Another whole day avoiding the computer, avoiding to write and deliberately; I guess this is just another facet what it means to write in order to stay alive one day more, to write in order to keep oneself from death – this ability to write and be saved at the same time comes not without a certain price to be paid. At present it´s not difficult to figure why would I avoid writing at certain times… I don´t know at all what I would be able to find along the way. I am going through extremely lucid times and this vexes me somewhat; I am not living a life for rent in the shoes of whatever-academic or whatever-business fickle positions, I am not drunk as often as I could in order to forget whatever there´s to remember, I´m quite self-conscious: I know that my plan for the year is an absolutely impossible dream to fulfill and that unless a miracle is worked out, this shouldn´t come to fruition. And then one also knows that there´re no miracles of that sort in this world or any other – we wake up in the morning, piss in the loo, find ourselves remembering our names and those of people we love and loath, we can swallow our food, the world is still bad and unsafe, those are the kind of miracles that we humans are treated to everyday. I know that I am extremely needy of human intimacy and that I´m desperately craving for a love affair but that at present I don´t have anything to offer but myself and that in this world doesn´t seem to be enough at all: I don´t have enough money in my pocket to cut my hair, to buy alcohol, leave alone the fact that I don´t have any clothes and that all my trousers are two or three sizes bigger on me or instead, three sizes smaller. I can´t decide the kind of food I want to eat and it´s been weeks and weeks since I haven´t left home for more than a few hours; and yet I seem to have the arrogance to believe with all certainty that I´m going to leave the country in eight weeks. What worries me the most is not just the fact that I won´t be able to fulfill my plan as I wish (I´m all too used to this) but the fact that I´m not being delusional at all about it and even that I´m overtly prepared to face the most complete defeat. I´m so fully aware of my limitations and yet I refuse to accept it, to live with it. Every day I think of another source, I expected humanity from a different person, from a different organization, I send a couple of letters more, I await more replies and more replies. Soon I´ll have exhausted all the possible people and places I could contact. Then I agree that David Silva might be right – step by step; one thing I am sure of, the first possible emigration plan that will fall into place, anywhere from Antarctica to the Polar Circle, I will go without a single blink. Then after all, it does seem like I am expecting some kind of miracle and not just expecting it, but am absolutely sure that it will take place and furthermore, I am shameless enough to put myself aside and give a detailed description of my own delusional situation which seems at the moment more hopeless than delusional.
Hope wrote me today about Peter, a 17-years-old boy from Wisconsin (the same age that Ariel Levy had when I intimated with him, not anymore though, he is now 18 and I am, as he said, really old) who suffers from some kind of syndrome (well, Ariel has ADD and I think I do too, very strongly but I´ve never been diagnosed) and yet he comes from this hardcore atheist family (that could be a nice adjective to apply to my own family lest that they´re such nobodies that it would be an insult to any mediocre –ism to apply it to them) and has been homeschooled; he started teaching himself Icelandic and some weird language from the north of Japan since the age of 13 and now he translates Icelandic books for children into English. Hell! That´s what I call a way to find one´s throughway in life in spite of deteriorating mental and physical conditions; I´m so far from that because even at this point of my learning only now I´m starting to believe that I can accomplish anything without selling my soul to the devil and being bought off by the complacency of bourgeois attitudes. She thinks it would be terrific for me to meet him, and hey! I would wish so much for that. Am I really imagining a future never to come? Am I really supposed to follow through the demands of the good God in whichever monotheistic version they are offered to me in order to save my soul from ignorance? Look at my transmogrified Catholic intellectual Judaism: I´ve accomplish a lot of learning, my life is completely defined by the Jewish ethos, consciousness and humanity; I led Ivan out of the monastery into which I wanted myself to go in and then I led Pablo into the wonders of the Hebrew language and the Jewish religion; both of them found their ways after me and are now actual “Jews”. I am certainly much more mature intellectually and spiritually but yet in life I´m the same old failure and remain in a place as insecure as ever and what´s worse: I look upon them with despise, even with cynicism and laugh in their faces about their newfound human condition. Am I just jealous and trying to get back at them for achieving everything in which I failed or am I mocking the idea of finding oneself ever at home? I think it is a little bit of both. In short, I joined the lines of militant Jewish missionaries and yet haven´t been able to solve the simplest spiritual questions for myself. I am exactly in the same place where I was fucking eight years ago but my mind is at least ten years ahead of my own life and yet without any wisdom to claim for! Although on second thought, maybe wisdom is something that one would never have to claim.
I´m not even depressed in the romantic sense of the world but clearly preoccupied: I feel that my sight is not what it used to be and even though my body remains immaculate, soft, unbruised and desirable, my eyes sharper and brighter than ever, my sexual desire intact; I still feel that there´s something wrong with me all the time. The repetitive cycle of physical tiredness, bleeding gums, the lethal morning headaches, the devastating effects of alcohol in my body and in my psyche, the constant stomach trouble and the bleeding, the impossibility to enjoy sweets, the unsatisfied appetite all the time and especially at night, mood swings, all the time. Yet I look at my body and I seem to enjoy it quite narcissistically even when it´s not the type of bodily shape I would be most attracted to; I think of my own physical complexion as too small, too fragile, weak and unmanly, however that´s not what I thought of Santiago´s body, while his facial and chest hair growth only revealed the man in him more than it concealed it. To abhor one´s own body is a way to recognize oneself I think, to recognize oneself either as the other or as the one craving for the other. I am all too aware of my physical defects: My yellowing and unkempt teeth, the Jewish nose, the lack of muscular mass of any kind, the testes, and the little belly that stands out even in the particular beauty of my skin without any blemish at all. I´m conscious of it and of myself all the time, even when I´m having sex, it´s this inability to really let go and turn yourself over as the one to the other; to reject one´s body as the one that appears to the other is not only a psychological movement, it is a movement of abjection in which one is dispossessed of his own in order to conquer the other through the other and not as a natural movement from the one to the other. It is a way to become bereft of yourself and turn into the other and toward him as you love him and leave behind the whole of your own personhood; it is not about trading it but destroying it so completely in a way as such that the other doesn´t realize he´s loving himself through the one which you are. A most desperate craving for an intimacy that is not only sexual but yet that shouldn´t border in responsibility for the other as much as it dwells on an aesthetic representation of the act of love itself.
I guess I´m somewhat opposed to the whole idea of people seeing themselves naked before they are intimate. There is just so much beauty to the human body and so little thereof in the sexual organs. The time shall come when people will only see their sexual organs because they will have no time to gaze into their own eyes. Sometimes the moment of the orgasm is treacherous, because you can´t stand your own presence bare across the other and that´s why you´re obligated to leave. Beauty is extremely important to me and yet I should be too modest about it, too prude and all too concerned with the value of human relationships and conversations; but for the most part unless my demands for beauty are met, I´m certainly not concerned. This shouldn´t be so bad taking into account that my standards of beauty clearly deviate from the norm, what I am after is not necessarily beauty of spirit, as if there could be any such thing… My main preoccupation in the camp of beauty is whether I am able to interact with that person as an interlocutor as whether I can let go of myself in order to love physically that person; whenever I remain in a narcissistic closure around my own body throughout the intimate moments I know for sure that I should stay away from that body and from that person. The curious thing about intercourse is that it is at the same time the most disgusting and the most beautiful of all human activities. I think no book other than the Bible contains all what we need to know about it, when the nakedness of the father was coveted; the realization of the father´s sexuality is the pathway of abjection, it is a way to deny oneself as someone sexual and then to encounter oneself again in negating the father. That is what Abraham does when he shatters the idols. I will be meeting this older man, Sergio, tomorrow, and I am completely persuaded that there´s going to be something sexual about it, but then I might be quite wrong because I´m not sure whether I am attracted to him and I presuppose that he might be quite attracted to me, but this is just another delusion.
Another aspect of my depression: I refuse to ask people to help me, it is something that makes me too much nervous and I prefer to run all the risks and all the troubles and enter prolonged cycles of lying and deceiving in order to get what I want or need, rather than asking for help. It´s some kind of inwardness that runs so much counter to the outgoingness in which my life seems to dwell; from cocktail party to cocktail party, carefully thought out conversations and opinionated wholes of the world. I don´t understand it myself because it´s a huge contradiction.
Another aspect of writing: I agree that it is a very miser situation when one writes from the position of being superior in knowledge to the reader but still that´s exactly what I did for most of my adult life and it had to do not with the fact of being more intelligent than other people but with the psychological condition in which I had to destroy everything that my life stood for and build myself anew from scratch with my own two hands and without the help of anybody; that puts me in a position in which I always think I deserve much more than others and this is just too vain. That´s perhaps the reason why all my written thoughts have been just this false until now and why they haven´t been given a chance to stand on their own. I certainly don´t deserve more than anybody else because my actions in the world have been so entirely undeserving of praise and no matter how good my intentions have been, I´ve certainly been wrong and hurt more people that I can remember that have hurt me and yet I always aim to protect myself from my own misgivings arguing for the suffering inflicted on me by those friends who were and not are not; and as cynical as this might sound in too many cases my impression has been correct but my argument is still hypocritical.
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