Should be Gauguin, Proust, Woody Guthrie, Hawthorne, Mary Shelley. Everything should be linked to Stendhal. Also to Paul Klee. I’m recovering my source texts & some of my memory. It’s also all the figurative language you have to deny yourself in order to get on in the contemporary / those old fashion affections coming out all at once in the forbidden-to-you-by-you work.
There are these conversations about how only the lyric is acceptable but also how the lyric is unacceptable, how only trauma is acceptable but how trauma is also unacceptable. I have never even thought of anything as trauma, perhaps because that word seems to be used by a kind of despised class to indicate the disappointment they feel that they are not able to have exactly everything that they want. I don’t even want what I want. What delicious possibility is inherent in the world of those who do not have the everything of the few? Who do not have to make one false choice, then the next, traumatized always by the stakes of mere taste, by the terror of an incorrect move among the serious, spectacular minutiae?
