* * *
I still spend each morning I sleep in dreaming about Oreste’s cock, but that doesn’t mean I’m hopeless or have an unhappy life. It just means I’ve abstracted some ideal from the time I’ve spent with him to exactly his size and makeup. But I don’t really know what his skin feels like, not objectively. I know that I react very well to a certain sensation upon me. Eventually, its form will become fuzzy, and sooner or later the difference will blur and some other skin will feel like just the right skin instead. Like it’s always been! It’s nice to daydream, even if it seems there’s a face to it. It means I’m not actually crushed: I still feel an active, positive sensuality. I still want to be touched.
For two days this week, I felt the enormous, frenetic out-of-placeness that I experienced for much longer at the end of my involvement with Julian. I guess the feeling is heartbrokenness or, rather, grief. A feeling that I am just about to lose my footing, like something disastrous could happen now that suddenly I’m not protected from. But to be left with my thoughts isn’t actually as bad as the threat seems. Turns out there is little that is actually so bad to think about.
Two nights ago, I had an afternoon tea with Freida that we’d both expected would last an hour or two, but ended up lasting eight. When I told her how terrible I’ve been feeling lately, she suggested it did not sound like I had a bad mood disorder, but rather a bad life. I cried before her and I was ashamed. Crying before others is unusual for me, but she was calm to witness it. It sounded worse to me that I might not be depressed, but simply unhappy. Right—then all I would have to do is make a new life! God willing.
* * *
I did not attend my only final exam but I did get a bursary from having been a better student earlier in my life. Money for a French class at a partner institute overseas. I will go to Paris, hang out with Odile, and then go to Tours for an intensive course. I have trouble speaking French. I become frustrated with my cognitive limits when studying a second language. My memory is never enough for it. I can’t tell, when trying to speak French, if my inhibitions are stopping me from speaking as best I can, or if it’s just a complete inability to conjure things up. Speaking a second language is a good sort of challenge to face when you’re trying to relinquish the need to be found impressive by others, and instead to learn.
* * *
I can write a novel full of anxiety, sentimentality, brutality, and sex, and I can even sign it as my own. It’s no wonder people are so anxious to make themselves the “artist,” because she who articulates always wins. It’s Ferrante fantasizing about others’ infidelity. It’s anyone’s comedy. It’s whoever makes the art. They tell the story; they command the attention; others trust them. Few people are with you and many meander. You can be the powerful one who doesn’t wait around for others to recognize how fucking special you are.
Today a lovely night, first with Caroline, then with Marianne: I adore her. She’s younger than me. There is a difference in speaking with younger people. They’re unpractised, but on the brink of articulating more. The older one is, the more one forgives oneself for never having articulated certain things; one stops trying. I look at myself: I already feel old. The way I’ve lost fat in my face over the past couple of years, what I still have in my cheeks droops down. I don’t look quite gaunt but I will, soon. I want to share fucking everything.
Maybe there’s no categorical difference between some artist and any old person. Or if there is, it’s that the artist doesn’t speak directly to people; she abstracts her feelings and thoughts into “composed” objects. An artist is someone who’s worse, interpersonally, because part of her contract with herself is that she cannot allow her work to suffer by wasting her precious thoughts on people. She’s far better protected in love if her sentiments reach a confused space between authentically experienced and hypothetical, as if she cannot tell which is which. Always fantasizing about some perfected form of that which she knows, all her life can suffer as though it were lowly and inauthentic. But she’s satisfied still because: that’s the world’s problem, and she imagines more.
* * *
Yesterday, had an extended hangout with Max. After my shift at the library, I met him at a bar near the financial core, where he was performing a set. Hanging out was largely on my behest, brought out of recent anxieties over how few of my exes are willing to be friends with me. It’s always nice to see him. We’ve had similarly slow, disappointing winters. I spent hours with him, car-pooled from his set downtown to one at Jane and Finch, and then back to Bloorcourt. Like each time I see Max, it was easy and honest and wonderful. He is a strange figure for an ex, a kind of ideal one, a representation of the fantasy that you really can get to know someone you’ve been attached to openly and intimately once you’ve given up trying to have a sexual relationship with them. It’s odd, actually, how much I feel free to share with Max, or what sort of conversational meanderings pluck out things I wouldn’t have expected to say. I like that Max always seems to know exactly what the fuck I’m talking about. Like about pornography and trouble getting off without it (for us both). I mentioned something I’d only told Freida, intimate and a bit mean, that I’m sure I’ve never been closer to coming with a partner than I was with “not Oreste, but the person before him,” during an instance where I was watching him go down on me and he looked like an idiot. Max says, “Maybe you’re not as submissive as you think!” And then, I: “Uh, what?!” Very surprised by this choice of words, confused that he would consider me submissive and believe I considered myself to be so, too. Turns out, terminology borrowed from another man who dubbed me thus, leaving out, I suppose, that I was not conscious for the full duration of our fucking. So then, of course, I mention that, and we talk about the whole undercurrent of non-consensual sex in Toronto’s big barn.
Max and I became quite touchy, staking out space in one of the thousand degrees of being intimate with others, or being attracted to them, albeit only in some minor way that doesn’t think of sex at all. I guess, for a few years now, I’ve felt this way about Max consistently: no desire to fuck him but a lot of affection that is nevertheless physical. It’s cuddly. I like being cuddly with Max. I don’t know. He’s dating someone, actually, still the woman from last fall. I don’t want anything from Max, or to interrupt or take from anything else in his life, but small and constrained lingering intimacies are such nice things to have. I wish I inhabited a world that didn’t consider them so threatening.
* * *
I’m twenty-five today, which is fine.
These passages from Nancy’s Noli Me Tangere make me sad, but I’m twenty-five, and I don’t believe in them:
Far from God, she is without love and allows herself to be paid in order to procure the simulacrum of love. But among creatures there are nothing but these kinds of simulacra. For love is of God; it comes from God; it is God himself in truth.
But God leaves his creature to his creaturely abandonment, and Mary is the one who knows to what extent she has been deserted. Abandoned by love, Mary is given over to the simulacrum of love. Yet in that very simulacrum, there is a similarity; there is in the fleeting embrace something which resembles love.
Mary is a sinner; she knows that her caress has no love in it. She knows that her hair is arousing, intoxicating, and without love. She knows that she must not expect anything from either men or herself.
* * *
Have had torrents of social time lately with friends old and new: Freida, Caroline, Maurice, Rebecca, Max, Ruby, etc. Some occasions public, others private, each of a different personal importance. I flip through the diary and see Oreste’s name written everywhere and it’s just the same thing as Julian’s name before. I’m glad sex always matters to me a bit less than before. Everything just takes a name.
* * *
There are limits to pleasure, even the pleasure of smoking pot each day. I feel frazzled. I think I’m the best writer. It is simply that I’m the only per
son who thinks this. Went out last night to an evening during which Blaise, Marianne, and Paul read. I was feeling some anxiety at this show but mostly I was anxious to have sex with Paul if he would, but he would not because he’s trying to conserve himself for the act of writing, until he’s finished his book?! What’s worse is I’m next to certain he wasn’t kidding about this. Told me that in any case, though, I looked great, like I’d “been working on it”!? It wasn’t as though I had some doubt in my mind that he still found me benignly attractive just exactly as he’s found me benignly attractive for the last seven and a half years.
Ivan says, other people decide how funny you are, no? I say, no, Ivan, I swear to God I’m the funniest person! I swear on my life that the trouble of it is no one knows I’m the funniest one. If only I were the one to do things, then maybe I would be the one people would be excited to see. One reason to feel aimlessly excitable is to work too few hours in a week. And smoke pot every day. And to have been recently turned down for sex. When am I least anxious? Because it’s not when I’m infatuated with someone who lets me fuck him. It’s only during the act of fucking, or the act of being on the elliptical machine, or when reading something that surprises me with a feeling of being at home.
* * *
Here’s a joke: at least, safely, I’m doing little in life that I might later be nostalgic for.
No: lots of external life has been missing. I felt clearer, yesterday, neglecting to smoke pot, so today I neglected once again. Irritating emails with Ivan and a shift at the library. Ivan gives me fodder re the life I have to carve an ethic against. All different people add all different things to your life. Let’s be honest: two of the things I love to feel are competitive and not quite understood.
The intensely stupid thing Ivan said was that the only way out of a situation in which men are sexually rewarded for their creative pursuits whereas women are sooner punished for theirs was one where the sexual market is upturned totally. That if women no longer hungered for the men who would no longer be asserting themselves more often than those women on the creative-sexual market, women would stop fucking men entirely. He said, if men were not paid in sex for their cultural gifts, they wouldn’t produce art any longer. There would be no impetus to do so. Further, since men on the whole would be fucked less, they would become violent. Art, entirely, would change. The cultural items that would be produced on an equalized sexual-cultural plane would serve different functions from before. Many of the features of his bogus consequential dystopia sound to me, in fact, perfectly fine. They don’t sound as good to him, recently benefiting from the feeling that his academic career may bring him fame. So he gets greater choice in fucking women he’s bound not to care about. Lucky him! If no arrogant dimwit ever wrote again, I’d be glad.
Are there mysteries? Is it a coincidence that this is a man, also, who defends the idea of perfect craft without ever quite articulating what he means? No. No mysteries. You cannot expect men to part with the fantasy of perfected craft when the prospect of that perfection widening their access to sex is the only thing propelling them forward in the cultural sphere.
You are not the only poor, misled person seeking out guidance from the world. For this reason, we must have compassion.
* * *
Last shift at the library until September. I should have been incredibly hungover and somehow managed not to be. A bit of stimulation can sometimes take me very far, and I love to be recognized as smart and attractive.
Depression is a negative ethics: assigning oneself to the threat against oneself, committing to it, giving it the power. Whereas mere hopelessness is something one is bound to feel and, ideally, may float right through.
* * *
Feeling spring in my heels. Blaise programmed a lecturer last night who was exactly my cup of tea, who spoke of seducing the committee. He was funny, and had such a way of speaking, and good stories. Started the talk with an anecdote about the tendency to choose a second-best lover out of comfort (so a good seductive tactic is to seduce another by being one’s own second-best, so they’ll take you without knowing you’d really been their ideal all along). He eventually adapted his understanding through some visual metaphor that no one understood, so I prodded further, and we had a bit of excellent banter during the Q & A, during which he told me that I “simplified seduction to only its most essential elements without a hint of perversion.” I responded, “I hope so?” Felt like something I’d always wanted to be told without even knowing that I’d wanted to be told it (love). He said seduction is an act of mirroring, and I have always thought of seduction as active—drawing another toward oneself rather than drawing oneself into the other. His conception brought with it another element: that the passive subject seduces and joins the dominant object, but in so doing smuggles in some hidden thing, bursting out with it, becoming active. After, excited, I went to a bar to read alone, and only thereafter joined the lecture-goers at a more crowded bar at which the lecturer was absent. I don’t know exactly what it was, but I felt as though I were glowing, and that anyone near me was bound to be impressed with me, with little effort on my part. I approached the crowded bar and smiled while two men in suits fell to my feet. The smile to them was good, and when they bought me a drink, the rest of me, too, suited them fine. I could play: clever, quirky, sensual, energetic, fun. Just perfectly. I could insult them kindly and take pleasure when they talked themselves into a dead end or seemed to feel worried that they sounded stupid. I could say, look at me, talking here to you when there are all these younger, better-looking men around! And it was fine, because I emerged forth to them as a Sexy Untamable Woman, and I stuck to the role.
They left. Too drunk. I wanted to fuck someone, so chose someone else named Oswald who had come from the lecture, too. Met him only that evening. Asked, no context, if he’d like to come back to my house. Yes. Took a cab, he paid, we made out quickly, I went down on him but he wouldn’t keep erect with a condom on and instead sought to discuss intimate things. That was just not the night I had set out to have. I asked politely as I could, could you leave my apartment? He did. I was drunk, but still wishing for sex, and so fucking sad. That I can’t get anyone to fuck me passionately, that my most reliable seductive trait will always be, simply, newness. Can stun some drunk men who don’t know I’m more. Less, in other ways. But whoever gets excited gets bored. I felt deeply, primally unlovable this night, and cried—audibly enough that my roommate commented on it. I don’t know why I’ve been so eager lately for just the act of fucking. Because I’m leaving the city soon. Because I want to demonstrate to myself that the physical feeling of Oreste could be anyone. So far, I’ve failed. There’s always too much time to wait between the lovers that really do something to you.
Today, in the park with Freida. Intended to read but instead spoke. She talked about being able to avoid the feeling of intimacy by preserving herself, monitoring her speech, being careful. One strategy: you can’t be intimate because you can’t show yourself. My strategy: there’s no further self I’m obscuring—I have no secret that makes me. All speech I share feels in some way intimate. Equally so. Or equally not. I’m still failing to cultivate intimate relationships while being “true to myself.” This makes me feel that the barrier Freida speaks of is similar to procrastinating, or producing intentionally subpar work: if only my real talent were on display, then I’d be successful! If you behave in a way you consider natural, if you disappoint yourself in the company of others, you’ve failed at your best. You don’t get the fantasy of self-occlusion—keeping your “true self” hidden so that if only someone would have known it, they’d have loved you more.
* * *
I’ve had: days. Empty time, sexual misadventures, drinking, hangovers. Not a surplus of reading or thoughtfulness, but that can wait, certainly. I can’t imagine the number of things that are inspiring my feeling of sexual desperation at present, but there are plenty. Ran into older friends from adolescen
ce, drank. It’s been a decade now since I first met these people, and in some ways I feel like I have no better status in the world than I did then, at fifteen. I work on fewer creative projects and people aren’t as quick to be with me. Then: a number of generous, unsurveilled friendships with people whose nerves were more active around others than with me, because I had little to judge and little to return. Occasional wit and a captive smile were my gifts.
I’ve come to know that having my own speech engaged by someone else’s in an equitable way is more stimulating than being on the receiving end of a monologue. I’m still, probably, quicker to laugh than the average person, but I’m positively stolid in comparison to myself as a teen. Sex isn’t the same as then, of course. I feel as though simply my capacity to reject others makes me rejectable. Say that very same Julian I met, then, when he was twenty-seven, were to meet me now, at twenty-five? Would he have fucked the person I am today as the person I was then, or would he be considerably more nervous doing so?
Another day there was also a Max thing with kissing. Many small things and no good, hard fucking, like when I was a teen who could be shown to want exactly what was given to me.
* * *
I suppose I’m far from the only woman who uses television in order not to be alone with her thoughts.
* * *
Last Friday night, I spent a few hours with Helena, and this was a pleasure. We spoke mostly about the nature of pleasure, happiness, and desire. We move through these subjects very slowly. I have some recurring fantasy that when Helena and I got together to talk, we’ll discuss Oreste, and I’d get some perspective or closure from this, but we didn’t discuss Oreste, for whom Helena is not, in fact, here to provide me perspective on. It might nevertheless have been easy for her to detect something of a summary when I explained how sexual compatibility was rare to me, and that I was so inexperienced in any other way of being with another romantically that it was the only thing that mattered to me. She said that, for her, there’s a whole other, transcendent way she hardly even knew before her current partner.
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