1. Photo of the foreskin of my jchu jchul (a slang term signifying penis for children in Armenian). Just the kind of grand gesture one could expect from a male performance artist, from the early 70s.

2. Photo of my fingers from my right hand with single fungus nail.

3. Photo of toes from my right foot with two fungus nails and possible third.

4. A police description of my face.

5. Black and white photo of my mother as a child, the one in which she is dressed like a doll, looking through the camera with piercing green eyes.

5a. How can a memory of an event, not my own, be a part of [Fragment left unfinished]

5b. What did Guy Debord mean in his film Critique of Separation when he wrote, “It is necessary to destroy memory in art”? Especially when so many of his films retain traces of memories, recollections, photos of friends, of drunken evenings spent together plotting the liberation—not of art, but of everyday life.

5c. I agree with him: I am not interested in using art as a place to express servile sentiments, but where to place the work of memory, of recollections that could, in their most intense heights, even undo our image, our understanding of our “selves.”

6. Image of a burnt American flag.

6. Image of a folded and wrinkled white piece of paper with the following text: “Let’s destroy our privacy before they do.”

6. Image of a sheet of paper with the number 6.

6, Image of a sheet with the number 6 followed by a comma.

7. Overwhelming you and me, there are words that remain abstract and words that fall close to home. Can one say the home is an intimate place? Can one say the home will always be unhomely? Can one say that we are never at home, even when at home? And to think that even when we offer our home to an Other, it is not our home to offer. Our home is not our home. Simply, our homeland, not our home-land. [It didn't work]

7a. Do the dead have a home? Is a resting place a home?

7b. My body, which is not mine at all, exposed to forces opening up to an outside, infinite, bursting, dispersing, potent, unexpected, and, thus, fragile.

8. Wait a moment, I need a rest.

9. Language is interminable, but how to be intimate with language? How to be intimate in language?

9a. Can we be intimate in language? Can we be intimate in any way other than in language? And I ask you, sincerely (with all the ambiguities of sincerity), in whose language?

10. [Withdrawn]

11. There is nothing one can say without saying the saying of what one can say. And yet, to say “no” or to say “yes” is already to draw closed the gates or open to an exterior of say-ability, which calls into question the initial point of departure.

11a. I wanted to write something related to the notion of intimacy. But before thinking about intimacy, I would have to think about wanting. What in fact is “wanting”? What does it mean to say: “I want”? To say: “I want to say”? To say: “I want to write”?

11b. Is want desire? And if so, where does desire reside? (Possibly inside the word itself –or would this just be wordplay?)

11c. Volition, will, wish, need, necessity, material, immaterial, conscious, unconscious, unquenchable fiction.

11d. What, who wants in the wanting of, wanting to say, and from where does the want come from? And where does the want go in the saying (instead of saying, should it be question) “I want”? And when is this want satisfied? Is a want satisfiable?

11e.  The time of a want is a time of searching for the right word, the right touch, for the right light, the right taste, the right warmth…

12. This has my signature all over it, and yet, it is not signed by me. My signature, a daily fiction, a performance of my most intimate distance from what I call “myself.”

13. How many marks or traces of an impending suicide can be discovered looking back into a past that forgets itself as often as it recalls the numbers, the days of the week, the years stacked upon one another.

13a. Ten is the kind of round number that events of the utmost intimacy can be marked. Usually, there is a song sung, but on some occasions, the loneliest loneliness is called upon (and of which, we should not be afraid)

14. There is nothing more intimate —even if you told me there is nothing more intimate.

15. Saying “I love you” is a political act. Saying “I love you” is a political act.

16. But when we say (anything), how do we say, how many things do we say, how many ways do we say, how can we say a thing worthy of saying?

17. His circle of intimates, a group of inmates, mating, constantly, and frequently, usually behind closed closet doors close to the cold coffin resting places.

18. In the 1961 film by Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch, Chronique de un ete, one of the participants, Jacques Gabillon, attempts to describe his struggle at holding on to and nurturing his “marginal life.” This marginal life is the site of his sincere interests, his friendships, his passions, his desires and wants. He desires to be a writer, to work with language and fights for this time, after his days of hard work. This marginal life is a time of leisure, love, sex, a possibly non-functional time and thought. Today, it stands to be interrogated. Whose are you? Where do you seek refuge? Who do you work for? Where are our intimate spaces, times, when they are increasingly mobilized and territorialized into a rationality only concerned with buying and selling?

18a. This voice. Which voice? Whose voice?

18b. Walter Benjamin, in his essay on the Storyteller, Nikolai Leskov, writes that we have lost the capacity to tell stories, because experience itself has lost its value: the truth of wisdom had been replaced by the truth of facts. Intimacy, which is connected to experience, our sensation of the world, our thought, our non-functional time, even our boredom, and possibly, a poetic existence, rhythm, is not something one can take for granted. It is connected to a time and space, or a relation to time and space, that needs to be fought for, re-asserted, re-constructed.

18c. To whom it may concern,

It has been brought to my attention that you have invented a “revolutionary” program, which allows me to share my most intimate moments with friends throughout the world, from various devices, instantly. Is it possible to take my intimate experiences, make them work for you, and then sell them back to me, or anyone willing to pay?

18d. Expropriate, dispossess, exploit, instrumentalize, package, sell. The most repetitive algorithm masquerading as the new.

19. The coordinates of the personal and the political—in the personal is political—have to be opened up and reconsidered in light of their economization.

20. I handed him this note, he saw it, the space was left empty, the papers were recycled, nothing else was done, I withdrew, so did she. They left. A world remained waiting for the next step.