3:37

Tobias shares a photo of a girl with blonde hair surrounded by a golden nipple of light, a dusky illumination – this gilded creature keeps appearing in his Instagram photos, and then disappearing when he clicks on the photo. He has no idea who she is.

The days of muskrat Twitter have dawned and even this angelic pixel-host seems seems connected to the present uncanniness—- an uncanny knit further from the eerie than the commercial.

Mystery has changed. Even mystery feels slant, invisibly calculated, algorithmically-inclined, in the spaces of social media, those mediums which mythologizes us to ourselves.

3:39

A DM from a bitcoin miner followed by a DM from a writer expressing concern about our role in the systems of dominance. My dog Radu barks at a squirrel.

4:01

X confesses: “I like myself better on screen. Being away from Twitter reminds me of how despicable I find myself in real life. The real me screams at her kids and fails daily. I am an actual failure.”

The way social media defines time, or infects our relationship to temporality, feels so loose, so wrong, so—to use a twitter expression — unhinged.

I console myself with the fact that my work originate there – in that hustle of headshots and fake luminosity.

4:08

Maël Renouard’s Fragments of an Infinite Memory: My Life with the Internet, as translated by Peter Behrman de Sinéty, arrives. I get sucked into it quickly…

5:18

“The Internet has rung in the revenge of the archive and sounded the death knell of the show, which used to set the beat for the triumphal march of the present,” Renouard writes.

The show-and-tell of tweetland— the instability of our attachments to it. One would have to be mindless not to consider the effects. Purisms aside, Renoaurd’s critique is right. And yet, I hope Twitter doesn’t die before I do, since I scheduled tweets for the year 2031, which I can’t imagine actually seeing.

We all have our dubious experiments; each manuscript invests in the variant dubiousness. On restless writing days, I inventory conditionals and fondle the dream of my posthumous bird voice carrying on without me.

One conditional: If Twitter dies, the ghost I wanted to be will die with it.

9:32

Revising an essay on Celan alongside a book about files, truth, and surveillance. Staring at photographs cut from family films. Thinking how quotation resembles the film still—the scavenged screenshot.

Addressing the shadow gives it weight.

One cannot read Paul Celan without absorbing this somehow. He says it directly:

the words
I address to you, shadow,
to give you weight.”

I speak to you in order to give you substance, to point to the thing attached.

As I remove these lines from the palm, I set them apart. Like S. Cavell, my interest drives me to write what arrests me. In turn, I arrest the image in a manner that turns it into a still from a film. I rip it from the context of its motion, of its life. Because I have isolated this photo—these lines, this particular shadow—I read it differently, there is no longer movement, the frame is reduced to the intensity of these lines.

The critic uses the imperative when they elect to quote or phrase a section of a poem. I want you to look.

9:43

The shade is the name for the ancient ghost. The lampshade changes the light. The order of life versus the disorder of death. Fourteen DM’s from friends trying to figure out whether they should migrate to another platform. Twitter slows fills with Muskrat experts and Muskrat reportage to reflect the new contagion. “Hyperbole is everything,” my teen daughter announces in her book report.

9:49

Order. Disorder. Simply put: I want twitter to die after me. I don’t want to witness the death of a book published posthumously. It seems rather wretched for logic to ask such things of the mind.

12:51

Renouard mentions “the aura of things glimpsed once and then lost forever” with respect to a book manuscript he lost. This missing book is the one which haunts him (I think of Mihail Sebastian’s The Accident).

The sad lovers crawl into my mind near midnight with their furious foreheads, their rage-curved shoulders, the books I have seen and lost. Projected books that come back like the ice pic of a migraine. As Renouard misses the written book, I miss the unwrittens—-the stories half-lived, half-remembered, the poem’s sharp clip, the shadow—-not a plot I’d wish to inhabit again but something I treasure like a lost tooth or a lock of hair cut from a corpse whose skin hasn’t betrayed its pastness yet.