A Thousand Plateaus

there is an uncanny quietness. the past weeks i could hardly stop myself from writing for the journal, but since a couple of days this has stopped. couldn’t really even give you the exact moment. and what’s even more disquieting : the flow of words seems to have been replaced by some kind of stupid tiredness that screws up my entire life-rhythm. i drop dead like a stone in the middle of the day and can’t go to sleep at two in the morning. like being out of tune. or out of focus. i look at my hands and my arms and my legs, and they are sharp and well defined against the other objects in the room : tables, glasses, books, pens, usb-sticks. but it *feels* different. like disintegrating into everything i’m touching. every glance – however quick and superficial – is an infinitely deep zooming into my skin to the point where it becomes impossible to say whether the molecules belong to the outermost layer of my flesh or of the keyboard. maybe this sensation wouldn’t disturb me so much if it wasn’t the question of merging with a glass, a telephone, a piece of paper but of merging with another skin.

“There is no absolute ear; the problem is to have an impossible one – making audible forces that are not audible in themselves. In philosophy, it is a question of an impossible thought, making thinkable through a very complex material of thought forces that are unthinkable.” (“2RoM” 160)

is alienation an inevitable consequence of this journal? susanne, who is working tonight, hasn’t ceased smiling for even a second ever since i’ve entered the café. she’s not smiling at anyone specifically – though it sometimes seems so when she approaches a table – she’s more smiling to herself with alert eyes and hair that she keeps pushing behind her ear. i’m trying to remember today’s session on plath. usually i’m going into the seminar with at least four or five pages of thorough preparations, having lined out an argument of a text for example. this is hard to do for a novel, obviously. so i didn’t really have a plan as to how the session on The Bell Jar would be structured. but it turned out that i didn’t need a plan because even though i had intended to use it only as an introduction to the novel we talked about “daddy” the entire session. and before i knew it time was up. and it felt like i hadn’t been there between the beginning and the end of the session. i mean obviously i had been there because the blackboard was filled with my handwriting but as during a gig these 90 minutes just seem to be lost. not lost in the sense of wasted, but lost in the sense of being unrememberable. as if i had been asleep or in trance.

“Literature [...] exists only when it discovers beneath apparent persons the power of an impersonal – which is not a generality but a singularity at the highest point: a man, a woman, a beast, a stomach, a child … It is not the first two persons that function as the condition for literary enunciation; literature begins only when a third person is born in us that strips us of the power to say ‘I’ [...].” (ECC 3)

and very conveniently, the two first person narrators of Book I and II of Beautiful Losers merge into the composite and imperceptible figure/haecceity ‘IF’ in Book III that has a third person narrator.

wonder if i’ll ever stop saying ‘i’. or if i have already.