I would just like total exposure.  I would like to know what everyone is reading and then, also, what their thoughts were as they read it. I begin to feel cheated that I do not know these things. I would like a lover for whom 92% of their purpose was to read next to me on a sofa or in bed.  I want to be like a voyeur of reading, not just in the sense of looking at pictures of attractive people reading, but in the sense that I would move beyond the body with a book a device a screen and into the mind itself, what transpires there, and how it happens.  Do you only see words?  Individually or in groupings? Do images appear to you?  Do you have a voice in your head? Do your thoughts take on the shape of music or geometry?  Do you become sedate?  Do you become aroused?

Do not be afraid to self-aggrandize, if what you are self-aggrandizing is not you, but the machinations of your mind with its books.  (I want to know.)

My thoughts, if they become ideas, turn less into music than into geometry.  I can see, when I read and also when I lecture or talk, them begin to shape up. If all is going well they make a pattern, they also move.  They can exist in symmetry, or not: sometimes these thoughts exist, relaxed, and in that lovely slacker disarray, like so many high people laying their bodies down sort of gloriously.

I know I have done well when my mind has “taken shape,” and these shapes have appeared to have left the realm of language.

That thoughts become geometry is why a poem will often appear to me as a useful piece of furniture.

A sonnet is a dresser.

I guess this is “form.”

I told someone recently it is too bad a person is never remembered, when she has died, for being a great reader.  But this is not true.  I have ancestors who are remembered exactly as this: “She lived in a small house in a field, and it had books on every wall.  Later on, after she died, feral cats lived there.”

***

I begin to re-read Arendt’s The Life of the Mind, both volumes, and at the very beginning find this:

“Nothing that is, insofar as it appears, exists in the singular; everything that is is meant to be perceived by somebody.  Not Man but men inhabit this planet.  Plurality is the law of the earth.”

I had forgotten how astounded when I first read this that  someone else had seen this obvious thing.  So much of my life had been among these people who had talked up some Romance that I Exist as the Only One.  The Romance that I Can Speak as One (“to speak for yourself”).

Eileen Myles wrote:

“Listen, I have been educated. I have learned about Western Civilization. Do you know what the message of Western Civilization is? I am alone. Am I alone tonight? I don’t think so”

I had forgotten, also, the feeling of being sometimes cheated, of wanting what is the opposition to this: a recognition of the world as the world.  Someone said something like –“it is my nightmare to have said of me what is said of you”: to be a poet who thinks about plurality.  She did not say this to me directly. (But this is my work — Joan: the plural life.  Also, The 2000s — “recalcitrant subjectivity peeing on the floor.”  But it is personal experience which keeps me from being personal.)

I am a poet who thinks about plurality, nightmare or not.  To want, finally, for poetry to be the worldliest of all things: more political than politics.   I was trying to find Benjamin’s letter on Kafka, and I found it, but I also found this.

***

Most of what can be found in Hannah Arendt on plurality and objects can be found in Walt Whitman.   When I teach my students I tell them they can see it like a poet, like a philosopher, or like a shoemaker.  I realize, then, I have left off “woman.”

Read and reread  Sonogram of a Potential from Tiqqun 2.  Reread Silvia Frederici,  read Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James (but didn’t I read this when I was in college? didn’t I read this when I was a housewife?  isn’t this my third time?).  My entire poetics is made of “work accidents” and “sabotage.”  Thinking of Kathy Acker’s true literature of the abortion table. Read two plays by Maria Irene Fornes: Mud and The Conduct of Life.  Both ended with the person who has the most power being shot and then dying.  Watched some Kardashians who always wear false eyelashes, who cover their machines in glitter.  Begin again, the institutional life, filled out Hazel’s middle school forms, finished the first day of classes, the oddity, again, of standing in front of people (one of Fornes’ characters — the affluent wife, more evil than the patriarch for her complicities: “I would like to be a woman who speaks in a group and have others listen.”)

Began to read Jaspers on Plato and Augustine, and though I do not have this with me right now, what Jaspers is making is an argument about philosophy as the love of men for men. I am both moved by this love and left wondering again if I am, by virtue of reading, now a man. Finished Eileen Myles’ Inferno:

“I was thinking today that I have spent my whole life trying to be a man. I’m sure you don’t understand what I mean by that. I think I was examining my behavior (as wrong) and imagining how some man would do it. I realized I thought he was right, somehow. Why do I think that. If I crawl inside of the head of a man, (and eat his thoughts alive) will I begin to live my life correctly. What will I do with the woman.”

Like you, probably, I have spent my whole life reading men, eating men’s thoughts alive. I know I am what Silvia Frederici says, too:  a housewife, a prostitute, gay.  What will I do with the woman?  Be a poet, I guess.

***

Last night, before bed, began Sorokin’s The Ice Trilogy.  It has a comforting structural sameness to JOAN.  I don’t know when or how anything will ever be published when I can’t even answer emails.  Read Louis-Georges Schwartz’s 0% essay.  Read critiques of it.  Thought how those who wrote the critiques made a genre error.

How can I forget, too, that entire twenty hours I spent thinking about a comment stream on Facebook about Occupy and feelings?

Read Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism. Read Maureen McHugh’s After the Apocalypse. Read Lauren Levin’s chapbook Song which came in the mail and Amy King’s book I want to make you safe which came in the mail and Mike Hauser’s long poem which he sent to me by email.   There are these fantastic lines in Mike Hauser’s poem about those who have the power who hold the cameras and those who do not have the power who hold the cameras, and these lines have been in my thoughts and conversations a lot lately, mostly as I have spent a lot of time looking at photographs from unacceptable angles like on the tumblr Fat from the side. I have reread part of the last section of Bernadette Mayer’s Studying Hunger Journals, including the dream of Walt Whitman who wanted to glow up the ass, and the very first part of Dana Ward’s This Can’t be Life in which he is making the gentlest argument for an anti-sovereign art and a poem by Stephanie Young on the internet in which there is an outfit on a hanger.  I have read one short story by Mary Gaitskill about a woman in a college town, but its attention to the details of physical bodies and the size, shape, attractiveness, accessories, clothing, etc., of these physical bodies reminded me how I do not care for literary fiction, how I do not care anything for the cruel visuals and descriptive details which give other people the feeling that something they have read is real. I read some things about Marie Calloway and thought of Erica Jong vs. Kathy Acker, also narrative and types of cruelty (again). I have read a long essay to remind myself about Adorno’s idea of the Autonomy of Art, an idea I haven’t thought much about since maybe 2006, and from it, I began to think about the Autonomy of Sex.   I have read, because Debbie Hu sent it to me, Michael Moon and Eve Sedgwick’s Divinity, a Dossier.  I read what I think must be a well-known essay about envying the silence of objects and also the silence of women but I do not remember who wrote it. I read Frank Sherlock and CA Conrad’s The City Real and Imagined, and I have already quoted the line about how listening to old music simply reminds you of listening to new music.   Read two typed out poems by Debbie Hu, and on the internet, a super-romantic piece like a Levi’s ad which questions a Levi’s ad by Lisa Robertson on Cabins, and Zizek making some degree of sense in The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie, and Gauguin’s more innocent book about Tahiti.  Read an interview with Ed Sanders, an interview with Renee Gladman, an interview with China Meilville, and Jodi Dean’s review of a book about universities.  Read Jameson rereading of Capital  and Judith Butler on Hannah Arendt.  Read two fantastically dirty pieces by Josef Kaplan which he sent to me by email, as well as a couple of the Segue introductions he has written in which he makes “heart-breaking claims for the power of poetry” by which I mean he is always assigning to poetry the power of political violence which is a power it has not.  I have read a new translation of The Revolution of Everyday Life.  Read some things in the New Yorker, but do not remember them very clearly: they were arguments about ambition, I think.  Read that disgusting piece in the NYT, I think, about a revolutionary mother, all of it stinking like a dead animal in the room.  I have not taken the plastic wrappers off the LRB. I have continued to read Hannah Arendt’s Lectures on Kant, and begun, but have not finished Karl Jaspers on Kant, and barely begun to read Eve Sedgwick’s poems Fat Art Thin Art.  Read everything Jackie Wang tagged “Tiqqun” on her Tumblr. I Watched “The Angry Brigade” / Watched “Hugo” / Watched “American Psycho” / Watched “16 Candles” / Watched Season 1 of “Portlandia” / Watched “There Will be Blood.”  Everything I watch is about men or the impossibility of existing as a woman, as usual, the revolutionary women in The Angry Brigade still images, always, with soft lips, hard eyes, and no voices.  Debbie Hu showed me Youtube clips with Julia Stiles being given the gift of “non-whiteness” through dance.  And there was this version, dubbed over in Russian, and recorded by a blurry lens, and by, also, a shaky hand. I have listened to every old record that I kept and also had hours and hours of conversation in my living room and kitchen, so many hours it has been like a career or ideal career.  Everything smells like roses this year. The first two dreams of the year were significant but after that they began to diminish, and now I remember almost nothing about what happened when I was asleep. I have mostly just written in my journals, also a few poems which have amounted to nothing, though one had the title “The anti-foreclosure occupation of the serial rapist’s loft.”  I worked on my scifi novel about the world’s richest art star in space, all of it unsatisfactory by any standard, all of it I want to rip up and rewrite now as what?  As a series of prose poems? Listened to a lecture series on Metaphor and the Philosophy of Language and Susan Sontag reading her stories. Read that dialogue between Adrienne Rich and Susan Sontag about feminism.  I am certain I have read and done more than this, but also I have not attended to my house or my health or my money though I have maintained, on my fingernails, red shiny paint.  I have bought some things, like from the Salvation Army red rain boots and a red sweater coat which makes me look huge and imposing and which in itself, even unworn, appears to be like a blood clot.  The sweater has given me an opportunity to explain to Hazel why it is one wouldn’t always want to look small.  Hazel has said “It’s such a bad book, and only half apocalyptic,” and by this, she meant the world. She had just come home from school with news about FoxConn. I have begun, though I know my face is too old for this, to wear red lipstick.  I have, as is always the case lately, dutifully read my twitter stream and have had an inexcusable attachment to the language and news which appears there, as if it is a project I am deeply invested in, like braiding strips of plastic bags but for what?  I mean to say it is like a craft project with no uses but attended to with perfect discipline. There was the first snow, too, and the first push toward getting into the new semester.  I have thought a lot about Magdalena Zurawski writing the first two chapters of her dissertation: What is she going to say?  When will I get to read these?  I have been sad I never got to write a dissertation. I have wondered if one is allowed to just write a dissertation, alone at a kitchen table, and for no institution in particular.   I read, online, Rae Armantrout’s Extremities and Bernadette Mayer’s Story. There were lots of feelings of liking men and their energies even just as a category and also feelings of love without a target, like Breton’s shooting into a crowd, but not with a gun or anything so urgent.