J U L I A N S E M I L I A N
__________________________________________________________COMPHESSIONS OF A PHETISHIST
I used to be a writer. Last night I wrote the following about myself, in the third person, the first sign of giving up on oneself: “The words he had known and copiously used then now refused to make themselves available to him. He was progressively opting for a sort of regression into infantilism and its phantasies, an infantilism which was prevalent in his life before his obsession with words took over. The phantasies seemed far more attractive, and, what's more, accessible to him. He believed for many years that by damming them, they would transform, in a vague, undefined, alchemical way, into the words he wished and perhaps for a time it was true. But now the words he had craved appeared to him as misguided enthusiasms, infantile exuberances, pre-orgasmic adolescent states now finally deflated. He was left now to fend for himself in the darkness of his moods, the constrained feeling in his chest, and realized that perhaps he had never been a writer, only a mere imitator, an enthusiast of others' words, words which he had paraded the way a model down a runway parades clothes created not by herself.”
Perhaps I am misguided to begin this book. If I could only hold up for a flashing instant, an instant aflash, a momentary diamond, a sudden sun, a word I freed from the forced marches of this age, this generation. I want to tell you now the story of this word, even if all I freed is a mere vocable, a morpheme, a particular phoneme.
But I can't go on. I feel I succumb to my lack of ability to make any progress in being an observer who can fashion a panorama of words out of the processes that occur within me, that first, style, obsession with style obstructs, and second, a somnolence takes over and prevents me from following “down the rabbit hole”, where the game takes on other aspects which I am not prepared or perhaps even capable to record. It is as if I were looking at woman's legs, entranced by the delicate weave of her stockings. The weave is fine, smooth and your fingers caress their coruscating surface, there is something so unbearably bewitching about their charms, they burn you like flames, you cannot explain it, you cannot resist it, you succumb to their flames and your passion takes you over like quicksand, controls you, has you in its thrall, and you give up completely the scientific mind-set you began with when all you wanted to do is study and speak about the weave itself, as you plunge yourself closer and closer to the filaments till they become maritime cables which in order to touch without wounding your fingers, you must wear construction gloves. Between the sly smiles germinating inside your readers, the subtle lifting of the corner of their lips at the candid and straightforward sprinkle of your words and the words themselves, this between thus, a floating sea of unsurpassed happiness that drowns you where you balance between the subtlety of humor and desire to touch the stockings of the women you desire, where you are balancing between the hoisting humor and the drowning aspect of desire and sleep.
It is kind of like mining for ore, a precious ore containing the words you'd die for to be able to claim they are yours. And yet on the way down to the mine, you are encountered by these desires. And I wonder if the desires he encounters are not the very mining itself, that the climbing down into the mine is not merely an utilitarian metaphor to decompose, disperse your search before you even start it.
And yet these are not real stockings, they are merely words. I could have used different words to suggest the bewitching feeling of drowning and swoon and avoid completely the element of confession. In this sense I am not a real writer because a real writer would have put the obsessive desire into one of his characters and would have even succumbed to making this character someone who lacks character, a person of little action who succumbs to slothful and futile phantasies and ultimately does not phollow the prescribed hero's path as the propagators of corporate storytelling enchain and incarcerate your identity with.
The problem now is that I don't care. I wished at times, passionately so, to free the word, the virtual, hypothetical word I spoke of in the paragraph above. But now I really don't care. My apathy is such that that I do not wish any more to undertake the labor of freeing this word. I only wish to give in to the apathy.
I began with the belief that the words I want are hidden in the sun. I meant the minerals, the dreams of men, the future, and the sun. I am not using the sun as symbol, or poetic metaphor. Nor is it the sun of conquering nations that I speak of. I mean the sun literally. Of course, if you think of the sun as an impersonal incandescent gaseous mass, you will not wish to go any further. Still, I attempt to deconstruct the sun, the sun you have imagined, and whose image you hold vaguely in the terrain of imprecise formulations that hold you in place. Part of the problem is this: This is really not my language. Certainly I use it, I have become adept. I have become adept at using it. I wield it, not without pride, I admit. But it means nothing. My heart tightens in disdain at its meaninglessness. Not disdain, perhaps despair. The nuptial metaphors infusing my mother tongue are prevented me. Reentry to my mother tongue is prevented me. So, I wield it, the new tongue, but with absolute disinterest. Disgust even. Not absolute, but disinterest. It is not that I don't enjoy using it, if enjoy is the word, if enjoy is the purpose here, or appropriate here, I have always been inappropriate, even when close, always when close, I do draw enjoyment, because I do, like one might become adept at say, playing darts. I don't mean playing darts, I don't play darts, not often, it could be anything, driving a car. Certainly, you drive a car, throw a few darts, drive back home, you skillfully avoid an accident, but then you think about it no more. But language sticks with you, sticks to you, not as much as the blood does perhaps, I don't know, is with you all the time, the one that's yours and the one you use. Like a sword, skillfully, certainly, I don't suddenly, can't recall. It was probably the best part and now it's gone. I'll go on. When I say adept, I don't mean I know all about grammar, say. I have read books about grammar, recently even. I have stretched the reading over a few years. 13. But I never finished it. Did I read circumflex in it? It's just a word I suddenly associated with grammar or maybe that book. But I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't belong in medicine. Or law. I know gerund, past participle, perfect, not quite sure what they mean. Language is merciless, this language. I am locked into the oppression of its meaning, like a cage I wear around my head, like a mask of meaning that I am prevented from speaking of. It's constraining me right now as if someone else, aware of my present words, is holding the reigns to my meanings. I don't even know what I mean. I have to stop because I don't know what to say anymore, already I have to stop and haven't even begun, and I feel that the entity in charge of holding the reigns does not like my speaking about it. No matter, I will speak about it, because that's all I can do, if I can, though I doubt I will see it or know it. It holds the reigns tight and the blinders tighter. But the fact that there is a reign and the fact that there are blinders betray the fact that I am a horse. That is of course a mere presupposition on my part, a bold statement perhaps, when I quickly and, I might add, inattentively scan myself, I am not aware of a horse. I like horses in a general kind of way, I have sometimes meditated on them and their uses by humans and wondered to myself without being able to give myself an answer, how it is possible they allow themselves to be subjugated like that; and go about it willingly, such mythological creatures, vaguely so of course, I don't recall the origins, they have been ridden for millennia, I know that, I suspect that, I saw movies, but no more, I rode a horse once or twice, was indifferent, indifferent and a little afraid. I could, I have considered that I am really a horse and am deluded about my appearance, I could merely be dreaming when I look in the mirror and see the appearance of a man, or even gloat over my aging good looks. Or I could merely be horse-like. This is good, horse-like. Speaking of myself metaphorically. In other words, there may be purposes in whose service I am engaged and know nothing about it. As I put these words down on my notebook——and this I am sure of, I have a notebook——as I put these words down in my notebook——I am hanging onto my words, my precious words here, repeating out of the pleasure of putting them down——so I repeat as I put these words down in my notebook, and aware of and fearful that they might dry up, like a barely begun brook. That the flow of words might dry up. Thus a few lines above I repeated. I did notice a buried voice was speaking, something that had been frozen was melting around the territory of my frozen voice. This is always the fear, that the voice will freeze, that I am so deluded I can't see ahead, that the holder of the reign will... but I was speaking, I did actually write it but crossed it out, I wrote speakings, like, I was speakings, which is funny and embarrassing at the same time. That's not really what I want to say. But it's like if you want to speak with an accent, or if you speak broken English and suddenly finding yourself, say, in a group or say, at a party and you say I was speakings. You suddenly find yourself naked, marked. Subject of ridicule, unless kindings exist. For instance * * *, who came up with lines such as “today called me a little boy” or “pisses I you off?” But I was pissing, speaking, speaking, speakings if you will, there is no use fighting it, about language. What was a clear thought to begin with——and this is not a figure of speech——is a jumbled symphony of unclear crisscrossing thoughts, I can tell that, though I am not sure I can separate the thoughts from the words, I know they are there, just beyond the darkness, or in the darkness but the reigns, the bit in my mouth perhaps, a hook really, a yoke——it will help knowing for instance that yoke and jugular spring from the same root——a cage of iron around my head, preventing understanding, prevents me from perceiving them enough to speak of them. Of course I blame myself for this, I dropped out of logic in college and can't finish reading an entire book. Rarely I do. If only I had studied logic, this confused convolution, no, this yoke of incomprehension, yoking my understanding might not be here. So I blame that for not being able to make out the thoughts in order to speak of them. Or just let those words in the dark speak themselves. The speakings. It's just that right now they won't. But maybe they're not really thoughts at all. Maybe they're not really words at all. See how I hang unto the words, always fearful they'll dry up. All I see is a crisscrossing of jumbled dark shapes, brownish perhaps, bloodstained, because they have to have a color, maroon like the memory of an abstract painting which is not very good, or perhaps it is good but you didn't understand it. I saw one like that in Rauchenberg at MoMA. I would like to pause and embrace the word understand. I would like to pause and embrace the word understand for a moment. For a time, more than a moment, because I want understanding to last, I want to embrace it apart from its apparent-at-the-first-sight components, under and stand. I would like to hold it to me as a lover. I propose that to myself. But what would I embrace? Does it have to be a shape? Even to place it——its amorphous shape——against my understanding cortex, against the surface of my understanding cortex, what do I then get? I am expecting, I should have said that first, a portal into a higher world, anything to get me out of my present misery. Is understanding a pole you can hang? And the cortex's surface like a fine veil of grey that grabs at the words you place before it, sniffs at them perhaps, gives you back an answer——but is that understanding? What is the answer based on? Can it be prophecy? I see it as a cat, or a dog maybe. You place a piece of food before it, they eat it or sniff it and abandon it. They wag their tail in gratitude, if they eat it. It's the same with understanding. Our understanding is a kind of dog diet. Simply based on base appetite, not the higher calling the sages of old speak of. Not prophecy. Mere prejudice based on base likes and dislikes. Philosophers need to go into analysis. A tiny structure of likes and dislikes one is forced into by the societal constraint. A tiny theatre. The pliers jaws of civilization. A reduced understanding by the demands of the present civilization. Where do you get the wisdom to discern the dark abstraction with the crisscrossing forms which a minute ago I mistook for thoughts or words, naked, meaningless words perhaps, the dark messengers of another sphere (perhaps a sphere of understanding). I observe them from a distance but I am prevented——perhaps because as I mentioned my lack of logic——but I feel obliged, forced not obliged, to sleep. I feel the need to stop writing, to put my pen down, so to speak, and stop speaking. Sleep claims me, as pure divertory distraction, a mere remorseless——not really a distraction as the center of words disappears and I don't have the power to stop it so I give in, like a dog or a cat after a meal. I can't go on, I must go on, but I find no purpose in going on, I propose to find a purpose beyond the propose concatenation which is so attractive. The problem I feel right now with understanding is that while on the surface it elicits a desire for it, at first hearing, it doesn't have the necessary letters to be embrace, such as words like perspective, perspicuity, purpose have, those cruel choruses of coruscating words she wore so close to her skin. Touch these, she said. They were green, a light hue of blue green, beyond enchantment. Understanding seems so male, so military, like bacon, like a baton or a march perhaps, so solemn and gruesomely honest. Even if I placed understanding inside myself, let the blood inside my trunk wash it, there it would be, these jagged words washed by the red blood, perhaps algae would grow about it, and mud, but would the blood and understanding ever meld? Or would the blood simply continue to flow uncomprehendingly, incomprehensively, and then the word understanding simply float in there and finally rot? Would the purposes of the blood, written a long time ago, beyond any memory you and I might have of it, circulating along the walls of its grottoes on its own secret mission as blood while the word understanding, perhaps as a signboard, UNDERSTANDING, the kind you'd see say standing in order to define a store say, simply floating and rotating in slow motion at random in the mindless liquid. Or whose mind is not the purpose of our mind, perhaps a long history is occurring here whose purposes do not include ours? A long long history. I don't know. We don't know.
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