COMPLETE EMPTINESS

Are self-hating Polish Jews Nazi sympathizers? I imagine my city, my country, my ancestors —I imagine the children born of Nazi rapes walking around the destroyed Warsaw streets holding phantoms inside them. Children playing in the communal playgrounds, holding each other’s hands and gripping tightly unable to let go when the blood stops to circulate. They ask about their father and their mother answers the story she has tricked herself to believe, or maybe it’s true by now too — “Your dad died in the War.”

A child born of hate, orders and power. How many of these children were born? Hundreds? Thousands? How many women performed abortions only to die?

Now those children had children too, and I’m of that generation. I was raised to hate Jews, to blame them for the Holocaust and for communism. “It’s their fault” everyone would say, the newspaper headlines would scream, the elderly would grimace. And so I did hate them, because I didn’t think. I hated the Russians, I hated the Jews, I hated the ‘Western’ world. I hated how I was picked on for not looking Polish enough with my sharp face and dark features. I hated how much my family hated me and how alone I felt because I didn’t understand how adults can hate a child so intensely and intently for just being. The phantoms of my past and of my birth weighing so heavy. They were phantoms inside me because I didn’t know or understand the complexity of history and memory.

(I watched The Night Porter recently &&& I hope you’ll excuse the work in progress of my stream of consciousness notes but I need to figure out how to articulate this in a public space… tbc & all that)

I started this project that’s a series of vignettes, of events, of feelings, of affections based on a trigger of the day. The trigger can be an event, or a word, or a conversation, but it has to trigger some sort of affect in me. Instead of writing about what happened in a ‘truthful’ way, I write around it with a lens of fantasy, or a memory, re-articulated to fit in whatever I imagine in my mind. I have the worst memory in the world, and I know everyone says they do, but I really do. People get upset and offended because I don’t remember important details of things, or moments that we have shared. Sometimes I draw complete blanks and nothing seems to trigger the memories. I want to write more about memory, but I have a paper due on cathaxis tomorrow from a Laplanche book I am about 1/4 through. I can’t believe I’m re-engaging in psychoanalysis again. Maybe it’ll help me better manipulate myself.

I am convinced that our childhood memories get re-articulated into interactions that best describe our feelings of our past in the present, and not the actual past event. I remember when I was in my early 20′s I tried to convince my mom I was a year younger than I was, and that the hospital made a mistake and she blocked the memory because it was too traumatic for her. I have been doing this since I was young. I re-make memories to evoke reactions in others and in myself. Cinema is truth 24 frames a second? Cinema is a lie 24 frames a second? I am cinema.

The general point of the project, which is bound to take on some academic mumbo jumbo meaning at some point, is to see whether I actually remember the trigger source, or whether I start to believe in the scenarios I outline. How much do I engage with that past in the present?

Oh it’s on my main website page http://raisecain.net

.

PS. MP3: Listen to Rucyl’s music & mixes. She is keeping me afloat in these times. http://rucyl.com/

PPS. I handed in my doctoral exam on 5 October. My defense is next month. I can hardly believe everything that is happening at once. If I pass I can go on to start research for my dissertation. Scholarship applications are activating the death drive in me. Next week I fly to Manchester via London.

This is Not What I want to Be Doing.

I peek into the world of the Other. I have made considerable measures to open up the containers, both my own and the one of the Other. I am desperate for the Other to not only notice but want to open up my holes more, make consequences of the holes. It’s easy to peer through the holes, even touch the stuff inside, imagine how it could feel like belonging to me. I am always imagining the Other as more than I am. I am constantly in relation to the Other. I have created a self-appointed war in which I don’t know how to compete in at all and my enemy refuses to be the enemy. It’s effortless for me to start with, “I am not…” when asking myself what I am. The Other seems so assured and willing. I suffer from myopia.

This is Not What I want to Be Doing.

Being insecure paralyzes your body. The Other doesn’t ask for my reassurance but I give it, and with that, faulty expectations arise in me. I need to go inside myself first. Not to figure out what I want to do with my life as some sort of psychological cliched breakthrough, but if I am constantly teetering, I need to figure out how to go through and risk it.

I am not productive with my energy, AT ALL. Most of my days are spent imagining, procrastinating, aimlessly sitting around my apartment until a moment comes and it’s almost always at that time I have to go to class, or go to meeting or sleep. I can’t just wait around for moments of magic, disillusioned that the Other has somehow harnessed these magical moments into the makeup of their container. Struggle. Struggle.

Why am I always reaching out for the Other? What is the Other constitute of that I am lacking? My container is swollen and ruptured (maybe? or is the rupture not happened yet… at that moment will I have no choice but to take that unknown risk for the future?). Ok. Maybe the container doesn’t break all at once, but little scissions occur all around. Yes, there are many holes. I have made the holes in myself and the Other. When did I start doing this though? I don’t remember.

What do I want to be doing?

I am tired of the constant “I” and my struggle with solipsism yet inability to escape it.

i found this photo of me from 2004. i used to spend hours talking about ‘doing’ with j, the man that took this photo.

I’ve lost my ability to write coherently. I’ve lost my ability to express my thoughts coherently. No! Ha! Actually I’m realizing that I just cannot and have not yet been able to express what is inside me and the anxiety is growing within me. So, no blog posts, just 140 characters on Twitter. Language is giving me anxiety. I know there is other ways for me to get around what I am living right now, but I don’t know what that is because I don’t have the language to go there. I want to go to there. I really want to be a better writer. Like, actually, a good one.

I have been sucked up by a self-referential spiral and so I just think about words and structures and concepts. I think about Polish (my first language) and my relationship to it and then my relationship to English – then the coalescing of the cultural contributions to my identity that form based on those languages.

Sometimes I feel like I am the only person in the world who doesn’t watch porn. I don’t watch porn because I haven’t found any porn I enjoy and I really really want to watch porn! I think it could be fun and engaging and inspiring to my own sex life and my own personal work. Recently a friend of mine sent me a link to some video on youporn and so I just watched it a few minutes ago. I didn’t find it appealing and I actually gagged at the end when the guy came onto the girls underwear. I responded to my friend asking her why is there no porn that looks like us and guys we fuck in our own lives? The guy in the video sounded like a douchebag and had a white cap backwards. How could I be possibly be turned on by the flailing around of his dick when every few seconds there is a shot of that awful baseball cap? I couldn’t. But the thought of someone I have the hots for caressing my breasts can turn me on while I sit on the bus. I’m often referred to as a ‘teenage boy’ because I get aroused so easily and so often and can make most situations sexual and arousing.

My history with porn is tricky. The first time I ever consciously looked at porn was online with a boyfriend. We were in his parent’s basement and we just googled some porn website. I was sitting on his lap and he was clicking through the photos. It didn’t last song because he found it repulsive. I didn’t really understand the aesthetic of it either. This was in the 90′s. I had another boyfriend who was really into porn but hid it from me because at the time I was in my feminist anti-porn stage. I got over that and then we were able to watch porn together. I bought a bunch of used VHS tapes from BMV. Yes used! It adds to the appeal. Shane’s World was my favorite series. It featured regular looking girls with little make up and the guys weren’t my type but were so generic it didn’t matter. I think the first time I ever had sex to porn was once in my flat we were watching Star Wars and then we started fucking; the dialogue from the film disturbed us so we put on Shane’s World. I had watched it on my own on a regular basis by that point but having it on while we fucked enlivened the experience. We were making noises and the tv was making noises too! It was a sex party!

I was into Shane’s World for a few years but then I moved on from VHS and couldn’t find any on DVD. When I finally found something comparable I watched it a few times but somehow grew out of it and my current boyfriend wasn’t much for watching it either. We made our own porn films and watched those instead. We mostly just filmed ourselves and projected it on our big screen tv. That was hotter for us than watching some strangers pretend to get off.

The main theme throughout my relationships was the creation of fantasy ourselves. With each partner I was able to use my/our narcissism as arousal. Foreign films also help this! In foreign films, sex is often complicated and dark and wrought with all the stuff I find hot in my own life.

I will have to write more on this. But in the meantime feel free to send me some porn please! Maybe you have found something out there I’ll love.

To situate the post here are some men  that if I were to see in porn, I’d probably watch on repeat for the rest of my life. To clarify, I’m also not really into objectifying men I don’t know. I know there is no chance of a sexual encounter with them, thus I see it as pointless. My fantasies always lie in the ‘possibility’ thus the men I do and have desired in my life, I have objectified to no end. But I won’t post them here for obvious reasons.

My belly is swollen, protruding. I hold it below my belly button. That spot. I would then run my palm up over my belly button and say, “Yes, here it is, here is our love.”

“Would you want me to carry y/our baby?”

If this was a book, then yes, it could happen right here, right now. I am always acting like I am in a book. You want reality, but I only know fantasy. I could one day stop taking my birth control and wait, prepare, massage my skin with oils, let it gain elasticity for its expansion, stop getting fucked up, start eating meat even!

I could learn to love meat. You could feed me real beef burgers and chicken wings. I would want more all the time, for all the years I despised meat. But nine months is a long time to be reading a book, maybe it is one of those serials that isn’t really a serial because serials aren’t serious literature. But it would still be a series of novels about the same character doing life in a way to relate to me, but having the ability to jump away with words and end just like that. Just like Catherine asked Jim to sit inside her car while she drove the car off the split in the bridge in Avignon. I was there looking at the bridge this summer. You have to pay to go on the bridge now. I didn’t want to pay to stand on a bridge, so it only exists from afar but close enough I could recognize it in films like Truffaut’s Jules et Jim. My Avignon bridge meant nothing but a way to make money, for Catherine it meant a way out of her neurosis, for Truffaut it meant a way to end the film dramatically but easily. Crazy women always get killed off in the end. Erica Jong talks about this, refusing to kill of Isadora Wing. Down with death! The world needs consequence without pitiful tragedy of funerals! A man can’t imagine follow-through on a life of a labyrinthine woman.

have sunk so deep

i am bleeding

they have tried to heal my wounds but it is only you who can

when they try to heal me, it is not a happy time

we do not sing together or kiss like kids

instead i gnaw and gnaw at their bodies because they are unable to fill my wounds

so i must create new ones

“We are in this together. Why are you so selfish? You need to be there or how can I be hard? Don’t you want me to be hard for you? If you are not there, then what do you expect. It is two of us. Two people are there, the desire doesn’t just belong to you.”

“Why do you insist on giving it to me then?”

“Why is there dogs around?”

“Who is barking? There are no dogs.”

“Write songs.”

“Now?”

“Yes. Let’s write it. You and me. It’s a day for songs.”

Who is this even happening to? Where are these kids? WHY DON’T I WRITE ANYMORE?! There is letters, unsent letters, sent emails, draft emails, scraps of paper, translations, quotes. I am covered in words yet there seems to be no sufficient output. It’s easy to fall in love with words. THEN WHY AREN’T YOU IN LOVE WITH ME?

Oh, who is in love with you? Me? Who? We are together holding hands. I have chip crumbs stuck to my fingers. There is so much love. What love is lacking. What is lacking?

CRUMBELINA!

“If I start I never want to stop. I can just go & go. Why did you stop? I can be hard again you know. Just give me a chance.”

“It’s not always about you.”

“Your honesty is a ridiculous contradiction.”

MILK GIVES.

Milk it. Milk me. Let me nourish you. Be your mother. When you close your eyes, I turn into her. Morphée and I take your life in the night. How easily you fall into us then.