Magdalena O!

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.

Just watched L’Amour l’après-midi by Eric Rohmer, only to find out it is the sixth and final film in the ‘Six Moral Tales’ series he did. I obviously wish I watched the previous ones first as this seems to be the culmination of them all.

The film is about “Frédéric, a middle-class lawyer, proud of his home life and in love with the idea of loving his pregnant wife and their first child, both safely ensconced in the suburbs. Frédéric also loves traveling to the city to work; it connects him to the bustle of modernity. He is invigorated by the freedom of city life, the proximity of chance, and, especially, the nearness of young, attractive, available women.” – Armond White

The ending made me wonder, was it Frédéric’s cowardice that led him to return to his wife and make passionate love to her, or was it truly that he was in love with her. Chloe, a woman that appears from his past taunts him that everyone cheats and that sooner or later he will as well, possibly with her. He grapples with this and is tempted on many occasions, but in the end doesn’t, despite her manipulations. She even goes as far as twisting around a story of his wife and a possible other man.

Was this Rohmer’s commentary on the French ethos? Maybe not everyone needs to be married and have women on the side? Maybe some are actually happy with their marriages? Frédéric was obviously influenced by Chloe’s rhetoric on the subject for a time, but in that confusion, maybe he was able to reinforce the love and desire for his wife and his life? Sometimes relationships need external influences for a broader perspective, and this was Frédéric’s? I am glad Rohmer didn’t let him sleep with Chloe. It would have been way too easy, even if they did fool around.

“These passing beauties are simply an extension of my wife’s beauty,” Frédéric says. Thus, Rohmer is not giving us a protagonist outside desire, but rather someone who takes in flirtatious pleasures, manifesting them for the benefit of his love life, rather than opposing them in the typical love and lust duality.

I really enjoyed the films discussion of relations, fidelity and love but without the overstated sexuality and eroticism that most movies of that genre give into. Not that I don’t love those films (because do I ever), but I’m not used to erotic French subtlety. In this I also realized the great effect, for better or worse, than French films have had on me especially my views on marriage. Being influenced by divorce rates of my friends’ parents is one thing, but while watching this, I think my equivocal, substantially anti-long term relationship viewpoint has definitely been massaged by French films. Without fail, most of them, or at least the ones I have watched pronounce a three-way relationship, something I have always been a fan of, compromised by intense desire and longing for the ‘other’ person, followed by a deep painful avalanche trumping all parties involved. Sometimes, like in Jules et Jim, even resulting in death. One reading would be that eventually it is the affairs that triumph and marriages get defeated. These consequences must have frightened me more than I realize, and even though I always find myself in long-term relationships, I am always afraid of them, afraid of myself in them, afraid of the other person in them. Maybe afraid is the wrong word. Hesitant? Distressed? At this point, the correct word isn’t in me. Yet, simultaneously, these emotions towards the ‘relationship’ are never created out of doubt about the love for my partner, about the passion and lust I carry. This is the crux French films have created in me. It’s so strange to intellectualize my emotions like this. I should stop. But I must get back to this.

I also just signed up for The Auteurs. Join me.

Anytime I am looking to make sense of life I turn to Mitsu -

At each moment, I say to myself, suppose I were at the end of my life, and I were transported back to this moment, to be able to live my life again.  I’m here, new, the first moment of my second chance.  What do I do with it?

We always think of ourselves as at the end of a long history which we imagine is trapping us, defining us and our world; our mistakes, our successes. But if we thought of this moment as a fresh beginning, rather than the end of a history of events, we would see there are vast possibilities in our present moment now. We don’t have to keep doing what we’ve been doing. If we had a second chance, we could do anything, we have the whole wide world in front of us… would we just repeat our past patterns or joyously start fresh?

There’s no reason why, as adults, we have to restrict ourselves to our habits, our knee-jerk reactions, our comfort zone. We can start over, every fresh new moment, with all our knowledge and experience, but not constrained by it but simply informed by it. Simple yet it’s hard to even notice we’re treating our lives as a great big experiment in repetition and not paying attention.

Not paying attention, because: if we really were paying attention, we wouldn’t jump to conclusions quite so readily, we wouldn’t be so sure our story was true, was fact, was set in stone. We would be a little more open to the possibility that we don’t, in fact, know what our world is, what we are doing, and the limits of our world. If we had a moment to look at things new, with a little more doubt, we could see infinite spaces open up in between our judgements and thoughts, and perhaps we’d have a chance to flex ourselves in directions we didn’t even conceive of before.

The same goes for listening, reading, thinking … when we listen to something we’ve heard before, when we read something we’ve read before, or something like it, we tend not to actually think about it again, fresh, re-checking it, but instead we consult our memory and replace the fresh experience of the idea(s) with a memory of having encountered the thought before. We take the memory placeholder as a stand-in for the idea. But this is useless and harmful, for a number of reasons: the memory is itself embedded in habits and contexts which are no longer nearly as relevant now, by doing this, we fail to refresh and re-check the idea, so that it can be expanded beyond the confines of how it worked for us in the past, and we also deprive ourselves of the advantage of putting our minds through the process of thinking about the idea afresh, which is always the best way to “remember” anything — not by remembering it, but by recreating it from scratch. Don’t take that retread: the “memory” of an idea, which is mere propaganda.  Every idea has a vast new possibility of application with each moment; evolution, expansion, even refutation. An idea, repeated, can be a gateway to a new insight, even if we’ve heard it or read it or thought it a thousand times before, by re-thinking it, recreating it as though we’d never heard it before. It’s only then we have the chance to see new dimensions of it, and to reapply it to our ever-changing and always unique presence with the world. – synthetic zero

Permalink: http://www.syntheticzero.com/?p=135

& read this too: http://www.syntheticzero.com/?p=183