I’ve been using bibliomancy to start my days. I pull a book at random and open it. Patricia Highsmith’s diary from Dec. 31, 1947: “My New Year’s Toast: to all the devils, lusts, passions, greeds, envies, loves, hates, strange desires, enemies ghostly and real, the army of memories, with which I do battle — may they never give me peace.”

It’s February but it’s always a New Year if you want it to be.

Even alone with a loose sense of time, today is the Sundayest Monday possible. Sometimes procrastination looks beautiful and sounds raw. This is one of those. It can happen later. Or better yet, not at all.

I can remember that Rex Reed bought his two bedroom apartment at The Dakota for $30,000 in 1969, but I cannot remember a single one of my passwords.

Listen to Marianne Faithfull and swan around my place like a Grande Dame Rock Survivor, imagining her in Lucifer Rising playing Lilith, a demon. It was Kenneth Anger’s most expensive film, partly shot in Egypt: “I said to Marianne, don’t bring any drugs because they’ll execute you. So, she hid her heroin in her makeup box underneath her face powder. I think she was powdering her face with heroin.”

***

All I want is to lie in bed and watch movies. Too much though and you start to meld with the voices and rhythms. Memories take on the edit, years on the cutting room floor. Those once-vitals scenes and characters no longer fit the story. I watch Sherlock Jr. in which Buster Keaton plays a movie projectionist who dreams himself into a film. He walks into the screen and becomes part of the action where he’s at the mercy of the way the scenes are cut. He enters a living room and f inds himself outside at a front door, knocks but the steps and the yard vanish, sits down but finds himself in traffic with cars rushing by, nearly hitting him, then he’s on a hilltop, in a forest between two lions, in a desert about to be hit by a train, on a rock in the sea. He dives into the waves, but they are a snowbank. He pulls himself out and is back in the front yard where he started. Inside the house a man and a woman are kissing.

***

“One emerges from this adventure lost. One no longer knows or recognizes oneself: but here these words no longer have meaning. Very quickly, one is no more than a slackening, floating strangeness, suspended between 32 poorly identified states, between sufferings, incapacities, lapses,” Philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy writes in his memoir after treatment for lymphoma, which took advantage of his immunocompromised body following a heart transplant.

Claire Denis made a film, L’Intrus, loosely based on it—more like a beautifully distorted riff. The image I remember from the movie is Béatrice Dalle, gap-toothed and grinning, as she whips sled dogs and bobs along in the snow. The movie-memory mingles with a scene of her playing pool with Maggie Cheung in Clean. The scenes splice. I’m a filmmaker now. I don’t need love, I need a bigger budget.

***

Are people who insist on being present sadists? I can get lost in the past. Like a child watching a movie repeatedly, the simulation soothes me. I try to trace events to the night of the hospital, create lines and reasons where none exist. Explanation is a veil. If I ponder any of it for long, connections arise, signs appear. Is that not true of anything? Light catches the spider’s web, turns it majestic or sinister, a sculpture or a death trap. Get the fucking broom.

They mean well is usually patently untrue. There’s a reason for everything isn’t said by reasonable people. An act of memory is still an act. Same with the act of forgetting. Stages. Footlights. Ghost lights. A performance of a thought.

From a young age, I knew language was violence. I was small and fast, but no matter how far I ran, someone caught me. People mocked my voice, gestures, walk. Why not beat everyone to the punch and be my own bully? Make them laugh, with an edge. Cut deep, carve away, scoop guts, place a candle, and become a cartoon menace.

Not unspeakable, unlistenable. Many prefer to say language has failed when their character has. Language doesn’t fail us, we fail language. Turn it into dead spots with no bounce, specialize it to death. Neither spectacle nor substance, a groove worn numb, an unloaded game of Russian roulette–-pantomimes.

***

“9. If you want to shoot day for night, make sure the sun is shining,” writes Wim Wenders in 50 Golden Rules of Filmmaking.

The day is sunblast, bright blue, pearl gray. All within moments. Truthfully, I’m still in my apartment. I lie in bed and sift through memories that are only peripherally mine—the best kind.

The poet said her wedding dress was lost in a fire, neglecting to mention she started it.

We’ll see when we get there, the cinematographer answered the director’s questions about the future of the shoot. Catastrophe moves to its own time signature. Why rush?

The actor, permanently affixed in popular memory to a gone-too-soon soft-boy actor I lusted after as a teen, gives a lot of interviews about hating interviews. Myth-tending, reflexive liar, but with good lines (better than the ones in his movies).

“His kind will never come again,” he says of the dead actor. I can’t tell if he thinks that’s bad or good.

***

I’m on an Elizabeth Taylor kick, old hiccupy DVDs from the public library—Boom!, The Driver’s Seat, Cleopatra. In Suddenly, Last Summer, the doctor played by Monty Clift: “Insane is a meaningless word.”

Taylor: “Lobotomy is a very specific one.”

Two famous prefrontal lobotomies: Tennessee William’s sister Rose. Aged twenty-eight, an asylum in Farmington, Missouri, where she was incarcerated by their mother Edwina. Rosemary Kennedy, aged twenty three, lobotomized at the behest of her parents—Rose and Joe. The ice pick driven through the roof of the patient’s eye socket and tapped with a hammer left Rosemary mute, incontinent, and with infantile intelligence. Her neuropathologist wasn’t stripped of his medical license. He went on to prestige and in 1949 nominated the Portuguese doctor who invented the lobotomy for a Nobel Prize which he won.

From a gay man held as a teen in a mental institution from 1962-1964: “This one doctor was talking about homosexuality. And he said, well, there is a normal homosexual period between eight and twelve and beyond that it’s abnormal. So, I piped up and said, Is that a.m. or p.m.?”

“I can’t remember things that I don’t know, that I didn’t see, that didn’t happen,” a man tells the police in the interrogation scene in The Driver’s Seat. I want to argue with the dialogue, with the way people do all kinds of things based on what they don’t remember, they don’t see, they don’t think happened.

I’m trying to understand why I’ve never been hooked on Cleopatra. The movie is bonkers epic, overwrought, endless—everything I love—but has always left me cold. Is Liz Taylor’s performance secretly layered and trippy? I can’t tell. It’s like she’s walking through the sets on a dry run to get the blocking down, and they never bothered to shoot the actual take.

***

Who wants to hear about an old faggot’s migraines? Not me, and I’m living them. Can’t slept. Can hear myself blink. A forehead tap with a nine-pound hammer. The world awaits, readymade. Shiva with a gun in every hand and a bus ticket. Somewhere new.

My life is like god, I no longer believe in it. The love of my life: my failures. All I talk about. The sounds of the night prick through my silence and my limbs hum. I turn from a man into an appliance. My chest tightens, a flutter spreads.

Around me I witness the catastrophe of adults who still believe fairytales. Earlier I braved the grocery store, and it was full of children named Michael and Jason and they were all in trouble. Mothers yelled, Jason! Michael! Michael! Jason! Different voices and little boys scurrying. Briefly I considered forming a pickpocket gang with them but remembered I’m an inept thief and an even worse leader.

I wad a pillow up and hold it. I think of resting my forehead against someone’s back or chest. I don’t tell this imagined someone what I’ve been seeing and hearing and how it has become more real than my actual days.

***

An ex-boyfriend thought I didn’t understand what it meant to truly appreciate or make art. I did. I knew what it meant to want to be someone else.

He believed he could forget. He could get rid of emotions. They were purgative. Responsibility, duty, courage. Qualities I strove for, but when he spoke the words, I sensed they would be used to mean the opposite of what they did for me. Dictums, maxims, and advice were his preferred modes of communications. I never felt I was talking with a person. Instead, I was sitting in front of one of those vintage love testers you’d find in pizzerias and video arcades in the malls of the 1980s where you pulled the lever and the red bulbs f lashed until they stopped: Clammy, Harmless, Mild, Naughty But Nice, Wild, Burning, Passionate, Hot Stuff. He explained Vipassana meditation and pain: loss and sadness in the heart, anger in the jaw, fury in the liver, and panic in the legs. Pain neatly color-coded. Was this how people believed they healed? He assured me: “The things you worry about aren’t the things you should worry about. The things you don’t worry about are the things you should worry about.”

***

I remember the friend attuned to sounds around him: street voices, languages he didn’t understand, traffic, the way buildings lived and made noises. When he traveled, he would take time in the early evening, lie down, and listen. His sphere expanded. He didn’t try to identify or follow. The source was unimportant. It was how loud everything became when you paid attention. The world was heavy metal, symphonic, plucked, struck, screaming, rattled, an air hose lullaby.

I gave him a copy of Pauline Oliveros’ Quantum Listening. Later I saw it in a pile with a Post-it: To Sell. Maybe he already knew it all through practice and theory was taxidermy. I understood enough theory and philosophy to grasp basic concepts but not so much to have ruined my life. I stole back the book.

***

If I could subvert my will, I could be loved. That wasn’t hard because I wasn’t certain the voice was mine or was in my best interest. Most of my life, I was told I was too much or not enough. My proportions were off. I would do whatever it took to be who they wanted because their want was also mine. We were one, even though I was much less than half of it. A fraction was love.

***

I think of words by an author whose name I no longer remember: “I begin as I’ll end, adrift.” Then about Lake Michigan. It doesn’t take much to drowned or drift. Stop struggling. Let go, as every therapist, life coach, Buddhist, abuser says.

When I was young and ambitious I could have. Now I must let time and neglect do the job. Wear the same clothes in bed for days until I smell myself. A habit of mind irons over the physical world like glaciers flattening the Midwest. The desire like Deleuze to leave philosophy but as a philosopher and like Cage to leave music but as a musician: to leave life but as the living. Robert Bresson sounding like the King James Bible: Let nothing be changed and all be different.

***

I wake and reach across the empty sheet, like in a movie where the scene telegraphs abandonment. For me: relief. 40 I could get up and start my day, as people do. Get a jump on things. Still not myself, still an object. My body is a rental unit between occupants. Rooms look bigger without anything in them. I know I’m not getting my security deposit back. I’m not lonely, I tell myself, that’s an inside job.

---

Bastards is out soon with Pilot Press. You can order a copy here.

Nate Lippens is the author My Dead Book, a finalist for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, and Ripcord. His fiction has appeared in many anthologies, including Sluts, edited by Michelle Tea (Dopamine, 2024) Little Birds (Filthy Loot, 2021), Responses to Derek Jarman’s Blue, edited by Richard Porter (Pilot Press, 2022), and Pathetic Literature, edited by Eileen Myles (Grove, 2022).