“If you could change anything about me—“
What?
“What would it be?”
Your eyes. I like green eyes.
“That’s terrible, Kid”
Teaches you not to ask superficial questions.
“But really, my eyes, you don’t like them?”
What about me?
“I love yours.”
But what would you change?
“How you never became a photographer.”
I said that wouldn’t last.
“Kid, will you remember me when you’re gone?”
I’m not leaving.
“That’s what they all say. You already are going.”
Who is they?
“All of us.”
Sunday, May 31, 2009
atoms.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
"Now I have the sort of table I admire"
Because I was unable to carry the table to my apartment, a man at the furniture store strapped it to the bed of his truck and drove both me and the table the twelve or so blocks to my apartment. With furniture, it's just the surface you have to be careful of, but with people, unless it's a dead person's body, in which case it's more like furniture, there are all these invisible little things that can set them off, the little things related to bigger things, the big things like filters or warped glasses through which people perceive themselves and their surroundings. This, though not exactly, is what the man told me as we were driving, and while I thought the comparison between furniture and people was simple, I understood what he meant, that a person’s past experience alters how she perceives her present surroundings, whereas the experience of furniture is recorded primarily on its surface. Along the way, the man got lost while telling me about how much he enjoyed the job at the furniture shop after working for so many years as a driver, first of a limo, then of a hearse. I did consider and fear when choosing it that its structure was compromised in ways that would only be apparent later, when I wasn’t expecting it, though this has not happened yet as far as I am aware.
As I am writing my phone number and watching the just-inked numbers blur, he calls the work of another sculptor superficial, which is a word I don't like, because who's to say that what's below a surface is not another surface, that one is better than another? I liked to trace the ink marks on the off-white walls with my finger the way I liked to trace my parents' signatures, mimicking the loops and folds of their thoughts as they were writing, as if what's written is any indication of what the writer was thinking. When I knew him best was when I was in school, studying painting, and he was an assistant professor who let it be known that painting, while often subtle, is inferior to sculpture because it lacks a dimension, but I never knew him well, and didn't want to. This seemed like such a simple criticism, yet one he held to with conviction, and it became part of his reputation, which surrounded him like a vacuum. Other words that are similar to simple, and which I know I've used, perhaps unfairly: facile, surface, superficial.
Finally we part, he going into his building, me turning in a circle before setting out in a direction. Realizing that I was being watched and possibly mocked, I would press my skirt down though the feeling of baring my legs was alluring. I look into doorways for the comfort of seeing someone in the midst of entering or exiting, the door opening, the air of inside and outside exchanging, a mouth slightly open as if awaiting an answer or arriving at the beginning or end of a sentence, and I suppose I do this because I would like to be where they are, in their thoughts for a moment. I tipped the man and thanked him for moving my table, which I could not have done alone, and he said something that concluded what he'd started to say earlier but left hanging—pink faded gum in the corner of his mouth—while he negotiated parking in a too-small space by pulling forward and backward, over and over, pivoting the steering wheel about his palm, motions that make me think of the tortuous movement—false starts, circling, and backpedaling—that goes on in me while I negotiate difficult conversations, and often while I'm writing, which is like having a conversation with one's memory.
People want to give you directions, said the man helping me with my table, They want you to listen to their problems and do for them what they can't do for themselves, which is different for everyone, we all have different strengths and weaknesses, you might be able to do something I can't, but I can do something your neighbor can't, so power among people is constantly shifting, and I can't understand how any one person ever gets to a place of importance, though ignorance is rampant, and—
Friday, May 29, 2009
Lucy Ives:
via GutCult
"To Find the Particular Place and Then to Hold On To It"
To find the particular place and then to hold onto it
The streets were wet where I was walking, what a phenomenal force she used to be
I said to myself as a white wraith rode out on a rope of light that went
Straight out horizontal from one eye of an ambulance
Burning rubber, the on-off flashes, getting away and just thinking
That’s ok, I tell myself, trying to enter one of the clouds passing overhead
I keep remembering what you said before we watched those stupid videos
And now how I peel the sticky paper off my eyes
You can’t look at your own ability to see, you have to just look
So I want to: at the candles jumping across the table on the tv
over the knifed-in name of the devil
They lock him in the ceiling
He makes a kingdom of the air, showing his teeth, making both a rule and a display out of his feeling
walking the long earth so active he can never get over it
How have I come to aspire to this also
From my forehead grow two wispy antennae and I go past a lot of stores
carrying gray boxes in my skull and putting your cool words in them
(Delight)
Have you ever thought it is strange how you have to talk to so many people each day who don’t need your existence
Who don’t need your weird existence like
I don’t need yours, reader
O push the clouds away, O push away the thick silk mat of me coming towards you
Push now the barrier in your mouth
A whole hill of tissue a whole room
We either say no words or weep into it
"To All Other Things What I Prefer Most Is Thinking What I Really Think"
To all other things what I prefer most is thinking what I really think
Even if I cannot say the words in a blue room dressed with diners and
recognized official faces dripping with very little save advice and allergies
Outdoors is a garden dripping with ferns where comes an orange-eyed cat
with a green branch, with a hollow green branch he has strung like a guitar
My blue hand slips in to scratch behind his pearly ear and then flies off
again like a bird: he turns his head like he would begin
but that was a bird
Why is it so far off
I can tell you how selfish I’ve become, this wasn’t a necessary transformation
I am telling you this as you look for the bird, I lie back with my back bent
over a star, with my long scaled back wrapped around a star
now sucking the hot tip of my finger
the face of the cat is your face and it burns
you smile like so many kitchens, pulling your white fur socks up
to make your way back to the party
Meanwhile the only thing filling my body is money
Now and then the scent of lucre drips from my eye in a gooey pearl
The people inside love a musical cat
The stars retreat like wheels
Thursday, May 28, 2009
We Don't Discuss Our Happiness.
All day, I thought to write about him. Instead, my cat tailed behind. Room to room, I went and left, absentmindedly. When she became tired, I sat behind her, admiring her baggy belly falling off the windowsill. Larger than most my friends’, her eyes show curiosity. I sat behind her, and for an hour thought about her small heart; how I love an animal more than anyone in my world. This love is significant; maybe I’m pathetic. She concentrated on the outside, better than I ever could. Sure, I can stare but thinking never pauses. Could she be as distracted? Splices of sight fall, rain too. There may not be any reality in this, nor a truth we are responsible for and yet, in recognition our bodies react with nostalgia. A creeping silence that rushes inward; a sound silencing the rest. Bodies are inconsistent, sensations inexplicable. We live with this failure all our lives. Do you know how often I let others and—worse—myself down by failing to communicate, by changing? The surface is dry on his hand. This isn’t how I am, how I feel. A woman can only hope she isn’t measured by appearance; although it speaks so loudly over her. The bedroom door was open, and before closing out the rain, I put my palm up to touch it, try to smell it. But nothing. I feel as he does, when his ear drops closest to my heart. My hand is as wet as it will ever be. And the outside is how I am. Today is a day from summer when everything seems to be falling. My cat sees this, too; giving me a sense that for the first time I am acknowledging reality.
I think that the rushing and the rumbles are: the body's pulsations; consciousness, entering the body, experiences it as a lumbering giant; the events of this dream are explainable to me thus.And—I think ...
—"He's coming, he's coming; look—he's coming"—
—and the shags of diamond torrents are borne off under your feet: into the cavelike windings of the skull ... And you see that He is coming in ... He stands amidst a radiant roar of rays, amidst the clean facets of the walls; everything is white and diamond; and—he looks ... That Very One ... And—with the very same glance ... which you recognize as ... the one that has been resounding in your soul: immemorially familiar, very cherished, forgettable never ...
A voice:—
—"I ...It has come, it has come, it has come: It has come—"I ..."
—picture: you are entering; and—you raise your head: to the left and to the right run symmetrical rib-vaults; their surfaces are whimsically arched; they rise up before you like a memory ... of memory; the wonderful arcs of the skeleton temple; in front is a passage ... to the white altar; and the skull is there; from the huge, resonant halls, amid the white splendor of juttings, you turn back—toward the exit; worlds of delirium are burning there; amazement, confusion, fear, seize control: actuality, from which you have fallen, is—still not the world...
Contemplation of the skull is strange: and it is the memory of a memory of the splendid skeleton temple hollowed out by our "I" in cliffs of black gloom; in the temple of the body—lie the plans of temples; and from the temple ruins, I believe, will rise: a temple of the body.
. . . . . . . . .
Contemplation of the skull consoles, reminds, and—dimly teaches something. The gesture of arcs above the eyebrows is known to us; this is the gesture of the winged "I" risen up from a covered coffin, from a cave, in order to ascend at some time; in order to ... return to its homeland ...
(Continues...)
Kotik Letaev by Andrei Bely.
Russian Author
Kotik Letaev
By Andrei Bely
Translated by GERALD J. JANECEK
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1999 Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-8101-1626-X
Chapter One
The Labyrinth of Delirium
A time of inexpressible anguish ...
All is in me ... and I am in all.
—F. Tyutchev
"Thou—art."
The first "thou—art" grips me in imageless deliria; and—
— in age-old, immemorially familiar ones: inexpressibilities, unprecedentednesses of consciousness lying in the body, the mathematically precise sensation that you are both you and not you, but ... a kind of swelling into nowhere and nothing, which all the same is not to be mastered, and—
—"What is this?" ...
Thus would I condense in a word the unutterability of the rising of my infant life:—
—the pain of sitting in organs; the sensations were horrible; and—thingless; nonetheless—age-old: immemorially familiar—
—there was no division into "I" and "Not-I," there was no space, no time ...
And instead of this there was:—
—a state of sensations in tension; as if everything were expanding-expanding-expanding: spreading and smothering; and everything was beginning to rush about in itself as wing-horned storm clouds.
Later a semblance arose: a sphere experiencing itself; the sphere, many eyed and turned inward, experiencing itself, sensed only—"inside"; it sensed invincible distances: from the periphery to ... the center.
And consciousness was: a growing consciousness of the unencompassable, an embracing of the unencompassable; the invincible distances of space created a horrible sensation; sensation was running from the circumference of the spherical semblance—to grope: inside itself ... farther; as sensation, consciousness inside itself ... crawled: inside itself; a vague knowledge was being attained: consciousness was being transferred; it rushed from the periphery to the center like wing-horned storm clouds; and—it was tormented.
—"That's not allowed."
—"Without end."
—"I'm being pulled over ..."
—"Help ..."
The center—was flashing:—
—"I'm alone in the unencompassable."
—"There is nothing inside; everything is—outside ..."
And it was snuffed out again. Consciousness, expanding, ran back.
—"That's not allowed, that's not allowed: Help ..."
"I'm—expanding ..."—
—that's what the little child would have said if he could have spoken, if he could have understood; but—he could not speak; and—he could not understand; and—the little child cried out: why?—they were not understanding, they did not understand.
. . . . . . . . .
The Formation of Consciousness
In that far-distant time "I" didn't exist ...—
—There was a sickly little body; and consciousness, embracing it, experienced itself in impenetrable unencompassability; nonetheless, being penetrated by consciousness, the body puffed up with growth, like a Grecian sponge absorbing water; consciousness was outside the body; in place of a body there was a sense of an immense chasm: of consciousness in our meaning of the word, where there was still no thought, where still appearing ...—
—(if these sensations had remained for me in my future days and if their full intelligence had arisen in this dark place and illuminated my body; if I could have turned my gaze into myself and illuminated myself—then I would have seen: our sky; the clouds there run on thunders in my sky of spiritual-soulness in a white outpouring; and the outpouring—are windy and branching; and—they leaf out; everything is thrown about by thoughts; and all of this is reflected: in the sky above us; that's why it speaks to us; and that's why we recognize it ...)—
—where there was still no thought, where still appearing to me were: the first bubblings of delirium.
. . . . . . . . .
Foam was formed for me: warmth was foaming up for me; and I was tormented by a red heat-glow; the drenched body was bubbling over with consciousness (bones in acids hiss with bubbly foam); and up foamed ... the first image: my life began to bubble with images; and up on these foams for me foamed:—
—things and thoughts ...
. . . . . . . . .
The world and thought are only the foams: of menacing cosmic images; blood pulsates with their flight; thoughts are lit by their fires; and these images are—myths.
Myths are ancient being: like the continents, like the seas, these myths rose up to me once; the baby wandered in them; he was also delirious in them like everyone at first: everyone wandered in them; and when they collapsed, then everyone became delirious from them ... for the first time; in the beginning—they lived in them.
Nowadays the ancient myths have fallen away below us as seas; and as oceans of deliria they rage and lick the firmness: of lands and consciousnesses; visibility was appearing in them; "I" and "Not-I" was appearing; and separatenesses. But the seas advanced: a fateful legacy, the cosmos burst into actuality; in vain one hid in the shreds of actuality; everything melted in unprotectedness: everything was expanding; the lands were disappearing in the seas; consciousness was being torn up in myths of the horrible Progenitress; and the floods bubbled.
A thought-ark—was being built; consciousnesses from the world which had gone away below us floated past it to ... a new world.
The fateful floods still rage in us (the threshold of consciousness is unstable): be careful—they will gush out.
We Arose in the Seas
In us are worlds—of seas: of "Mothers"; and they rage in redfrenzied gangs of deliria ...
My childhood body is a delirium of "mothers"; outside it there is only an eye; this eye is a bubble on a flying whirlpool: it would appear and ... it's gone; only my head is in the world: my feet are still in the womb; the womb has bound my feet: and I sense myself to be—snake legged; and my thoughts are snake-legged myths: I am experiencing titanicity.
All thoughts are like whirlpools: the ocean beats in each one; and it pours into the body—like a cosmic tempest; childhood thought arising resembles a comet; now it falls into the body; and—its tail turns bloody; and—it pours out in rains of bloody carbuncles: into the ocean of sensations; and in between body and thought, in a whirlpool of water and fire, someone has catapulted the baby; and—the baby is frightened.
. . . . . . . . . .
—"Help ..."
—"No strength"
—"Save me ..."
. . . . . . . . .
—"It's growth, madame."
. . . . . . . . .
—"Help ..."
—"No strength"
—"Save me ..."
. . . . . . . . .
The little child does not know how to shout like this (he will shout like this later); snakes are crawling—in him, around him; they are filling his cradle; and—they hiss in his ears.
You have heard this hiss—in a quiet midday hour when everything is still and the sun is shooting rays ...
You have heard this whistle already: the whistle of pines.
. . . . . . . . .
I continue to envelop with words the very first events of life:—
—to me sensation is a snake: in it—desire, feeling, and thought run away into one immense, snake-legged body: of the Titan; the Titan is smothering me; and my consciousness is tearing out: it has torn out—it is gone ...—
—with the exception of a certain point, precipitated—
—into nillions of aeons!—
—to master the measureless ...
It—did not attempt to master.
. . . . . . . . .
This is—the first event of being; remembering holds it firmly; and precisely describes it; if it is such (and it is)—
—prebody life is exposed at one of its edges ... in the fact of memory.
The Old Woman
The first semblance of an image was an accretion onto the imagelessness of my states.
It was not a dream: a dream is what one wakes up from; I, though ...—had not waked up yet; actuality and dream did not alternate with each other in my given world. The givenness itself was posed as a difficult question ...
Unawakednesses swarmed up for me to wakedness—
—I both lived
and struggled in bubblings!—
—unawakednesses, not similar to dreams ...
No, they are not dreams, but—I would say—
—spyings behind one's back; and—the desire to start from place; not rushings in whirlwinds of meaninglessness, being developed thousand-wingedly, momentarily, and falling apart into thousands of tornados flying thousand-wingedly—not such rushings into "I" (with space lying inside it), but ...—a movement in something: in my own self (for me space had already become established) ...—
—if I moved—it was beginning, it was becoming established—most of all behind my back: something like that; it—was not me, but was—so fiery, red: spherical and searing; in a word—old-womany: why? I could not say.
Imagelessness was forming into an image: and—an image was formed.
Inexpressibilities, unprecedentednesses of consciousness lying in the body—the sensation that you are both you and not you, but a kind of swelling—was experienced now approximately thus:—
—you are not you, because next to you an old woman—has half stuck to you: spherical and searing; that's her swelling; and you—no: you are all right, okay, nothing to do with it ...
—But everything was becoming old-womany.
I was again being filled up with the old woman: this is the way a turkey fills up its slackened wattle—to bright red puffiness; this extension or extenuation in the surrounding, devouring, crawling, bustling, whirlpool emptiness was turning out to be: invisibly lying down, hugging, sucking; all you had to do was move and this frankly old-womany thing lying next to you—
—would quickly dash away; for a moment it would become visible to me:—
—as if the dark itself had melted in fiery slashes: a lightning centipede would spread out in fire-horned flocks and run around in the distressed, black firmness ...—
—then the frenzied sphere would flame up and ...—
—the darkness would fall apart into a red world of circling carbuncles ...
. . . . . . . . .
I don't know when it was, but I ... spied on her: behind my back—
—as she, describing an arc in space, collapsed directly into my back: out of the hurricanes of a red world, shooting a rain of carbuncles; her white-hot head bent around with its champing mouth and very nasty eyes; I rushed over the precipice; and above me in cliffs of light and heat she fell down—onto my back; and, once she had grabbed my back, she made circles with me in space ...—
—I myself was a circle.
. . . . . . . . .
I think that "old woman" is one of my out-of-body conditions not wanting to accept "I" and living: an isolated, special, age-old life; this life sprouts at times: in senile old women and insane people who lapse into childhood; and—it rushes by in thundery summer lightning during July nights; its cockles rustle in the dust of life:
The wenchy prattle of the Parcae ...
The mousy bustle of life ...
A gossiping woman even now reminds me of the "old woman ": in her there is something "mystical ..."
Burning As If on Fire
My first conscious moment is—a dot; it penetrates the meaninglessness; and—expanding, it becomes a sphere, but the sphere—flies apart: the meaninglessness, penetrating it, tears it apart ...
Flocks of soapy spheres fly out of a light straw ... A sphere would fly out, tremble, play out with sparkle; and—burst; a tiny drop of viscous fluid, puffed up by the air, would begin to play with the lights of the world ... Nothing, something, and again nothing; once again something; all is in me, I am in all ... Such are my first moments ... Then—
—scarcely noticeable torches flashed; darkness began to crawl off me (like skin from a young snake); sensations were separating from skin: they went away under my skin: out fell black-born lands—
—my skin became like ... a vault: space is like this for us; my first impression of it is that it is—a corridor ...—
—later I conceive of our corridor as a remembering of the time when it had been my skin; it would move with me; if you turn around behind—it squeezes together into a hole; ahead it opens up to the light; little passageways, corridors, and alleys are familiar to me later; even too familiar: here is an "I"; and there is an "I" ...
Rooms are—parts of the body; they have been thrown off by me; and—they hang over me, in order to fall apart for me afterward and become: black-born land; I have been forming things inside my body for millennia; and out of my body I throw: my strange buildings—
—(even today:—I am shaping a temple of thought in my head, solidifying it as ... a skull; I will remove my skull; I will make it—the cupola of a temple; the time will come: I will walk through a huge temple; and I will walk out of the temple: as easily as we walk out of a room).
. . . . . . . . .
Sensations were separating from skin: the skin became—a pendule; I crawled in it as if in a long pipe; and after me—they crawled: from the hole; the entrance into life is like this ...—
—At first there were no images, but there was a place for them in the pendule ahead; very soon they opened up: my nursery room; the hole was healing over from behind, turning—into a stove mouth (the stove mouth is—a remembering of something old and long since disappeared: the wind howls in the stovepipe about pretemporal consciousness); between the holes (of my past and future) went a current of surpassing images: they would huddle up, expand, change shape, dash about, and, drenching me with boiling water, they would stick to me (their remnants are the wallpaper: and at night they rush for me as the starry sky rushes past) ... An extremely long reptile, Uncle Vasya, used to crawl out at me from behind: snake legged, mustached, he was then cut into pieces; one piece of him used to drop in on us for dinner, and later I encountered another: on the cover of a very useful booklet, Extinct Monsters; it is called a "dinosaur"; they say—they have died out; I still encountered them: in the first moments of consciousness.
Here is my image of entering into life: a corridor, a vault and darkness; serpents are rushing after me ...—
—this image is akin to the image of a journey through temple corridors accompanied by a bullheaded man with a staff ...—
. . . . . . . . .
All this was etched into me by the voice of my mother:
—"He is burning as if on fire!"
They later told me that I was continually sick: with dysentery, with scarlet fever, and with measles: at exactly that time ...
Doctor Dorionov
I remember a little room: I don't remember the things in it; but—disorder in everything; everything was—tossed about topsyturvy, dug up as ... in my soul—which was palpitating, alarmed, frightened because ...—
—Grandma, shaken by fears, but hiding the fears from me and yet infecting me with fears—is sitting there rolling cigarettes for herself: without a bonnet, bald; her forehead wrinkles up when, raising her eyes above her eyeglasses, she gazes at me frowning—in a brown housecoat which stands out against a wall—of tobacco smoke; and in the flickerings of the candle, the housecoat and bald spot do not seem good to me. I know—it's bad: completely bad even; but why—this I cannot understand; perhaps because Grandma's indecency is open to me (instead of a bonnet with lilac ribbons, an entirely bare head), perhaps because a whole half of the wall is entirely absent: not four walls—three walls; the fourth—has been thrown open in a dark-bottomed grin with a multitude of rooms—
—it's all rooms,
rooms, rooms!—
—step into them and you will not come back, and you will be grabbed by things, it's not yet clear by what kind, but, it seems, by armchairs in severe gray slipcovers which stick out in the deaf-mute dark; the essence though is not in the armchairs, but, so to speak, in the extensions of airy material and in the open possibility of sensing the chilly race of a draft from room to room, of seeing an armchair jump ... in a mirror. In a word—bad rooms!
Meanwhile: conscious of the unthinkableness of being there, all the same, in spite of everything, someone had become active there; and—he carelessly fusses among the chairs—sits awhile, walks awhile, lumbers around, and directs—his aimless step, barely perceptible from here, around the distant voids ...
If one is entirely quiet, then the step will not want to come closer, because it prefers to make noise there alone rather than to bother us with the horrible possibility of experiencing the invasion of the step; and—the main thing: to feel—the lack of a wall separating you from the step; it is possible to live in such a situation; moving around is also possible perhaps; but—without making a single noise; make noise, and—it will start: to make noises, to stamp its feet, to get stronger, regenerating rumbles.
I feel the impossibility of further remaining without a single sound: I want to give out a sound; Grandma, giving a shudder like an aspen leaf, threatens me with her hand:
—"None of that: no, no, no!"
I—make a loud click: and oh!—what I did!
It—is occurring, it has already occurred, because the one who has been living there, summoned by the noise, is slogging around already; and he is already getting stronger; from far, far away he answers my summons; and—ti:-te:-ta:-to:-tu!—he makes stomping noises for me: he is that very one (but who, I don't know) ... This happened many many times: out of the darkness the rumbles of the pointless, severe step treaded; if one ran up to the little bed and if, wrapped up, one fell asleep, then nothing would happen: it all would end; already falling asleep, I would be hearing the dissolution of the rumble into a quiet whistle and the snoring of someone calmly sleeping ...
Too late ...—
—out toward me
from the black
rumble ran—
—a quite prosaic fat man with a short neck, blond haired, a healthy fellow: he would turn his paunch around; he would sparkle at me with his gold eyeglasses; and—with his little golden beard; later he appeared also when I was awake: this was Dorionov, Artyom Dosifeevich, my doctor; they later told me that I was continually sick; and at that very time. Doctor Dorionov, I remember—had monstrous galoshes, soled with something hard: and, arriving in the vestibule, he would produce a rumble with them; I always recognized him by the thunder-bearing stomps, by the huge raccoon coat hanging in the vestibule, and by the sharp ring at the entrance door; before he appeared, I would develop: aching leg pains; he would prescribe cod-liver oil; and with this he would slap himself on the knees, rupturing himself with good-natured laughter; it seems he raised canaries at home; and when he heard a song—
a gray-winged swallow hovers
beneath my jamb-framed window—
—then tears would flood his face: he used to play checkers with Father, and he would tease Grandma and maintain that we didn't live on a sphere, but—in a sphere.
. . . . . . . . .
I think that the rushing and the rumbles are: the body's pulsations; consciousness, entering the body, experiences it as a lumbering giant; the events of this dream are explainable to me thus.
And—I think ...—
And I Think ...
--Passages, rooms, corridors, remind us of our body, give us the image of our body; they show us our body; they are the organs of the body ... of the universe, the corpse of which is the world visible to us; we have thrown it off from ourselves: and it has congealed outside us; they are the bones of earlier forms of life among which we walk; the visible world is the corpse of the distant past; we lower ourselves to it out of our genuine state of being—to rework its forms; thus we enter the gateway of birth; passages, rooms, corridors, remind us of our past; they give us the image of our past; they are the organs ... of past life ...—
—passages, rooms, corridors, arising in my first moments of consciousness, transfer me into the most ancient era of life: into the cave period; I experience the life of black voids hollowed out in the mountains with fires and beings running around in the blackness, gripped by fear; the beings penetrate the depths of the holes because winged monsters stand guard at the entrance of the holes; I experience the cave period; I experience life in catacombs; I experience ... Egypt beneath the pyramids: we live in the body of the Sphinx; rooms, corridors, are the voids between the bones of the Sphinx's body; if I chisel into the wall ... I won't find Arbat Street: and—I won't find Moscow; maybe ... I will see expanses of the Libyan desert; in the middle of it stands ... a Lion: he is waiting for me...
. . . . . . . . .
Imagine a human skull:—
—huge, huge, huge, exceeding all dimensions, all temples; imagine ... It rises before you: its porous whiteness has risen up as a temple carved in a mountain; a powerful temple with a white cupola materializes out of the darkness; inimitable are the curvatures of its walls; inimitable are its chiseled surfaces; inimitable are the architraves of columns at its entrance: a colossal, chiseled mouth; a multidentil-columned mouth, the entrance opens up the measureless, dusk-blown halls of the skull's compartments; rocky peaks rise up into the dusk of the vault; the bony vaults echo back and forth in a resonant clamor; and—they reach down to embrace you; and—they form a huge polyphony of the developing cosmos; and ponderously, precipitously, the indentations descend; gazes fall into grins of gorges—multiform holes—of passages leading in rapid lines off into the labyrinth of semicircular canals; you go out to the altar place—above the ossis sphenoidei ... Here is where the priest will come; and—you wait: before you is the interior of the forehead: suddenly it breaks apart; and through the breach made in the gray-black, bewhistled, wind-licked world rush: walls of light and torrents; and they fall like swirls of howling, singing rays: they begin to lash you in the face:
—"He's coming, he's coming; look—he's coming"—
—and the shags of diamond torrents are borne off under your feet: into the cavelike windings of the skull ... And you see that He is coming in ... He stands amidst a radiant roar of rays, amidst the clean facets of the walls; everything is white and diamond; and—he looks ... That Very One ... And—with the very same glance ... which you recognize as ... the one that has been resounding in your soul: immemorially familiar, very cherished, forgettable never ...
A voice:—
—"I ...
It has come, it has come, it has come: It has come—"I ..."
. . . . . . . . .
Picture a skeleton: it has thrown out its arms—bones—in the form of a cross; and—it is motionlessly stretched out, in order to ... rise on the third day ...
Picture:—
—you—tiny-tiny-tiny—defenselessly plummeted into nillions of aeons—to try to overcome them and master them—are gripped by the black whistles of voids and you are rushing forward as a quick-moving point (this is the first breakthrough of consciousness: remembering holds it firmly and precisely describes it); prebody life is horribly and darkly exposed; the old woman is rushing after you; and in a hurricane of the red world she has stretched out her giant arms; and you are unprotected; suddenly --a push: you—itty-bitty have suddenly knocked against the skeletal body of the temple; you escape into the interior of the temple; and you hear how the oceans of the red world are smashing themselves against it: there the old woman has bent down; she cannot enter—
—picture: you are entering; and—you raise your head: to the left and to the right run symmetrical rib-vaults; their surfaces are whimsically arched; they rise up before you like a memory ... of memory; the wonderful arcs of the skeleton temple; in front is a passage ... to the white altar; and the skull is there; from the huge, resonant halls, amid the white splendor of juttings, you turn back—toward the exit; worlds of delirium are burning there; amazement, confusion, fear, seize control: actuality, from which you have fallen, is—still not the world.
And finding oneself in the temple is similar to the question:
—"How? ..."
—"What for?"
—"Why?"
—"How did you get here?"
Light pours forth from the altar: this "I," a priest, is consummating rites there; and—he elevates his arms:
—"I, I."
You have recognized Him.
He stands there as "I": and toward you holds out—the purest hands ... This gesture—the gesture of the visiting Priest—the gesture of elevated arms was imprinted, of course, by the arcs above His eyebrows: upon finishing the radiant matins, the Priest will depart; you will not see him for years ... He will return to his homeland ...
. . . . . . . . .
Contemplation of the skull is strange: and it is the memory of a memory of the splendid skeleton temple hollowed out by our "I" in cliffs of black gloom; in the temple of the body—lie the plans of temples; and from the temple ruins, I believe, will rise: a temple of the body.
Scripture proclaims this to us ...
. . . . . . . . .
Contemplation of the skull consoles, reminds, and—dimly teaches something. The gesture of arcs above the eyebrows is known to us; this is the gesture of the winged "I" risen up from a covered coffin, from a cave, in order to ascend at some time; in order to ... return to its homeland ...
(Continues...)
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
for jj
Amina Cain
2:21.
She called. She sounded happy. Said she was sad. The terms were that basic. I understood. We didn’t have to agree to talk. Don’t have to be needy. Bored. Either. Today we reach out without really reaching. Still lecturing with chalk, professors drawl a line under Modernity. Classrooms are filled with accents. I rarely hear myself in anyone. We are stylized, while our ideas are erasable. This is nothing new. Does that alone make me feel worse? I am the only one that’s trying to be who I have never been before. He wrote “ha-ha” and mailed my story home. His best-selling novel is “Ha-Ha.” I could read into two letters and achieve zero proof that what I see is the same as what I think. This I could do for the rest of my life. I’d die overworked. And when they come to retrieve me, my mouth will be opened and pennies will go spilling. No one will have been watching. And I was never seen either. I’d die underpaid. I’d die without credit. This is profound. This is the truth. He wrote “ha-ha” and mailed my fiction home. My dad is an old man. And she was crying, but shared only the sound. The ones closest to us never age with us. It seems. Maybe we forget to look to our side. And when we are ready, and we do, we notice the size of our friends, the shape of father’s body, but never talk about their eyes, why we never saw them, how they made peace with the ground, and were quietly collecting time. Can you hear me? I couldn't ask. Too afraid. The answer is no. Maybe we never knew about life. And don’t know this till after. “It’s getting later all the time.” My family will never forgive me. It was the earliest she ever woke. They chewed bagels like two years prior. Now he always watched. She called this worry. Either way, I said sorry. And then said sorry for not being responsible for what she is going through. I think she said the truth doesn’t deserve an apology. But I could be wrong. She woke too early to see herself and instead saw him. The worried old man. Sure she could be sad that he had left her and now was back to follow her around with his eyes so to speak. But she wasn’t. I listened as she thought. She was sad that two years could make you old. And that she couldn’t add cream to her coffee. He was worried that it was the only thing she hadn’t finished. And she was sad that this is what worried him.
Friday, May 22, 2009
To Be A New.
I’m late and have to cut this short. At the doctor yesterday, I asked the woman leading me to the room, how she is. “Tired, Chelsea, I am just real tired.” Today? Or often? “Today.” I was agitated in my sleep last night. Was that what happened? “No.” Just not enough? Are you someone that needs a certain amount of hours? “That’s not me at all. I had my dream and all day I’ll be depressed because I had to leave it for work.” She then told me about the man she has been dreaming of every month for the last 18 years. It began on July 15 1990 when she came to Miami from New Jersey. Do you feel depressed because you wake from this next to your husband? I asked. Does he know about him? “He never wanted to know anything.” She told me multiple versions of dreams. She told me of the paycheck, the plane, the ticket back. Another doctor called her out, urgently she said she’d be right back, but she never came. I waited, and wrote out a poem by Robert Creeley for her and included a note:
Echoes
Eight panes
in this window
for God’s light,
for the outside,
comes through door
this morning.
Sun makes laced
shadows on wall
through imperfect glass.
Mind follows,
finds the lines,
the wavering places.
Rest wants
to lie down
in the sun,
make resolution.
Body sits single,
waiting—
but for what
it knows not.
Old words
echoing what
the physical
can’t—
“Leave love,
leave day,
come
with me.”
- Robert Creeley.
* What is the use of poetry if it can’t be shared; what good is a dream if the body never lets it actually act out?
An old soul has perspective. She has insight. She has a sense for reason. I feel she can become new by risking soul, by caring for the outside, by encouraging those to retain a youthful heart. The only way one can risk himself for the other is by intuition. This takes a certain confidence; a communication where one believes his feeling, and trusts the other can—and wants to—believe too. If I die aware of my development, I will have lived. I know.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
First Semester Freshman
Brave enoughTortured enoughHopeful enoughDesperate enough
StephanieMargotAllison