small objects

(Sometimes I still make things that aren't floating in the ether. I never used coasters before I came to England--well, maybe very occasionally, but not as a matter of course--but here it seems like many people use them. One day, I saw these plain linen coasters [and placemats, but I haven't done those yet] at Muji; it happened to be the day after I'd signed the application for the house I'll live in next year. Nothing feels quite so homelike as making things for your own home. So I am.)

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Small objects figure for me as sites of resistance. Small narratives, too (I was so pleased to find the work of Jean-François Lyotard this week-- he calls these narratives 'petits récits,' which makes a special kind of sense to me in terms of the work I'm doing: lovers continually re-recite their own story to one another in order to confirm its reality to themselves and to affirm its difference from grand narratives). The small is beneath notice, often; it can function as a differend, an unresolvable left-over.

Choosing the small is not a heroic action. It barely bears witness to the differend. But still, in quiet ways, it is an action against commonly held ideas and modes, and that is its importance.

on longing

What is longing? In Seminar 11, Lacan writes that desire is "to lack what one has". Desire resembles longing; it must, although of course it is not the same. Longing: the word has distance contained in itself. Distance between the lover and the beloved is the originating point for anticipation, for desire; the lover longs for her beloved, she considers the value of what is made distant from herself.

Most simply, longing is desire for what is radically exterior; i.e., not the self. I cannot long for myself because I am never separate from it. Longing requires separation. If I am longing for my self, it is for a self I believe I have lost, a self which has become fragmented, articulated, which no longer belongs to my whole (my perceived whole). The subject who is paranoid or schizophrenic may be able to long for her self; her attachment to that self is fragmented in its own being. In a split subject this self-longing is easy to understand. In subjects who are more whole than fragmented, longing is directed outwards, toward the other, the beloved. What is not part of the self, what I love, I want to become part of my self. Longing, then, is linked to possession: I want you means also I want to own you. I want you for my own. You belong to me. Or with me: the feeling is essentially similar.

The function of longing is a paradox. It is necessary and it is intolerable. Barthes: this can't go on! is the cry of the lover away from the assurance of the love of her beloved. And yet it must go on: longing for the other is inescapable. I can never be fully with my beloved, if for no other reason than that of our separate skins, separate bodies. So I continue longing for just a bit more closeness, always just a bit more, and cannot attain it. But it is this tension between what I think I want and what I can ever attain which makes it possible for love to continue: if ever I were able to be as close to my beloved as I think I would like, I might lose interest. But the variable is not a constant variable; it shifts, and where I believed myself to be approaching the one I love I find in fact that there remain many unknown, even unknowable, reaches. A self-sustaining system.

Longing is the expression of desire for the ideal relation, which is only ever approached. Approach is anticipation, it is a provisional 'yes'--its orientation is towards the places where the beloved could be, in the future. It anticipates in both senses, then: in the sense of waiting, and in the sense of arriving before the other arrives. In this way it is both respectful and dismissive of the being and desires of the other; it says, I will wait for you, I hope you will come, and, simultaneously, I expect that you will be in this place (where we can understand 'place' to mean a physical location, certainly, but also a state, a kind of being)--a limiting thought, perhaps.

But, luckily, the role of the lover and the beloved in relation to one another is always one of gentle, loving transgression of the limits of being and of understanding.

on imagination

In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault identifies imagination, in the Classical episteme, as "the suture between body and soul," both "the locus of error" and "the power of attaining to truth" (p 77, Routledge Classics, 2007 edition). Imagination borders the body, it is longing; it mediates between what exists in the world and what exists in the not-space (the heterotopia, could it be?) of the hoped-for, wished-for.

Imagination has the power of bringing the imaginer closer to 'truth' and of distancing her from that truth. Like a trick mirror, it distends what is, but simultaneously the imagination permits more to exist than does exist. It is thus both limiting and transgressive of limits--i.e., liberating. It is the potential tense, the subjunctive tense. What can be expressed in the space of imagination is what is contrary to lived experience, and when I do express hopes, wishes, fears that contradict that experience, what I am doing is imagining; literally, forming an image. The subjunctive mood is desirative: a tense of planning-ahead. When I make an image, I am making a plan, a possibility for experiencing the world. What is important in that moment is not that what I have imagined should come true; it is that I have been able to imagine it.

The image is not integrally or necessarily tied to the future of what I experience as 'real', although it must have some relation to my past understandings of the world (because I cannot imagine--create image--in a void; my hopes and desires come from somewhere). This is where heterotopianism belongs; the imagined body (space) both is and is not. It exists and does not exists, and, more importantly, it exists as I imagine it (because I have imagined it; it exists to me) and it exists as I do not imagine it (and it exists counter to my imaginings). Although imagining traces a limit, it ultimately cannot transgress completely; there is always a further limit, which is the edge of what can be imagined. It would be impossible for the imaginer (the lover) to imagine all the ways in which her beloved is (and is not); the fractalized, faceted nature of the human being is the limit of imagination. Time is its limit: I cannot possibly do the work of knowing every edge, every face, of my beloved, even though I devote a whole life of work to it.

So the gaps of knowledge are bridged by imagining. The danger (the integral other) of imagination is fantasy (which is not permissive to its object). Imagination, although its locus is in the subject, must respect the other. It must "make a sort of promise...to address the Other as Other, not to reduce the otherness of the Other, and to take into account the singularity of the Other" ( from an interview between Jacques Derrida and Nikhil Padgaonkar). When it does this, it makes an "irreducible affirmation" (ibid)--which is the act of loving the other, watching what is known and what is imagined align and interweave.

on being taken aback

It was not what I expected; it was completely out of place and in the wrong season. But regardless of my own expectations, it presented itself to me and it was beautiful. It shone where everything was darkened.

I thought nothing could get larger. Of course, I was wrong. Everything does.

lavender and roses

Somewhere, in a burst of glory, sound becomes a song

I'm bound to tell the story; that's where I belong

When I see you smiling, when I hear you singing

Lavender and roses, every ending a beginning

(Paul Simon/ "That's Where I Belong," from the album You're the One)

cross-pollenation

Coincidence is what I count on when I am feeling lost in the enormity of my body.

holes

Of course they can be dangerous (like the well in Norwegian Wood): things to fall into; places to be lost. But from the underside, they let the light in.