Articles Available Online

This vision was strongly nebulous, an indeterminate but bold reaction only because it was so much like one of my poems There I was one weekday night starring in a work of literature about gentlemen’s anarchy and artists and rapists and masculinity, and there I was later with my innocent questions, and then I was facing, yet again, an entire interrogative oeuvre about the self-suppression of undeserved esprit de coeur   This whole scene was like Picasso’s Blue Period, but the colour I was exploring was ‘wretched with indefinite longing’ I had grown tired of the auto-destruction of literature I didn’t want to erase my face from the coinage I had grown tired of all the metaphysical rumours and wanted to be away from the clatter of interiority, to be — in a new form — alone   I dreamed of a category containing those who are more beautiful, intelligent and virtuous than anyone else I had known This was a category into which I kept inserting the names of my friends I did not gaze admiringly or touch this category too much, and when I was out of its radius I became sick with a mysterious illness: I was tired, sad, my chest ached, I didn’t want to get out of bed I could think only of this category’s face, and was struck with the most intoxicating loneliness, like the loneliness of a person who has lost an organ   Later, on the phone, I said ‘This is so curious — it is like I have lovesickness without being in love with anyone,’ and the voice on the other end said, ‘Of course you are in love’ But how and with whom? It was painful to be lovesick without love, like a person who has quit her job but still stocks shelves in her dreams That’s when my suffering became an art project I was no longer a self-suppressioner, I had become a miserablist   Later I realised the state of lovesickness for a love that isn’t love and for no one in a fixed particular had lasted for some time I began to think its