"I am animated by this call or demand, and I am at first overwhelmed by it. The other is, from the start, too much for me, enigmatic, inscrutable. This 'too-much-ness' must be handled and contained for something called an "I" to emerge in its separateness. The unconscious is not a topos into which this 'too-much-ness' is deposited. It is rather formed as a psychic requirement of survival and individuation, as a way of managing-and failing to manage-that excess and thus is the persistent and opaque life of that excess itself."(Judith Butler)

Reading Judith Butler's notion of a subject, of the de-centering necessary to produce a fiction of the self - that to speak with the "I" one has to step away and tell the story of the "I" and then of course this isn't the truth, it is a narrative produced by the demand by the other. And this is the way one becomes a subject. By becoming an object. An "I" produced for "You".

... and where else am I going to test the bounds of what is possible to speak between us.

I must find ways to manage myself, to keep myself level, so I don't freak out or fuck up.  



I saw tiny birds on the ground yesterday - pecking back and forth under a tall tree. And the sun today was so nice. I walked to the studio and back, although I didn't even touch the paintings.



The revellers outside my apartment are too loud for sleep; I haven't slept much in the past few nights, and reading Judith Butler, plus the emotions of this afternoon's flute performance at the closing of my show, accompanied by a check for paintings sold, all leave me in an excited, sad, urgent state. Most importantly, I really don't have a sense of where you are at.

And months later, another winter is upon us, Another weird warm winter, and I feel like a fool, not as though you were laughing at me, but in a deeper, more painful way, where I have offered myself to you completely, giving me no tools, no defense, no tricks or devices for self-protection. She keeps moving forward, this I produced for You. (While the other me falls behind, muttering obscenities interspersed with intimacies.)

Making is coping, and I... I can cope with being called a fool, but a conventional fool, caught in a conventional trap, with my agency blunted and my desires subjected to an injunction of secrecy and ineffectual sighing... Well, look at the paintings. How they spasm, whimper, curse, scream, drip, strangle and tremble in their rectangles. What is the difference between a trap and a frame?

It's all language. But the differance between speech, writing and the mark (or perhaps I mean touch) is where struggle, disappointment and grief is registered. What can be said. What can no longer be believed.