it is a duty? At least there was no doubt that I was alone in regarding the duty as a heavy burden.

At last I spoke: "So, you're leaving...But of course even if you were here, I myself would have to be going away before long..."

-Confessions of a Mask by Mishima p165-166.

Oh Boy.

That day, the instant I looked upon the picture, my entire being trembled with some pagan joy. My blood soared up; my loins swelled as though in wrath. The monstrous part of me that was on the point of bursting awaited my use of it with unprecedented ardor, upbraiding me for my ignorance, panting indignantly. My hands, completely unconsciously, began a motion they had never been taught. I felt a secret, radiant something rise swift-footed to the attack from inside me. Suddenly it burst forth, bringing with it a blinding intoxication...

Some time passed, and then, with miserable feelings, I looked around the desk I was facing. A maple tree at the window was casting a bright reflection over everything - over the ink bottle, my schoolbooks and notes, the dictionary, the picture of St. Sebastian. There were cloudy-white splashes about - on the gold-imprinted title of a textbook, on a shoulder of the ink bottle, on one corner of the dictionary. Some objects were dripping lazily, leadenly, and others gleamed dully, like the eyes of a dead fish. Fortunately, a reflex motion of my hand to protect the picture had saved the book from being soiled.

-Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima.

In the Eyes of Another

She framed his face in her hands, looking into him straight-on. What did it mean, the first time a thinking creature looked deeply into another’s eyes? Did it take a hundred thousand years before this happened or was it the first thing they did, transcendingly, the thing that made them higher, made them modern, the gaze that demonstrates we are lonely in our souls.

She said, “Why do I think I’m standing closer to you than you are to me?”

She wasn’t trying to be funny. It was true, a paradox of the spectral sort. Then she tried to be funny using sweet talk and pet names, but soon felt foolish and stopped.

The Body Artist by Don DeLillo p 85.

The Moment After

Unclothed I curl into a shape similar to a seashell: spiraling curves, careful to keep music—my breathing—inward. Closer, his artless hands reach, trying to touch me, but I can’t be felt, won’t admit consolation. Imprisoning poetry. Can’t be released. We are our words. My tongue is stroking, gently calming me. I try to talk always to me. My body is caressing the inside of itself. I always try speaking on behalf of myself. Doesn’t he know he changed us? “You’re the writer,” as if those words were a novelty, as if they touched me most, as if I didn’t know before, and haven’t already felt the pressure. He doesn’t understand. This, nebulous, female; my fetal position. Reborn in his bed. He can’t see. The child only wants to know she means something. Something special to those she looks up to, that is, whomever I’ve chosen to see.