Didn't the young Kafka write in his diary something like: "why is it always the case that the women I find most beautiful are supposed to be bad"? We must give him some credit.
The error of the male writer is in their attempt to understand women *in general*. I have tried in a similar way to generalise about men, but all I can find that is *general* is a shared tendency to assume they have misunderstood the same thing in all women.
Yes! I think they all understood women perfectly - as in, better than everyone else - but they found in women access to the part of themselves which they didn’t understand (the part which, coincidentally, didn’t understand women). I think the worst possible position is the self-congratulatory Socratic one: ‘but at least I understand that I don’t understand,’ but Dostoevsky-Nietzsche-Kafka came up, independently, with a formula running something like: ‘I understand that whether I understand is irrelevant’ [coincidentally the foundational idea of psychoanalysis]. I mean that, for them, while ‘I understand that whether I understand is irrelevant’ is perfectly general - can be applied to anything, ‘time,’ ‘space’ etc - it was in sexuality that they found a way to concretise it [art]
Do they know it's irrelevant and yet keep trying to understand, because everyone wants to understand everything, ultimately? It's just that the male orgasm appears to be such a moment of crisis! He's accidentally-on-purpose made it to the inner sanctum, and realises he has access that mysterious inscription (pertaining to him, her, whatever), and he's taking a rubbing, but he's a little too vigorous with his crayon and suddenly the whole temple complex is collapsing around his ears.
Art is definitely safer, thanks to those prophylactic brackets around it.
You really can't substitute the word man for woman in any of this. I feel like when the temple collapses women just drag a few nice plinths out into the sun. Or realise starkly that pleasure is a viable existential anchor, in spite of what the propaganda of the matriarchal line has hitherto promoted.
I'm never sure that I believe that 'male pleasure' exists, or if it does, it's entirely non-sexual. I wonder if homophobia is primarily a phobia of pleasure (more so than a fear of any particular way in which that pleasure is produced)
It (sex for straight men) always, I mean, has a covert existential quality, a sort of scraping the barrel of the soul (I mean this in a good way). I would guess that for women there is also this existential quality, but it's more ambiguously futural (e.g., more mysteriously wrapped up in the future, the idea of pregnancy) and (therefore) much less circular.
It's interesting to write about this; it's the one thing I'm absolutely certain I'm completely wrong about.
Isn't it terrifying that we make ourselves so completely vulnerable in a situation where empathy is utterly impossible? Ah, but then, how profoundly “in the same boat”…
***
Maybe this is the one riddle an artificial intelligence will eventually solve.
ah I've been meaning to check out Hölderlin (to save me from Hegel). Enjoyed Novalis a lot when I read him. Not sure what the canary is. Amerika is glorious-
This pensees will be easy to index later. Admiringly inarticulate abt this but if one can affirm the analogy between the Idiot's St. Pete's and Am'kah, amrcA, asin Saul Steinberg's very many pen drawings of Am'can statues
There was one; there is only, mostly missing in the Idiot, in Steinberg's monuments, the gifts of a cleanliness obsessive to make Steinberg's statue vivants last for the implied promise of a ridiculous 4 hours. David Lynch does this too, under the sign of Arcade Sepsis, our style of lives in which we can forgive sex-robots( Are Us) for winking blinking and nodding , was to come cleanly. The only easy way to say it was like you did about organs upclose, " why t Idiot has to end with the love triangle exhausted, in bed".
A man has to vibrate to the fear of putative responsibilty, merely wordsoundsvomitosvowels, but on the downbeat of joining the Renaissance teaseandplease, to instantly put on the dull dish water expression of a Cleanser 2/3's of the way through her shift? Or another mechanical solution was to say Only multiinstrumentalists can save our days. Somehow, by clowning and breaking a nose in a fiasco of a drunk sleep in a bar, if she or he survives, then Pan has been served?
Thanks. I was abt to mix my memories with the disco realities of the Kurosawa. I jokingly started a sstack with “what is a woman, and dangerously wanted to say “She is who nearly can respond to gifts proportionately to their mixed-materials dangerousness. But instead i kept it glib, because I donot know. My glibness today is to say Once she has seen StarTrek, how keep her down on the farm? To which the reply is every woman receive UBI in the form of a car to leave every Russian beardance, I have no right to say it...
For some reason I think women are more comfortable on farms than men these days, based on what I've seen. I have between five and eight empirical examples of this. I wonder when was the historical moment when men and women felt equally comfortable on ruined farms.
The last example of your translation of Cioran - 'His lack of talent bordered on genius' - is a gleefully passive-aggressive gibe to throw at almost any puffed up pigeon pontificating on GB News...
The point is that great writers take alterity seriously (they can't help it) and that the concept of 'understanding' is always performative, but especially so when applied to men in relation to women (Schopenhauer being the most egregious example). And I think that (sex and gender entirely aside) people would get along a lot better if they committed to not understanding one another, perhaps using negative theology as a point of departure
I almost believe it, though! But maybe I should qualify and say I mean understanding in the sense of 'fully grasping' - and that this is always dangerous (the sense that you really 'grasp someone' being a kind of violence, or a kind of taming, that the most important thing about someone is that they fundmentally unreachable-
Women don’t run in herds. Men will tend to. Case closed.
Do men run in herds because they don't understand women?
to refute your point, I present myself: a loner who understands nothing (practicing my 'Diogenes' mode of argument)
Was I making a point?
I’m new to this newsletter. I feel compelled to say: it’s rather brilliant!
thank you for reading, Anthropocene!
Didn't the young Kafka write in his diary something like: "why is it always the case that the women I find most beautiful are supposed to be bad"? We must give him some credit.
The error of the male writer is in their attempt to understand women *in general*. I have tried in a similar way to generalise about men, but all I can find that is *general* is a shared tendency to assume they have misunderstood the same thing in all women.
Yes! I think they all understood women perfectly - as in, better than everyone else - but they found in women access to the part of themselves which they didn’t understand (the part which, coincidentally, didn’t understand women). I think the worst possible position is the self-congratulatory Socratic one: ‘but at least I understand that I don’t understand,’ but Dostoevsky-Nietzsche-Kafka came up, independently, with a formula running something like: ‘I understand that whether I understand is irrelevant’ [coincidentally the foundational idea of psychoanalysis]. I mean that, for them, while ‘I understand that whether I understand is irrelevant’ is perfectly general - can be applied to anything, ‘time,’ ‘space’ etc - it was in sexuality that they found a way to concretise it [art]
Do they know it's irrelevant and yet keep trying to understand, because everyone wants to understand everything, ultimately? It's just that the male orgasm appears to be such a moment of crisis! He's accidentally-on-purpose made it to the inner sanctum, and realises he has access that mysterious inscription (pertaining to him, her, whatever), and he's taking a rubbing, but he's a little too vigorous with his crayon and suddenly the whole temple complex is collapsing around his ears.
Art is definitely safer, thanks to those prophylactic brackets around it.
You really can't substitute the word man for woman in any of this. I feel like when the temple collapses women just drag a few nice plinths out into the sun. Or realise starkly that pleasure is a viable existential anchor, in spite of what the propaganda of the matriarchal line has hitherto promoted.
I'm never sure that I believe that 'male pleasure' exists, or if it does, it's entirely non-sexual. I wonder if homophobia is primarily a phobia of pleasure (more so than a fear of any particular way in which that pleasure is produced)
It (sex for straight men) always, I mean, has a covert existential quality, a sort of scraping the barrel of the soul (I mean this in a good way). I would guess that for women there is also this existential quality, but it's more ambiguously futural (e.g., more mysteriously wrapped up in the future, the idea of pregnancy) and (therefore) much less circular.
It's interesting to write about this; it's the one thing I'm absolutely certain I'm completely wrong about.
Isn't it terrifying that we make ourselves so completely vulnerable in a situation where empathy is utterly impossible? Ah, but then, how profoundly “in the same boat”…
***
Maybe this is the one riddle an artificial intelligence will eventually solve.
Sexual intercourse was discontinued
In twenty sixty-three
(Which was rather late.. etc)
Arms at three feet; for a woman; writing poetry about a man ; check out Holderlin’s final poems; by Diotima
ah I've been meaning to check out Hölderlin (to save me from Hegel). Enjoyed Novalis a lot when I read him. Not sure what the canary is. Amerika is glorious-
ok I get it; still working on Kafka’s Amerika; the canary’s coal mine; Novalis’s Blue
Does women undestand women?
if someone knows, it is not Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Kafka or Cioran (based on what I’ve read of them so far)-
I'm not so sure that Cioran knows what a man (or even he) is.
ur a gift to this world!!
thank you for reading, Blossom!
love this
thank you for reading, Echo!
Thank you! You inspired me to write something about Holderlin!
This pensees will be easy to index later. Admiringly inarticulate abt this but if one can affirm the analogy between the Idiot's St. Pete's and Am'kah, amrcA, asin Saul Steinberg's very many pen drawings of Am'can statues
https://images.app.goo.gl/fFmuvkxDAfPhPsEDA
There was one; there is only, mostly missing in the Idiot, in Steinberg's monuments, the gifts of a cleanliness obsessive to make Steinberg's statue vivants last for the implied promise of a ridiculous 4 hours. David Lynch does this too, under the sign of Arcade Sepsis, our style of lives in which we can forgive sex-robots( Are Us) for winking blinking and nodding , was to come cleanly. The only easy way to say it was like you did about organs upclose, " why t Idiot has to end with the love triangle exhausted, in bed".
A man has to vibrate to the fear of putative responsibilty, merely wordsoundsvomitosvowels, but on the downbeat of joining the Renaissance teaseandplease, to instantly put on the dull dish water expression of a Cleanser 2/3's of the way through her shift? Or another mechanical solution was to say Only multiinstrumentalists can save our days. Somehow, by clowning and breaking a nose in a fiasco of a drunk sleep in a bar, if she or he survives, then Pan has been served?
I have to re-read The Idiot, I think... To be honest I found the 2003 TV version even more terrifying: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3xinaq . Only Kurosawa filmed snow with any conviction [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJcfJ4Smp9Y], it seems-
Thanks. I was abt to mix my memories with the disco realities of the Kurosawa. I jokingly started a sstack with “what is a woman, and dangerously wanted to say “She is who nearly can respond to gifts proportionately to their mixed-materials dangerousness. But instead i kept it glib, because I donot know. My glibness today is to say Once she has seen StarTrek, how keep her down on the farm? To which the reply is every woman receive UBI in the form of a car to leave every Russian beardance, I have no right to say it...
For some reason I think women are more comfortable on farms than men these days, based on what I've seen. I have between five and eight empirical examples of this. I wonder when was the historical moment when men and women felt equally comfortable on ruined farms.
The Ww2 generation in fact the whole suburban exodous w a s about moving to Green Acres. Preferably a boutique hobby farm...
The last example of your translation of Cioran - 'His lack of talent bordered on genius' - is a gleefully passive-aggressive gibe to throw at almost any puffed up pigeon pontificating on GB News...
ngl I'm going to take down GB News one secret Cioran half-translation at a time
Okay. So what is the point of this essay? All men choose to “not understand” women? Guess I’ve missed the point.
The point is that great writers take alterity seriously (they can't help it) and that the concept of 'understanding' is always performative, but especially so when applied to men in relation to women (Schopenhauer being the most egregious example). And I think that (sex and gender entirely aside) people would get along a lot better if they committed to not understanding one another, perhaps using negative theology as a point of departure
You are a great contrarian aren’t you?
I almost believe it, though! But maybe I should qualify and say I mean understanding in the sense of 'fully grasping' - and that this is always dangerous (the sense that you really 'grasp someone' being a kind of violence, or a kind of taming, that the most important thing about someone is that they fundmentally unreachable-
How are you doing these days, Patris? It's been a while-
Okay. In my life, I think I've gotten to a point of understanding men very well, women less so. But then I am a cynic too so...
Utterly fascinating to see all the mental gyrations. Carry on!