* * *
I guess the question of (my) life is, how do I not simply endure, but bring something of each experience into myself? I won’t go without metabolizing each day as though I can somehow convert even the inedible into nutrients. It’s a way to insist on memory, and to insist on autonomy. So, this summer, which is properly weird, wherein I don’t feel particularly intimate with others, I write constantly and translate each experience back to and for myself later, because I don’t feel I have the best opportunities to process it and share it with whomever makes the most sense (Caroline, Maurice). I’m not even writing long, intimate emails (to Helena, to Ivan). I guess it’s that I haven’t been carrying on a single therapeutic relationship.
Spent yesterday with Ruby and a friend from the residency, Trevor. Dropped off their things at my apartment after their train ride into the city and took them on a nice walk from the deep 20th to the Yiddish cultural centre in Chateau d’Eau, via the cemetery (Ruby loves cemeteries!). Mind certainly was active at the time but I don’t know what to make note of. When Ruby mentions Helena, I experience jealousy, but it’s just an experience. I know why I have it. I know it troubles me that Helena’s relationship to Ruby is one of greater intellectual curiosity, one in which it has never occurred to her to pimp the girl out to her brother. I know that it makes me feel jealous to hear that Helena has recently emailed Ruby out of the blue whereas she and I haven’t spoken in months, and it makes me feel as though Ruby has somehow remained more useful to her, or that Ruby holds her respect or interest better. Jealousy tells me only of my own insecurities. It doesn’t tell me otherwise of myself, or of Helena, or of Ruby.
There is something disquieting about the capacity to turn away. The last two nights in the 20th, I slept somewhat fitfully alone. I’d slept more calmly beside Miles and Odile the two nights prior. No sleeps better than at CER, where, though alone on the mattress, I could not choose whom I’d be eating breakfast with, and who (Ruby, Noah) might wander into my room. (I desire choice, but realistically I prefer being surrounded.)
Dictum: allow yourself the experience of passion, abandon, but never so much that you forget to pee afterward.
Ruby’s friend, yesterday: continually anxious about the idea that we didn’t know where we were going, though he couldn’t have had any real concern for where that was, because he didn’t have any stake in it. Still very important to him that wherever it was we were going, we didn’t lose our way. I found this anxiety annoying because I’m in the process of battling it in myself. (I suspect that this summer I’ve made some very good progress.)
Simone Weil, providing counsel I could have used months ago:
A rock in our path. To hurl ourselves upon this rock as though after a certain intensity of desire had been reached it could not exist anymore. Or else to retreat as though we ourselves did not exist. Desire contains something of the absolute and if it fails (once its energy is used up) the absolute is transferred to the obstacle. This produces the state of mind of the defected, the depressed.
To accept the fact that they are other than the creatures of our imagination is to imitate the renunciation of God.
Affliction in itself is not enough for the attainment of total detachment. Unconsoled affliction is necessary. There must be no consolation—no apparent consolation. Ineffable consolation then comes down.
It’s possible that the body lags behind the mind, which is no explicit shame.
As I was saying about sex with Noah: “As soon as we know something is real, we can no longer be attached to it.”
Just straight up crying on the metro for no reason but indiscernible existential anguish and possibly a lapsed anxiolytic prescription rn!
* * *
Yesterday it wasn’t purely existential confusion that caused me to cry on the subway. When I chatted with Max, he confessed that he would “probably be using the apartment more as an office” and sleeping primarily at Cybil’s. I said this was nothing surprising and nothing to worry about, and that he could only upset me by pulling out at the last minute and leaving me no time to find someone for the room. He said he wasn’t planning on this. He wants to be close to family, and I am family. At the end of it, I have probably had more contact with Max since I’ve been abroad than with anyone else. Much of it is just updating the other on our emotional states: “I feel sad/excited/strange/etc. I can or cannot think.” His choice about the fall makes little sense to me: why he should, if involved in a relationship, choose to stay in an apartment with another woman with whom he shares such affection. I have no narcissism feeding upon the situation, and no feeling that I’d like to monopolize his affections, and no feeling like: oh, though I know very well it’s best we stay supportive of each other, why isn’t he too sexually attracted to me to involve himself in this? I feel fine. So why did I cry? I don’t know. Affection is beautiful.
There is no way for someone to tell if the conversation I shared with them served a therapeutic purpose for me. (There is no way for someone to tell if the sex we shared served an intimate or recreational purpose.) In either case, they’ll be able to venture a guess.
Whomever should produce himself at my side is the one of my preference. I am now ready for death. (Joking, joking.)
It’s just unsettling the extent to which, though I don’t feel like God has been with me, I feel like Simone Weil has:
Attention is bound up with desire. Not with the will but with desire—or, more exactly, consent. We liberate energy in ourselves, but it constantly reattaches itself. How are we to liberate it entirely? We have to desire that it should be done in us—to desire it truly—simply to desire it, not to try to accomplish it. For every attempt in that direction is vain and has to be paid dearly for. In such a work all that I call “I” has to be passive. Attention alone—the attention which is so full that the “I” disappears—is required of me. I have to deprive all that I call “I” of the light of my attention and turn it on to that which cannot be conceived.
I turned down hanging out with Claude to hang out with Miles, and turned down hanging out with Miles to be alone, because sometimes all that isn’t therapeutic is exhausting.
Perhaps foundational, demoded psychoanalysis and contemporary fashionable feminism share a method: of uncovering some original, primary wound, which, if resolved, would allow you a clear pathway to remake yourself? Is there some way to do this without conferring with whomever it was that wounded you? Is there some way not to demand an apology? Is there some way not to hold resentment? Radical forgiveness is not much advocated for women insofar as all we’ve ever done is forgive.
Statistically, young women lead the change of language, which means I should be able to write as I please, but on average, women are speaking with each other, and not always making such bizarre departures.
* * *
When living here a few years ago, the attention I received on the street made me feel sick, weak, and beholden. Now it makes me feel kind of powerful. I don’t feel as though someone’s speech gives them any licence to me. I just feel like, well, it’s good, yes? Most men are not forceful: they just make a little comment and move on. The few men who have followed me or berated me for failing to dignify them with a response, I’ve been very comfortable just yelling at and moving on from. Hundreds of comments and not a single man has touched my person. Again: I do not wish to be an apologist for this stuff, which attracts such ire, and I know that a little younger, I really was hurt by it, really felt as though I owed something, either shame or attention, to the men who spoke to me uninvited. But now? I don’t know. It feels like another form of public intimacy. I like the way I look and how it moves in the world, and when men are like “ravissante,” “charmante,” “manifique,” when it ends there? I like it. Before I didn’t like it. The problem from a public-ethics perspective is that it’s no one’s responsibility to like it. Also, before, most of these men, mid-to-late-twenties, still felt like my eld
ers. Now they are my peers, and in some cases I’m older than the men who call at me. I just don’t feel like the weak one anymore. I don’t feel like because someone’s announced that they can see me I have some responsibility to them. It’s summer and I feel fluid: does it make much of a difference that someone should call a stranger beautiful rather than just smile at them? (I know it’s all still shitty for those women who, like I once did, feel fear, responsibility, and embarrassment, but I’ve really come around to it.)
What happens when you come around to a world that isn’t good to you? Take your pleasures where you can. Or renounce them as perverse, because when the better world dawns, there will be better pleasures, too.
* * *
Little dinner party at friends of Odile yesterday. Smoked some hash. I’m not doing much research to ensure that my time is most imaginatively spent here and, were I weaker, I could get upset with myself for this. But instead my largely unvaried days are not disappointing me. I do whatever I want, which lately consists of having intensely emotional days strolling, thinking. Will see Miles tonight. On the thirteenth, he flies to the States, and Odile takes the train to the south. Lucky that I leave the fourteenth.
I stole one copy of the Que sais-je? on Freud and another on the Popular Front, not because I couldn’t or didn’t want to spend four euros, but simply because I didn’t want to be a hypocrite who wouldn’t steal for myself but would happily have another do so on my behalf. I now have no reason to steal again.
* * *
I think that most of what Miles says makes no sense whatsoever, but I have simply never seen a body like his (nude, up close). I wish it weren’t rude to ask to take a picture of him.
His sex drive surpasses mine, though I consider myself to be the less good-looking of the two of us (most bodies do not make me feel like mine, in comparison, is doughy and malformed). But the key to a stronger sex drive for me would be if I were to find him funny, or if I were to find him to make sense more often. He has many large ideas. Many large, untethered ideas (about the revolution).
In any case we’d both find ourselves agreeing with Simone Weil when she says: “After the collapse of our civilization there must be one of two things: either the whole of it will perish like the ancient civilizations, or it will adapt itself to a decentralized world.”
But maybe I alone can agree further: “You could not be born at a better time than the present, when we have lost everything.”
Yesterday, while it was still light out and I wasn’t yet eager to fuck Miles, I asked him, “Do you think there’s some relationship between periods of hyperactivity and anxiety and your sex drive?” He said, “Maybe, do you?” I said, “Sure, absolutely.” And he, “So, you’re telling me you feel calm right now?” Yes, quite calm indeed.
* * *
Woke with vague and physically pressing feeling of unease this morning but stayed slowly and calmly with it, identifying its components, coming to the understanding that nothing that contributes right now to a feeling that I am stuck is so bad.
I finally got a rejection from the Toronto lit mag to which I sent my story in June, which was particularly discouraging because one of the editors had been at my reading. But also: not a problem. Simply something that didn’t happen.
It’s a blessing that I should be sensitive enough to the physical manifestations of frustration and anguish that I can feel its onset as a pressing, a closing in of walls, or a caving in. This is the narrative my subconscious is establishing: because some things in life do not go forth without friction, I am trapped. But as I can feel this narrative as it’s being drawn up, I can stop it with close attention: there’s no trapping. There’s leaping out of events that won’t be of any further consequence as I disengage from them, and there’s the understanding that what’s easiest for me is not what’s easiest for someone else, so I resign myself to a new path of action somewhere toward the centre of the two desires. Then the anxiety lifts.
I feel right now as I always feel at the beginning of August: sweaty, stuffed, and ready for fall (I have not left for Portugal yet. There is a-whole-nother seaport to this odyssey).
Funny, my twin standards for intelligibility: when I don’t make any sense to people, they’re simple, impatient, inflexible, and uncreative. If Miles doesn’t make any sense to me, he’s talking out of his ass (language is never perfect).
* * *
Julian favourited a tweet of mine last night. Can we continue on? No matter how I feel or what I do in life, I still feel somehow like I am a thing made for his tastes beyond all others. He will always be the one who knows how funny I am, or how funny it’s my intention to be. And all the rest of the world will continue to make the mistake that I am serious or sentimental or sexy.
* * *
I like Miles more each time I see him. A certain resistance has been a part of this. When I’m hanging out with him and his friends on the canal and saying I want to spend the night alone because I think if we fuck right now I’ll develop a UTI, he says, we can still spend the night together. I say, I’d prefer not to, and he doesn’t push it, but by the time I get back to my place, I wish we had. Part of this was accepting a ride home from a stranger on a motorcycle who then took me to the other end of the city, and while he stopped in to a convenience store to buy booze, I fucking BOLTED, and then told Miles that there’s only such a thing as a free ride from comrades. I have now employed the term comrades fully in earnest, like him, and he says, that whole ordeal sounds terrible!
Yesterday at the canal was someone who had been patriated to France because he helped facilitate the escape of a French prisoner who’d been captured by ISIS. Remarkable! I never stop telling Miles how he looks to me. Healthy and big. Like the Americans deployed to World War II who completely awed their skinny and deficient European counterparts. He said he’d never been called a doughboy before. Remarkable! I said, impossible, you are such a doughboy. I’d planned initially: Tuesday night with Miles, Wednesday with Odile, but then just because I wanted to, I told him, regardless of what I do with Odile tomorrow, I’ll spend the night with you after, in Paris or up in Île-St-Denis. To date easily for two weeks is ideal.
Helped Odile move. Montreuil again. I love going through her things, and I love being with others on significant days and the feeling of peacefulness that comes with it. The best way I know how to live is by suggestion and invitation. Did I email the editor I saw at my reading when I was drunk last night to ask what the matter was? Yes. Will I follow up if he doesn’t write me? No! Does it matter: not at all.
I’ll miss the music played here out of cars and in bars. I’m ready to go but I’ll miss everything. It’s unreal that I feel no anxiety to fuck my terribly handsome lover, but I look forward to hanging out with him and the Appelistes before spending the night with his arm around me. Had it been Alexandre, would I have felt just the same? So many lives are suitable. The one I’ve fallen under especially. Remember, two weeks ago, I was at the monastery, with another? Everyone is foolish and summer is sweet. There’s really no one to seek counsel from, because there’s no one who knows better.
* * *
Must one steal from the margins in order to begin altering the basis of the structure? (Capitalism, love.)
I read too slowly and my friends are gone. Odile is a legitimately magical woman with inexpressible powers. Miles left the bed I’m in an hour ago, and it feels gloomy. Maybe it’s not kind to explain to someone that they’ve never once made you nervous and it’s one of the reasons that summer’s been so great. I didn’t sleep well but I had a dream about Max. Max and I fucking in some apartment resembling the one I just moved Odile out of in Montreuil that I’ll never see again. But more psychedelic. What does any of it mean? Leaving Montreuil yesterday evening toward Île-St-Denis, I was grateful not to be heading back down to the 20th. The house in Île-St-Denis is lovely if dirty. Nice courtyard, books lying all around. I’m not sure what
everyone does here, but their shelves are replete. Ate dinner with Miles, Eli, who lives here, and two new Americans. The new guests and I shared a sense of humour. Better than Miles and I. But Miles and I share an enthusiasm for having sex with each other and sleeping while touching. He got hard fewer times this night than the last one he spent at my house, so this time I was the one who wanted more. I’m welcome in New Orleans, but perhaps I won’t be if he’s seeing anyone. I’ll be welcome either way. But in one case we most likely won’t be fucking.
The adjustment to an island of family for two weeks will be difficult. Odile told me there is a party in Lisbon that is likely to be wild, and people will probably be taking drugs should I so desire, and I believe I should. Are any of us really sticking the wrench in capitalism? Must radical contingency nauseate me so? I really could have given anyone a blow job my second night in Paris. Anyone could still have been around for another blow job my second-to-last morning. They never face-fuck you the first time but they might later, especially if they’ve a plane to catch. Miles wouldn’t tell me what he wanted from me when he thought about it, but I said, that’s fine. I said I have an incredibly thin membrane between my desires and my speech, but it’s not this way for everyone: “Some have many membranes all scraping up against each other.” What am I ever talking about. We talked about taking plane rides and that being at the airport makes him nervous. I said, every time I’m in a plane, I’m ready to accept death, and I don’t even want to consider that if it were to crash, I might survive. He says, but people do survive! Begins to explain to me how to preserve your body as a plane falls. I go, please, I have never wanted to hear anything less.
Miles, last night, told me he didn’t think I was energetic; he thought it was likely very important to me to put the effort forth to be present for others. Thank you.
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