"Art is anything you can get away with." - Marshall McLuhan
-
Incompatible (or inconvenient) truths given expression; often outrageous, shocking, bold.
-
Poetics that branch out, spiral out, weave into other branches/spirals.
-
Prepared for all occasions.
-
Sucking out the venom only poisons your mouth, unless you learn to spit.
-
"Time to put God away" - Bill Calahan
-
Sacred Mysteries
Silence. Alone with myself. Horror!
-
DON'T FUCKING SAY THAT.
-
I think I'm writing spells when I define my terms. I think these words are his, in fact. I calm myself with different delusions that I cycle through like a carousel.
-
Learning how to choose, how to act.
-
Gateway. Hinge. Threshold.
-
The ants carry food home; this energy fuels the colony, particularly the queen. With this energy, the queen reproduces and the colony expands in number and in space. Soon war will become necessary. Ants will die. The queen is the ant-hinge between the material and the virtual. She knows only hunger.
-
Sitting on the deck with my coffee as the sun comes up. I woke up too early and as my mind wandered, I started to cry. I realized how much time I've been spending with screens so I try to just be alone with my thoughts, with the morning. The birds, the beautiful light, the smell of ripening corn - but again I burst into tears.
Lonely in my soul. I feel myself giving up. My stamina and patience running out.
-
“...shame is a painful thing to write about: an exposure of the intimacies of selves in public”
--Elspeth Probyn
-
"The word Ovid most consistently uses to designate “beauty” is forma, the same word he uses in the epic’s opening lines to state his theme: “shapes (formae) transformed / into new bodies.”"
-- Stephanie McCarter
Black mold. WritingFucking.
-
Can't do that in Microsoft Word.
-
Opening myself to the possibility of rejection -- or acceptance. Octopus arms.
-
For months I accidentally starve myself; I have no appetite and when I force myself to eat, everything tastes awful. After meeting T, I wake up famished. I know how to fast but we both want breakfast so he takes me to his favorite diner. Over our soggy eggs, a puddle of ketchup, and endlessly refilled coffee, flies kill themselves on the sticky paper in the window at the same rate our conversation dwindles -- then another fly buzzes around and one of us tries again to fill the summer-morning-yellow air between us with words and knowledge of the other. This is desire in action.
He works in a factory owned by Elon Musk. He has a copy of the Declaration of Independence nailed to his kitchen wall. He reads Nietzsche, Jung, Alan Moore, and Homer. He looks like a Spartan hero with his silver-gold mane cascading down his neck. I like to gently tug his goatee and bite his earlobes and nose. He lets me, though he doesn't like it much. This is desire in action.
-
We walked a long time after dinner and made out a lot by the river. He wanted to lay down in the grass with me but I was too chicken. He listens and has opinions of his own. We bonded over our lifelong need for bondage. I love the way he touches me.
He said he remembered me from the last time we connected on the dating app -- he missed me and was glad I came back. He kept complimenting me but it felt genuine. I want to practice opening myself up again so I'm ready for this kind of love, so I don't reject it or question it to pieces. I want to receive it gracefully and amplify it back at him. This is desire in action.
The space between us -- our bodies, our fantasies, our dynamics. A trick of alienation, in the same way that dignity is a trick of respect.
-
The invisible snake we all carry around our waists.
-
How we make choices.
-
Love is an incursion.
-
I guess I don't really love my projects. They just fill up time and use up my energy. I don't believe in soulmates but if I did, it would still be him. And I know because I keep looking. And I know because sometimes the writing bursts out of me like magic.
-
I don't even melt over children anymore. Baby fever requires hope, desire, and tenderness that I simply can't spare right now. I am muted and numb.
-
“Desire is no light thing”
--Anne Carson, "The Autobiography of Red"
An ego is a wound, is made up of wounds. Bitch. Whore. Cunt. O.
-
The magic is gone because I sent my soul away. For safety. For profit. For peace.
-
I love my sense of place. I like being a local. This is my home.
-
To serve. To demand service.
Our false need to feel totally independent. Cut off.
The urge to lie, cheat, control others. To shrink, shapeshift, slink away quietly.
-
Am I taking myself too seriously?
-
The choosing. The compulsion. The moment of action.
-
I am a nest, a vessel. I have a will of my own.
All I really want is peace and quiet -- and loved ones who come and go with some regularity.
I feel alone in my brain -- nobody witnessing.
-
Fell asleep early and woke up early -- both times, head full of voices speaking nonsense. Dog tired. Still sick. Lonely and wounded by it. Dishes in the sink. Bathtub needs to be scrubbed. Tried to make myself cum imagining him driving out to see me for the day, where we would go, what we would do. Made me cry.
Devastated by inattention.
-
I am alive. Nothing matters. I guess I'll keep living unless something really terrible happens. I can't give or receive love. The flow of desire and tenderness is broken. No love. No hope. No joy in anything I do.
Nothing matters. I could try to feel angry or cry about it but why bother. This is temporary. I'll be manic again soon.
I'm supposed to write but all I do is spiral and complain.
Nothing matters.
I only make myself chip away at writing and reading to lie to myself about how cool and smart I am. So I can have fodder for the delusions someday.
-
One of the things that annoys me about theory is the way it ignores the sexiness and pleasure of desire. The sterility of theory sometimes irks me.
I need a long, winding conversation in his arms late at night in dim light or total darkness. Love and laughter.
-
Woke early to a golden dawn filling my room -- and a longing to worship a nonexistent lover with my body. My cat feels so good in my lap -- his weight and warmth. Coffee feels good warming me inside.
The sun is warm but the breeze is cool. The grackles sound irritated. The April wind feels delicious on every nerve ending. I get wet and my nipples crave touch. I want to give birth. A black cat prowls around the building; I think he was a kitten last year. I have nothing profound or beautiful to say because the world has said it all perfectly. Another storm is coming.
It's not your cock I want; it's you. I want your body, your moods, your laugh, and your memories.
-
Out walking in the world and I felt that sense of long-awaited, fulfilled deja vu-in-reverse. This moment has been waiting for me. White-blue barn. Wild flowers in overgrown fields. Birds chirping and dive bombing happily because there are no cars or people to disturb their mating and hunting. I feel tethered to my past and to my future as if sliding along an invisible umbilical cord. I think if someone made love to me just right, we'd catch each other up in our timelines like talking fish in each other's nets. Irrevocable.
World-building.
I tied my boots and walked with the wind all the way home.
-
Reading Anti-Oedipus gets me intellectual-horny. I want to talk long and slow with someone until our clothes slide off.
-
"The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves."
"This internal requirement toward excellence which we learn from the erotic must not be misconstrued as demanding the impossible from ourselves nor from others. Such a demand incapacitates everyone in the process. For the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing."
"The erotic functions for me in several ways, and the first is in providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.
Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy. In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea."
-- Audre Lorde, "The Uses of the Erotic" in Sister Outsider
-
Love and sex “are more than just analogous anarchic situations from which people try to build out relational infrastructures for what they want from the world and each other. Their scenes of practice, fantasy, and attachment focus intensely on how, in desire, they seek to upend and reorganize life in extremis, actually pursuing an inconvenient self- and life-disturbance that would help or even force them to unlearn their unfulfilled ways of being in the world as it is.”
-- Lauren Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People
The roads are badly flooded and my heart feels unwieldy.
-
I am alive. I get to do things. I feel so many sensations. The static in my head is temporary. I will find language again someday.
Wordless wrath.
Navigate a new flow of existence, find a new groove.
-
The days are still hot but the evenings have been cool and quiet. It's black walnut season again. I love the yellow leaves and how black with grime and mildew they become.
-
I think men like anal sex because they can enjoy release without the anxiety of consequences (fatherhood) and enjoy that release and relinquishing of their power and authority in the denouement without fear of judgment of a "superior" woman because she too is reduced, almost childlike in her helpless suffering.
-
"When we live outside ourselves, and by that I mean on external directives only rather than from our internal knowledge and needs, when we live away from those erotic guides from within ourselves, then our lives are limited by external and alien forms, and we conform to the needs of a structure that is not based on human need, let alone an individual's. But when we begin to live from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us, then we begin to be responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense."
"In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial."
-- Audre Lorde, "The Uses of the Erotic" in Sister Outsider
-
“Hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being a self in a song”
--Anne Carson, "The Autobiography of Red"
Delusion.
-
A dark and stable center. A firm yet sinuous membrane.
-
Inventing rituals together. Living inside each other's magic.
-
Blending of different forces to generate a new force. Electromagnetism. Life. Flow-disrupting art - theory - philosophy that theorizes itself. A third force that disturbs the regular flow of other forces.
-
Cordyceps. Ants. Zombies. Hyperparasites. A thing that creates itself undeniable.
-
I like it when we move slow, talk quiet. I want his DNA.
-
"The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love - whether we call it friendship or family or romance - is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other's light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another." - James Baldwin
I frequently use men for their warmth.
-
I exist to intrigue, to flatter, to reinforce some melodrama. He needs to live out a seedy fantasy through my body and his urging into it.
-
I forget I can make choices. The effort is too much. I forget how to choose. I am not good enough to turn down a valuable offer. He will never love me. Never read me. Never touch me. I want pain.
-
I'm so tired of feeling nothing but the pull of death or a man.
When I first arrived, he tried to goad me into beating him with a belt, so that he wouldn't feel so guilty when he beat me with one.
-
He says he wants to see me. Bad. But I know him so I try not to get my hopes up. The day arrives. I know he's not coming. I tell myself over and over all week long. Still, as the time inches closer and the disappointment approaches, I get myself ready just in case. I know. I know I have to let him go. Why is it so hard?
I sob for almost an hour. I think it's not just the quiet rejection, it's the ease of his disregard. I am nothing. I am worthless. I've made such a mess of my life: marriage/divorce, career, integrity, friendships, tastes, cosmology, art. He leaves me rotting at my core and I would let him continue for just a little bite of pleasure, or the promise of being seen.
All this suffering and yearning for such an unworthy man -- What does that say about me?
-
I feel nothing when he touches me. Just thrill and fulfillment of curiosity.
-
"There are frequent attempts to equate pornography and eroticism, two diametrically opposed uses of the sexual."
"The severe abstinence of the ascetic becomes the ruling obsession. And it is one not of self-discipline but of self-abnegation."
"To share the power of each other's feelings is different from using another's feelings as we would use a Kleenex. When we look the other way from our experience, erotic or otherwise, we use rather than share the feelings of those others who participate in the experience with us. And use without consent of the used is abuse."
"When we look away from the importance of the erotic in the development and sustenance of our power, or when we look away from ourselves as we satisfy our erotic needs in concert with others, we use each other as objects of satisfaction rather than share our joy in the satisfying, rather than make connection with our similarities and our differences."
--Audre Lorde, "The Uses of the Erotic" in Sister Outsider
-
"They are having sex with themselves through each other, but the selves they are having sex with are a relief from what they had been…"
-- Lauren Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People
-
"To decipher the commodity, we have to look to production, and not consumption, which is only a concomitant of production."
"Human wants of the imaginative type can be vague and illusive as well as unruly and disparate, so our wants are consolidated in such a way that their satisfaction leads directly to products available through commodity exchange."
-- Jane Gaines, "In the Service of Ideology: How Betty Grable’s Legs Won the War"
What is given freely must be made undesirable.
-
Whore-Rhetor
The way Dolores calls Humbert "Dad," and thereby rewrites him more expertly than he could ever hope to rewrite her.
Aspasia
Helen
Bunny Yeager
Sasha Grey
Ironic admissions of the economy of sex without condemning or celebrating the fact of its existence.
Fiona Apple (every post-90s popstar, I suppose)
-
Most of the things I love, I could find almost anywhere.
I have choices.
-
I feel like a cow, loved only for my utility. Low-class beast of burden. Big-eyed and seemingly stupid. Vulgar.
I want to be treated well, cared for tenderly. I wonder what it feels like to be cherished.
-
What does it mean to study sensuality?
-
The Giving Tree
-
A lifetime of rough hands scraping out my insides and all I ever needed were the magic words soaking into my brain.
-
Inside of me, I fear there is a rainbow with nothing but helpless delight. I don't notice threats - or, if I do, I let them come. Is this courage, stupidity, or privilege? All three maybe. Maybe also love.
-
I want to heal him. I want to break the world and make it better for him.
-
“The history of a text is like a long caress.”
“Raising a camera to one’s face has effects no one can calculate in advance.”
“Men had to be taught to hate women.”
-- Anne Carson, "The Autobiography of Red"
-
“Thinking, writing, and reading are integral to our capacities to affect and be affected”
-- Elspeth Probyn
-
“As a pin-up photographer, Yeager's rhetorical argument is problematic: Her work is intentional, persuasive and pervasive. Yet the argument her work presents is one deeply entrenched in postwar femininity and serves as visual evidence of Betty Friedan's feminine mystique.”
"The emotions evoked by pin-ups are no less political if less overtly so. That the emotional nature of pin-ups is often—if not necessarily—sexual complicates our ability to understand them historically not because they are less evocative, less emotional, but because we are often not as willing to admit their sexual power and potency."
"That is, by drawing attention to her gender, Yeager both facilitates gendering (to a male audience reading/looking at a female photographer's images) and deflects it. This establishes her as a professional—while at the same time works as a wink at her male audience."
-- Steven Kapica, "An Iconography of Influence: Bunny Yeager and 1950s Pin-Up Rhetoric"
-
"Thus Aspasia comes down to us as an odalisque, while Alcibades, the object of her attention, comes to us wreathed in laurel."
-- Cheryl Glenn, "Sex, Lies, and Manuscript: Refiguring Aspasia in the History of Rhetoric"
-
“Blasphemy protects one from the moral majority within, while still insisting on the need for community. Blasphemy is not apostasy. Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humor and serious play.”
-- Donna Haraway, "The Cyborg Manifesto"
What am I worth? Where is my dignity?
-
"You're not special. You're just like everyone else."
-
I'm not special. I'm not special. I'm not special. I don't work hard enough. I am the ugliest piece of seaglass, left unloved on the shore. All these humiliations that pile up and beat me down.
-
I want to make you laugh. I wish you would make fun of me a little. Tell me I'm perfect, then tease me anyway. Where do I rank in your erotic fantasies?
-
I still have so much potential. You only have so much potential.
-
I ask him to write me something sexy, tell me a fantasy. Instead, he leaves me on read for an hour then sends a stupid 'dick pic' made of veggies. I am easy to ignore, to avoid and pass over.
-
Do you think of me when you cook, then regret not saving me a plate? He doesn't want me enough to change.
-
Oh, twisted one, I will howl inside your nightmares.
-
He hurt me more than anyone else ever has and I'm not dealing with it because I don't want to lose him.
-
"The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need - the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfilment. Such a system reduces work to a travesty of necessities, a duty by which we earn bread or oblivion for ourselves and those we love. But this is tantamount to blinding a painter and then telling her to improve her work, and to enjoy the act of painting. It is not only next to impossible, it is also profoundly cruel."
-- Audre Lorde, "The Uses of the Erotic" in Sister Outsider
-
“We cannot know each other without being inconvenient to each other.”
-- Lauren Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People
-
"Sometimes grief leads characters to continue the cycle of violence that victimized them, as in the tales of Procne or Hecuba. Powerless to undo trauma, these characters metamorphose first into a potent brew of wrath, grief, and vengeance before losing their humanity, and form, altogether. Ovid is also keenly aware of the gendered dynamics of power—being a woman in this cosmos often means existing on the brink of disempowerment."
"The victim’s objectification is clear: They are first a visual object, then a sexual object, and finally simply an object."
-- Stephanie McCarter
The break. The rupture. Fracture. Snowflake. Spiderweb. Branches of trees. Mitosis.
-
I read. I am changed. I weep.
-
Take off your mask. Bleed. Take off your mask. Void. Take off your mask.
-
Eerie gray June morning. A sharp, rhythmic chirping bird. A thrum that almost sounds like a broken radiator. Mockingbird? Or a creeky table? The air feels dense. The crows sound like autumn. I don't know how to be human today.
I feel my low calm, mellowness, sleepiness. I miss the mania, the outrage with myself.
I try to enjoy this time to myself because I know it won't last forever.
-
I am an anarchist in my soft ways. I am alive and unmoored from so much I used to feel chained to.
-
I want to heal him. I want to break the world and make it better for him.
-
We imploded last night. I don't know if or when we will speak again. I was awful. This feels heavy and dull, like a ten-ton weight I must balance on my head. What have I done? mylovemylovemylovewhathaveidone
I'm so ashamed of my temper and venom.
-
Almost 24 hours not talking to each other. Itching. Dwelling. Fantasizing. Stubbornly trying my best.
I am [a bottle of vodka] [a typewriter] [dirty little bitch] [whore] [confessor] [ugly, awkward bird] [cow] [blood transfusion] [star, gravity] [sunlight] a Witch. A knife. Wings.
I am alive. I get to do things. I feel so many sensations. The static in my head is temporary. I will find language again someday.
Wordless wrath.
Navigate a new flow of existence, find a new groove.
-
Ovid's Metamorphoses:
"The Metamorphoses begins at the very beginning of this world, before grief or love or loss—or even time. The first word after the proem is simply “before,” a word that at once unleashes time into the cosmos. Time becomes the irresistible force propelling the narrative forward, bringing constant change in its wake."
-- Stephanie McCarter
ART that THEORIZES itself. Art so revolutionary, it is compelled to invent its own theory. Art-as-theory that cannot be contained, but spills out or erupts.
Art/theory that sustains transformation, which often feels like death, as a butterfly in a cocoon.
Art-theory that spirals, labyrinths, completes mitosis, and generates hurricanes within our egos.
Art Theory that propels explosively, births strategically, and resists established patterns.
The diligence of ants.
-
I make choices.
-
Static. Choice. Flow and form. Stabilize. Alone.
-
"Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe."
"Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world, rather than merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama."
-- Audre Lorde, "The Uses of the Erotic" in Sister Outsider
-
“A politics of the ordinary requires a different poetics of the event.”
-- Lauren Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People
-
“I need theory because it pushes me to find connections outside myself. In the realm of theory, I generalize from what I know and stretch to think about what I do not directly experience… I am allowed to imagine other ways of being.”
-- Zillah Eisenstein, “The Problem of Theorizing Feminism”
-
I'm at the mercy of my brain chemistry so I try to be an alchemist, alter the formula with drops of distilled poetry.
-
"In both instances, it is creative expression, either through writing or through weaving, that allows these victims to recover their lost voice in defiance of those who have harmed them. Art indeed becomes the most significant means whereby individuals can assert agency."
-- Stephanie McCarter
-
Alison Knowles' The Big Book
Let it speak through me.
-
"You're not special. You're just like everyone else."
-
Teach me. Teach me what I am.
-
"Sing, muse, of the man of twists and turns..."
-
I cannot rewind time. There is no going back. I cannot comb out the tangled tresses of my years. But I have choices. I don't want to be flung this way and that; I want to take control of my timeline. I learn to ride waves and hop over ripples -- feel vibrations in the air and water, keep fire and earth at my core for stability. This is big. I have to be careful.
-
Stopped to meditate along the river. I'm out of practice with the necessary stillness.
-
This love will not just evaporate or fade. It embeds itself into my psyche. I bring him with me wherever I go. He remains. Undercurrent. I would know his shape in the dark, the way I feel his mind inside mine.
-
Pinball.
-
“Optimism is often unbearable; so is the fact of openness to life, which is inevitable but often feels forced… an impossible state of things: the perfect rhythm of being in and out of control, of being open and closed in the right or bearable ways…”
-- Lauren Berlant, Sex Without Optimism
-
"This essay is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction."
-- Donna Haraway, "The Cyborg Manifesto"