originally posted to substack — Aug 26, 2023
i keep thinking i should go to LA, probably, before we die… and my first thought — NO WATER, even as it rains. fires, gangs of drug-addled arsonists, it’s already happening here too. every major west coast city i keep thinking, every single one and i can’t imagine living anywhere else, the closest thing i’ll ever have to an identity, maybe
—fire & geography
instead i read I LOVE DICK again – it’s been eleven years, things have changed, i’ve accepted my own misogyny and it’s made me a ‘nicer’ person. the first-person confessional was always aspirational, to me, like in the sense of how to be a woman – only demonstrating the many ways in which i’ve failed (to care, to invest, to desire anything outside myself). turns out i’m the backwards type who has to write in order to live and not the other way around
the confessional is hyperstition
and i’m like okay, fine but WHO WILL BE MY MUSE, what puckish man will step up and be my muse
but DICK IS NON-SYMBOLIC too referential, too anxious, too self-surveilled… in the literal sense
and all the cute, clean-cut hardcore boys have aged into doughy beardos who seem to think craft brewing constitutes a whole-ass personality — IPA metal et. al. i don’t know how to recalibrate my desire, i just don’t — or don’t think i should have to (the vanity in wearing the same size jeans you did twenty years ago, or is that vanity sizing)
one has to intentionally curate attraction these days, almost manifest it out of an air thinned on suffering and smokey prayer — like some holy guardian angel you’re allowed to fuck but never trust. so i try to think of my desire as “the systematic revelation of fate” just to get going and invest in the epistolary ‘you’
—YOU
(write the reader/muse into the text b/c i’m so desperate to communicate)
“write a narrative in which the speaker starts to understand that events, as they happen in her/his life, can be seen not as surprises but as an uncovering — the systematic revelation of fate”
— Kraus, I Love Dick
“the unconscious needs to be created” — i read, and felt you were close. like my own little abramelin procedure
—confessional, hyperstitional
my schizophrenic relation to cause & effect or the tiny frontal lobe seizures i keep having that sever all order of events make the space for a sacrificial practice – fantasy. (what does fantasy sacrifice, fulfillment?)
like in that movie Arrebato, have you seen it? what happens in between frames of a film – one thing disappears as another is created. entropy, or art
fantasy returns the gaze/line of sight and refracts it, splits the transmission — watcher + the watched, and quickly becomes a surveillance state if one doesn’t invest it with a kernel of possibility, WILL… becomes the fantasy of social media, the hygienic prison of a public self
and not the fantasy of forgetting, transcendence 1 2
—through art of course. your art, my imagination — the distance required of desire. so far to see only through a screen, a spectral encounter negotiated through the terms and conditions of youtube, basically. b/c now that the spirit is what’s between us, the primary mediation
—it’s you & me & the holy ghost
(i want to write about the resonance between evangelicism and salesmen, the empty promise in the expiatory vastness of THE WEST. like ancestor work)
i mean you seem kind of dumb but you’re a musician so, duh, & i really admire your ability to get things done – you seem very professional, which is maybe why your band broke up. and while sanctioned expertise is not really something i’m generally into, at this point in my life (my non-existent ‘career’) i could use some of that energy fr. you’re obviously a fan of gesamtkunstwerk tho you prob don’t even know what that word is and i certainly can’t pronounce it… i’m just like that, dumb at the point of execution, but it doesn’t matter b/c it’s the only way – art as total life
(i’m going to steal your band name, i kind of want to tell you this in person but that might curdle the spell)
the holy ghost is the technique of fantasy that slowly forms a witness consciousness between you and me – sol. tech. #1
in this podcast they’re saying that the muse makes an art of their life and the artist – makes things, produces. and that the female artist, the un-muse, will never be happily partnered – nothing, nobody lives up to the ideal being chased &/or no man wants someone so utterly manifested, someone who isn’t some immaculate canvas for projection
—like a virgin
but virginity, also: “is the promise to remain true to oneself and the radical refusal to participate in the reproductive order of civilization, in full consciousness of holding both the key to its maintenance and the key to its destruction. …awareness of their own self-sufficiency—an absolute self-monotheism capable of plunging the universe into ruin”3
like Klossowski on Diana — “goddess beyond destiny, with whom no mortal, even at destiny’s behest, could presume to join in union.”
to hold oneself beyond destiny
—and so like being the mistress, you can never relax – you always need to be engaging desire
and there’s little comfort there, little rest
maybe i don’t need a muse, maybe i just need a producer — final form is always what’s hard for me. it’s that thing of having all and every inspiration but finishing nothing, and so come to find you’re not really an artist — just a mystic. unless i can practice mysticism as genre
but genre mysticism begins at failure (genre as in what’s legible), as the nature of the void is that it hears but doesn’t speak (is fantasy a type of failure?)
and so far i’ve failed to even start so, fuck
- fantasy makes relation to myself possible, otherwise i’m just me, i’m just being, i can only feel i can’t think. but do i even want to relate to myself, should i? do i have to witness myself b/c no one else will? ↩︎
- and when Butler says GOD IS CHANGE, must one forget in order to change? like thoughts of suicide acting as palliative – i don’t really want to die i just want to CHANGE. the space created between my fantasy and i, by act of imagination, creates the lack in which i can think these things, like an ascetic clarity. and and then of course Neville says God is imagination ↩︎
- Revolutionary Demonology, Gruppo di Nun ↩︎