new haven

“Sometimes a vast solitude opened in my head and the entire world disappeared inside it, but came out again intact, without a scratch, with nothing missing.”
—Maurice Blanchot, The Madness of the Day

Haven’t had anything to do with the man on my mind since he saw my initials on a list and emailed me to check I hadn’t perished in a terrorist attack on London. I didn’t submit any of my writing to the Derrida journals he’d recommended. If he put a gun to my head I’m not sure I’d be able to say much about Derrida. He knew grief, he knew that poems were little hedgehogs lying on their backs; he knew how to what, take things apart? Maybe I just don’t find that so impressive anymore, [redacted].

I think much more softly about that French writer who swam out into the sea,
who said that the true law of hospitality meant finding yourself more alone, or more strange.
Although it was really Wallace who said that, now I think of it.
Wish I had a few friends over tonight.

What the French psychoanalyst actually said was: “This strange law of hospitality: you die abroad and not always at all as you would have wanted it.”

Is that what happens when you read someone’s words and they can’t answer back? Sounds more like an invasion to me, but there’s no other option. Just got to make sure it’s conditional and that everyone’s still held to account.

For years I’ve been tugging at the shirt sleeve of anyone who will listen, imploring them to grasp some idea of what I’ve been working with. It’s not theirs to hold, though, and that’s alright. It probably doesn’t smell good.

I sent someone a message asking them not to message me at 3 o’clock in the morning any more. It felt like a small win, and when I fell back asleep I had a dream about kissing a girl with a forked tongue in some ancient ruins.

“With each first death the whole world is lost, and yet with each we are called to reckon our losses.”

(I think it was Brault and Naas who wrote that about Derrida writing about Barthes.)

Now there’s dirt under my nails and I’ve got more space than I’ve ever had before to think things through. Those of us who aren’t currently having to reckon any losses are the lucky ones, and maybe we’re even glad for the respite, but I still feel nauseous when I see what’s going on and who’s being martyred. It’s like Rukeyser said:

I think there is choice possible at any moment to us, as long as we live. But there is no sacrifice. There is a choice, and the rest falls away. Second choice does not exist. Beware those who talk about sacrifice.

You don’t have to tell me twice, those bloodsuckers have been martyring people’s friends for centuries.

There was a choice. The rest fell away.

Meanwhile I get tight in the chest when I think about stroking the short hair around someone’s ears.

(Couldn’t see it, could you, bless you. You always saw it as something the universe was doing. The universe making fun of you, but that’s not it at all. You were the one I met laughing. You were the one that made the fun.)

I want to bring these disparate thoughts together. My little pines and the massive disasters unfolding everywhere.

My head is spinning, not because of those catastrophes but because someone called me malevolent, told me they couldn’t trust me because I didn’t love myself enough not to hurt myself and that they were relieved to be rid of me. My brain twisted itself into an anguished pretzel trying to comprehend the words coming up on the screen and for some insane reason I couldn’t look away.

Wherever the disasters are, they’re all unfolding on a screen in my room and I can’t look away.