05 06 2024 morning
Desire larps as love to get what it wants; the particular larps as the universal to get what it wants. The difficulty is to persuade love to larp as desire, to persuade the universal to larp as the particular.
The outrageous insistence of ‘I’ in the sentence I love you, entirely distinct from the temperate love you. The ‘I’ has to be squeezed into that first position; it arrives exhausted, spent, as if it had just returned from some kind of intergalactic pilgrimage.
An almost gymnastic feat, to get from I, the floor of the self, to love, the ceiling. Almost every time I hear it attempted I picture the speaker suspended in the hopeless middle of his glutinous personality.
How the mind fingers the difference between love you and I love you, as if it were trying to locate a memory of the moment language was given to the world.
Need you, want you, thinking of you; here it’s simply because elision is grammar’s intimacy. Only in connection with love does elision dramatise the gap between confession and restraint.
Only, that is, in modifying love does I take its ‘final form:’ the grimace of undefiled subjectivity. Anywhere else, I signifies precisely the absence of this grimace, or rather it signifies a different grimace, one which you would be well within your rights to disown.
The line that runs between being hopelessly in love and in love with hopelessness, the second form confessing the neurotic’s preference for the nominal. Crossing it again and again, feeling out its structure, like trying to undo a knot with your feet in the dark.
Instead of saying love, the neurotic says because. He treats his because with the utmost care and respect, he hangs on its arm, he opens the door for it, takes its coat and places it on the hook.
Eve’s sin: to make motive causal. One step from there to the police state.
Or, in Blakean terms, evil is not evil because it causes suffering but because it necessitates an analysis of causation.
Great admiration for M’s obsession with coincidences, her back-to-front determinism. And it’s perfectly correct: the present is not the vanishing point of determinism but its inauguration.
Proust, like a fisherman, casts the line of time into the water, reels it back in, loves the feeling of control in his hand, speeds up, slows down. Kafka: the hooked fish.
06 06 2024 evening
A form of diagnosis which diagnoses only diagnosability. This is what everyone longs for.
In 2008 or so, listening to a song by Mos Def, where he says I refuse to understand. Every thought I’ve had since has this line imprinted on its inverse – its interior – side.
I saw her sitting naked astride the corpse of art, flapping her arms, making odd noises, trying to discourage us from eating.
No death in Marxism, only corpses. This is its most astonishing virtue.
If you could go back in time, etc., what would you have, etc. Impregnated Jesus, etc.
In taking tragedy entirely unto himself, Jesus condemned man to various ratios of silence and comedy.
07 06 2024 morning
Can’t help but pray she’s not listening to my ideas about Taylor Swift, or at least that she’s privy to some secret Taylor Swift information which invalidates mine, some astonishing fact she’s keeping to herself out of pity or fatigue, or saving up for a dismissive repartee, God willing, if she can’t protect herself this way I pray at the very least for a natural intervention, an earthquake or a flood, nothing too major, just a little local tremor or something, but beyond this there’s nothing I can do, above all I can’t say, but I guess it’s kind of subjective in the end, how many people have died on account of other people claiming it’s just subjective in the end, no, I have to reach untruth organically, bit by bit, not leap ahead and temper my ideas with retroactive self-doubt, which might bring the conversation to a close but would do nothing to protect her, in the long term, from the haunting power of my Taylor Swift ideas
but the truth is she’s simply less well informed than me, she has a young family to feed, a not uninteresting career in garden design, she has no time to participate in mass cultural psychosis, it’s going quite well, she said, a couple of hours ago now, the garden organisation sector is really taking off, she said, she shows up at some boomer house with a shovel and they pour money down her throat, she said, the sight of the shovel unnerves and glorifies them at once, something in the way she holds it diagonally across her chest, as if barring entry to their past, or symbolising some deeper, pseudo-Grecian past, from which they’re also barred, but at the same time drawing attention to her breasts, in terms of the actual gardening side of things, she said, I’m generally pretty conservative, the adjustments I make are minor, schematic, almost anti-topographical, but never superficial, I simply turn the garden’s key, she said, mimicking a twisting motion, as if turning a long pole in her hands, like an absent-minded gravedigger, she said, and in a sense that’s what I am, she concluded, leaning backwards slightly in her dungarees, her eyes green and wet, wet and green
oh God I respect her so much, her combination of managerial efficiency and cold wit, it’s a rare combination these days, but it leaves her horribly vulnerable to me, she’s had no time to refresh her defence mechanisms and those on which she still relies are nowhere near contemporary enough to protect her from my Taylor Swift ideas, from all their languor and beauty, and so I lose patience, I start to make enormous generalisations, I try to fly as close to the sun as possible, I mention the infinite, I say the two Taylor Swift infinities, the politics of culture versus the culture of politics, I say, the wax between my ideas about Taylor Swift will surely begin at a certain point to melt, to show signs of weakness, but it doesn’t come, no earthquake, no flood, not the slightest flaw in my ideas about Taylor Swift, I speak with perfect assurance of the geopolitical significance of her cognitive trajectory, of her strange, fly-like legs, of her post-sexual Germanic face, the only solution is for Taylor Swift herself to come to the party and explain why I’m wrong, I mean there’s certainly room for her here, just three or four of us in James’ strange new ‘riverside’ apartment, perhaps she would even find the situation somehow edifying, but the truth is we just don’t move in the same circles
08 06 2024 afternoon
It was psychology that Yeats saw, slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.
The psychologisation of the spiritual can only be undone by the spiritualisation of the psychological. As Heracles redirected the Alpheus and the Peneus to clean out the stables, so Dostoevsky lay down bodily in the waters of psychology to redirect the flow.
The brain, the contemporary image of which is simply a product, an almost faecal emission, of the concept of psychology.
“Ah, it’s great, the sense of togetherness, the wine, and the little cracker… the little cracker on the cross.”
Kierkegaard: do it or not, you’ll regret both. Or, as Hegel would say, neither.
This particular shoulder, viewed from this particular side-on angle, a distance of twelve to fifteen inches. Summer night, NW21 3BG. Rain.
Hello, thank you for reading!
Consider becoming a paid subscriber; it makes it possible to write independently, discount at the button:
Alternatively, please share on Substack or repost somewhere like Twitter; it makes a big difference. Thank you!
This was exhausting and great, as per.
How does the spiritualisation of the psychological work? Is it what happens to Horselover Fat in Valis? Monitoring his own mind and finding it defective, and using this defective instrument to monitor outer reality. "Using a defective instrument to sweep out a defective subject"...
You make me think of things I would never think without you. That we have all been lying down in the River Lethe for centuries and so are the philosophers.
The humorous intricacy of the Taylor Swift section - really delightful.