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Ritual | Jan 14 2006

A friend recently shared this quote from Deleuze’s book Pure Immanence: “Modes of life inspire ways of thinking; modes of thinking create ways of living. Life activates thought, and thought in return affirms life.”

These days I feel stuck in how I think, stuck in the life defined and delimited by my thoughts. It seems the best prisons rarely require bars and walls.

I’ve had one idea, though. It’s of a kind of ritual. I’d construct a figure, a dummy, of a person, a woman. She would be life-size, I think, and made of wood. Ideally she’d be hollow, or hollow in places. Once I finish making her, I would write on her, describing everything I know about her—her body, her personality, her history, dreams, and desires. In the end these descriptions would cover her from head to foot; they’d have to, because I know so much about her, having known her so long. Then I’d take her to the woods or some other place far from people.

The next part is unclear. The question is whether I’d bring an ax. I know I’d bring matches, but an ax is something else. It comes to down to how I plan to destroy her, the degree of violence involved. This is a problem with made-up rituals: you can’t know in advance how something will feel. At this point, though, I lean toward the ax—not because of the violence (the violence frightens me) but because of the way an ax would engage me, my physical self, in the act of destroying her. This seems important. If I merely burn her, burn her and watch her burn, I remain at a distance, less her destroyer than a witness to her destruction.

I haven’t said who she is. She’s not a real person. In a sense this is her crime. Her crime is that she cannot exist anywhere but in my mind, my desires. Her crime is that she surpasses what is possible, lacking nothing but the possibility of existing. Her crime is that I love her, and have always loved her, and will continue to love her even after I destroy her—assuming that a smoking pile of chopped-up wood equals her destruction, which I have reason to doubt.