The nervous fluid of a city is similar to a grammar or an electric current. Loving and loathing, we circulate. I myself did not exist before bathing in this medium. Here I become a style of enunciation, a strategic misunderstanding, a linguistic funnel, a wedge in language. Here I thought I’d destroy my origin, or I did destroy it, by becoming the she-dandy I found in the margins of used paperbacks. What do I love ? I love the elsewhere of moving clouds. Reading unfolds like a game called ‘I,’ in public gardens in good weather, in a series of worn-down…
Do you sometimes at earliest waking observe yourself struggling towards a pronoun ? Do you fleetingly, as if from a great distance, strain to recall who it is that breathes and turns ? Do you ever wish to quit the daily comedy of transforming into the I‑speaker without abandoning the wilderness of sensing ? The sensation isn’t morbid ; it is ultimately disinterested. For me it’s a familiar moment, boring and persistent and disappointing. Again one arrives at the threshold of this particular, straitening I. With a tiny wincing flourish one enters the wearisome contract, sets foot to planks. Daily the humiliation is almost…
Baudelaire, so bitterly wracked with ambivalence, with rejection and debt, anachronistically repudiated the ideology of capital. His realism would recognize the spiritual complexity of dispossessed lives. He undoubtedly projected his aesthetic emotions on those outsiders cursed by Haussmann’s city ; he loved actresses, street singers, old women, acrobats, and prostitutes. He loved Jeanne Duval. He reconstructed the baroque city he required in Le Spleen de Paris, a city whose equivocity could enfold both pleasure and doubt. In Baudelaire’s cosmos, bizarre beauty was necessarily striated with irony, anger, and refusal. The old pleasure had been lost, and the new had not yet…
My youthful commitment to the identity of beauty with freedom had been experimental, in the sense that usefully recognizing oneself as a girl was an experiment. I had absorbed the commitment from the literature, trying it on like a rhetoric that I called passion, loving the interior thrill of difference I felt as the tiny identifications operated within me, interpreting the thrill as my own emotion, not recognizing that what this thrill covered over was a worried questioning, not yet linguistic, about the scorn that bordered beauty’s literary description. The man-poets scorned what they desired ; their sadistic money was such…