[SEPTEMBER 2024.]
Black bile baby in love
Took two eighth graders to the Mitski show! This time around the band is country but her persona is a dapper-dyke David Byrne, marionette stylings to hold off all that raw feeling. She thanks the parents and guardians who brought their kids out. Maybe this wasn’t your first choice for how you wanted to spend your evening? The eighth graders were having the time of their lives, it’s true; but there I was one row over, having my cry through all the Puberty 2 material. Funny mom. I say unto you, teenagers at the Mitski show: right now you know, and in time you’ll forget, and if you ever have a second puberty and start to remember it all over again, woe betide you. Youth after age, doubled over. Susan Fraiman’s sodomitical mother, the monster who pursues pleasure (or pain?) independent of function. What a seedy Deleuzian corner for a nice girl like you to end up in.
tell your baby that I’m your baby
E quella a me: “Nessun maggior dolore
che ricordarsi del tempo felice
ne la miseria.”
In Christian time, which moves from ignorance to revelation, death is the local apocalypse that uncovers your soul as it always was. So Francesca in the whirlwind, casting her mind back to that time of happiness in the library (al tempo d’i dolci sospiri), understands that she was in the whirlwind always and didn’t know it.
In Dōgen’s model of time, that’s half right. What the apocalyptic view obscures is the effect of desire, which always looks to the future and so pierces time with an asymmetric arrow. If Francesca was already in the whirlwind when in the library, it’s equally true that she is still in the library while in the whirlwind. We know that; we hear her verses bring it to life. You want to say that’s her nobility, her superiority to circumstance, to any torment God could devise for her. At the same time (nessun maggior dolore), her wish to return to that place is what ensures her separation from it. Her punishment’s perfect architecture.
