My dear, if it is not a city, it is a prison.
If it has a prison, it is a prison. Not a city.
Citations
1. Notes Toward a Theory of the Crush, Crush’s Discourse, Ma Vie en Crush.
2. Tableau vivant of extant crushes with possibility of sexual consummation determining centrality.
3. Tableau vivant of former crushes, all asleep on the floor.
4. Hidden track of embarassing crushes on an otherwise unlistenable album.
5. Regarding the crush of never-to-be-lovers, these subcategories : the never-to-be-lovers of who is already spoken for ; the never-to-be-lovers of geographical impossibility ; the never-to-be-lovers of sexual incompatibility ; the never-to-be-lovers of the narcissism of small differences ; the never-to-be-lovers of asymmetrical desire.
6. Some species of crushes : the crush of intersecting research interests, the crush of good politics, the crush of great poems, the crush of proximity, the crush of lack of proximity, the crush on who you’ve never met, the crush on whoever sits next to you and begins to talk, the crush on the highly informed gossip, the crush on who leads with cruelty and ends with affection, the crush on who leads with affection and ends with cruelty, the crush on whoever you are content to observe, the crush on who you think could use a little more education, the crush on a fighting spirit.
7. And what are the territories beyond the territory of the crush ? Romantic love ? Sex ? Friendship ? Apathy ? Literary journals ? Unsent emails ? Armed cells ?
the stupid logic of dinner
We were not innocent. Our education was authored by our senses. Our lambness was written into our bodies with the violence of the world as it is, yet our interest in understanding the lamb’s education, in the lamb’s way of knowing, began to take the form of the bird of prey’s pursuit. We were at once formed by grudge and narrowed by desire. In everything we wanted, all we acquired, and in how we could not want, how we could acquire nothing, we were simultaneously lamb and bird of prey.
Our mixed nature was not innocent. No matter how much predator-like acquisition of the predator’s way learning acts upon a lamb-interior, a lamb still appears to all who see it like a lamb. The lamb might be a doubly conscious lamb, but the bird of prey’s stupid logic of dinner remains, for the time being, the logic of the world.
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« When the lambs rise up »
A handbook of disappointed fate
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p. 21
History is full of people who just didn’t. They said no thank you, turned away, ran away to the desert, stood on the streets in rags, lived in barrels, burned down their own houses, walked barefoot through town, killed their rapists, pushed away dinner, meditated into the light. Even babies refuse, and the elderly, too. All types of animals refuse : at the zoo they gaze dead-eyed through plexiglass, fling feces at the human faces, stop having babies. Classes refuse. The poor throw their lives onto barricades. Workers slow the line. Enslaved people have always refused, poisoning the feasts, aborting the embryos. And the diligent, flamboyant jaywalkers assert themselves against traffic as the first and foremost visible, daily lesson in just not.
Saying nothing is a preliminary method of no. To practice unspeaking is to practice to being unbending : more so in a crowd. Cicero wrote “cum tacent, clament”—“in silence they clamor”—and he was right : only a loudmouth would mistake silence for agreement. Silence is as often conspiracy as it is consent. A room of otherwise lively people saying nothing, staring at a figure of authority, is silence as the inchoate of a now-initiated we won’t.
Sometimes our refusal is in our staying put. We perfect the loiter before we perfect the hustle. Like every other toddler, each of us once let all adult commotion move around our small bodies as we inspected clover or floor tile. As teens we loitered, too, required “security” to dislodge us, like how once in a country full of freely roaming dogs, I saw the primary occupation of the police was to try to keep the dogs out of the public fountains, and as the cops had moved the dogs from the fountains, a new group of dogs had moved in. This was just like being a teenager at the mall.
There is no superiority in making things or in re-making things. It’s like everything else, old men who go fishing, hair extensions, nail art, individual false eyelashes glued on with semi-permanent glue, sewing clothes and re-sewing clothes, sketching, sketching animals, sketching human faces, sketching flowers, growing flowers, flowers, flowers that might even be marigolds and petunias, perfume that smells like party girls, perfume that smells like dowagers, perfume that does not smell like flowers or more like flowers mixed with the urine of jungle animals and some tobacco smoke, perfume that does not smell like men, one faux-Chanel earring, sunglasses resembling those of RAF leader Ulrike Meinhof, hair pinned up on one side, purses that are not real, pockets on dresses and skirts, dresses and skirts, blouses without buttons, limiting each type of possession to one old suitcase full of that type of possession, track suits with rhinestones, zip up onesie track suits, plump women, fat children, fat dogs, slender men, photos of Angelica Houston, the cracked dirty swimming pools of low-rent apartment complexes, bleach-haired boys smoking dope against the chain-link fence, the workers walking to their strip mall jobs, the strip malls, the dumpsters behind the strip malls, the karaoke nights in the bars in the strip malls, physique training, hypertrophy, very heavy weights, Juicy Stacey, Toy Selectah, every apartment complex having its own ducks, waking each spring morning to those ducks, the stateless state of contract labor, the invisible iv also the invisible catheter, everyone hugging the duct tape replica like starving little rhesus monkeys, everything in the everything like “there is no world but the world!”
Other things that cause discomfort : people picking through the trash for their food. There are those who want “only the best” and those who believe only-the-best is immoral. I would talk about these two impulses, one for comfort, the other for justice, and how one appears animal, the other not that animal at all, for what dog says of her litter, “It is not only my own that should have my milk, but I will suckle the world”? I would like to meet that dog. I am the dog who can never be happy because I am imagining the unhappiness of other dogs.
Some people believe to know the fin is to know a shark, but this is an incorrect belief. The fin is not a fin of a shark at all though it is a reproduction shark fin strapped on a boy’s back, and the boy with the reproduction fin does very much want to be a shark, wishes it a great deal, dreams some nights of being a shark in a great fleet of sharks in some unexplored sea where sharks are in fleets and somewhat even more powerful that the sharks of the daytime world have shark banks full of money and minnows. One could be, also, a person with a fabulous malformation of a shark fin on her back, who says often “please excuse the fin” but others look at it and say, “look at that grand shark with that awesome fin” when she is, underneath the fin, a person who is fond of peeling carrots for soup and a person who could otherwise just not help the fin that fortune dealt her. Some could be real sharks, the fin an adequate representation of sharkly reality : that’s just the deal.
Nous avons dansé ensemble toutes les figures que l’on peut imaginer : passion, tendresse, folie, trahison, colère, grotesque, ennui, amour, mensonges, joie, naissances, coup de tonnerre, clair de lunes, meubles, articles ménagers, jalousies, grands lits, lits étroits, adultères, dépassements des limites, bonne foi – et encore –, larmes, érotisme, rien qu’érotisme, catastrophes, triomphes, contrariétés, injures, bagarres, angoisse, angoisse, désir, ovules, sperme, menstrues, départs, slips – et encore –, mieux vaut en finir avant que ça ne déraille – impuissance, lubricité, horreur, approche de la Mort, la Mort, nuits noires, nuits d’insomnie, nuits blanches, musique, petits déjeuners, des seins, des lèvres, des images, tourne-toi vers la caméra et regarde ma main, je la tiens à droite de la brochure, peau, chien, les rituels, le canard braisé, le bifteck de baleine, les huître abîmées, tricheries, cachotteries, viols, beaux habits, bijoux, attouchements, baisers, épaules, hanches, lumière étrangère, rues, villes, rivales, séducteurs, des cheveux dans le peigne, les longues lettres, les explications, tous les rires, le vieillissement, les ennuis de santé, les lunettes, les mains, les mains, les mains – voici que je termine ma litanie –, les ombres, la douceur, je t’aide, la côte à l’horizon, la mer – et maintenant, le silence.
Le plus dur, c’est l’heure du loup, entre trois et cinq heures. Quand viennent les démons : les regrets, l’ennui, la peur, le malaise, la fureur. Ça ne sert à rien d’essayer de les endiguer, ça devient encore pire. Quand mes yeux sont fatigués de lire, j’ai la musique. Je ferme les yeux et je donne libre cours aux démons : venez, je vous connais, je sais comment vous fonctionnez, allez‑y jusqu’à ce que vous en ayez assez, je ne résiste pas. Les démons deviennent alors de plus en plus rageurs et au bout d’un moment, le fond cède, ils se montrent ridicules, ils disparaissent et je m’endors pour une heure ou deux.
En général, les gens vont et viennent comme autant de symphonies d’odeurs : poudre, parfum, savon au goudron, urine, sexe, sueur, pommade, crasse, relents de cuisine. Certains sentent l’être humain en général.