From my LA diary
Los Angeles, sometime in the late 90s
My heart and stomach flip while waiting in the endless gourmet take-out line
at Say Cheese on Hyperion. This is the third full day not eating .... I stare
through thick plate-glass at tureens of baby peas in mayonnaise. Ten bucks
a quarter pound, they're canned. Little bits of foreign cheese displayed on
the top shelf like so many sad specimens. English tilton, camembert. From
the bodies of imprisoned animals to the air-conditioned case, it's obvious
this food was never touched with love or understanding. The chubby woman up
ahead of me seems to think this food is good. She is luxuriating in the moment
when she speaks her choices to the shop girl, even though the girl is bored
and hardly even listening. I'd hoped to trick myself to eat by ordering the
most exquisite food but now this place offends me. Say Cheese, Say Choose.
She wraps the names of foods around her tongue, pleased with her passable
pronunciation. Why do I hate everything? The food here is so vastly overpriced,
it no longer smells like food, it smells like bills and coins and plastic.
If I'm not touched it becomes impossible to eat. It's only after sex, sometimes,
that I can eat a little. When I'm not touched my skin feels like the flip
side of a magnet.
The Alien penetrated me very slowly as we sat together on the bed. (This is
Ulrike Meinhof speaking to the inhabitants of Earth ....As the rope was tightening
around my neck I lost perception but regained all my consciousness and discernment.
An Alien made love with me ...) Uncovering his body takes my breath away.
The paleness of it underneath the soft dark hair. The Alien was naked. I had
several of my clothes on. We're very still. Fibrational quivers between our
bodies in the dark. "This's exactly how I imagined it would be. So smooth."
It now becomes possible to say anything. Low voice. "Don't move."
"I like to hear your breathing."
Like me, the Alien is anorexic. Sometimes we talk about our malabsorption
problems. Everything turns to shit. Food's uncontrollable. If only it were
possible to circumvent the throat, the stomach and the small intestine and
digest food just by seeing. After several weeks the Alien decides that he
will no longer make love to me because I'm "not the One." Aliens
spend their lifetimes on this planet testing, searching. They get dewy-eyed,
nostalgic about hometown virgins.
I'm in my kitchen making chicken noodle soup for the Alien. It's his fifth
day of withdrawal from valium and heroin. He can't walk, can't sleep. I want
so much for him to eat. Even though he says he doesn't love me, I can't believe
it's true. Therefore, I want to help him. "How about a nice piece of
wholewheat toast?" I ask, ladling out his soup. "Don't take offense
by this," he says, "but there's something I have to tell you. Your
cunt smells bad. If you washed the way you should, I would've done the things
to you I do to all my other girlfriends." I gasp. Soup spills. "Sorry,"
he says. "I guess I should've mentioned it when we were dating."
Food stripped of all its color, nutrients and smells and then reconstituted,
like my expensive hair (he loves it), Ravissant Salon, $300, like suburban
small town cunts drenched in Massengil.
If I could only eat, a little
Although no one, to my knowledge, has analyzed the work of Frederich Nietzsche
through the occurrence of his blinding headaches, the poet Kenneth Rexroth
reads Simone Weil's philosophy through her anorexia. Both are "egregious
nonsense ... unholy folly." Rexroth puts lays the blame where it belongs;
on the Catholic men, Gustave Thibon and Father Perrin, who took her seriously.
"If only," Rexroth speculated in The Nation (1957), "she
had sought out an unsophisticated parish priest, who would have told her 'Come,
come, my child, what you need is to get baptized, obey the Ten Commandments,
forget about religion, put some meat on your bones and get a husband' ..."
What you need is a good fuck, he said to me.
In Holy Anorexia, the scholar Rudolph Bell wants to take the magnificence
of the medieval female saints and drag them down to his own level. He does
this by conflating them with contemporary teenage girls, who he finds pathetic
and ridiculous. St. Catherine, St. Theresa, and Hildegaard van Bingham are
all essentially the same; they're solipsistic brats. The collective trans-historic
She, the holy anorexic, "emerges from a frightened insecure psychic world
to become a champion of spiritual perfection .... Her will is to do God's
will, and she alone claims to know God's will." The holy anorexic is
a manipulative vixen; she "commands the war against her body and therefore
suffers deeply at every defeat, whether it is a plate of food she gobbles
down or a disturbing flagellation by nude devils and wild beasts. Then with
varying degrees of success, the holy radical"like the newly slender
teenage girl"begins to feel victorious ..."
Like witches, or female writers, thinkers, artists, who use the names of others
when chronicling their lived experience, holy anorexics are not merely people
to be differed with; they must be despised.
Shouldn't it be possible to leave the body? Is it wrong to even try? Hungry
yet repelled by food, Weil wrote: "Our greatest affliction is that looking
and eating are two different operations. Eternal beatitude is a state where
to look is to eat."
"The Alien is in my eyes. He's flooding my eyes. He's completely penetrating
me, every bit of me in my eyes.
He's in my eyes, he's spreading into my brain. Oh God,
he's in my mind. He's making me feel things in my body that I don't feel.
He's making me feel feelings, sexual
feelings. And he's there. He's everywhere. My body's changing."
David Jacobs, 1988 interview with an Alien Abductee
- from Aliens & Anorexia
Semiotexte/Smart Art Press 1999
***
In Aliens & Anorexia I am attempting to make contact with the writer
and philosopher Simone Weil. At the moment of her death in August, 1943, Weil
became an Alien, i.e., a legend who transformed politics into tragic poetry.
Not all Alien encounters are hostile and dispassionate invasions. There are
others who see the Aliens as their friends. Aliens encounters, like narrative,
happen essentially in realtime. In order to make contact with the Aliens,
it is necessary to carve out little pieces of yourself to let the Aliens come
in.
In Paris, the librarian Florence de Lussy is editing Weil's Collected Works
for Gallimard. Weil's been dead for more than fifty years. The project's overdue.
The edition will contain eleven volumes, and yet hardly any of what Weil wrote
was published in her own lifetime. Because she was an amateur philosopher,
teaching philosophy in French girls' lycees until 1941 when Jews were banned
from working for the government, Weil's writing has a narrative quality mostly
absent from the philosophy of her own time. She wrote articles for the leftist
press, reports, position papers and communiques during her years as a trade
union activist. Concurrently, and in the years following her disillusion with
the trade union movement, she wrote notebooks and voluminous letters to her
friends and colleagues. In solidarity with the dispossession of the workers
who her labor colleagues claimed to represent, Weil sought out the experience
of dispossession in the person that she knew the best, herself. "If the
'I' is the only thing we truly own, we must destroy it," she wrote in
Gravity and Grace. "Use the 'I' to break down 'I'." She was
despicable; according to Bataille, "odious, immoral ... a dirty hook-nosed
Jew." Had anyone taken her seriously enough to prompt her to write professionally
for publication, her work would not have happened. She was writing to find
out what she thought.
"The body is a lever for salvation," Weil wrote in her notebook
in New York. "But in what way? What is the right way to use it?"
Simone Weil was a performative philosopher. Because her texts are really notebook
writings, there isn't ever any subject that's apart from her. Which is not
to say she's writing "memoir" or "autobiography." Channeling
her subjects through her person, Weil does what writers do. She is constructing
a narrative in realtimearriving at a state of openness, witnessed by
her audience, the readerin which thoughts fly in and out according to
who's listening. In Weil's philosophy, just like in narrative or phone sex,
it's not the story that we're really hearing, it is the fact and act of telling
it. Her thought approaches narrativean emotional transparency that occurs
when someone else is listening to you.
Issue
One
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