Emotion and Trauma (2024)
Inkjet and Watercolor on Hanji Paper.
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Broke Phone... that shit read 600 hundred thousand... just two years ago i ain't even have all these problems...

A footnote in Fichus lead me to Ulysses Gramaphone: "What right do we have to select or interrupt a quotation..."

I talked to S on the phone last night and it took me a moment to find my voice. I've barely spoken in Madrid, life is silence broken by brief ripples of conversation. This will continue for a while and I like it. I tell him this and realize how absurd it sounds. This only happens later, before we talk about New York, how things are there, how people are there. As the conversation continues, I get increasingly tired, I keep repeating what was I saying where were we where was I what was I saying

It's like a computer, D says, and before computers there were still computers: the pen and the post. There is "the motif of postal difference, of remote control and telecommunication"

T texted me that he received the Bape bag. I'd meant to mail it to him months earlier, but I never made my way to the post office. When I was leaving L's place, I realized I needed to get it to him. I gave the bag to Z to give to A who saw T yesterday. The bag was given to me by A2, who bought the gift for me while she was in Tokyo. "Tokyo: does this city lie on the western circle that leads back to Dublin or to Ithaca?" This was in March, the bag started and ended with A before going to T, and L thinks "the coincidence of meeting . . . the whole galaxy of events" while at the centurypast cabman's shelter.

"...what remains untranslatable is at bottom the only thing to translate, the only thing translatable. What must be translated of that which is translatable can only be the untranslatable."

Another note leads me to Blanchot's The Madness of the Day, but there isn't a translation to download anywhere, only La folie du jour, and I'm reminded of the strange place that is being relatively well-read in the wrong language, of being illiterate in other ones. I went to a kebab place near me yesterday and it was ran by an Indian guy, he spoke to me in Hindi and I replied "I don't speak Hindi" in Hindi and he was confused and I explained to him in Spanish that my family is from Tamil Nadu and I didn't grow up in India so I never learned any Hindi and he still seemed offput by this and I thought of the scene in Louis Malle's Phantom India where he's in Tamil Nadu and the people are protesting against Hindi being taught in their schools. When you're outside of India, everyone gets flattened to Indian, but when you're there the Tamils will speak poorly about the people in Delhi and the dirty Biharis and in Mumbai all the rich people look down on the Dharavi slum dwellers as filthy Madrasis. That was the longest conversation I had yesterday. Blanchot lived in isolation for two decades, but he maintained length correspondences with his contemporaries. I think about how archives of letters will be lost because of how the digital archive overwhelms. D points out how Nietzsche and Joyce anticipated the academies to come to study their work, and he makes fun of the James Joyce Foundation and how American such a thing is. Part of this anticipation is the relation of the computer to the encylopedic project. And what to anticipate of the centuries to come...

"Any public piece of writing, any open text, is also offered like the exhibited surface, in no way private, of an open letter, and therefore of a postcard with its address incorporated in the message and hereafter open to doubt, and with its coded and at the same time stereotyped language, trivialized by the very code and number. Conversely, any postcard is a public document, deprived of all privacy and, moreover, in this way laying itself open to the law."