January 2003
Sometimes I read the things I’ve said before and I say to myself, Well, lookit, you were saying things then. Now I have nothing to say. It’s been like this for some time.
Probably I’ll have something to say later on, although it’s possible I won’t. All the other times I had nothing to say, I eventually found things to say, but who’s to say that this time will be the same? (Remember: falling down seven times, getting up six.)
Part of the problem is that I don’t want to say the same thing as always. This wasn’t a problem before because I hadn’t realized how much I was saying the same thing over and over. Now I do, and it makes me nervous.
A friend wrote about a trip to California, which he described as “pain, torture, anguish.”
“I didn’t know if I’d make it back,” he wrote. “But someone is writing this.”
Exactly.
25 January 2003 | S
Sophia and I went for a walk in the West Village. I showed her the apartment where e.e. cummings lived for forty years, 4 Patchin Place. As we walked, I taught her how to write haikus. She already knew what they were but didn’t know the number of syllables in each line. Soon everything she said became a haiku:
I need to pee bad
Where’s a place to urinate
Without buying stuff?
My hands are frozen
Did you hear?—frozen solid
Like hands made of ice
Soup is the best thing
Well, it’s one of the best things
Anyway it’s good
The soup poem was written in a restaurant called Sacred Chow. There we decided that everything good begins with an s—soup, sleep, showers, sun, and sex—though not necessarily in that order.
20 January 2003 | Doll
On page 141 of A Lover’s Discourse, in a chapter entitled This Can’t Go On, Roland Barthes writes:
Once the exaltation has lapsed, I am reduced to the simplest philosophy: that of endurance… I am Daruma doll, a legless toy endlessly poked and pushed, but finally regaining its balance, assured by an inner balancing pin (But what is my balancing pin? The force of love?). This is what we are told by a folk poem which accompanies these Japanese dolls:
Such is life
Falling over seven times
And getting up eight.
Having read A Lover’s Discourse long ago, I’ve often remembered the poem at the end of that passage and have quoted it many times to friends. Today, though, I happened to read the book again and was surprised to find I’ve been quoting the poem wrongly. In my version the poem ends with the word six not eight—a mistake that radically changes its meaning.
The way I’ve always remembered it, the poem is about death, about the final time you fall, the first and last time you fail to get up. It says: life consists of falling and getting up and falling and getting up until you finally don’t get up any more and it’s over.
Barthes’s version is about some freakish form of endurance. The legless doll is indomitable; no amount of abuse can knock it down, since abuse is what it was made for. In fact if abused in the right way, the doll is immortal; its fate is like that of Sisyphus but without all that nasty, backbreaking, spirit-crushing toil.
I doubt Barthes would care (he’s simply trying to describe the lover’s endurance: the intolerable yet tolerated state that follows from the “magical amazement of the first encounter”), but my version (which admittedly I didn’t write or anything) kicks that other poem’s indefatigable ass.
19 January 2003 | Sunlight
I can’t give what I don’t have. There’s sunlight on the surface of my desk. It’s coming through the window, from under the window shade, from across the space between the window and the sun, which is where it comes from. Shall I give it to you? Here, look, I am taking a picture of it. Is this what you want? Or do you want what you want not because you ask but because you want me to want you to have it? There are a lot of wants in that sentence, but you know what I mean.
*
Yesterday while walking along Washington Street, I sang the Clash song Janie Jones. Do you know it?
He’s in love with rock and roll woaahh
He’s in love with getting stoned woaahh
He’s in love with Janie Jones woaahh
But he don’t like his boring job, no…
I was singing Janie Jones because I had a cold and because I like how my voice sounds when I’m sick and sing songs like that. When I got home I tried to record myself singing it, to give to you, but something went wrong.
Sophia sat behind me, at the kitchen table, as I tried to record it. I kept apologizing to her because of how horrible it sounded—I was screeching—but she insisted it was fine. I really don’t think it was fine.
Anyway I’m sorry the recording didn’t work out because it was something I wanted to give you. I’ve since figured out what the problem was (the plug on the mic wasn’t all the way in), but now it’s too late to try again because I’m feeling much better and can’t get my voice to sound quite so bad.
18 January 2003 | Sophia
The alien is living with me now. I still don’t know her name. I’m not even sure aliens have names. When I asked her about it, she told me to call her whatever I wanted, so I picked Sophia. I don’t know why Sophia; I’ve never known anyone named Sophia. Although maybe that’s why I chose the name: because it isn’t associated with anyone in my head.
*
We had burritos for lunch today. I ate mine too fast and got the hiccups, so I stood and bent over and drank some water like that, with my head upside-down. It’s my favorite method of alleviating hiccups.
What are you looking at? she asked.
Nothing, I said. I was upside-down when I said this. I have the hiccups, I said.
By her tone, it sounded like she really didn’t know what I was doing, although it’s possible she knew but wanted to make it seem she didn’t so I would trust her more and treat her as I would treat any other woman.
This is the question: How much is she like other women? I see two possible answers: nothing, and a lot. What it comes down to whether and to what degree she knows things that no woman, no person, can know. Can she read my mind? Can she call up my past? Nothing she does reveals she can, but I’m not so certain.
She has a laptop computer, an iBook. When we’re not talking, she likes to sit on my bed and type what she calls her “notes.” She’s a fast typist but doesn’t always keep her fingers on the keys. Her main problem is the delete key, which she types with her right forefinger instead of her right pinky. This slows her down. When I mentioned it to her, she nodded, but I haven’t seen her trying to change.
That’s exactly how a person would react. Who is going to start typing a different way because someone (a human!) suggests it? No one, and yet one imagines that an alien could type any way she pleased.
I’m not making myself clear. I suspect she’s lying to me and that everything she does is designed to get me to relax and to treat her as I would treat any run-of-the-mill woman who happened to be sitting in my bed drinking herbal tea (she likes Wild Sweet Orange) and typing an incredible amount of what she calls “notes.”
And I find myself falling for it. If someone or something looks like a woman, smells like a woman (!), and acts like a woman, you can’t help thinking of that person or thing as a woman. And like all women, I think she’s banking on this, and on the fact that I will react to her as a man.
Last Friday while walking home from work (I work every Friday at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, doing web stuff), I noticed a spaceship in the Shakespeare Garden. At first I thought it was for one of the Garden’s cutesy community events (Plants from Outer Space perhaps?), but couldn’t figure out what it was doing in the Shakespeare Garden. Without question the Children’s Garden would have been the place for a spaceship. Was it being built it in the Shakespeare Garden with the thought of moving it later? If so, this was a stunningly dumb idea because the damn thing was blocking the path and had crushed several flower beds.
I should describe what it looked like. It looked like a flying saucer. That is, it was shaped like a giant frisbee and had a bubble-like dome and a ring of round red lights along its circumference. It stood on three stilt-like legs and had a hatch underneath, which I noticed was down.
Later I learned why it looked so much like a flying saucer, but at the time I was impressed that the Community Events people, who I presumed to have built it, had worked so hard to make it seem “realistic.” I walked closer to see what it was made of and was surprised to discover how smooth the surface was. I had never touched anything that smooth.
But the real shock came when I climbed up the hatch. In the vague way one imagines such things, I had expected to find a cramped room with a bunch of hokey alien spacecraft controls and navigation screens. Instead what I found was a space that looked exactly like my own apartment. Stranger still, it really was my apartment, only I didn’t understand this at first. What I understood was that it resembled my apartment. Precisely. The pot I’d used that morning to cook oatmeal was still soaking in the sink, and the clothes I’d worn the previous day were exactly where I’d left them, in a pile on the floor by my bed.
About the only thing that had changed was that a woman was sitting in my green chair, watching me. She was an alien, but again I didn’t realize this at first.
Hi, she said.
Hi, I said.
I’m an alien from outer space, she said. I’ve come to study you.
I don’t know why, but she reminded me of a certain former girlfriend.
Really, I said. That’s awesome.
I didn’t believe she was an alien, so I was playing it cool until I figured out who she really was.
Assuming a casual tone, I asked if she happened to know why there was a spaceship in the Shakespeare Garden.
There isn’t any more, she said, indicating the hatch with her eyes.
I climbed down. The hatch led not into Garden but the apartment of my downstairs neighbor, an older guy I always see drinking Coca-Cola. Whenever I see him, he’s got a can of Coke in his hand. Or Coke Classic, actually. I recognized his apartment because it was shaped exactly like mine and had eight cardboard boxes of Coke Classic stacked against the wall.
I climbed back up the hatch and pulled it shut behind me.
Nice trick, I said.
Thanks.
Who are you?
I’ve come to study you. I will sleep in your bed but I won’t have sexual relations with you.
I don’t remember asking you to have sex with me.
It is expected. I have assumed a physical form that you in particular find hot. Did I use that right, “hot”?
It’s more like hottt, I said, with three t’s.
I thought it was just one t, she said.
She had a space between her two front teeth, just like that certain former girlfriend.
Hot is fine, I said, but it’s a bit flat. The extra t’s add a level of irony by referencing how the word is used in phone sex ads and the like. It is ironic because phone sex ads that spell hottt with three t’s are so moronic as to render their sexiness moot. To refer to this is a kind of wink. You are saying, I recognize how moronic and unsexy it is to spell hottt with three t’s, but I am going to do it anyway. By some roundabout logic, this sort of stubborn self-consciousness is itself sexy.
But how can anyone know how many t’s you’re using when you say it?
They don’t, so you have to find other ways to indicate this.
Like how?
Gesture, intonation, facial expression, anything.
This conversation is not very hottt, she said.
05 January 2003 | Friday
It arrived Friday.
It attracts me.
It can be described in different ways, from different points of view.
It comes down to a question of freedom, of feeling or not feeling free.
It doesn’t work in reverse.
It has me happily excited but also a little frightened.
It is a continuous circuit.
It is a hook in the mouth.
It is a town along the way.
It is a place to tell the truth, no matter how ridiculous or humiliating.
It is a powerful indication that at this moment at least I’m not alone.
It has a lot of footnotes.
It is a giddy delicious feeling, a lovely sort of tension in one’s chest.
It is a lot more messy than I remembered.
It has a great raw quality that is so different from the glossy sheen of the suburbs.
It gives me a place to hide.
It is akin to covering one’s ears, or more to point, running in and out of the theater while the film is showing.
It is all I have.
It is a veiled attempt at creative/erotic synthesis.
It is also revolting.
It is by the French Surrealist poet Paul Eluard.
It is crossed out and scribbled over in black.
It is an escape, a withdrawal from reality.
It is compelling in its simplicity.
It is like hitting a wall.
It is simple, unself-conscious, and direct.
It is so huge.
It is phlegm-besotted.
It is ten times nicer when you slow it down.
It makes me think of Jonathan Borofsky, of how he numbers all of his pieces.
It is the first good news I’ve had in a long time.
It makes me love her—a sudden wave of feeling.
It is like water.
It haunts me.
It is the result of seeing something for the first time.
It means that I’m approaching the truth.
It originates in fear.
It seems a lot longer than it is.
It takes so little to destroy it.
It is something like death.
It must be stapled together.
03 January 2003 | There
Beckett, twelve paragraphs from the end of The Unnamable:
It’s the last words, the true last. Or it’s the murmurs: the murmurs are coming, I know that well. No, not even that. You talk of murmurs, distant cries, as long as you can talk. You talk of them before and you talk of them after. More lies: it will be the silence (the one that doesn’t last) spent listening, spent waiting (for it to be broken, for the voice to break it). Perhaps there’s no other, I don’t know. It’s not worth having, that’s all I know. (It’s not I, that’s all I know.) It’s not mine. It’s the only one I ever had? That’s a lie: I must have had the other, the one that lasts—but it didn’t last. (I don’t understand.) That is to say it did: it still lasts. I’m still in it. I left myself behind in it. I’m waiting for me there.
02 January 2003 | Tape
The moment it happened, once I realized it happened, I just wanted to rewind the tape. That’s all I could think, just rewind it.
Of course I knew you can’t ever rewind anything, but still that’s what I kept thinking—Please god, just let me.
Not that there was any tape anywhere.
Nor any god to allow it.
No tape and no god, and yet there I am, practically begging.
01 January 2003 | Flinch
There is no one else at their end of the compartment. They take seats directly across from each other. Both pull out books to read. She holds hers in such a way that he can see the title—The Box Man by Kobo Abe—since she thinks he might find this intriguing. She is a woman, she wants him to see, who reads Japanese novels. His book he holds in his lap, so the title isn’t so obvious; however it seems to be a novel: dense writing with few paragraph breaks.
They take turns sneaking glances at each other, then gazing absently about the train. Or first they look about the train, then sneak glances. When the train emerges above ground, she pretends to be interested in the river beyond his shoulder but actually uses this opportunity to check out his eyes, which appear to be hazel.
Her stop is the first stop past the river. When she rises to go, she notices him flinch. Evidently he was imagining that she was about to walk across the aisle and start talking to him—the last thing she or anyone would ever dream of doing.
