The Sore Throat a portrait of the man as a young artist

I’m inventing a machine

for concealing my desire.
And I’m inventing another
machine for concealing the (or)
......
machine. It’s a two-machine
system, and it sounded like
laughter. And I’m inventing
a machine for concealing
the sound. You, to me: “Why are “so, i’m wandering around an essay, writing a library in my head”
you concealing the beauty
of your machine?” Every machine
has more beauty than the last,
for everything whose purpose
is to conceal seems to change, or maybe i’ll just call it...
in the end, into a sign
of what it’s concealing. And
now the sound that once sounded
like laughter is so loud that saying, also it’s hard to
it seems more like sobbing or keep myself from inventing
laughter concealing sobbing. another machine to keep
All my inventing is a from hearing it. So invent
complete disaster. It’s not a machine for disinventing.
concealing my desire, it’s This will be the last machine
talking about my desire I ever invent, and its
to conceal my desire, like purpose will just be to change
a voice on a message machine every machine into shit.
that would say: “Hello. About No more inventing (for me).
desire, I’d like to say a —What a shame. It once was a
word or two. It’s not your eyes, wonder of a machine; now
it’s not the word you say, it’s it’s more like a disaster.
not your complaining voice that —I think he left a message . . .
I desire. All I desire —You’re wrong: he just left a mess.
is your applause.” It’s hard not
to hear what the message is -Aaron Kunin
Dear “John”,

As Rimbaud says: “Je” est un autre - that is to say, “I” is someone else.

So, the day after our last class, “I” spent the afternoon re-reading “Portrait of the Artist as
a Young Man” outside of the Art Library, perched on something that I can never remem-
ber the word for, but it is neither a railing, a platform, nor a ledge.

Kathryn was in the library writing a paper for Parker, and when I checked my e-mail, I
burst into tears. She came out of the door and asked me what had gone wrong, under the
impression that something horrible had happened. I told her that I had read your e-mail,
and I reproached myself for crying so openly, outside the art library, but I told her “I cry
when I am incapable of understanding my feelings”; I said that I cried when I was “inca-
pable of comprehending the immensity”.
I think that the head is small. The mind, however, I cannot measure.

This might seem off topic, but it is only because we have yet to reach the topic, now, finally, thank-
fully, we are currently on it.

Almost.

That afternoon, I had finally felt comfortable slipping into Joyce- upon re-reading it, re-
turning to it for reference, dogearing the pages and tearing off the cover, I had finally be-
gan to understand it and love it- I was taken aback, however, startled by the sincerity of
your words, shook by the reality of that sort of language- at once, emotionally embroiled in
Joyce, and then, only a moment later, touched in my own life- through joyce, through your
e-mail- through learning. I’m still learning what it means to learn, honestly- it’s as hard as
learning a task or a tool, to know what it means to know something always seems harder
than knowing how to name or mention or recall. So, following that train of thought, I’ve
written this overtly long essay regarding the ways we learn about ourselves through litera-
ture.
“and she said, softly- that she cries when dogs die, which reminds me of a story I would like to tell
you.” edited fragment from my memory outside the art library-

She said she loved Bach. So did Hutton. That was the bond
between them, and Hutton (a very bad poet) always felt that
Mrs. Dalloway was far the best of the great ladies who took
an interest in art. It was odd how strict she was. About mu-
sic she was purely impersonal. She was rather a prig. But
how charming to look at! She made her house so nice if
it weren’t for her professors. Clarissa had half a mind to
snatch him off and set him down at the piano in the back
room. For he played divinely. Mrs. Dalloway pg.176

This essay is about “three” things. It is about literature, love, and growth-
hopefully, I’ll at least scrape the surface of such weighty,
tempermental topics. “Three” is in quotations because,
honestly, this essay is about “me”, and loving literature al-
lows me to grow, and yet the whole is less than its parts, I
am only “I” in so many words or less.

This should not be read as an essay about a movie, but

instead as an essay about movies as a contemporary form
of identity. The essay is structured as a complementa-
ry personal/cultural form of remembering; by utilizing
the narrative of the film as a conceptual corollary, I re-
turn to the relationships that define my memory, the pri-
vate, shamed moments of my childhood, the literature that
has come to define me, and the difficulties one faces when
they view their existence as a composite of creative urges.
In class, as we watched the film, I left the room three times. Once, as soon as the
score began (00:00:35), then, once more during the childhood sequences, and fi-
nally, towards the end- directly prior to the house exploding. These “lacuna”,
or gaps in my presence, were each caused by an immediate synaptic reaction be-
tween the images and sounds of the film which triggered a visceral, emotional re-
action in my face- that is to say, the movie made me weep.

The ability to weep in the face of a fiction is indicative of the profound effects
that culture can have on our cerebral architecture, that is to say- the associative
interplay that is forged between a fiction (a cultural object) and a person (a bio-
logical cogito) is demonstrative of the conditioning effects of culture as well as,
in a more positive sense, the intrinsic, humanizing value of reading, seeing, and
experiencing media, in the form of film, music, and literature.
1. Learning about human existence through a stylized stream of consciousness-
{frame of reference}
(This paper will go in reverse. That is to say, from the past to the present- the same way the film works-
which is a linear, logical, and cumulative form of de-compresssing time)

I first saw “Eternal Sunshine of the

Spotless Mind” during the spring se-
mester of my first year in college, at
Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia
PA. At the time, I had been devoting
all of my energies towards art, in the
form of drawing and painting, but in
all honesty, I was devoting all of my
time to Emily- her ID is to the right
with an index of its memory-
 I saw “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” with Emily on
a rainy Sunday afternoon in Philly, afterwards, writing in my
small black moleskin of how “I wanted her to forget to remem-
ber me”- and immediately after- after I scrawled this in my little
notebook, she turns to me, and she said “I need to forget to re-
member you”. I told her that I had just written that, and, since
Still frame from “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”
Kate Winslet as “Clementine”

she said it during its transcription- (and since it is the plot of the
film we had just seen together) it’s clear to me now, looking
back, how formative such fictions were; not only did we expe-
Still frame from my memories
Emily Kane as “Clemintine”

rience art together, but art, in many ways, structured our expe-
rience of each other, morphing a rainy afternoon in Philly into
a romanticized hyper-reality, the metaphors given by media be-
coming metaphors for our love, our lives.

Seeing a movie gave materiality to a fantasy, filling in the gaps

of reality.
 “I am not aware” observed the grave lady whose voice I had heard but once,
“that to think of any person is to make a great claim upon that person, my
dear.” Great Expectations pg. 87

I hesitated to use the term “love” in describing my relationship to Emily, because the
word itself exists, in many ways, as merely the product of the cultural manifestations that
structure many peoples identification of the experience, and rightly so, as the concept of
“love” far exceeds the capacity of four letters. Of course I loved Emily, but it was a par-
ticular, young, projection of love- the way that Paul loved Snow White, or Pips infatua-
tion with Estella- the idea of love, the “fiction”- in many ways, exceeding the capacity of
reality. To romance someone without sex, to adore them without possession, to seduce
them without expectation- this is post-modern, this is adolescence- but as a form of ex-
perimenation, it has taught me a great deal about what it means to be a person.
The capacity for literature and culture to cement and structure our relationship to concep-
tual categories that have far outgrown their biological, emotive origins is

a. Often conducive to hyperbolic mis-identifications.

b. an historically positive, stabilizing force that sustains traditions and encour-
ages communities.
c. A fascinating field that I know nothing about. But it makes sense to me.

I would have to say all of the above, or none, but that’s because it’s rigged, and opinions
are irrelevant at this point. Literature maintains the integrity of otherwise long forgotten
thought patterns, acting like an internal archive of world views and logics of life, in this
sense- literature, as an archive of desire reconstitutes the dead (or absent) consciousness
of the author through the mass proliferation of the transcribed, written structure- moving
through the minds and often then, into the lives of those who love or relate to the original
figure and the form of their feelings. Extrapolated emotive structures can then act as social
lubricants in the self-as-cultural-composite”s gradual formation, laying down guidelines
and ways of life to encourage experimentation and the furthering of the human spirit. It
does this through memory. It allows us to remember the meaning of humanity, the lineage
of life insomuch that literature re-enacts itself in the life of the reader, sustaining the past
by varying the ways in which the present is accessed, influenced in large part by the differ-
ent ways that language structures social experience.

The lore which he was believed to pass his days brooding upon so that it had rapt
him from the companionship of youth was only a garner of slender sentences from
Aristotle’s poetics and psychology and a Synopsis Philosophiae Scholasticae ad
mentem divi Thomae.” (Joyce, Ch. 5)

As Jameson points out, “perhaps the immense fragmentation and privatization of mod-
ern literature-its explosion into a host of distinct private styles and mannerisms-foreshad-
ows deeper and more general tendencies in social life as a whole.” That is to say, the idiosy-
cratic and personalizing connections that I have forged with different authors and filmakers
have altered the linguistic makeup of my weltanschauung, stylizing my experience of reality
due to the ways that my understanding of the world hae been shaped in a large part from lit-
erature like Joyce, Dickens, and a slew of other thinkers. Being queer has also left me with a
fragmented sub-culture, as it has been difficult to develop a lifestyle in relation to others who
share my sexual preference due to the social ambiguity surrounding queer identity, leaving
me in love with William S. Burroughs and Jack Spicer; as Jameson points out how the impli-
cations of modern fragmentation have caused, “each group... to speak a curious private lan-
guage of its own, each profession developing its private code or idiolect, and finally each
individual coming to be a kind of linguistic island...” This type of post-modern self, the pas-
tiched personality, was for me from the very beginning a creative act, a way to invent a self
out of the literature and culture I loved since other structures were difficult to relate to. Ini-
tially, incapable of being myself, I found myself incapable of expressing myself, incapable
of feeling as if I could every actually know an other; and due to this, instead of creating art,
I found myself creating a self, effectively a euphemism for my identity, a way of rework-
ing my language and my external self construction through the filter of social codes and con-
structs- that is to say, a style of self, where the language and ideas of literature or culture can
then act as a sociable enactment of the stylized self.

This self, effectively “born” and created at art school, was nothing other than the accu-
mulation of the culture that provided me with a structure to grow through, a structure that in
many ways, stretching far back into my childhood, owes its foundation to what I consider to
be a form of post-modern Victorian literature.
“Since that time, which is far enough away now, I have often thought that few people know what
secrecy there is in the young, under terror. No matter how unreasonable the terror, so that it be
terror. ...I am afraid to think of what I might have done, on requirement, in the secrecy of my ter-
ror” page 15-
 As a child, I remember cherishing a chintzy, mass marketed collection of the “Great Il-
lustrated Classics”- in particular, two versions of novels by Charles Dickens, “Oliver Twist”
and “Great Expectations”. These were thick, weighty hardcover copies- glazed with cheap,
shiny covers and rather poorly drawn illustrations; post-modern in terms of the synthetic re-
construction of a masterpiece through the commodification of the classics into re-worked, re-
written widely dispersed and inexpensive “accidental” pastiches. In “Oliver Twist” I found
one of my earliest erotic memories, as it seems, now, looking back, that my relationship with
Oliver was one of my earliest moments of literary identification, and as a young child, grow-
ing up gay meant growing up alone, in the privacy of a novel. A place where my mind could
imagine how it would feel to be someone else, to know someone else- to let Oliver be the
boy that I wanted to be, to live through literature a life that I knew I’d never live as a person.

In “Great Expectations”, I chiseled out a small section of the novel, creating a ragged,
rigid square in the center, a hollowed out hiding place where I hid the only thing inside
of me that had no where else to go- my sexuality, something that was only known to me
through creativity. Pornography, at the time (prior to the advent of the internet), was still im-
possible to come by, especially any of a ho-
mosexual nature, and as such, I often trace
the roots of my drawing habits back to those
early, primal creative acts, the private mo-
ments when I began to identify as a particu-
lar type of person. The drawings themselves
were crude re-interpretations of “Blond-
ie” comic strips, paper dolls of Bumstead
and Blondie in various states of nudity, and
as it turned out, I eventually stopped draw-
ing Blondie, and my “Great Expectations”
eventually became a pile of naked Dagwood
Bumsteads.
Conclusion- Preserving a Way of Looking at the World:

“What could I become with these surroundings? How could my character

fail to be influenced by them? Is it to be wondered at if my thoughts were
dazed, as my eyes were, when I came out into the natural light from the
misty yellow rooms?” Great Expectations, Charles Dickens- Pg 96

I shared this previously shameful memory with Emily, a year later, when I came out of
the closet to her in a Hostel in San Francisco. After leaving Art School, I took a long,
sprawling road trip to California with a childhood friend, Steven, and we roamed the
coast, homeless, vagabond gypsies, living out a personalized pastiche of the Beat Gen-
eration, reworked in twenty first century with a GPS and a cell phone. Finally settling
in Eureka, California- a decision based solely on nomenclature, we rented an apartment,
and- directly after settling in, rented “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”- just re-
cently re-leased on DVD, watched by two men, laying on the floor, alone with one an-
other in the middle of nowhere California. Months later, after the movie had been pur-
chased, re-watched numerous times, and eventually lost, Steve left for South America,
and Emily came from Philadelphia to visit me. I had to drive 6 hours to San Francis-
co in a 1988 Chevrolet Suburban with a wooden angel found in suburban new jersey
nailed to the front bumper, smattered with dead flies and debris. In San Francisco, I
met up with myself, came out to Emily, and told her that I loved her regardless of the
deception I had conveyed, and that I had not been lying, I had, instead, been inventing-
and there is a difference.

“Historically the concept of the self has changed constantly; an Athenian citizen, a member of the great Roman family, a
Christian anchorite, a Renaissance artist, a Romantic poet, a Freudian psychologist, and an existentialist philosopher will
have vastly differing concepts of what constitutes their self, and their works will inevitably reflect their assumptions about its
nature.”- Craig B. Brush- A Self Portrait is not an Auto-biography: Essays on Montaigne’s liteary portraiture
Fiction can offers the imagination the ability to speak through a re-oriented and stylized
plane of the person, which can arguably result in the most honest means of communica-
tion, a strainer, if you will, by which the thoughts of the author force themselves through
a stylistic filter which universalizes the personal into a re-constructed reality of desires,
translated into prose through the beautification of language- eventually resulting in more
than reality, a supreme non-fiction; literature thus allowing humans to enter a world far
more real than our own, the world of the imagination. The world that I know, this ob-
jective “reality” is only available in the form of a room, the space between buildings or
the highways and streets that lead out into the unknown. Non-fiction is organizational,
and while it establishes structure, sustains and preserves history, it does this such a thing
thanks to the dichotomy formed by the remainder, (and I remember, in first grade asking
the librarian what the other one was, “Non-Fiction” she said to me, or- while at a bar, hit-
ting on a psychologist years ago, mis-pronouncing dichotomy as dyke-oh-toe-me). Be-
yond these pragmatic foundations which provide culture with a politics, fiction is, quite
obviously, that which provides culture with a logic- a way of imagining itself, as more
than an area demarcated by boundaries, but moreover, through its reflection in a lacanian
mirror of literature, the cohesive gestalt of a fragmented assortment of the past- sustained
by history and society- which then can organize itself through its shared hallucination, as
the dreams of a culture become eternal when transfused with material- the history of liter-
ature, humanity as its own mirror.

Mankind has amused itself with the lie that there is no longer any un-charted ter-
ritory, merely since we’ve organized the world into a lexicon of countries and geogra-
phy. Writing, imagining, and inventing occur in a realm that far exceeds the boundaries of
physicality, where the mind fills in the blanks of reality- resulting in both culture as well
as the psychological framework of personality. I am aware of my body. The surfaces and
textures that compose me can not resist comprehension, I am cognizant of my organs, my
heart beating, my cheeks reddening. Yet, when someone takes a picture of me, oftentimes-
(unless I am self-conscious, and thus posing) I realize that I do not know what I think I
look like. I can never fully step outside of my body- (video aids in this, to a degree) –and
in the same manner, a culture cannot comprehend itself through the documents that form
its government, these are ideals as much as any collage of Helen, such rigid networks of
objective relationships form a tautology, to be sure- but they do not define the personali-
ty of a country any more than an image defines me. I only look like myself when I write
in a way that externalizes how I feel, how I think- Joyce can know Dublin, can know Ire-
land, but only because he knows himself, and such a thing then becomes pure, a style of
writing that is a style of being, a reflection that is internal yet ruptures the very surface
of the self in its scope. To be sure, I can pretend I know “America” after reading “on the
road”, but it is then up to me to make literature live, vividly- to carry out the legacy of
other lives that lends themselves to me, a life relived in leisure, a world of words that can
enter this cell of cells and reorganize its architecture as a vision understood only through
culture.
“here I am, getting on in the first year of my time, and since the day of my being bound, I have never thanked Miss Haveisham,
or asked her, or shown that I remember her.” (pg 111)
 Literature is a self perpetuating system, a malleable, pliable, amorphous structure:
an analog, if you will, for human memory- a means of immortality, sure- but not neces-
sarily for the “individual”; instead, it would seem more apt to say that literature keeps life
alive, an immortality of experience rather than any ephemeral notion of interiority. Of
course, inclusive in such a broad introductory sentence is a pre-occupation with the arts,
generally speaking- and yet it is so easy to get off track, to think of the Mona Lisa as more
than a painting of a dead person, to think of Jane Eyre as more than a woman. To think
of the arts as anything more than an imitation of an intention, the intention to understand
what it means to be a human, is to over think it, and rightfully so, as the complexity of hu-
man history is indeed beyond any simple explanation, and as such, such broad topics often
evade relation, or fall into the obscurity of a pedantic reductionism.

We are so plagued by purpose, by origin or inception, that we often fall to notice

the meaning and value of influence, mimesis and inspiration, the sense that the effulgence
that surrounds us is much more than us, and as such, our experience, my experience, is effec-
tively one of a placeholder, a point on a graph, a cipher, a centered perspective, nothing more,
nothing less.

In literature, “I am myself become other.” - Maurice Blanchart

Again, thank you so much, I can’t tell you how beautiful my education has been for me, and
your guidance and compassion have meant a great deal in the past several months. I hope we
have a chance to stay in touch.
Prolouge 1a-

So, after writing this, I searched for Montaigne in the Library. It took awhile to find
which versions were in English and in the library that I was in. Then, it took awhile to find
them, since wrapped around the bookshelves there was a huge yellow line of caution tape,
which I had to duck under and pass through in order to find Montaigne. I ended up mistak-
enly in the children’s section, which I was astonished to find. The first two books that I saw
were titled “Emily” and “Henry”, so I grabbed them, eventually found Montaigne, and then
stopped by a good friends house on the way home.

Heather Yaden is a beautiful person that I’ve had the ability to get to know, and I
stopped by her house to show her the books that I had found. When I showed her “Emily”,
the children’s story I had borrowed on impulse alone, she burst into joy, as it turns out that
it was one of the most important books for her as a child. She told me of how, unbeknownst
to me, “Emily”, the children’s book is actually a story about Emily Dickenson, and that, af-
ter reading it as a child, hundreds of times over through the voice of her mother,and now,
Heather’s love for Dickenson has grown with her, through the course of her growth and
deep into the present of her varied interests. By seeing a bundled pile of papers that she
hadn’t seen in years, Heather re-touched a part of herself, and my self in the process-

Epilouge 2-

I saw a girl from our class at Starbucks yesterday, and made the mistake of mis-re-
membering who she was. The girl in question was a person whom I had been prone to a
form of casual confrontation over the course of the semester, and mis-remembering her
identity was surely a step backwards in terms of knowing one another, which was unsat-
isfying for me, at first. However, I had the chance to speak with her about her paper, and
she was nervous, but I smiled- telling her she’d be fine, telling her that you love her, that
you’d be fine with her paper. Of course, you weren’t there, I don’t know how you feel
about her, and frankly, her paper might be a disaster. I was impersonating your earnest-
ness, because I have that in me as well, and knowing you allows me to know how to know
myself, and thus how to know others. I left her smiling, and walked home to write this.
While walking, I began thinking of my memories of this girl from our class, and how- odd-
ly enough, the first moment that comes to mind was during the class on “Portrait”, and how
I argued with her, softly, regarding the “myth” of identity, etc. (and you seemed pleased to
see me being post-modern).

What a ruse, what a lie that we tell ourselves, I think now, to myself. Just because my past
is a fragile slew of CDs and DVDs, even if the present is nothing more than an imperson-
ation, even if this dramatic conclusion knows itself to be a dramatic conclusion- none of
this can get rid of the person. Post-modernism can teach us about dissembling the self- to
critically unearth its cultural ontology, to tune us into the contemporary context we’ve been
born into- but, it should also be able to enlighten us and invigorate our expectations by ex-
posing, through these temporal transmutations and cultural means of contextual identifica-
tion, that there is, beyond all of these smoke and mirrors- somewhere, out there- in here;
despite language, despite all these codifications, that there remains much to be understood,
that there are vivid, agile, and resilient aspects of human identity that have yet to be cat-
egorized or comprehended, that while we are making it up as it goes along, the world is
making us up as well.

thanks so much for such a great class- take care- so long then- enjoy your day- thanks
again-

dp