32.

Yesterday fielding a question from Jay, something about why do I not write about affect, reply that for me the only affect is—or affect is only—an expression of the wish, “Let me not be destroyed.”

I remember the precision with which I experienced time when young. I am only saying this since there is almost nothing that can restore this precision, this specificity, except arousal.

I can’t describe myself as a poet. I’m the author of some kind of thinking about writing.

33.

That a kind of experiential or “in-the-world” engagement should impinge on how a canon is taught. Nearby these notes now, on the same page, a fragment has appeared: “que les étudiants ont décidé d’abandoner, joyeusement, leur passé”

From a list of texts to read: Susan Howe, “Statement for the New Poetics Colloquium, Vancouver. 1985”

34.

Imagine that love between two people is of such parity that one has only to hear the other speak and then, in an instant, remembers years of kindness. Yet why won’t the other speak now? Why does he seem to become lost, as if inside his own living?

35.

An essay occurs in time like dog years, where it isn’t a task of reasoning so much as something that befalls one. I perhaps don’t read or write enough and yet always feel like I am reading, like I am writing.

36.

One must work, perhaps for some time, to see scenes.

[…]

43.

If someone fears me I may think, “At least I am a woman.”

From a list of books to read: Mustapha Khayati, De la misère en milieu étudiant

44.

You tell yourself it is a desire to fade, to walk backward into scenery. This is the general way in which you despair about friendships.

In movies there is no such thing as “experience” for the professional—who is, therefore, a type—only necessity, skills.

I find a fragment written on an index card: “rescues” address by converting it into allegory = author as hero

45.

A game: Imagines a past version of herself and compares present iteration to this—or, rather, present self is paraded before past self for judgment. Past self has powers of speech and imagination. Present self is, interestingly, too preoccupied with own current problems to give much shrift to past. Present self extremely difficult to speak to; in fact, taciturn, keeps looking in the wrong direction.