Crying

It occurs to me that crying is surely in some part a social act and that therefore isolation may have something to do with tearlessness. It's not everything but it might be a part.

Stink

How strange it is that love makes us ugly. In return, we are able to forget our usual senses and see something else, perhaps only our own desire, reflected beautifully on such a graceless foil. Love is an altered state, a state of ritualized transgression in which the categories of a working state are dissolved. It is the greatest trauma to remain critical during lovemaking, to remain detached and self-aware in a working state.

"Are you into it?" Of course you say yes, what else can you say, but god, oh god, I'm hurting you. You squint in your mind 'til it's twisted and wild, yet nothing's making much sense. "What is this act, this imitation of bile? I'm lost and I'm finally alone." But no, I say, "I'm right here. I'm strange and I'm flesh but I'm yours all the same; just come under this spell like the bed that we've made." But once it's been broken (the sheets are cast off) it's just me and I'm swollen, pubescent and vile. And you, you've just started laughing the laugh of a businessman.

How do I smell to you now?

Memory

I could've easily rationalized not doing this tonight (it's late and I already did writing today) but I didn't. I think this is a good sign. Also it's traditional because the video's loading. Unfortunately I think I'm getting a sore throat. Maybe hope will cure it. Hope is a desert apparently, which needs blood to nourish it. Didn't make sense to me either. Check your metaphors, fanatics, cause I'm here and I'm judging you.

I've decided that Plato probably won't force me to delve into my past, because I can get away with just engaging with the text and going from there, rather than thinking in reference to self alone which is what would get me in trouble. I expect there will be some of that because there was a fair amount of it yesterday and a little bit of it today but for the most part it seems we will be dealing textually which is great by me.

I remember that in middle school I was obsessed with the idea of memory. Specifically, though I don't think I could really articulate this then, the way in which memory was constitutive of the self and the way in which we can understand the experience of memory (this latter is an older question which relates to the embedding of both memory and prediction that tripped me up as a child). I was enticed and confused by the idea that a self could exceed memory. I was thinking about reincarnation; I still feel kind of the same way about it. I think it has to do with a certain sense of continuity. If I am reincarnated but have no memory of my past life, in what sense am I the same self. This assumes some sort of idea of soul. On further thought though, I guess it's simpler than I thought it was. I don't know how I ignored the example of amnesia (maybe I felt differently about it than I do now). At this point I feel that I would be the same as an amnesiac, so I think my crucial problem with reincarnation may in fact merely be the soul thing. Another possibility, maybe this is secondary, is that a critical part of selfhood is the establishment of a life story. The amnesiac has a continuous, though inaccessable, narrative, whereas the reincarnate is essentially starting over in the terms of a conventional narrative structure. I need to get some more water for my throat.

I think that I need to begin questioning my sentence structure again. Not the ones I write here, but in terms of my essays after a while of writing I got cocky and just started assuming that my thoughts translated transparently through my skill at writing into clear sentences. When I got to college that was reinforced by some of the writing I was reading which placed little emphasis on clarity of sentence structure. The things I need to be careful about are places where there is no place to put clarifying punctuation and there is an excessively, probably at least temporarily ambiguous grammatical constituents, like NPs, especially where they are in some sort of relation, where the syntactically important small words get lost among the pretentiously important big NPs. Sometimes I wish I could just bold some words or do lots of parantheses embedding, but in the end it's not that much trouble to restructure I just have to be humble enough to admit that even I don't always get it right the first time.

Back at School

So yesterday I of course rationalized skipping this. I'm trying the after-dinner thing, but for jan-term it may make more sense to do an after-lunch thing, assuming I don't fall asleep like I did today. We'll see. Moving on, I'm on a no inspiration run, so let's start with nothing. Never meant (things said). I never meant anything I ever said, assuming correspondance between thought and speech. Here I lack the Happy Match. Don't really believe it, though. I guess that's what I always am: critical of criticism. Let's just take things as they are. It's about a certain disciplining of the body, a certain 'if you don't like this song you're listening to it wrong'. Keep going. I stopped there for a little while but I can't do that. Chimes are bells, guitars sound like chimes but they lack the complex, even unpredictable non-harmonic overtones. Very strange. Trumpet is softer, even a sharp attack is like a kick in the groin not a knife in the guts. Slow, deep-felt ache that only recedes with a struggle, writhing on the grass. Amherst tomorrow, imperative, no sleeping. I can take the 1:05 or the 2:25 but no later. If I'm efficient I should be able to go to the bookstore and CVS and get back to the bus stop by the time the bus comes back, 20 minutes after it drops me off. Maybe five minutes to get back to the bus stop, five minutes getting to and between the stores and ten minutes in the stores. Maybe more time in transit less in stores. Not sure, but I think I can do it.

Let's just see what happens when the summer ends. Feels like the end of summer because I'm back at school but it's cold cold cold outside and a bath in even the melted snow would feel like a bear hug from a bear made out of cold water because the water would be cold it would be cold it would be snow oh god. 33 degree water must be colder than snow, in terms of how it saps your heat. Must be something to do with the way liquid works. Not that interested in it. More importantly I'm having trouble streaming. I mean, I'm writing but it's not coming real well. I know I said that it didn't have to be transparent or profound or whatever but I really need some kind of reward to feel good about keep on keepin' on. I'll do three paragraphs this time because I think they're a bit longer than some of my previous ones, but still, I need something. Keep on. There's a certain value in fake historical documents, even if they're simple exotifications. Not that this treatment of the exotic is actually good but sometimes I think that it's good there are these negative things because at least we know. The worst thing is a bad thing that happened but no one knows about or acknowledges. Keep studying atrocity. I don't know. I don't really believe that.

The problem with moral and political and especially ontological philosophy is that I gave up on it when I was fourteen. This is the stupid thing. We need philosophy classes in middle school not in college. Well, philosophy class with middle schoolers might also have been torturous, but the point is that I needed that resource and it wasn't there. I can do analytic philosophy now because I've only just come to it; at least, it addresses questions I've come to in the past three or four years, which is less painful than having to delve back into the worst times of my life. Also I never gave up on questions of language and literature like I did on the earlier questions. It was actually kind of exciting for me to realize that even after I thought I had given up on philosophy there were still whole realms that I hadn't given up on, hadn't even thought about. The point is, Plato might be as much an exercise in regression and self-therapy as it is one of philosophy. I don't think I was really ready to deal with all this yet, but I guess I have to now. Maybe.

Of Abortion Grammatology

Priority is on avoiding this becoming a chore. Because then I'll just figure out a way to justify not doing it. And also if this isn't a chore then hopefully writing papers will also be easier. I'm not sure how hopeful I am. I guess it depends on how school goes, how busy I am, what my life is like. Certainly won't have as much free time as I do now, but also may be in a more workman-like mood. Well, I'll just have to take it as it comes. I don't know what precautions I can take, besides planning to write after dinner and trying to think positively about it. I mean, this hasn't been difficult. Doesn't take long. But somehow there's still some anxiety associated with it. About the same amount as the sense of accomplishment it brings, so it balances out; but the structure of motivation, before/after, means that the anxiety will inevitably be stronger than the reward. This is the problem: the stimulus doesn't generalize. I don't know why.

Another observation: it's striking how a lot of people I know who seem quite liberal and open are actually personally quite conservative in terms of sexuality, relationships. Not just people without a lot of experience, either. I guess it's really a deep-seated thing, something quite visceral, the kind of thing evolutionary psychologists spend all their time talking about. Not sure how I feel about evolutionary psychologists right now. It's similar to the kind of thing I've been worrying about: how much can we actually choose this kind of thing. I mean, I know I don't actually believe in these conservative principles about promiscuity and such on one level, but on another, if I actually came into a situation where I had to be comfortable with a lover's promiscuity, would I be able to hold to my beliefs? If I couldn't, then do I actually hold these beliefs? I think everyone comes to a similar quandary, but rationalize it. Ideally, many maybe most people believe that everyone should be loved, but when it comes down to it even a person who strongly believed in this principle often times would find themselves unable to love someone hideous. I think when it comes to love we are basically amoral; love really isn't ethical at all, even though it's supposed to be some ultimate good. It's an evolutionary impulse—still very strong and very important—but we shouldn't rationalize into a force of actual good; it can only inspire good acts (and also bad ones, of course).

On the other hand I think I actually am in some important ways less conservative than a lot of my friends. I'm not going to go around telling everyone to read Bataille (although perhaps this is why Vishnupad teaches), not that anyone would do so anyway. But I think this is really an area that society needs to confront. I'm having trouble not putting this in language of progress (another conflicted issue). Not only is this conservatism a source of widespread harmful repression in adolescent devolopment (the first war), it also marginalises groups who transgress certain taboos. No one's talking about teach-ins for the masochism crowd, and I guess that's not really a good first step. I think the first step is really simply just to encourage people to really, seriously look critically at their own sexuality, to notice what attracts and disgusts them, to understand the inherent connection between the two (this is the point where they resist), and to try to look at others without reference to some societal norm that they have made an essential part of their identity.

New topic, new paragraph. I think I'm done ranting about sexuality. Go back to school tomorrow. For some reason I'm less excited about it than I was a couple days ago, but I'm sure it will be find. Change just always dampens me a bit. Plato should be good, I hope. Maybe it will be like high school that would be good. I don't know if I've ever really looked forward to classes at college as much as I did to Irish lit and Western Civ. Maybe that's because I haven't yet taken a literature class I really enjoyed. Note to self: in the future be more discriminating about who you take literature classes with. I think I've already internalized that lesson. If writing becomes less of a chore, then literature classes really should be fun filler classes for my div II. Filler in that it doesn't directly address the issues I'm interested in. Although maybe eventually teachers will start being self-conscious about their methods of teaching and reading literature. It's a hope.

Slow down, you move too fast

Getting harder. I came to a point where I began writing real things and then it started to fall apart. Too much pressure. I have to go back to streaming. To Just Writing. No need for deep thoughts; I mean, I don't have to push them away, but if I'm not thinking about something coherent I don't need to force myself to do so. I need to get better at streaming. Need to get more comfortable at writing at top speed at writing continuously. There's no other way. Maybe another way. See. Here Just Keep Writing. Anyway, clothes are masturbatory in soft silk in rough linen in a hair shirt I called to you. That is, which is masturbation: soft silk or hair shirt. When I touch myself, when I strike myself, if I hold myself up or hold myself down my self-involvement is unsavory, bitter, metallic.

Coming back. Antipathy gives way to apathy and finally just to pathos itself; that final, singular root of all that is painful and all that is true. Cultured, ash-like masses shout, shout in disunity, in that familiar rhubarb chaos at last at last and the universal all familiar sound is the only real change we have. That scale, that ugly, monstrous scale of a city. The city, the bastion of culture and crowd, of anonymity and re-anonymity. Modern plumbing, plumbing the depths of the complexity resulting from a person and a person, multiplied and reconstituted as a singular mass that has oh-so-much in common, every shared epiphany some kind of trite surprise that, oh, you consume the shit they pump out, too; you have your own shit-filled feeding tube you chose, your target demographic, you target. We're all coprophagics after all and oh the transgression has no taste. It's not the taste that attracts or repels us because this transgression is so much stronger; it's a little bitter but really it doesn't taste like much at all but when we bite down we gag in ecstasy.

Fashion is the same root as all cultural change. A study of fashion could perhaps be the basis of a study of cultural change. Music changes in the same way that fashion does; art is a little different. More self-conscious, more literate, smarter, but less powerful as a cultural force. Maybe that's just what art is now. The novel used to have a comperable force, but it seems somehow different. Ultimately, music and fashion both seem more cyclical; they do not actually repeat themselves, but they constantly consume their pasts in such a way that the pieces of the past are transparent and distinct, like corn. Maybe it's a continuum with fashion at one end and then music and then the novel and then art at the other end. Art is always a tricky category (duh!). But I'm not even sure what the continuum measures. Cyclicality? Everydayness? Should we subdivide fashion as we do art (high and low)? I don't know. I think really when I say I don't understand fashion I'm realizing I don't mean that it's an entirely foreign process but merely that I don't have enough data to form any concrete ideas about it.

Now: see. Eventually we get something concrete. But don't push it. If I want to spend a paragraph:_experimenting_: with punctiation—I'll goddamn do it. But no, I probably won't do that much because punctuation takes a lot of keys holding down to do new things. More likely I'll just do words and words and words. Punctuation doesn't take up much space anyhow—except the dash. That's a good one. Makes justification more difficult but it does take up space. I wonder if someone's done a calculation to determine how long a 10-page paper would be if all the colons were replaced with dashes. Actually it probably would only be a line longer, if that. But it was a nice thought. Cat sits on small round table like a pedestal, tail wrapped round white feet and chest puffed out below big, pleading eyes. Kitty's hungry.

New Year

Presumably some things will change, as a process, as they have before and as they continue to do, no more or less for the digit's promiscuity. There are certain markers of change that are meaningless, such as the new year, and some that are meaningful, such as inauguration. People don't change because they start thinking about change. Change must be scheduled, planned and set into law for me to have any real hope that predictions of change will come true. That is, distinct change—when the slope changes, an asymptote or instantaneous acceleration or decceleration. It's rarely actually instantaneous but in these certain cases we can point to an instant that is meaningfully linked to this change.

Words come slowly, awkwardly, stork-like, tonight. Also my I think there's something stuck under my 'o' key. Well, I took it off and there wasn't anything there, but I put back on again and it seems to be working better now. I guess I'll write about writing again. About this, the point, the blog, etc. I'm not sure specifically what exactly the point is. Where does a block come from? Is it the ideas behind the words? The syntax of stringing the words together? The compositional problem of putting the ideas together? Or maybe the aesthetic problem of making them fit an acceptable form? I'm not sure. Maybe I'll think about it next time I'm stuck. There's a recipe for disaster. More things to distract myself with.

I'll be satisfied with four paragraphs, this length, tonight. Shouldn't take long except—damn you, Stork!—something's sticking. O, apostrophe! Assembly line isn't an apt metaphor but it's one I'll use. There are certain things that are just so applicable that they can be and are used as a metaphor for virtually anything. Assembly line, evolution, I'm sure there's a few more. I could make up a word for them. That's what people on blogs do, right? They make up words and then they say, this is the blog where this word was invented, and then they put up bilboards and product placement and plastic dinosaurs drinking coca-cola behind a silk-screened t-shirt that says 'the bell of the ball' and there's a picture of the liberty bell on it and then at the bottom it says 'my god! she's cracked!' and then on the back there's something completely unrelated.

Colostomy bag. That's a good metaphor. If I need a metaphor for something I want to make people think is icky I'll use that one. Like, Houston is a giant colostomy bag. I don't know if I'm even spelling that right. Oh well. Oh yeah, assembly line. There's something jammed on the assembly line and I'm not sure which station it's at: molding, fitting, quality control... the extension goes on. That was all that was at stake. If I used the evolution metaphor instead I would say, I don't know right now... it doesn't seem to fit as well. That puts a slight wrench in the works. I think it's pretty clear that sentences don't evolve before we spit them out. So I guess these aren't universal metaphors; they're just hyper-applicable and well known.