FAWN

One time I watched a movie by Aleksei German in which the state executes its intellectuals. A character points out that it’s not that they want to kill all scholars, only scholars in doubt. I thought about this a lot, for many years. Then I forgot about it. Now I think about it again.

*

I hadn’t been a “being outside time” in months, possibly years. I began to read all literature as foreign in order to relate to it.

*

X simply would not name the bloodless rhizome poets! I had to find them out for myself. There were amazing, terrifying labyrinths in my dreams.

*

Tarot card reading at the mall. A love of subtitle files and the people who resync them. The pornography of accuracy on period TV shows.

*

I became accustomed to the spots on my face. I bought a bolo tie. “The time of fashion,” notes Agamben (trans. Sullivan and Whitsitt), “anticipates itself and consequently is also always too late.”

*

Was my personality bad, I wondered. Later, a celestial hour at H Mart. As Laura Riding put it, “Nothing so far but moonlight / Where the mind is.”

*

The morning after Etel Adnan’s death, I copied these lines of hers into a notebook:

The morning after

my death

we will sit in cafés

but I will not

be there

I will not be

*

I sat on the porch, I awaited the storm, the wind picked up, and I read this sentence as it happened: “Les feuilles sont des extensions matérielles du vent, révélatrices par tremblements” (Gaillard). Later I translated it into English: “Leaves are material extensions of the wind; their tremblings are revelations.”

*

These days everybody wants a little white space, “Life is a bitter aspic” (Stevens), and I’m just taking notes.