II

Imagine having to write a note like this: April has 58 days after which it can't go on. 

I turned to the idea of a cryalog by the American writer Mary Ruefle, whose proposition of writing about one's menopause has become some sort of lifeline for me.

Many times imagined, yet never done, I have not kept a journal of the times I've cried. Yet in the months of last winter I wanted to. I watched myself scoring daily strikes. I watched something happen that Anne Carson describes as a word that breaks love's wrists and throws it down the stairs. 

A cryalog looks, in fact, like this. 

It deciphers the amount of times the author has cried in the month of April in 1998. It states the day of the week, the number of times (up to five times a day), and whether it was 'very bad' or not.

Somewhere along these lines, I started thinking about other ways of crying. Things got complicated. I knew that I could not be complicit in the way art interests women, as there is a class division I can't get past. 

When faced with uneven love, there is not much you can do. 

You remain watching.

You remain collecting.

By my tears, Roland Barthes once wrote, I tell a story, I produce a myth of grief, and henceforth I adjust myself to it. 

So I did exactly that. 

I prolonged Mary Ruefle’s 58th day, after which it couldn't go on and turned to other ways of crying, or, as I understood it, to Anne Carson. 

III

Anne Carson wrote in a publication in 1990 on contact as crisis. 

In the first three sentences, she quotes an anthropologist who speaks of touch as a “modified blow“. 

Contact here is presented as a transgression or violation of something closed; it is seen as a possible intrusion of a place, “where someone does not belong“. Any instance of contact is that of a violation of a fixed boundary. 

Greek philosophers (lovers of fixed boundaries) find sexuality in women a fearsome thing. Not only do they 'let go' and are inexhaustible: They swell, they shrink, they leak, they are getting penetrated, they suffer metamorphoses. 

Rarely, Anne Carson points out, do they not lose their form in monstrosity. 

Those who lack boundaries evoke fear. Considering philosophical frameworks of Aristotle, Plato, or Hippocrates, women were usually wet. Now, as for those who leak, you can find this: Aristotle considers female incontinence to be a consequence of weakness. 

But as A.C. points out in another publication much later, Aristotle was also the one who was likely to pass rapidly from wrist to slave, when trying to recollect wife.