July 29

 I often think people have been doing exactly what they’re doing forever.

I mean, I often assume people have been doing exactly what they’ve been doing for a long time. 

At one point the best side of my face became the other side of my face. It happened so quickly, almost beneath the speed of observation; however, given my training, I noticed as soon as I woke up. Yes, one of my eyes had become a different shape, the lid acquiring a new collection of folds, throwing into question everything I thought was true about the symmetry of my face and the requisite actions for looking beautiful in two-dimensional images. I am still readjusting to my new reality. 

People tell me I’m perfect for this role. When they say this, I have no idea what they’re talking about. I liked a bunch of Agnès B listings on Ebay and woke up to a flurry of offers from various sellers. Why would I pay $170 for an Agnès B Louise Bourgeois collaboration artist T-shirt? I know why. I wanted to buy a book valued at $900 because in my mind it was priced at $30 and maybe the bookseller would give me a discount. People tell me I’m a good fit for this role. 

Shelley tells me there is no know, only knew. I think of availability and then simplicity, or is it the other way around? 

(What Maja and I Discovered About) Death and Disappearance 3/14/24

(What Maja and I Discovered About) Death and Disappearance 

3/14/24

• Death is something the body does.
• Disappearing is always of an object. 
• The self becomes an object when it:  
• judges                    

                                                    upends
                                  remembers

• Both are related to patience. 
• [ Found myself with tears remembering Colin’s questioning me––Why do you live? What keeps you here? ] A wondering mind is neither subject nor object.
• Finding death and disappearance in what’s already always there.
• Disappearance is freedom from the past. Death is freedom from the future. 
• Disappearing isn’t separate from appearing. Disappearance appears in relation to presence as absence. Disappearance can happen on a spectrum, “a circular scale.” 
• Death is related to drama, giving up. 
• Dying is alive; dead is dead. 

Here is Heaven

A vast underground system

A vat of potted ingrown hairs obliterated to plastic in an air fryer left on for the duration of electricity

A network of therapeutic experiences subsumed under the guise of a wellness spa

Nothing bad happens here

Ruin being very close to transformation

Movement happens in one direction

Sensations are projected upon technical planes of composition, materials ascend toward sensation, material becomes sensation:

    Drivingly chug forward on the right foot before catching the weight on the left foot flatly allowing the right heel to kickstand the rest of the headier weight before driving the left fist behind to cause the abdomen to throw the entire body into an exalted preparation for a jump that opens itself to the back of the room, the left palm open and right hand reacting to the melodic air, the monophonic refrain––

All of this happens in one direction

Everyone is specific, and this is ethical

A balmy breeze blows through your outstretched hand

Untrodden and unchewed your hand

Your hand which is also our hand

A beautiful lesbian takes your order

As you settle into your personalized experience

All creatures are willing to wait that intractable duration

For your eyes to become more listening than thinking

Your whimsy is lauded and has broken into the contemporary art market

You have an assistant who is in a happy and stable relationship and has never once thought of fucking you

Your hair is white, becoming that way at one point in time

All of your friends were born

And exist now, with you

The door to your house opens automatically using sensors tuned to your scent

You can turn on and off at will your pheromones

Desire coexists peacefully with love

You live an integrated life––shadow and not-shadow

There are no phones, there is no internet

And yet you receive millions of likes on your Instagram posts

Your stories are valued at over one million dollars

The characters, the psychosocial models

You create them 

And they interact with you 

Of their own accord

You are that interesting.

My Summer of the Dérive, or Spending Money I Don’t Have

A work of art = A bloc of sensations, c'est à dire a compound of percepts and affects

I may as yet be a very indeterminate person. I am comfortable with the contradiction and contingency that materialize me. "Sensation refers only to its material." To hold that the heart and mind talk to each other requires the presupposition that each individually exists—the space between them a legible distance upon which marks may alight. Land is some thing upon which we stand. I am my material, unfortunately. 

I think the desire called mine to transcend myself is juvenile in the sense that I had this desire when I was younger than I am now. Read me all you want; you'll never see exactly what I see. I have these fantasies of being a bizarre, brilliant outsider, notorious for being exactly what she is; and of being chosen. When someone chooses me it's like some light streams into myself. I hate myself the least. 

Three showerflies (an invented term I won't explain) made avant-garde compositions on the wall to my left. I noticed each time I looked at them and doubly noticed my analyst's probing eyes follow my darting ones. I sat in the chair again today. What did they hear? "I need to remember how to act, and be in public." There is an image of myself, and a decidedly not-image of myself. I am meant to uphold both. Ann won't tell me how to prepare—only I can do that. 

Drowsily she regards you. Everything throbbing with sleep and its availability. "What are your fantasies?" He may as well have asked you. I want to be someone who cooks dinner for others. I fell asleep for a moment there. 

Yeast turf

Your gem

I fell asleep in the face of my own life again. 

East Broadway Ann

"Albertine came from nowhere, and is very modern in that way: she flutters, comes and goes, from her absence of attachments she derives the instability and the unpredictable quality which give her her power of freedom." Jacques Dubois, For Albertine: Proust and the Sense of the Social.

1.

The Young-Girl is fascinating in the manner of all things that exhibit a closing-in-on-themselves, a mechanical self-sufficiency to the observer, like the insect, the infant, the automaton, or Foucault's pendulum.

The Young-Girl wants to be desired without love or loved without desire. There is no threat, in either case, to her unhappiness. The Young-Girl has love stories.

It is enough to recall what she classifies as "adventure" to get a good idea of just how much the Young-Girl fears the possible.

2.

Femininity = infantilism of women

Masculinity = infantilism of men

3. 

"I'll scream if you come any closer."

I'm no subject, I'm just stuck.

4. 

It's 1941, it's 1944
I'm in Dimes Square. I'm in Bergen-Belsen.

Sty medication dripping down your sweat-soaked shoulders 

Your drenchable body of work

You drip

I hire you. No more sensations of 

So

I write so I can read my writing

I write so I can look back at myself

I write to look after myself

Friends to lovers to friends

A traveler in my mind grimacing beneath the weight of a brain-filled skull. "To be treasured," I think.