Consider the category of desire that is the desire to make a stony expression break. Think of those humans who are attractive for the primary reason of how the presentation of their face and body is impenetrable or brooding or fierce or impassive with brooding fierceness. This category of desire is simple, slightly mechanistic : to penetrate the brooding, fierce, impassive, impenetrable presentation. There are several ways to make a stony expression break. These include to enrage, to surprise, to humiliate, to sadden, and to give pleasure. The experts at impassive expression, however, are not so vulnerable to sadness, rage, or…
Think of the way one person can make you feel, also the way that one person is only one. Why want that one person who is only, after all, one person, and why wake up longing for a person and fall asleep longing for the same person and who knows if anyone else in this is longing ? You don’t know if that one person is longing, too. the over-determination of each thing unheld That person who is only one person is just as over-determined as anything else unheld, over-determined like an angelic realm or the commune or whatever else you…
The harm will come : it never doesn’t. It will open up our chests and enter here. Some days it will come by fortune, some days by no agent in particular, and sometimes others will bring it to us, either willfully or on accident. Those others might trip, the harm spilling out of their arms onto us. We might all look at each other startled. We might all have the harm then and eyes full of tears. The others might take one look at us or many looks at us and decide we deserve the harm. We will look back at…
Doing the dishes is not like freedom. Freedom is whatever we notice because it isn’t like doing the dishes. The ordinary is ordinary because it ordinarily repeats : taking care lacks freedom’s entertainments and its exceptions. For any author of doing the dishes, the best part of the story would be the story of missing out on everything else while the dishes are being done. Or a person could be a modernist of the dishes and make a stream of consciousness account of an attempt to flee dish-sink reality. But it would be easy for any of those accounts of doing…
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…
The tears are automatic. They drip down the cheeks, dampen books, keyboards, dinner plates, postcards, steering wheels. I don’t weep from sorrow. I weep as a symptom. I don’t want to cry, but I do because of a medicine. It is as if my body weeps on its own behalf. My body has reason to weep – more reason than I do – but there are times I join my tears in their crying, adding to the tears of side effet the tears of cause. Disease has bullied me into Cartesianism, but the mixed tears undo division through liquification. Can…
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…
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…
Tu tombes dans un trou, et tu dis « ouais non c’est pas ma tombe, je me tire de ce trou », tu sors du trou qui n’est pas la tombe, tu tombes de nouveau dans un trou, et tu dis « ouais non c’est toujours pas ma tombe, je me tire de ce trou », tu tombes dans un autre trou ; des fois tu tombes dans un trou à l’intérieur même d’un trou, ou dans plusieurs trous à l’intérieur de trous, et tu sors de l’un puis l’autre, et puis tu retombes et tu dis « c’est pas ma tombe, je me tire de…
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…
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…
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…
At the fullest expression of its treatment, breast cancer is near total strike : striking hair, striking eyelashes, striking eyebrows, striking skin, striking thought, striking language, striking feeling, striking vigor, striking appetite, striking eros, striking maternity, striking productivity, striking immune system, negated fertility, negated breasts. Self-manage, the boss that is everyone says : work harder, stay positive, draw on eyebrows, cover your head with a wig or colorful scarf, insert teardrop- or half-a-globe-shaped silicone under your scarred skin and graft on prosthetic nipples or tattoo trompe‑l’œil ones in pubescent pink or have flaps of fat removed from your back or belly and…
Every movie I watch now is a movie about an entire cast of people who seem to not have cancer, or at least this is, to me, its plot. Any crowd not in the clinic is a crowd that feels curated by alienation, all the people everywhere looking robust and eyelashed and as if they have appetites for dinner and solid plans for retirement. I am marked by cancer, and I can’t quite remember what the markers are that mark us as who we are when we are not being marked by something else. Anne Boyer The Undying Penguin 2019…