“Better late than later.”

.



I've been thinking about this paragraph:

In 1915, as the American economy boomed, the huge supply chain that supported horse-drawn transport—harnesses and horseshoes, wagons and buggies makers (13,000 of them), farriers and blacksmiths, hay balers and feedmills—looked like a robust and vital segment for deploying capital. 1920 was the year of “Peak Horse” in the U.S.. By 1940 it was gone. This was not “low-cost”, incremental progress. It was an economic disruption so fierce that the phrase “buggy-whip maker” became a business simile for loser.

(It's part of the conclusion of Carl Pope's article: Get Ready for Ugly as "Free Markets" Begin to Deal With Climate Crisis.)

1915 was one hundred years ago. Is it possible that by 2040 oil will seem like a thing of the past?

There is this feeling that things are moving too slowly, or not at all. But, at the same time, I also have the feeling that when things do change sometimes they can switch really fast, like rats fleeing a sinking ship.

I don't think this change will in any way save us. Wars over oil will be replaced by wars over water. And the environmental degradation that is already underway will bring along with it more flooding, hurricanes, typhoons, migration, famine, disease, mass species extinctions and, as previously mentioned, war. But if oil were to become out of bounds, or even greatly reduced, in my lifetime it would be really be something to see.

The phrase “Better late than later.” comes from a Christiana Figueres speech. And whenever I hear people say 'It's already too late' I think the exact opposite is true in any given situation. The true motto of all activism is that there is always something to be done, it is never too late. And you don't yet know what is or isn't possible until it happens.

Arthur Ashe: "Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can."

Albert Camus: "One must imagine Sisyphus happy."


+ + + +


As an addendum I thought I'd return to a section from an earlier post entitled Stories I started but couldn't finish:

I have been thinking so much about solar energy, about how much of what I read, especially from a mainstream perspective, seems misplaced. When I read that we will not be able to generate enough energy using solar and wind, I feel they are completely missing the point. The points are:

1) That these new, sustainable technologies will force us to use less, will demonstrate – on a real, lived, experiential basis – that resources are renewable but not infinite.

2) That there is more autonomy, and less greedy profit, in a decentralized power grid.

3) That the many exorbitant expenses of polluting the air and water are simply not being factored into the standard calculations. Environmental devastation is expensive on every level.

But it is mainly the first point I obsess over. Let’s say you have solar panels on the roof of your house. Each day, you will use only as much energy as these panels generate. When it runs out you go to sleep and wait for the sun to come up tomorrow. The energy is not infinite, not available twenty-four hours a day. There are limits and you learn, out of necessity, how to live within them.

This, for me, is the main lesson of sustainable technologies. They would force us to live differently, to be aware of daily limits, to find solutions that acknowledge real limitations. They do not make life easier in every way. They make life harder in some ways, ways that force a fundamental shift in how we see the world and our place within it. I also suspect that working within a series of concrete, reasonable limitations would bring along with it a kind of reality and even joy.

.

Renee Gladman Quote

.



"I wrote a book whose title I withheld from the book for a long time as I wrote it and slept on it and not because I didn’t want the book to know itself (I had no influence on that), rather, because I feared that once I put the two together they would go on without me."

- Renee Gladman, Ana Patova Crosses A Bridge



.

My Apologies

.



This book is not reality. No book is reality but this book especially so. Things that happen in reality are often extremely obvious and just as often utterly counter-intuitive. This might also well be the case within the pages of this book but this fact for some reason does not bring this book any closer or farther away from the reality which it is not. Even as I write that this is not reality I have to admit to myself that I don’t actually know what reality is, I don’t know what freedom is, if it is something I want or something I’m only afraid of. I don’t actually know how to change anything but suspect so many things so deeply must change.

When I think what exactly is the problem, I always, almost immediately, have the opposite thought: that there is in fact no problem. There are social climbers, people of unfortunate integrity, people of great efficiency and others who are able to generate so much space around themselves. There is as much devastation as we can bear and there is always more. There are so many problems and in the same way there are none. There is a fairly specific idea I wish to express as well as a fear I might never exactly get at it and also a fear that I might yet do so badly.


+ + + +


In one hundred years it will be 2222. That is the first side of this mirror. On the other side: one hundred years ago it was 2222. This year has been chosen at random due to its repetitive beauty. The iconic year 1984 was famously chosen by reversing the last two digits of the year it was written: 1948. But this book has all taken so long that I can no longer guess when it began or finished. I have already missed the year I wanted to catch, perhaps in the same way that one misses the future when you try to predict it, or the way one has already missed or forgotten the past. At different moments we are different creatures, or not, I don’t know. Or I do know, what I don’t know is if this is the most helpful or useful way to describe it. There might be a more simple way: at different moments we are different, from ourselves and also from others, also from the other that is the self. There are others and others and others and others, and all of them are also us, if you want it, or if we try. I’m the other and everything I do is adding others.

Guilt is conservative. We are all implicated in more ways than we will ever know but shouldn’t feel guilty. We should be angry, must become open to an anger that experiences possibilities everywhere, that opens towards genuinely other ways of seeing our predicament and where it might first or most crack.

Most of the changes that might concern the contemporary reader took place many ages before my time. One of these changes concerns the fact that time is no longer so carefully measured, therefore I can no longer accurately state how long ago each of these changes took place. But knowing how many years, decades or centuries have passed since a given event no longer seems of primary importance. More immediate concerns dominate. Another change: the further in distance one travels the less it is possible to know. There might be other places, on this continent or further, living as we do or living in completely other ways. We don’t know. Some have set out to find more but either found nothing or have no way of sending their findings back. Very few set out. We live here, in the ways that we live, and find other ways of travelling, movement both more and less precise, each movement an echo from somewhere else. In writing this down, in this way, I am directing my energy towards maximum clarity, whether or not you notice or noticing means anything. The steps taken that brought us here are steps we all took together.


+ + + +


Clarity, to speak clearly, to convey what I experience in ways in which it might timidly be met by your experience, neither one overpowering the other, in which reality might shift through and within this meeting. The year 2222 has been suggested, but closer might be 3333 or 4444. We are in the future which is also a past. This is the thing I’m most trying to understand, the trance I wonder if I’ll ever be able to properly express. The repetition of a single number, three or four times, or five, is a way of suggesting other, more confusing, repetitions. But when you experience them they are actually not confusing at all. They are timeless. I wanted to write something completely different than I’d written before and instead I’ve hit this dead end that doesn’t yet know in what way it may or may not be the future.

Here, when we travel we transform. That is a kind of trick, where you trick yourself to experience other sets of knowledge, becoming a meeting place where diplomacy might occur, in the same way these words might become a meeting place between you and some shade of exhaustion, the exhaustion of the reality which this book is not. Every trick has a place to hide and a truth on which it might snag.


+ + + +


We don’t count the years but we do count each other. There are about two hundred of us not including children. This writing is a trick, a trance, a song and a game that at least all two hundred can play. It is a book in a room. You go into the room and you write in the book. You go in alone or with others. You take turns writing or you write together. You read what came before or you start from scratch. When the book is done we will read it aloud and then start again. We have made a life for ourselves that we now want to share, speak as clearly as possible, also further mystify. Later I might edit it, or I might not let you. This might be one book or it might be many. It is not reality.


+ + + +


I did things that I knew were wrong. That I knew were wrong as I was doing them and that I still know are wrong today. Why did I do them? I actually believe I know why, know why with such an intense precision that as I think it cuts me in two. Yet each time I formulate these reasons they fall short. There was a meeting. I believe all of us were there, everyone I’ve ever met and everyone I’ve ever known. At the meeting I was asked to explain myself. I was told first I must change, then I must apologize to each of those I hurt, then they must each agree to forgive me. Over time I must continue to change. At any point I could be asked to leave and never come back. All of this was explained to me before I was allowed to explain my reasons. But of course there was no true need to explain it. I had been at these meeting, been a part of them. They do not happen often and I had not been to many. But I had been, and as I was doing the things I knew were wrong I also knew that this was the possibility. That there would be another meeting, I believe only the third or forth in my time, and that I would be its sole focus.

As I started to explain, those around watching and listening with such muted intensity, I hear my own voice as if it were a voice from somewhere else carefully speaking to me. The voice is saying that something came over me, a desire or a terror,



[Unfinished.]



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Greece

.

 

Reading article after article on Greece and thinking the reason for Thatcher’s ‘there is no alternative’ is that alternatives are continuously crushed.





A few of the better articles I read:
Why I’ve Changed My Mind About Grexit by Daniel Munevar
Yanis Varoufakis full transcript: our battle to save Greece
Alexis Tsipras: Hero, Traitor, Hero, Traitor, Hero by Alex Andreou
Zoe Konstantopoulou: Nο to ultimatums, Nο to the Memoranda of servitude
Greece and the EU: a macro and micro mess up by Mariana Mazzucato
Slavoj Žižek on Greece: This is a chance for Europe to awaken




I still can't get over this line: “Well, the Eurogroup does not exist in law, there is no treaty which has convened this group.” It can be found here.




.

Remembering...

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Mohammad Mosaddegh
Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán
Patrice Lumumba
Salvador Allende



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Four quotations on sex

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The ubiquity of such struggles occurs, not because of some fundamentally problematic quality of sexuality, but on the contrary, because sexuality has qualities that draw other problems to it as people seek sexual solutions for the neverending conflicts and ambiguities of the hassle of living life as a human being, whether male or female. The entangled relationship between the sexes is the site of attempted solutions, which give the appearance of ‘problems’ only because the solutions are unsuitable. Sex is an arena within which other kinds of problems get played out.
– Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him



This is also why, for Freud, “everything has a sexual connotation,” why sexuality can infect everything: not because it is “the strongest” component in people’s lives, exerting a hegemony over all other components, but because it is the one most radically thwarted in its actualization...
– Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing



Another paradox: Often the one most plagued with lust is the one most capable of restraining it. The monk and the philanderer are likely to be the same person.
– Qiu Miaojin, Last Words From Montmartre



In abstraction, sex reveals the intangible force of its own irreconcilability and becomes what it is in reality: a spell for togethering doubling as a boundary.
 – Paul Chan



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The four links I referred to in my Copycat Academy talk

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Assemblages: Félix Guattari and Machinic Animism

Falling Into Decolonial Love: An Interview with Leanne Simpson

Feminist Killjoys (And Other Willful Subjects) 

Feminist Killjoys Blog



Bonus links:
White Fragility
Against Students
Longing for Animals



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All Profound Distraction

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My text All Profound Distraction can be found in this anthology on the theme of concentration.




.

And then, as the book was nearing completion, I suddenly panicked...

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The original title for this book was Artists Are Self-Absorbed. And then, as the book was nearing completion, I suddenly panicked, feeling I couldn’t give the book such a negative title, that sending it out into the world with a self-defeating name was almost a form of self-sabotage, and my entire life had been a series of incidents of self-sabotage and now was the time to change. To get on my own side and, hopefully, turn things around a bit. And in a way I already had another title in my back pocket: Polyamorous Love Song. It was a title I had used for a short-lived music column and it was a title that had already received much love. The idea of the column was that most love songs, mainstream or otherwise, are directed towards one person, the ultimate soul mate or new excitement, and maybe a polyamorous love song, a love song directed towards a few (or many) soul mates, might undermine some of the basic songwriting assumptions, be a small step towards a more liberating, emacipatory way of being alive. Then something else occurred to me: that this explanation might also be a form of self-sabotage. So many paradoxes piled upon paradoxes.

It was around that time I became obsessed with the idea that I wanted people to read my books long after I died, that I wanted to be one of those authors – like Kafka, like Walser, like so many others – whose work only found a substantial readership after they were gone. I didn’t want to do anything in particular to bring about this goal. I just wanted to work, to live, within the vague, unverifiable hope that it might eventually come true. And it occurred to me that this hope was a bit like the Christian idea of an afterlife, that my body would die but my work would live on in the eternal heaven of a considerable posthumous readership.

And then another thought. Maybe all works of art are some kind of polyamorous love songs, offerings sent out into the world in order to get everyone to love you. Works of art and literature are not directed towards one person but towards many. Songs in the sense of bird song, messages thrown out into the world. At times I felt that everything about being an artist is encapsulated in the tension between these two titles, between Artists Are Self-Absorbed and Polyamorous Love Song. And by changing the title it was almost like I was trying to say: look, I’m no longer self-absorbed. I’m not the same person I was when I started writing this book, when I started dreaming it. Or at least I wish I wasn’t. However, I fear I am more the same than ever.


- From the interview: "I Have Never Watched Pornography" - 11 Questions with the Author of Polyamorous Love Song



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Four Decades

.



1988-1998: Theatre & Anti-theatre
1998-2008: Translation & Polemic
2008-2018: Books, Music & Hospitality
2018-2028: Emotion & Decolonization



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C.E. Quote

.



Loneliness, which is really lack of love, is the pain of being unable to be present, makes us inhabit our bodies differently. At its most radical, loneliness’ pain relates to a missing presence beyond any comprehension or memory, as the speech of what feels the unspeakable. Where it does not, or rather cannot, remain trapped in the self-soothing, heterosexual loops intended for it, it may become a question of political engagement.

- C.E., Undoing Sex: Against Sexual Optimism



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Jericho Brown Quote

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Poets whose work supports the status quo often fail to acknowledge that their poems are just as political as poets whose work questions it.

- Jericho Brown



From his text Love the Masters which can be found in The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind



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Two recent things I've written

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Four Letters from an Ongoing Series / at Joyland

On Leanne Simpson: Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back & Islands of Decolonial Love / at Lemon Hound



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Anything is possible, but not everything.

.


[This text was written for the performance One Thing Leads To Another by Emma Murray.]



Anything is possible, but not everything. Thinking you know exactly what is going to happen next is the easiest way to be wrong. Of all the things that are possible, among which we might even include many things that are relatively impossible, rather few are likely. It is possible that the next sentence in this text will be about dinosaurs, while it is likely that it will not. It is possible that human beings will become extinct much sooner than was previously thought.

Of the things that are possible, it is difficult to arrive at a percentage that might be generally understood to be desirable. If human beings were to become extinct, it might be said, from differing perspectives, to be both desirable and undesirable. After you, as an individual, are gone, why would you exactly care what does or doesn’t happen? But it is possible that you do. Or at least a part of you does. What might be the best way to understand this particular part?

Desire can be understood in terms of sex, but it can also be understood in terms of everything else. For example, the desire to be alive, or to continue living. The desire for the impossible, far from being a contradiction in terms, is in fact extremely common. Things that I desire that I am frequently, or at least implicitly, told are impossible: an end to war, an end to capitalism, powerful people treating those they have power over with enormous kindness and generosity, etc. But, of course, all of these things are essentially as possible as anything else. I see no proof otherwise.

It is possible that one thing causes another, but it is equally possible that it does not, or that we have the cause wrong. However, whether the cause is clear, unclear, or misleading, the desire to find and know the cause for any given thing is not difficult to understand. Every moment is a mystery waiting to be solved. Or a pleasure screaming to remain unsolved. A pleasure screaming to remain lost. Understanding everything completely and perfectly is the death of all pleasure. Fortunately this is impossible, and there is also of course great pleasure in learning, in coming to understand something. As every conspiracy lover knows all too well, almost everything happens for a reason, but then, every now and again, something beautiful happens for no reason at all.



.

Unit of Measurement

.



We hate the government
the government represents us
we hate the government that represents us
the government doesn’t represent us
it represents corporate interests
corporate interests that give them money
money they use to get us to vote for them
we don’t vote for them
but someone does
with thirty percent of the vote
you can have a majority
the majority never says to itself:
I feel inferior because I’m only
worth thirty percent
it says: I used strategy and guile
to flip my thirty percent
into absolute power
perhaps every vote feels superior to the vote
sitting next to it, glancing over,
thinking: let me handle this
I know what I’m doing
or perhaps not

Our vote represents us
we hate our vote, our choices
we hate the choices that represent us
a vote is a unit of measurement
but the hatred we feel for the government
cannot be measured
if you want to understand the present you
have to read history
if you want to understand history you
must understand human nature
human nature is malleable
it is formed by the society and
culture that surrounds it
perhaps not entirely
our history: we came here, said it was ours
but it wasn’t ours
there is enough for everyone if you’re willing to share
if you use only the small part that you actually need
they say the government is ours but it’s not ours
it’s against us, but that
doesn’t mean we’re not the same
the problem of government is a problem we all share

I know someone will tell me I shouldn’t
use the word hatred in this poem
that hatred is unproductive
but we do hate the government, I think,
how they reshape our world in their image
I know someone will tell me
I shouldn’t be so simplistic or didactic
but perhaps all I’m trying to say
is that the simple things are complex
and the complex things are as simple
as poison



.

Six Links by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah

.



I just discovered the amazing writing of Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah:

If He Hollers Let Him Go: Searching for Dave Chappelle ten years after he left his own show

The Radical Vision of Toni Morrison

When the Lights Shut Off: Kendrick Lamar and the Decline of the Black Blues Narrative
 
De origine actibusque aequationis: Rachel Jeantel, Rammellzee, Basquiat, and the Art of Being an Equation

Stakes Is High—and Black Lives Are Worthy of Elaboration: A True Stories conversation between Kameelah Janan Rasheed and Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah



Edit: Very excited that Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah just won a Pulitzer for A Most American Terrorist: The Making of Dylann Roof



.

Two blank pages.

.



Sometimes, when my notebook is almost full but not quite – the notebook I carry around in case I have a thought I want to write down, or when I’m working on a book or article – when this notebook is almost full but there are still five or ten empty pages left, I feel suddenly that I need a new notebook, a completely empty one. I feel this moment is almost the entire story of my life, always wanting a blank slate, to start again, to forget all the pages I have already written before I can even consider writing new ones, almost like a curse. The pages I have left empty over the years, always just a few at a time, if they were all put together could make up several new empty notebooks, but for me it never seems to work that way. I am writing this now because in this notebook I’m currently writing in there are only two blank pages left, and I want to fill them so I can then get a new notebook. I have already filled one page (my handwriting is large and clumsy and I only use every other line to make room for notes) and am now six lines into the second blank page. Why do I always want to start again? What do I hope will happen next time that hasn’t happened all the times before? Does this ‘wanting to start again’ make me a better artist or a worse one, and if I were to somehow leave it behind what would I actually be moving towards? I almost never look back over old notebooks, much like I so rarely think back over my life so far. But here near the bottom of the second, no longer blank page, I feel the way I almost always feel during endings: I don’t really want to deal with them so instead, while still asking myself questions, I just sort of throw them away.



.

You can’t just do the moves, you’ve got to let go.

.



Let’s say there was a writer who decided that, in his lifetime, he wanted to write a hundred books. Before he had even started his very first book he had already decided: I’m going to write a hundred books. Of course, the moment he finishes his first book he immediately starts writing his second, then his third, and on and on it goes. When he finishes book number fifty he thinks: this is amazing, I’m already half way there. Then, just after book sixty-two, he dies. As he is dying he thinks: I could have made it, I really could have made it to a hundred. Now let’s look at the content of the sixty-two books he did actually manage to write...



.

How did I become so bitter? (comment stream)

.




I posted the question "How did I become so bitter?" on Facebook. This is the comment stream:



Too much lemon. Go easy on the lemon next time.

not sure I could tell you how, but I could think of a few good reasons why

you're not bitter. the speed of your mind and the want in your heart can't be matched by the trudge of reality.

Could say the same

Funny, you don't look bitter.

bittersweet

Dig the i out and put an e. It will be - ok -

social media addiction

cuddle deficit?

how do you think it happened?

Because what you are doing is nearly impossible. But don't give up.

Old age, happening to me too

it´s because they lied to you......all of them.....

do not become bitter Jacob, we need you and your thoughts/posts...go out and sit in the sun and so...

I keep asking myself this too

I was born this bitter!

hahahaha. wondering the same myself. but its no mystery really!

Just happens with age. As soon as you start freakin out about hearing people who were born in the 80s are are now over 18 you become bitter.

It's just a logical reaction, at a certain point.

I tried bitter, but that stuff'll kill you. So I'm angry. Keeps all of the other feelings alive. In theory, at least. Maybe.

Because you didn't eat enough butter

I think my bitterness actually peaked in my early 20s, for some reason.

People keep telling me yoga and meditation keep the bitterness at bay, but the bitterness goes so well with the paranoia that I'm on the fence.

Maybe because deep down you are too sweet. Try doing something bad on purpose? Balance things out...

Or walk around making sensory observations until you forget the bitterness for at least a moment.

Are you bitter, or cynical. One is a waste of energy -- the other, the result of intelligence. At least that's the way it seems to me.

Perhaps because you still give a shit.

You seem too busy. But then I may be not busy enough

Half Japanese-Put some sugar on it

Bitterness is the fate of the idealist. Sunlight, lots of fluids and a GG award can help.

Sit in the sun and close your eyes. Try to think about who you are, rather than achievements

It's usually because your ratio of leaf to water is wrong, or the water is too hot, or you left yourself brewing too long. Try using a thermometer and a timer, just to practice for a bit, and take yourself out of the water before you usually do.

One of the tastes we try when the others grow tiresome

i ask myself the same question somedays, guess it must be the business

brush your teeth?

I'm wondering what took you so long.





Bonus track: The Fiery Furnaces - Bitter Tea



.

Passage from The Fourth World by Diamela Eltit

.



When I turned twelve I had my first sexual encounter. Transmuted by the ancestral force of passion, I was on the verge of consummating the act, but I didn’t know then if I was being liberated to experience glory or to experience punishment, for all I wanted was to go further – I had to go much further – until I could fuse hesitation with acceleration, disorder with precision, in the sacred flesh.

It happened on a street. The sky was darkened with clouds. I was walking attentively along a narrow street when I sensed that someone was following me. My heart began to pound, yearning for the secret pleasure that emerged from some part of my brain.

I soon realized that I was not the one being followed, but the one following someone else, someone slender, walking unhurriedly, and seeming to glide along in an affected manner. The equivocal situation made me fear I was hallucinating, but the sound of the steps, the crisp air, and the uneven sidewalk confirmed that I was deeply immersed in a real situation.

I was astonished to realize that not only was I following an unknown person but also I didn’t know why I was doing it. Inexplicably, and in some crucial way, however, that moment pulled me away from the world I knew and pushed me into another in which that hieroglyphic person would make similarity and difference fade into one another.

At one particular moment I lost sight of the figure. Dejected and vexed by inertia, I began to double back, thinking nostalgically about my loss. I felt deprived of some absolute presence, more fundamental than my parents and more mysterious than the sum of my fluctuations.

Sadly, I started back. Of the four roads from which I could choose, each one was as equally possible as it was a mistake. I quickly realized that not only had I lost someone but also, in the search, I had become lost myself.

It would have been absurd to wager on which way I should return. One of those roads would take me home, but if I were to choose the wrong one, it would take me three times as long to get back. It seemed as if I were being punished for letting myself be guided by my impulses. Soon it was going to get dark and the city would become even more dangerous. I had been warned about it so many times that now it seemed like a dream to be exposed to it, just on the edge of twilight and shielded by anonymous, conventional dwellings.

Some curious faces observed me while I stood there, stubborn and rigid, trying to decide which way to go. Becoming desperate, I tried to reconstruct my original route, but each possibility seemed equally valid to me. As I got cold, I became more anxious, so I made a random choice. I had no memories or assumptions that would have convinced me that I should have headed south.

I was facing a long and lonely walk, intensified by fear every step of the way. There was nothing to distract me, except the darkness that was overtaking the sky ever so quickly.

Suddenly, when my miserable condition was too much for me to bear, I saw that same figure standing nearby. I froze, overwhelmed by irrepressible desire. Without thinking, I walked through the darkness, guided only by the scent of another person’s skin near me. I stopped.

I felt myself being pushed up against the stone wall, breathing in unison with the figure that was stroking me. Expert, soft hands ran all over my body and fingers pushed against me in order to remove my clothing. In that public exchange, those hands that traversed my body back and forth found their way to the most stimulated part of me.

Unable to feel the stone wall jabbing my back anymore, I sought a deeper reality once those caresses had prepared me for that moment. Feeling totally outside my body, I tried to touch the other person, but a pair of hands stopped me.

As if in apology, our mouths became fused with the passion of our saliva. My tongue became a sword, seeking not only to wound my rival but also to lick my ally.

Out mouths witnessed a combat of shifting liquids that became desperately and painfully prolonged. My breathing became nasally vulgar as the undulations, domination, and pricking left me out of breath. Unable to continue, I decided to consummate the act, but the figure fled, leaving me stinging against the stone wall.

Then the pain began. A sharp, genital pain, provoked by vigorous and demanding desire. Alone and shameless, I resigned myself to the personal glory that I had assiduously attained for the first time. Satisfaction was measured by the curve of desire and the dimension of abandonment. When the violence of the stones returned, I knew it was over.

The hours it took me to get home were agonizing, for I cursed and cursed the whole way, trying to destroy my sexual vitality. I saw myself as an outcast, I was unworthy of living with my family, and I felt as if my mind and body had been condensed into all the encrusted afflictions of the world.

At intervals, strong surges of well-being helped return me to a state of moderation, reducing the denigrated feeling I had about myself. The accursed sermon of reason incessantly accused me of a perfidious crime whose fine was permanent shame and horror.

I promised to make all kinds of sacrifices, even castration, in order to alleviate that burden; yet something had become hopelessly perverted in me and, deep inside, I had exposed myself to a cynical yet honest life.

I suffered intensely for several days but, little by little, even though I was feeling much anxiety, I concentrated on elucidating exactly what happened in that meeting on the street.

I couldn’t determine who or what seduced me that evening. Despite continually reconstructing that encounter I could never ascertain anything with any proof, even though I know I encountered youthful plentitude in the flesh of a young female beggar or a young male vagabond who, as night approached, performed a charitable act for me.

- Diamela Eltit, The Fourth World/El Cuarto Mundo



.