I am stupid

When I say I am stupid, I do not mean what Deleuze meant when he wrote about stupidity as lying outside the image of thought—-stupidity suggestive of, if not constitutive of, nomad thought outside the strictures of what everybody knows to be true. No, I do not mean that, and I do not mean whatever Nietzsche meant when he said, in the grip of paralysis progressiva, "I am stupid because I am dead."

I just mean... I don’t know. Maybe I mean that I’m dumb. Mute. This place I’m at, this so-called phronistery, that is what they call it in the promotional materials, is designed for isolation. I will not bore you with the obvious reading of its mid-century modern houses: the nearly floor-to-ceiling windows, all without curtains.

On good days in the phronistery—-days when the weather is not too appallingly beautiful, say—-you can imagine that the time you pass here without speaking to anyone is granting you a phantom childhood: inwardness, genius. As Guy Davenport writes in his essay on Balthus, "Balthus' children are as complacent as cats and accomplished in stillness... Of the autistically interior, dreaming, reading, erotic, self-sufficient child in Balthus' painting, we have practically no image at all. Balthus' children are not driven to succeed where there parents failed, or to be popular, adjusted, a somebody."

On other days, the mute passage of time has brought you to nothing but the bad bargains of interiority: ____. Whatever they are; I am in no condition to enumerate them. Too. Stupid.

And on the other hand (though I was just now comparing days, not hands), maybe weeks of muteness bring you to an a-relationality. The "revolutionary inaptitude...for sociality" Leo Bersani writes about in Homos. Though I haven’t gotten very revolutionary, since I just elided the words "gay desire" from that quotation.