1.  There are moments during my day when I’m alone and being myself and laughing out loud at something that crosses my mind or listening to opera—of which it should be noted I have absolutely no real interest in, and just pick out at random according to how intense and deeply depressing it sounds—while heaving around a glass of wine like it’s the most cumbersome thing I can’t seem to ever bring to my mouth, just this perpetually full vase I swish around as an extension of my hand, and I think to myself:  Christ, you’re a creep.  

2.  If we had a conversation the way I’d like it to go, it would probably start with a lot of smiling.  My teeth stick out a little bit, they’ve always been like that, I can’t really help it.  I think it’s endearing to people, probably.  Makes me seem like some kind of harmless animal and I suppose that’s not exactly far from the mark.

You would say:  I can’t seem to have conversations anymore.

And I’d smile and say:  Me either.

And then we’d just keep smiling at each other, me with the teeth out and you with your hands in your pockets, probably leaning back against something.  That’s how I see you.  I’m not sure where that image came from really, but there it is—you leaning against a wall or a table or a chair or I don’t even know.  Our telepathic exchange here—the sub-conversation; the counterpart to the verbal exchange that’s only slightly less apparent and takes place mostly within glances, postures, and pure intuition—is that there is something wanting to be said here, but neither of us knows what it is or how to say it or what any of it would mean.

3.  The bed was positioned directly across from the glass shower that thrust itself out into the middle of the room like a showcase.  Every person who had entered the apartment since I had taken up residence there found it disturbing, this glass shower out in such an open space placed high up on a crudely tiled platform.  I remember feeling intrigued by the sort of inherently voyeuristic aspects of this shower from the beginning without any shame, but rather a naïve kind of curiosity and wonderment at its possibilities.  

You watched me from the bed most mornings.  This daily ritual became an unexpected performance art, so consciously aware of your half awake eyes trailing my every move.  We never once spoke about it, as strangely cagey as you were when it came to these matters.  I remember sometime during the summer, sitting on the dark leather couch watching some insignificant movie, when it occurred to me that you had never said anything remotely dirty to me.  It seemed all-important for a reason I can’t identify now.  

4.  Interviewing my roommate:

Now to a more specific account.  ‘Paul’ seems to be the giant rock around which all other relationships (whether these relationships ever came to fruition or were simply considered in a way that ‘could work’) orbit.  She brings up, “Paul and Stefan were similar.  There were a lot of things similar about them that I was immediately drawn to.”  I asked, “Were you attracted to Stefan because he had similar qualities to Paul, or are these qualities intrinsic, in the larger scheme of what makes you attracted to anyone, even if Paul had not existed for you?”  “Even if Paul had not existed.  It is just something I like.”  

What are these qualities?

Their manner of treating me was the same, despite the difference in the outcome of these relationships.  They appreciated the qualities in me that I would like people to notice and appreciate rather than just the fact that I’m a female with two arms and two legs speaking a common language.  They treated me like I was special without any air of desperation or the sense of an agenda.  

What qualities, if you can specify, do you feel were appreciated?

They seemed to appreciate whatever intelligence I have.  I always felt on even ground with them.  There was a certain affection toward me that made me feel special.  They both sort of had the ability to draw me out, or err on the side of being emotional, which I’m not typically prone to.  

So this is about emotional response.  Why do you feel you are not typically prone to this?

I’m always suspicious of an agenda, sexual or otherwise.

That’s fair.  That’s normal.  You should be.

It must be something other than that, though.

The real threats are artists who refuse to stop there—who move from confession, which describes a situation, to analysis, which seeks to explain it. If someone foolishly insists on making his—or her—life known, institutions have words for discrediting it. This candidate can’t be admitted. As Kraus declared in Video Green:

I think that “privacy” is to contemporary female art what “obscenity” was to male art and literature of the 1960s. The willingness of someone to use her life as primary material is still deeply disturbing, and even more so if she views her own experience at some remove. There is no problem with female confession providing it is made within a repentant therapeutic narrative. But to examine things coolly, to thrust experience out of one’s own brain and put it on the table, is still too confrontational.

If the sufferer describes a pathology that is socially approved, because privately felt, personally inflicted, and guiltily accepted as such (anorexia, addiction, sexual misadventures of all varieties), great. If it is socially determined and experienced by a person who knows she is sane and lucid and doesn’t want to get well—who will not even identify as sick—well, that’s not so cool. If it’s not her problem, then whose is it?

 For so long, so many lives refused to be lived like books! Because the books, in turn, were not truly like lives. One way in which they failed to account for female experience was by not acknowledging that failure to account for female experience—that constant feeling of being told, you are telling your life the wrong way. You are taking your life personally, which is to say: not like an artist. In I Love Dick, Kraus quotes a letter Flaubert wrote to Louise Colet, after he read La Servante, a poem about a young woman who, like Colet, loves books and a writer who scorns her: “You have made Art an outlet for the passions, a kind of chamberpot to catch the overflow of I don’t know what. It doesn’t smell good! It smells of hate!” Her poem was not so much a bad poem as a bad review of his life, to use Hebdige’s phrase. Colet’s description of universal experience had not thoroughly enough been scraped of her personal experience and was therefore not universal.

But what was the universal? At what point did an account of human experience spill over into the trivial? Female experience constituted art up until the point it ceased to be identical with male experience. (Flaubert to Colet: “You are a poet shackled to a woman!”) And so to live one’s life as a woman was at odds with living one’s life as if it were a work of art—not just because certain elements particular to female existence tended not to make their way into most novels but because most novels, if they were good, refused to acknowledge that the world maintained such crucial distinctions. There should always and only be the human—and we all wanted to be human.

This piece covers all sorts of interesting ground and is really worthy of your time.

It happened quickly and then less so until it gradually became nothing.

1.  “Can we love each other more?”

“Do you want to?”

“Of course I do.”

“How do we do that?”

“We have to stop thinking that the other person is always going to be here.”

“I never thought that…”

“Well, I did.”

2.  When I was nineteen I sat on a beach sometime in the early hours of the morning when it was still dark out with a woman of indeterminate age who told me about her life with her husband and two children.  I think for the most part I kept nodding off a bit, letting her words filter in and out with the static of the waves, or maybe I was crying silently—the memory is thin and full of mostly feelings and few images—but the part I remember most, right down to the specific tone and cadence of her voice:  “He has been really difficult.  My whole life with him has been so difficult.  But I’ve always had everything I wanted.”  And then she smiled at me and I felt sick and sad and lonelier than I had before she came to sit beside me.

3.  I’ve got this idea, like you might be brilliant or hidden really deep, enmeshed by Responsibility A, Responsibility B, and so on and so forth—driving at something, but what?  Want to jump and kick and maybe bite you a little while you’re asleep. Some sort of problem with latent aggression in order to express sentimentality.  Comes bubbling up sometimes.

4.  I don’t trust in my ability to separate fact from fiction anymore.  Have constant moments where I seemingly stare at/through some inanimate object and think, “Was that a dream?  Did we have that conversation?”  I can’t think of anything worse than mundane interactions while I’m asleep and while I’m awake. 

5. Right Brain/Left Brain/All Brain/Contradictions Inherent: