She recognized his paintings instantly.

It was now as before in Paris exhibits, all the methods of scientific splitting of the atom applied to the body, and to the emotions. His figures exploded and constellated into fragments, like spilled puzzles, each piece having flown far enough away to seem irretrievable and yet not far enough to be dissociated. One could, with an effort of the imagination reconstruct a human figure completely from these fragments kept from total annihilation in space by an invisible tension. By one effort of contraction at the core they might still amalgamate to form the body of a woman.

No change in Jay’s painting, but a change in Sabina who understood for the first time what they meant. She could see at this moment on the wall an exact portrait of herself as she felt inside.

Had he painted Sabina, or something happening to all of them as it was happening in chemistry, in science? They had found all the corrosive acids, all the disintegrations, all the alchemies of separateness.

But when the painter exposed what took place inside the body and emotions of man, they starved him, or gave him Fifth Avenue shop windows to do, where Paris La Nuit in the background allowed fashions to display hats and shoes and handbags and waists floating in mid-air, and waiting to be assembled on one complete woman.

She stood before the paintings and now she could see the very minute fragments of her acts which she had believed unimportant causing minute incisions, erosions of the personality. A small act, a kiss given at a party to a young man who benefitted from his resemblance to a lost John, a hand abandoned in a taxi to a man not desired but because the other woman’s hand had been claimed and Sabina could not bear to have her hand lie unclaimed on her lap: it seemed an affront to her powers of seduction. A word of praise about a painting she had not liked but uttered out of fear that the painter would say: “Oh, Sabina . . . Sabina doesn’t understand painting.”

All the small insincerities had seeped like invisible rivulets of acid and caused profound damages, the erosions had sent each fragment of Sabina rotating like separate pieces of colliding planets, into other spheres, yet not powerful enough to fly into space like a bird, not organic enough to become another life, to rotate on its own core.

Jay’s painting was a dance of fragments to the rhythm of debris. It was also a portrait of Sabina.

And all her seeking of fire to weld these fragments together, seeking in the furnace of delight a welding of fragments into one total love, one total woman, had failed!

Can I ask you something?  Do you think you’re pretty?

Sometimes.

Not all the time?  You’re so pretty.  I mean, really, you’re so beautiful.

Sometimes, I think I’m really beautiful.  Other times, I can’t stand to look at myself.

What changes?

I hate to admit this, but a lot of it has to do with how I imagine other people perceive me.  Or my emotional state.  And often my emotional state is a reflection of how I imagine other people perceive me.

I guess sometimes I think less of the way I look when I’m feeling shitty, too.  But not drastically.  Most of the time, I think I’m fairly pretty.

For me, it’s broken down into two separate issues: the face and the body.  The face is much less complicated than the body.  I’m much less dramatic about my face.  It takes more emotional strife to make me feel bad about my face.  My body, on the other hand, is a mine field.

What makes you so insecure about your body?  I think you have a great body.  I mean, you fit pretty well into society’s standards of attractive body size and shape.

I’ve struggled with body image issues since puberty, I think I’ve told you that before.  I never felt thin enough…  I went through a long phase of anorexia, which felt so great and so awful at the same time.  The sad thing is, for a long time it felt like the only thing I was ever really good at.  Then I finally got healthy, got to a good place with my weight and felt good about my body for a few years.  And then I gained 40 pounds from medications that I was taking, that I needed to take to live a normal life.  I’m only five foot three.  40 pounds is a lot of fucking weight.  I went from wearing a size extra small to wearing a size large.  It was shocking… it changed everything.  I couldn’t bear to look at myself naked anymore.  I was scared to have sex because I didn’t want anyone else to see me naked.  I didn’t go back to anorexia, I was still far beyond that, but I was struggling with these issues again that were so pervasive that they affected every aspect of my life.

And you still feel that way?

No, not all the time.  These things still affect me, but I’m in a much better place now.  I’ve come to accept my size more.  I know intellectually that being a size large does not make me unattractive.  I also know that being attractive is not the ultimate goal.  It’s just that when I’m emotionally vulnerable, my body is the first thing I take it out on.  I start to hate my body all over again.  It’s always a roller coaster ride.

I’ve always been so lucky to have a mother who loved her body so much.  She was always overweight by any standard, but she never cared, and she never showed any insecurity.  I think that’s why I’ve always had such a positive view of my own body.

You are lucky.  I definitely think my mother’s attitudes played a big role in my own insecurities when I was a young girl.  But it’s so easy to blame our parents.  I used to blame my parents for so many things… my poor mental health, my perfectionism, my inability to maintain healthy romantic relationships, my intellectual insecurities… but at some point, you have to take responsibility for your own life.

Right… Hey, I have a question.

Sure.

This is something I think about for myself a lot, so I’m wondering what your take on it is.  When you get dressed, do you do it for yourself or for other people?

You mean, do I wear things to make myself feel good or to attract other people?

Yeah.

Definitely both.  I’d like to think that making myself feel good comes first.  In fact, the evidence for this comes from the fact that when I was dating Christopher, he complained that I always wore loose clothing, that I rarely showed my bare legs, and that I wore dresses everyday and never wore jeans.  These are things I do to make myself feel comfortable, and I’m not willing to change them just to attract someone else.   But I’m definitely hoping to look attractive to others when I wear certain outfits.  What about you?

Well, it’s complicated.  To look at me, you’d think I don’t care what anybody thinks.  You know me, I wear things that other people find a little crazy sometimes.  But the truth is, sometimes I do care.  Or, at least, I’m well aware of what other people think.  I think about it all the time.

Is attractiveness the goal?  In what you wear, I mean.

I guess a certain sort of attractiveness, yes.

Why are we so obsessed with being attractive all the time?

I really don’t know.

Being attractive is so much less important than so many other things.  Like being happy, being healthy, being productive, or feeling accomplished.  Yet we obsess over it as if we owe it people, whether they be our partners or random men on the street.

You’re so right… But then again, whether people find us attractive or not affects us in tangible ways.

That’s true.  I remember when I used to wear big sweatshirts all the time because I was trying to hide my body, nobody found me attractive.  I had the same face as I do now, but nobody took a second look at it.  But I think that was more about how I felt than how I dressed.

But it was also about your performance.  This idea of what’s attractive is about the whole performance of how someone looks, how they dress, how they act, etc.  And you fell outside of the ideal on more than one count.

I was shocked when I started to dress differently and realize that men actually found me physically attractive.  Then I started to play into it and use my looks to get things that I wanted, like sexual attention just for the sake of attention.  The whole thing was so new, so exciting.  But it quickly became dangerous, and I felt dirty and vain.

I think we’ve all done that before, at one point or another.

I got such a high from it.  I had never gotten sexual attention before in my life.

Yeah, see, I was showered with sexual attention since I hit puberty.  Sometimes, I relished it, but sometimes, it just felt like such a burden.  But I always had boyfriends, so my relationship with it was probably different than yours.

I get that.  In recent years, attention has sometimes come to feel like a burden for me, too.  There’s wanted attention and unwanted attention, and you can’t have one without the other.

True.

Do you think that many men feel the same way about attention?

I have no idea.  I know Adam doesn’t.  For him, sexual attention is almost always positive.  But I’m sure other men feel differently.  But you have to remember, men don’t usually get catcalled on the street.  And they don’t get all that “smile, baby, you’re too pretty to look so sad” bullshit.

Oh, the “smile, baby” thing is the worst.  Why the fuck should I smile for you?  I am not here to look pleasing for you, to give you pleasure with my appearance, to arouse you, to make your day.

I know, right?  God, that pisses me off.  No one would ever say that to a man.

Or if someone did say that to a man, it would still be offensive, but not the same case of systematic sexism.

Right…  You know what I worry about?  Do you ever feel like you contribute to sexism yourself?  I worry about that a lot.

Yeah, well we all do in some ways.  We have to be really aware of it to try to move away from it towards a healthier way of living.  Like, for instance, one thing I decided on a long time ago was to delete the words slut, whore, and bitch from my vocabulary.  All they do is reinforce this dynamic of women hating women, and they say that women’s sexuality is an inherently bad and dangerous thing, and they take the power of women’s sexuality away from women and put it into the hands of men.  I mean, we can’t take sexism out of the world, but we can do little things to try to shift the experiences of people around us in the right direction.

I never even thought about how much I use the words slut and bitch.  They really are awful words when you think about them.  I’ve always taken issue with the way we use words like pussy, and dick, and suck, and blow.  I think suck and blow are particularly interesting ones, actually.  Because what we say when we say something sucks or blows is that it is bad.  This association of badness with the act of a woman performing oral sex on a man is an interesting association, no?  I mean, where does that come from?  The fear of women’s sexuality.  And suck and blow essentially do the same thing that slut, bitch, and whore do: they shame women for being sexual beings.

Most people don’t even realize how simple language choices like that contribute to a sexist culture.  But I’m not going to sit here and pretend that I don’t use the word suck just like everybody else does.  I do.  I use it all the time.  But I do think about what it means, and where it comes from.  It’s just that, there’s only so much you can change, you know?  Our language is our language.  Like, I’m outraged by the fact that the word hysteria comes from a word meaning “of the womb” and that it has come to mean “excessive or uncontrollable emotion.”  But that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop using the word.  It’s part of our language, and I can’t change that.

I never realized that about hysteria…  Oh, I guess it has the same root as hysterectomy, that makes sense.

Yeah.

Anyway, this whole question of language is interesting.  It’s one of these things that can seem sort of insignificant, but I think it actually plays a huge role in systematic oppression.  If the language changes, the whole dialogue changes.

That’s why I try to be careful about what I say, particularly about other women.  I think the second you start to degrade other women, you open the door for men and society at large to degrade women.

You’re so right.  I think sometimes I can be judgmental without realizing it.  Sometimes jealousy plays a part in it, too, I hate to say.

I know, jealousy and competition are major problems among women.  We have to move past them if we’re ever going to make progress.

Competition is the worst.  It makes us insecure, angry, vindictive.  Men must get competitive with each other, too, though, right?  Or do you think it’s just women?

I’m sure men feel competitive.  But I don’t think they’re taught to tear each other down the way women are taught to.  I think the way it manifests itself is different.  The name-calling – bitch, slut, whore – that doesn’t happen with men so much.  There aren’t even equivalent words.  I guess men call each other dicks and assholes and douchebags when they don’t like each other.  But there are different connotations and none of them have to do with sexuality.

But you’re forgetting the most important one.

I am?

Fag.

Oh my god, you’re right, how could I forget fag?  I take it back, fag is all about sexuality.

Right, I mean, fag is probably the biggest insult that straight men throw around at each other.  And what it really does is call into question the very definition of what it means to be a man.  It sets up these rules about manhood.  It says that a man is only a man if he desires women, if he objectifies women, if he sleeps with women, if he sleeps with many women, etc.

It’s amazing how many layers there are to the word fag.  It shames men for having sexual feelings towards other men, or for not having strong enough sexual feelings for women.  It shames men for not being interested enough in “manly” things, like sports.  It shames men for having qualities generally associated with femininity, like sensitivity or timidity.  The list goes on and on, but just like with slut and whore, the key tactic is always shaming.

Still, isn’t it interesting that women get shamed for promiscuity and actually being sexual in the first place, whereas men get shamed for not being sexual enough, as long as their sexuality is being expressed towards women?

So interesting!

To go back to the whole thing about attractiveness and beauty for a minute… do you think that the reason we’re so obsessed with looking attractive all the time is because of this sense of competition with other women?

That’s probably part of it.

I know I’ve said this before, but I think I’m going to shave my head.  I really mean it this time.  I want people to look at me differently.  I want to look at myself differently.  I’m sick of looking like a vanilla Barbie.

I know what you mean.  Sometimes I feel like cutting all my hair off, too.  But I really like my long hair, and I’d rather subvert my gender performance in other ways.  Like not shaving my legs.  But I don’t think subverting gender performance has to be the goal anyway.  There’s nothing wrong with performing your gender in a typically feminine way or wanting to look attractive.  It’s just that you have to be aware of why you’re doing what you’re doing.

Well, I’m gonna shave my head!  Ahh!

I think you totally should!

Oh, I almost forgot.  Adam wanted me to ask you, what did you think about his friend Eric from the party the other night?

He was nice enough.  Why?

He thought you two would hit it off.

Really?  Eh, really not my type.  I mean, he went to business school.

Yeah, but he’s not your typical business school student.  He’s into camping and stuff.

Okay, but have you met me?  When was the last time you saw me in the woods?

That’s not the point, though.  You’re so quick to judge.

No, I just know when I click with someone, and there was no chemistry between us.  He wasn’t my type.

Well, what is your type?

You know the kind of guys I go for.  Like Christopher.  Or Dan, if he hadn’t been sleeping with other women, obviously.

Right, you like the whole artsy, sensitive, long-haired musician thing, right?

Well, that just makes it sound like a terrible cliché.

Maybe that’s your problem.

I don’t think I have a problem.

Okay, I’m sorry, I was just trying to help.  Adam thought you might like Eric.  We just get worried about you being alone sometimes.

Look, sometimes being alone is hard, but Eric is not the answer.  I know you two are really happy together, and I look at you, and I want that, too, but I’m okay for now.

That’s good to know.  I just want you to be happy.

Thanks, hon.  Listen, I should really get back to work on my paper.

Yeah, I have a ton of shit to do, too.  Let’s do dinner tomorrow?

Definitely.

Some people like to look down on us, as
though ’twere a sin to find God in
every passing moment. A nickname is
affixed to the lifestyle. More and more
youths begin to join. Articles and
theories are elaborated, but tis a method
simple enough. One need only to
conclude that it is, indeed, an
interesting time to be alive — and set
about looking for proof of it.

But it’s a funny thing. Once you start
looking for it, the object of interest
flits away from one source to
another. It ceases to matter
who says what, who does what –
just follow, whatever it is, so long as
it stimulates. Origin is a moot point, 
and so as the briefest glimmer of an
essential anonymity breaks through
into your conscience, one either
becomes aware of oneself treating
others as one sublime object of
potential pleasure, or recapitulates in
the endless cycle of corporeal in-
gestation. A grim kernel of rest-
lessness, a premonition of having
stopped short without remembering
where – years, weeks, and months that
pile on, burying a person who wondered
if things could go differently — “An
orchid dies,” so they say.

What is there to do but grin, Socratic
and self-satisfied.

Irony: as simple as the sun shining
down day after day, no matter the
habits with which we .
The hemlock we learn better to
withstand with each and every
consumption of the new.

Music recommendations (from
Jonathan Richman’s Morning Show,
91.5 KEXP New York, 4/13/10
7-8a.m.)

Franz f. All my friends
New order. Life vigilantes
LCD soundtstem. All I want
Clorofila. el general
Nortec collective
Unkle. natural selection
Dandy warhols. Good morning
Tanlines

Sent from my iPhone

This notion of what is deserved is beside the point

and yet we keep coming back to it.

I’m more interested in what actually happens

when connections are made or broken.

–

He spills red wine on her beige rug.

A sudden gust of air lifts her skirt above her waist.

The cat pees next to the litter box again.

She likes to be strangled during sex.

He likes to strangle her during sex.

The chickadee eats the seeds of the tree.

I was not going to post this, but in the interest of park preservation, wetymology, helliott smith, the dismemberance of things past, and coeuruption of the symbolic order…

The site is not a reality. You go there
and look for a place to fit in. Not like
conforming; just like a piece in a clock,
fitting together and rotating in co-
motion. The site is where you go to
make a living. It’s a place where skills
get deployed. The ploy is: they get you
to think you have to be there. The
truth is you don’t, but

You really care. You care if the water
turns green and you can’t drink it so
all things being about the same you
care about your job. But the site is not
a reality. It’s a ploy in the interest of
a boss. And the boss is not a reality,
he’s

An animal is a reality. But that’s why
they can’t come to the site. Too
distracting and so “your cat is a very
good friend and offers his heart with
allegiance, and if he could talk we’d be
best friends; the only friend he has is
his bowl, ooo-ah-oooo, ooooooo.” An
animal is a reality, while the boss is

An alphabet is a reality. But we think
in words not letters because the latter
are too primordial to understand.
Vowels and consonants bring bowels
into consonance with the living,
speaking world. And if I know that this
causes our despair, I do not care. “I
know what you are, I just don’t mind. I
won’t say you’re wrong, I know what
you want, and it’s what I want. So
let’s go out, I’m ready to go out – I’ll
show you around this alphabet town.”
And so can’t you see, an alphabet is

A night is the purest of realities. The
boss is immaterial; he nightmares the
running scowl of your day but “No bad
dream f***er’s gonna boss me around,
Christian Brothers’ gonna take him
down” – ah, ah yes – “I’ve seen the boss
blink” and alphabet city is real and the
only way to truth is to

Gimme fiction, not shelter. Tis time to
spoon, not roll like a stone. The site is
an anomaly and the boss is immaterial.
Animals in alphabet make up the real
and the city is where we go to forget.
“All the pretty girls go to city” and so
do I and so do you, you hips—

the words we use to describe one another
end up by becoming who we are

A drink is a reality six nights a week,
the boss is one six hours a day. But
while nobody’s looking sneak out and do
whatsoever you please in the middle of
the workday. Go to a bar, go home.
Feed your cat. He’s sitting there
pouting, licking himself in all the right
places, purring, humming “This house is
saaaaad, because he’s not, in-si-ee-i-
ee-i-ee-i-ee-i-ee-i-ee i-ee-i-ee-i-ee-i-
ee-i-ee-i-ee i-ee-i-ee-i-ee-i-ee-i-ee-i-
ee-iiiiiiiiiiiiide.” The boss is immaterial,
and your cat is

An animal is a reality. And the site is
not; it is an anomaly. But being there
so often leaves one reeling in
reminiscences. Scenes screening desires
to be more than what you are, they
never go away, but ya know, you can
see within them that the site is not
reality and neither is the boss; that
the letters and half broken animal
crackers knowing one another as
strangers across the eyesight of a
tram car, nowise lascivious, confirms
to one another that reality is the
person you are but are never named,
that the site takes but a drink to for-
get: eyes conveying the animal alphabet
too primordial to understand, the reality,
the real I-tie, the reel you and I tie
together

*

The thing is to take the idea of
existential anxiety and turn it into the
experience of disinvested desiring-
subjectivity. “I want to WHAT I want
to WHAT I want to WANT I want to
WHAT” and “I caaaaan’t get ou-uu-out
of what I’m in-to with youuuuuu.” So
it is as it is, there ain’t no changing
that when one is stimulated it comes
up for question, ‘What will I do next’;
and then the world happens – as a
result.

It was quite a doosey so far as Freud
was concerned, the whole problem of
aggression. What can we do with it?
he had asked betwixt two world wars.
These folks at each other’s throats;
indomitable dissent and unrest. It’s like
people get pent up with all this energy
and ain’t never find no way to make it
go away. Then the question became,
for awhile: how do we work with this
energy, make it less dangerous for us
all; how do we organize the industrial,
slice the pie economical; how to coax a
foal into the slaughterhouse, how to
give everyone an education, how put to
work and satisfy the bodies flowing to
all the corners of the earth, exposed
and blinded in the myopic radiance of
subject–

–a grammar lesson, fair duvel, to dis-
(re)member our global funkitude–

Subjectivation. Definition: subjection, + 4
letters (-ivat-).

I-vat. The I, + 3 letters. VAT: acronym
for Value Added Tax (like what one
doesn’t pay in the Tax-Free mall at
airports). Subjectivation is subjection +
the I-vat, the value added tax on being
oneself. This is that to which one is
exposed, at all corners of the earth:
anyone can be an active subject to the
extent that one pays the tax.

Ah, but just let it be. There are things
one can change, and others one can only
enjoy. Such is this park in spring–

But the I-vat! The tax we pay for
getting to be a person with a name, a
person who can speak, a person who
can earn a living and enjoy the degrees
of freedom decreed civilized by one’s
locality and nation. Subjectivation is
the freedom to be, a certain way. It’s a
certain way, seeking after the certain-
ty of ascertainability installed and dis-
tilled within a responsible government,
composed by the voicing of its citizens.
In other words, subjectivation is the
cultivation of responsability on all levels,
macro and micro, of the human
coeurganism.

I hope this does not sound like paranoia
to you, duvel; one has no reason to fear
it. One can walk in the park, and like
it. One can be amongst others, and not
disdain the frivolty with which they
enjoy themselves. One can bask in it,
like the best.  But some simply cannot
abide the limitation–

Ah duvel, let me teach thee a new
word. Coeurespondance. One is but a
body of forces corresponding within
the comotion of all things, the dance…

I can walk in the park, but not
without remembering how it comes
with a tax. You see, duvel, it’s a bit
like being a thing that is stuck
in the middle

Sent from my iPhone

One more for tonight, because I was going through old poems for inspiration, and I came across this one and thought it was kind of fun.  Jed, you might appreciate this.  I wrote it when we were in Berkeley that summer.  I think it was 2006.  Doesn’t that feel like another lifetime?

In the park we talked about homelessness,

swordfish, and hemp. Took turns

at being blindfolded,

guessing the weight of the bay.

There were golden-feathered buzzards,

sneezed down a light rain; dumb puns

making haste, lighted crayons

of the brain.

You raced seeds, grew a prism

by holding your breath too long and then spinning

your arms back and forth like a squid, calling

your mother, then hanging right up.

We hid lint in thimbles,

and cumin on trains.

I showed you how to read the weather

with an orange slice and some latex paint,

and how I held rabbits in my pants

on Sundays.

You always said yes just before the question,

brought lions and onyx and myrrh to bed.

We’d crawl out electric, suitcases full

of double-penetration, gender

constructs, long-grained ball-point pens,

not to mention:

the spooky back-

lighting effect of that one odd strangling incident

very early on.

You laughed

when I said the park was too small

for a few mosquitoes dressed as birthday

clowns, but I think you missed

what I meant.

In a fit of fury, you typed crewel instead of cruel,

and you didn’t even know that it, too, was a word!

A hundred times I cried in concert with the tiny object.

And yet you turned away!

Intent as I was upon entering, you closed the window.

Day broke along the edges of the lake.

What lovely feelings all around!

Somewhere a cake is rising for my sorrow.

We begin
and end
and fill each day

with our encoded dreams
our text.

Whose graphic self spills
the variables of an
insistent vowel and
sweeps away the incoherence
of tidal narration.

They fret and flit to who to who
to whom we leave a row.

Sleep
of which you do not remember remembers you and
your selvedge and your abdication.

These are from the Spring of 2008.  Came across them today while looking for something else and got kind of excited by the discovery.  No one but me has ever seen them, so I would really be glad to hear your comments.  If you look closely, you’ll see that all of them are actually multi-panel pieces, so as you might imagine, they’re pretty large.

The Birthday Candle

The Proposal

Indoor Plumbing

Sometimes it is like one is from a
family of beavers that more enjoys
swimming than building the dam – as
seems to be this species’ wont – to
forever stop up th’ bloody water.
Sometimes it is like one would rather
be awash in the blood than buried
behind this barricade. And sometimes
it is like one watches a race to build
a bridge across an ocean, and is
beginning to think the whole affair
just ruins one’s view from the beach.

People are misguided, but the world
is not so strange. Culture is the
concretion of forces immanent to
humankind. Myriad, its powers of re-
cognition, association, representation;
tonality and humor collaborate in the
production of a giant mirroring which
reflects its claims upon us like so
many accountants on reality

Ah. . . ah yes. But what on earth can
beat early spring. Nothing; except,
early fall.

What is strange is that the things you
should want are inevitably lost if they
are said aloud. A desire stated is as
good as dead whether or not it ever
comes true. So what would you do
about culture. But if a life is just
collusive accident, one would no
longer have reason to doubt

The first buds come at the tips of
the trees, and the rest follow further
after. That is what we like best – the
utter certainty of spring.

And to speak and see like buds on
a tree, which is to say, not at all; to 
unfold, give color, and pass over in the
season of becoming, a’flourish in one’s
time; was it not like this that those
previous dreams passed into the ones
that surpassed them, and left us like
seeds to grow anew in the gardens of   

Indeed, but that one sometimes finds
oneself amidst the rarest of fine beauty,
and in trying to speak, finds a way to
squander it. . . . 

Lofty! Lofty like trees in silent steady
combat, all of this pretense to get more
of the sunlight they all co-inhabit

Sent from my iPhone