the story though that is my story or the story as it unfolds repeatedly as I obsessively recall what there is to recall even if that is not really possible or not in any sort of comprehensive way because who has the time to go over it all again and even again but there are specific moments that recycle themselves on an unpredictable loop. to return to the difference between boys and girls which is not necessarily the animating force here but will do for an interim narrative pole the story at the time when I had only just arrived here had to do with appearing one thing while having plans to become another and the funny thing is that now that I have been years in the process of becoming I find it difficult to locate either the one thing or the other.
I do not know that I can say that I have given up my penis envy and let us assume for a moment that I did start out with penis envy although that is debatable but the question of whether life would be easier with one is of course yes it would be in certain situations. because as I said I do wish that appendage were long enough to make it all the way through the glory hole even though that is not necessarily the first place I would put it but on the other hand I don’t feel particularly like something is missing so much as something is not quite the handful that I would like something to be.
which may be a way of saying that I still harbor some penis envy except that I would not call it that exactly. As I have already mentioned what I do not have, precisely, is a name. a member, if one may even call it that, of some sort, if one can think in terms of sorts of members, without an agreed-upon signifier with which to be referenced in everyday speech or writing: I could of course call this insignificant development anything I wanted but without a common name it remains insignificant. which is not to say that I find it worthless or dismissible. but it is gratuitous in a way to the degree at least that it seems to me to resist the sort of convention that would place it on a discrete continuum between penis and clit. and I think it is also gratuitous in other ways as I will try to explain or illustrate or clarify.
take “neo-phallus” as one possible name: but this member is not new at least to the degree that I no longer am new and it has been with me for as long as I can remember if not in its current shape but what part of me was ever in its current shape until just now. it has not been regenerated in the sense of being generated again for although what it is now it was not before, what it was before was and is continuous with what it is now. nor has there taken place a revisitation of some other, better-delineated form to inhabit a place abdicated by what was up until then ill-defined. I did not switch parts in this case. and it is not a revival of an ideal that preceded it.
I think one can say that it has been modified but as to what “neo-“ conditions: I have had no sense of having ever been handed a phallus except for those few times I stood in front of the classroom and was granted the power to ruin students’ lives with the stroke of a pen or keyboard. and at that point I may have been able to use the phallus but it was not mine properly speaking and it was certainly not embodied in any fleshly way. I am still sometimes granted the phallus in everyday interactions but again this has little to do with any bodily zone of sensation or function.
of which it has none. no function, that is; no purpose. it is completely inefficacious. it gets nothing done. which is not to say that it is inert or that it does not pass through various states of excitation. it does, but it accomplishes nothing in so doing or not to the extent that accomplishment should produce an object or procedure that could be utilized toward a greater purpose.
and that is precisely why I have been going on about it at length. although it is not generative it is something of a kind of exclamation or an additional but completely unnecessary emphasis on rogue moments of physiological exception. but only barely. by the skin of its— skin, actually.
have I said too much? and yet I cannot claim to have said anything of consequence. sometimes I stare at it, quite disbelieving that I can actually see it. it never sticks around for long but for a few minutes at a time it rises enough to be remarkable but not enough to leave a mark.
I will return to this because where I have trouble giving an account I always feel compelled to give an account even though accounts often accomplish little or even nothing. all that straining and agitating and nothing to show for it.
but what else can one do. or not exactly one but some small assembly of comrades but in any case what else can any of us do.
it is not as though I could get it right even with constant effort which I cannot give it anyway not even with time on my side which it is and is not. whatever any of us can spit out and regardless of how far the voice carries the unconscious of everything will outlive us all scattering incoherence from horizon to horizon. exposed always to its own violence but never suffering from it except at those points where it accepts incarnation. in other words except always as there is no question of acceptance what materializes materializes without granting permission or lodging protest. over and over and over. as though nothing were subject to everything.
no matter how loudly we insist that we are the only beings to suffer all the rest will remain in a kind of excruciating contact with itself and with us and we with ourselves and with all the rest even as it becomes apparent that there is between all the rest and ourselves no separation and no distinction outside of the possibility of distinctions which themselves make all the differences in the world.
I do hope that anyone who might read this will grant some leeway, some allowance, some patience and forbearance. to me? no not me exactly but to these several accounts. I could try to explain why forbearance insists on itself when in the company of company but that would make this something I did not set out to say.
which is not really a good excuse for not saying it so much as it is an alibi that I cannot avoid in the course of trying to take this down in a readable translation.
I barely escaped adolescence. actually I am not always so sure I escaped but what I mean to say is that I am unprepared that is I have no concept that can explain or make clear the reasons why I am still alive. it is not like anyone expected me to reach old age. I know I was not planning on it. not that I am there yet but it seems now to be just a little ways beyond that future that always looks attainable until the last moment when it vanishes.
but that is another chapter. whether it appears here is not something I can predict just now. but someday they will find the notebooks and I will die of embarrassment. in the meantime perhaps this will throw them off the scent.
the Blue Socks Chapter continues
in two weeks or maybe only one!
