I was trying to write something about closets and queer form – had been thinking about Eve Kosofky Sedgwick’s idea of queerness as a subjectivity produced by limits (always bearing the mark of the closet), and Sara Ahmed’s image of ‘bumping up against the doorframe’ in Queer Phenomenology
and anyway a friend put me onto this passage by Walter Benjamin .. in his Berlin Childhood 1900
I think it’s really lovely so I’m going to read it in full

"The first cabinet that would yield whenever I wanted was the wardrobe. I had only to pull on the knob, and the door would click open and spring toward me. Among the nightshirts, aprons, and undershirts which were kept there in the back was the thing that turned the wardrobe into an adventure for me. I had to clear a way for myself to its farthest corner. There I would come upon my socks, which lay piled in traditional fashion - that is to say, rolled up and turned inside out. Every pair had the appearance of a little pocket. For me, nothing surpassed the pleasure of thrusting my hand as deeply as possible into its interior. I did not do this for the sake of the (...) warmth. It was the 'little present' rolled up inside that I always held in my hand and that drew me into the depths. When I had closed my fist around it and, as far as I was able, made certain that I possessed the stretchable woollen mass, there began the second phase of the game, which brought with it the unveiling. For now I proceeded to unwrap 'the present', to tease it out of its woollen pocket. I drew it ever nearer to me, until something rather disconcerting would happen: I had brought out 'the present', but the 'pocket' in which it had lain was no longer there. I could not repeat the experiment on this phenomenon often enough. It taught me that form and content, the veil and what is veiled, are the same. It led me to draw truth from works of literature as warily as the child's hand retrieves the sock from 'the pocket'."

anyway, as I was reading it I was more and more struck by the ‘pocket’ than the closet
which in some ways makes a lot of sense because you could say that the closet is the pocket of the room --> they adjoin the room/garment, but sit beyond it in this kind of nether space

But what I think Benjamin is trying to say here is that the form and the content is the same
more than that, trying to get content from the form destroys both

Though really I could be totally wrong bc really I was just so distracted by how embarrassingly/offputtingly sensual B’s description of the pocket is – his desire to reach & grasp the ‘present’ that hides within the pocket?! come on – the little hard nub where the socks are mated together?
or maybe I just / I’ve already shown you / you already know that I have a dirty mind

I’m also reading Jordy Rosenberg’s confessions of the fox right now, so maybe its just that whilst I’m reading the Benjamin quote I’m also looking at that book, but now I’m thinking about Jack Sheppard’s ‘ecstasy of trespass’

jail-breaking, pocket-picking, and quim-quaffing – of a piece w/ each other (folding inwards – the cell, the pocket, the pussy)
desire is to break open all of these things – not just break open but actually break
prison abolition
free circulation of goods
trans obviously jack fucking up this

trespass = something beyond material (escape from materiality OR needing to be immaterial to escape) – to not be a commodity
if one is material one can be measured, surveilled, bought
even by ‘History’ --> consider the return of materialism to history – Hegelian dialectics considers things in their movements and changes, interrelations and interactions. Everything is in continual process of becoming and ceasing to be, in which nothing is permanent but everything changes and is eventually superseded

I’ve been told I need to think about the materiality of my own voice – stolen?