Always having been afraid to keep one, the closest thing I have to a diary is an ever-growing archive of my marginalia. This archive consists of digital and physical lists of collected annotations that for years I have kept disorganized, scattered around, for the sake of privacy. Its fragmented format, generously discreet for the disembodiment of its pieces, is hardly ever declarative, revelatory. 

My desire for discretion and privacy regarding my annotations is a fairly recent acknowledgement. I came to it during a conversation among friends about journaling, which is something they all assumed I did. Their assumption was not shocking to me, because I was the writer in the room. What was shocking was realizing that not only did I never journal, but I never thought about or felt like journaling at all. I explained this was because I regarded journaling as the equivalent of keeping a diary, and had decided, as a very young child, that I would never keep a diary [again], or any record of my internal life.

My friends immediately identified, rightfully so, this attitude as consequential to my somewhat stereotypical Latin upbringing in a household of meddling women, and accepted my answer as natural and obvious. I, however, did not. The interaction had made me realize that my relationship to journaling about myself was a source of embarrassment and shame. What kind of writer doesn’t journal about their own life? 

Shortly after that conversation, I, of course, forced myself to start a diary, expecting to find some degree of catharsis in the act. But after a few days of going at it, I resigned myself to the reality that I had found no such thing. What I did find was myself returning, like a dog with its tail between its legs, to my old habit of collecting fragments. I suppose one could call this journaling, or keeping a diary, though I have yet to refer to it as that, and frankly doubt I ever will. There is a stubborn sense of refusal somewhere in my body that prohibits me from equating the practices. Perhaps this is the frightened ghost of my childhood reservations burrowing away in the now-unreserved, libertine den of my outer conscience, of my life. I was convinced I had abandoned this ghost years ago, traded it in for a more or less shameless woman, but somehow, it survived. Today, it insists that the records I keep of myself are disembodied and inaccessible. Sometimes, when I write about myself I get lost in the disembodiment.

***

Among the most recent additions to my archive is

—libidinal liminal spaces of solitude,

originally a scribble on a xerox of Umberto Eco’s “Travels in Hyperreality: The Fortresses of Solitude,” which now lives in a nondescript notepad containing other marginalia. Enticed by this annotation, and perhaps lured in part by the afterthought of the opening sentences of Eco’s essay, “[t]wo very beautiful naked girls are crouched facing each other…[b]ut the girls are no longer there,” I began to draft a piece about Pleasure. Or rather, about how desperately I want to devise some system of invariables through which I may return to my own sense of Pleasure, unpredictable and lush as it is, the moment I find it gone. It reads:

—Lately, I’ve been feeling the need to return to or advance toward some sort of liminal space, so long as this threshold is a portal into my personal Pleasure. Characteristically uncertain spaces of becoming seem to me the only kind where I can place myself at all. Within the solitude they provide, I do not have to be anything or anyone.

Inveterate hedonist that I am, my own sense of Pleasure is the subject that interests me the most. It is also the subject that intimidates me the most, perhaps just as much as the thought of two very beautiful naked girls facing each other, which is to me something comparatively sacred. The thought of Pleasure requires a simultaneous disarming and undressing of the self, otherwise it cannot follow itself to its natural end: Thinking about Pleasure forces me to renegotiate the terms of my private life, to acknowledge the social strictures I’ve internalized, to address the ritual violations I sometimes fail to protect my body from so that I may learn to resist them, to recognize whether I have cheated or abandoned myself in the name of naïvely unselfish pursuits.

I find I often have to defend this position against inherited ideological tyrannies. Consider how, for instance, despite centuries of philosophical deliberations, the ancients’ rupture of mind and heart endures triumphant—even Bob Dylan says you can never be wise and be in love at the same time, as though intellect were not, too, an emotional gesture by necessity. 

But then again, I am resisting, in some way, a passage into an inner life insubordinate to dense deliberation. I am operating through inherited ideological tyrannies. In my manner of writing about myself, I divorce my mind from my heart. In this way, I am betraying myself.

That piece I began to write about Pleasure, by the way, remains unfinished.

***

Sometime last year, a phrase began to circulate the Internet: To fuck around is human, to find out is divine. Because I found this half Internet meme and half new age declaration enticing, it too made its way into my archive. The appeal came from some sense that the phrase was a shameless articulation of a notion already familiar to me. The truth is that this phrase already existed in my body and had lived many lives within it in different, though nonetheless interconnected, iterations:

Many years ago, before my First Communion, I came to the phrase through catechism, in Matthew 7:7 to be more specific, which, in one of its translations reads, seek and ye shall find. 

Many years later, before high school, I happened upon the phrase again in the streets of Queens, New York, through overgrown schoolboys who, enveloped in laughter, would urge each other to fuck around and find out. 

At some unidentifiable point between these two instances, I also encountered the phrase in two Latin American colloquialisms, 

el que busca, encuentra, the one who seeks finds, directly derived from the Bible, and
no me busque porque me encuentra, don’t look for me because you will find me, a derivation of the previous derivation.

In their own lives, my mother and her mother both encountered these phrases as gendered teachings against rummaging through a lover’s life, usually a man’s—the contents of his wallet or pockets, the particular soiling of his shirt collar, the possible scent of an imagined stranger that has lingered all the way to the laundry basket, clinging to his clothes—in the hopes of finding nothing. They both delivered this teaching to me in the same manner, with the same connotations with which they themselves received it.

All iterations considered, the one with the most visceral particulars is the one I place closest to the newfound expression I am toying around with. To say that to fuck around is human and that to find out is divine is an allowance to follow a particular impulse through to its natural end, despite threatened consequences. I do not think there is sufficient bliss in ignorance to prefer the inherent spiritual abjection it requires over the, yes, divinity, of knowing. Finding out about things of your own initiative is a way of deriving Pleasure from the world, especially when you are raised, in great part, to believe in a distant promise of bliss, provided you don’t linger too long by the dirty laundry, whether it be your own or anyone else’s. 

This phrase, to fuck around is human, to find out is divine, actually happens to be a misadaptation (or perhaps adaptation) of a line from Alexander Pope’s “An Essay on Criticism”: To err is human; to forgive, divine. 

But because I don’t think that to fuck around is a mistake but rather quite the deliberate act, and because finding out does not have to take the form of grace nor forgiveness, I am grateful for the misadaptation (or adaptation) and let it take me by the hand. I extend an apology to Alexander on the other side, and admit it is not as easy to find my own agency in his words. They are simply not vicious enough. To fuck around requires the destruction of your own comfort and familiar self. We create many fictions for ourselves, often of ourselves, for the sake of self-preservation. But then again, I for one find it rather hard to tell simple truths. I find it hard to admit to discomfort. I don’t think it suits me.

***

In the early ’80s, Jenny Holzer famously printed some of her truisms onto latex condom packaging:

MEN DON’T PROTECT YOU ANYMORE

IN A DREAM YOU SAW A WAY TO SURVIVE AND YOU WERE FULL OF JOY

EXPIRING FOR LOVE IS BEAUTIFUL BUT STUPID

These were some of the earliest additions to my archive. I don’t particularly prefer latex condoms but would carry an unlimited supply of Jenny Holzer rubbers in my purse if they were available for commercial consumption. The sight of them alone might inspire the abstinence from romance I’ve always aspired to. In such reminders I might find the strength to think twice before letting my body pursue fleeting ecstasy at the expense of a mental crack brought on by post-nut clarity, or whatever equivalent of that may be assigned to women. For months I have been quoting a tweet in conversations with my girlfriends: i hope all the men i’ve slept with know i did it as a form of self-harm (I suppose this, too, figures somewhere in my archive).

On any given hangover Sunday, I may find myself in the company of a hairy chest and a stubbly chin that I know will peel my own. But because my chin peeling tomorrow is none of my business today, I lean into the Pleasure of carelessness and abandon—into the sight of a man’s arms and the sight of the small of his back and the sight of his bedroom eyes at the sight of mine at the sight of his. In this leaning I also gain the certainty that Pleasure always, somehow, prepares us for suffering. 

For me, the possibility of full immersion into physical love is often punctured by the looming threat of self-reproach. On my right shoulder sit perched Lorca’s Angel and Muse. On my left, his heralding Duende. On any given hangover Sunday, I may find my own body fraught with guilt and shame closely resembling second sight. Many years ago, zooted, I wrote an ode to Dylan Thomas:

Sometimes, to great grief, I see the boys of summer in their ruin.

In retrospect, I realize this is only half true. What I see most clearly are the girls of summer, of spring, of fall, of winter, indexed in our catalog of years, in their ruin. This, the greatest grief of all, the crux of second sight, the sight that directs my every sight, the sight that sometimes seems to swallow all possible distractions.

On this note, a narrative on fellatio:
A few years ago, a man I briefly dated confessed to me over dinner, unprompted and in genuinely benevolent praise, that he was happy I had never given him a blowjob. He explained that his fondness for me had made him fearful that I would be good at taking him in my mouth. Had this been the case, he would have had no choice but to logically deduce that many other men had also been in my mouth. He finished off by adding he was happy I was not a “loose woman.” Later that evening, because I do happen to be a loose woman, I slept with him one last time. I had to bid my farewell to all that beauty, wasted on a man too comfortable being honest about his capacity for a violence I could only dream he would someday recognize and devote his life to exorcising from his body.

***

The year I turned 17, during a visit to Colombia, I picked up the habit of slumping down into my grandmother’s rocking chair on the balcony, listening to her tango and bolero cassettes while everyone took their lunchtime siesta inside. Because I counted on the faithful appearances of dirty old men and teenage boys at this hour of day, I’d let the straps of my dress fall off my shoulders and bunch the skirt up onto my lap, generously baring my legs. Most days I’d take a plate of mulberries with me to rouge my lips and cheeks with, the sweet and sour sticky juice running down the side of my mouth, down my neck, down my collarbones.

I’d amuse myself by solemnly ignoring the adoring and predatory glances cast up at me, youthful naïveté long gone to spare me the sight of them, as though it were even possible for the unseasoned girl I once was to ignore the congregation of drooling dogs that gathered at my feet. Perhaps they thought I could convince myself they were looking at the scenery within which I figured as a mere embellishment.

The scenery: A row of three Staghorn ferns that hung suspended on chains wrapped around the balustrade of the balcony. Two Christmas orchids in clear plastic pots made from recycled Sprite bottles, one in the upstairs window, one in the downstairs one. A Caladio potted in the doe-shaped jardiniere at the center of the garden. Heliconias, Colombian Climbing Lilies, Anturios. A two-headed Quindio wax palm, tall and imposing. At its base, an all-purpose aloe plant for home remedies and beauty rituals that cannot be trimmed, under any circumstance, at the height of the afternoon sun. A variety of herbs. Carefully trimmed undergrowth (maleza in Spanish, derivative of the Latin malitia: A bad quality; badness, wicked; spite, malice, ill will; cunning, artfulness). My house the house of flowers, my lineage a lineage of florists, herbalists and, supposedly, witches. And in the background, boleros (in his fictional memoir about an old man’s melancholy whores, Memoria de mis putas tristes, Márquez wrote that the bolero is life itself).

***

 
For as long as I can remember, my mother has said to me in Benedict tone

ESTUDIA Y NO SERÁS CUANDO CRECIDA EL JUGUETE VULGAR DE LAS PASIONES

She came across this phrase when she was a young girl in Catholic school. It is a line from a sonnet by Venezuelan poet, journalist and politician Elías Calixto Pompa. There was a nun who would write these words on her homeroom chalkboard. No matter how many times the words were wiped off, the nun would patiently rewrite them. Eventually it was understood, in silent consensus, that the words had to stay. If I have subdued myself to any violent structure in my life, it has been to the dominion of analytical Pleasure, first engendered by my treatment of and mooning over this singular phrase. If my archive of marginalia started anywhere in particular, it was probably here. And yet, I have no desire to glorify what a male intellectual in the 1800s had to say about vulgarity and passion, because to do so would be a detriment to much more important considerations.

Did it ever occur to figures like Pompa, in the artfulness of their connotations, that one might want to be the vulgar plaything of passions if these passions were one’s own? And why is it that these passions cannot easily be inferred as being one’s own?

Among the many things I inherited from my mother is an intolerance toward the idea that women are the ventriloquists, the dolls, the playthings, of men. Though she disagrees—generational differences in ideology sustained—with the idea that anyone might want to be a vulgar plaything or hand oneself over to passions violently, she had resolved to arm me against the liberticidal arsenal of sexism the moment I was assigned my gender at birth. For reasons difficult to explain, she had been expecting a son, and for reasons I have never fully empathized with, she became ecstatic upon the sudden opportunity of raising a woman instead.

We are often told, even in this 21st century, that it is much more difficult to raise women, and it would be futile to deny this. Properly equipping a woman for the world requires you to teach her to account for her mistakes as well as those of others—past, present, and future—and always through the myopic visions of others. You have to teach her to expect unwarranted violence from strangers. Not only is this obviously unjust, but also vital. Not knowing these things could, and has, cost women their lives.

One of the many ways in which my mother taught me to survive was to prioritize my education, always, over romance. I have tried for years now, by way of displaying my stoic distrust in artlessly shameless men, to prove to my mother that her sacrifices have not been in vain, for I have yet to rest on the laurels of love. In my mother’s vehement inculcations against sexual discrimination, the very threshold of my liberty, I have found a driving force, something that takes over when I sometimes let myself go. I have to rationalize the extent of my devotion to my lovers, not because they are my lovers, but because they are men, and as men have been taught to venerate their own Pleasure in ways that could, if I am not careful, cost me my own. Is this, in any way, a reversal of violence?

***

From my own Catholic upbringing I retain one figure, whom I did not meet until I was an agnostic in college. Retain may not seem the right word to use, but I defend it as proper for describing the gripping principle of devotion that never leaves a body that was once indoctrinated with religion, even if religion has been killed within that body. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-1695), who was able to escape marriage and become a scholar by joining a convent, is perhaps best known for advocating for women’s rights to education and written expression. She is often called the first feminist of the Americas and the 10th muse. In life and in death, her devotion to books has been a scandal to many. The central argument against her was (and still is) that she could not have possibly been properly devoted to her god because she was also devoted to the personal interest of knowledge, and that this was evidence of an ulterior motive for having sought a position as a member of the church—an accusation men were, of course, spared of. 

At the height of her persecution, Sor Juana justified her scholarly practices before the Inquisition primarily through the Augustinian Doctrine of self-determination: Saint Augustine (the reformed sinner who wrote the Confessions) made a case for the importance of human self-determination, or free will, positing that it is only through the pursuit of knowing ourselves, ultimately an act that acknowledges the gift of freedom that constitutes Being, that we can come to be truly good. This is the same goodness that one encounters in the experience of pure, or true, love. Saint Augustine also posited that the origin of evil could only be expounded through a thorough understanding of self-determination.

In employing Saint Augustine’s doctrine, Sor Juana was able to counter the church’s historical feminization of ignorance (we can begin with Eve) and make a case for her own, as well as all women’s, rights to education through religion itself, despite the social determinations that denied them the most important element of this doctrine: Autonomy. 

But who has prohibited women private and individual studies? Do they not have a rational soul like men?…What divine revelation, what determination of the Church, what dictate of reason made for us such a severe law?

—Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, in Autodefensa Espiritual

Notwithstanding, posthumously, some have declared her love for knowledge as a sexual aberration, accusing her of penis envy and menopausal neurosis. In order to describe Sor Juana, they had to resort to blatantly misogynistic Freudian jargon, as though a woman couldn’t be insulted in any way other than through the mythological vacuum of the phallus. Her problem, the matter with her, was that she so badly wanted to be a man, and was doomed to the misfortune of being a woman.

I have come across this same accusation so much that I feel I’ve been stripped from my right to ignore it, and I often wish I could. The accusation that the problem with so many women is that they want so badly to be men carries with it quite the history of derogatory intent. I have often had this attitude of abjection attributed to me by others, and am frankly not even sure that it exists in my body. I do not intend to deny or confirm its veracity. I am not interested in providing a half-assed answer to something that deserves more deliberation than I have, at present, the time and capacity to give. But I do think—no, know—that, in this world we have inherited, we are fond of identifying ourselves through reductive binaries, through comparisons. I know what I am by what I am not, by what I do not have, by what, perhaps, I could have, by things that exist outside of myself, by what I do not possess, by what has been stolen from me, by what I have been denied.

Someone once told me that the moment a desire controls you, it ceases to be your own. Have I dwindled, out of anger or frustration or pride, the idea of desire to a type of yearning reliant on external wills and sources? Have I disproportionately blamed others for the loss or absence of my Pleasure, when I should have also held myself accountable for this loss? If I restrict my inner life to a disembodied form that hinders my knowledge of my self, is this not, also, a form of abjection?

***

There is a particular section of my archive of marginalia that I came to categorize as a collection of things I wrote and gathered to read to one of my lovers, in what may as well be another life now. The idea to do this came from an excerpt from Simone de Beauvoir’s The Independent Woman:

“Women who assert they are men still claim masculine consideration and respect. I also remember a young Trotskyite standing on a platform during a stormy meeting, about to come to blows in spite of her obvious fragility. She was denying her feminine frailty; but it was for the love of a militant man she wanted to be equal to.” 

Back in that other life, my own love for a man succeeded in disarming me. In his presence and in my desire to share the things I most loved in the world with him, I came to regard the fragility of my self-composure and repellence toward romance. In an effort to protect myself from the spiritual abjection of ignorance, from the looming danger of becoming a plaything, from the threshold of cruelty of others, I was rejecting my own capacity for devotion, desire and Pleasure. I was handing over, perhaps to politics or to history, my emotional self-determination: There is a self inside us fully given to the business of longing, whether we want it to or not; to disavow it is to deceive, betray and forsake ourselves.