Found You

Incredible day. Woke late. Went to laundry room. Someone had surprised me by wrapping all my clothing in a plastic bag. Ha, I'm lazy and they are proactive, thanks. Walked down St. Marks. Met a man who has been changing shades since the 70s. Super cool. Friendly man. I enjoyed his personality and I just went along with his ideas. A collaboration of sorts. In the end, I've realized, I have to make decisions impulsively. Yes or no. Do or don't. This is about living in the moment. Not leaving and dwelling that I should have or fibbing myself into the future. Ate Indian food. Hysterical. Strange. Ornaments crouching over my skull. Food fell all over Jim's lap. Got a rub down. Strange. Hysterical. Talked box cameras. 3D film. Ate and finished with mango ice cream. Short skirt. High on the navel. Men under awning: She looks athletic. Whether to me or not, I'll take it, I guess. Bookstore. Sat on floor. Copied down poetry into notebook. Modern Life by Matthea Harvey. Darkness Spoken: Songs in Night by Ingeborg Bachmann. The Narrow Road to the Interior by Kimiko Hahn (zuihitsu form). Bought The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley 1975-2005. Nice and thick, filled by a word chopped and changed. Walked from Washington Square Park back to East Village. Stopped in to see for my glasses. Entered with a loud, obnoxious curse. My sister and I. We aren't getting along. Two men trying to calm me. Together, the three of us, blow it off. Given a card. Pay $50. Shake a hand. Wave a thanks. And I'm onward. See Mr. C.D. himself on the park bench, crisscrossed legs, writing. We sit together for what felt like a good while. And I laughed - calling attention - to all the memories I have of ourselves, the weird reality of Manhattan together. It was nice. And I have much hope that he will be happy doing everything he will do in film. I was happy. I think it was how things should be. We (people) come in and out of lives. But there's no reason (unless harmful) to not open your life up to both him and you talking on a park bench in a different season with a change of mind. Long long long splice forward and it is after dinner. I've open boxes beneath my bed. Packed high with different cards. Brown envelopes filled with letter stamps and banging inks. All in all, it inspired a few projects in me.



Then I found an old written journal. Only a few entries. I think I was 18, moved to BOSTON for first year in college. Here is what it says:

A Brave New World
www.fashion.arts.ac.uk
FIT - > 7th avenue @ 27th St.

Be the change you wish to see in the world -Gandhi.

Walk in the rain, smell the flowers, stop along the way, build sandcastles, go on filed trips, find out how thinks work, tell stories, say the magic words, trust the universe -Bruce Williamson.

I get driven down streets I've never been on and more than likely will never see again. I do it just to stare into windows, peer into the lives of others. Knowing that we all are experiencing more pain than pleasure. But why? Because the superficial tunneling of advertisement tells us we need more and are incomplete until we acquire? The past sketches we desperately try to bury in memory? We are on a quest, a search for obtaining a rode we may never be so lucky/fortunate to drive down. Down to happiness.

I watch people eat sandwiches and chips. White bread, I almost can remember the way it tasted. But it has been too long. I think how lucky they are. To not care. Or to not care at the apparent moment and that's all I'll ever know of them. I grab my things and buy coffee. I anticipate how I'll regret the cup of coffee. I use to be addicted and then out of nowhere it makes me feel really really sick. But I need something and I'm prolonging my vegetable drink.

As of February 2006 I live off of oatmeal and tofu. Sometimes spinach, tomatoes, broccoli with tofu. Apples, oranges and always grapefruit. One would assume I'm withering but I'm just a block of mass. I only get to eat so accordingly at college. That's pretty much because I don't do anything. I don't go out and drink or have lovely dinners.

I don't know what the answer is. I refuse starvation, throwing up, or drugs. I'm anti-signs of weakness and I could never succumb to such cries for help. I guess why I care so much is because I remember what I was and what I was able to do, my liberation and having no self-conflict. I assume that it is the only factor preventing me from my dreamed of life.

I walk, I sit...people stare. I use to always turn my head to the ground; insecurely. Now I stare them in the eye. People tell me it seems like I'm looking through them. But really I'm just trying to find a connection, even if it is only for a brief moment.

I don't believe I wrote this, that there was no filter. I had no intention of being a writer at the time of writing. The page was just a secret, a space where I could speak to myself. Whisper. Scream.

Time: Robert Creeley

(extract)

I want a human world, a
chance. Is it my age
that fears, falters in some faith?

These ripples of sound, poor
useless prides of mind,
name the things, the feelings?

When I was young,
the freshness of a single
moment came to me

with all hope, all tangent wonder.
Now I am one, inexorably
in this body, in this time.

All generality? There is
no one here but words,
no thing but echoes.

Then by what imagined right
would one force another's life
to serves as one's own instance,

his significance be mine -
wanting to sing, come
only to this whining sickness...

Up from oneself physical
actual limit to lift
thinking to its intent

if such in world there is
now all truth to tell
this child is all it is

or ever was. The place of
time oneself in the net
hanging by hands will

finally lose their hold,
fall. Die. Let this song
live, let him live.

Listening to Silence.

I've graduated and my next step is turning the inner outward, to vocalize, articulate, to risk.

Listening to someone else, you may hear what you aren’t able to say yourself. The most startling realization in the last days: How blocked I am, how I have been postponing feeling really for another. I know I've said it before, multiple times, that I have been numb. No one believes me. But it's the truth. I am moved inwardly, but outwardly I've avoided for years now what this means or where it comes from. I go to dinner parties. In corners, we converse - urgently. We both ask: Who am I? We both agree, by now we are use to asking questions and forgotten how to answer. I acknowledged this really for the first time a few days ago. I have wanted to, but I haven't because I know the process it takes to be yourself with no excuse (ie. I am shy, I am distracted by work, if he was my type he'd bring me out of myself). Are these not the excuses I've given to myself? And really, the only purpose they have served is not rising to the challenge. I seem unstable I am sure: all the unexpected crying, but I don't expect it either. Honest. I'm not familiar with tears, letting myself cry. I may not be able to speak on behalf of them, but I do know they don't mean I am sorry, that I am sad, but that I am scared this shows - this means - I am feeling. And I don't know where that will take me. Such honesty sounds weak I am sure, which is why I become abstract (I don't know, don't want to be known for not knowing, question question question). Intimately (in writing and/or through physicality) I appear as a child who has no clue of herself. This has silenced me; I will write later. 

Loves Final Go.

This has to become something by tonight. Due 10 am. My eyes are sleeping. And I haven't read the 8 texts. But I've gotta dish it out, so tomorrow I am done, finished. Undergraduate, so soon!, I've barely gotten comfortable.

Love is woman’s attachment to experience, the obligation to bare offspring, and a commitment to compose herself—all women—yes, that’s right, to speak for once and for all. Yet, pleasure alone does not release her, nor persuade her to share and speak in the present. Why does the life of a story begin with what wasn’t accomplished, what the heroine couldn’t make happen? The novel is the author’s chance to be the first to captivate, to decide—change history—and then, she chooses the Other. “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife” (Austen 1). We are made to wait; she isn’t ready. Love, life starts again with the line that is not the woman’s truth. And yet, it is the author’s reality. Readers open, willing from the beginning to not judge her first, and be on her side or, at least, stay in her mind. Instead, the writing resists readers’ expectations: the responsibility for revealing, resolving distance, and delivering revelation. If the female has been waiting for her moment to finally be seen, why does it take longer when she is in control— as it is, a free hand, which writes—why must the reader continue at great length to know her? The feminine flows backward; against expectation, woman lives through reason. In a dual, [in]tense effort to recreate herself and be woman, she rationalizes and romanticizes. And through the very object of life that’s resisted—the story of man (male and female)—she sews the split and extending herself becomes, at once, both—the product of a rationalized romance. Even classic literature like Pride & Prejudice and Jane Eyre, in retrospect, shares Steffie Cvek in the Jaws of Life’s inevitability to be a modern self-project for the woman to listen to her intuition, and take a chance to become her own truth by the end.

Unprotected by a social position or family, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre is perhaps, in turn, desperate for a new life. Young and with no social power either, she often hides behind a curtained window. But when John Reed discovers her, Jane is devalued and maltreated by her single freedom—literature. Protecting herself against his “heavy limbs…large extremities…flabby cheeks” makes her smaller and insignificant in the eyes of the Reed family. In this scene, weight and literature are held against her as obstacles around autonomy. Silenced, Jane is placed in seclusion to learn complete submissiveness. This not only causes her body to react hysterically, but also is the episode that inspires her to speak and ask to be sent to charity orphan school. Sent, Jane has a chance for another life, but discovers the conditions are no better: the minister provides girls with starvation levels of food, freezing rooms and poorly made clothing and shoes. Again left to bare the conditions of the outside, Jane survives by controlling her perception; using her imagination to distract reality, she finds warmth, richness and prospect in her interior.

This analysis may ask the reader to see Jane, as she did not want to be seen. And for this, I may be deemed superficial, modern minded and/or uninterested in knowing her in the way Bronte intended—as a female loved without physical beauty. However, it is because of a concern with knowing her—why she became an iconoclastic character, admired for the respect she required—that I challenge she be looked at in the light of her lack, and scrutinized for her aesthetic starvation and starvation from food, for it is these nutrients which bring character to life in the first place.

To pay Jane attention for her strength alone is a selfish desire to have her represent a female that has not achieved considerable approval in literature before. By not staring at her under the corporeal gaze, the reader hopes this means he will be given the same advantage as well. In other words to applaud Bronte’s portrait of a plain “not pretty any more than I am handsome” (140) female is to, again, dismiss what isolates her. In Rochester’s words, “besides it is convenient, for it keeps those searching eyes of yours away” (140) and does not hold the reader responsible for his own vulnerability to empathize. “I never take supper”…”…I am hungry: so are you, I dare say, only you forget” (475). Had the external found its way only casually into Jane Eyre then I would not press the reader to complicate it or make it a concern, but Bronte consciously inserts questions of hunger and the quality of appetite into the narration that this would not be a careful analysis without closing in on it as a confession. In the Anatomy of Love, Helen Fisher explains the phenomenon, if not importance, of love at first sight: “Love is a certain inborn suffering derived from the sight of and excessive meditation upon the beauty of the opposite sex…” (49). This, of course, is the point that in support of Rochester’s feelings for Jane, the reader will insist his attraction was powerful because of her inward mystery. And in the vein of Stendhal was intensified and aroused by his incentive to encourage Jane to speak—talk of herself—so he could formulate an interior reading that would crystallize her beauty. Such associations are honest interpretations of the male’s pursuit. He knew his aim and motives were not errors and candidly “believed it was an inspiration rather than a temptation: it was very, very soothing—I know that” (145).

“…But to the clear and eloquent tongue, to the soul made of fire, and the character that bends but does not break—at once supple and stable, tractable and consistent—I am ever tender and true…I never met your likeness…I am influenced—conquered; and the influence is sweeter than I can express…Why do you smile, Jane? What does that inexplicable, that uncanny turn of countenance mean?” (280).

Since Rochester’s intrigue in Jane is favorable from the first sight, one must locate the conflict—indecision—of Jane Eyre to see what the Other’s heart will help her body transcend. The Other certainly pushes, not only the reader, but Jane to confront the unknown. “You are afraid—your self-love dreads a blunder” (147). It may be the male’s intuition here, that helps dissolve her coarseness. As a child, Jane had no one to confide in and the two school-friends she had made left only a trace of memory in her life (Helen Burns died from typhus epidemic and Miss Temple married and moved). “So it is, whether for reasons of ideology or experience,” that Ethel Spector Person would consider Jane’s consequences of human deprivation and starved interaction to be why “many of us regard love with a split or alternating consciousness…a form of self-deception or even self-destruction…we long for and seek it out” (102).

Having few experiences, Jane escaped into literature to find images to fill her ignorance. And therefore, her sense of truth had always been removed from the real and her sense of self was always detached, isolated, “half suffocated with thoughts that rose faster than I could receive, comprehend, settle them: thoughts of what might, could, would, and should be, and that ere long. I looked at the blank wall: it seemed a sky thick with ascending stars—every one lit me to a purpose of delight. Those who had saved my life, when, till this hour, I had loved barrenly, I could now benefit” (418). Images (the imago and the imagination) are Jane’s infatuations; her central means of sens(e)ation that above all longs to channel, what Fisher deems, “the feeling of helplessness” (70). Therefore, Rochester represents the drive toward self-transformation. He is not the means she lacks, but the force capable of changing the way Jane sees her self in the world with others.

For Helping Her Think or Only To Know More.

And in this handful of days,
That covers my concern
I discovered,
Around my words,
Everything! I wasn’t saying.

I will start where I left off, and then look backwards, go there and not go then, but soon.

A Ballad by Robert Creeley:

We have a song for the death in her body
And if the night is long
Or the blackness blacker,
Then something is effected from us.

But if, without hope, there is crying
And a moaning, a retching,
And the time is horrible,
And she cries and tries to escape from us—

Do we then sit down with petulance
And a show of hate, and not like her?

(This reminds me of the night we talked about. The night that's gotten you into thinking I am hurting.
And all be-caused by you? Is that not selfish?
Maybe. Just by being
There hasn't ever meant you've done anything).

I'm aware what I say doesn't reassure you,
but that is also not its purpose,
nor any interest of mine.

Writers from the other side.

Reading the Japanese novel The Miner by Söseki. It was criticized harshly, rejected for its explorations into man's psyche and the dissection of human actions. He was a highly acclaimed author, however, it was for his fiction; whereas The Miner is never spoken of or included in the selected works because it is considered an 'anti-novel'. I don't believe this was at all his point. Tomorrow I have to finally write a paper on this, but for now what I find incredibly interesting is other literature The Miner has been compared to: Dostoyevsky's The Double (1846), Strindberg's Miss Julie (1888), Ionesco's Victims of Duty (1952), along with Robbe-Grillet, and in regards to stream-of-consciousness Proust, Joyce, Camus and Faulkner. If only such names didn't make me so damn curious, maybe I could stay on track.

The Afterward

"But is rarely attempting to convince the reader of the immediate reality of what passes through the protagonist's mind. By the sixth paragraph, it becomes clear that the narrator is writing, commenting on his own thought processes in retrospect, and we are reading his pages, not floating somewhere inside his brain. There is an eccentric consciousness of consciousness here that is more reminiscent of Beckett's bedridden writer/narrators Molloy and Malone...Beckett's invincibly comic method, which locates comedy in the very movements of the human mind in such works as The Unnamable" (loved this, and at the final moment used it for my Colloquium!)

the day off

we celebrated me
by behaving,
as a child
I can’t remember, did we finish
pizza in the dark? now we share
straws sucking maltshakes
bathing after
creamed mouths, kissing
every part that isn’t ours.

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.