For Langston Hughes and Nancy Brown.

The dog that walks

has a leash.

The cardinal on my chair

sings.

"I have been a hard-working person

all my life -- strong

and look at me now."

The dog that walks

has a leash.

The cardinal on my chair

sings.


I vomited my meal into

my hands.

My mother consulted with

homicide.

Tampa is a place where I brew

green tea and take

calls for Nelson Brown.


The number is wrong.

The number

sings.


Grandma, laugh.


Man can laugh louder but

I can

I can

I can

I can

I can

310 - The Gay Science

Will and wave.-- How greedily this wave approaches, as if it were after something! How it crawls with terrifying haste into the inmost nooks of this labrynthine cliff! It seems that it is trying to anticipate someone; it seems that something of value, high value, must be hidden there.--And now it comes back, a little more slowly but still quite white with excitement; is it disappointed? Has it found what it looked for? Does it pretend to be disappointed?--But already another wave is approaching, still more greedily and savagely than the first, and its soul too, seems to be full of secrets and the lust to dig up treasures. Thus live waves--thus live we who will--more I shall not say.

So? You mistrust me? You are angry with me, you beautiful monsters? Are you afraid that I might give away your whole secret? Well, be angry with me, arch your dangerous green bodies as high as you can, raise a wall between me and the sun--as you are doing now! Truly, even now nothing remains of the world but green twilight and green lightning. Carry on as you like, roaring with overweening pleasure and malice--or dive again, pouring your emeralds down into the deepest depths, and throw your infinite white mane of foam and spray over them: Everything suits me, for everything suits you so well, and I am so well-disposed toward you for everything; how could I think of betraying you? For--mark my word!--I know you and your secret, I know your kind! You and I--are we not of one kind?--You and I--do we not have one secret?

On Pornography and Prostitution

Erotic dancers expose themselves and simulate sexual behavior. The term 'simulate' is crucial, because prostitutes allegedly differ insofar as they engage in actual sexual behavior. In order to know whether this distinction is accurate, we need to examine the definition we have of sexual behavior. We tend to publicly say that sexual behavior needs to be reciprocal and consensual. However, the popular construction of this notion tends to orient around male orgasm from the viewpoint of a masculinized consciousness. To establish this we can consider that women often fake orgasm, as the textbook reports – because if women were included in the privileged viewpoint around which our concept of sexual behavior revolves, faking orgasm would make no sense. Certainly men only do so rarely. This is because the male's physiological pleasure is central to our notion of what constitutes sexuality. This indicates to me that engaging in sexual behavior, under the rule of popular culture, does not necessarily imply reciprocal enjoyment at all. If this is so, then we've got some ethical problems on our hands. However, considering the world in which reciprocity is necessary has more value given my argument. A prostitute, who behaves as she does strictly in order to get money, does not have sex with her customers because doing so is pleasurable in-itself. Thus, if we think (as I think we should) that an agent can only be sexual when she acts out of sexual desire, then what a prostitute does, in a sense, is simulate sexual behavior. I do not think that we should consider either pornography or prostitution to be 'trafficking in bodies,' per se, if only out of my semantic desire to recover some of the body's dignity, a dignity which our culture seems to have so tirelessly worked to destroy. If we reject a Cartesian view, i.e., one which states that the mind and body are separate entities, then trafficking in 'bodies' could only be trafficking in human selves for us: we say that a person can only exist if a person is embodied. But we will help no prostitute recover to tell her that she has absolutely surrendered her selfhood in her prostitution. This does seem to be the grounds of the cultural and moral attitude toward people we call 'whores.' This is an ideology which only serves to reinforce permanently the temporary subjugation which happens when somebody sells sexual performance in exchange for money, because it makes the action a performative statement about this person's identity. This is part of the reason I have for believing that our culture overemphasizes the cruciality of sexual behavior in constructing identity. Surely sexuality is crucial to our species, but our cultural identity is something we construct after our species has already survived. It is not sexual.

Similarly to any other 'sexual transgression' which would only be encouraged by its prohibition, this is a case in which the relationship between the crime and the law is more complicated than the simple one of inferiority and superiority. In a sense the laws against prostitution depend on the act of prostitution for their efficacy. But laws regulating prostitution would as well, and given that the laws so often tend to prohibit something which is going to exist anyway, one wonders how this law could work in favor of the people which it alleges to morally correct. There are good reasons why these judgments only entrench our culture more deeply in its implicit advocacy of rape, prostitution and pornography, or explicit advocacy of rape-like, prostitution-like, and pornographic behaviors. The key issue is that it advocates sexual behavior rather than sexual action. One would only truly compromise oneself if in fact what one was doing in the simulation of sex was selling one's self. But as mentioned, if sexuality is not the crucial determining factor in our identity, it only becomes so when it is treated as such. A body, then, is required for all human performance. What is exploitative about both pornographic media and about prostitution, then, is the totalizing moral context and attitude which inevitably goes with these things – when an event's meaning is already predetermined by someone other than the participant, this event leaves the realm of action and enters the one of behavior. Action creates new meaning. We believe that behaving in a way that commercializes sex once, or as an entire livelihood, will automatically prevent one from respecting oneself, or ever being able to act. These expectations inform the opportunities available to actors in pornographic films, and prostitutes, and even rape victims – and really, any person who alienates themselves from their sexuality.

Anyone who simulates sexual behavior rather than acting, sexually or otherwise, is being controlled by this attitude. To explain the socioeconomic forces which produce such behavior in people despite the fact that it is not in their best interests, Simone De Beauvoir tells us that as long as there is poverty there will be a market for this very lucrative field. We need not wonder at the supply of sex workers which male demand creates. A glance at Time Magazine indicates this. In Time Magazine's “Time 100” list of the one hundred most influential people who lived in the last century, Marilyn Monroe was listed next to Einstein. Women, we believe, become powerful not by performing powerful actions – but by providing simulated sexual gratification to powerful men. The official cause of Marilyn Monroe's death was drug overdose and probable suicide. There is debate over whether the cause of death was murder or suicide – but it's hard to imagine how it could not be suicide. I imagine that popular culture still fails to realize that Marilyn Monroe could not be happy as Marilyn Monroe. 'Marilyn Monroe,' you see, truly is merely an object, working in fact to make popular culture happy. Undoubtedly it will neither help nor hurt her to treat her as such. Norma Jean Baker*, though, is fucked. She's the one with everything to lose, in fact has long since lost it.

*Norma Jean Baker died of a drug overdose, potentially suicide, 1962.**

**What.

In a dream, a camera came upon the man, who is short, who, additionally, is heavier than is necessary. He wears a black suit over a white oxford, an oxford which gleams dully gold, due to a particular ambience in the bathroom which is to be described in the ensuing text. The man stands in a long bathroom combing his short hair. He bends over the counter into the mirror. The mirror is framed with an ornate gold and floral gild, which extends beyond the gold of the frame of the mirror and into the air around it. The gold frame appears to inform the wallpaper, regarding its ideal condition. The entire bathroom is encrusted with such a dialogue, regarding golden gold.

The man's chin, it seems, is coated with what might, normally, be a fine white lather; however in this bathroom white light in fact turns gold when it reflects off itself qua. the walls and onto his jaw. He scrapes, slowly, at this lather; he does so with a straight razor, a razor which is burnished on its handle with a dull gold. The man slowly turns the tap and begins rinsing his face. It is now revealed that in the yellow light against the golden sink the water shines with gold. It has not yet been determined, nor ought it be determined, whether flecks of gold in fact run through this water. I believe there is a cinnamon liqueur which contains such a gold; but as stated, that is not for us to decide here.

He rinses the fine lather from his face. He turns out and looks again into the lens.

"Yes," gruffly. "Yes indeed," slowly. "I in fact have heard about all those people out there, without bathrooms. Indeed, it's terrible. How is one to function without a bathroom?" His jawline, which previously had small hairs protruding from it, no longer has any, unless perhaps his shaving-project is incomplete. But that is not to be demonstrated now.

"Truly. Such a condition would be unbearable. It's absolutely unthinkable." The man begins attending to his reflection anew. What appears to be the case is that the light, which as established burns with a low, hyperbolic gold, has caused his flesh to lapse into a sort of hysteria in the angelic clutches of which it itself resembles gold. The man reaches out, and determines that what is now crucial is to stroke the face as it appears so in the mirror. He raises his fingers, the skin of which makes contact with a cold glass that would otherwise appear to be silver. He moves his fingers vertically, whispering in a low tone of barely a carat.

"Appalling. No bathrooms."

He offers his visage a conciliatory slap, the sound of which sounds harmonically through the golden air. Satisfiedly, this man angles his face so that he is able to glance backward at the lens and return to himself.

He begins to smooth his hair to the side.

Lipstick I'd wear for 1 million years.

I haven't stopped writing in the time since I've been out of New College, and that means something to me. We are the products of our situations and my situation is that I am the daughter of an alcoholic and I am learning over decadent Italian dinners and good generic gin just how it is that my grandmother is the mother of my mother. How they refuse to throw away books, art supplies, long past the time when they read or use either. How my grandmother did yoga every day of her youth. And these actions mean something, these things which are not given to us by incident. Thing which arise after and apart from the day shifts drinking Coca-Cola and the evenings eating Kraft --

My French teacher hates Godard.

I did not recently return from any exotic locale or any interesting discussion. I had been giving my thoughts away in the healthy appropriate way and it gave me nothing to write home about. Nonetheless I will write. Because home is here, in my head. I am losing it here but I am not going to lose it. In a classroom where skin is darkened more than just one hue, Kwasi Wiredu with his PhD. in philosophy from Oxford, B.A. from University of Ghana, pacing the front, voice a slow deep synthetic one, sounding all at once of polished glass tables in Victorian London and simultaneously of the jungle, not the way Herzog describes it but the way it really is -- peopled. The rainforests are peopled, sweaty Mbuti pygmies in straw tutus, bodies constellated in white circles of paint, being forced by the virtue of their situation to take temp jobs as loggers deforesting the forest which birthed them. A foreign tragedy, but the only really foreign quality is the setting. I myself have borrowed paintbrushes from my grandmother, painted on her canvas, my hands losing their circulated blood. Harish says I must paint through the mud, but days are so long here, and I am so distracted by the men in pageboy caps preaching the gospel outside my USF classroom, yelling and leaping, satyric, to us, over morning dew and artificially green grass. Jesus thinks we are all sorority sluts, us -- us fornicators and breast-fondlers and breast-fondlees. Sunglasses editing out our faces like porn stars. I am burdened with a Krsna telling me that I am a special soul, like I want his flattery, like I want the threat of reincarnation, all the cows I ate as a child growing human arms and chopping me into pieces. Rawls had his own doctrine of reincarnation, in a less whimsical form, and I don't know that I want that either. I also don't know that I don't. And just that -- I can't tell if it's the philosophy or the financial stability that is draining the color from my flesh. I am so pampered here, making good on what I was denied, what everyone else had and I was allegedly deprived of but what maybe I don't want.

The will to self-destruction is so strong yet, not asceticism but obliteration. And the feeling that I am missing something if I don't post on here, not wanting you to read it and compliment me but clearly begging for it anyway, just so I don't have to define the social sphere in which I dwell in terms of the place I'm at, in Tampa, which consists of being childlike following ducks or driven followed by ducklings. The lines between public and private -- something I've never delineated. Like in Ancient Athens. A Hegelian necessity for society. And society is Dr. Wiredu right now, a synthetic human being who by his very eccentricity in my own society makes clear the synthetic nature of any personality at all. It is simply that his is never recognized in the local media, culture. How his very voice is marked by the historical violence of his people. The British accent he uses so proudly a bloody reminder of incessant European colonization of Africa, as he describes disunity, degradation, and stunted growth. But the problem is not even simple disunity and degradation but also the failure to recognize such disunity. Africa is not one continent full of a single tribe called "the Africans." They are precisely not recognized as diverse in themselves when they all fall under the category of non-white, very non-white. My young sister watching childrens' Tarzan movies where instead of any representation of the actual human beings who populate Africa, she is presented with a British gorilla.

You owe your audience an orchestrated duet of apologies, please, applied like henna equally to the palms of all past and future oppressed peoples and oppressors, equally to young blonde children with pale flesh, Starburst candy after dinner, blue eyes. Don't lie. Like you are incapable of understanding how African-Americans today could feel justified in asking for reimbursement for the long ancestral hours in cotton plantations, slavery -- slavery is not gone categorically, but only decaying by degree of explicity.Slaves organizing civil war revolts by playing war drums to strangers, across plantations in the sun. Their hearts pounding, dropping bushels of cotton which puff in great heaves and running, full of hope older than imprisonment, chronologically prior by thousands of years, but still a hope that had become dustier than its fresh bloodshed, dustier than salt tears and dustier than the slow, dark yield to their suffering. In African thought the soul is in the blood, and in modern genetics blood type is determined by ancestor. The very thing that justifies my gratitude for not being a woman born in the Victorian age, or to a country who still practices female circumcision, keeps me entitled to the demand of empathy that cannot be a plea but a statement. Having entered myself into society, my identity has become swallowed irrevocably. And this society is silent, in its flouted indebtedness, to the bodies it demarcates with its language.

As a child, I contested this factory farm application of history written by technologically superior victors. This was of course indicated by my passionate interest in being appropriated by Native American culture, reading fables, wandering Floridian swamplands behind middle class housing lots, bloodlessly observing venomous snakes, sheltering myself from the rain by lean-to shelters built with my eleven-year old hands. Kant said that the only people less worthy of his respect than the Africans were the Native Americans. And is that simply because they lost the wars against Caucasian imperialism in such a more permanent way? Alexander: to the victors go the history books, I tell you this over and over, unborn paintings forming themselves in my half-forgotten dreams. Africa is being born as a false unity, and as a wound on the surface of the political globe, visible, uncomfortable to regard. Native America exists, then, in suffocated drug overdoses on the wet floors of Seminole Casino bathroom stalls, annual festivals marked by frybread and venison, people whose skin is tanned to leather either by their indigenous history or by their addiction to methamphetamines. The scientific names we give these races and their cultural products to cleave them from the threads of our empathic intentionality once we have deprived them of their humanity. An "indigenous" people, producing "ethnophilosophy," and providing us with the opportunity to be open-minded about a music that formed the very basis for modern rap, jazz, blues -- by studying "ethnomusicology." Etymologically, from the Greek word ethnos: the study of music made by pagans and heathens. How very generous of Uganda. Oh, I'm not racist: I celebrate MLK Day and intentionally befriend people who are black. It's there if you look for it, and if you look you see the jungle, decaying, but filled with no more fornication than the halls of Kappa Dee at the University of South Florida. Perhaps less.

It is not clear to me that the entire six billion of us have evolved from the same species of hominid. Can we, or need we, yet evolve into one? Our desires farmed into horizontal planes of mud, stamped by the roots of giant trees, held down by lightly stepping, lightly chained feet. Where we stave off the slavery of being hired to destroy our own forests by building leaf-huts above the trunks we will tomorrow incise. We have never met a Nigerian but will be depicted on American television as one and the same people, even homogenous with the people who set the prices of our indebtedness, so long as history of colonization and history of denying Egypt's possession of Egyptian civilization has sufficiently purpled our flesh. By the evening we know, we will never either of us meet the Mayans. We will only smoke marijuana joints rolled with flat leaves for our fatigue, humming rhythmic hymns to the concept of darkness as we press, otherwise burdened, nomadic and hushed, into its trees, singing: anything you bring us cannot be wrong.

A newborn child has no teeth.

THE LETTING GO: How One's Passion Sets In Motion The Passion Of Others

"The phenomenological world is not the bringing to explicit expression of a pre-existing being, but the laying down of being. Philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existent truth but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being. No explanatory hypothesis is clearer than the act whereby we take up this unfinished world in an effort to complete and conceive it."
--M. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception


Above: David Audet in Ybor Square Space

When I was eight years old, I was young,
and I was shy. On the last day of school
I asked my art teacher to sign my yearbook,
standing out among the live oak trees,
out where we had spun clay until
our hands were dry and chalky
like the hands of gymnasts.

David pressed hard with my neon pen, leaving bold-faced
indentions upon the glossy paper. He haphazardly
scribbled and handed it over, and of course
I eagerly flipped around to find his signature before walking away.
He had given himself a beard and mustache
in his photograph. He had written

YOU'VE GOT IT / IF YOU WANT IT.

While I was reading before him
David verbally reiterated his note,
eyes catching me instructively,
holding me for a moment.
I understood, right?

I HAVE IT IF I WANT IT. BUT
I HAVE TO WANT IT.

And yes, I said of course.
Yes of course.

David Audet is the best art teacher
I think I've ever had. He had eyes
disproportionately keener than the rest of his body,
which was husky, unshaven, unkempt.
He arranged art galleries exhibiting
stale Cuban sandwiches. He constantly reeked
of body odor. He had built a deck, gingerly, around
the old oak trees to hold classes. He would simply
sit in the center of this deck with us circled around
him, and play guitar while the peacocks screamed
in circles, around us. He would have us draw him
in bursts of sixty seconds and then have us rotate,
cyclical, around one another to capture all angles.

When it rained we cried out and ran inside.
We would go into small unused rooms, smelling him
and listening to him telling us how the government had
assassinated John Lennon until the situation was too
repugnant for there to be room in it for our juvenile art.
David was prone to bursts of violent rage at his young
students. Eventually the school dismissed him, hired him
back, and dismissed him again. One wants to attribute this
either to his memories of the Vietnam War or to his
perennial occupational overexposure to paint thinner.

David Audet loved to eat avocado sandwiches and
in class he would eat them as he taught us to cast
pottery in the traditional Raku style. Sen-No-Rikyu.
David was too big in himself to fit neatly anywhere.
Even Lee Academy was too much for him. The school,
which it would admittedly be quite an understatement
to say was not the most oppressive I've encountered,
could not contain the firing glazes which interested him,
and glittered.

YOU'VE GOT IT / IF YOU WANT IT.

If his note in my yearbook had read
IF YOU WANT IT / YOU'VE GOT IT,
David would have entered the fallible
sphere of logic which his statement preexists.
But no -- his area of expertise was precisely
the precognitive moment of inspiration where the question is not,
"How best can we analyze this?"
no -- David asks, in true form for the visual artist,

"WHY WOULD ONE WANT TO ACKNOWLEDGE
THE EXISTENCE OF OBJECTS WORTH ANALYSIS, AT ALL?"

The realm where possibility is made actual
does not rest in the dry and stiffened fingertips
of some absolute objective truth which existed fully formed
thousands of years ago as it stands dusty, before me now --
no. "The only pre-existent Logos is the world itself."
This sphere begins entirely frothing in liquid slip, fires precisely
in the lowest temperatures of my immediate,
glittering desire. Here the genesis of meaning --
And here the condemnation of meaning,
Fissures caused by air and water in the clay,
As banal and violent as an act validated in its own performance.
Upon the littlest effort it takes for my fingers to wield their water
over the indentions in lumps of pliable earth, fanning and smoothing the
Thing into Being -- upon this depends the very being of the tradition itself.

Soren Kierkegaard says: life is lived forwards but
understood backwards. I had always contested this.
But what if memory were found to be like the heat left in an object
long after the fire has gone -- the residual glow of ceramic sake-cups
and pitchers, indelibly, only there after they have left the kiln.
Then we could only understand the past. David Audet's influence was to
plunge us all the more, in spite of history, into the
establishing values for the future. He became our personal history so that
when we were adults, then we might turn our heads
over our shoulders
like someone who just saw a friend walk past in a crowd.

I could not have fathomed it then, age seven,
face covered in white paint, hands covered in dust
and chalky like the hands of gymnasts.
Only over time did the man grow to glow
with a phenomenological heat. Only now I begin
chipping slow flecks off the marble
of what I learned there, still covered in paint,
David still living by the lake in a trailer next door.

A PRELUDE TO THE LETTING GO

Though you wipe your hands and brush off the dust and dirt from the vessels, what is the use of all this fuss if the heart is still impure?

Sen-No-Rikyu


| re: machines rendering manual labor unnecessary - the difference is that the upper classes always gained reactive identity by way of a condescension toward those who did their bodily labor, be they african-american slaves, the proletariat, or women. one cannot in the same way condescend to a machine, and thus the reactivity by which we tried to assert our detached superiority over the body disappears, for it no longer has a subject-as-object upon which to displace/inflict its gaze -- only mere objects -- indeed the objects for which the oppressed classes have, throughout history, shed inexhaustible torrents of blood.

| re: what happens when the detachment from modes of power which is necessary for any true criticism & radical rennovation of values to take place does not coincide the establishment and affirmation of positive alternative values -- those who would be radicals are powerless, and become rematriculated into original power structures as members of lowest, most oppressed class; they go to jail, they become impoverished and marginalized. thus we reject the ascetic denial of power. BUT the most radical revolutionary will be a conservative the day after the revolution.


Though you wipe your hands and brush off the dust and dirt from the vessels, what is the use of all this fuss if the heart is still impure?

Sen-No-Rikyu

What's going to be the death of me? Static electricity.

Why does a house cat, when it is left outside, invariably come back to its master? Cats do not think of us as a part of their "pack" -- they are, allegedly, "not social animals." Even when they do stay with us their independence, to say nothing of the real neuroses some domesticated animals (caged birds...) display, assures us that it is only out of a lack of alternatives. That is precisely it. A cat who escapes comes back when it realizes that it prefers regular meals, albeit regular meals in servitude. It does not want the freedom to starve, and the ones who do -- well, they drop off our radar. And thusly do we construct the universality of our sovereignty.

Thusly do women remain oppressed. There are other options, of course -- last time I checked, women did have the option to get paid for their jobs. And last time I checked women get paid on average half what men do for comparable work. We will continue to accept the dinner offers of traditional gentlemen so long as that is the most certain way to ensure a regular meal. Men don't have the option of such dependence at all, but women -- well, it's unfortunate, but you know how things are. These days, nobody much looks out for the strays.

Miss Madonna, won't you give me a kiss.

i. days need yet to begin

as life begins, unconscious,

so that waking is intuitive

and shortly after the day's light -- discrete

from the clock-tick of day.

this day has yet begun as

a weathered and phlegmatic exhale

after the exhaustion that results,

incomparably,

from a day full, without exertion.


ii. If we do not know ourselves to have a culture on par with Ancient Greece, if we cannot properly revel in our passions in the sphere of some ideal, then it is because the Greeks, and the ideal, have already been historicized. All understanding moves against the current in this way, and before we ever had occasion to claim lack, this responsibility should have been obvious. Since, by looking at our demographic's deep dissatisfation with the current state of American culture, we know that it was not, we have occasion to identify yet another failure of modernization, of the democratic state, of the herd. The failing is precisely when our ignorance of our own power becomes, effectively, the lack of power. Like the joke about red ink in the Zizek film -- we have all become culturally indolent by way of the formative effects of totalizing homogenization in media. If some cultural practice has not been presented to us, prefabricated and preordained, by some media, well then we imagine at the very least that it must be strictly taboo -- or, most often, that it does not exist at all. This betrays a fundamental existential ignorance, or a similarly fundamental laziness -- either way, an irresponsibility toward the care of the self. The next question that we ask -- well, what does historicizing do, anyway, so that we might ourselves? What is recollection in its transfigurative power, and how does one seize it as one chooses and acts? This question is not asking for proof of possibility, for it already has that powdering its very bones. Rather, it asks for the greatest absurdity when we are working in such a general & abstract conceptual framework -- it asks for self-disclosure to come from an outside source.

iii. "You are standing as if on the summit of the Mount of Transfiguration and must depart -- but then all the little demands of finitude and the petty debts owed the greengrocer, the shoemaker, and the tailor take hold of you and the final result is that you remain earthbound and you are not transfigured, but the Mount of the Transfiguration is transfigured and becomes a dunghill." / "Close air always becomes noxious."

They're perfect.

God is love. I do not love. God is love. I do not love.

I have to get rid of all my art directly after I make it these days; if I don't purge it I can't stop looking at it and it immediately falls apart. I give it to people and it's alleged to be my gift to them, my narcissism, and they thank me. Why do they thank me? They are taking my monsters and housing them in the cupboards of their viscera and their intentions and their vulnerabilities. Those things get locked in. Why do they thank me? I just lose respect for what hangs around too long.

I slept through ballet because I was up at four in the morning fretting and drinking wine and reading the preface to the Phenomenology of Perception; every once in a while I would encounter a phrase or two that would cause this high laugh to issue from the top of my throat, and I had the feeling of a gradual recovery of this thing I had in my heart at all times as a child, methodical now, reimbursed by my attempts to decide whether or not this thing I was reading could possibly be about science. And I was stretched out on this hardwood floor that never fails to give me splinters and I was knowing I was going to sleep through ballet and the train horns kept sounding through long sheets of rain, passing through the open windows or closed Venetian blinds, drops in the slits perpetuating themselves, polyethylene.

Last night I didn't think that aliens or cyberstalkers were going to come find me in my sleep; all superstitions were sleeping and I wasn't sleeping and I was stretched out across the hardwood floor feeling a hysterical silence awaken and reposition itself behind my eyes, perfect and sensible like a system of wires. I know that there is no such thing as a chemical imbalance, and instead of a therapist and instead of humanism I just have this very old phenomenologist with blue eyes and white eyebrows like Santa Claus, an old man with a PhD whose job it is to tell me every Wednesday that I'm not mindful enough to be a philosopher. He yelled about Myspace and I deleted my account.

I slept through ballet because it isn't what I want, lying in the dark on the hardwood floors feeling that it is my duty and my privilege to be as feminine as is possible, friends with women who follow their boyfriends to New Haven. Jobless and hopeful women, pink subjugated bodies watching their men mill through the law programme at Yale. Women who wait to exhale, women who want to birth your children but not mine -- mine much too pure, undiscovered in peapods, in snow. What if my Freudian envy is not of the phallus but of possessing the love of another woman? Then the fault of Freud is not in his biology, and not in me, but in the very perpetuation of his idea. I slept through ballet because when I was younger I was a Tai Chi master, fasting and walking alone through forests and making effortless motions of knowledge in solitude.

I was never a woman. Nobody ever was. It has always been a lie, and nobody has clean hands. Nobody. And nobody is willing to discuss it for long, to lose blood or relearn old movements. And in the seeds of these images new answers are formulating, new answers to all those old questions about tigers, all those questions John Roewert asked me about phenomenology, on the staircase one night, doubtful and intrigued. When I find these answers unfurling themsleves they will all be running in a stampede across wet green fields, bodies oiled like Spartans, and I will run with them. We will adjust to changing air and the scent of paint and plants, and will retire to respective attics, at all times with the windows open allowing in all noise and ice. And I am going to exhale. I am going to exhale and white air will rush out.

Last night I grew desperate and teary and wanted to move in with my homophobic sexist racist Catholic capitalist Republican Grandparents in Tampa, because of the guarantee there that I would have health insurance for when breathing grows more difficult. I would have a private world and somebody would come in and order me to wake up every morning. Because I wanted to remain the product of that same old sad situation, stealing Xanax. Because I thought about how we ally ourselves with people who share values, sometimes whether they treat us well or not, because we want uniform ideologies, scarcity and necessity. Here it would arrogantly and falsely be about myself, about the sciences. But the real goal here is not myself. The real goal involves Sparta; has more to do with facticity and with overpainted walls in empty rooms, with clean strange basslines and sore sore bones. We are adapting despite fantasies and we are amalgamating disinterested vocabularies, and we are honing our intentions into the slackening threads that connect us to the world, slacken in wonder.

Some fifteen-year-old somewhere in the world.

All I can bring myself to talk about is art.

1. At the end of this video there is a performance of "Baboon," from JD's The Coroner's Gambit, that everyone everywhere should see.



2. It is my contention that John's song "Wild Sage" (from newest album Get Lonely; lyrics here ) is narrated by an anonymous one of the mental patients he worked with as a psychiatric nurse in California. The "wild sage growing in the weeds" is a metaphoric reference to the population of the insane, entangled in the panopticon beneath the grit of its institutional power, and despite their status as self-aware individuals capable of complicated thought and emotion, etc etc etc. In other news, I hate interpretation of art.

3. It seems that this is the state of things.

And all the ceilings in New York have come down.

"Boredom is the root of all evil."
[S. Kierkegaard]



I had my first kiss on September 11th, five years ago today. I remember this now, of course, because it is ominous -- this boy would later sleep with sex workers at age fourteen or fifteen, sleep with my closest friend at the time. He would attempt suicide with broken beer bottles to the wrist -- because I didn't return his phone calls. By seeing him as often as I did, I would come to witness a drug war waged with frames of doors ripped off their walls, with rusty nails and gasoline fires. In the depths of rage after an argument which itself would have directly followed a passionate kiss, he punched me in the face until I was bleeding. He once attempted to run me over with his car.

People ask all the time -- why didn't U.S. intelligence intervene in what they knew looked suspicious until it was too late? What should be a simpler question -- why did I keep seeing this boy? I thought I loved him -- what I loved was being ignorant to the fact that some human actions are absolutely intolerable. If I always tolerated him, then he became the limit to my moral world and to my freedom. We would be rendered free of judgment by any greater society. I wanted to live in a world where everything was forgivable, even unrepentant violence -- for in such a world, how could my relatively naive and gentle nature not appear saintly?

When what we want does not fall neatly into our hands, insidiously, we imagine fate edging us along. Rather than admit the necessary fact that we lack, we craft false respite from our striving with illogicality, with superstitions. This abusive relationship I was in could never truly be forged in commitment or freedom; and so we would ask fate to forge it for us. By September 11, 2002, we had broken up, but we remembered our anniversary -- not because it was ominous, but as the first of an indefinite and increasing number of reconciliations. The reconciliations happened just as the worst Hollywood film would have done them. These were the ethics of adolescence, truly, but we were and are living in a cultural atmosphere where immaturity is constantly being mistaken for vitality.

We went to dinner at a restaurant we could walk to from our high school -- he paid for everything, of course. A year after our first embrace, we spoke plainly. He let me know that he "wanted me back." We knew that we could not help but fall back into one another's arms, and so we did, our depravity teetering obscenely between hypocrisy and idealism. And I know that even now, I still want to accord these passions some dignity. Whether I want this out of a desire to redeem our ignorance, or because a part of me still wants to live in that wonderland of universal validities, amoral and boundless -- that is harder to discern.

a

THE INDENTIONS OF YOUR OVERTONES; THEIR RECOVERY*

when the dipping of the sun is less
a finished gift, more an organ embarassed
to have been, a seeing which draws color
to itself looking less murderous, more opaque
bruise-purple weather to me, seeping
consistent and banal through all diaries

when mornings warp awfully, running water etching
new preludes for a decade which is running
its fingers between my legs despite protest
giving mercy its name, and moving through
radio darkness gritting dirt into dark skins
hovering above that clay, grounding toothless hat-dippers
who forget the grinding of their teeth

when footsteps fall away from paged-novel pulses
and rush plagues, waking, into reclaimed water, fingering
mildew over three stacked nickels, dousing names
that exhibit their bodies in saltwater, schools of public transit
arranging in old teams; they drink the smoke of my tobacco
packed in highways and reclaiming old loyalties, harvested
like laundry stains, extending bloodless legs in broadcast
i change my position




*This is an impenetrable poem which summons up an impenetrable landscape in order to avoid actually explaining how the notion of going home is always the death of ambition

A, "On Nothing In Particular"

"We never saw one another directly, of course; instead we always looked -- as any individual will always look at any other individual -- indirectly. This means that whatever we saw when we tried to look at one another was entirely mediated by the standards of an instantiated third gaze, which, we imagined, constituted the rest of society."

And now here's Soledad Brian.

I know that none of my blog audience watches the news, or at least the important news, and I'm concerned for your ability to stay on top of the important issues of our day. So here they are exactly as I found them*, but conveniently abbreviated entirely into the digest-headline form you find below. Guess which headline is fake**, and remember that brevity is... wit.

a) Man Accused of Killing 7 Prostitutes
b) Jessica Simpson Loses Voice
c) Kids Watch Clown Crushed To Death
d) Virgin Mary Found On Turtle
e) Woman Has 14-Pound Baby Girl
f) Widely Publicized Child Sex-Object Murder Case, Due To Wide Publication, Gets Attention From Pathologically Lying Child-Sex Aficionados Who Then Must Necessarly Get Widely Publicized Themselves

*Well, I wasn't actually able to quote headline f verbatum as, I'll be darned, you just aren't able to find any articles on it anymore. Guess the news doesn't like to sensationalize particularly sensitive and singular court cases for too long or anything, especially when the coverage necessarily includes graphic descriptions of violence, sexuality, and/or social taboo. But I remember back in the day, when our tabloids still cared about JonBenet Ramsey. And this is more or less how they read.
**None

And ballet slippers will hurt my feet

...the way your ideals of beauty are a suspension of your own image, a projection of it out into the world, as a general framework within which you wait, until you encounter and incarnate beauty -- and precisely then you run the risk of ruining it. you yourself change from the suffering of this loss, and the ideal necessarily changes with you, moving close beneath your own flesh until the moment your consciousness lapses entirely, until the moment you die...

the appreciation of childhood, nostalgic or otherwise, then arises from precisely a desire to evade death and finitude yourself -- one seeks redemption and self-verification in the respite of possession, and especially here through possession of an object "childhood" one seeks to perpetuate one's own life, "in the abundance of its fertility," indefinitely. and at once excessive fixation on being-towards death is necessarily a pathos, necessarily pathological, for in thinking of mortality consciousness conceives of itself as dying. in pursuit of beauty we seek respite FROM mortality, and yet it is through thorough engagement with life that one is aware of oneself as beginning to age.

we can then explain at once why we find a conjunction of fertility and childishness, of sexuality and the youthful image, in popular media and popular ideals of the beautiful. a woman is sexually attractive, generally speaking, when she has disproportionately large eyes, or is from the waist-down tiny as a six-year old and from the waist up, pregnant. and it is through appreciating youth and fertility as beauty in a woman that man precisely can HAVE a child, recreate himself THROUGH their child, precisely distance himself from the imminence of his finitude -- though he also admits of this limitation IN the need to give himself sexually and emotionally to youthfulness as an OTHER in the woman and ultimately, also the child. age truly begins to decline once even one's children are grown. death awaits beyond self-fulfillment in this way. though in a patriarchal society this standard would apply only to women as objects of sexual desire, i should note that to the extent that when ANYONE finds this youth-oriented concept of beauty sexually attractive, they are likely facing the finitude of their own status, historically or personally, and attempting to surmount their own impotence in the same way men of a patriarchal society do -- thus particularly fitting is DeBeauvoir's questionably-phrased call for a "brotherhood" of men and women.

an ideal of beauty which fulfilled no more than the desperate need to affirm one's own virility and youth in the face of one's own weakness cannot be of any solace here, can it? and this is why it develops. but ultimately an ideal of beauty can only perhaps be of partial solace. the greater question is how to balance the corruptive force of power with the subjugative force of powerlessness in oneself -- for one is deceiving oneself to say that the appeal of the childish other, the innocent other, is not contingent on the perceived powerlessness of that childishness -- an attempt to gain immortality through projecting nostalgia for youth outward into an object of consumption. and if it is not possible to make oneself the object of one's own desires, through vagaries like the notion of self-realization (that is always also a disunification from the immediate self), we could then only explore the potential of an ascetic relinquishment of any attachment to the movement of desiring itself.

I forgot the password.

I've this summer, in my desperation, ended up watching both the Derrida documentary and the Zizek documentary, both productions of "Zeitgeist" films. I'm not going to apologize for this desperation -- it raises some interesting issues, and even allows me to better comment on the film. Precisely the only thing keeping me from exhibiting desperation would be this attempt at concealing the distaste I had for my surroundings all summer, in the name of maintenance of a public image. Rather than do that I find it interesting to think about the way Derrida and Zizek each reacted to the possibility of fetishization as it works through the public image which is being projected when something vaguely resembling a biographical film is made about you.

Both men seem to be aware of the constraints such a concern places on a sort of enlightenment-style disregard for style -- an emphasis on Derrida or Zizek's "style" taking priority over their "actual theoretical ideas," a distinction which Zizek at least thinks can be strictly maintained. But at the same time his thought seems to me to preclude such a distinction in some ways. Okay, so Derrida at first requested that no images be published of him, ever. This makes it seem as if he already had the problems that go along with having a public image in mind, and wished to avoid them entirely -- and indeed, a lot of what he says in the film seems to be predominantly concerned with the qeustion of tension between theory and praxis -- to a point he agrees with Heidegger, who agrees with Aristotle, that a philosopher is born, thinks, and dies. The preemptive rejection of a philosopher as a knowable human being, and the identification of a knowable human being with "style," surreptitiously sets you up to want to know more about the secret life of the philosopher, and the documentary tries to taunt you with this -- filming Derrida very ambiguously explaining his behavior is in many ways completely artificial because of the fact that he is being filmed, and so on. On the otehr hand, Zizek's reaction to the cult of personality forming around him is a blunt cry of "Confound it, you idiots!" which means not that you shouldn't want to know about a philosopher, lest you embarass him by emphasizing personal style, but more -- why are you not able to think about a philosopher as a living person without turning her into a caricature of herself?

Precisely what he is trying to avoid here appears in his other talk about surplus-value and surplus-enjoyment having the homology of desire -- precisely the problem he has with public images is the emphasis it places on philosophy without philosophy, precisely the way one seeks cybersex as sex without the sex-act. His realization, unlike Derrida's, admits its contingency on the reaction, admits that he didn't originally think it would even be necessary. His role as a philosopher, when he sees people coming to him as a brilliant thinker who will tell leftists finally "what to do," he sees as to react by making these people ask themselves to what extent such requests are even legitimate, why they might have such needs to begin with. His public image complements this with a public suicide, and an artificial image of himself on the ground after having leapt a flight of stairs. The image of his playing dead is not the black nothingness of a prohibitive warning, as in Derrida, but rather as the aftereffect of an insult, a rejection of flattery. The absence of an image still by its very being named can't deny its status of existing as an image for others, not the same as this image of something - of suicide. In fact it's more insulting to have nothing.

Ultimately, though, both Derrida and Zizek share animosity towards the idea of the passing fad, the ironic sitcom of the real. What we are lacking in popular culture is the ability to take anything seriously. We are afraid of the implications behind any move we might make and so we choose, in the name of not tarnishing reputations, not to say anything at all. Rather than what we fear as weight we prefer cartoons of weight, and to make our impotence more palatable we express it as a joke, as if self-awareness already is articulated freedom. But one cannot have chosen not to be in freedom, and so we still fail to say anything meaningdul when we make a joke of discrimination, of class oppression, in order to give the appearance that we are able to somehow disengage from our conditions simply by having a basic awareness of them. We replace any decisive action with ironic remarks and with style -- I still don't know if I understand how style can possibly have weight so long as it is measured against a distinction from underpinning theoretical content (Nietzsche, anyone?). And irony is so pervasive that even the deepest suffering can become a trinket of its amusement. We think that we bequeath fair treatment to the suffering person so long as she is able to address us colloquially with an affirmation of her satirization. In this way we miss the point of the morbid, as an impetus to challenge whatever conditions result in it. More important and less understood than the sheer morbidity is the reasoning behind its appearance in art. Why does the Zizek film end with him throwing himself down a flight of stairs? Well, his other option was what, to end his talk on the artificiality and insincerity of public image by waving goodbye? Sorry adoring fans, I'll deproblematize your adoration some other time. For now I have to go enjoy my champagne and the idle preening of small talk with the film producers. Life goes on.

The problem is that this fear of weight does not itself even indicate any real object around which the satire orients itself -- the elementary definition of the real, for Zizek, is "death which resists symbolization," the negative that resists symbolization -- and that, stated as such, is absolutely meaningless. For example, there is no "real difference" between the liberal and conservative camps insofar as there is not a definition of that difference which does not already originate from the liberal or conservative side; at most, positively, there is a "difference from." And yet this "difference from," weightless as it is, carries even greater and more insidious forms of the weight which is barring free possibilities for change -- because we do not have the trite but firmly established vocabulary for change that we do for the status quo, and the status quo is becoming global capitalism. Still we claim a so-called society of tolerance and free choice, and still we enforce the injunction to ENJOY which is even more pervasive than the injunction simply to DO. The alleged postmodern individual appeals to a basic humanity which has been recovered after a loss of the meaning, a loss of the real, but these appeals carry all the same and even further restrictions on our behavior -- we must tolerate even the petty sitcoms which ease their nausea lest we risk social alienation. This constitutes an authority which precisely disallows any opposition in its denial that it itself is even an authority. It denies that real radical change, expansion of vocabularies for articulating lack of freedom, and indeed real social tolerance would require us to make any compromises in our comfortable patterns of etiquette, even the etiquette of ironic self-abnegation!, at all.

God will come and wash away our tattoos and all the cocaine

Woke up in Pittsburgh early this morning after twelve hours of sleep. Breathed in air. Attic windows illuminate brick houses, metal roofing washed iridescent with rust and rain. Houses crowded so elegantly, distant pines spread across the distant mountains walling us into Sharpesburg. Tea outside for breakfast, the Zenith for lunch. My cousin Brian suggesting the city is "paradise, under deconstruction," noting how the poorest parts of the town lack a single grocery store, yet never are wanting for the spires of Catholic churches. And men who bartend and hunt deer will refuse neat scotch to dirty niggers, and angsty chickenwire art spins slowly, suspended from the ceilings of antique shops. All the architecture has always already been defaced by graffiti here, dust ignited neon under bridges, and everywhere an unfaded revelry of names humming in cacophonous blue and red beneath the traffic, indicating a population forged entirely in neglect like steel. I alternate between reading Machiavelli's "The Prince" and de Saint-Exupery's "The Little Prince." I befriend a girl with a pink mohawk and a jump rope. I run my fingers along our halls of stained glass and peeled wallpaper, stucco Greek doorways, dried flowers pinned everywhere. In the evening we sit outside on concrete stairs, overdressed for the poor part of town. And I start drinking blueberry Stolichnaya and I grow aware that the heart may yet awaken from its sleeping.