12 04 2024 morning
Definition of humour: suffering with your eyes open.
In China, the laugh is shared between the hips and the mouth.
A bad decision – by Plato et al. – to put it in the mouth. In two hundred years the English will laugh with just their tongues…
Impossible to laugh at a pun without confessing to a trace of sadism.
Vacuum-packed eggs and ice-cream at the shop with I and J; everything which ‘actually happens’ continues to be completely indescribable, especially people. Sign of hope.
The horror of a diary is that you can’t say, ‘it’s a lie,’ except by producing the truth, which would have to take the form of another diary.
13 04 2024 evening
As Nietzsche points out, no one has ever thought anything or known anything or been anything. Reference to these imaginary activities is always a declaiming of responsibility; this is not me, this is ‘knowing,’ this is not me, this is ‘thinking,’ this is not me, this is ‘being.’
‘It was in the cafe at nine pm, just after the train left for Cannes, that I realised I didn’t love her.’ Meaning: it was not my fault, but the fault of the cafe, the fault of the patterns of time, the fault of continental geography, the fault of the imaginary cognitive process referred to by the verb ‘to realise.’
You can tell how much someone is lying by how often they make reference to what goes on in their head…
A staring contest ends when someone wants to feel time pass again.
Time should be measured in faces, in how long it takes to see one clearly (eight hundred days), to bring it to memory (nine hundred days), to forget it (two thousand days).
‘He took it upon himself to describe the region of the hip somewhat to the left of the ilium’
‘He even mentioned the movement of the elbows!’
‘His reference to her wrist seemed congruent with the overall context, as far as I could tell’
‘His description of her hair did not offend me’
This is the only viable form of literary criticism.
14 04 2024 evening
Areola1
The centrepiece was going be a very clear description of her breasts, or rather the breast-chest nexus, the area from the xiphoid process to the clavicle, I was going to start with that, it would function like a Playboy centrefold, but one charged with all the moral-aesthetic ambition of fourth century Christianity, that was my plan. All I had to do was imagine coming across her in the desert somewhere, during some sort of mystic assignment, perhaps of my own accord, perhaps sent out by the abbot, go on boy, get yourself a pure experience, it’s time. I’d need to imagine it not only as the first time I’d seen a woman without her clothes but also as the first time I’d seen anything at all, but I was confident I’d be able to do it since that was exactly how it had felt.
I anticipated I’d expend about a thousand calories a day, for about sixty days, on this centrepiece, sixty days nervously crossing out words and re-writing them, crossing out lobe and writing lobule, crossing out lobule and writing bulb, leaving bulb on the page, looking at it, weight sliding off me like so much tap water. Once it was done I’d take a short holiday in Malta, lie down in the sun for a week or so to recuperate, and then quickly run through the rest of the novel, three or four hundred pages, I thought.
Which will be easy enough, I thought, the seeds of the novel’s end and beginning will be right there in the centrepiece, one narrative thread running from the first line of the novel to the left breast, say, and another from the final line to the right, but of course it needn’t be so neat, of course they could cross over, the narrative threads, people like that these days, a ‘tangled narrative,’ etc., and even if it didn’t work whatever I wrote would be finally justified by her climactic and completely accurate appearance in the middle of the text. And perhaps with the pressure off, with a perfect image of her, from xiphoid process to clavicle, already set down, I’d feel free to let myself go, to develop some new version of the university-coffee-shop style contemporary novel. I could mention some conversations with friends, walks in the park, perhaps a brief military excursion, during which the narrator would send little text messages to certain friends, “Dave, have you checked the news,” “No.” These ‘real life’ fragments would provide an important insight into ‘the mood of the times’, out of which she would dramatically emerge, contrapuntally enfleshed, shod entire in the skin of radical being, and if it didn’t work out like that, if I was fully spent after completing the centrefold, fine, it could be published as a ‘short story’, people will believe anything these days.
I made several abortive attempts at this centrepiece, all equally depressing, characterised by sentences like “they peaked over the subtext of the blanket like the deep-set eyes of a strange bat,” and this wasn’t even the lowest point I reached. I was eating entire troughs of fresh orange juice and chicken eggs, expending perhaps three thousand calories a day on my literary praxis, but making no progress at all, in fact I found myself making increasingly desperate references to the aureoles, writing things like:
‘the exact size and shape of the small handles on the chest of drawers I inherited from my grandmother’
‘the recalcitrant forward thrust reminded me of my own attitude to life’
‘something inescapably nozzle-like about the whole event’
The problem was that I could remember absolutely nothing about it, her chest-breast nexus, from the xiphoid process to the clavicle, I could remember the environmental details of the scene, the forest sliding off to the left and right, a clear, mirrored scene, a perfect place for the imagination to grip down, to begin its memory-forming work, to fix on certain elements and downplay others in a kind of pre-emptive chiaroscuro. But beyond this, the only thing I could remember was an eerie sense – beginning when she took her shirt off and looked back from the shore – that my eyes were attached to her by a sort of string, not to either breast but to their precise midpoint. I remembered feeling that at any moment my eyes could be reeled back to this resting place, to this uncanny heartland of the ‘male gaze,’ but a version of it so absolute as to preclude any actual seeing. My eyes, I mean, produced absolutely nothing, seeming instead to mark the edge of some more general being, some sort of ever-expanding tit-being on which I had no leverage at all.
It’s the self-sufficiency of breasts, I realised, the impression they give both of lacking nothing and having an enormous amount leftover, it’s this unique ontology of reserve, almost of storage, which makes them impossible to describe. Men look at them and feel like they have been predated by thousands of years, and they try to get around this via the so-called aureoles, which, incidentally, have no salvatory power at all, functioning instead, in almost every erotic novel written by a man, like two soft hooks on which the imagination hangs itself, kills itself, in fact. I found this rule followed with such harrowing consistency in the books I was reading that in addition to my despondency I began to feel a strange joy, a sense that I was falling into the arms of a brotherhood of shared aesthetic bafflement, if not complete defeat, all of us together rubbing up against the same impossible point, a white-crested wave slopping against some ancient defensive wall.
Well I need to be hit in the face, I thought, a certain number of times, and also to hit other people in the face, I need to engage in protracted physical combat with men of a similar height and build, over a period of several months, and perhaps I can even find men with similar interests, if not similar projects, perhaps we can ‘work together,’ but one mustn’t ask too much, and I didn’t have sufficient social capital to assemble a crack squad of ‘like-minded’ men to hit me in the face, or to be hit by me. In fact I was finding it increasingly difficult to assemble just one or two such men, even for the most mundane purpose, meeting up to ‘eat some cake,’ or ‘walk along the river,’ but no matter, what the other men were up to was irrelevant, since after all my project was one of tactical disembodiment, not political unification. As long as we were hitting each other in the head with approximately equal force and frequency, that would do, I thought, and if we had to keep our projects and our personalities to ourselves, so much the better.
I’d look them in the eye, I thought, I’d count the beads of sweat, especially those which form just under the eye, tear-like, I’d watch them form and then trace their tracks, that would keep me focused on my task, I’d count them off like beads on some kind of spiritual abacus, and when a certain number was reached, I thought, I mean once a certain quota of blows to the head had been met, something would start to give. Just as, squeezed together in a death fever of fraternal competition, one of the foreshortened heads of the amassed spermatozoa eventually finds a way in, so, I thought, will her image emerge from inside my battered white-collar head, and once it’s out, once it’s free, well it will be plain sailing, aesthetically speaking, from then on, that was my plan.
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From Latin āreola (“small vacant space, garden”).
Whew. Kafka and Kierkegaard had a tête-à-tête and, discovering certain congruencies, went in search of Philip Roth but ended up at Joseph Heller’s place, and who do you think was there, but Hunter S. Thompson. It was clearly a conspiracy.
I felt like I was approaching the cusp of what we call “writing.”
I think I'm in love.