LONELY GIRL

PHENOMENOLOGY
#1
THE ROOM WAS THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT I HAD CREATED IN MY
HOUSE, THE OPPOSITE OF THE SOFT BEAUTY THAT CAME FROM MY
TALENT FOR ARRANGEMENT, MY TALENT FOR LIVING, THE
OPPOSITE OF MY SERENE IRONY, OF MY SWEET AND EXEMPT
IRONY: IT WAS A VIOLATION OF MY QUOTATION MARKS, OF THE
QUOTATION MARKS THAT MADE ME A CITATION OF MYSELF. THE
ROOM WAS THE PORTRAIT OF AN EMPTY STOMACH.

CLARICE LISPECTOR

Diaries | Jacob Wren

Notes of a Crocodile (Notebook #2; 4) | Qiu Miaojin (translated from the Chinese
by Bonnie Huie)
We love as cannibals/Stay alive longer | Christiane Craig
Decomposure | Kay Rozynski
Last Words from Montmartre (Letter #15) | Qiu Miaojin (translated from the
Chinese by Ari Larissa Heinrich)

Edited by Lonely Girl Phenomenology

Commissioned by The State

Designed by studioKALEIDO

thestate.ae
lonelygirlphenomenology.com

Jacob Wren makes literature, performances and exhibitions. His books include: Families Are Formed
Through Copulation, Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed and Polyamorous Love Song.
As co-artistic director of the Montreal-based group PME-ART he has co-created performances
including: Individualism Was A Mistake, The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information and Every Song Ive
Ever Written. He travels internationally with alarming frequency and frequently writes about contem-
porary art.

Qiu Miaojin (1969-1995) was a Taiwanese novelist. In 1995, she was awarded the China Times Hon-
orary Prize for Literature. Her works garnered mainstream attention and critical acclaim for their queer

cinema to modern Japanese literature. She was educated at National Taiwan University and Universi-
t Paris VIII. While in Paris, she directed Ghost Carnival
committed suicide. A two-volume set of her diaries was published posthumously in 2007, and the
excerpts from the English translations of her novels Last Words from Montmartre and Notes of a
Crocodile appear here courtesy of New York Review of Books Classics.

Bonnie Huie is the translator of Qiu Miaojin's Notes of a Crocodile (forthcoming from NYRB Classics),
for which she was awarded a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant. She occasionally writes about pho-
tography and Japanese literature.

Christiane Craig is a writer, translator and master's candidate in Comparative Literature at Paris IV.

Kay Rozynski is completing a Ph.D in Creative Writing at the Writing and Society Research Centre,
-
tive and site-responsive writing, and experimental translation. She is based in Melbourne, Australia,
and teaches Creative Writing and Spanish at the University of Melbourne.

Ari Larissa Heinrich is the author of The Afterlife of Images: Translating the Pathological Body Be-
tween China and the West and the coeditor of Queer Sinophone Cultures. He teaches at the Universi-
ty of California at San Diego.
LONELINESS IS THE DEAL. LONELINESS IS THE LAST
GREAT TABOO. IF WE DONT ACCEPT LONELINESS, THEN
CAPITALISM WINS HANDS DOWN. BECAUSE CAPITALISM
IS ALL ABOUT TRYING TO CONVINCE PEOPLE THAT YOU
CAN DISTRACT YOURSELF, THAT YOU CAN MAKE IT
BETTER. AND IT AINT TRUE.

TILDA SWINTON
Monday you often arrive somewhere less or different than originally imagined.
Today I dont feel well. Yesterday I also didnt But it is rare that nothing changes, even when things change for the
feel well, and expect much the same tomor- -
row. It is June, in one week I turn forty-three. ests with others, which means recognizing that one is not alone. As
Thinking back, I suddenly feel that this past David Graeber writes: Revolutionary constituencies always involve a
year has been one of the most exhausting, tacit alliance between the least alienated and the most oppressed.

wouldnt begin this way. I feel an opening like We are told the key to who we are can be found in our childhoods, in
this belongs in a diary, and I dont write the ways our parents raised us and our friends treated us, in early
diaries, I write theory and literature. But I am formative memories that can be unlocked and analyzed. But I wonder
wondering what it would mean to begin if there is something overly apolitical in this truism. Perhaps the key to
writing from ones present state, not to front or who we are is to be found, for example, in
hide behind formal invention. What kinds of
theory, of literature, might drip out from the honesty of an overly immediate job in order to earn money to survive. Or
impasse. that we compare ourselves on a daily

Im burnt out but know it could be worse. I just heard about someone I havent and movies. That our character isnt only
seen in awhile, whom Im told is now clinically burnt out. She cant get out of formed by our pasts, but is just as much
bed, cant work, goes for a short walk and immediately needs to sleep. I formed by our daily lives, each and every
wonder, if I went to visit her, would it make me feel better or worse? Im still day. By the things that surround us,
more or less able to function as usual. But I feel like doing nothing. things we dont believe we can change,
that make the world the only world we are
In a way, all theory and literature emanates from some shade of not feeling well. given to be part of or be lonely in.
Philosophy begins in disappointment, as Simon
Critchley writes. Also in unhappiness, in heartbreak, It is also possible I want to think that the
present trumps the past because I dont really
remember my own childhood. It was an
was fairly certain I did not particularly belong. To averagenot particularly dark, nor particularly
give myself an activity, some sense I could make happyupbringing and yet Ive mostly blocked it
something happen. But that was thirty years ago. out. Why is it that I prefer to struggle with the pres-
Where am I now? ent moment, to make art that smashes against the
now, that doesnt seek solace or explanation in the
When Im in a reading mood, I read about one book past? One thing writing from the immediate
a week, and almost all of them are bleak. About ten impasse seems to be telling me is that I have more
years ago I decided I wasnt going to listen to
depressing music anymore, and I do
have some strange feeling that ten Saturday
years of mainly joyous, or at least I copy out this fragment from an online text by Eileen Myles: ...a monotonous male
energizing, music has helped my reality. Which seems just sort of staid and old. Tapped out. And this is how I feel:
DIARIES / JACOB WREN

overall mood. But why do I feel it tapped out. I certainly dont enjoy this feeling but believe I will, at least partly, recover.
would be impossible to do the same That I will learn something from the mistakes of this painful past year, perhaps making
with books? different mistakes in the future. I fear my best work is behind me, but recall having this
exact same anxiety as a teenager, when I was just starting to make work. I know I am
Wednesday part of a culture in decline, wonder how to work and think under the weight of this tepid
I dont think I have any right to imagine knowledge.
myself as a lonely girl, but whos going
to know, so I imagine myself as a Im tapped out, both at this moment and in some larger sense. All right, that might be
lonely girl. It is a clich, but if I were a one kind of prob-
lonely girl I might very well be writing this in a diary. I barely even think of myself as male, lem, but another
but every once in awhile I catch a glimpse of the ways in which I am. A diary is a private problem is this:
space, and there is likely something male about this desire to avoid private spaces, to honestly I dont
go public, to actively take on the mantle of theory or literature. As a lonely girl I think: seem to mind. I
dont really mind
expectations of me. Im going to be Bataille, Badiou, Foucault and Derrida all rolled up being tapped out at
into a single ass-kicking, girl-savage endeavor. I know this will not make me less lonely. the end of an
I read somewhere that the difference between a genius and a normal girl is that the exhausting year,
genius has a much greater aptitude for being alone, can endure far greater loneliness. dont even mind
Girls are historically less likely to go around proclaiming themselves geniuses, but this being at a moment
lonely girl will. in history in which
the straight white
male that I am is clearly not the most
- convincing or compelling thing to be.
acters that the reader is supposed to imagine as fully formed real people. Im However, if I believed my writing had
against fully formed people, believing, rather, that we are all a series of become tapped out as well, then I would
be genuinely distressed. This is really the
against a story that playfully knows it is a story, with characters that are crux of the collapse: work above every-
simultaneously people, ideas and fragments of the author, with truth that is thing, work that will never make me free.
The depressed mind tells itself the world is
going to hell and I am barely able to live my
literature, this counter-position feels excessively lonely. The road less life, but at least I continue making work
and being validated for it.
moments that threaten to stretch out into a lifetime,
or worse, a career. Sunday
I try again to imagine myself as a lonely girl, as this
Thursday character I have invented but cannot implement:
I suppose this burn out is also a form of loneliness, myself both the way I am at this precise moment
a feeling thatemotionally at least no one has my and simultaneously a lonely girl who will change the
back when Im most in need. When I was a child, I world. And I feel angry that I cannot really imagine it,
had a pillowcase featuring the entire cast of the that I can barely even imagine myself as myself,
comic strip Peanuts. Above their heads was the much less as someone else, as someone with a
sentence: Happiness is being one of the gang. completely different inner life. There is one kind of
But as a child I was not especially one of the gang, loneliness that results from a lack of physical
had few or no friends, ran around alone contact, and another that results from an inability to
until I discovered adult literature, and get inside how others think and feel. Literature is
then reading was my favorite thing. Or supposed to be a partial cure for this second kind of loneliness, but unfortunately
maybe it wasnt like that at all, I barely not the kinds of literature I read and write.
remember my childhood.
Work is a way of avoiding some things by focusing on others. Art is a way of using
I do now think that politics is being part the things in my life that feel negative by transforming them into something that
of a gang, that nothing in this world
changes unless people form coalitions
and work together towards improve- issues in my life that I am so actively avoiding through over-work like, for example,
ment. That loneliness is the opposite of my lonelinessmy unwillingness or inability to fully deal with others? What might
 Notebook #2 She said that night shed wanted to wrap her
4 arms around my waist, but didnt dare to, and really
regretted it afterwards. She said it after a few days
As crimes high tide inched nearer, I anticipated, I had passed. Within my catalog of various little memories,
schemed, I feared. I had to that easily went straight to the core.
death.
What are you writing? she asked.
She was used to relying on other people. I had a habit of
looking after girls. If she was in class at a set time for a set

NOTES OF A CROCODILE / QIU MIAOJIN / TRANSLATED FROM THE CHINESE BY BONNIE HUIE
time, I was there to soak it up. In class I was a show-off, but
from the moment classes ended till the moment they What are you
started up again, I was gone. Her long hair trailed over her
shoulders. Her elegant clothing gave her the appearance of Im writing about you coming over.
being around 24 or 25. That entire year I went for a kind of
made me What did you come up with because I came over?
look barely 15 or 16.
Want me to read it out loud to you?
She was like a pendulums motion between school a n d
home. Id sleep until the sun disappeared off the west- e r n Yes.
horizon. Then Id cut loose from my cave like a charged parti-
shy- To - nights the big night. A certain someone came over for a
ness, she had refused to socialize. Cunningly, I changed a l l romp in the hay.
of that.
Thats enough. I dont want to hear the rest.
Two very different types of people, mutual attraction. And
for what reason? Its hard to believe, this thing beyond the Scared?
imagination of the chess game known as the human condi-
tion. Its based on the gender binary, which stems from the Uh-huh. Scared of you.
duality of yin and yang, or some unspeakable evil. But human-
ity says its a biological construct: penis vs. vagina, chest hair We were in the room on Wenzhou Street. I put away the
vs. breasts, beard vs. long hair. Penis plus chest hair plus
beard equals masculine, vagina plus breasts plus long hair
equals feminine. Male plugs into female like key into lock, and the bed.
as a product of that coupling, babies get punched out. That
- If we were locked up in a mental hospital together, would it be
board. All that is neither masculine nor feminine becomes sex- any better? she asked.
less and is cast into the freezing cold waters outside the line of
demarcation, into an even wider demarcated zone. Mans great- Would we be locked up in the same room?
est suffering is born of his mistreatment by his fellow man.
I dont want be in the same room.
She agreed to stay over at my place. I was like a little girl who
Why not?
10 in the evening, heading home from private tutoring on
Chang Chun Road, I took the 74 bus down Fuxing South Im scared of you.
Road, picking her up along the way. She waved as she stood
at the bus stop, an overcoat draped over her shoulders, a What are you scared of?
spotless white rucksack by her side. A woman ready to
elope, was she. As I looked out at her, she was almost like a
vine extending one slender, delicate branch towards my
window, hoping I was the direction of the sky, not knowing Whats so great about being locked up together?
that inside that window, there was no shade, and not
much sunshine, either. We could live next door to each other. Our beds would be
separated by a wall. Id sit on my bed and talk to you.
Like two sparkling gemstones, we were shakily carried t o Youd sit on your bed, too, and we could talk all day
campus by the 74 bus. I gave her a ride on my bike. S h e longThatd be so much fun with no one else around.
quietly sat sideways on the back. I started singing a song
that was popular back in high school, pedaling to the rhythm. What if we ran out of things to talk about?
Y e l i n
Avenue, and which grew vaster the further we rode. I How can we run out of things to talk about? Id pound on the
couldnt see her face. I was dying to see if it was that of the wall and say I was tired. Then Id go to sleep. After you
Moon Goddess herself. Waiting for the Sun, Waiting for wake up, you automatically have things to talk about
You, and The Wild Lily Has Its Spring, Too, those were again.
My favorite
Sylvia Chang songsThe One I Love Best, Flower on Fine. You go to
the Sea, Standing on Top of the World, or She wait for you to wake up.
Goes Walking by the Seathey cap- ture the mood of
Song 1980, Love Youre not allowed.
Proverbs, and Little Sister were Lo Ta-Yus biggest dont have anything. Youre only allowed to talk to me.
hits. To my 17-year-old self, Sylvia Chang and Lo Ta-Yu
were equivalent to a dab of some kind of cosmetic She leaned partway over the edge of the bed to talk, her
powder, a soundtrack applied to cover up teenage face peering at me. I wrapped the covers tightly around
heartbreak. After high school, I couldnt remember the myself. When you sleep next to me, I suffer, I said. So
names of songs and singers anymore, but I still come sleep here on the bed, she said. Thatd be
knew the words by heartand you? even more painful, I thought.
It is through the imagination that the imme- and in North Africa it is still painful. [...] A play. Is it writing Im putting off, or was it always
diate passage from error to crime is estab-
lished.
it up. I cannot go on this way.
Mikls Vet

One photograph of the writer Jane Bowles, walking arm in longing, for the pain that abolishes personality. I speak not of the chronic, tedious pain
arm with her that she would suffer trying to spell simple words in letters to friends after her stroke, but
Moroccan lover
Cherifa through the decision of any personality, Millicent Dillon writes of sin and salvation, in which sin

STAY ALIVE LONGER/WE LOVE AS CANNIBALS: JANE BOWLES SIMONE WEIL / CHRISTIANE CRAIG
sun-bleached market- would be something like self-indulgence, dependency, parasitism, and salvation would
place at Tangier, remains be utter detachment: freedom from fear and even, perhaps, from love or at least from
with me. In part, for its self-interested love.
incongruity: Janes white tea
dress, her thin, tan limbs, her eyes
squinting in the light and heat; while
Cherifa, in a niqab and dark glasses, We love as cannibals. [...] Beloved beings [...] provide us with comfort, energy, a stimu-
leans forward and away from Bowles, her lant. They have the same effect on us as a good meal after an exhausting day of work.
arms caught behind her back as if she were We love them, then, as food. [...] We love someone, that is to say, we love to drink his
- blood.
ers, enjoying the camera as if witnesses to an
arrest. And indeed, in an early letter to her friend Miriam Levy, Jane writes: Im tired of loving and

Sunless, of three children

on a road in Iceland, in 1965, is described wanted, as a child, to be a religious leader herself, before deciding that she had a
sensual side. Dillon, in her 1998 biography A Little Original Sin, also recognizes some
the image of happiness. For me, the photo- -
graph of Jane and Cherifa in Tangier is the image of tion of loved ones is concerned, Jane seemed to love in precisely Weils terms:
unhappiness.
I love Tangier. But like a dying person. When Tetum and Cherifa die I might leave. But we
When Millicent Dillon, Janes are all three of us the same age, more or less. Tetum older, Cherifa a bit younger. Id like
biographer, visited Cherifa in the
seventiesthe latter by then an old one I like best, or how long I can go on this way, at the point of expectation, yet knowing
womanshe laughed about Bowless
stroke, subsequent condition, and eventual that I want than it is they themselves. But I do want them to belong to me, which is of
course impossible... If I have broken through my own prisonthen at the same time I
husband, suspected Cherifa of having poisoned have necessarily lost whatever was my place of restTangier cracksI love itBut it can
her, inducing the stroke that would leave her mentally no longer contain me...
and physically handicapped until the end of her life.
Whether Cherifa poisoned Bowles or not, she didwhile
employed as the Bowleses' housekeeperroutinely leave little
parcels, containing herbs, menstrual blood and pubic hair in their
Conversations, he women in question. To procrastinate the demise of her two lovers, however distant it
describes Cherifas very criminal instinct, the knife she kept in her jeans, under her may have been, was to procrastinate her own independence, her own freedom from
djebella: she was so proud of it because she was always talking about killing men while
making threatening gestures, like slitting throats. He believed her capable of anything, own need, the attachments of self, makes human relationships into idols, as Miklos
especially where his wife was concerned, and dismissed her several times over the years

visit Jane. However forcefully and permanently he dismissed Cherifa, returning to Tangier,
he always found that Jane had taken her back.
suddenly unoriented.

composer, and enthusiastic traveller. Jane, by contrast, found all physical displacement Cherifa and Tetum were not kept alive for their own sake, but for Bowless, because they
gravely distressing; but then, a great many things distressed her, and often to the point of real were her sustenance. And againnecessarilypain, an appreciation of the impossibility
fear and panic: bats, bugs, elevators, new places, water, fever, all manner of tropical illness, of having and of keeping, steals away her place of rest. And it is precisely such compli-
and the possibility of any sort of sickness or injury. Indeed, the vast majority of her anxieties cations concerning the scales of imagination, fancy, necessity that
seemed to have their root in the fear of pain. In one journal entry in 1954, Bowles wrote: her two serious ladies fail to resolve in Two Serious Ladies. Christi-

A play. There comes a moment when there is no possibility of escape, as if the spirit were
a box hitting at the walls of the head. Looking at the ocean is the only relief. I have trained the same monotonous cannibalistic dramas.
my eyes to look away from the beach where they are going to build the new docks. I
cannot look at that part of the beach unless I think of my own end, curtail my own sense Despite this epiphany, Tangier cracks, Tangier was
of time, as Paul says that we must all do now. I can do it, but its like: You too can live a city, or prison, Bowles would never freely
with cancer. When I was little I had to imagine that there was some limit to physical pain -
in order to enjoy the day. I have never yet enjoyed a day, but I have never stopped trying
to arrange for happiness. after writing the entry, she called a
Morroccan friend, saying simply:
Bring me Cherifa. Giving up the
have stemmed from any one of several unfortunate events: her fathers sudden death more subtle approach and all
from hypertensionhe had never been ill beforewhen Jane was thirteen; her fall from hope for an authentic passion, she paid the younger woman to
stay the night.

Woodmere, Long Island. Bowless love and procurement of Morroccan women is unset-
tling. The desire or coveting of the native other is a theme
But, how bitterthat the possibility of just such a loss of actual freedom should be the that is also present in much of her work and should not be
root of her fear, as it was precisely this fear that crippled her, that rendered her, by all ignored. Although Millicent Dillon considers that
accounts, a complete dependent upon her husband, her mother and stepfather, her perhaps in the person of Cherifa this wild creature,
friends, the Moroccan women whom she loved (and who despised her in return). The this illiterate but powerful peasant girl nineteen or
twenty years old, a descendant of the patron
limit ones freedom compels one to limit ones own freedom to avoid injury. saint of Tangier Jane recognized possibili-
ties of freedom, of life without worry or
For those who knew Bowles and spoke of her to Dillon, Bowles was adventurous to the care. After all, Cherifa was a young
Muslim woman, but drank openly
was wild, but also babyish, nervous, panicky, fragile. It was perhaps not only or even and was known to be a lesbian.
Notwithstanding, the same
agonized over the simplest decisions: where to go for dinner, what to eat. Her dread was structures of dependency,
two-fold: there was the fear of freedom, but also the fear of never claiming it. The result of eating, persist
was a paralysis that kept her from writing. Her collected works are published in just one -
volume of a few hundred pages: a novel, a play, seven short stories, and other fragments. ern interfamilial relationships. The not infrequent
Although this scarcity is to be regretted, there is the sense that what Bowles wrote could choice, then, of exotic subjects seems more often
not have been written in any greater quantity. Her prose was not troubled by darkness, as a means of deepening private impossibilities. In
houses are by bad weather; rather darkness was, unfortunately, the territory. In 1954, in Everything is Nice, an American woman
the same entry, she wrote: visits a Moroccan town, spending her day
in the company of a native woman
Nothing has changed. My father predicted everything when he said I would procrastinate named Zodelia, and walking back
until I died. I knew then it was true. In America it was terribly painful to know this as a child. through the town alone, toward
Now that I am nearly forty
her hotel, at dusk: began to sway backwards and

Although the sun had sunk behind the houses, the sky was still luminous and the blue of more tightly to the mannequin and togeth-
er they fell off the top of the hill and continued
the powdery stuff came off. And she remembered how once she had reached out to rolling for quite a distance until they landed on a
touch the face of a clown because it had awakened some longing. It had happened at a little walk, where they remained locked in each
little circus, but not when she was a child.
dream best; and the fact that all the way down the hill the

AN EARLIER VERSION OF THIS ESSAY FIRST APPEARED IN QUARTERLY CONVERSATION (ISSUE 28) AS LOCKED IN EACH OTHERS ARMS: JANE BOWLES FICTION OF PSYCHIC DEPENDENCY.
For Jane, misunderstandingfailing to understand or to be understoodwas all part of mannequin acted as the buffer between herself and the
being out in the world, and not only in the non-western world. broken bottles and little
stones over which they fell
In Two Serious Ladies gave her particular satisfaction.

The wickedness, the sin that

A study in contrast, Christina Goering resolves to strip herself of all familiar, loving contact, Bowles fears is precisely this: impos-
sible to synopsize, and still so cleanly
contained within the one, strange image. It
is an image which serves, imaginarily, to quali-
fy the imaginary act itself, not only as sinful, but
natural tone into the conversation. Its on an island, said Miss Goering, not far from the also perverse, uncreative:
city by ferryboat. I remember having visited this island as a child and always having
disliked it because one can smell the glue factories from the mainland even when walking An imaginary act is necessarily an unreal act, for it meets
only shadows ... not to see obstacles is the terrible secret of
the carnage of the victorious warrior and of the misdeed of the
criminal; victims are in their eyes only shadows without
substance, inert and inanimate objects. Thus an imaginary
act is sinful because in being unaware of them, one violates
circumstances are unpleasant, tragic even, all remains cheerful and bright: everything is the boundaries of another being.

Its comedy always involves evasion or prevarication. Her prose is so absolutely contrived, so To imagine is to exploit the living
substance of other beings toward the
glitches, it is as if there was sand stuck within its machinery. In fact, Bowles suffered greatly fabrication, the fashioning, of lifeless,
in her writing, spending days on a page, on a sentence. Very little came easily, naturally. pleasing objects. These objects are
precisely the idols that Vet is referring to.
There are other authors who did write weird, snappy burlesques of the same order, but
perhaps what distinguishes Bowless work is its sense of sin, something she detected creates: it fabricates. The defectiveness one senses

gratify it, how to control it, how to conceal it from others. Nowhere is this dependency -
tion rushes forth to supply the self with lies, consolations,
little tasks to carry out. One short fragment of Bowless, seem-
ingly autobiographical, represents imagination as a false trust, a
second heart:

a lie and protect it. Her wild clinging to this false trust is a result of her not wishing to

trust in order not to fall into her single heartThe single heart is herselfit is sufferingit
alone from one minute to the next. She looked up. The sky was packed with grey clouds. is Godit is nothing. ...

was an atrociously imaginative woman and to her it seemed that to renounce imagination

her heart. It was not lack of discipline that kept Bowles from writing, but her conviction
Dont leave me, she called out. that the imaginary act was, fundamentally, wicked.

takes another into water. At the start of Two Serious Ladies,

Christina Goering, a small child, seals a smaller child in a In her journal, in 1954, Bowles writes: the only time I wrote well, when I passed through
burlap bag for a game of I forgive you for all your sins.

creek, ignoring her frightened protests. In the

short story A Day in the Open, during a picnic
by the exercise of the will through attention; in order to wear down this imperfection in
Julia over slippery rocks:

If I let you go, he said the current All that appears to be resistance is overcome, inertia, fatigue, inferior desire on the level
would carry you along like a leaf of willall of that, when one has passed beyond a certain threshold, becomes suffering
over the falls and then one of those big rocks would make passively undergone...
a hole in your head. That would be the end of course.
Julias eyes widened with horror and she yelled with Attention is the experience of the void and redemptive suffering, implying love and free
the suddenness of an animal just wounded. consent. One can pay attention only to that which exists, which is real; it is purifying in
that it requires total psychic devotion, the temporary suppression of self (just as in giving

-
that she was not dying, but hugged him all the more tion, desire without object: ... and she remembered how once she had reached out to
closely. Millicent Dillon suggests that these water touch the face of a clown because it had awakened some longing. The act of writing
scenes are baptismal. But sin is a symbolic becomes an effort to wear down imperfections, to exhaust imaginative possibilities, just
concept for Bowles, a word to contain all the as a wheel wears down a piece of metal.
wickedness of dependency. If young

the total subjection of their captives, constantly at oddsor in abrasionwith her power of attention, her single heart. To pass
dependency proves still more through the inner door, over a certain threshold, was to vanquish the false trust by
perverse. Because meanwhile, means of attention. Only then did writing become a place of salvation.
-
-
strongly reminds her of ness and originality of her prose. Bowles knew this even at age twelve, writing in her friend
an oft-recurring Miriams autograph book:
dream:
To Mir
She was being chased up a short hill by a dog. At the top of the You asked me to write in youre book
hill there stood a few pine trees and a mannequin about eight I scarcely know how to begin
For theres nothing orriginal about me
But a little orriginal Sin.
the mannequins arms very tightly around her own Loads of genuine love
waist. She was startled by the thickness of the arm Youre best friend
and very pleased. ... Then the mannequin Jane
The narrow passage had been the daunting cockroach, and I had slipped with
disgust through that body of scales and ooze. And I had ended up, all impure In 2010, I attempted to translate Clarice Lispectors The passion
myself, embarking, through it, upon my past, which was my continuous according to G.H. in a way that erased speaking pronouns. The
present and my continuous future. novel recounts a womans confrontation with a cockroachthe
way the confrontation dislodges her subjectivity and the way
Clarice Lispector, The passion according to G.H she removes the cockroach from objecthood, collapsing its
boundaries and aligning it with her own subjectivity by
A blank, waiting page: already a kind of aftermath. A well-oiled cataclysm of eating it. It was a free or creative translation that wanted
industry engineers the mashing of its vegetal, chemical, and biological to take the disembodied but real relationship between
elementselements plundered from what we, with certain hubris, call our writer and translator seriously; I wanted to address
natural resources (natural, as though the instrumentalization of plants Lispectors text, writing to it, on it, palimpsestually, onto
were a given, or as though they were naturally ours). But even prior to the body of her work, between its lines, into its white
these depredations, the blank page was already marked up with spaces. The technique gave me the opportunity to
insinuate my own writerly self, cockroach-style, into a
space wears the spectral aftermath of a literary tradition that 'foreign' body of work, and I liked the way identity was
stakes everything on coherence, on the perpetually renewable continually disorganized in the interplay of the machines,
promise of novelty racketing into the foreseeable future. On the technologies and affects I had to call upon in the process. I
assimilation of dis-ease into comprehension, on the translation also liked the way it became clearer to me as the translation
of things into things-said. On composure. progressed that the machines and technologies I used to
translate emerged as co-authors of the translation. My body and
What I think about the task of writing, about the way in which theirs co-operated in generating the new text.

DECOMPOSURE: ON THE AESTHETICS OF AFTERMATH / KAY ROZYNSKI

writing takes me to task, turns on a concern for, not to say an exas-
peration with, what might be called writings mutenesswith which I, neutral cockroach body, I with a life that at last is not eluding me because I
term I want to designate texts that white-out evidence of the writers

itself. Texts, that is, that result from a convention that bars the writer from
playing with the affectivity of writings tactile surfacesin other words, literary that if they divide me in pieces like a lizard, the pieces
texts manufactured within a tradition (ours) the particularities of which will keep writhing and shaking. I am the silence
prevent the writer from imbuing the material dimensions of a page with etched on a wall.
the capacity to signifyor rather, from disturbing the standardized

is that it assures that there is a loss incurred in the movement from eliminates difference. Popular wisdom
demands that the translator, in reiterating
or copying a text, remain unaffected and
Ralph Rugoff used the phrase aesthetics of aftermath to refer to a invisible, an impartial conduit for the
certain kind of artwork in which the procedural trace of its creatorher passage of the original. There is a
trials and hesitations and errorsremains in evidence. In the context of parallelism here between the assumed
literature, this aesthetic might manifest as a certain erasure of legibility in empty page, innocent and a-semantic
favor of visibility, which is to say, it might provoke texts that mute languages carrier of the text proper and the
loudly ineffectual stabs at representation and play instead at foreground- translators (presumed) invisible work.
ing the writers embodied entanglement with the materials of her Yet the process of translation involves
compositional process. Writing in this way is to de-composeat situating oneself into an inter-linguis-
least, it is to compost saying and doing. It is writing that is tic space. The space is in turn inevita-
unabashedly organic, dirty, rooted in its vegetal, chemical bly colored by the translating subjec-
and biological progenitorsand it fascinates me. I, who tivity: its choices and its tools, and the
squirm uneasily before the glare of a new page. Louis sense of self the translator brings to the
Hays term textual genetics refers to the tracing of a work amid the uncertainty of translation.
-
uct, made up of drafts and other material manipula-
tions that go beyond the linearity of the code and entangled with the unresolved tensions of
[spill] over into a variety of other spaces. With Hay, Im linguistic incommensurability. Perhaps it is
the particular sense of isolation that translation
theatre behind the scenes of writing, valorizing the affords, isolation from both source and target
languages, that marks it as an act of vulnerability.
creator. Because writing begins well before that blank, Disarticulated in this way between languages, the
papery stare. translators body is like that of the writer who perambu-
lates before the task of writing. Translation mimics the
The world looks at itself in me. Everything looks at every- embodied relationships (between writer and text, writer and
thing, everything experiences the other; in this desert things reader, reader and text) that are fostered in the kind of writing that is
know things. attuned to an aesthetics of aftermath.

Derek Beaulieu is a writer whose poetry might be called conceptual or

concrete. His verbo-visual practice produces works for which, in his own named for her declaring that she does not know what to do with the
words, the graphic mark of text becomes fore-grounded both as a newfound and abysmal disorganization of her being. She feels she
rhizomatic map of possibility, and as a record of authorial move- must do something with it and so, she says, she will tell you about
it, if you consent to holding her hand all the while (whence her
what excites me is that this brings the writing process into telling and your holding constitute the reading of the novel). But her
the orbit of the written object. Witnessing the trace of objective in telling is not to sort through the disorganization; not to
practice in this way constructs a space akin to a overcome it, with a view to reinstating her previous composure.
crime scene: a place where action has already G.H. recognizes that the more she encounters, the more disordered
taken place and has left indelible clues as to the she becomes; the less ordered she is, the less tenable is her previous
event of its unfolding. Such texts, beaulieu
contends, construct a poetic where the re-arranged, immersed in a bilingualism that befuddles the part of my brain

biological author of the text and the work to dissolve a sense of self, and the task of writing arises like an inevitable
technology by which it is created. This blank wall. The kind of travel I am doing here is a literal translation (translatio, a
seems reasonableas long as the carrying across) of my self, from one side of the world to the other, and from
writers body is considered a creating right to left brain and back again. Translation, beginning to write, bilingual
technology. travel: all forms of back-and-forth ferrying that present a singular challenge:
how to accept pre-lingual chaos as a starting point; how not to wait for words,
I take as a point of scholarly interest, for always imperfect and at risk of impotence? How to accept instead the materials
instance, the fact that my own vacilla- that pre-exist words, the way they speak for themselves? G.H., encountering her
tions before the task of writing very often own self as spectral fragmented and distilled in all she passes
manifest bodily as a will to snack, as if I throughmust discredit the expectation of accommodating chaos in
were stopping up the mouth; or, more ordered identity. Her struggle, rather, is to resist assimilating this
harmfully, at least in the short term, as an unease, to resist ingesting disorganization into the ordered and
obsessive drive to bite my lips until they are ordering organism. Likewise, encountering the empty page, freight-
tender and bleed. The event of writing elicits ed with its expectation of composure, the trick is to resist
a physical restlessness that is sometimes languages tendency to silence the materials on which it impresses
elated and sometimes hapless, but which is itself; to resist, and then to notice and expedite the unfolding
always, at least for me, as interesting as the text aftermath.
that it fosters. The blank page is an enclosure that
- Oh, don't pull your hand away from me, I've promised myself that
mentthe bodys presence in the writing processre- maybe by the end of this impossible narrative I shall understand, oh
mains private or unexamined; if the bodys movements do

come the text it delivers. sinking completely into what we are.

Letter #15 to her.

ARI LARISSA HEINRICH

I only neglected you so badly because
you were my strictest teacher.
Yesterday I returned to Clichy. Every
object that passes through ones hands
holds a story. I fondled with awe the
complete set of habits and governing
principles underpinning the
objects. That day you came
from Montmartre to see me and
Clichy was the same as ever, standing
t h e re
u p -
right, sparkling white, and innocent, will-
ing to maintain a tacit understanding with
me. But how can I tell her she is about to
get a new owner, that I am about to pass
as

TRANSLATED FROM THE CHINESE BY

you were about to leave carrying a load her along to someone else?
of stuff, it was as if you were standing
onstage and shouting: Clichy is my I snuck over to Montmartre to sit at
home! Now I stand here sighing softly: your desk, where I sat listening to
Home for me, as in building a home, Zhang Aijia talk, making me think of my
I lack the imagination, so that even birthday last year (well, the year before)
when Im physically there and have when you gave me a tape of you sing-
been given countless explicit instruc- -
tions and hints, I still am incapable of bered you singing for me and remem-
making a real place of Clichy. For bered the little boys bowl of porridge...
Clichy I have mopped the front court- For half a year Ive been contemplating
yard, tending to every
detail. Why is it always
better when you buy her a bowl, put up
FROM MONTMARTRE / QIU MIAOJIN /

a shelf, bring back a jar of jam or the idea that people always imitate
butter? Will my soft sigh bring things to themselves growing up, and now here I
a close? I carried out my business as was sobbing and wondering if I really
usual in Clichy, assuming I was doing understood the price
housework there and being cared for of growing up. Ze,
and paid attention to by my wife, wearing a gray wool cap, asks me if I
when it turned out that I had already know the meaning of trauma. But
brought her, Clichy, to the brink of de- before I can or will or dare to answer
struction through my chores. I this question, Ze has already grown
wanted it to end well for her, but my old and weak.
steps grew increasingly heavy and
sluggish and the re- sidual emotions I just wanted to tell you how beautiful it
came out looking
like a sneer as I
LAST WORDS

wished in vain that together you and I felt to be sitting here since yesterday
could, with our presence, pay homage writing letters at your desk.