On 'not understanding women' (feat. Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Kafka, Cioran)
03 12 2024 evening
A culture which replaces the ‘have you eaten’1 greeting with ‘are you far from the sea’?
How was the wheel invented except by looking at the sea (how it turns over itself)?
How was language invented except by listening to the sea (how it turns over itself)?
These long winter nights, so quiet you can hear the sea conjugating.
God: nature’s morning-after pill.
Ocean: contractions of infinity.
(Nature: God’s morning-after pill).
At a certain point, if you have no children, and if you’re discreet about your personal life, you have nothing left to talk to your father about except i) the news and ii) death. A couple of years of this and you are compelled to agree with Kierkegaard: the only thing worse than death is the news.
Precisely the act of sitting down which gave birth to the idea of deduction, to ‘the law of non-contradiction,’ etc.
04 12 2024 morning
All good male writers are eternally and absolutely confused by women, can’t put together a single coherent sentence about them (if they do, it ends up being about something else; God, Judaism, food, etc.) –
Dostoevsky, who ‘understood women’ less than any man before or since, whose work, up to and including The Idiot, is a ‘how to’ guide for not understanding women –
The Idiot: wherein his inability to ‘understand women’ reaches a pitch of intensity sufficient to induce schizoaffective collapse in a saint –
Having witnessed the blinding spiritual power of his inability to ‘understand women,’ he turned away in terror, devoting his remaining years to questions of fraternity (Demons, The Brothers Karamazov) –
Dostoevsky’s two periods: looking at a woman’s face [1846-1869], looking at a man’s face [1870-1880]. The Idiot as the hinge work, the transexual middle term (yes, off he2 goes to Switzerland, to his little hotel, where the face of Nastasya Filippovna lies pregnant on his own like so many slices of cucumber) –
Nietzsche, who could grasp women only as a joke or a metaphor –
Kafka, the interminable truth of whose seeing would have killed him outright but for one blindspot, his miraculous inability to ‘understand women,’ which kept him going despite everything, which continually nursed him back to health –
Conversely, all bad male writers (Schopenhauer above all, but also every American after 1945, etc.) ‘understand women’ –
05 12 2024 evening
The dog (Bōng3) gets hit by a car, limps home, they take it to the vet. It seems to be doing well, but is evidently spooked, has lost its faith in things. We take it in turns, thirty minutes each, touching the dog back to life.
Palm-stroked back to life by a bunch of aliens (since dogs have no hands, to say nothing of palms) –
But somehow this is just what it wants, each constitutively incomprehensible touch tied to an even more constitutively incomprehensible intention –
A madness far beyond human imagining.
The next day I wake up with a sort of mystical jolt, thinking: but that’s what God is to man –
(You climb the chain of constitutively incomprehensible touches; the less you understand them, the higher you’ve gone).
If you can’t say love and mean it, what chance do you have of saying and meaning anything else?
All words are footnotes to the word love, she said.
06 12 2024 evening
The ugliness of mountains at a certain distance –
While the sea, as you approach it, modulates through different forms of beauty. An aesthetics textbook written by a saint –
One man is most aroused by breasts at ten cm, another at fifty cm, another at five metres, another at ten metres.
Test of heterosexuality, homosexuality: does your arousal increase in direct proportion to the degree of magnification? If not, you’re merely an aesthete.
Flirting: calibration of distance.4
On writers who enjoy reading their Collected Works
An enormous basement of your necrotic genital appendages, arranged in staggered glory holes, which you vividly remember ‘working on in your twenties.’ Locking yourself in there for a couple of days, to study the fumes.
Sky with clouds: God’s desk equipment.5
Overheard in Kotor: ‘Yeah. God likes to keep the battery low.’
To experience joy in its fullness, picture everything under the sign of subtraction, the holiest sign.
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Tomorrow (08 12 2024), I’m sending out a couple of poem series; a ‘Balkan’ series, and a ‘religious-erotic’ series (no connection between the two). There are about four poems in the first, about eight in the second.
E.g.,
BALKAN POEM
RELIGIOUS-EROTIC POEM
On Wednesday/Thursday, I’m sending out the first part of an ‘interpretative translation’ of Emil Cioran’s Cahiers6 (which for some reason hasn’t been translated yet).
It’s probably about 70% ‘translation,’ 30% ‘variation-condensation-improvisation’ –
Sample [in the post itself the ‘entries’ will be dated, and the hyphens will be longer]:
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I’m running a Hegel reading group. We will be looking at the preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit, reading paragraph by paragraph to elucidate the text. The first meeting is UTC 8-10pm December 17th. It’ll eventually cost £30 but will be free for the first meetings since it’s experimental.
Email philip.traylen@gmail.com for more information.
Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin
A common traditional greeting in, e.g., Mandarin Chinese, Korean, Tagalog, etc., (if I understand correctly).
Pronounced in Mandarin Chinese first tone. ‘The first tone is high and level. It is important to keep one's voice even (almost monotone) across the whole syllable when pronouncing the first tone.’ More information
Claire-Louise Bennett described flirting, somewhere, as ‘playing with distance.’
Malcolm de Chazal: low clouds are the paperweights of the wind.
Women don’t run in herds. Men will tend to. Case closed.
I’m new to this newsletter. I feel compelled to say: it’s rather brilliant!