Passive in Revolution

grief sharpens us

turns us into the ghosts we are

slap happy in the world 

you can't survive living

i have adjusted my expectations around you

i have retrieved the significant bytes from previous dialogues

i have attributed values to the 1s and 0s used in each string

i have typed these symbols in the text box [$#!?]

i have anonymously answered three questions about myself 

that only eternity can hold 

i have become incoherent passive in the revolution 

as predicted by television 

i have telescoped my thoughts to the smallest diameter

i am winking at you across the borders of declension 

have you had enough water today 

right shift + control: delete your notions of absurd

it's taxing to be a poet

in baseball season. and without. 

amidst a pandemic. or without. 

we write about the moon. 

but it's not like i really want 

to end up alone there.

Don't Be Afraid

this is the us of our country. the us of our diligent courses. the us of financial disparity. the us of consuming resources. the us of hoarding. the us of instant gratification. the us of short attention spans. the us of enslavement under different names. the us of concentration camps, of prisons, of anything but freedom, home of the brave.

please be brave.

capture as blocks of time. i was in the moment listening. i was in the net, internetted to notions of lovely, shaped by direct messages & alerts and not by touch, the sound of your voice is a memory but i have scrolls of words that will nail you into place. 

 

this is a story of failure, the ways we collapse collectively. 

found our discomfort is what we call every day. 

 do you feel historical today, i mean, hysterical. i mean no one can work. no one 

can function. i mean how do you not marvel every day at the psychological 

warfare we're being asked to exist under

 emotions are the entertainment of distraction

it's when you feel nothing anymore that we can begin 

to deprogram you 

how long is this internment? 

 or what is the length of your belief in time. 

 

 

 

Observation determines reality

 

Information received by the optic nerve is always interpreted as light. The trifecta of seeing involves the external reality, which is a series of waves and particles, the retina’s absorption of said material and the mind’s interpretation, which is what we call “the world.” The world secretly thought by a woman dreaming and dead. The fact that we are able to coexist in an interpreted reality that each of us perceives as completely unique means at some fundamental level, consciousness must not be subject to any separation. My dreaming is your dreaming as the truth of reality is no more than vibration and light. 

 

 

And when was the last time you felt a particular aversion or attachment to light waves or photon particles or neutrinos? How else to make the narrative of the felt world go than to create a mind that could take all of that input and create a new program full of graphics so complex, we might actually forget it is all manufactured. 

 

The actual statistical chances of meeting the people you need to meet in this world to grow and learn on your path is astronomical because of the number of beings on this planet, so it is either true that every one you meet is meant to change you exactly as they do in their entanglement or that the universe is exact and you only meet exactly who you need to entangle with or as Schrödinger, tells: reality is a dead and a live cat at all possible moments. 

 

I’m not advocating for specialized love here, as much as I am saying one can recognize the intricacy of the maze they are within without becoming enamored of the walls. I would rather love be continually warehoused in the body of the poem, in the makeshift of art where upon the cave walls we have thrown our shadows and believed in our dancing selves. The play of life should remain as such and can you see it around you always, so tell me too, how did we transform these naughty angels and better yet, tell me how we want to transform again into natures of light….

Something is Being

Time sampling is a form of poetic entanglement. This is a photograph of the residue of stars, the ash of designed universals, the way light trespasses into infinity. Once upon a time there was an explosion of sound, cataclysm of pressure so we digitize the archives to complete the radical swerve we cultured. The camera is a device for erasure, not catalogue. It is the way the poet is a danger to everyone because an inability to contain measures crutches the established norms. 

Something is being conveyed instantaneously. 

               And yet the mind remains nothing but emptiness. 

But what can we know about emptiness except in relation to all that we must abandon: It is almost as if consciousness created all of this not out of desire for, but a desire to depart from, so that we could determine the truth of what is.

Digital cameras sample light from our world, or outer space, spatially, tonally and by time. Spatial sampling means the angle of view that the camera sees is broken down into the rectangular grid of pixels. Tonal sampling means the continuously varying tones of brightness in nature are broken down into individual discrete steps of tone. If there are enough samples, both spatially and tonally, we perceive it as faithful representation of the original scene. Time sampling means we make an exposure of a given duration.

But let me ask you: Does potentiality entangle with the environment? 

Do we create the potential for attachment or aversion, or is it beyond our control?

 

 

Is tradition a verb?

Day 2:

Patience brings you closer to reality. You ask how to breathe like a worm under soil watery, what floats in memory. You take it out. You put it back. You can close your eyes, and still smell the way the photos ran on the walls. You can smell a city of death inside you always. What miracle you are now. What fire carried you on the surface from there to this new paradise of absurd infrastructure, designed to fail, you ask. Is a city designed to always break?

**************************************
Process Notes:

I was 28 years old when Katrina & the federal levee failure destroyed New Orleans. I had a 2 year old daughter and I was 4 months pregnant with my son. I had just bought my first house. We packed for 3 days when we evacuated. I wouldn’t go back to the house for 2 years. I think if that woman could survive then I must be able to survive now. But maybe I survived then because I survived now. Perhaps, I was writing the survival of myself now and it depends on what I am able to hold here more than there.

what we forget to attend to

is what isn’t there

what is invisible

it seems ] what seems]

         [ever since    [we met

inside the matrix]

         a lot has been shutting down

[first me

             ] first me

         now [now] the world

Final Symptoms that emerge in PTSD:

excessive shyness

muted or diminished emotional response

inability to make commitments

chronic fatigue or very low physical energy

immune system problems

psychosomatic illnesses

depression, feelings of impending doom

feelings of detachment, alienation, and isolation

diminished interest in life

fear of dying, going crazy or having a shortened life

frequent crying

abrupt mood swings

exaggerated or diminished sex drive

amnesia and forgetfulness

feelings and behaviors of helplessness

inability to love, nurture or bond with others

difficulty with sleep

reduced ability to deal with stress

-Walking the Tiger

Photograph: 

A brick wall with weeds growing out of it taken near the Bayouk Choupic/ Bayou St. John

29.9755° N, 90.0852° W

“The word bayou comes from bayuk, meaning minor streams in the language spoken by the Choktaw, believed to have been one of the Native American nation-groups that inhabited this area before the Europeans settled here. The Native Americans called the bayou area Bayouk Choupic, after the mudfish, and built thatched homes near its bank.  Groups from the Chapitoulas nation are thought to be the first to inhabit the area. Another nation-group, the Choctaw had noted the advantages of living near this waterway and transported food and other goods on the bayou. They also traveled to the Mississippi River, by way of the bayou and a path now called Bayou Road. Ultimately, a trading village was established at Bayouk Choupic and Bayou Road.”

Source: https://www.datacenterresearch.org/pre-katrina/orleans/4/43/snapshot.html

“It all started the year after the storm, residents say. If the bayou was unsightly before Katrina, it was even bleaker right after. Floodwaters were pumped out of the city, but sluice gates were still closed, which caused low water levels in the bayou and high salinity, according to the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation. That wrought damage on the bayou’s already compromised environment, and exposed the tires, drowned cars and shopping carts that had been trapped in the water.”

https://midcitymessenger.com/2014/01/12/bayou-st-john-residents-look-into-restricting-activity-near-the-waterway/

 

Helicopter crashed near Bayou St. John, 2005

Bricks & Environmental Contamination:

Currently, the use of brick has remained steady, at around seven to nine billion a year, down from the 15 billion used annually during the early 1900s. In an effort to increase demand, the brick industry continues to explore alternative markets and to improve quality and productivity. Fuel efficiency has also improved, and by the year 2025 brick manufacturers may even be firing their brick with solar energy. However, such changes in technology will occur only if there is still a demand for brick.

Even if this demand continues, the brick industry both here and abroad faces another challenge: it will soon be forced to comply with environmental regulations, especially in the area of fluorine emissions. Fluorine, a byproduct of the brickmaking process, is a highly reactive element that is dangerous to humans. Long-term exposure can cause kidney and liver damage, digestive problems, and changes in teeth and bones, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has consequently established maximum exposure limits. To lessen the dangers posed by fluorine emissions, brickworks can install scrubbers, but they are expensive. While some plants have already installed such systems, the U.S. brick industry is trying to play a more important role in developing less expensive emissions testing methods and establishing emission limits. If the brick industry cannot persuade federal regulators to lower their requirements, it is quite possible that the industry could shrink in size, as some companies cannot afford to comply and will go out of business.

Source: http://www.madehow.com/Volume-1/Brick.html#ixzz6TPrOxQM9

“The dreamer in his corner wrote off the world in a detailed daydream that destroyed, one by one, all the objects in the world”  -Bachelard, Poetics of Space

“Tradition can be a verb. It isn’t over yet. It hasn’t become history yet.” -Johnny Vidacovich

Plague Journal:

5.7.20

dear unica: do you remember seven years in the bardo? how we jumped, fled like an angel. winged our way out here. do you recall the in between. dreaming of dolls & men. how we trapped ourselves in the image. strap now to a life of carry: father in the exotic & mommy gone away & what of being bound to a brother. how we rewrite all narratives. shaving it down. did we murder the airwaves with our talk of revenge. tell me, even now do you love the extra pages of blank days till we outnumber time itself & what did we war within….

Resources: 

http://archive.oah.org/special-issues/katrina/Raeburn.html

You can't wipe your tears

MILKY WAY

a coin placed on the headstone
           mark a bargaining     for life

          she is "great flood" Mehet-Weret

               
always cross roaded       never still, this circle

i was wedded to the root, she says, great tap root, and i think i will make it a poem, no not a poem, i will make it a book, no not a book, i will make it a mapping, an escape route, do you recall we were always this side of the river, i was silt legged, a pelican not of color but rooted to region, i mean we rot here, she said name a hue to protect you, and it washes down, the eyes cast of i could never be a clever girl, can you... i have always been surrounded by women, or angels, i mean, have you ever left your body. you know when you can't feel. it only occurred to me after four decades that i have never really felt anything at all.




     i swayed barge giver
                    crossing water is a junction
                                   no one stays on the boat, girl

you have to choose a shore sooner or later
             step out and it's an  either/ either
                                    we're never leaving this cave
   & it's because the fire is nowhere near burning out


her name is domain of horrors. did you translate that right. i have been in these hospitals most of my lives. do you mean life. but there were some i forgot. tell me what year it is. it's two different years across continents. right now, you could take my hand and we would be in the futuring. i am dreaming we made it. i am dreaming i slipped out the window. did you jump. she died a few times. but one of us survived. i put hysteria in my pocket. i had to steal it.

  be careful touching a beast burning.

          i held inside me the grief i slipped from each of you.

          i rolled inside me like pearls the damage, all of the suffer you
kissed me. you fucked me. you put inside me. you laid your hand
in my hand and i breathed in.        did you think i was just your friend, another human?

                  i am devouring. as she has always been,    i have yet to meet the face

 that calms this trampling.        this is the year i said good bye to masking.



    the sistrum leaks. take a travel, i am gone blood thirsting to silk roads of soft landing.

             there is a type of petal that will not burn.

                 tell me you mean the naming.







                       

dear poetry, who takes away darkness

dear poetry,

what to do with strangers who come into our lives like a new word on the tongue and delicious this glistening, i sounded/ it blew me up/ carved meat of repetition, disrupt the feel of your hands running wild over my skin, when i come to: be inside me. when i come to: here made treacherous. abandoned gaze, i seep auto-narrated into shaming this derelict, weather against me, serum down to rot, mouth sewn shut to eyes held down a penny for each last thought then to cross upon verses. i call this light as a feather my tongue wet to the edge where the scream fell off: what are we exactly in this space between veils, the space of the poem writing itself, Oh Megan, it mutters, all of your life hidden safe to hear voices till this is what you have become. fettered to i want to make a cage big enough to hide the cage i am inside of. whatever you know is words. i can hear the sounds of the dead ringing. i can hear a babble of tongues, a language i fail translating, the din of transmission, i could tell you how exact this one takes: remember how you danced beside me. will you lay down beneath my feet: madness the seraph unfolds. no one's hunger meets yours. no one eats and eats this sacrifice of fill then looks up to see the same story woven into the cloth, an all down the table top where we feasted on what was left.

GHOST: ménage à trois

-->

In the infamous "GHOST" pottery scene, Demi Moore’s character, Molly, and Patrick Swayze’s character, Sam, have a seductive moment while both shaping a phallic mold of clay on the pottery wheel. The “other” in this instance is the phallus on the wheel, which they both grasp. And it is the most seductive source of the scene, not the later images where they fumble through clothes groping each other as The Righteous Brothers croon in the background. It is the initial moment when their hands, wet and covered in clay reach out to grasp and hold the phallus, to stroke and mold around the head of it: That leaves the impression.

The subtext of the cuckolding of Sam is woven throughout the film. Or the reality of the triangulation of desire, that the ultimate state of seduction is not on the body but is on the mind’s knowledge that desire is being witnessed.

In an incredible beyond the dead cuckold scene, the ghost of Sam witnesses his former friend now murderer, try to seduce his fiancé. Carl makes a move spilling coffee on his shirt in order to remove it so that he can display his masculine chest, a nod back to the opening scene in the film where two shirtless men, Carl and Sam, flank a diminutive overall wearing Demi Moore as they sledge hammer a wall down. Three bodies, some partially clothed, covered in sweat and grime wielding heavy tools as they demolish a wall. The question of desire here is whom does Carl actually desire? Does he desire to possess Molly or to possess Sam whose life he will take or both? Is Carl metaphorically the phallic mold on the pottery wheel that if Sam and Molly could have reached out to grasp would have changed the arc of the story? Did Sam and Molly take Carl to bed after this initial renovation scene and we missed it? Is it the missing link as to why Sam’s best friend seemingly went off the rails, murdered Sam for a measly 80K and then preceded to follow it up by attempting to murder two women.  Or is it because they couldn’t take him to bed, they couldn’t enact the unspoken desire created by their triangle because their heteronormative coupling outline did not allow it.  Or are we to believe Carl is just evil and this is just the evil men do?

Sam ends the cuckold scene where he is silent witness to Carl’s seduction of Molly by knocking over a picture, essentially finding his ability to enact his will upon the scene even without his corporeal body to stand in place. This is pivotal because the other underlying desire in GHOST is belief.

Does desire occur in the body or the mind? Does love lie in language, actions or in our will to believe in it?

Parameters of desire: Demi Moore’s body versus Whoopi Goldberg’s body

what is the fluidity involved in the traditional ghost story as transitional from here to there, alive to dead, between worlds… corporeal or spirit.

The most complicated threesome in the movie is enacted on the women's bodies. 

Of course it is.... the most complicated threesomes in every movie are enacted on women's bodies. 

Whoopi Goldberg's character, Oda Mae Brown, agrees to allow Sam to inhabit her body in order to have a physical form to touch Molly.  The complications of a white man inhabiting an African American woman's body in order to enact desire on a white woman's body is such a nesting doll of political and ethical difficulties that I would have to dedicate another blog post just to this one scene. 

The way that this scene is filmed speaks to how difficult the subject matter is: Once Sam inhabits Oda Mae's body, we never see her body touching Molly's. We instead enter a fantasy where we bear witness to Sam, now incorporeal again, having a tender scene with his wife. This heteronormative fantasy is so powerful, we literally suspend the reality of what is happening. 

Think about that for a minute: We forget what is happening when we are presented with a powerful hegemonic fantasy. 

This is how culture works.  Thankfully, Goldberg won an Oscar for this role, because the amount of emotional labor she probably had to do to perform this scene is beyond language. The suppression of self to be more palatable is never not vicious.

“And I won an Oscar because of Patrick Swayze,” Goldberg said. In her 1991 Oscar speech, she thanked Swayze, calling him “a stand-up guy.”

The first time I touched a penis I cried. Surely, this scene holds some meaning.

"Mimetic Desire" as Rene Girard explains it is the desire for objects or people influenced by others. So our desire then is not our own, but influenced by the other's desire. We enact and are subjected to mimetic desire every day endlessly. It is the basis of all advertising and marketing, but how does it then slip into the language of love? 

Online dating is the epitome of mimetic desire in the domain of romantic desire. An endless scrolling of available choices dilutes the possibility of specialized desire to nothing. When confronted with endless possibility, we believe the fantasy. We forget the reality in order to believe the slip of the camera, which shows us we have choices and options; we are indeed in control of our relations with others. The opposite of freedom is actually the possibility of infinite choices that don't feed us, but in fact deplete us. See Capitalism. See Consumerism. See what we have done to the place we call home in the name of being an "urbanized" society. 

How do we confront risk when faced with it all? And/ or if we do dissolve the notion of specialized love are we as a species actually ready for the idea of unconditional love. 

I'm fascinated by the changes in the conversation from when I began dating as a teen in the early 90s to today with options in contrast to monogamy that exist now. But what I find is the conversations and ideas around open/ poly/ ethical nonmonogamy are leading before the practice. And perhaps this is how it must go. Perhaps the idea must be taken into the community, disseminated and then practiced before the actual concept can take root. 

Most people I've met who either successfully or unsuccessfully practice any of the above rules of relationship parameters seem to still operate in the sphere of specialized love and the sphere of specialized love requires hierarchy, and hierarchy then leads to power struggles. 

Srećko Horvat in his book: The Radicality of Love states: 

This is the meaning of "falling in love." We take the risk, whatever the consequences might be. Even if we are aware that this fatal encounter will change the very coordinates of our daily lives, we insist on it precisely because of that. What else is there to be done?

What can be done?

What can be done?

Perhaps we could remember we were a species who did not always fall for the trap of specialized love, perhaps we can remember as a species that control of people begins in the roots of how we are taught to love and how we receive love. And that no equality or freedom exists when we love one above another. 

Perhaps...

The Righteous Brothers’s 1965 cover of “Unchained Melody”

Oh, my love
My darling
I've hungered for your touch
A long, lonely time

And time goes by so slowly
And time can do so much
Are you still mine?

I need your love
I need your love
God speed your love to me

Lonely rivers flow to the sea, to the sea
To the open arms of the sea
Yes, lonely rivers sigh, "Wait for me, wait for me
I'll be coming home, wait for me"

Oh, my love
My darling
I've hungered, hungered for your touch
A long, lonely time

And time goes by so slowly
And time can do so much
Are you still mine?

I need your love
I need your love
God speed your love to me

Tell Me I'm A Bad Girl, Dick

Dear Chris:

Let's talk about voyeurism and how it relates to art and how it relates to sex and how it relates to being alive.

The astounding thing about pornography is the amount of repetition and how little variation is needed to stimulate response.

In Episode 2 of I Love Dick, there's a great sex scene right at the beginning that works on several levels to capture a "female" gaze from both within the scene and external to the scene. It's interesting that the word "scene" is often used in S&M play to delineate the borders around fantasy and reality. A scene has parameters, and it has a clear beginning and an ending with characters "acting" out their roles. This fact is crucial. Within the anatomy of the S&M scene, there is at once the person and the role played by the person, a duality from which pleasure is derived on a single body.

Take note: This is art. This is the body. This is the body. This is art.

We as viewers of the scene in I Love Dick interrupt. We have not been made privy to the rules of the scene. We know the players, but we don't know the guidelines. Film creates a heightened sense of the role of the voyeur more so than almost any other medium. Here we are in the bedroom while Chris and Sylvere fuck and while a fantasy Dick watches, and we watch. The artist aware always that the art we make is subject to an audience we will never meet. And so we watch the watcher watching and even here now, as you read this, find yourself the watcher watching me watching Dick watching Chris.... it's an endless gaze.

Not a male gaze.... an endless gaze. For what is sweeter than the thing itself is sometimes knowing the witness is there to absorb your pleasure, to record and take note of your experience. It's why children look to the gaze of the parent. I both experience the world and I experience the world through that which adores me... my experience witnessed. It's the appeal of social media, the root of all religion. The gaze. We are never alone. We are so precious as to elicit the desire of a constant gaze.

There is no couple that does not triangulate. Here the scene is literally made flesh through Chris' desire. It's the woman's fantasy, and yet it still pivots on the standard roles. Dick is bad daddy. Chris is the bad girl. Why does this get repeated so often? Role Play like pornography seems to be suspended in its own repetition, an ouroboros of caught langauge, a script from which we enact and reenact the Freudian theater of childhood abandonment and desire for total union. Dick, with Chris' letter in his hands is actually taking cues from Chris. She is calling the scene and it is as if Sylvere is not there at all.

Classic Cuckold S&M game: 

In 1966, Lenore Kandel wrote a small pamphlet of poems called "The Love Poems." It was seized as pornography and the book declared obscene.

from God/ Love Poem

I love you  / your cock in my hand
         stirs like a bird
in my fingers
as you swell and grow hard in my hand
forcing my fingers open

What is it about a woman's desire that is most monstrous? Most ob/scene?

Etymology of "obscene":

1590s, "offensive to the senses, or to taste and refinement," from Middle French obscène (16c.), from Latin obscenus "offensive," especially to modesty, originally "boding ill, inauspicious," of unknown origin; perhaps from ob "in front of" (see ob-) + caenum "filth." Meaning "offensive to modesty or decency" is attested from 1590s. Legally, in U.S., it hinged on "whether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to a prurient interest." [Justice William Brennan, "Roth v. United States," June 24, 1957]; refined in 1973 by "Miller v. California":

The basic guidelines for the trier of fact must be: (a) whether 'the average person, applying contemporary community standards' would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest, (b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and (c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

Who is the average person? Who decides if a work lacks literary or artistic value? Can we even allow for the average person to have any parameters for what constitutes artistic value?

Dick tells us when to CUM. His hairy chin is the average chin of an average man demanding a woman's pleasure be performed for him, and we are watching to see if language has that power. What can a word make you do? 

 From To Fuck with Love Phase 1

positions and pleasures of need my body
transforms into one enormous mouth
       between my legs
suckfucking oh that lovely cock

 When does pleasure turn to pain? When does desire make us suffer, and why can our bodies sometimes not distinguish the difference?


 From To Fuck with Love  Phase II

my cunt is honeycomb we are covered with come and honey

The best moment in this scene is when Chris throws Sylvere off of her to make herself cum. She takes over the whole scene. She is the sub and the dom/domme, she is the writer and the actor, the bad girl and the daddy, she is the alpha and the omega. That is the core of this scene.

From To Fuck With Love  Phase III

I kiss your shoulder and it reeks of lust
the lust of erotic angels fucking the stars.


There are just four poems in Kandel's obscene pamphlet The Love Book. While I think censorship is horrifying; I must admit to a kind of romantic notion that is fascinated that four poems about a woman extolling fucking and the pleasure it gives her as being seen as a threat to society. What did the average person find offensive then and what does the average person find offensive now? Are we post-obscene? Is violence the only obscenity left to us that we hunger to consume?

"There are no barriers to poetry and prophecy; by their nature they are barrier-breakers, bursts of perception, lines into infinity." L. Kandel, 1967

"...you eroticize what you''re not, secretly hoping that the other person knows what you're performing and that they're performing too." -C. Kraus, I Love Dick 

Does the artists know the space between making art and living? What is that space called? When does one begin and one end? What is the scene and what are the roles assigned?

I have nothing but questions tonight, Chris. 

M

 
Notes:
Collected Poems of Lenore Kandel by Lenore Kandel, (North Atlantic Books, 2012)
I Love Dick by Chris Kraus, (Semiotext(e), 1998)
Etymology:  http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=obscene

Sidenote: I could write a whole other blog post just on the spelling and usage of "cum" vs "come." I prefer cum when talking about sex, so that is what I always use.

when the form is in place, everything with it can be pure feeling – C Kraus

"Because in the end you are really alone, whatever you do..." M. Abramović 

"When we die it ends. Until then we are all tied up." -L Montano

"I'll never understand why I write what I do as I do"  -K. Acker

did i poet every day/ every waking hour/ i wanted to make something that mattered -M.B. 

Dear Chris: 

We get lost. A year ago. 

July 26, 2016 (at my father's house): "silence holds us like a bridge/ i can 't cross/ so i gather my words where they stay/ unspoken/ think i came to writing/ to survive/ from disappearing

July 29, 2016 (breakfast w/ Dick) "what lies between us/ the space we keep safe/ i tell you everything. anything./ what does it matter if you care not/ who i see or what i do" 

August 5, 2016:  "dear love, this was the day you left me/ we went to the beach/ you flew back to Arizona/ we didn't cry or say good bye/ the world turns on/ insignificant gestures/ what makes a thing desirous/ you hid from me all of our time together/ but we mirror/ i hid too" 

I wrote my lover two letters when he went to rehab: 

in one letter i spoke of rain & our love/ a lifetime/ in the next i was saying good bye b/c i wanted to be the one to say good bye first/ seeing how you were the one leaving


It's true: strangers walk into our lives and they rearrange us. They pull us apart and put us together.

I started Basic Programming thinking I would talk about infatuation and desire and obsession. And by the end of the summer, I started Volume II. And I spent my time in deep meditations. I went to Kali and gave her my name. I burned fires and threw everything in. I counted 108 steps down in the underworld where Inanna showed me how to hang my skin on a hook. I laid in meditative sleep healing each part of my body. I chanted and moved energy and learned the names of each aspect of the subtle body. I wrote spells. I dream walked. I stayed in the space between here and there and I waited for each veil to lift. I went to the bottom of grief. I gave up knowing. I stopped taking the medication. I met the Empress who laughed and in a cottage, a trio of women who knew the way to the crystal city. I spoke with the dead. I watched my mind unfold. I became unplugged and panicked. I asked for help to be pulled back to shore. I went too quickly and then I learned the way to go slowly. I read the cards. I watched as it all fell further and further away. My brother reached out and touched me and when he did the entire universe was there, like lifting up the edge of a rug. I went looking and saw beautiful things. That is how I finished the book. I learned to read my programming.

I guess if you go far enough out-- you realize in the coding, it's all ones and zeros. There is no Dick. But there's also no us.

I forgot for awhile that making art was supposed to be fun. I am trying to find my way back, Chris. 

I have been gone a long time looking for something I hid away to protect in this life. I found her. I like how in interview magazine, you said: "I'm really committed to telling the truth in writing. ... I think that's what writing does. It tells the truth about something." 

Art changes us sometimes more than other people. Other people can be the door though, can't they? We walk through and nothing is ever again as we knew it.

And here we are now. in the menstrual hut. a trio of women, with the keys to the crystal city.

Love,

Megan




 


 

 

Do we all get a Dick?

Dear Chris:

I have a Dick too. His name is even four letters long and starts with a D.

I met him on Fetlife and we slept together a few time, went on a few dates and then he decided we should just be friends. I was infatuated already though, thought I was in love with him. I started writing this book about infatuation. I left poems on his porch. We stayed friends. It turns out he hates women. We have these long tedious debates about feminism. He often says… “all women…” and when I point out that I don’t do that and I am a woman, he’ll say, “you’re an exception.” So maybe, I am not a woman because I don’t perform all of the acts that women perform that allow him to both hate them but also sexualize them in a way that he can’t with me because I act like what, … a man?

Of course, I would fall in love with a man who hates women. I’ve been programmed my whole life to save that broken bird.

I kept writing my book and thinking about attachments and obsession and strangers. I met my Dick by trying to be less attached to the man I was having an affair with, and I fell in love with my Dick while the man I was living with moved out and left me. And I thought now I just have to write this book and understand the way I attach to people and by people, I mean men. So, I started fucking a lot of strangers and watching how, in some cases, I felt no attachment after the fact and in some, I felt an enormous misplaced attachment. I realized my Dick was the perfect muse. I was writing this book to him, to seduce him, which is to say, to seduce myself; art being first and foremost a facet of narcissism: To solidify what I feel in language as poetry has done for centuries/repetition a  masturbatory act, love only really occurring in the confines of the idea. Lacan is right (write?)  when he says sex is always narcissistic.  It’s a thin line between the desire to please for your own pleasure and that moment when it is crossed, and you believe someone is taking advantage of you for their own pleasure; it means they are receiving more pleasure than you and that’s not what you signed up for, doesn’t it? The narcissism of using an "other" body in which to enact our desires, our pleasures up to the point where we perceive the reciprocity is off, then the balance of two narcissistic acts becomes unstable. I’m not talking about abuse, but the more subtle moment. You know, the moment when you keep blowing a guy because it takes him forever to get there, and sometimes you love that and sometimes you just want to throat punch him. Or the moment you know that it’s taking you a long time but you just don’t care because patriarchy….  or insert whatever gender roles you want in the examples and as many bodies as you want, because the metaphor remains consistent. Even exclusive of orgasmic conclusion, any physical or even media based sexual act is the desire to be seen and to be wanted by the other -outside of a sexual economy-   the desire to fulfill our desires enacted on a body not our own, conceptualized in a body not our own, various in a body not as familiar as our own. 

It’s selfish, even when we sugar coat it with the Disney premise of romantic love, even when we believe all we want is to please our partners, deep down we know the line is there, we know the minute it’s been crossed and because the line exists, ultimately, we have created a boundary around what sex is for, what is our end goal.

Sex in all of its permutations remains of the body and of pleasure when not abusive—which is not sex, but violence manifesting against our bodies in a sexualized way—and therefore subject to the illusion of our senses, the distortion by which we can write many kinds of fictions all over it. And we grow tired of all our desires… which is why we created romantic love as Lacan also points out. Desire only takes us so far…. but it’s everything in the writing. It’s a fire, isn’t it… unrequited desire. What I wouldn’t say to make you want me?

I am the I of the body and the I of the mind and the I of the Story; the story of I.

Chris, I have this fantasy. I have this fantasy on one end where the muse is replaced by the Dick. That we all get our Dicks and write like our minds are on fire. We put Dick in the role of the muse: passive, ethereal, angelic phallus in the house. And the other end that I tread even closer towards is the menstrual hut. I want to get back into the bleeding of it. I want to know a world written only from the vacuum of what occurs in the menstrual hut. I want discourse only of what is in the menstrual hut. I want art only made in the menstrual hut. I want language only created in the menstrual hut. I want to know what that world looks like… I want to have never known that there was a Dick we were measuring up against. Can we imagine that kind of universe… my book became about programming. How we are all programmed in our responses, in our attachments, in every thing we know about love. And if that is true, then we can break our coding/ we can hack into our own known variables and we can code anew… I think we can get back into the menstrual hut. I think we can learn to create out of the menstrual hut effectively erasing the fictions of history that program how we use our senses to make art.

I think our lives depend on it. I think it's something we remember, can remember, it's located in our DNA. This world inside our consciousness that erases any DICK that comes before the womb. It's our hysterical future.

More soon,

M

Who Doesn't Love Dick

Dear Chris:

 what happens when we begin to think about consciousness…

 the way art is made. what is desire. the name for our product. our vehicle. the design for our liking.

 I’ve been reading women artists for decades… what does that make me. I’ve sat under the influence of women writers for decades….

 what kind of monster box are we in.  (there's nothing to see here)

 still in the boomerang of deflection, even as we speak to each other, we are still speaking against others… but now, let’s chat. Just you and me, Chris, about what it means to use words. and images. to say anything.

Season 1 Episode 1:

WHY WOULD TRAUMA NEED AN AESTHETIC?

Nine percent of films directed by women means 91 percent directed by men.

This is my office

in the beginning, there was the womb.

the closet off of the bedroom, the womb space… it’s tight, cramped, cramping

we see it.

the phallus in the guise of a peeled banana in the reflection while the two women talk in the doorway of Chris’ office… the phallus ever present...  we, always trapped in its reflection.

Hidden Mickeys in a Disney Film.

Enter Hysteria:

At 3 minutes and 52 seconds in,  we get the first hysterical episode. The monster is so loud she alerts the neighbors, she evades reason, she throws her body about, arms flailing, she messes up her hair. The scene cut into stills to capture the female body in its messiness, its natural habitat.

-as horrified you see yourself invented-

Look at her. She de-monstrates.

Introducing Toby: beautiful ingénue

(with underarm hair)  Toby exposes her underarm hair while undercutting Sylvere’s technique of impressing women with his travels. She tops him. He can’t help but wince when he sees a soft tuft of reddish hair beneath her arm, a hairy pussy laughing at him… too much beauty provokes anxiety, or the bewildering moment when Freud states: a surprise to learn from analysis that girls hold their mother responsible for their lack of a penis….

We sweat out all the wilderness left in us 

Toby is everything Chris is not. We are asked to compare. We are asked to contrast. We are always asked to hold one woman against another, aren’t we?

What spectacle licks our faces in theater dark?

Penis-Envy as Aesthetic

"The pleasure gained from touching, caressing, parting the lips and vulva simply does not exist for Freud." 

In this scene, Dick will play the role of Dr. Charcot and Chris will play the role of Augustine in the great hospital of mad women: Salpêtrière.

Dr Charcot: Augustine, you don’t want to be well. If you wanted to be well, you would be. It’s just a question of desire. A question of want and you don’t have it.

Augustine: (redacted)

“The gaze has always been involved.

Now the little girl, the woman, supposedly has nothing you can see. She exposes, exhibits the possibility of a nothing to see. Or at any rate she shows nothing that is penis-shaped or could substitute for a penis.” 

Dr. Charcot leans over to Freud (here played by Sylvere) Is she any good?

Sally Potter, Jane Campion, Chantal Akerman

Is she any good? Is she any good? Is she any good?

Woman on film bends over, the lead positions himself behind her. This is how it works, he tells her. I want you and so I know you want me, even if you do not know it.

Sally Potter on why she doesn’t call Orlando a feminist film: "I have come to the conclusion that I can't use that term in my work. Not because of a disavowal of the underlying principles that gave birth to that word – the commitment to liberation, dignity, equality. But it has become a trigger word that stops people's thinking. You literally see people's eyes glaze over with exhaustion when the word flashes into the conversation." Frilot, Shari (Summer 1993). "Sally Potter". BOMB (44): 30–35.

I made a movie about my life. The opening shot a polluted river, the closing shot my daughter’s eye

“Campion was a month away from having won the Palme d'Or. She was two weeks away from giving birth to her first child, a son whose presence was already inescapable in the Sydney apartment she shares with her husband, Colin Englert, a television producer and director. The baby's crib was set up in Englert's small office, and Campion lifted her billowy white shirt once to stare at her swollen belly. "Is he kicking?" her visitor asked. "Mmmmm," she answered, lost for a moment in that curious bubble that encloses the pregnant.” Mary Cantwell (Sept. 1993)

 “Jane Campion’s Lunatic Women” New York Times

Jasper, Jane’s son, lived 10 days with medical support, and then she brought him home to die.

That the quiet in a house swims as film in its emulsion, image rising

“I won’t say  I’m a feminist film-maker…I’m not making women’s films. I’m making Chantal Akerman’s films” (London, 1979) –C. Akerman

Within the doctrine of unclean hands, her shame is made clear as a metallic ringing in the ear.

“Here again the little girl will have to act like the little boy, feel the same urge to see, look in the same way, and her resentment at not having a penis must follow and corroborate the horrified astonishment the little boy feels when faced with the strangeness of the nonidentical, the nonidentifiable.”

HIDDEN MICKEY: COME AND TAKE IT

  Dick swallowed by womb

"in other words, is it possible that the phobia aroused in man, and notably in Freud, by the uncanny strangeness of the "nothing to be seen" cannot tolerate her not having this 'envy'?" 

There's nothing to see here.

…and what else is a line of verse but a casting and recasting of the inside of the body?

EVERY LETTER
IS A LOVE LETTER 

Let us not neglect the fact that the historical analysis of women's sexuality hinges on the gaze of the man and the hysteric's desire to please the man at any cost, to be seen; for why come to analysis at all if one cannot the seduce the viewer into seeing what they most desire to see. 

SUBJECT TO DESIRE : "A problem to be solved by putting the Phallus at the beginning, and at the end."

WOMB TO WOMB

Notes: 

dear: Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick

images: I Love Dick (Jill Soloway and Sarah Gubbins) Amazon Video

italics: Rag by Julie Carr (Omnidawn, 2014)

highlighted text: "The Blind Spot of an Old Dream of Symmetry" Speculum of the Other Woman by Luce Irigaray (trans. by Gillian Gill) Cornell Univ, 1985 (orig pub 1974)