relation to the past.

Tonight I left class feeling good, high, better than when I arrived. Not to say I felt bad or ill when class began, but more that it is impossible not to feel better after coming and going. We sit around this island of a table, the professor at one end and myself at the other, and talk about Kristeva and Kafka. Next week more of Rilke and Baudelaire. These are all some of my favorite minds. I can’t help but prefer the hours I sit engaged in the exchange of ideas, rather than the hours I feel forced to talk, listen or occasionally share—out of pure necessity—reflected stories on people and things. No one talks in class, and I see how the silence feels disturbing to the professor—how the speechlessness and vocal inactivity is distracting and distressing. I talk, bring handouts, try and give something without being too much of a character; the one male in the class had a piece of writing passed out, anonymously, to the class (but I knew it was his, despite other female’s perception that “males don’t write romantically or expose feelings”). Still the class said very little. I couldn’t help but copy sentences from his work, quoting them in my new book of materials. Male writers… ahhh… where do the words come from? and yet, how intrigued and struck I am by the men who materialize their thoughts. Home, and I find more Blanchot to buy, come across more and more photography portfolios (more and more work that excites me—photography makes me see the world differently, literature helps me see the world). Made up a big pot of soup, which really was “thick as fog” and as it cooked read Durrell’s Balthazar (Justine was exquisite—genius, so on to his next). Walked through the park to a friend’s apartment. The night was already much colder, but this winter the city keeps you conditioned and whatever its temperament may be I never seem to mind, dispute or fight it. Though as I thought all this, a man in passing said, “Nothing changes but the weather.” Ah, the routine of life, we all experience it to varying degrees. Perhaps, routines are the one thing we can rely on, if it is not the weather? Before the curtains fully draped their secret insides, the windows exposed pairs sharing wine—red cheeks caressed with emotion. This always makes me happy to see. The intimacy of red wine is a weakness of mine, regardless. I listened to a pizza boy continue on his delivery with a flat—cursing his luck. Heard some guys at a bar talking about how he wasn’t his father, unfortunately, but at least he looked damn good. Climbed the stairs of repetition and fell back on the couch, greeted by the usual ashtray of couple’s cigarettes and a freshly poured glass (and soon later, glasses) of Baileys, which in its coolness would seemingly make me feel warm. Listened to stories of love, the Honeymoon phase (which can last the entire relationship, if you do as I did ☺ treat dinners as continuous dates which is a constant reason to celebrate…and all the other secrets), work disasters and on and on. I felt like I was talking through glossy eyes and a perpetually merging smile. Leaving, I couldn’t help but take notice of how storytelling is really just a practice in enlarging ideas (usually idealized ideas) and expounding beyond the natural and intended. I mean, really, how can any of us really trust what we “know” or “say we know” of the actions and truisms of others? I shouldn’t be the one that tries and decides what another feels or felt. That is up to them. But, I guess, imaginations and assumptions lead us elsewhere and back into the minds of others. Also all the talk drove home how I miss intimacy—not physicality, but intimacy. And though hearing about relationships and seeing partners here, there and sometimes what feels like everywhere may always appear special, I know that I am lucky to have experienced what I have—to know those feelings and have an archive of those memories, but still I see how hard I judge everything else in comparison. I give fewer things a chance. And I certainly don’t believe in excuses, which can be translated as, I don’t believe in wasting time or energy. I think back through my writings, take notice how relationships, love and sex never surface on paper. My writing seems uninterested in those topics. My journals portray zero engagements. Yet, I have multiple stories that have all been so different. Stories that surprise me, stories that all have lent themselves to shaping my idea of romance, physicality, sensuality and all that isn’t that. I realize how much I have “forgotten”—that seemed to slip away into oblivion, but still exists buried beneath all the more recent or more glorified layers of engagement. It is interesting how past relations have revealed themselves in my work in a very influential and yet, masked way. As if I have worked from the essence of the individual or the questions he inspired rather than, using our storyline/plot. This is a style I discussed further with my professor this week—which I want to flesh out in writing further. Recently in talking to an old loooove and perhaps forever, infatuation, he spoke to me about my writing (I should admit, this took my breath and won’t be something I forget) and I told him how often I want to write of our times. A time where it wasn’t necessarily myself that felt differently, but the space around me that felt reborn, newly discovered and uninhabited. I felt like a stranger to the city—a city I have known and lived in all my life, but which in being there with him, I noticed I had never been and never lived inside of. I spoke sincerely of my interest in reviving those moments of memory in writing. Almost as a way of giving the enchantment a tone of realism. However, I think sometimes one needs distance from the experience—one needs maturity, perhaps to reason and not be as effected in all the wrong places. I refrain from admitting… but it is always when I am outside of the time, that I am most inside of it. Is it then that my imagination seems most real? There is no saying. But I think I am ready, or at least getting closer, to developing the character analyses, finding where the story really lies, beginning the novel and devoting myself at length to crystallizing my past and celebrating the characters that have helped develop my writing eye.