gone to costa rica

crusin' around costa rica til the 5th. wearing these glasses the entire time.

Hang On

I love when reading you find passages that reconfirm your own thoughts that had been planted in your mind. I mean, nothing thought is truly original anyway. We all meditate over the same central issues. Finding in reading good strings of words motivates, if anything, the necessity to say, write and reveal as many thoughts as one may have. I think it is important for others to recognize the courage and reward of not having to hide and conceal one's feelings, emotions, theories. All it really is, other than a form of art, is a person's personal philosophy.

I was tempted to share the below quote with a woman I had been talking with the other day. She was telling me about how miserable she has become since being married. All the lies. How she is about to call it quits. But yet, she is still holding on. But then I tried to stop and realize by doing that what it would say about me. Do I, without realizing, try and show someone what they need to see and hear rather than what they may like to. My sister told me this morning that the trouble is when I am around (a certain someone) my personality becomes such that I try to instill life lessons. And then I realized, no one wants to be told or called out on what they are doing. No one wants to be given lessons. But what if I can't help myself? I want to help and I can't help by supporting and/or not saying anything that ends with a judgement. Its unfortunate, but I can only imagine how much my presence must kill him and as a result, at times he feels he has to hate me.

"It is a horrible thing to feel what is yours falling to pieces. One even only hangs on to it in the wish to find out if there is anything permanent." -De Lautreamont, Maldoror and Poems.

Jekyll & Hyde

I always try to look terrified and/or wacky:


Last night I couldn't sleep. It was way after 4:30am and I was still wide-eyed. This lamp I have kept chiming in sync to the fan that I finally have in my room and I had taken two Valerian Root vitamins before bed (supposedly promote relaxation for sleep, but instead give you endless amounts of restless energy). So I did all of two things, ate my grandmother's special chocolate and stared around my room trying to come to a more comfortable understanding of how someone can 1) be an expert at dominating a conversation (which I now figure has all along been nervous talking energy) and consequently, be a terrible listener 2) have never used the word "sorry" or "I apologize." Someone who is so good at lying, performing, putting on an act--who can act all roles, except one that calls for true emotion or honesty (conscious-striken). I can't dismiss feelings. I can't dismiss having to philosophize the actions and inactions of others (which is really an attempt to understand others, the situation, empathize and/or sympathize, and not regret). But I can and do make the effort to dismiss toxic people that try and disrupt a healthy flow in life. It's harder to remain healthy and positive. And it is much easier to fall off and not ask much out of yourself or others. No one else is worth that risk.

Before and After Christmas

These days it is endless suspensions around the phrase (so-to-speak) “You look beautifully healthy, so healthy. Healthy.” Today a year ago, I would have been mortified and disappointed with myself. I would have irrationally translated the comment and believed that it was an alternative way of saying I looked full-figured, voluptuous and simply heavy. Despite this being the case (actually being rather curvy) or not—now, it doesn’t seem to matter. I smile, concentrate on what is really being said to me, nod and say, “I have to be. I really need the energy.” Then after my open appreciation and/or recognition of the subject, others want to proceed—“It looks like New York must really be it. Keepin’ yah healthy.” I overly agree, saying, “There can be no other way. Thank goodness, it’s keeping me alive, would never imagine going back to how it was, what it was, what I was, I couldn’t be that now.” Tonight it was a cousin that chimed in, breaking the intimacy or honesty of the conversation and laughingly said, “So you’ve gained some weight.” Yes, pounds. And I thank everything today and along the way, that has inspired me not to judge the play of perception but to go back to just “workin’ whatca got.” Of course, it has been more than just these simple and rather, superficial terms. As on the surface it seems/seemed/and was seen to be, it wasn’t. And because of that, I can look back and grow distant from the experience but always have had it and even as terrible as an experience as it was for me and everyone else, I appreciate, understand and never deny a moment. This was the first Christmas where I didn’t fall asleep wishing or wake up expecting that this would be the chance for something new, that this would be the day things changed. Today, nothing needs to.

Last night even reiterated, for myself (and this is my own way of living), that the end was and is decided for a reason. I cannot return to that moment of feeling in time—it will only be a re-experience of the past, but it will never be what it was in the past. Nor would I like it to be. I feel like the bulk of others remain at a distance because they assume I have become too serious, that I’m not “giving myself up to every experience”, or that maybe I am just simply exaggerating my assertiveness and thus, will readjust my behavior to compliment their flimsy mental states and behavioral inadequacies. The way I behave and the commentary that ensues in response to the deficient personalities I unfortunately encounter (at times too intimately, even if it just be in a locked car) is no joke. I keep pressing for others to grow up, level/ground themselves in reality (and by reality, I mean, at this age the here-and-now is no long a sugar coated existence of Candy Land board games and childhood reliance, dreamlands or wishy-washy attitudes towards others and life). It overly frustrates me; I want everyone I interact with to take “it” seriously, but they won’t—can’t—can’t even let themselves and are fearful of the reality (seen clear only after the guise and disfigurement of drugs and maybe even worse than drugs, self-denial, wears off). One must become sober to the actuality of the world. Perceive, judge and understand the events of the world the way you wish (these are the gifts we are given) but you must accept the fundamental facts—otherwise, goodbye success and goodbye successful relationships. Most suffer so severely from any commitment to the reality of life past four to twenty-two years of age, that it scares me for them. Less and less “adults” will move away from home, face their future without a team holding their hand and wiping their ass and/or brow. Denial of oneself, denial of what it means to grow—what in the world is becoming of our generation? Hungry for their past and ending up starving in their future.

in-the-middle-of-sleep:

What It Feels To Sleep

It is as if someone scheming in the dark set of the night, unscrewed my feet from the stalks of my legs and breathed black heat through the tunnel of my body, expanding and permeating in the cave of my soul.

super 8

5:23 am and delirious.

Wondering forward, I wander backwards to a place in time. A feeling sealed tight around an action. A packaged feeling positioned in an action’s space, however,—and this is where it exists out of existence—, retaining the attention of a place in time. This is the feeling of a fixed kiss. A kiss fixed on a place (a pair of lips). A kiss fixated on the space in which the action revolved. But after rationalizing and over-reasoning, this was and that is a kiss fit only for the fixation of a time. Lips match and melt having found their match. Do they freeze to a state of solid-tude when one of the two pairs of lips decide they are completely drained and therein, matchless? I remember my lips matching and melting in mid-kiss. I miss making lips melt and remember having had them match. But I don’t miss remembering the memory or miss making memories from the rememberings. Matchless, I now know three things though that I had not known before the time my lips matched and melted. One of three being, lips melt from a kiss that found its match, but the match is beyond the subject of the kiss. To have a matching kiss that melts, the time is what you need to have it made. I know the subject. I have the lips. I can take our lips back to the space. But it is beyond my natural abilities to take us back to the place in time when the lips matched and made a melting kiss. Imagination can be called upon, but that is not real and the action would be fraudulent. Backwards wondering on a match, I wander forward matchless.

flame faints

My light flickered out tonight and the time between the final flick on and the first flick out I feared I would not be able to see.

Awaiting Oblivion

A half a year ago, I courageously bought Awaiting Oblivion by Maurice Blanchot. Without much time or mind, I put it down defeated. Hours passed holding me embittered toward my decision to buy his unreadable literature. In spite of the unfeasible text’s inaccessibility, I aspired to return the published binding of spinning sentences for another author’s work who would make me move and see with his lyrical imagery. Truth be told, my condition never inspired me to make such moves and Blanchot remained shelved, unfinished. And lucky enough for me!—Tonight I squeezed the thin book out from between two others that competed for my attention; courageous, again, for the challenge. A half-year later from the first and last day I tried to read Awaiting Oblivion, I see tonight Maurice Blanchot’s blinding brilliance.

(extracts)
Here, and on this sentence that was perhaps also meant for him, he was obliged to stop. It was practically while listening to her speak that he had written these notes. He still heard her voice as he wrote. He showed them to her. She did not want to read. She read only a few passages, which she did because he gently asked her to. “Who is speaking?” she said. “Who, then, is speaking?” She sensed an error that she could not put her finger on. “Erase whatever doesn’t seem right to you.” But she could not erase anything, either. She sadly threw down all the pages….

While he gathered together the sheets of paper—and now she was watching him through curious eyes—he could not help feeling that he was bound to her by his failure. He did not understand very well why. It was as if he had touched her across the void; he had seen her for an instant. When? A few minutes ago. He had seen who she was. That did not encourage him; it suggested rather the end of everything. Period. “All right,” he said to himself, “if you don’t want to, I give up.” He was giving up, but on an intimate note, in an utterance that, it is true, was not addressed directly to her, less still to her secret. He had been aiming for something else that was more familiar to him, that he knew and with which he seemed to have lived in joyous freedom. He was astonished to discover that it was perhaps her voice. It is the voice that was entrusted to him. What an astonishing thought! He picked up the sheets of paper and wrote, “It is her voice that is entrusted to you, not what she says. What she says, the secrets that you collect and transcribe so as to give them their due, you must lead them gently, in spite of their attempt to seduce, toward the silence that you first drew out of them.” She asked him what he had written. But it was something she must not hear, that they must not hear together.

Past Present Pasting Present Future

Burning a candle To: A Dream From: The Night.
A candle burns behind the dream. The night blows between its flame. The dream breathes beyond the night. Dreaming during dark depths, the sleeper sensed light and seeks to see the sight seen beneath the night during day.

tale told truthfully:

I watch her the little doll who cries in rapid succession fire flushes her face a surge seizes then leaves the extinguished skin seals her pearly face for protection the wings of her upper lip burnt blood bubble with spittle between pangs the little doll rushes to rip the envelope of her lips words encourage their way up from the vase of her throat bidding for a string of utterances or a successful sentence to bloom as a lotus into flower the lily floats head up dreamily in the collected tear puddle dwelling on the landscape of the little doll’s skin the Poet stares as watchman in the sun of day writing the little doll’s tale to night she will not forget I was watching.

Between the eggs cracking over the pan and entering as an omelette into my mouth, I wrote:

I hold inside myself’s body All that has been sensed. Past and Present reside inside this eternal home. Inside pushing outwards. Skin screams in one long stretch. Scars result and I exist silently. The weight of Space presses its back against myself’s body. In all directions it tries to penetrate. Contact is an attempt to stifle the safety of my senses—to disrupt the shelter of their home. I will resist Space’s entry. I will remain wedged between two mounting pressures, larger than I—the Senses’ push and the Space’s press—for as long as I can hold.




I feel reborn, as if I woke anew. There is much to write, but it is probably best told in increments. Soon.

Because I can't fall inside Sleep

—Outside331’sSleep—
Don’t open your eyes yet not until I explain last night I went to bed with Sleep last night I fell for Sleep last night Sleep unclothed me left me naked in a room painted black I couldn’t see Sleep because Sleep was dark too and the room was black and the foreground blended in with the background I couldn’t tell what was far and what was close I became frustrated because Sleep was either hiding inside the room or the room was hiding behind Sleep neither were being fair to my eyes who wanted to play hide and go Sleep I hide inside the room and Sleep seeks I said where are you Sleep I can’t see you my eyes can’t find you Sleep I said I wanted to fall inside you brought me into this black room and I am trying to wrap myself around you won’t you come inside of me you won’t stage scenes in my eyes created with color everything is black one long stretch Sleep are you moving and I can’t see you or are you standing still and I can’t feel you are here Sleep you are silent Sleep I feel alone Sleep I want you to be inside me if you take me to a black room and make me go to bed are your eyes open I can’t see you did you leave is Sleep here Sleep am I inside you explain Sleep explain did you open your eyes Sleep are my eyes open Sleep are you outside me Sleep you took me to bed and left me Sleep I can’t open my eyes until you are back inside me I can’t see Sleep when you’re not inside me open your eyes Sleep do you see me inside you explain last night am I still inside Sleep?

anonymous

anonymous comments are opened up.
if you feel it, say it.
if you read it critiques and critics help.

experimental films:

finally got my work back from paree': volume needed:

The Kindle

The Kindle: Click for article
Would I actually own one? It's a hard call. One of my biggest interests (though strange) is the materiality of written words. I'm a huge nerd and fanatic for paper, layout and fonts. But then again, all I ever want to be doing is reading, so this would be practical. But I sure wouldn't be able to highlight the hell out of all my books. Oh, technology, it ain't ever gonna to end.

I'm not referring directly to the Romantic Movement.

She told me, You are a romantic writer. In today’s world there is no room for such a type. People are not readily favorable of such a language. People may not be willing to listen.

My response was simply, Maybe not now. But my writing is not necessarily for the now, nor the people of today. I am a lyrical historian and my voice will not change just for the ears of today’s people.

Then after, and now reflecting back, I am not even sure that my writing is that of a Romantic. I try to visually collect the samples of all my writing. What are they? What are they about? Love? Ek, I don’t even think so.

How could I possibly have my writing favor the motif of “romantic love” in the way it is easily understood: coupled relationship—if in actuality all I am after/seek taking control of in my own life is independence and the self’s relationship in solitude. The exploration of self-love.

I question all this because I, too, am trying to figure out where to pair my writing, how to further it, what to make it a collection of. What I do seems so contradictorily of natural suspicion. Sure, the writing I wish to pursue is romantic in the sense that I only imagine language to be lyrical. I want it to play like music—make the body mentally and physically move, even after it ceases to play. But the actual content of my writing analyses, unravels and reveals the conflict of another type of romance: 1) a romance of the self in a relationship with the other. A romance that one struggles with, a romance that evokes scenes that are staged, performed—a romance that is a self-designed play. Therefore, relationships become for one’s self, more than they are for the other. Intimacy strangles the self. It is something one is not comfortable with—it is an act one hides from. 2) A romance that is understood, explained, experienced and highly dependent upon sensation. This relationship begs for intimacy, craves touch and is seen in the dark confines of the night. Is it a dream? Or is it an ideal?—which is also a dream. Think: in the act of “making love” one is told early on that it is only appropriate to close your eyes. We are instructed, we are guided, at our earliest stages to seal tight our eyelids, close the curtains of our eyes, see at first black and then imagine a scene, a scenario, an ideal fantasy that will take us to a moment or moments of climax. Is ecstasy only achieved in dream? Is dream only awoken in the intoxication of ecstasy? Is The Ideal the figure of highest pleasure?

The romances of my writing are noncommittal. Subjects share nothing. They give. These romantic relationships are involved for the pleasure of receiving. Perhaps, my characters at the core are all femme fatales. Through others’ mystical essences they look for sensations, both erotic and lyrical, they look for words given in conversation (they do not share words because they speak at each other) to be evocative and provocative. This type of romance is explored for the heightened moments that will hopefully awaken one to a different state (reality?) or a different intellectual understanding. Relationships are sought for the emotional awakening necessary for insight. Are my characters most concerned with romance in the way of what the other can do to them—how the other can make one feel—and how one can make and change the other by their own self power? If so romance, more than ever, seems harmful.

And under all that explanation, still, what the hell is it all about?

lowleighlow

I just made the mistake.

I just made the most accurate decision to reminisce at a less sober state. More than likely, the night's own nostalgia and good, good conversations made me stumble or rather, tumble back on to an old (though not long ago enough) photograph. And either my unsober state is making me see selves in alternate realities or my unsober sight is finally seeing images more sober(ly), but thank goodness for proof, the past and for proof of the past. I was thin as death. And as I explained, even tonight, I know exactly why I got to that level and openly reveal and honestly reflect at what brought me there, what it was all really about and how it has changed my 'now'. But to see it still existing in documentation and thus in some form of reality, it is hard to imagine that what I see was not coming from an imagination but a true time and thus reality. I feel most ashamed of those that were linked in pictures or in contact with me or 'that' person (but really, we are one in the same and that was very much me). I enjoy and can appreciate that others involved around me never hid from it or me and that I never hid from the world either. And even months after, that I can still openly have the pictures floating about and still remember the judgment that was given, and not delete it all. Not try and erase what happened, what was experienced, what was real. I am, an inspiration. "The Bounce Back."

I still trust my quote that "I lived by" in middle and highschool: Criticism is Inspiration. That's all it is.

Thursday

I rose and through the doorway, sliced open, saw him coiled, hovering comfortably over the small shell of her body. The sun casting a glow upon the covers helped mimic the scene I imagined: two purring cats committed to an afternoon nap. This made me happy. Happy for them. The budding of something new, something fresh. One should always preserve the early stage and encourage themselves not to rush pass the delicacy and fragility of new romance. Maturity will come and carry itself forward, and it is then, in age, that we look back on the youth and remember what it was like to be childlike, and simple.

I left early, weaving myself through the park that I walk through multiple times daily. The dog run is being renovated and I wonder, where have all the dogs gone? Do they realize that they have skipped a day at the park? Do they question when they will be back? Are thoughts just a continuous strand of propositions that plague us, rather than serve as any form of fulfillment? See, another question.

I think (over and over and over again) how fortunate I am, that I begin my mornings walking instep with a flow of others—merging from disconnected realms, the veins of different streets—and come flowing together, connecting, crossing and moving on. You arrive in New York City completely uprooted and immediately are replanted. And yet, the fascinating actuality is that as you become (and have to become in order to survive) more in control of your self existing alone (more involved in a one-on-one relationship with your self than you may be anywhere else in the world) you are comforted by all the others the city is composed of, existing just as you, on foot in the early mornings, walking themselves to where they have planned to be. You are a portrait intimately involved in the composition of the city.

Listening to music, no different than all the others I walk up, around and against, I idolize the ability rhythms have to reshape and recolor our experienced reality. The songs I listen to paint different scenes of my morning. The person next to me, listening to something different, experiencing the music differently, is seeing the scene of his morning play out differently than I am. And this fascinates me. It fascinates me that with a playlist complied of only two artists, the texture of my reality changes dramatically. Radiohead freezes all places and things in time. And it is only the people that actively exist and also actively resist the mechanics of time. People stretch in place and weave their bodies around a motionless city. The song ends, the artist changes and Amandine acts in opposition to Radiohead. Listening, I feel cemented and all places and things move freely and quickly around me in season. I move but feel like I am getting nowhere and will go nowhere. I think the more I emerge myself into music, the more satisfied I will be with my immediate reality. Even though that really is a contradiction.

Arriving, I sat down waiting for my “mentor” (brief mention: mid 60s, has changed the course of my life in the past half year, created an independent study with her this semester called Reinventing the “I”. got accepted in the Gallatin’s art festival where she will be my mentor for what I am pursing and next semester we are doing another independent study, she is the most fascinating, soft-spoken and intelligent woman that I have been blessed to stumble across). I began taking notes in my third book—alas, since September I have filled three books of notes, quotes, fragmented prose, thought and the like.

She came tumbling in with more energy than I have ever seen her with. We resituated ourselves in, what we laughed about later, a Kafkaesque closet/copy room, to begin discussing. Except, instead of discussing Nin she handed me two works I had done with a note saying, Instead of responding with 20 pages I want to discuss what you have done when I see you. We proceeded for the next hours to unveil what I had done. Never—have I been so honored or so.. I can’t even find the words. All I could do while she spoke of it was laugh and smile… and smile… and smile. My work is inaccessible, indulgent even, opaque, thick, theorized, masked with symbolism and placed in a surreality. I think it was Nin who said her writing was a language that once people learned would understand how important it was. And so, all I could do was laugh and smile because, now, she knows me, she knows my work, she knows the collection of ideas I work with, the bodies of work I read and she is understanding my language—she is seeing how I define my symbols, my metaphors and unveiling the self that is, always, buried beneath the guises of my writing. To understand my writing is to understand me at my purest, gentlest and most honest. To understand my writing is to discover my reactions, reflections and my idealizations. It is to reveal the mystery which is [perhaps] why I choose to make it so inaccessible to begin with, because truth and reality are inaccessible even to me.

without walls

Her eyes carry clouds delicately through the night.
At seven it begins to shower.
Rain trembles out, dangerously defeated, dampening
the exterior decoration of her face.
Snow falls from the ceiling.
Landing on her lashes
And slowly
Licking the corners of her eyes

She is wearing winter’s weather.
Cold blood frozen under her crystalline skin
Looks like rubies contained in a glass case
The vein’s body is frozen with ruby blood
(easily breakable).

She shakes erratically
A dance of deep carnal grooves.
- in motion -
The curtains rise but
the film of her eyes stops playing.
She no longer feels herself
watching her dream
And this, this, wakes her.

Waking drugged by dream,
she dreams she wakes from dreaming.

Her mooneyes give no glow
because they sink in
deep pools of depleted dreams.
Dreamless, sleep dies and she is born anew.

Her sheets are wet and wishful.
Her body must have melted and left
Remainders of tissue as reminders.
Which reminds her to remember that he said,

Proceed from the dream outward.

The clouds rained.
The ceiling snowed.

Somewhere someone said,

Start from the state you are in
and proceed further.

Her face is wrinkled with age,
(She has grown sad)
And is wet from tears.
It did not rain. It never snows.

Beneath where her head sleeps,
she reaches for her pillow book but
Writing nothing shows.

The fearful room turns black to hide.
No one can see her, colorless.
She sees she does not exist.
She reaches for the walls, trying to walk the walls and corner a light that will show a mirror that will reflect her standing self
if she exists.

Nothing. No one.

“There are no walls. There are no walls.”
There are no walls here to enclose her body.
Reaching to her left,
Trying to touch what separates her from
The Other Side.
She falls through the air.
The only thing to catch her is
whatever lies beneath.
(Beneath her dream)

She watches herself saying,
“There are no walls. I feel like I am sitting in the middle of the world. I don’t know if I have come a long way or have more to go. The poet is a lover. Trying to write in the middle of the world a description of an intangible state of dream. Forgetting how it started and how it will end, the poet becomes trapped inside a confusing world of words, trying to make sense of the dream. I want to run forever, shaking myself sober from drugged dreams. But it is dark. And there are no walls and I don’t know if I have already run a long way or still have more to go.”

Silent, she was speaking in sleep.
Only kissing air.
Writing, she never materialized words.
She didn’t want to risk awaking
from the dream she was safely sleeping in.

One should always be drunk with sleep
To avoid seeing the multiple dimensions
of reality.

peektures: