 I didn't believe she was seventeen, because I know what I was doing at seventeeen, and what was thinking, and how I was thinking, and Tamara sacrificed the believability for something bigger, greater, which she tends to do in a lot of her work, it is always so clear what she is getting at, and like pornography, she sometimes makes it all too clear. But I all together like this book so much. I understand what it is like, for pornography to be the only container able to hold what it is that is going on inside the skull, and so doing certain things because of that, going all the way, because of it....it has to do with the mother, but the mother is a very small thing, or she is a thing so large that she had to be removed entirely, I agree with this choice, lest it become boring, to always bring it back to the mother...and so the fact must remain, that to accept pornography is to accept the fact that you are now beyond mothering at all. I think the school project as a fine way to talk about theory, even if not a believable way, I knew nothing of pleasure then. talking about theory this way, like a child, reminds of Kraus, the way she talks about theory in her books, like a little a girl. She does this without the suture of a "school paper," she just acts like a little child, and that is all okay, too. I want something of the suture, so that I can rip it out, and let pornography become its own kind of schooling. An education. Which is good, because I know where I am situating myself now, at 22, and just leaving school. Is she writing her thesis? Has her thesis already been written? Written on what? Something boring and provential, like women being raped without pleasure or joy. Being woken up by something, like the way that Gayle and Elijah woke Myra up from the collective dream, because sometimes taking a beating is exactly what you need. And thinking about the psychic beating I've been giving myself over and over again. I refuse, no matter the extent to which it ruined my life (and my life certainly is a mess), to repudiate the experience, refuse to see it as anything other than the single most important, compelling, and shocking thing that has ever happened to me. tfb uses the master/slave dialectic to talk about it...I can't get too into Hegel, but I do need to narrow the way she narrows, she picks a few, Weil (why do all whores love Weil?), Hegel, and Bataille, and I have all these names spinning around my head, all the time, and there are a few that stick, Sade, for obvious reasons (all this accrual) and Baudrillard, and Barthes, but what does he have to do with pornography? Mythologies//Pornographies, I'll incorporate it, the way that Myra, at seventeen years old incorporated Hegel! I was 22 years old when it happened to me: pornography. An old hag! But its the truth I have to write. But just like for me...there were 3 actors alone in a room together. there always needs to be the third thing. It never could have been just Myra and Elijah alone in a room together, like it never could have been just me and Joe....Gayle and Myra and Elijah and the slave dialectic...Alice and Joe and B. and ---what? I am only at the beginning of the synthesis. In what ways did B. beat me up? What does it mean when the third thing does not even know that I am there? When everything that happens happens entirely within your own mind...
there needs to be some kind of rebellion against everything you have ever known. Myra rebels against her privilege, the safety and girlishness of her former life. What was I rebelling against? Perhaps all of that too...the stoic nature of the intellectual girl. Do I care about that rebellion? Does it mean anything?
She is writing an essay, and it is all so simple. Was Alice writing an essay? No. She was writing a thesis. Is that important? Should it be included? "What do you want to write your thesis on?" "I am not sure, I am still not sure." "If you could write an encyclopedia of anything right now, what would be?" "I don't know....something about a desire so close to the center of the earth that it feels, or is....essentially pornographic." "An encyclopedia of pornography. that's it. there it is." My thesis. A stoic whore who had never been touched: writing a pornographic encyclopedia. I feel I can be honest about this now because I am no longer mythologizing. I am synthesizing....
And I had friends too, people who were my core, that I had to leave. When I think about what I am doing now, it is another kind of restructuring, it is still giving myself my own education. Knowing what I need, and so being able to burrow in.
Passages:
"Pornography is a mirror of us, a mirror of our self-consciousness....pornography is the liberation narrative that takes us out of the family pen. It synthesizes the secret and the domestic, the explicit and the implicit, the master and the the slave. this is a synthesis that we must absorb in our lives...pornography and the innocence of it is a mode of learning, a constant struggle that synthesizes our understanding of the opposites within ourselves. I was an actress not acting. A being *being.*"--Maidenhead, tfb
"You have to let people be witnesses."
"I was now free of my mother's desire for my life to be safe."
"I could not be mothered at all anymore."
"Porn crisscrossing in my head every time I thought about Elijah."
"I mean, in a life-or-death situation, do people, essentially have to become slaves?"
"Because slaves can experience pleasure self0conciously, in secret...and it is ironic that we see this displayed in contemporary pornographic actresses who subvert, very publicly, the notion that slaves are not supposed to feel pleasure."
"My essay had evolved into thinking about fucking....I was writing about fucking by a master and fucking as a slave, about Hegel, the comfort of women and teenage porno stars...I was compiling a list of every single book I'd read or that I'd wanted to read that was about power and sex. High school should have a whole fucking course on just this. I was helping the school make curriculum."
"My needs were bigger than my family's needs."
"I would be a collaborator. I would be the artist's collaborator in my own porn." (which is to say, that in life...I will be the artistic collaborator in my own death.)
"This was a true loss of virginity, a multiplication of joy from a division of myself." (like I said, all whores love Weil.)
"I was a porn scholar!...I knew there were girls out there like me. Girls who liked to be in porn...I was changing up my life, climbing out of the hole of not knowing who I was. I could be anything 'cause I had porn in my blood."
"true inner experience can't be mapped by absolutes. the whole Hegelian thing was too neat for him. Bataille was all about the cracks."
"I'd met Elijah alone on the beach. Gayl had changed the look of me forever. Our meeting was the first in a chain of events that the expansion of my consciousness was built on."
"I believe in what I've done. I don't regret a thing. that's what porn is. It's sharing yourself."
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there needs to be some kind of rebellion against everything you have ever known. Myra rebels against her privilege, the safety and girlishness of her former life. What was I rebelling against? Perhaps all of that too...the stoic nature of the intellectual girl. Do I care about that rebellion? Does it mean anything?
She is writing an essay, and it is all so simple. Was Alice writing an essay? No. She was writing a thesis. Is that important? Should it be included? "What do you want to write your thesis on?" "I am not sure, I am still not sure." "If you could write an encyclopedia of anything right now, what would be?" "I don't know....something about a desire so close to the center of the earth that it feels, or is....essentially pornographic." "An encyclopedia of pornography. that's it. there it is." My thesis. A stoic whore who had never been touched: writing a pornographic encyclopedia. I feel I can be honest about this now because I am no longer mythologizing. I am synthesizing....
And I had friends too, people who were my core, that I had to leave. When I think about what I am doing now, it is another kind of restructuring, it is still giving myself my own education. Knowing what I need, and so being able to burrow in.
Passages:
"Pornography is a mirror of us, a mirror of our self-consciousness....pornography is the liberation narrative that takes us out of the family pen. It synthesizes the secret and the domestic, the explicit and the implicit, the master and the the slave. this is a synthesis that we must absorb in our lives...pornography and the innocence of it is a mode of learning, a constant struggle that synthesizes our understanding of the opposites within ourselves. I was an actress not acting. A being *being.*"--Maidenhead, tfb
"You have to let people be witnesses."
"I was now free of my mother's desire for my life to be safe."
"I could not be mothered at all anymore."
"Porn crisscrossing in my head every time I thought about Elijah."
"I mean, in a life-or-death situation, do people, essentially have to become slaves?"
"Because slaves can experience pleasure self0conciously, in secret...and it is ironic that we see this displayed in contemporary pornographic actresses who subvert, very publicly, the notion that slaves are not supposed to feel pleasure."
"My essay had evolved into thinking about fucking....I was writing about fucking by a master and fucking as a slave, about Hegel, the comfort of women and teenage porno stars...I was compiling a list of every single book I'd read or that I'd wanted to read that was about power and sex. High school should have a whole fucking course on just this. I was helping the school make curriculum."
"My needs were bigger than my family's needs."
"I would be a collaborator. I would be the artist's collaborator in my own porn." (which is to say, that in life...I will be the artistic collaborator in my own death.)
"This was a true loss of virginity, a multiplication of joy from a division of myself." (like I said, all whores love Weil.)
"I was a porn scholar!...I knew there were girls out there like me. Girls who liked to be in porn...I was changing up my life, climbing out of the hole of not knowing who I was. I could be anything 'cause I had porn in my blood."
"true inner experience can't be mapped by absolutes. the whole Hegelian thing was too neat for him. Bataille was all about the cracks."
"I'd met Elijah alone on the beach. Gayl had changed the look of me forever. Our meeting was the first in a chain of events that the expansion of my consciousness was built on."
"I believe in what I've done. I don't regret a thing. that's what porn is. It's sharing yourself."
Â
