Epigraph

"Tomas came to this conclusion: making love to a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation but in the desire for shared sleep."

-Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

I met a boy. His name is Paul and I feel great affection for him, though I'm not sure if I love him or not. Tomas's model doesn't quite seem to work in this situation. Of course there's sex. And that's great. We even sleep together sometimes, and it's also great. I've never been a huge fan of sleeping alone. Naturally I agree with Tomas that at times sharing one's bed can feel like a violation, and that certainly one must be selective when dispensing invitations. But I'm not sure that the mere desire to share one's bed determines (or is determined by) love. If Tomas is right then I love Paul, but sometimes I feel like I only love him in the confines of my own private little world, a world which of course doesn't exist. This world is contained in a bedroom, and here I love Paul and all the laying and sleeping and talking and fucking and staring into each other's eyes. They all feel like one single continuous act and when we do these things I feel for a while like a coherent being, without fractures, without incongruities. In this bedroom world there are no borders between perception and emotion. But this world doesn't really exist because if it did it would be eternal and in reality it always ends.

You see, Paul isn't happy with just my little bedroom world. Paul wants to share the outside world with me but in that world I cannot possibly grant anyone a monopoly over my affections. He wants to be with me always and so I am only too eager to be rid of him. He wants to protect me but I don't want his protection. He wants us to share all of our problems but I don't want to bear the weight. How can that be love? My rather obvious conclusion is that the Paul that I love, like the world he inhabits with me, is unreal, nonexistent, a utopian construction of my consciousness designed to compensate for the alienation I feel in public life. The Paul I love is just a body that I fill with myself, or a negatively tuned mirror that reflects my needs as fulfillments. I love his body. I love his smile and his laugh. I love that he loves me enough to humor me as much as he does, to tolerate my abuse and hypocrisy, even. But I don't love him unselfishly, so I guess I don't really love him at all.

Seeing a Stranger

I had to run some errands today so I took the subway into town. On the way back, I was riding down the escalator when I caught a glimpse of this girl, riding up on the other side. First I glanced at her, and I noticed that she was pretty. But then there was something about her face that made me look again. She wasn't exceptionally pretty; I took note of her various imperfections, none particularly significant, but altogether making her objectively unexceptional looking. The thing was that she looked familiar somehow, although I couldn't place her. My first thought was that she must resemble some actress or other, although which one I couldn't decide. Then the more I stared at her, the more I noticed her look. She seemed to be looking off at nothing, noticing nothing, but her expression was certainly not vacant. Something about her eyes, which would not meet mine, pulled me in. I wanted to say something to her. I wanted her to clear things up, to explain herself, to help me figure out why her appearance had sent such a jolt through me on an otherwise uneventful commute. I would say, "You look like an actress," and she would say, "Oh, yeah. ____ ____, right? I get that a lot." Then we would smile and part ways. Or I would say, "Do I know you from somewhere?" to which she would reply with a quizzical look and say "I don't think so" or, "Oh, hey, Jo, yeah!" and a quick catch-up conversation would ensue, followed by empty promises to keep in touch. But I was going down, and she was on the other side of the escalator, going up, and anyway her eyes never met mine, so instead I just turned and stared at her as we drifted past each other.

Je l'aime et je la respire

Read a book. Make tea. Tell me something. What do you want to hear? The sounds of wet, loving, foreign tongues. A cold rain. A forest. A bed of poison ivy. A secret patch of mushrooms that "broadcast on transcendental frequencies"- Robbins. A body of work, tatooed, stamped, branded, owned, sold, thrown away and picked up again.

"This is terrible," she said, looking up from the sheet of crumpled notebook paper, over her glasses.

"I know," I replied. "But sometimes I just find myself in a liminal space, like maybe I could burst out in every direction at once, except that I can't escape the stasis. Or maybe I'm nowhere."

"Well, see, that's just garbage. Introspective sloth. You're just too lazy to really ask yourself the hard questions and figure out why you feel the way that you do. That's why all you can do is spout twisted half-clichés and nonsense. What you've got to understand is that it's not enough to be authentic. It's not even enough to be honest. And they're not the same thing. No, the important thing is to be rigorous. To understand, or at least to come as close as possible. Or maybe to understand why you can't understand. But this visceral shit don't fly no more."

"I think I understand what you mean. You've got to have ideas, reasons. Otherwise, it's easy. And no one wants easy. But what if my ideas are so obscure that even I can't untangle them?"

"Then you don't really have any ideas."

Cupid's Trick

I took the bus home from work last week.  The rain had already sucked all of the autumn out of the leaves and the unseasonable warmth made me think of rot.  As we crossed the river I glanced out of the window and watched the runoff pour in from concrete drains.  I huddled into my jacket; it was damp and uncomfortable, but the AC was blasting cold air at me, and my leggings were soaked with rain and puddle-water.  The bus took a right at the end of the bridge and made a stop.  An old man had rung for it, and as he stepped out into the foggy drizzle, he slipped and fell on the curb.  The driver put the bus into park and got out.  With his help, the old man got up slowly as the other commuters idly gazed out at them or did their best to ignore them or ignored them without trying.  I was sitting on the opposite side of the bus, next to last row, so I didn't get a great view.  

I came home to an empty, dark house, just as I had hoped.  Something about the light in a dark house on an ugly day...I like it.  So I stripped off my jacket, kicked off my shoes, and went into the kitchen to put the kettle on.  My first instinct was to turn on the TV, but I couldn't bring myself to break the stillness.  This kind of solace was something to savor.  So instead, I walked up the stairs toward the bathroom and wriggled out of my sopping leggings.  Without turning any lights on, I sat down on the toilet and studied my legs.  My feet were dirty in spots, and my toes had turned to prunes.  I lifted my left foot in the air, leaned it against the sink, turned it so that I could see the crook of my knee in the soft blue light.  Then I started cutting.

I'm an expert at this.  I don't do anything too deep or visible, and I never cut in the same place twice.  Even the closest inspection of my legs doesn't reveal any scars.  I just popped a blade out of a fresh razor and began making the slightest vertical incisions on the inside of my left thigh.  Parallel lines, three, four, five.  You don't need to cut deep to get a lot of sensation.  The blood looked bright black in the dark as it rolled down and dripped onto my panties.  When I was done I stripped the rest of my clothes off and stepped into the shower.  I let the blood trickle onto the floor for a moment before I turned the water on.  The cold shocked my skin at first, then it warmed slowly.  I washed myself, paying particular attention to my dirty feet, then stepped out, dried off, and put a bandage over my thigh.  I walked downstairs in my towel and found my kettle cold.  I had forgotten to turn on the burner.  I switched it on and waited for my tea.

Short Essay

"The more total society becomes, the greater the reification of the mind and the more paradoxical its effort to escape reification on its own.  Even the most extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter.  Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism.  To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric."

-Theodor W. Adorno

Joanna reporting from Thanksgiving weekend.  Adorno writes that "there is nothing innocuous left," that even the apparently "simple" pleasures of life are actually lies which serve the forces of cruelty and terror and repression by concealing their very existence, by encouraging those of us who can afford it to ignore them.  For him, the only true pleasure can be found in contemplating "horror, withstanding it, and in unalleviated consciousness of negativity, holding fast to the possibility of what is better."  It is not a new argument.  It is, however, a call to action.  

From an ethical point of view, Marxism is not all that different from certain strands of Christian thought, particularly those whose ideology derives from the Sermon on the Mount.  It is this moral code that is taken up by Hegel in his discussion of Lordship and Bondage.  This exploration of a hypothetical first encounter between two subjects, or self-consciousnesses, describes the dialectical link between Fear and Desire that ultimately results in battle, and the emergence of one superior and one inferior subject (the beginnings of society, perhaps).  Hegel goes on to explain, however, in a characteristic twist of logic, that the apparently superior Lord is actually inferior, and the Bondsman in fact is superior.  This is because the Lord exists only as an empty vessel of sensation, a receptacle for pleasure and nothing more.  The Bondsman, on the other hand, acts upon the objective world, realizing a part of himself, effecting real change as he creates in order to satisfy the Lord's demands.  And in the process, he learns the (Beatitudinal) values of self-discipline and humility.

Exactly what Hegel meant to describe by his thought experiment is obscure, but there can be no doubt that Marx read the piece historically, with the Lord representing the ruling class and the Bondsman representing the downtrodden workers.  So Marx's ethic is clearly aligned with that of the Sermon.  But while Christ promised his poor flock the Kingdom of Heaven, Marx was a fierce atheist, and so religion, like the pleasures scorned by Adorno, comes to be viewed in this discourse simply as another distraction, and worse, a lie told to conceal the real horror that surrounds us.

In the past century, of course, we have attempted to compensate for God's absence by creating aesthetic productions whose beauty can help us escape the prosaic awfulness that increasingly surrounds us.  But although this may comfort us it cannot save us; the Nazi obsession with aesthetic perfection is no coincidence.  For this reason, and for many others, perhaps, the beautiful can no longer be beautiful; only the ugly can.  And only in gazing upon the horror of reality (the reality of horror), and in it discovering the possibility of realizing a better world, will we be able to rediscover the truly beautiful.

Preventative Care

I am getting fat.  It's not too noticeable to the naked eye yet, but it will be soon if I don't do something about it.  See, I noticed that my jeans were feeling a little snug lately.  (This is not something I do particularly often; as an emancipated woman I feel able to shed the pressures of patriarchal society and not worry about my weight.  This time, however, I was faced with real empirical evidence of weight gain, and I don't want to be one of those emancipated fat girls.)  Needless to say, (and without mentioning any specific figures), I was a little surprised, and quite disappointed, by the results.  Wearing tight jeans has proven to be an effective early warning system, but now that I am aware of this trend, I am unsure of what to do about it.

You see, as far as I can tell, there is no medical consensus on this issue.  Some say carbohydrates make you fat; others say fat makes you fat.  Some say exercise; others, dieting.  Every time I turn on the TV there is another weight loss method advertising itself as The Solution.  One would think, with the amount of money being poured into this problem, we would be able to have some doctor come on TV and give us the real answer.  But then I suppose nobody would be able to profit from the general lack of health and self-esteem.  Now, it seems reasonable that a combination of exercise and a reduction of overall caloric intake would probably be most effective, but that sounds hard, and I don't want to commit to the long, difficult path without hard scientific evidence.  I want a decision to be made for me.  If we had Marxists running the show, somebody would have already reached a consensus, and we would all feel a lot better about ourselves and our habits.  Everyone in the gulags was thin.

Good News

Hey guys.  Sorry I haven't written to you in a while, but I have actually been busy.  I got a job!  Well, it's more of an internship really.  But at least I'm getting paid something.  My mom was really getting on my case, as I indicated in my last post.  And the whole escort thing never really got off the ground.  It was one of those things that are fun to think about, but wouldn't work out nearly as well in reality as they do in my fantasy life.  Anyway, my mom called up her friend Stephanie, whom she has known forever, and Stephanie told her that she needed an intern to help her out in her capacity as an insurance industry representative.  See, the insurance companies are lobbying extra hard to maintain their grip on the American healthcare system, and what with the new bill being debated in Congress currently, there is no shortage of work.  (Don't worry; this blog will not turn topical).  So, I have a paid internship at least through the Fall, to be terminated once these sharks devour and kill the impulse to reform.  (I hate performing menial clerical tasks for these reactionaries, but, hey, a girl's got to make a living).

So, the job is okay.  Unfortunately, I don't directly answer to Stephanie.  She just helped me get the job, but she's too high up to be bothered with micromanaging mindless office duties.  My immediate boss is this guy named Trevor.  He's a real asshole.  Thinks he's doing God's work here slaving away to make the Gala Corp. lobbying machine function more efficiently.  Plus he leers at me constantly.  I mean, I don't mind a little attention, but I would rather put up with Pumba's shit than this.  He's probably twenty-seven or twenty-eight, and he still wears a fake tan and gels his hair up like a schmuck.  He's one of those guys whose idea of flirting is making sexist comments and innuendoes that aren't even witty, and then play-acting like he's hurt when I shut him down.  The thing is, I'm brand new here, so I feel as though I should tread lightly, but if he doesn't cool it I will have to talk to Stephanie about it.

Other than Trevor and Stephanie, I really haven't had the chance to meet any of the people here.  I was hoping there might be an interesting crowd, but, let's face it, we're a small department in a multinational corporation.  I don't think that interesting people exist here, or if they do, they don't expose the interesting aspects of their personalities at work.  This is a place where verve and vim come to immolate themselves.  Even the place's physical surroundings reflect the death of personality: an office park, surrounded by pavement, somewhere in outer suburbia.  

Okay, so maybe I'm being a little bitter.  On the plus-side, I get to car-pool with Stephanie since she only lives a couple blocks away from me.  I really enjoy her company on the commute.  It's odd, because I've known her for so long as my mom's friend, but I really think that now we are getting to know each other on our own terms, unmediated.  It makes me optimistic about the possibility of meeting somebody at Gala Corp. who isn't a tool.  Moreover, she demonstrates that it is possible to work in such a cretinous environment without losing your mind or your soul.  So on that note, I begin my journey into the rabbit hole of the corporate world.