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.