Intrigue, n.

:To excite the curiosity or interest of; to interest so as to puzzle or fascinate.


Mysteries like the hollowness of a womb. No one home.

A balancing act of lurid dreams and formidable conceptualizations.
I am waiting for some(one)thing.

::

Reading "Elders and Betters" by I. Compton-Burnett, first published in 1944. Examining the characterizations and positions of women, as conceived by a woman writer. I am seeking to understand dialogue, as I usually find myself entrenched in description.

In the beginning, in a move to a new house, a bag has gone missing:
"Well, does it matter so much?" said Anna. "It will follow by itself."
"Cook had it with her in the compartment, Miss Anna."
"You mean it had no address? Why did you not bring it in the cab?"
Jenney's eyes went from Anna to Ethel, as if to measure their mutual effect.
"We only brought what was needed for the night, Miss Anna," said Ethel, throwing some light on this.
"Did you leave the bag to speak for itself at the station?" said Esmond. "A label would have saved it the trouble."
Ethel met his eyes in silence.
"You must know what you did with it," said Anna.
"We thought it would come with the other luggage, Miss Anna."
"It would have been wiser and kinder of it," said Bernard.

...

A Panel on Embodiment:

Interdisciplinary conversation on the subject (substance?) of the body. This is where everything gets a little tangled; how do we discuss the body as a material thing? What has happened to the substance, the subject?

How do we return to the question of an ethically informed politics of substance? This substance is an anchor of certain formations of power. The question is of theorization; how to theorize various formations of bio-politics, sovereignty, etc. How do those theorizations help us to understand why the critique of the body was so important in the 1970s and 80s?

Discursive formations of the body. Or has the substance been abandoned?

Thinking in circles. Physical ellipses. The body as simply an imprint of discursive formations. Torture shatters the substance so that it is unable to do a politics anymore - except be shattered.

Mind


the gap.

Disassociation from the body. My body. Or yours.

Triolets and Turing Machines

If I write one line, it will repeat three times in the form. The second line will repeat twice.

These are the rules for writing a triolet: first, make sure the line can be repeated without becoming stagnant. Second, make sure the second line is interesting. Third, know where the repetitions fall.

I wanted to write a triolet, and so I did. Perhaps I will show you sometime.

::

Am currently reading Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing by Helene Cixous. When I described it to M. she aptly described it as one of those books where each sentence feels like an indisputable truth. I couldn't figure out why, though I had read more than 100 pages, each page seemed like I had read it only one page ago.

"I will talk about truth again, without which (without the word truth, without the mystery truth) there would be no writing. It is what writing wants. But it "(the truth)" is totally down below and a long way off. And all the people I love and whom I have mentioned [Writers: Clarice Lispector, Kafka, Ingeborg Bachmann, Tsvetaeva] are beings who are bent on directing their writing toward this truth-over-there, with unbelievable labor; they are fighting against the elements and principally against the innumerable immediate and exterior and interior enemies." -Helene Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, 6

Only one of many passages I could quote, and only one of many passages I have taken deeply to heart. M. is away and I wish she was here so I could share this with her.

"Writing is learning to die. It's learning not to be afraid, in other words to live at the extremity of life, which is what the dead, death, give us." 10

I desire death, which is to say, I desire to write, and that is all.

The Side Show

This weekend was filled with delicious sounds and exploding colors. On Thursday, M. played a magnificent concert at Holy Trinity Church on 65th and Central Park West. A Tuba and a Piano! The church yawned down on us, holding the notes in its mouth. My favorite was the Plog.

On Friday A. dragged me to Fuerzabruta! downtown. I did not want to go, but have since revised my initial opinion of the trek. What a spectacular onslaught of light and color! The show was perfectly disconnected and entertainingly distressing. I recommend it to everyone - think Cirque du Soleil on acid in a rave. I did not want it to end - I wish I could always exist in such a surreal state of expectational disturbance.

Tomorrow I am going to be between A & B, listening to Susan Stewart, Thomas Devaney, and Susan Briante. A perfect way to start a week.

::

A Mona Lisa
I.
I should like to creep
Through the long brown grasses
That are your lashes;
I should like to poise
On the very brink
Of the leaf-brown pools
That are your shadowed eyes;
I should like to cleave
Without sound,
Their glimmering waters,
Their unrippled waters,
I should like to sink down
And down
And down
And down . . . .
And deeply drown.

II.
Would I be more than a bubble breaking?
Or an ever-widening circle
Ceasing at the marge?
Would my white bones
Be the only white bones
Wavering back and forth, back and forth
In their depths?

-Angelina Weld Grimké (1880-1958)

Saturday

Here, there, and an ear.

A feeling of concavity and vacillation.

Between what, I do not yet know.

Meaning, or the time after a poetry reading

I am contemplating the dissolution of words

the spaces between lines solidifying into tactile objects -

employment of the five senses

Emptiness denoting thought, preoccupation
only when there is room in which to move:

there is not.