Incomplete Motivation
<<2003-10-09 - 2:11 p.m.>>

What is today's motivation?

The fat firm hollow feeling of an apple in my hand. Bright green talisman.

I was playing with a beautiful green apple, pondering eating it for breakfast, thinking it would be too loud to eat in class.

When Will (school-Will, not home-Will, although affections are roundly distributed to all comers), in a mixture of pretentiousness and incredible sweetness, tried to explain Lacan's theory of difference-based identity, of self-identified incompleteness by comparison, he used the example of his hand not being an apple. Indeed, his hand was not between mine. I added:

Not a hand.

And then a few moments later, thinking about this new theory and how it makes me want to send him obnoxiously enigmatic emails that say things like "How are you incomplete?" I added:

(Personhood is incomplete. Read some Lacan. We are all incomplete, defined that way. I hold the not-hand apple to my heart.)

This morning, on the phone with Zibby, I was talking about motivation. Mine. Or my lack thereof. I have lost my motivation, and in its stead I want to erect a System and worship it dutifully.

My motivation used to be so simple: I thought everything would be good if I were thin. If I thought that way now, I would think that if I were thin my housemates wouldn't irritate me and school-Will would come up to me after class and ask me a personal question and home-Will would send me an email asking how I'm doing and Max would write me a letter full of himself and Eddie would nurse a special pleasure in crossing my path on campus and I would be totally on top of my anthropology assignment and I would have a fascinating whirlwind of a life, "live picturesquely day and night." The problem is that I've figured out that it's not true. I can't picture myself perfect anymore, can't call up the vivid immersion-image of me, beautiful and adored. I am, I think, too immersed in my own life to connect so viscerally to a life not my own, and becoming too sensible to pin all these irrational thing on an unrelated goal. Which is all well and good.

But it means my motivation is gone. I can no longer think of anything that would be fixed if I were thin. I'd still be awkward in the ways that I'm awkward. I would still think, to the degree that I do, of being touched with tenderness as a foreign concept. Would still be pointlessly porous. And I frustrate. I fret. Because my jawline is gone and I look in the mirror and stamp my foot and yowl "fuck!" but still go home and eat peanut butter, and that doesn't seem to make sense.

But today I've eaten the not-hand apple, a bowl of cucumber slices with salt and a little bit of cream cheese, and a nonfat lemon yogurt and I am clean and sharp as citrus.

<< - >>