Claudelean Musee

museelemuse.tumblr.com

2010-06-30T17:30:00.002-04:00

Meet me @ museelemuse.com & let's follow up.

2009-10-21T17:03:00.002-04:00

So I had some other websites I was trying to set up shop in. But as I said layout was driving me nutttty. So I've moved her for now. Please follow me. Graduate School, and the silence after my work has been read, has been discouraging. What I need is to remember why, why I've been writing for so long, why I've never known otherwise.

LeighMusee
LeighMusee
LeighMusee
LeighMusee
LeighMusee

twit twat.

2009-09-11T15:19:00.002-04:00

http://twitter.com/ClaudeleanMusee

I've moved and for the first time delivered a new approach: a genuine attempt to establish my life; to feel at home. There is so much to say. And a novel I am signed up to write by the end of two months. How heroic. In short, I am on my own; surviving, smiling. And I am in the midst of a new site name. I don't know if I will latch on to it or not. For whatever reason, I'm the type, that supposes a new domain will separate me from the associations of what I did and didn't accomplish here.

Only today.

2009-09-07T02:31:00.000-04:00

Since moving, I’ve been snacking on cheese. Jalapeño Jack, Goat, Manchego. Perhaps this is my effort to be that woman living on her own. The one of stories, the one I could never write. To spend money in bulk, on flavors. A first try to regard the body in the manner I think of the person I love. Happy just to have. After showering, I hold a mug and look for someone doing the same thing by an open window. Settling into the morning, clutching night in a fist. We boldly drink our coffee. Pretending we are without routine.

Vertigo.

2009-09-07T02:27:00.001-04:00

He said I’m thinking late. A chill out chat or film.

She moves to find, her body is not inseparable.
Surprised? There was a long way to go.
And at least she’s made it, so far.
Her thinking stills to picture something else: a late night or just later.

No one can watch without lying.
He’ll believe I own only one.
He wants to find it a bit beyond the bed’s edge.
He will wait for me to take him up.

Spiral stairs are designed for someone of distinguishable purpose.
They say you are lucky. But I would never offend you like that.
So go on, show me how it looks.
Show me what it is to have my muse wrapping her body around.

He typed Thinking of you. He sent. And he didn’t touch her on any level.
Should it have been late enough, the two may have gone to bed; planning and not planning to watch a film.

Words from Some Other.

2009-08-22T03:46:00.001-04:00

And It Came to Pass
by C. D. Wright

This june 3 would be different Time to draw lines I've grown into the family pores and the bronchitis Even up east I get by saying goddamnit Who was that masked man I left for dead in the shadow of mt. shadow Who crumbles there Not touching anything but satin and dandelions Not laid his eyes on the likes of you Because the unconnected life is not worth living Thorntrees overtake the spot Hands appear to push back pain Because no poet's death Can be the sole author of another poet's life What will my new instrument be Just this water glass this untunable spoon Something else is out there goddamnit And I want to hear it

a repetitious knot.

2009-08-10T13:28:00.006-04:00

It was the ninth, I didn't dream. Instead I determined the date and further, this time I have lived by or, more sensationally, been locked into has been a series of goodbyes. Upon exiting I discard the feeling, which is to say I disassociate from myself.

I sense a heaviness; writing with the light pushing down.
In so few hours, she'll have the morning, but not the motivation to ask anything I can answer, agree upon:

How'd you sleep?
Didn't.
What's wrong?
It's becoming later all the time.
Next time tell me. I'll give you something to take.
I want someone to have.
There is so little difference.
To you. But for me, all I hear in the night's silence is the difference and after, its impossible repetition.
Well, sorry your night sucked. But time to get moving. We've got a party to put on.

Perhaps I am waking, as if at birth, to isolation, its noise (this, all:in myself). Then again, there is the fear that my honesty is harmful, that this is possibly about one thought determining, distracting, deluding all others: What is difficult about being in love, to me, is being in it.

In La Pointe Corte, Agnes Varda has 'him' say to 'her':

The first one who's had enough should leave...if their heart says so.
The heart never tells us that. The heart never gets enough. It's the mind that rebels or the body.
And then she tells him at last,

I came to make noise and silence has won.

At the party, I didn't want to make a speech, but when push came to shove I had to go on and do it. So I said, I'll sure try to be short and sweet. What I figured is my indifference instead was interpreted as personalization, and more embarrassing as emotion. Was this the truth? I apologized. Blamed my inconvenient nostalgia, said it is a shame. Why? Can't I be more careful, more comforting. Reach for interaction, don't let the city pull you, promise not to loose the adrenaline, but goddamnit slow down. I spoke with one man for the majority of the time. Knew it was easier being myself, than pretending Manhattan and undergraduate is a place I met people, found love. A father interrupted, So now that you have graduated you are fully pursuing modeling? What, no, I am leaving to write. But then, he brought up film and I asked him what his eldest daughter made him watch. (I despise such questions, or rather being put on the spot, but I also despise being taken for a face over my word. He brought up Bergman and call me crazy but I instantly felt safer, acknowledged accurately). See, my humility from not having done/experienced more - being greater - is why I mate in corners, divulge the panic of ambitions, lean forward curious about larger schemes. Once I resumed my conversation, last night some how found its way out of my mouth. Me and all my dreamlessness. I explained the interpretation of my last five years: the ever-evolving goodbye. It would have been hypocritical had I been defensive when he said, You are running away or are you? As if I could finally just break my seal, allow my strength to go collapsing. And I did in ways; in ways that men discover are attractive, as if they too can be listened to. I spoke about love, asked him about his own. What is the lesson in long-distance? He wanted to know how we met - and really, why the hell he wasn't around - said he, himself, sees where the interest comes from. The power of a couple, he made me think, is the fanatic self-other interest, the collapsing of a room, when the outside others are tone and the selves are musicality, an urge, a talent to honor. And this was invigorating. For whatever reason we hugged and said we enjoyed how quickly the party went by. His wife was on a book signing. She had finally come to the point of applause, of readership, of respect. But he hadn't wanted to tell me because 'why compare two stories so to speak'. I really didn't know where to go after that.

toes to tongue

2009-08-01T23:18:00.002-04:00

Originally uploaded by Lillyan Lilac

discovered, he woke. that wasn't she, testing her tongue toward me. but a bird baiting me on.

I will stick around, hopefully.

2009-07-29T01:14:00.002-04:00

An unexamined melancholy
Sitting in myself
Horrible, this pain and the little you know
Three years back, I spent all my time not writing
This summer has reminded me just of that
Then I had a pardonable excuse:
Those whom are in love don't write down their happiness.

it was thought that we were on top of the mothafuckin world, we said so too;
dad's rebuttal: one word (coke) so we shot down Santa Monica, crashed on sand,
drank until we felt the sea came within, settling ourselves, made out black all around.

The feeling, the falling
When I am "living
In love," I don't go just spelling things out.
The feeling of the first time
Seeing myself with
No bruises circling caps
Was a separate sort of arrogance
Women in love keep knees kempt
Before I was whorish
I was myself
When I was a lover
I was a writer who didn't write
And now?

(You give me meaning for once).

Borges, Please.

2009-07-20T16:21:00.002-04:00

The story I have told, although made up,
could very well symbolize the plight
of those of us who cultivate the craft
of turning our lives into the words we write.

Here once again the memorable lips, unique and like yours.
I kept getting close to happiness and have stood in the shadow of suffering.
I have crossed the sea.
I have known many lands; I have seen one woman and two or three men.
I have loved a girl who was fair and proud, with a Spanish quietness.
I have seen the city's edge, an endless sprawl where the sun goes down
tirelessly, over and over.
I have relished many words.
I believe deeply that this is all and that I will neither see nor accomplish
new things.
I believe that my days and my nights in their poverty and their riches are
the equal of God's and of all men's.
-W.S.M.

Kate Bradley

2009-07-15T15:57:00.002-04:00

yawner.

2009-07-15T02:10:00.003-04:00

I have been blogging, divulging since the end of 7th grade. Two months ago I graduated undergraduate and in a month will be transported - all doors open - to a dream I have dreamt day in, day out: to live in San Francisco, accepted into graduate school, recognized as a woman with words vocalized through the fingertips. Now the most difficult venture is living the dream.

This mind of mine is blank. I think static. Staring me down is an essay by Evan Eisenberg and Jeffrey Fisher tacked to the wall:

There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know." -Donald Rumsfeld.

I don't know whether I have been feeling anything or nothing, which very well might feel like something or another. I do know I need to be stronger for all of us. Is that because I am narcissistic; thinking I can help you, help us. Period.

Point is I have been unwinding on the web for ten years. Maybe once you're netted, your caught for good. Harhar. But really, you can't erase your identity. Can't deny posts were your feelings, is your past. So I snooped around. And on the blog that I was actually drawling in a following - praised and absolutely defaced - website dedications - images generated for pro anorexia and asked to be in a published book - well, I ended that blog with an entry about an autobiography I was having to write at the time for my first NYU class. A few of the questions which were posted (recommendations for me to cover) were as follows:

2007-03-28 03:34 am
you are an amazing writer, so inspirational. and i adore your style. my random question is (i'm hoping you can answer) what are your traveling jet-set necessities? what do you wear on the airplane? i'm just dying to know. thanks!

2007-03-28 01:05 pm
What is your background gave you the innate inspiration to go above and beyond the average person, to make you who you are today. The high goals you set for yourself, is this because of your past or just who you are?

You move from school to school and major to major, continuously creating, is this because you want more? Why? (I think it adds to your character emmensly, always creating in a range of fields) Though I see you as an AMAZING writter beyond all.

Anorexia is linked directly to the personality of an overachiever. (Like myself) Putting pressure on yourself to be perfect, and from what age...? Is there something that brought all of this on? Things that lead up to it?

Good luck :) I cant wait to read it :)

2007-03-29 12:17 am
what were you passionate about as a child? what did you want to be when you grew up? has your relationship with your twin been affected by your modeling? you are a very attractive girl and i can imagine that it must be hard for her (she is cute as well of course), knowing that you are not identical and you have had modeling jobs, to watch your struggle with anorexia when so many consider you to be gorgeous.

2007-03-29 05:37
am does your boyfriend live in NY? if not, how is the long distance relationship going for you? do you believe he is "the one"?

2007-03-27 09:16 pm
where does your parents wealth come from? do you think it has spoiled you? do you think you would be as interested in fashion if you didn't have the funds to support it?

I only replied directly to the last user: (Once I begin forming the autobiography, I will write detailed answers). But I have to respond to part of this now. I really am not at all that interested in fashion. I am interested in how it is capable of manipulating society. If I were to work in the industry it would be as a booking agent or doing critical essays as Susan Sontag did for Vogue (for example). I wear the same thing every day. And am rather boring in my dress. I have bought clothing once in NYC and woke up the next day wanting to return most of it.

It's a hard call. My life goal is to effectuate a changed vision of one's self starting in youth. And as much as I would like to avoid visuals, I have to recognize that blogs and the media generate larger audiences when they do showcase the exterior. At the end of the day, my previous attention to such medium is why I had a following. A self-induced pressure that probably motivated me to plummet to 80 pounds. Anyway, I am going to look through files for the autobiography. I can't remember it because I hated myself and my blog for what it taught me about myself, and above all my online edited persona. But I owe my present and my future to it. I swore if I ever wrote again it would have to be different. And that difference provided me with two out of four graduate acceptances. And that initial confrontation with myself is what forced me to wake up, to bring whoever I am back to life.

There is now nothing not to do.

2009-07-12T23:06:00.006-04:00

I am twenty-one. At twenty-two I will escape Manhattan to examine myself in San Francisco. After no time, I will have packed my material life and begun hanging myself on vacant walls. Knowing no one will only make me conscious of writing this self. I cannot laugh aloud and alone; such monologue will darken spirit, as well as any brilliance. The opportunity to not be recognized for who I am will cause me to feel most alone, redundant, insignificant, unapproachable, misled, extinct. When asked about lifting my roots, all I can consider or rather care for is the chance to clean up my act. I am twenty-one and have never breathed anything through the nose. My luxury is carelessly scrambling beneath bed sheets and carefully cooing meaning from silence, selflessness. She, a sloth. This does not bother me nor place me in particularly high hopes. I look for concentration, not an honest hand to be held. That is the alibi; my way out. I am twenty-one and as far as now have only wished for the simple and demanded outspokenness. More travels into the girth of these legs than out of my mouth. And when I should have clung I cried, convulsed. I am twenty-one and aging, forgetting what is behind can propel forth to matter as well. I am either too stubborn or determined to protect myself. In other news, I have fallen in love.

I had spoken softly, I have said so aloud.
written in flight: aspen to manhattan

Mutevellioglu

2009-07-12T22:19:00.002-04:00

Turks in Georgia by Rengim Mutevellioglu
view more from the series photographyserved.com

Forgive Me for Forgetting

2009-07-12T16:57:00.003-04:00

I am isolated, but not lonely. I am inside myself, but on the outside I am visibly touching you. In the instant of our touch, I am trying not to think. We are always far from where we expect ourselves to be. My body wants to be committed, but my mind won’t compromise. It has been said shadows show themselves out of light. But I am afraid. Afraid of finding I’m attached to what’s behind me. Afraid time never relieves us of our difference. On Saturday, Gabe told me he had been alone all day. It was nighttime now. I asked him how it felt.

“Not like anything. This morning, I couldn’t move. I sat on my bed and didn’t have a thought. It was the first time I couldn’t think at all.”
How did it feel?
“Not like anything. I may be addicted.”
Already?
“These changes change you immediately.”
What changes?
“Claudelean, I’m desperate.”

Becoming concerned was a risk from the beginning. But if characters became callous, my story wouldn’t survive. The challenge was to see where we relate. And after all this time trying to be closer, it’s hard accepting that sometimes we’re not enough. I’ve considered replacing characters, but I’m afraid the story will be the same. Afraid this is how I’ll always be, thinking I could do better. Being a writer isn’t as freeing as expected, as I’d hoped. If I were different maybe I wouldn’t depend on words to feel meaningful, wouldn’t need this to imagine I’m not alone. If I wasn’t writing maybe we wouldn’t happen to meet, maybe I wouldn’t have thought we had a purpose. Here’s a secret: nothing in mind hasn’t been discovered in sense. I am not creative. What’s written is what I had, all I know. And in the end it’s because of me we’ve become this way.

I saw you (and by you I mean Gabe, but you will feel more connected if you think this is all about you) for the first time outside the city. Prospect Heights. An accent of spring sun shaded us at an angle. Six strangers sat around a picnic table gargling “mystery juice.” Others grilled portobellos barefooted in the grass, as a handful drenched relish on hot dogs till buns soaked green. I was talking, but never connecting. Engaged, but that was only how I looked. Inside I was waiting for someone to know me, to make this better. I was there to meet a friend’s boyfriend. Well, that’s what she thought. I had my own reason. I came to photograph moments I would otherwise not have; capture character, consider it my own.

Everyone was shit faced. And underneath the sound of fists banging the wooden tabletop, of wrists flinging sake bombs backwards down throats, thumbs rubbing lighters and bongs bubbling filthy water, I could hear myself more deeply. On the opposite side of the bench, you were talking about writing. You felt close, and I was curious. How did that feel knowing you’ll end, be finished? Were you concerned you’d think of something else soon? I can’t imagine. But I’m sure I meant to tell you then. And just didn’t know what would happen, how you’d take me. Anyway, you have to forgive me. There was much to consider. Being a writer. Having the story always in mind. It takes patience, perseverance. I stared, needing to know, to have the better of you in me, to see if what you wrote was worth talking about while everyone became distracted by the generosity of their limbs, appetites to bone.

I took 23 pictures of people highfiving. What were you thinking? Maybe you watched me when the camera was covering my eye and thought I’d be the perfect woman to lie down on the page. Maybe you chose me because your other character, the leading lady, turned uninspiring halfway into the novel, and now you needed a quick replacement, a rush of sensations. Really, I can’t question this if I’m going to be like you. From the beginning I’ve known, a writer’s dream is to become a novelist.

“You’re a photographer.”
Only tonight.
“Because of tonight.”
Sure, if you say so.
“What do you want?”
To leave—
“You’re leaving? It’s barely begun.”
I never said I was ready.
“Then we have some time to make this interesting.”
A bit, I hope. But in the end I want to leave with something I didn’t come with.
“Oh Kid, stay for a moment.”
I didn’t say—
“You haven’t, I know, and I’m interested. Long term, what do you want to become?”
Maybe I’m not following—Have we met?
“Do you have to ask?”
I’m Claudelean. A pleasure to meet—
“Gabe. Probably one of many trying to know you.”
This wouldn’t be the first time.
“But it sounds better if this is.”
You’ll get closer wanting.
“Wanting?”
To know me.
“And what is it you want?”
I want to become a writer.
“Because of tonight?”
From the beginning, that’s all I’ve considered.
“Well, for starters, if that’s the truth, by now you should be considering nothing.”
I don’t think—
“Good, now, do you write?”
Everyday.
“Well, you’re a writer already.”
It takes more than that.
“Not much. Take my word, Kid.”
Do you really consider me a kid?
“Don’t be so literal, you can tell I want you to stay.”
A bit, I hope.
“Well, if you’re going to, we’ll have to start over.”
Sure, if you say so.
“Now, what do you want?”

It took ten days to call, wanting coffee. There was a pleasure in not knowing what to think.

“Claudelean, it feels like it has taken forever to reach you.” But my voice is always just a phone call away. “What are you doing?”
When?
“Right now.”
Writing.
“A story?”
Fragments toward the whole.
“Come have coffee with me. I’ll give you a plot.”

But it is the character I need.

What do you look like? I’ve forgotten. I rush by the window, unaware you are watching through the glass. You know before me how close we are; I’m not ready to meet you. The coffee shop is nearly empty, but it will fill and we will still find ourselves isolated. You notice light leaking in, as I’m framed in the doorway. This alters your complexion. And I wait, staring again, as you shift uncomfortably, touch the table, move the knife. And for an instant more, with your head down, you appear like you are not waiting or looking for me. If it weren’t for this, I’d never imagine you weren’t ready either. I forgive you. We are all self-conscious.

Have you been here long?
“Yes, no.”
You have?
“No, no, not more than an instant.”
Oh god, I’m sorry. Recently, I’ve been behind on life.
“Are you unfulfilled?”
Sorry, I practically ran here. Remind me, what are we talking about?
“Your writing. Your life.”
Oh, yes yes yes, of course. But they are unrelated.
“Are they?”
They should be. But my answer is the same. If by fulfilled you mean satisfied. Then yes, I am unfulfilled with my writing and my life.

Help me remember. How did you look? Blonde hair. More dark than light. But wouldn’t that be brown? I’ve never been attracted to blondes. So, okay, you have brown hair. Tall, yes, you are tall. Taller than I was used to, but I can get used to it. I did get used to it. Now it’s a preference. And I remember seeing your chest. Enough to make me wonder. Were you encouraging me to follow you home? I didn’t ask. I did so anyway—on my own accord.

I drank coffee. You had tea.

I thought you came for coffee.
“I came for you, Kid.”
Oh, okay.

You looked like you hadn’t expected me. Expected me to be. Candid. You were right. I didn’t expect myself to be this way either. But I changed around you. Or rather, I was more myself, which was a change and an accomplishment. You helped me stay inside. Together we communicated that and from there.

I don’t actually act like a kid, do I?
“I wouldn’t be here if you did.”
You may have nowhere else to go.
“I don’t.”
Then why haven’t you called—
“Claudelean?”
Yes.
“Because you’re different.”
Different?
“Would you rather I name you Angel?”
Don’t you like my name?
“Sure, but you had it when we were strangers. Now we’ve changed. And Kid is what I’ve given you.”
Fine, if that’s what you want.
“I’d like if you didn’t take this so literally. You might have some fun.”
It might be easy if you act like you want to be here.
“Oh Kid, you enjoy hearing me repeat myself.”
I forget easily.
“When we met, I told you right away, that the pleasure is all mine.”
And I thought you’d be seducing me by now.
“Kid, you’re dangerous.”
Should I be careful?
“Not around me.”
Well, I just figured since you’re an experienced man, you would use age, your appeal. You know, to get me to like you, to keep me interested. But so far this isn’t what I expected. I’m not used to being with a writer. Maybe you are only a voice. Completely unaware of your body.
“What if that’s the appeal.”
What if, Gabe. What if.

Remind me of the outside. How you appeared. Your shirt, your skin tone, even the tea you drank. I can’t remember everything that is real. Tell me anything, so the story can be more colorful. Tell me how we were together. When we met, all the talking. In the coffee shop, it seemed we had known each other always. But we knew nothing. We only felt we could, that we were learning, getting somewhere faster than usual.

I wish I could make us look different by remembering your appearance, your mannerisms. I wish I knew what to quote. But whenever someone captivates me they exist as an interior translation. A feeling that provides me with more reason than embellishment. How is it possible to show feeling? How could from a feeling, anyone read me and imagine a face—a face I am not even thinking of, for it isn’t how I remember you. It is your touch I return to every time. So is that what it is? You are unforgettable because I retained the feeling of you, which was immediately intriguing and made me forget to be impressed by your face. Remind me, what did you look like?

“The thing about life is it’s all based on perception. You and I can sit here discussing thoughts until there are no more beans to brew, but we aren’t going to change the ways of the world.”
I don’t know what to do about it.
“All you can do is tell somehow how you feel. Otherwise, you’ll remain the way they see you.”
What if I feel I think too much?
“Claudelean, what if I told you I could talk to you forever?”

And I followed you home. Wanting to know you, discover us, in another place in time. In Manhattan, one of every two apartments has a tenant that lives alone. Once we reached your room, I knew I’d come to romanticize it; the place between ideal and actuality, not where one sleeps but where two try to touch their dreams—see if what is separately thought is mutually true. I have come, we are here, and I know our reason but not what I feel about it. My body was always there. Waiting while you spoke. Touching through silence. For three weeks we kissed upside down. Mouths passing breath between bodies. The rush is unbelievable. And even more extraordinary was what we hadn’t fathomed: we could survive if we were attached and breathing the same air.

Have you ever felt lonely living here?
“People find themselves in Manhattan, so they never have to feel lonely again.”
Have you?
“I like to think so.”
When?
“Oh Kid, I can’t remember the date exactly. But I probably knew once I stopped changing.”
Don’t you get bored?
“I haven’t.”
But there aren’t any books in your room.
“You’re here. Would you want to watch me read?”
How can you write so much? I don’t understand.
“I use my imagination.”
You make things up?
“I have to or I’ll never finish.”

You became more involved with your novel. Never letting me read it because it wasn’t good enough yet. Lying in bed, you might have seen me finding pleasure in rest. Appreciating the softness. Another skin against my body. With the night covering my eyes, you stared, admiring the image of sleep. The image of belonging to you. During those hours. You blushed, as I never imagined you would. And you’d never want to believe I wasn’t sleeping; behind veiled eyes I was awake, considering who I was to be there, what that said about you, and meant about us—then or sometime ever.

I wish—
“I didn’t mean to wake—“
You didn’t. I wish you’d tell me how I am to you.
“Me too, but honest, you’re the writer.”
Not yet. Please, this means something to me.
“I wish, Kid.”
Try.
“You’re young and curious. It reminds me of how I was in the beginning.”
When?
“Before I became concerned. Once you start, and are closer to the end, you can’t afford to have things changing.”
I don’t understand.
“Listen Kid, when your feelings change you expect the world will, too. And sometimes, it isn’t worth waiting for things to become the same. Sometimes you just have to finish, because it’s time to move on. That’s when it doesn’t matter what you want.”
I want to read your novel.
“Once it’s finished.”
When will you?
“As soon as things are perfect.”

I’d watch you write, and I’d come up with clever ideas. A few lines. How often you used the bathroom. If you ate the moment you woke. Whether you napped on your side. Asked you how it felt sleeping on your stomach.

Were you able to breathe?
“Of course, or I wouldn’t do it.”

I wrote that down, too. Notes and notes. You taught me the time it takes to build a character.

Tell me who you were.
“But I’m not that way.”
You’re missing the point. You are this way because of then.
“I’ve told you everything. I guess it isn’t what you want to know.”

Was the truth that avoidable? One day, you said it made you nervous, that you were becoming self-conscious. But you told me to write with my heart, I didn’t understand how this was different.

I just want to do everything I can to make sure my memory is accurate.
“What memory? Nothing is going anywhere.”
Gabe, I’ve always told you how easily I forget.
“Not me.”

The silence was suffocating. Our relationship depended upon what we offered. We were our words, just as you had said at the coffee shop. And each time you left me curious, I felt you were depriving me of meaning, that you were holding me back from what I wanted. You knew I was there to talk. Of course, I didn’t expect us to when we were writing, but you didn’t seem even interested in that.

When we kissed I could no longer feel your lips; our tongues didn’t try. I couldn’t remember why I was there. What made me stay? Did we share all our thoughts and now we didn’t speak because we feared we’d sound repetitious? Seven times during one week, you entered me and I could tell we both knew you were feeling my inside, how warm I am there, while I was only experiencing your outer shell, your unbearable weight. Four nights in a row, I watched the sky become ruby at four. And always wondered whether you liked it better blue. I can’t imagine you could.

“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.”

The night before I left, you asked if I missed you. I said I am always nostalgic. And you asked me to come to bed. We touched each other for the last time. The night was too black. I was afraid. Afraid I finally found time would never help us relate, never relieve the difference. I thought of what had happened. How we fell in and fell out. How love is a story I would never be able to tell. It rushes past. I tried, but maybe I had written down too many thoughts. Maybe I had tried to remember the details and forgotten to isolate the feelings. Thinking nothing had changed, you breathed easily through your dreams. In boredom, I drew an arrow from your navel down, pointing through curls of hair, and wrote, “He’s my only concern.”

In the morning, I woke practically thrown from bed.

“What’s this about?”
I couldn’t sleep. I was restless. I didn’t mean it.
“Of course you did or you wouldn’t have written it.”
Gabe, it’ll come right off. I promise.
It’s permanent, Claudelean. This is all so goddamn permanent.”

And you threw the sharpie against the wall. I left, never really looking back. When I was on my way, I had to keep moving. Two days went by. Ten days went by. I drank tea at the coffee shop. Wrote some lines. Fragments, which made it possible to select my story and turn it into a memory that was bearable if I am ever tempted to remind myself.

On the 22nd day, you called.

“I told you you would leave.”
I did what you wanted.
“I have to see you.”
When?
“Right now.”
I can’t, I’m writing.
“You always are, but you still haven’t started your story.”
It’s coming along.
“Barely. Claudelean, please see me. I’ll give you your story.”

But it is the climax I need.

This time you were waiting for me when I walked in. You were wearing all white with red high-tops. Two mugs of coffee were on the table. I have no idea why were behaving this way.

What’s going on?
“Can’t I get a hello first?”
Hi. What’s up?
“How are you? What have you been doing?”
Writing, sleeping around, writing. You know me, the usual. Why, what’s up?
“You’ve slept with someone else?”
If I want to, I can, right?
“How does it feel?”
Erotic. Distanced. Unattainable. Poorly evoked.
“Sounds terrible.”
It’s fine for now. What’s this all about?
“I’ve just been alone all day. I was alone yesterday, too. And the day before that and the—well—since you left, I’ve just kind of been hanging out. Trying to finish my novel. I was so close to being done. But now all I can think about is how lonely I am.”
What does it feel like?
“Impossible to describe. Like nothing I have ever known.”
Maybe you should be seeing someone.
“I want you back.”
No, I mean, someone professional. Therapy. You even look different.
“Nah, it’s all artificial. Real egocentric. You know, I’ve never liked talking about myself.”
Maybe it will help.
“Being alone won’t make any of this better.”
Well, tell me then, what happened this morning?
“I couldn’t move. I sat on my bed and didn’t have a thought. It was the first time I couldn’t think at all.”
How did it feel?
“Not like anything. I may be addicted.”
Already?
“These changes change you immediately.”
What changes?
"Claudelean, I’m desperate.”

"I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me" -In a Lonely Place, filmed by Nicholas Ray.

* Envisioned after an afternoon and a night with a writer and an actor. Somehow I can only hope this doubles as a thank you for advancing perspective, for adding to the Manhattan experience and - in nature of the roles - depth to the moment.

Month to Month.

2009-07-07T19:59:00.000-04:00

This is the end of what I thought. These days the closest thing to me is these days.
We were in early June when he asked.

Could you share a story?

Haven't I been?
Not entirely.
Well, what are you looking for?
You.

July is here without invite. Turning back are hours that cannot be seen, valued.
Without depth, darkness isn't imaginable. In me there is feeling only.

An emptiness that maybe I have
slept through then and now.

What is left is all I got.

So I will pull my panties off to finally tell you how afraid I am.
Afraid I've waited to inhale. Afraid I will always be waiting on myself.

Eros

2009-07-05T23:53:00.001-04:00

"Three visionary directors. One erotic journey. Michelangelo Antonioni, Steven Soderbergh and Wong Kar Wai address the themes of love and sex."

2009-07-05T15:15:00.001-04:00

Chamber Music

2009-07-05T14:40:00.001-04:00

Wu-Tang Clan's new album, Chamber Music, is one word: art. Listen to the full cd at Spinner.

Alice Neel

2009-07-03T20:51:00.003-04:00

Alice Neel from SeeThink on Vimeo.

Even if I'm not working, I'm still analyzing people...Her nerves were at the end of her fingers.
This is worth your time: arthousefilms
her website

Simian Mobile Disco

2009-07-02T19:29:00.000-04:00

the rest is lost.

2009-07-01T12:53:00.003-04:00

Unfortunately all I've written, words upon words, have been deleted. Frustrating for sure. Here is a bit 06-28-09

I haven't brought anything to this website, I know. Nothing I can claim - and at best consider - progressive, beneficial, informative, revealing, substantial. Not like I thought, imagined, expected, hoped I would. May and June have left me. And I have forgotten, and I have felt. Time has been here for me to use, but I haven't been able to take it at my advantage. Repetitive voices advising: "Live now, work later, write in the Fall." But what if I forget by then? The story will be different. Less rich, less labyrinthian. (I will retreat to bad habits when I need to delve deeper, be honest, be crude, so even I as reader am shocked by the sincerity. Design less, clarify more). Already, I have forgotten... What he said, why it got me thinking, how his perspective made me see I could be devoted. And those are revelations that need to be captured when they are raw, unmediated. When me, an ever evolving character, is callow, desperate, resistant, horribly paradoxical, sickened and heavy-hearted with elation. Sitting in Yankee stadium on Graduation day, I promised myself that if I could not write nor read the story of another then at least I could react to my own everyday. Worse case, I thought, I begin developing a story that follows the process of falling in love, breaking free of the interior security blanket, the fear of finally living, the panic of happiness, the body's reaction to sex at this level, the emotional upheaval of falling and never wanting to hurt, the plague of moving and having to say goodbye to one more, the one that for the first time I am trying to give myself to even though I have my calling for privacy, even though I/you have our past, my future, and the present which he will come to see me in, see me as, and want me despite of. I think about the beginning, a few months ago, before he was really around me. How he said I am the happiest girl he knows, everyday, smiling, never not. I listened, denying the factuality of his observations, feeling my happiness is circumstantial. And now knowing in this past month or so we have been close, never without, overwhelmed by the effort to be closer and that he has seen me cry after two years of a dry spell, has watched me lash out, change moods, purposefully be unlikable, vague, uncommunicative. Well...

closer to closure.

2009-06-27T13:01:00.002-04:00

i drove home, i drove backward. this wouldn’t be my first time trying to peel the day away, achieve clarity on the likelihood of tomorrow. so they say this is her problem. i go grabbing for air with nails. forget i need hips to make a hula hoop spin. i had no time for jokes, small talk. six hours, one of them was counting, then she’ll be gone. i spent “extra” time thinking of men, few that have, and are, creating a changed me. tease a tongue into the mouth, and the kissed wake hungover with nerves. so the sought after always is comparing sense to sex, scraping the dream from her eye. while the lover stays, focusing on film. although ask and he’ll talk about patience, his flexibility as a grown man. we women are expected to thank him. after all how many times has our difficulty been topic for conversation. this means they like us, are thinking. and, of course, their nature isn’t to dehumanize anyone. men need our emotion to blame theirs on. projection!, the transparency. see they love all this feeling, wait around for all that touching coming after. he said i love you when i was in his arms. said i love you as i thought to pull away. said i love you when we had nowhere to go. it was obvious how different we are when i told him he is the best. and i am sure he knew better, recognizing my response did not reflect my reaction. what should have been said? what is it i want? i drove home, i drove backward. and thought of him, how once we separated we were able to quit smoking cigarettes.

Listening

2009-06-27T02:53:00.001-04:00

He said it not me.

2009-06-25T09:09:00.002-04:00

It was difficult to begin talking. I had not talked very much for the past fifteen years, not really talking the way I once talked with Mary Whitney, and Jeremiah the peddler, and with Jamie Walsh too before he became so treacherous towards me; and in a way I had forgotten how. I told Dr. Jordan that I did not know what he wanted me to say. He said it wasn't what he wanted me to say, but what I wanted to say myself, that was of interest to him. I said I had no wants of that kind, as it was not my place to want to say anything.

Now Grace he said, you must do better than that, we made a bargain.
Yes Sir, I said. But I cannot think of anything.
Then let us discuss the weather, he said; you must have some observations to make on it, since that is the way everyone else begins.
I smiled at that, but I was just as shy.

Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood, p 67.

moreintelligentlife.com

2009-06-23T02:04:00.000-04:00

BEING CRAZY IS NOISY

via moreintelligentlife
By John Sterns

Created 18/06/2009 - 11:48

John Sterns is diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder (a co-diagnosis of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder), chronic depression and chronic anxiety. He describes a lifetime of fighting demons ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

I. I hear voices (“auditory hallucinations”, technically). They come from all directions and fill my mind with hateful, self-destructive demands. One comes from above the crown of my head and commands, “You must die”. Another rests on my left shoulder and says, “You should be dead”. A third whispers insidiously into my left ear, “Kill yourself”.

But the most persistent and long-standing of my voices, which began when I was eight years old, pounds on my left shoulder like a jackhammer, repeating, “I hate myself. I hate myself. I hate myself. I hate myself. I hate myself. I hate myself. I hate myself. I hate myself.” It never ends. My response to this particular voice was to develop a permanent cringe in my right shoulder. I am now spending thousands of dollars to correct compressed discs in my neck that have caused me chronic pain for nearly 30 years.

Before my treatment, hospitalisations and incarcerations, these voices were all separate and distinct, with individual sounds, tones, rhythms and pitches. Now they are one voice--my voice. Once a chorus, they have become a soloist, though attacking me with the same message. Treatment has meant that I have finally found a “self”, a “me”, after four decades. But the me I’ve discovered is now my enemy.

II. Not all voices are demonic. I once met a man who heard happy voices. I was walking down the hall of the locked ward in the hospital’s inpatient facility (“Club Head”, we called it) and a young man with dark curly hair approached me, staring into space, smiling, giggling, laughing. He turned his head to whisper to someone who was obviously not there. We passed each other and I heard him chuckle and say, “That’s very funny.” I knew he wasn’t talking to me–I hadn’t said or done anything–and I knew he was psychotic (I recognised the symptoms). At dinner that night I asked my roommate about the young man. “Oh, that’s Kevin," he answered. "He hears happy voices.”

I immediately hated Kevin. I have been tormented with psychosis and delusions since I was four years old. To meet someone decades later who apparently relished the very same symptoms that have haunted me all of my life felt unfair, an abomination. I avoided Kevin. When I did run into him I wished him the worst voices--the kind that would finally push him over the edge. I wanted him to fall into the endless pit of suffering and pain where I have spent nearly every day of the last 40 years. This is wrong, I know, but I do not yet understand how to be both crazy and compassionate.

III. During one hospital stay, we were encouraged to use art to express how we felt about ourselves, our illnesses, our pasts and futures. As a child I hated art classes. I was a disaster: my chronic anxiety led to constant sweating, which caused paints, pens, crayons and coloured papers to smear my young face, hands and clothing. The result was often a sickly green-grey mess, a melted miasma. By the third grade I received a free pass from all art classes through the remainder of my school years.

Art therapy required me to sit around a table with seven other inmates and a social worker, and stare at a blank piece of paper and a torn box of broken crayons. I didn’t want to draw anything. In fact, I didn’t want to think about my illness--not my past, my present and certainly not my future. After an hour the social worker announced that art therapy was done and we had to hand in our work. I turned in my blank sheet of paper and walked to the cafeteria for lunch. I told myself I had made an existential statement. Blank was as good as it gets.

The next day brought another art therapy session and once again I turned in a blank sheet of white paper. That afternoon I was called to meet with the social worker who guarded the art therapy class.

“John,” she began ominously, “you are failing art therapy.”

I misheard her, clearly. How can one fail art therapy?

“Unless you make more of an effort,” she continued gravely, “you will not pass. You will not be released.”

The conversation was obviously over.

I returned to my bedroom and considered this exchange. Being called a failure did not surprise me. I am a failure--that I already knew. It was the "You will not be released" part that grabbed my attention. I wanted to be released. Club Head has its advantages: shelter, a bed, meals and the suspension of disbelief for all the problems I've caused, the troubles I face, and the remorse, disappoinment, disgust and fear I will feel for hurting others. But I missed my wife and son, so I resolved to make more of an effort during art therapy over the next few days.

So I draw. And draw, and draw some more. Colours fill the pages and I am the most prolific crazy art-therapy inmate ever to grace the hospital floor. Over the next two days I draw and colour geometric shapes, which I had calculated would be safely "meaningful". My favourite drawing was a rough outline of the state of Alaska that I call “All-I-Ask-Ya”. It has the city “Nome” plotted on the map.

But at the end of each class, I felt sad. The drawings meant nothing to me. I was not using art to express myself. I didn't even know what that meant.

After three days I was told that I had passed art therapy and would be moved to the open ward. A victory. I didn’t tell them that I still had auditory, visual and kinesthetic hallucinations, paranoid delusions and daily thoughts of suicide. That would mess things up.

Picture credit: lepiaf.geo [1], *_Abhi_* [2] (both via Flickr)

I, too, have been crying.

2009-06-22T15:39:00.000-04:00

The most distressing position to be in is across from your father, hearing his cry. It’s impossible to stare, even though it’s amazing. Could I be intruding? I feel that way. He was sitting at his desk, the morning after Father’s Day, when I gave him his card. I don’t like to be in the room when things I’ve given are opened. I don’t like reactions. I don’t like having to wait, to watch my under or overwhelming effect. There are few moments when we have room to breathe. I feel this should be one of them. He made stick around. I buried my eyes in corners. You see, I appear distracted but rarely ever am. He cried immediately. Broke down. I have never heard emotion as loud. My timing is always on. If only, I were off. If I could be lighthearted in a letter. If I didn’t show him what he has meant. If I didn’t assure him I will always be the child he sees he is losing.

before:

2009-06-17T10:38:00.001-04:00

2005 June 25

"sometimes i question whether i turn my desires into realities too easily. too keen on experiencing or the enjoyment to consider the consequences or maybe even others. then there is the whole concept that i'm living a life that those in their late twenties are experiencing. there is always two sides to each question. two answers, i suppose. i see my sister and the boy she is seeing &it just sorta sinks in that i haven't really had that. sure, i've had plenty of other things - but never really the nights where you sit on the living room couch &watch a rented mystery &make a cake. i've always been too shy to do all the cutesy things. i applaud those that do, maybe envy them &its funny because i hear how people talk up my situations. i suppose we always wonder about what we don't have. i love &do enjoy where i'm at.. but every once &awhile i wonder if maybe i pushed for it all too fast. i didn't experience what those my age were. i outgrew even what i didn't know."

Film To See:

2009-06-16T18:05:00.001-04:00

"One night, I sat down, the ideas came in, and it was a most beautiful experience. Everything was seen from a different angle ... Now, looking back, I see that [the film] always wanted to be this way. It just took this strange beginning to cause it to be what it is." - David Lynch.

garden of evil.

2009-06-15T15:12:00.003-04:00

Having no say on whether I am ready, he says this is real. Don’t I feel it? Pushing me. There was no question. Through my body, yes, of course. I shared secrets, Hemingway. Told him I was him; sorting matters, resigning lovers, abandonment, oh, the charm we haven’t got. Writing those we no longer need. Our pages, unheard gestures, are a final wave. Goodbyes, they take so long. And the story changes at least nine times; in the interim, even after.

I have a lot to be good at.

I can’t say anything that you won’t care about. We have made me quiet. These days you think you know how to read me. Now I make you insecure. And I can’t feel guilty about what I haven’t yet done. I enjoy watching you listening, become shy seem stupid when you probe me to answer my abstractions, I hate a phase your face passes through. I’ve failed to keep what was there. It only takes a moment for you to worry about me. I enjoy watching all the silence in you; even I want to ask how you are doing.

favourite new band:

2009-06-15T12:59:00.002-04:00

The Xx - Crystalised

A Good Man Recommended:

2009-06-13T14:31:00.004-04:00

What is Beauty?
an extract from
Meeting Life: Writing and Talks on Finding Your Path Without Retreating from Society
by Jiddu Krishnamurti

Questioner: I don't know what beauty is. I never even thought about it until I heard you talk about it. I'm an engineer and have constructed many buildings, bridges and railways. I've lived a hard life in the open and in countries where there are few trees. On a walk one day you pointed out the beautiful shape of a tree. I looked at it and repeated the words, 'How beautiful,' but deeply inside me I didn't really feel anything at all. I politely agreed with you, but I don't really know what beauty is. Sometimes a straight railway line might seem beautiful to me and sometimes I admire one of those marvelous modern bridges across a great river or across the mouth of a harbour. They are functional and are supposed to be quite beautiful, but I don't really see it. Those modern jet planes are functional machines. When you pointed them out to me and said they were beautiful I somehow felt they were things to be used and wondered why you got so excited about them. That yellow flower on the walk didn't give me at all the same quality of feeling as it gave you. I dare say I am really crude. Your mind is much sharper than mine. I've never bothered to look at my feelings or cultivate them. I've had children and the pleasure of sex, but even that has been rather dull and heavy. And now I wonder if I am not being deprived of something which you call beauty and whether at my age I can ever really feel it, see the world as a marvelous thing, the heavens ,the woods and the rivers. What is beauty?

Krishnamurti: Are you talking about the beauty of living or the beauty that the eye sees in something, or the beauty of a poem or the beauty of music? Probably all this may sound to you rather sentimental and emotional, but there is beauty in mathematics too, which you know. In that there is supreme order. And isn't the same order in life also beautiful?

Questioner: I don't know if it is beautiful, but I do know what I've don with my own life: I've rigorously, almost brutally, disciplined myself, and there is a certain tortured order in that. But probably you would say that this is not order at all. I don't really know what it means to live beautifully. In fact, I really know nothing except a few mechanical things connected with my job; I see by talking to you that my life is pretty dull, or rather my mind is. So how can I wake up to this sensitivity, to this intelligence that makes life extremely beautiful to you?

Krishnamurti: First, sir, one has to sharpen the senses by looking, touching, observing, listening not only to the birds, to the rustle of the leaves, but also to the words that you use yourself, the feeling you have - however small and petty - for all the secret intimations of your own mind. Listen to them and don't suppress them, don't control them or try to sublimate them. Just listen to them. The sensitivity to the senses doesn't mean their indulgence, doesn't mean yielding to urges or resisting those urges, but means simply observing so that the mind is always watchful as when you walk on a railway line; you may lose your balance but you immediately get back on to the rail. So the whole organism becomes alive, sensitive, intelligent, balanced, taut.

Probably you consider the body is not at all important. I've seen you eat, and you eat as if you were feeding a furnace... This is comparatively easy. But what is more difficult is to free that mind from the mechanical habits of thought, feeling and action into which it has been driven by circumstances - by one's wife, one's children, one's job. The mind itself has lost its elasticity. The more subtle forms of observation escape it. This means seeing yourself actually as you are without wanting to correct yourself or change what you see or escape from it - just to see yourself actually as you are, so that the mind doesn't fall back into other series of habits. When such a mind looks at a flower or the colour of a dress or a dead leaf falling from a tree, it is now capable of seeing the movement of that leaf as it falls and the colour of that flower vividly. So both outwardly and inwardly the mind becomes highly alive, pliable, alert; there is a sensitivity which makes the mind intelligent. Sensitivity, intelligence and freedom in action are the beauty of living.

Questioner: All right. So one observes, one become very sensitive, very watchful, and then what? Is that all there is, just marvelling forever at perfectly commonplace things? I am sure that everybody does this all the time, at least when they are young, and there is nothing earth-shaking about it. What then? Isn't there some further step than just this observation that you talk about?

Krishnamurti: You started this conversation by asking about beauty, by saying that you do not feel it. You also said that in your life there is no beauty and so we are inquiring into this question of what beauty is, not only verbally or intellectually but feeling the very throb of it.

Questioner: Yes, that is so, but when I asked you I wondered i there isn't something beyond just the sensitive looking you describe.

Krishnamurti: Of course there is, but unless one has the sensitivity of observation, seeing what is infinitely greater cannot come about.

From Bulletin 32, 1977
for a collection of Jiddu Krishnamurti's quotations on Love

Heat Wave.

2009-06-13T11:41:00.002-04:00

During summer, we take our time falling in love. The day is enriched hour by hour. Making it heavy, getting us heated, pulling our pants off. We achieve color to better compliment our bodies. Darker and we look alive. He wants to get through to me. So he says things, so I listen. And he gives himself away so well, and I feel warmer on the inside. It’s funny how these changes happen. This way we are only in our mind. This should and shouldn’t matter, I think. He doesn’t like that my body does all the talking; thinks this is no compliment. And I don’t like hearing him talk that way, hearing this either. He wants me to say it. But how can I when love now sounds questionable? It never feels as you think it should, thought it would. Once upon a time, being a bad girl made everyone believe you were giving yourself away, easily. During summer—after having lived eighty-four seasons, the color changing, the body aging that much—I take my time falling in love. Go by the pond to wait a little. I could be promising promises or I could watch the sun become wasted. It feels good not to be moving. But it feels different also. It just so happens that fewer people are around these days. It just so happens this is when I am taking my time. The heaviness of the hour is exhausting. And the heat makes me tired too. It feels good not to be moving. Feels like the summer to be forgetting the end, that he can’t wait till fall to have me finally speaking.

Summer 2009:

2009-06-12T13:12:00.000-04:00

When no one is by you what do you think? Last night I almost told him.

She stared instead. And he loved those eyes.

I’m wondering whether he knew just by looking. He talked a lot so I couldn’t think, wouldn’t worry. But I’m unstoppable. It feels cheap holding hands at the bar. Which is why I’ve never let it happen. The summer makes me lazy, so I shower sitting and have the water come to me. Life becomes something else when you have someone who wants to kiss you everyday. This is the first time I haven’t had to use my tongue to enjoy myself.

Same day Different year.

2009-06-09T12:05:00.007-04:00

Thumbed through envelopes of 1998 photographs last night. Convo: 'Wearing one pieces then, just like you do now. Have you ever worn a bikini?" No, never. (thinking, well yes, those few times I let myself when I was skin, when I was bone). "Why not?" I hate myself in them. "So I have to get you to a private beach." Those are my two fears. "What?" Bikinis and beaches.

I was stupid saying any of these things. Then today I checked out my journal entry from June 9 2004. I need documentation because past is proof. I need to take time by the balls and overcome myself. I've gotten better. There's a certain quickness that has surprised me. Call it love. Call it growing up. I'm opening up to what I'm not. Because I actually care. Maybe about him. Maybe about me. The next step I know I need to take to be better, to be - well - rounded.

The entry begun as follows. I was at Sanibel Island:

2004 June 09

"I hate bathing suits. I try really hard to be confident. But then things convince me otherwise, like mirrors, that I'm just gross. & no matter what people tell me, no matter who they are, I think they are lying. I think they are just worried & trying to feed me words I'll believe, but I don't. I will tell you that I am eating better than I have been since freshman year. I don't count calories or eat small amounts. I do not have a disorder, at all, just an image issue. The point of this was to express my desire to start working out once I get home. Not only do I love working out (it's a great feeling to have a routine) but it's a great way to release pent up anger? Hah, which I have none of, of course."

Same day. Different hour:

"BASICALLY, HI LOVES

Ive been having an AMAZING time. Friday & Saturday was rough. I felt like I could cry at a drop of a pin. I was down & yet now everything has completely cleared up. I'm really happy. PERIOD. Being here is exactly what I said it would be before I left. Something I needed. It's great to be away & realize that you d-o n-o-t need to rely on anyone. Or more over, I don't need anyone to be happy. I don't feel like anyone has this control over me anymore, I'm just more or less above it. Them. Him. Her. Whoever. BEING ON THE BOAT & TUBING are possibly the greatest feelings of life. It does sound extreme, hahha, but honest. I love being on the boat, listening to music, it gives me 793749 reasons to really go check out San Diego. ANYHOW, I really love my black nails, my rainbow belt, my pointy bracelets, my 70s glasses, & my new pin (Thank you Alli) "BE NICE TO YOUR ENEMIES, IT FUCKS WITH THEIR HEAD" THIS HAS BEEN WONDERFUL <3"

It wasn't the story I needed.

2009-06-06T14:51:00.004-04:00

Before she left on her flight, I told her I may be in love.

“You think you are or…”
“I feel I am.”

It’s better not to think. She said something about this being the third time. She could have said anything other than that. But, no. I’d rather be a liar than lucky. She made me sound like I was always falling. Falling into major conditions. A sickness. Depositing sanity to accumulate change. I’m not very mathematic. It hasn’t been three times, I wanted to fire back, but nothing is worse than denial, doubt. She was envious, dropped the call, took to Chicago and three days after my confession sent me a text saying she had found her mate, her soul. Congratulations. I replied but she hasn’t seen this because they are talking, still. Sixteen days ago, I said I am in love. But I kept this to myself because I didn’t know what to do with it. I hadn’t decided. Once it’s said, more time is spent trying to understand what it means, if love is what you wanted when you stopped by his house that one day. The day I didn't think could make me feel differently at all.

The Catch: When Asked to Speak I Can’t.

2009-06-04T15:31:00.005-04:00

Yesterday, we ate and drove. Our only good idea when it wouldn’t rain. She called pet stores while speed and wind wrapped hair to our friend’s face. Their hands reached out and up as I advanced to sixth gear. We may have no reason to rush but that has nothing to do with how we may need it. At lunch, she said they are my friends. She said it is okay to talk seriously. Of course I knew this but didn’t exactly know why a square table and ceviche seemed like a great setting for an intervention. When I asked for a drink menu, she asked if I was getting sauced up. The pairing of this with their diet cokes made me embarrassed so I said maybe and then never made eye contact with the waiter again. Driving is more fulfilling than food. It’s an empty space in time to fill with consideration. Which is why the driver should be idealized as an escapist and cynic. I considered my point as I took us places I had thought about but had no reason for being in. She bought food for a kitten she hadn’t found. And my friend chose toys and decided between color choices of liter boxes, while I held a white bunny over my heart. Everyone tells me not to buy another and in the same breath acknowledges them as my favourite animal. I acknowledge that I am 65% silent but I hope that doesn’t take away from the fact that I can’t be okay with what many spend all their time speaking about. Instead of excessive commentary, I just wish someone would ask me why I might want a bunny instead of a gerbil or dog. But I guess what is said compared to what is asked doesn’t impact the living like I imagine it could. What amazes me is our opportunities. In the center of a Petco, anyone can hold a bunny and discover why they are the way they are and how they are made to love. I only had to touch her between the ears more than twice and her posture perked, devotedly. But the point is, I only had to touch. And it was like watching a body feel for the first time. I wasn’t with the bunny for twenty-minutes before I loved her. And had to drive home.

not the end of everything.

2009-06-04T11:30:00.000-04:00

– before beginning, I become distracted by my image – and what’s distracting is I don’t think of it as my own – (I’ve written this two thousand times before, in other words and also the same) – the maintenance of being myself – well, it’s an idea I’ve been engaged with all my life – and the truth is it’s a process which I acknowledge but somehow can’t accept – I have no patience, that’s one theory – fuck your theories – and I agree – or maybe, it’s being better than myself that I take to be my responsibility – if not, a responsibility, call it the chore I’m asked to accomplish everyday – the only job my parents hold me accountable for – she said if it’s about you, then your life is paved by selfish pursuit – in other words, you don’t mean to do good –the great kind, that is – when she said that, it wasn’t the first time, I knew this but it’s not like she remembered – because what she says about me and my life doesn’t effect her – I tried to process the insinuation, along with the last few weeks – but it was a lot to do at once – and, well, I don’t have patience – not any patience, but the patience this sort of revelation requires – so because I couldn’t do everything I just repeated what she said, well the one line that stuck or that I remembered – and while repeating it, I told myself to memorize it, remember it really, so it can mean something for someone – but as I was repeating it, I began replacing “it” with “this” and now what I’m so hurt about is when she said, “if this is about you, then your life is only in pursuit of doing good for yourself” – I feel hurt but maybe it’s just the confusion – so I told her – “I never say I want to be a famous author”…“I’ve never said that” – which was true at the time and still is if I say so myself – I stood up because I was through talking, which means I just couldn’t talk or want to – and pulled the fat of my thighs like a clamp – in the mirror I looked thin – but then I thought about my hands and the pulling and that I was becoming an illusion, that I wanted to mistake the real, that I was anything but substantial – really all I was doing was perpetuating an ideal – “Would you stop already, it’s fucking nauseating” – “This fat is going to make me throw up” – “It’s muscle” – “It’s weakness” – “Get over yourself” – “I am”– “Why were you crying about who takes the cat when you move?” – “Because” – “You’re leaving?” – “Because I love her” – “You’ll love any cat that’s yours” – “What else am I doing wrong?” – she was talking, explaining, expounding, whatever word makes a drone sound somewhat worthy of listening to – but I couldn’t hear her, only because I didn’t want to care – you know people can talk for hours and never know each other – even though she told her and he told him that that night they were so close – at times I know I’ve lived two lives and just yesterday was told, in this third one, that I live in the moment but then will go and spend time thinking, spend too much time reflecting – when I was a child, I thought adults were different because they acknowledged the important things – I always thought this was a privilege – now-an-age I seem to be wrong and friends try to correct my behavior – I don’t care – when I was intimidated by adults, their lives, I still dreamed about them – and I do – dream about me all grown, secure, writing about the world, how we look too big, feel so small –

atoms.

2009-05-31T20:34:00.001-04:00

When we kissed I could no longer feel your lips; our tongues didn’t try. I couldn’t remember why I was there. What made me stay? Did we share all our thoughts and now we didn’t speak because we feared we’d sound repetitious? Seven times during one week, you entered me and I could tell we both knew you were feeling my inside, how warm I am there, while I was only experiencing your outer shell, your unbearable weight. Four nights in a row, I watched the sky become ruby at four. And always wondered whether you liked it better blue. I can’t imagine you could.

“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.”

"Now I have the sort of table I admire"

2009-05-30T16:47:00.002-04:00

extracted from Discomfort by Evelyn Hampton via Harp & Altar.

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—

Lucy Ives:

2009-05-29T18:50:00.000-04:00

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

We Don't Discuss Our Happiness.

2009-05-28T20:06:00.006-04:00

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.

2009-05-28T14:56:00.005-04:00

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

2009-05-28T13:44:00.001-04:00

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...)

for jj

2009-05-27T19:42:00.003-04:00

When the mind furies, it may or may not be recollecting.

It may or may not be attempting to unweave that remembrance

which has become a rich part of life,

but when does remembrance become constriction?

We are always inside of the walls:

we want to know others - we want to be lost outside ourselves.

Observe me,

the smooth-legged man reclining

at the foot of the bed.

- Claire Donato,

Address to California

via Coconutpoetry.org.

Amina Cain

2009-05-27T18:28:00.004-04:00

Thank you Amina. Her new novel I Go To Some Hollow. I haven't read her until just now as I came across this excerpt. But, I'll tell you, I'm damn pleased with what I see and glad she's out there. She's soothing, sincere, alienated, thoughtful. She balances what we hear in our head against what we don't receive in dialogue.

2:21.

2009-05-27T16:36:00.005-04:00

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.

To Be A New.

2009-05-22T16:00:00.003-04:00

How to write at all?—I’m curious, concerned. (I hear this voiced within, ask aloud on the patio, by the pool, speak on skin, through sheet: How will I write in this happiness, when?, if I am living, spending time doing that). Fulfillment is a block. But I’m willing to allow it, to let this, for the first time to let it go, go on. (And I think, not at all, and I relate—rarely—to the absence, which was “I”). Back in the yard, I walk after the rain. At first thought I think this will be more difficult to explain. Then, no. No, this—these last(ing) days—are less challenging to explain, while description I bet may barely brush the surface, so to speak. In other words—what? I can explain why I’ve come, how I’ve resisted. And I will hear—as I have been—“but you are young with such an old soul.” But I can’t conjure the words to describe my difference, our engagement—how engaged I am, truly; on a private level, so many touch me. Language is my intimacy: I live for this, because of this. My dream—my hope—is to be better at how I live for others, to discover the particular words as to make us stand out. By “stand out” I mean, if paper were shuffled together, I want to be able to blindly grab, and hear a passage that marks a change in time, situation, that I can remember specifically (who, where) that is not because my character but a result of the other. I want what I write to reveal the remarkable traits of someone else. I can achieve this by practicing, beginning to write the everyday (the aftereffects, the [common?] surprise, the sentimental, the seen, the revered) and acknowledging I will make mistakes. Life only expands with a voice in mind. I want to listen to others, to voices; I want us to relate. Maybe because somewhere I hope this is how we fall in love. And how we grow up without forgetting.

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.

God Help the Girl

2009-05-22T13:13:00.000-04:00

Woods

2009-05-22T13:05:00.001-04:00

New Poirier

2009-05-22T00:23:00.000-04:00

First Semester Freshman

2009-05-17T15:35:00.005-04:00

Packing for Miami. Siggy situated herself inside the suitcase. Found another journal. Recycled pages, a quilt cover, only 14 pages used. The 14th said: "Mend my mind! 5 days Miami. I NEED IT NOW." I want my emotions to change but they don't, as much as I think they have.

August 26 2005 - November 12 2005

I miss ash locks, untouched and free.

I miss pictures not being measured by beauty, but by the awakening of a moment.

Now the camera clicks and I wonder..."If someone else sees this would they desire the eyes staring back?"

I miss not knowing danger, the addiction of sexuality and acceptance.

I miss being light and in love with no one. No one other than the boy that swung on the swing.

Some days I am...

Brave enough
Tortured enough
Hopeful enough
Desperate enough

I find myself with pants curled around my ankles, staring with disbelief into the mirror.

This is the moment that I find hatred in the depths of eyes. The moment where I watch stardom slip from palm.

I know that with insecurity one's feet become cemented; their heart shallow yet drowning in discouragement.

And I, I want to say fuck you 'dream'...because I'm done with dreaming. I want it to be real. But I'm naked. I'm insecure.

Christian showed me what it was to hold love, yet let it go when loved the most...

He got me to understand what it was to 'Eat, Breathe and Live' what one strives for...

He made me realize how imperative it is to offer something as a person...

He showed, got and made sometimes by not saying anything at all.

He will leave his mark by action - alone.

* Never be too busy to laugh.

Never be too old to live.

Never be too arrogant to change.

- Mistakes take us to our finest -

Reminded of purity and the perfection of imperfection.

The safeness a sheltered mind offered.

Before the danger of sex, the ladder of experience - one

fall and she breaks her neck!

With age, the welcoming to

A world of self pursuit,

indulging on tactics to a

quote - unquote Better Life,

so to speak.

Weighing the benefits against

the costs, advantages

versus disadvantages to get us

through the day in hopes of

racing to the end of a better

life...?

Reminded of silent beauty

at laughing at wind,

but not behind someone's

back. Funny where age takes us...

Why is it time to grow up?

I haven't even experienced my first day of college...and I already hate it.

I am still a little child at heart. And it isn't to say that I can't handle the world on my own... no.

I'm just not ready to say my goodbyes to the times that should last forever.

Why did I worry when all I had to do was smile?

* Today was the first time I thought this:

Maybe we don't chose love but love chooses us.

Or at least the timing of it all.

We have two options:

1. To run with it, open to the potential mistake - "the bending or breaking" of a choice.

2. To bury faces into sand, remain immobile, let lust stir heart instead of love making heart beat.

I woke to a message from Christian, "Why can't I allow just one more time for us?"

...Is love turning off or on?

* Or do something that's never been done...

Criticism as inspiration.

I feel like I've forgotten what it is to be a kid, an adolescent...

young and immature.

The truth is people have been telling me for years that I take myself and that/those around me too seriously.

But now it is more than ever.

I'm critical.

I expect people to be in line, aware and maybe not here for the journey but to know their destination (?)

[I guess] I feel like most people have so so so much growing up to do.

And I'm just especially use to choosing who I am around.

And now I have less ability to do that.

It took me years to find:

Stephanie
Margot
Allison

Such insightful, composed individuals.

And now there is Scott...who probably really drove such high behavioral standards home.

He is 24 and these people are 18...oldest 22.

Many haven't been exposed to the reasons for maturity. And then again most don't want to.

They just aren't in the rush.

Knowing certain scenarios of behavior from back home makes it harder to accept the ones I'm experiencing/witnessing now.

Many want the casualties, the ease, the aloofness that comes with the unaware.

Maybe the answer is:

Who can blame them?

Verging on inescapable tears.

Truth: Incompatibility is a possibility for two young hearts.

You know what I enjoy...

No one seems to know about my relationship.

It's like the one thing in my life that isn't publicized.

It's a strange sensation that it is all for me,

when I'm usually so open. Weird? It is the way

things are supposed to be.

Mend my mind!

5 days Miami.

I NEED IT NOW.

...I mine as well be the same person. ha ha ha.

Found You

2009-05-16T02:15:00.003-04:00

Incredible day. Woke late. Went to laundry room. Someone had surprised me by wrapping all my clothing in a plastic bag. Ha, I'm lazy and they are proactive, thanks. Walked down St. Marks. Met a man who has been changing shades since the 70s. Super cool. Friendly man. I enjoyed his personality and I just went along with his ideas. A collaboration of sorts. In the end, I've realized, I have to make decisions impulsively. Yes or no. Do or don't. This is about living in the moment. Not leaving and dwelling that I should have or fibbing myself into the future. Ate Indian food. Hysterical. Strange. Ornaments crouching over my skull. Food fell all over Jim's lap. Got a rub down. Strange. Hysterical. Talked box cameras. 3D film. Ate and finished with mango ice cream. Short skirt. High on the navel. Men under awning: She looks athletic. Whether to me or not, I'll take it, I guess. Bookstore. Sat on floor. Copied down poetry into notebook. Modern Life by Matthea Harvey. Darkness Spoken: Songs in Night by Ingeborg Bachmann. The Narrow Road to the Interior by Kimiko Hahn (zuihitsu form). Bought The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley 1975-2005. Nice and thick, filled by a word chopped and changed. Walked from Washington Square Park back to East Village. Stopped in to see for my glasses. Entered with a loud, obnoxious curse. My sister and I. We aren't getting along. Two men trying to calm me. Together, the three of us, blow it off. Given a card. Pay $50. Shake a hand. Wave a thanks. And I'm onward. See Mr. C.D. himself on the park bench, crisscrossed legs, writing. We sit together for what felt like a good while. And I laughed - calling attention - to all the memories I have of ourselves, the weird reality of Manhattan together. It was nice. And I have much hope that he will be happy doing everything he will do in film. I was happy. I think it was how things should be. We (people) come in and out of lives. But there's no reason (unless harmful) to not open your life up to both him and you talking on a park bench in a different season with a change of mind. Long long long splice forward and it is after dinner. I've open boxes beneath my bed. Packed high with different cards. Brown envelopes filled with letter stamps and banging inks. All in all, it inspired a few projects in me.

Then I found an old written journal. Only a few entries. I think I was 18, moved to BOSTON for first year in college. Here is what it says:

A Brave New World
www.fashion.arts.ac.uk
FIT - > 7th avenue @ 27th St.

Be the change you wish to see in the world -Gandhi.

Walk in the rain, smell the flowers, stop along the way, build sandcastles, go on filed trips, find out how thinks work, tell stories, say the magic words, trust the universe -Bruce Williamson.

I get driven down streets I've never been on and more than likely will never see again. I do it just to stare into windows, peer into the lives of others. Knowing that we all are experiencing more pain than pleasure. But why? Because the superficial tunneling of advertisement tells us we need more and are incomplete until we acquire? The past sketches we desperately try to bury in memory? We are on a quest, a search for obtaining a rode we may never be so lucky/fortunate to drive down. Down to happiness.

I watch people eat sandwiches and chips. White bread, I almost can remember the way it tasted. But it has been too long. I think how lucky they are. To not care. Or to not care at the apparent moment and that's all I'll ever know of them. I grab my things and buy coffee. I anticipate how I'll regret the cup of coffee. I use to be addicted and then out of nowhere it makes me feel really really sick. But I need something and I'm prolonging my vegetable drink.

As of February 2006 I live off of oatmeal and tofu. Sometimes spinach, tomatoes, broccoli with tofu. Apples, oranges and always grapefruit. One would assume I'm withering but I'm just a block of mass. I only get to eat so accordingly at college. That's pretty much because I don't do anything. I don't go out and drink or have lovely dinners.

I don't know what the answer is. I refuse starvation, throwing up, or drugs. I'm anti-signs of weakness and I could never succumb to such cries for help. I guess why I care so much is because I remember what I was and what I was able to do, my liberation and having no self-conflict. I assume that it is the only factor preventing me from my dreamed of life.

I walk, I sit...people stare. I use to always turn my head to the ground; insecurely. Now I stare them in the eye. People tell me it seems like I'm looking through them. But really I'm just trying to find a connection, even if it is only for a brief moment.

I don't believe I wrote this, that there was no filter. I had no intention of being a writer at the time of writing. The page was just a secret, a space where I could speak to myself. Whisper. Scream.

Time: Robert Creeley

2009-05-15T19:43:00.005-04:00

(extract)

I want a human world, a
chance. Is it my age
that fears, falters in some faith?

These ripples of sound, poor
useless prides of mind,
name the things, the feelings?

When I was young,
the freshness of a single
moment came to me

with all hope, all tangent wonder.
Now I am one, inexorably
in this body, in this time.

All generality? There is
no one here but words,
no thing but echoes.

Then by what imagined right
would one force another's life
to serves as one's own instance,

his significance be mine -
wanting to sing, come
only to this whining sickness...

Up from oneself physical
actual limit to lift
thinking to its intent

if such in world there is
now all truth to tell
this child is all it is

or ever was. The place of
time oneself in the net
hanging by hands will

finally lose their hold,
fall. Die. Let this song
live, let him live.

Listening to Silence.

2009-05-14T15:25:00.007-04:00

I've graduated and my next step is turning the inner outward, to vocalize, articulate, to risk.

Listening to someone else, you may hear what you aren’t able to say yourself. The most startling realization in the last days: How blocked I am, how I have been postponing feeling really for another. I know I've said it before, multiple times, that I have been numb. No one believes me. But it's the truth. I am moved inwardly, but outwardly I've avoided for years now what this means or where it comes from. I go to dinner parties. In corners, we converse - urgently. We both ask: Who am I? We both agree, by now we are use to asking questions and forgotten how to answer. I acknowledged this really for the first time a few days ago. I have wanted to, but I haven't because I know the process it takes to be yourself with no excuse (ie. I am shy, I am distracted by work, if he was my type he'd bring me out of myself). Are these not the excuses I've given to myself? And really, the only purpose they have served is not rising to the challenge. I seem unstable I am sure: all the unexpected crying, but I don't expect it either. Honest. I'm not familiar with tears, letting myself cry. I may not be able to speak on behalf of them, but I do know they don't mean I am sorry, that I am sad, but that I am scared this shows - this means - I am feeling. And I don't know where that will take me. Such honesty sounds weak I am sure, which is why I become abstract (I don't know, don't want to be known for not knowing, question question question). Intimately (in writing and/or through physicality) I appear as a child who has no clue of herself. This has silenced me; I will write later.

Loves Final Go.

2009-05-06T20:13:00.003-04:00

This has to become something by tonight. Due 10 am. My eyes are sleeping. And I haven't read the 8 texts. But I've gotta dish it out, so tomorrow I am done, finished. Undergraduate, so soon!, I've barely gotten comfortable.

Love is woman’s attachment to experience, the obligation to bare offspring, and a commitment to compose herself—all women—yes, that’s right, to speak for once and for all. Yet, pleasure alone does not release her, nor persuade her to share and speak in the present. Why does the life of a story begin with what wasn’t accomplished, what the heroine couldn’t make happen? The novel is the author’s chance to be the first to captivate, to decide—change history—and then, she chooses the Other. “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife” (Austen 1). We are made to wait; she isn’t ready. Love, life starts again with the line that is not the woman’s truth. And yet, it is the author’s reality. Readers open, willing from the beginning to not judge her first, and be on her side or, at least, stay in her mind. Instead, the writing resists readers’ expectations: the responsibility for revealing, resolving distance, and delivering revelation. If the female has been waiting for her moment to finally be seen, why does it take longer when she is in control— as it is, a free hand, which writes—why must the reader continue at great length to know her? The feminine flows backward; against expectation, woman lives through reason. In a dual, [in]tense effort to recreate herself and be woman, she rationalizes and romanticizes. And through the very object of life that’s resisted—the story of man (male and female)—she sews the split and extending herself becomes, at once, both—the product of a rationalized romance. Even classic literature like Pride & Prejudice and Jane Eyre, in retrospect, shares Steffie Cvek in the Jaws of Life’s inevitability to be a modern self-project for the woman to listen to her intuition, and take a chance to become her own truth by the end.

Unprotected by a social position or family, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre is perhaps, in turn, desperate for a new life. Young and with no social power either, she often hides behind a curtained window. But when John Reed discovers her, Jane is devalued and maltreated by her single freedom—literature. Protecting herself against his “heavy limbs…large extremities…flabby cheeks” makes her smaller and insignificant in the eyes of the Reed family. In this scene, weight and literature are held against her as obstacles around autonomy. Silenced, Jane is placed in seclusion to learn complete submissiveness. This not only causes her body to react hysterically, but also is the episode that inspires her to speak and ask to be sent to charity orphan school. Sent, Jane has a chance for another life, but discovers the conditions are no better: the minister provides girls with starvation levels of food, freezing rooms and poorly made clothing and shoes. Again left to bare the conditions of the outside, Jane survives by controlling her perception; using her imagination to distract reality, she finds warmth, richness and prospect in her interior.

This analysis may ask the reader to see Jane, as she did not want to be seen. And for this, I may be deemed superficial, modern minded and/or uninterested in knowing her in the way Bronte intended—as a female loved without physical beauty. However, it is because of a concern with knowing her—why she became an iconoclastic character, admired for the respect she required—that I challenge she be looked at in the light of her lack, and scrutinized for her aesthetic starvation and starvation from food, for it is these nutrients which bring character to life in the first place.

To pay Jane attention for her strength alone is a selfish desire to have her represent a female that has not achieved considerable approval in literature before. By not staring at her under the corporeal gaze, the reader hopes this means he will be given the same advantage as well. In other words to applaud Bronte’s portrait of a plain “not pretty any more than I am handsome” (140) female is to, again, dismiss what isolates her. In Rochester’s words, “besides it is convenient, for it keeps those searching eyes of yours away” (140) and does not hold the reader responsible for his own vulnerability to empathize. “I never take supper”…”…I am hungry: so are you, I dare say, only you forget” (475). Had the external found its way only casually into Jane Eyre then I would not press the reader to complicate it or make it a concern, but Bronte consciously inserts questions of hunger and the quality of appetite into the narration that this would not be a careful analysis without closing in on it as a confession. In the Anatomy of Love, Helen Fisher explains the phenomenon, if not importance, of love at first sight: “Love is a certain inborn suffering derived from the sight of and excessive meditation upon the beauty of the opposite sex…” (49). This, of course, is the point that in support of Rochester’s feelings for Jane, the reader will insist his attraction was powerful because of her inward mystery. And in the vein of Stendhal was intensified and aroused by his incentive to encourage Jane to speak—talk of herself—so he could formulate an interior reading that would crystallize her beauty. Such associations are honest interpretations of the male’s pursuit. He knew his aim and motives were not errors and candidly “believed it was an inspiration rather than a temptation: it was very, very soothing—I know that” (145).

“…But to the clear and eloquent tongue, to the soul made of fire, and the character that bends but does not break—at once supple and stable, tractable and consistent—I am ever tender and true…I never met your likeness…I am influenced—conquered; and the influence is sweeter than I can express…Why do you smile, Jane? What does that inexplicable, that uncanny turn of countenance mean?” (280).

Since Rochester’s intrigue in Jane is favorable from the first sight, one must locate the conflict—indecision—of Jane Eyre to see what the Other’s heart will help her body transcend. The Other certainly pushes, not only the reader, but Jane to confront the unknown. “You are afraid—your self-love dreads a blunder” (147). It may be the male’s intuition here, that helps dissolve her coarseness. As a child, Jane had no one to confide in and the two school-friends she had made left only a trace of memory in her life (Helen Burns died from typhus epidemic and Miss Temple married and moved). “So it is, whether for reasons of ideology or experience,” that Ethel Spector Person would consider Jane’s consequences of human deprivation and starved interaction to be why “many of us regard love with a split or alternating consciousness…a form of self-deception or even self-destruction…we long for and seek it out” (102).

Having few experiences, Jane escaped into literature to find images to fill her ignorance. And therefore, her sense of truth had always been removed from the real and her sense of self was always detached, isolated, “half suffocated with thoughts that rose faster than I could receive, comprehend, settle them: thoughts of what might, could, would, and should be, and that ere long. I looked at the blank wall: it seemed a sky thick with ascending stars—every one lit me to a purpose of delight. Those who had saved my life, when, till this hour, I had loved barrenly, I could now benefit” (418). Images (the imago and the imagination) are Jane’s infatuations; her central means of sens(e)ation that above all longs to channel, what Fisher deems, “the feeling of helplessness” (70). Therefore, Rochester represents the drive toward self-transformation. He is not the means she lacks, but the force capable of changing the way Jane sees her self in the world with others.

For Helping Her Think or Only To Know More.

2009-05-05T19:48:00.005-04:00

And in this handful of days,
That covers my concern
I discovered,
Around my words,
Everything! I wasn’t saying.

I will start where I left off, and then look backwards, go there and not go then, but soon.

A Ballad by Robert Creeley:

We have a song for the death in her body
And if the night is long
Or the blackness blacker,
Then something is effected from us.

But if, without hope, there is crying
And a moaning, a retching,
And the time is horrible,
And she cries and tries to escape from us—

Do we then sit down with petulance
And a show of hate, and not like her?

(This reminds me of the night we talked about. The night that's gotten you into thinking I am hurting.
And all be-caused by you? Is that not selfish?
Maybe. Just by being
There hasn't ever meant you've done anything).

I'm aware what I say doesn't reassure you,
but that is also not its purpose,
nor any interest of mine.

Writers from the other side.

2009-05-01T23:34:00.002-04:00

Reading the Japanese novel The Miner by Söseki. It was criticized harshly, rejected for its explorations into man's psyche and the dissection of human actions. He was a highly acclaimed author, however, it was for his fiction; whereas The Miner is never spoken of or included in the selected works because it is considered an 'anti-novel'. I don't believe this was at all his point. Tomorrow I have to finally write a paper on this, but for now what I find incredibly interesting is other literature The Miner has been compared to: Dostoyevsky's The Double (1846), Strindberg's Miss Julie (1888), Ionesco's Victims of Duty (1952), along with Robbe-Grillet, and in regards to stream-of-consciousness Proust, Joyce, Camus and Faulkner. If only such names didn't make me so damn curious, maybe I could stay on track.

The Afterward

"But is rarely attempting to convince the reader of the immediate reality of what passes through the protagonist's mind. By the sixth paragraph, it becomes clear that the narrator is writing, commenting on his own thought processes in retrospect, and we are reading his pages, not floating somewhere inside his brain. There is an eccentric consciousness of consciousness here that is more reminiscent of Beckett's bedridden writer/narrators Molloy and Malone...Beckett's invincibly comic method, which locates comedy in the very movements of the human mind in such works as The Unnamable" (loved this, and at the final moment used it for my Colloquium!)

the day off

2009-05-01T18:55:00.002-04:00

we celebrated me
by behaving,
as a child
I can’t remember, did we finish
pizza in the dark? now we share
straws sucking maltshakes
bathing after
creamed mouths, kissing
every part that isn’t ours.

She gets in the car to drive.

2009-04-30T16:12:00.002-04:00

You find where

You aren’t vulnerable

You must do this now

The window I leave myself through.

I have to stay out after door’s locked

In order to find him tonight so I

Must memorize her window.

Yes I know he’s dead

I know it in this dimension

We’ll get in a car and drive north, or south

South if someone just died

North if I must be submissive

These are memories but not of what happened.

Extract of The Window to Fly Through by Alice Notley.

The City with Codrescu

2009-04-30T13:59:00.003-04:00

At the City Light’s Bookstore in San Francisco, I saw Andrei Codrescu read. There were all but two expectations: the space would be cramped and the reading of The Posthuman Dada Guide would be a bit of a performance. I wasn’t far off. On the second floor—a space taken over by poetry and Codrescu—eager admirers sat on stools, Indian style on the ground, others leaned on the stairway. The evening began with the bookstore owner charging up the steps with an orchid balancing on his palm. Barely winded—though it sounded like he had fallen face down on the staircase—he paused and flew back as if ready to plummet toward his death. Then, down below, hysterical laughter. Increasing. Hysterical. Almost a behavior to be concerned about. Andrei wouldn’t begin until someone sat in the single empty stool. The idea was to prevent the woman who left from interrupting the reading when she came back. She did so anyway. That too was amusing.

Then Andrei began. It was all rather informal. As if he wasn’t sure he knew what he was doing there. In such a sense it was the very essence of the Dadaist, impromptu. He showed no embarrassment showing us that his copy of The Posthuman Dada Guide had a sticky note on every page. He read his notes, which makes sense. The novel really is less about imagination—invention—than it is with piecing together facts to create some fluid history—explication—of the movement. Mocking his brilliance, he said the only reason chapters went alphabetically was because it was the only way he could condense his excessive notes.

Over all, I was confused. You may say this was a language barrier. And this is true. His accent was thick, heavy, hard to hear. Bringing out my notebook was incentive to listen carefully. Otherwise, I can’t swear I would have walked away with anything, but the image of him pulling on the colored string crisscrossing the room like streetcars wired and saying, “BOING!” However, Andrei was most provocative in his rambling answers—insights—to questions asked by the audience. Here is what I have:

The library is a place to transfer one’s life.

Future burglars are the poets of the future. Thieves operate in this room.

Singing seductively wasn’t enough to fulfill an evening. She was high strung. His hackles made it easy to make her cry, to laugh.

The author breaks into memory so he can clean it out.

Perfecting the art of forgetting. Struggle of consciousness, leaving behind the weak.

This right now is a transitional moment, a post-human time. The track we are on for the future is remembering nothing but the box it came in. Now that we have become responsible, I don’t think it’s worth it to nod on to humanism. Who wants to be human? What’s so great?

Everything that isn’t war is cowardice.

Bahhhing like sheep right into their death. Bahhhing = Buying.

The difference between Futurism and Dadaism is, well, I’ll start saying there is a difference. Futurism is the love for machines. This is a love for speed, a speeding toward another war. Dadaism moves in all directions at all time. This question of time was very urgent to them.

But today what do you put into time? How is it perceived? This is the Postmodern pondering.

Surrealism was more of an idealism.

I created a guide because it keeps asking question.

Today there is a means of reading the thoughts of an artist before he has even conceived of their being born.

I mean, right now, there is at least six things walking around, that I almost thought of.

It took and still takes awhile for Dada to be on exhibit. There is too much juice in it. It’s still alive. Museums hang the dead. This is why it takes so much time, effort, strain.

There are no more spectators. You may be the last audience.

On a Side.

2009-04-30T03:05:00.005-04:00

Wednesday I woke from the dream of destroying us. Maybe it's already destroyed, or rather was while sleeping, and the progression of dreaming worsened the already distant. Sleep has been a new activity for me, an activity I don't get more time with by any means but that - when there - am more involved with. And in that way, maybe sleep has been a sort of suffering, a way of having my concerns be filled. A self-service; a masochism.

In San Francisco, I tried revising the final fiction. As I feared, it was tedious, forced and unproductive. I did nothing, but doubt my life, what I am perceptive to, what I've been choosing to become. I was also sincerely overwhelmed and depleted of energy. Oh, I also saw in the morning that I had turned the male character into a ballerina. Well, the equivalent. One thing I didn't doubt was my desperation. I was too willing to eat everything, and was visibly dragging myself around. Face in hands, I slumped outside the graduate school, unwilling to walk in, not ready for anyone to ask me who I am, what I do, if I could possibly mean anything. Sometimes I wasn't convinced I could, forgot they already thought I did.

Of course, those were only tough times. Catastrophes I was creating. Or that is what I was told. The truth is, I leave out the juice. I felt ritzy, walked pantless, came home with two handfuls of numbers. And another truth? The first person you meet in San Francisco does make you want to stay.

Today I finally caught some wind, struck a pace, and heard the voice that may - hopefully - have made the story better, solid. At midnight I began reading Adrienne Rich's The Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society 1997-2008 and Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet. I'll post quotes along the way. It's always the same feeling; a suffocation and then the touch that calms. They write what's rewritten in my mind everyday. They speak what I want to share in dialogue. In dialogue damnit! It makes me feel empty, maybe hypocritical, or deceiving to read such prose and acknowledge everything I never write out. This neglectfulness keeps even me out of the known. I know it doesn't matter to you any which way, but my aim is for others to be vulnerable, and here I can't even do it. I can't be so pathetic. But if I really let it all slip, there's a good chance that's exactly what I'd be.

On a side. The common tale that if the sex is this [sensational] it means there must be more you are communicating, can communicate. I say yes and I think no. I need it to happen.

Also, a certain type of communication I admire. The one that risks being silly while being thoughtful. The voicemail:

Hey carrot girl, you know I was just thinking, you're my carrot and I'm your apple, I think together we'd make a great juice. Um, if you want to go for that walk, by the way, I don't know if you're in California already but maybe we can take that sometime. I'll be around, so you know where to find me.

Actions are far different than the Written.

2009-04-23T12:44:00.003-04:00

As a follow up to my entry about being shunned in class, my confusion about his tone and overall reaction to me. I don't know. Life always arranges itself in strange ways (last night was an example that I will get into later). Confrontation that is. I always have people, particularly family, say I appear aloof. I don't like the sound of it. I also am just not sure whether it means acting above others, disinterested or just elsewhere, internal, in a peaceful realm somewhere within. It could mean none of those things. It could be really simple: I don't look like I give a damn or I'm a space cadet. Either way, I've had professors - men, if that makes any difference - react to me in front of entire classrooms in explosive sort of ways - not physically, but just behaving unlike themselves; as if I've truly conflicted them. I don't know why I am talking about this. But ultimately it must be because I want to understand the reactions I cause, so I know better what to and not to do. My sister always claims that she imagines I get defensive, abrupt, offending others; that the problem must be me, who I am, how I come across. Yes, we don't know who we are in the gaze of others, but I don't feel like I could let myself be that way to others. I think more times than not, I am soft spoken, firm minded, because I respond passionately and I try to give feedback that is hopeful, rather than criticism; if anything I am not critical enough and that is my own laziness. Absolutely. Aloofness, sure. But really, I am just a bit shy here. I don't really know anyone at school. It has never been that experience. I come and go. I resent this a bit. I have established a relation that will probably, hopefully, some day end up in a dedication. Looking back on last night, I didn't really see it then, only after as I thought back in the shower; standing on broadway, Burberry raincoats, her frail body, encouraging me, a sort of pep talk, as if she had watched me through elementary school and was now sending me off to middle. Victoria has certainly been my professor from the first day I walked into NYU, from there we went on creating independent studies together, she sent my recommendations to graduate school and she watched me through my colloquium. She read my first words and her guidance will follow me to my last. She shaped me. She helped me grow up. It wasn't my boyfriend that made me healthy again (though he did that in other ways), it was her without ever acknowledging my weight. At best she compared the situation to Virginia Woolf's struggle ("people forced food down her throat, trying to ripen her up, she hated them for it.") I remember when I came to that revelation. I remember the letter I sent her. Thanking her. And hoping she knew what I meant, but couldn't say directly. When I left for college, even before attending NYU in the spring of my sophomore year, I never believed I could/would read theory, philosophy. I thought I was all emotion; intoxicated my wine and romance, the cliches that are cliches for a reason. Last night I felt maybe Victoria was a second mom, guiding me, not through instruction, just telling me it was okay to try, showing me it was normal to just want to sit in the corner of the room and talk to one other about thoughts.

After every confrontation with a professor, I receive an email. I was scared to open it, but then there was this. Maybe?... it is all teaching me, that confrontation is how we establish our positions, how we show someone what they mean, and perhaps words are our chance to go back and explain ourselves.

Thank you Chelsea. These were in my inbox when I got home last night.
If you haven't arranged for N & C to receive your
comments, please do so. And good luck on your colloquium.

And I want to be clear about something. You bring a special quality to
the class, which I value. You enter into classroom discussions with
great independence and tremendous heart, and your own work introduced
a narrative approach that I feel enriched the course dialectic for all
of us. You've been a wonderful addition to our sessions.

But the issues with the mundane exchange of class documents are not
issues I've had with any other student, and it disturbs me that your
carefully considered responses are somehow dropping into a void. I
think it should concern you, too, and it remains your responsibility
to resolve whatever has gone wrong.

Any aloofness has been because I acknowledge my slacking and somehow I can't just resolve it. I've only felt guilty that I've been struggling with work. It embarrasses me. I need to break through myself. Off to San Francisco is a few hours.

Two Lips.

2009-04-23T10:16:00.003-04:00

I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free--

Tulips, Sylvia Plath.

Nothing is over, even when it ends End.

2009-04-22T03:06:00.003-04:00

After the end of the world
after my death
I found myself in the middle of life
creating myself
building a life
people animals landscapes

man should be loved
I learned by night by day
what should one love
I answered man
this is a man
this is a tree this is bread
people eat in order to live
I kept repeating to myself
human life is important
human life has great importance
the value of life
surpasses the value of every object
man has made
man is a great treasure
I kept repeating stubbornly

this is water I kept saying
stroking the waves with my hand
talking to the river
water I said
kind water
it is I

- extracts pieced together from In the Middle of Life, a longer Polish poem by Tadeusz Rozewicz.

*This is minimalism. I miss my Fall poetry class. It taught me how much I can cut. He taught me to speak backwards. But now I've forgotten. I've forgotten much. Apologetic, oh! I was petrifying to listen to, to watch - she tried, shifting The History of Sexuality from left palm to right - me stammering on about guilt, a dry anguish told through a dry mouth. She said no need. And fled. Some time between 7:30 and 8:30 pm I was debased again. Extraordinary! And no effort on his behalf. I am yet to meet a creative writing professor who likes me. I offend them, personally, this is my only rationale. It always appears as hate, but never does it feel that uncomplicated. I am ready to resign from spring. She recommended an incomplete, "Sit with Foucault for two or three weeks, then write. Your analysis of Mishima was superior, original, insightful. But here, around this red ink, you mistook Foucault, power, you said the opposite. Sit with him. Write." Until the end of May? I couldn't. I have to move. I'm guilty or I feel I am. "No need. He isn't your interest. I read your rationale, extremely interesting. Tomorrow? Let's work you out after." No need. No need. My colloquium is tomorrow. I still have so much to consume. I always want more. Checked two books out tonight. Found phenomenal existential psychoanalysts at 12:30. I want to add them too! I want to show them off to the world. I want them heard.. even if by only one or two people. I want people to read what I read. I want to know what you read. Recently I have received the most gripping messages in the mail, also quotes sent to me. Thank you. I am terrible responding. But they make me feel closer, they also open me up, encourage me forth. Last night, he and his umbrella. He could stuff a family of five beneath its girth. Time calmed, the city drenched. "If you hadn't shown up to your own invite," he decided, "I would have known you were suffering from anguish." Oh but I am, that's why I made sure to reach out to you, it got me here. And it had. I've been 'flaky' as ever. The existentialist will tell you, there is no excuse for your action. It is true, this is me at a certain time. I told him this. And he laughed along, "As if the world is exerting his stress on you." It was funny. I walked to the story of his "philosopher's walk". He told me it's the substitution to psychedelic drugs. "It's 420, I don't want to talk drugs." To me, it's stupid, but this doesn't have to mean or matter anything to anyone. So yes, tomorrow/today my colloquium. I've learned. I've taught myself. And really, thanks to these hours of making sense and not, of being and not being, I've had to acknowledge my habits, my years, fear. And all of this came from desire. The lack. Before, when I made this study up, I never would have taken desire to mean the missing, the insatiable, the impossible, the always present-absence. He said I know what I am doing, that at graduate school I'll come in with more than most. Something like that. Existentialism tells you to take responsibility of "I". Kierkegaard said, The self is only that which is the process of becoming. I'm a fan of him, but not of the notion of becoming. I am more focused on being. Not continuing to look out into the future. Becoming insinuates desire, the dissatisfaction, the drive toward the impossible, impractical illusory ideal. No thanks. But, yes, I take responsibility. This here is me in process of my self-project. There are periods where it does and will drag on, obsessively, indulgently inward, and other periods when it will venture elsewhere. I don't think I will change. But I know my tone will. It has, it does. All this, these months, maybe they were an effort to embody my undergraduate project, the human dilemma.

We must look elsewhere to know better.

2009-04-22T01:53:00.003-04:00

E l'uomo
curvato
sull'acqua
sorpresa
dal sole
si rinviene
un'ombra

- from L'allegria on 19 agosto 1917
by Giuseppi Ungaretti

Overheard Gestures

2009-04-21T12:54:00.005-04:00

Alarm! Do I not have you to wake me? Those three and a half hours of sleep couldn't have been that good. But they were, all because I was letting myself turn off. O! Now I am in trouble. With an authority that isn't even real. Odd, bewildering, amusing these confines, the rules I follow because I think, what?, I will be spanked with a ruler. And then? won't be able to sit on my ass as I've been doing many a day, my knee many a night. Kiddy's tail is looped around the curtains. Birds waking made it into my dream. And I kept sleeping to the to the to a tune. Wanting to go on. Knowing by now how good it tastes, those tasteless feelings, bedridden beneath blue. Never used to dream. Never kept them after the morning. But now! I meet everyone there. And they tell me many things, showing me all I can't face. A few hours ago, he showed up to tell me a thing or two about himself but really it was all about what I wasn't allowing.

"What you've said
you are,
everything you've told
me you'd like the man
for you to be,
I've done. I know
I have. You know
this."

Questioning or convincing? His startling awareness. And being all sleepy, I remember, this narrative. Remember that a year ago I was in a gallery and in it my show spoke to the notion that in dreams there are no words, that no one ever speaks, that we are infants, that we dream future memories and can't articulate them because they don't make sense to us without our experience of them, our subjectivity. I believed that. Only because I had never experienced the other. I made myself believe my only reality at the time. And these few months, all the talking. And being all sleepy, I remember him asking, telling me. He wasn't looking at me. Kind of a step ahead, to the side, gesturing as if to an audience. But I can't promise anyone was there to back him, supporting. He did not see me watching him as he spoke. He did not see, did not experience the way I took his words. He did not see my sobbed face, did not see me, a hysterical laughter. How well do the dreamed of hear?

In my dream, you did not find me. Always sitting, laying back. In my dream, I had to follow you. Together, accidentally finding ourselves. All these visions, if they are future memories or not, are the same: small and terrifying.

Indulgence

2009-04-21T03:18:00.001-04:00

This is unfair writing. My apologies, but it isn't agreeable, this would be fair if the writing changed. Already a conscious decision to not make an appearance, and now, "This too!," as one we say, "unnamable." Everyone is named except anyone I speak of, talk toward. Look, you know already who I am. Chelsea's Claudelean. Chelsea first, forever. What do you think? Will he last forever? Who is you? I know. But can't say it, I, say it, Your's name, tells who I think of when writing you. Selfishness is never fair. You are right, on the outside I am not you.

Nice to meee, Nice to know you.

2009-04-21T02:22:00.001-04:00

I have wanted, am still wanting, to do many things for him. Reminders of me, proof. But I've waited, and time appears to be late and I'm just walking, thinking how I've missed chances missing him, walking slower than my thought, getting no where I haven't been, hadn't imagined I'd see. In person, I learn all it takes to be me, to be for me. And between living and telling, I learn when I am so many arm lengths away, screened, lettered, I am not the extent of myself, I am other than who I intimately live behind. I act in step, in the silence, of that I oppose. Maybe I want nothing, but the wanting. That can't be it. Not this time, not lately. Is it the wanted I want? When the unspoken isn't said, still, I hold myself back. Because I don't believe. (It takes how little we are being). I believe. (I have what it takes).

In my ears, I am listening for the first time to what was given to me. I may only be hopeful, or had I? had I missed you? I am at fault, I read others the way I want to be read. I look for their message in the word. Maybe our meaning isn't there. Does it have to be? I've been avoiding this. My ex-boyfriend (I still hate this term, believing, knowing we are better than its implication; there is no need for reducing, we went on to become more, this was my hope) has shown himself similarly in another. And what have I learned? To go again. So many men met, many inside, in such short time and have I really wanted nothing other than to wake with this other one of resembling qualities? I am afraid of this likening. Knowing the possibilities, potential of becoming everything, feeling we have it all, or sobering up to discover I know nothing of I, having become wronged in feeling again.

At Best: An Inferior Infant.

2009-04-19T17:39:00.006-04:00

It was night, only since he needed it so and I let it be. But I could feel difference in the reaction a body has to time. He gave me a feeling, the one of being rushed. And I take what he gives, have here all he gave. Keeping these slight gestures, unrecognizable, as to never betray us. I promised. The anonymity someone like him requires. We never meant anything, you’ll see. We, obviously, weren’t real, really there although we are in ways. At five the light stills behind a dangerous window left wide, kept open; alls quiet but his breathing on me. Reminders of time, convenience, ceasing: the very pulse of romance. He said the distance will be our desire. And had he said this desire will become distant, could it be thought, that I came first, that we are satisfying each other now? Would words have made us different? His breathing, I knew then would be the last trace remembered, the only thing I didn't want continuing. No one forgets whatever seems to say: We have these hours, few till we are forgotten, until we are no more. Hurry will you. And it’s funny really, in a sad, pathetic way, how maybe I seemed, if I judged myself on the outside. Hunched up, fingering the hole; my fluid will be digested just below here, I probably thought. And I went, crawling, wanting to taste him, trying to think of him too. You may deem us hopeless, sad, pathetic. That’s funny, because, really, I was trying.

but the blank screen blinked.

2009-04-19T03:01:00.000-04:00

I am feeling empty. The other receives a blank expression. Hours upon hours planning, mapping out materials for my colloquium. I think it is all of two things. One, a selfish desire to be at one with my thoughts - while I still can before summer starts and academia ends - furthermore the selfish refusal to read anything outside of what correlates to my inner lack of knowledge, my inner desire to know myself more fully. Two, my determination/my need to master this theory I have put forth. Already, the applaud of my rationale; the gripping journey that hasn't been put forth in the past, but that my colloquium expects too much of itself. And really, there is so much and my compulsion to know more, to include more, to show more. I have two desires. One to reach a revelation - this is impossible - and two, to provide my panel with connections that haven't been made, relations that have not yet been associated. All my fictions are obscure. And I am absolutely fascinated by each one. Astounded. Thankful that above all I am leaving undergraduate having read these texts. And that this was my drive. That all this knowledge was because of my own curiosity, my own concern. (Sartre: It is relation to myself as subject that I am concerned about myself). On a side note, I've come to realize this insatiable curiosity is not that, but an insatiable concern that language will "reveal to me a being which is my being without being-for-me" - that is, I will recognize that I am always othered, always objectified in the gaze of the other, that I always body before mind. What has come from all my gathering is perhaps the issue of utmost concern - a concern I thought I could somehow avoid. And that is the crisis of the body's image. However what I have done is not included any psychology of eating disorders. This is a decision I've made for so many reasons, so many instinctual reasons. Ultimately, it is too superficial - too much a given, that gives the subject no deeper dimension, no inner explanation, no origin of desire - to say that the self's image is a lack because one does not see his body as it is, does not see his body as the ideal-I. Worse it is that the self sees his body and says, that this image does not embody how one knows himself. Therefore, one's image of himself (what will satisfy it and what perpetuates its lack) is thought. I think the body image is a philosophical dilemma and that the psychological comes after. Feelings are a reaction to thought. Language is the image of all things. By presenting the positions of philosophers, I want to show what I term The Desire to be in The Other. And through the fiction works how the self cannot escape the other (a partner's body, language which confines, constructs and others one from the start, the ideal-I seen in Lacan's mirror stage, Freud's castration, Kristeva's split subject, Derrida's trace, etc etc). My only hope is to show that I have been thinking and also that I don't know what to do; it is impossible to satisfy desire, and yet our thought and experience is conditioned by the originary lack. Contradictions are naturally embedded, obscurity is intentional and yet there is this calling - this urgency, this compulsion - to figure it out. Yes, I am the epitome of the subject with an existential dilemma. Not to mention I am so damn far behind on school work. I have so much to tell! Damnitdamnit. I'm going to San Francisco this Thursday to check out the graduate school. I hope the glove fits. I hope the city satisfies my desire so nothing any longer seems to lack, defer my desire to be. But this of course is impossible. Exhaustion!

Some word was trying to come to the surface of her being. Some word had sought all day to pierce through like an arrow the formless, inchoate mass of incidents of her life. The geological layers of her experience, the accumulated faces, scenes, words and dreams. One word was being churned to the surface of all this torment. It was as if she were trying to name her greatest enemy. But she was struggling with the fear we have of naming that enemy. For what crystallized simulatenously with the name of the enemy was an emotion of helplessness against him! What good was naming it if one could not destroy it and free one's self? This feeling, stronger than the desire to see the face of the enemy, almost drowned the insistent word into oblivion again.

What Stella whispered in the dark with her foreign accent enhancing strongly, markedly the cruelty of the sound was:

ma soch ism

Soch! Och! It was the och which stood out, not mas or ism but the och! which was like some primitive excalmation of pain. Am, am I, am I, am I, am I, whispered Stella, am I a masochist?
Stella by Anais Nin.

She, We.

2009-04-15T03:00:00.000-04:00

She was cruel. She made you feel small. Dumb, naive, hopeless. She called her, she named me a romantic. She said you talk of losers. She made them small. Her hand was to her head. Her little body in that bed. Her eyes always that, yes, that red. As if, as if, yes we were hurting her. Her head. A fantasy world, Chelsea, all of you, your fantasies. She was cruel. She made you feel hopeless. She provided no help. "Get out." "Okay, yes, I will." "Get out." "I know, I am, we are, that tiring." This is a reason man and woman never get involved, never evolve. No one can be human. It would be much too much a surprise; a surprise for the better. But the boyfriend can take her glasses. Throwing them like darts. He can pull the curtains I left her. Pull and have the rod almost go through her head. And she can plead and he won't listen. And she can leave and he'll say she should learn to try. Try to understand what it means. What it means to be normal. Why was she never cruel to her? Never just real with her, as she imagines she is with me. And if reality made her feel small? Then stand on your toes. She made me feel stupid and made the people, the losers of my stories, the friend in my head, the man in my mouth out to be the same. And my feelings, she wanted them insignificant. She didn't want me and him to mean anything. And I don't want to be like her. Dismissive and alone every night.

It's strange. All this distancing we, people, do. The distance doesn't make me feel at all. I don't have the imagination for it. And yet every time I try to get closer to her, at times by trying to talk of him, she says WAKE UP.

GET OUT.
MOVE ON.

And I was
going to
I am
GOING
any
way.

(I
love you,
I don't
want to
blame
you, for this,
you can't
understand if
the boy is
never in you,
can't help this
when it's
never you
in him,
but you
care, you
care right?)

A Conversation in the Night.

2009-04-13T14:35:00.002-04:00

He was in my bed, and too tall for it really. But without him or some body, it always felt empty. Maybe that was only me. As I laid my head on his stomach, he moved his fingers from one side of my scalp to the other. We named this gesture “the rake” and I’ve never not wanted such sensation in my head. With a turned face, I’ve lied like this for hours without sleeping. It’s never made me tired either; how little we sometimes speak. Not needing to make an effort to entertain was enjoyable, relieving. Four nights in a row now, I’ve watched the sky become ruby at four. And always wonder whether he likes it better blue. I can’t imagine he could.

“Would you say you’re always traveling or leaving?”
“Neither. I’m just often in the air.”
“What do you like better coming or going?”
“Commm.” And we laughed and I tried to bite the stomach he doesn’t have.
“You think it’s easy to know someone?”
“Ignoring intuition, never. But I think it’s easy to know whether you like someone.”
“To decide whether you like?”
“Right.”
“That isn’t too fair.”
“Nothing right off the bat is fair.”
“Yeah, yeah. It is what it is.”
“No. It’s how it is.”
“Blue or green?”
“Green.”
“Sailing or cruising?”
“Sailing.”
“Red fish or swordfish?”
“Red.”
“Godard or Antonioni?“
“Antonioni.”
“Antonioni or Bergman?”
“Bergman.”
“Freud or your father?”
“Both, together, at the same time.”
"To be or not to be."
"That isn't a question."
“If you could change anything about me.”
“What?”
“What would it be?”
“Your eyes. I like light eyes, but I don’t like them light.”
“That’s terrible.”
“Teaches you not to ask superficial questions.”
“Fine. But really, my eyes, you don’t like them?”
“What about me?”
“I love yours.”
“But what would you change?”
“What you consider home.”
“Ruby or blue?”

Attraction, I'm Afraid.

2009-04-12T23:42:00.004-04:00

The sound of the lighter. The thumb raw from trying. Bubbling, so obnoxious like a bath, but the body isn't submerged, just the mind which is becoming less and less a pure and extraordinary thing. Then the breathing. And the repetition. And that bathroom wall. "I will myself to stop." Now the eyeliner has no color. But her nose has been looking red. Can't say it's from the outside. This is you. Can't blame what you see. Though what I see seems to be feeling less and less. And the skin is so pale. And it smells like shit. No I don't want to smell. Don't bring it to my nose. I said no. No I said it smells like shit I said. And they were fucked up all weekend. Like she was fucked up each day. I've tried for years not to be judgmental. And the best I can do is separate desire from a friend. I'll be a friend but you can't attract me. And what attracts me is the desire to be grounded, ambitious. I'm not talking about jobs. But yes, maybe what I mean is the job for yourself, the job to be good, to have a clear mind, the desire to teach yourself things, everyday to be thinking, to not always be escaping into a drug or a party. I cringe at my judgment, knowing no one is perfect, and knowing I don't want myself or anyone else to be, but I'm afraid consciousness attracts me and escapism is in no way what I am pursuing, even if I leave town every month and I write "fiction" everyday.

Who is it Tell me His name

2009-04-11T23:56:00.002-04:00

Oh these weeks have been mind AND body hogging. Constantly reading, devouring texts for my Colloquium. The day after I leave for San Francisco. Then I have about a week - if I pass my Colloquium - to finish all the other three research papers and portfolio. Ep. Everything works out in time. Although I am a mad lady in the mind. Not so sure whether I have been taking the Colloquium too seriously oooor not enough. Whatever it is, it happens. As for today I read St. Augustine's Confessions Book X Memory, Samuel Beckett's Not I, The Unnamable, Cascando (But the entire reader is damn good and I need to seriously get in on that). I also finished Molly Bloom's soliloquy the last interior-scope in the final pages of Ulysses by Joyce. Yesterday was Lacan. And tonight I need to try and get a move on Plato's Phaedrus. So many words, so many texts referring me to other texts, other words, other poems, other quotes I need now always to share. I watched a PHENOMENAL video from Philoctetes Center Multidisplinary Study of Imagination with a panel (Arina Abramovic, Paul Campos, Sander Gilman, Marcel Kinsbourne, and Sabine Wilhelm) on The Body and Its Image. These issues merged with the study of my Colloquium The Desire to be in The Other has made me more aware, most awake. It has all been just before my very eyes. I feel like I've been reduced to terms, like I've been in an analyst's hot seat for months - days that don't die - and now I get it. And soon I will have to see if I can articulate it, reveal what I've done and how, yes, the clues have been laid out for me all along. I feel good. But extremely worn out. Too much school work I fear I'll never finish, but regardless I will, crazed and insufficiently. The ol' group went to Miami for the weekend and I couldn't go. A first. Miss that sort of pleasure. Went out for a bottle of wine Thursday, she even said I talk differently, hold my body differently as I speak in Miami. It made her sad and that made me sad. But it all really shouldn't be a sad thing. It isn't. I've accomplished a lot here. But yes, I'm just trying to meet deadlines always. Manic exhaustion, I admit. Can't wait for kisses and all of that and that and this and such makes me feel immediately well again. I can't wait to feel good. I can't wait to begin living again. To be a yes girl and not a no. Which leads me right into Joyce's Ulysses. He believed "Yes" was the female's word. The final chapter is referred to as "Penelope", after Molly's mythical counterpart (OTHER). One major difference between Molly and Penelope is that while Penelope is eternally faithful, Molly is not, having an affair with Hugh 'Blazes' Boylan after ten years of her celibacy within the marriage. On that note, this soliloquy is the damn funniest thing I have ever read - erotic, crude, the whole nine yards - it is damn good. I will include some of the passages from all the works at someone time but for now:

After that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldn't answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know.

I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

James Joyce, Ulysses: Molly Bloom

Sight Changes once Feelings Change.

2009-04-10T20:02:00.002-04:00

Yesterday, the reality of myself seemed to change, or, at the very least, feel different.
Maybe I just finally let myself see things the way they are.

Q. Back to the mine? A. It's the only place I have to go.

2009-04-08T14:24:00.004-04:00

When I met Chozo and the tea lady, for example, I took in everything they said without a peep - not a hint of my usual argumentative, self-assertive behavior. Of course, it would be reasonable to try to account for this by reference to the fact that I was starving at the time, but hunger was surely not the whole explanation. Any way you look at it, it's a contradiction. Here I go with the contradictions again. Never mind.

I have a habit of recalling the adventures I experienced back then whenever I have a few spare moments. It was the most colorful period of my life. Each time I bring back those images to savor, I wield my scalpel mercilessly (you can do this with old memories) in an attempt to chop up my own mental processes and examine every little piece. The results however are always the same: I don't understand them. Now, don't tell me I've just forgotten because it happened so long ago. I'll never have such an intense experience again in my lifetime. And especially don't tell me that the lines are tangled because those were the frantic acts of a confused adolescent. The acts themselves were confused and misguided, but the only way to understand the processes leading to those misguided acts is to examine them calmly with the brain I have today. It's precisely because I can now look at my trip to the mine as an old dream that I am able to describe it for some people with even this degree of clarity. I'm not just saying that I have the courage to write down everything that happened because the passions have faded; I could never have managed to put down even this much on paper if I didn't have the detachment to drag out the old me out to where the present me can see it and study every wart and pimple. Most people imagine that the most accurate account of an experience would be the one written at the time and place, but this is a mistake. Driven by the passions of the moment, a description of the immediate situation tends to convey preposterous misconceptions. If I had kept a diary, say, of my feelings just as they were at the moment, I'm sure the result would have been an infantile, affected thing full of lies - certainly nothing that I could have presented to people like this and asked them to read. -The Miner by Natsume Sōseki.

Present & Experienced.

2009-04-07T00:52:00.001-04:00

Extracts from Being and Nothingness by Sartre.
All of these are sentences from the text that I have linked together.
And not the complete or actual passages themselves.
Although they advance as the text does itself.
Enjoy!

Language: by revealing to us abstractly the principal structures of our body-for-others (even though the existed body is ineffable) impels us to place our alleged mission wholly in the hands of the Other. We resign ourselves to seeing ourselves through the Other’s eyes → we attempt to learn our being through the revelations of language. Therefore it is language which teaches me my body’s structures for the Other. But it follows that even in reflection I assume the Other’s point of view on my body; I try to apprehend it as if I were the Other in relation to it. It is evident that the categories which I then apply constitute an emptiness or rather, a dimension which escapes me.

I am language. By the sole fact that whatever I may do, my acts freely conceived and executed, my projects launched toward my possibilities have outside of them a meaning which escapes me and which I experience. Seduction is the complete realization of language. In other words it can be our primitive expression. Thus I do not know my language any more than I know my body for the Other. I can not hear myself speak nor see myself smile. The problem of language is exactly parallel to the problem of bodies, and the description which is valid in one case is valid in the other. Seduction will perhaps determine me to risk much to conquer the Other-as-object, but this desire to appropriate an object in the midst of the world should not be confused with love. Love therefore can be born in the beloved only from the proof which he makes of his alienation and his flight toward the Other.

Cornered.

2009-04-06T02:42:00.002-04:00

We sat in the corner as we had times before. It wasn’t habit, just a preference that never needed a voice. I felt bad, immediately; my noticeable nature, I was there but nowhere to be found. She looked into my eyes and I let myself pass further into the distance. I’ve become someone less. Engaged, she saw me for the first time and I laughed.

I wanted to ask her whether I looked sad or blank. But what would I have done with the answer? I didn’t know. I didn’t really care. For months, I’ve been looking forward to gaining my esteem soon. But I’m not certain it will happen. And if it doesn’t, I wonder how I’ll be, if I’ll excuse myself or just keep waiting.

She left for water. Hurt her back looking at photography on exhibit. Swallowing a pill for pain. Closed my eyes. Envious. “I have something, a small surprise.” Flowers. I hadn’t seen that amount of color in a long time. I was silent. “I’m so proud. You’ve made it happen.” I was silent. “Chelsea…" "It's just you didn’t have to do this. Wherever I am going, whatever becomes of it, and everything that’s already been written is because of you. I don’t deserve these." It’s impossible to decide whether words are the consequence of yourself or the other. But a writer lives for the touch, works toward the story that will say it all; doesn’t move until affected although a writer races and waits, races and erases. "Thank you for caring."

“I’ve been missing you and you’re not gone. You’re here and I’ve already.”
“Things haven’t been the same.”
“I’ve noticed. You’re scattered, exhausted from trying to do too much.”
“I don’t have anything to say.”
“That isn’t the case.”
“It has to change. I have to change.”
“Things already are.”
“California.”
“You’re suited for San Francisco. It had to happen.”
“So not LA?”
“It’s not a question. You know my first husband and I’s relationship ended because Los Angeles would never be me. You’re the same way.”
“This is certainly true.”

We talked about San Francisco. Neighborhoods. Where I’d live. Your’s, Mine and Ours. Ferlinghetti. The scale of intensity. Manhattan: 10. Berkley: 2. San Francisco: 6. Big Sur. Wine. Romance. Intoxication. We talked about Manhattan and if she’d ever get me back.

“I feel like I’ve lost myself.”
“How does that happen? People find themselves here.”
“Exactly. I did. I thought. In the beginning. But now I can’t remember anything. I have the worst memory you know.”
“All you need is summer.”
“But it became spring yesterday. It’s everyone’s favourite season.”
“You’re doubting yourself.”
“Exactly.”
“What’s happened?”
“I don’t like myself here. At this time I don’t. I’m that type of New Yorker giving the city a bad reputation. I walk in and out of lives. Meet you then I’m gone. And I don’t like doing it, but I do. Out of laziness? Maybe. People say I have priorities but that’s no excuse. People should be the priority. All my friends complain about dating here and I’m worse than men. They follow me home and once we’ve both been had, I ask them to please not try to reach me. They say they want to and somehow, somewhere inside of me, I find it okay to respond that this isn’t about them, it’s about me. I seem complex but it’s all rather simple. It’s Manhattan and I don’t have time.”
“Your honesty will always be admirable.”
“But I don’t think this is how I feel. And if it is, I don’t believe this is how I come close to feeling.”

Extra Extra

2009-04-04T21:55:00.002-04:00

Finally checked out some clips from Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist and though it isn't in your face, you can actually see me. Especially 2:30, I walk in front of them and turn. It was a long rooftop night, and my fur was drenched. But it was an interesting experience and the money was damn good. I should have/be doing more of these things.

Relieved of the Obligation to Love.

2009-04-03T15:30:00.007-04:00

"Don't you sometimes feel that, in times like these, to separate is normal and to meet is the miracle...that, when you think of it, even our being able to meet and talk together like this for a time is probably quiet a miraculous thing?..."

"Yes, I also..." She started speaking with some hesitation. Then she went on with an earnest but agreeable serenity. "But here when I was thinking we'd just begun meeting already we're to be separated..." I could not make a causal reply. The pain I felt in my heart was so piercing that it surprised even me. The feeling of ease I felt with Sonoko had given me an illusion, a belief that all our days would be spent together and that everything would remain just as it was now. In a deeper sense it was a twofold illusion: the words with which she passed the sentence of separation upon us proclaimed the meaninglessness of our present meeting and revealed that my present feeling was only a passing happiness, and at the same time as they destroyed the childish illusion of believing this would last forever, they also opened my eyes to the fact that, even if there were no parting, no relationship between a boy and girl could ever remain just as it was.
It was a painful awakening. Why were things wrong just as they were? The questions which I had asked myself numberless times since boyhood rose again to my lips. Why are we all burdened with the duty to destroy everything, change everything, entrust everything to impermanency? Is it this unpleasant duty that the world calls life? Or am I the only one for whom it is a duty? At least there was no doubt that I was alone in regarding the duty as a heavy burden.

At last I spoke: "So, you're leaving...But of course even if you were here, I myself would have to be going away before long..."

-Confessions of a Mask by Mishima p165-166.

Oh Boy.

2009-04-02T13:31:00.004-04:00

That day, the instant I looked upon the picture, my entire being trembled with some pagan joy. My blood soared up; my loins swelled as though in wrath. The monstrous part of me that was on the point of bursting awaited my use of it with unprecedented ardor, upbraiding me for my ignorance, panting indignantly. My hands, completely unconsciously, began a motion they had never been taught. I felt a secret, radiant something rise swift-footed to the attack from inside me. Suddenly it burst forth, bringing with it a blinding intoxication...

Some time passed, and then, with miserable feelings, I looked around the desk I was facing. A maple tree at the window was casting a bright reflection over everything - over the ink bottle, my schoolbooks and notes, the dictionary, the picture of St. Sebastian. There were cloudy-white splashes about - on the gold-imprinted title of a textbook, on a shoulder of the ink bottle, on one corner of the dictionary. Some objects were dripping lazily, leadenly, and others gleamed dully, like the eyes of a dead fish. Fortunately, a reflex motion of my hand to protect the picture had saved the book from being soiled.

-Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima.

In the Eyes of Another

2009-04-01T20:09:00.004-04:00

She framed his face in her hands, looking into him straight-on. What did it mean, the first time a thinking creature looked deeply into another’s eyes? Did it take a hundred thousand years before this happened or was it the first thing they did, transcendingly, the thing that made them higher, made them modern, the gaze that demonstrates we are lonely in our souls.

She said, “Why do I think I’m standing closer to you than you are to me?”

She wasn’t trying to be funny. It was true, a paradox of the spectral sort. Then she tried to be funny using sweet talk and pet names, but soon felt foolish and stopped.

The Body Artist by Don DeLillo p 85.

The Moment After

2009-04-01T00:21:00.000-04:00

Unclothed I curl into a shape similar to a seashell: spiraling curves, careful to keep music—my breathing—inward. Closer, his artless hands reach, trying to touch me, but I can’t be felt, won’t admit consolation. Imprisoning poetry. Can’t be released. We are our words. My tongue is stroking, gently calming me. I try to talk always to me. My body is caressing the inside of itself. I always try speaking on behalf of myself. Doesn’t he know he changed us? “You’re the writer,” as if those words were a novelty, as if they touched me most, as if I didn’t know before, and haven’t already felt the pressure. He doesn’t understand. This, nebulous, female; my fetal position. Reborn in his bed. He can’t see. The child only wants to know she means something. Something special to those she looks up to, that is, whomever I’ve chosen to see.

Recall

2009-03-31T18:25:00.001-04:00

She wasn't watching him now. She was looking at the backs of her hands, fingers stretched, looking and thinking, recalling moments with Rey, not moments exactly but times, or moments flowing into composite time, an erotic of see and touch, and she curled one hand over and into the other, missing him in her body and feeling sexually and abysmally alone and staring at the points where her knuckles shone bloodless from the pressure of her grip -The Body Artist by Don DeLillo p 49

Time and Time Again.

2009-03-30T23:27:00.005-04:00

The worst time is time lost, when you thought you could be gaining. Spent a few hours writing a-could-be-story. In the back of my mind, considering the time that takes and all the enormous - unbearable - amounts of other work I also have to be doing. And then all of a sudden it goes from day to night and it's after 10pm, I break, somewhat proud of what has been written, go to a friends, come back, have the part read, and in my head - one beat, two beat, three, four, five - "Uh, Chelsea, no, no, none of this. I can't read it. No good." Just like that. As if it's so easy to place emotion on a page. Not even sections. Not even lines. Not even the chance to see the direction. Just, as always, "I know your work and this is too abstract." And I sit with my work in my lap and look at it like one can with time - abstractly, curious whether its been wasted and myself with it.

No one wants to feel dumb or defeated either. But at times the most resonating feeling is being unwanted, which also is the most unwanted feeling. And what do you do with that? Try to compose yourself time and time again.

Unfortunately, when I spend time articulating the self, the other, the memory the reader doesn't want me. I've taken this to heart and tried to change. Accounts were less of everything. I don't know, I suppose they touched people, but really? They seemed obvious, like everything was being given away. Unfortunately, many readers accepted me when I was feeding them.

Ah, hell, spooning is what I'm after. Feeding = fulfillment. Spooning = sensation, prospect, the lack. It's a tease, it's an involvement, pleasure is give and take. Why do people think writers already know everything? We write to discover knowledge, but when we begin we are empty.

I feel that more times than not.

A Place Adventured.

2009-03-30T13:31:00.007-04:00

The following excerpts are extracted from Nausea by Sartre.

This dark body which grows lighter little by little makes an extraordinary impression on me: when it becomes entirely clear, entirely white, I shall stop just beside it and the adventure will begin.

It must be such an upheaval. If I were ever to go on a trip, I think I should make written notes of the slightest traits of my character before leaving, so that when I returned I would be able to compare what I was and what I had become. I’ve read that there are travelers who have changed physically and morally to such an extent that even their closest relatives did not recognize them when they came back...To speak frankly, I would also like something unexpected to happen to me, something new, adventures. 35

I have never had adventures. Things have happened to me, events, incidents, anything you like. But no adventures. It isn’t a question of words; I am beginning to understand. There is something to which I clung more than all the rest—without completely realizing it. It wasn’t love…It was…I had imagined that at certain times my life could take on a rare and precious quality. There was no need for extraordinary circumstances: all I asked for was a little precision…And naturally, everything they tell about in books can happen in real life, but not in the same way. It is to this way of happening that I clung so tightly. The beginning would have had to be real beginnings. Alas! Now I see so clearly what I wanted…Suddenly you see that it is the beginning of a great shape whose outlines are lost in mist and you tell yourself, “Something is beginning.” Something is beginning in order to end: adventure does not let itself be drawn out; it only makes sense when dead. I am drawn, irrevocably, towards this death which is perhaps mine as well. Each instant appears only as part of a sequence. I cling to each instant with all my heart: I know that it is unique, irreplaceable—and yet I would not raise a finger to stop it from being annihilated…All is going to end, I know it. Soon I shall leave for another country. I shall never rediscover this woman or this night. I grasp at each second, trying to suck it dry: nothing happens which I do not seize, which I do not fix forever in myself, nothing, neither the fugitive tenderness of those lovely eyes, nor the noises of the street, nor the false dawn of early morning: and even so the minute passes and I do not hold it back, I like to see it pass.

I have reconsidered my thoughts of yesterday. I was completely dry: it made no difference to me whether there had been no adventures. I was only curious to know whether there could never be any. This is what I thought: for the most banal even to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell. I led a funny sort of life. But I was in the middle of it, I didn’t think about it. 37-39

Binding Desire.

2009-03-29T00:03:00.004-04:00

As ever, I have no knowledge of what this is, where it will be taken or why it began. It just starts, unknowingly, plotless and continues without plan. And that is how it happens. All my endings surprise me in their referencing to the opening - my unconscious desire to have a revelation. I only noticed that it seems like an authorial design when my professor wrote back saying how well I foreshadowed. I thought it bizarre - seeing how the story was autobiographical and his comment went to show how maybe, one - I - knows all along how time will turn out and/or needs all along for the future to mirror a subconscious fulfillment. Even more shocking (which isn't the right word) was his comment that the rape scene was touching, especially moving. Rape? I had never read my story that way. Did those reading my graduate application render the same reading? Was writing a way of prolonging denial, preserving a particular point of view? Lately, nothing I write seems unlike what I have written. But I think this will be the case until I write the better version to a story interacting with the same, single trope. As ambiguous as I make details, each character (in real life) sees the fiction as our account. Of course, this recognition probably prevents me from using my imagination more; a reluctance to have anyone believe I am purposefully falsifying or fabricating. I suppose what should be clear is anyone a fiction is influenced by, should perhaps prevent themselves from reading critically and find compliment in their being there, somewhere. Anyway, don't we all hope to be remembered?

Silence could be the most deafening song. It is possible, yes, just as silence is the most intimidating partner ever to be placed in the mind. When together we exist, I try to survive. Myself: be I and not become overpowered by speechlessness. I try to talk always to me. I always try speaking on behalf of myself. Swallowing words without time for memory—my moments—to be properly digested. This is all I fear.

Lying on that bed, he may have seen me finding pleasure in rest. Appreciating the softness of his sheets. Another skin against my body. Denying darkness the chance to disfigure subtle shadows shown by my nakedness, I made myself look comfortable, like I needed to be there. And maybe I did, perhaps I do. He stared, investing himself. Admiring the image of sleep. The image of belonging to him. During those hours. At a time never in time. He blushed, as I never believed he would.

And he’d never like to believe I wasn’t sleeping; behind veiled eyes I was awake, considering who I was to be there, what that said about you, and meant about us—then or sometime ever. Of course, yes, all states other than the one I am always in are concerns of my mind. The future. Will you matter? Would you be willing? He blushed. I know this not because I saw such change, but rather felt it. I did. Him too. The third time. Lying on that bed, I already knew I’d come to romanticize it; the place between ideal and actuality, not where one sleeps but where two try to touch their dreams—see if what is separately thought is mutually true. I have come, we are here, and I know our reason but not what I feel about it.

“I wish—“
“I didn’t mean to wake—“
“You didn’t. I wish you’d tell me how I am to you.”
“Me too, but honest, you’re the writer.”
“Try.”
“I wish.”

Richard Brautigan

2009-03-28T22:21:00.000-04:00

Hinged to forgetfulness
like a door,
she slowly closed out of
sight,
and she was the woman I loved,
but too many times she slept like
a mechanical deer in my caresses,
and I ached in the metal silence
of her dreams.
-Hinged To Forgetfulness Like A Door.

The sweet juices of your mouth
are like castles bathed in honey.
I've never had it done so gently before.
You have put a circle of castles
around my penis and you swirl them
like sunlight on the wings of birds.
-I've Never Had It Done So Gently Before.

Claudelean Musee

museelemuse.tumblr.com

twit twat.

Only today.

Vertigo.

Words from Some Other.

a repetitious knot.

toes to tongue

I will stick around, hopefully.

Borges, Please.

Kate Bradley

yawner.

There is now nothing not to do.

Mutevellioglu

Forgive Me for Forgetting

Month to Month.

Eros

Chamber Music

Alice Neel

Simian Mobile Disco

the rest is lost.

closer to closure.

Listening

He said it not me.

moreintelligentlife.com

BEING CRAZY IS NOISY

I, too, have been crying.

before:

Film To See:

garden of evil.

favourite new band:

A Good Man Recommended:

Heat Wave.

Summer 2009:

Same day Different year.

It wasn't the story I needed.

The Catch: When Asked to Speak I Can’t.

not the end of everything.

atoms.

"Now I have the sort of table I admire"

Lucy Ives:

via GutCult

"To Find the Particular Place and Then to Hold On To It"

"To All Other Things What I Prefer Most Is Thinking What I Really Think"

We Don't Discuss Our Happiness.

Russian Author

Kotik Letaev By Andrei BelyTranslated by GERALD J. JANECEK

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS Copyright © 1999 Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved.ISBN: 0-8101-1626-X

for jj

Amina Cain

2:21.

To Be A New.

God Help the Girl

Woods

New Poirier

First Semester Freshman

Found You

Time: Robert Creeley

Listening to Silence.

Loves Final Go.

For Helping Her Think or Only To Know More.

Writers from the other side.

the day off

She gets in the car to drive.

The City with Codrescu

On a Side.

Actions are far different than the Written.

Two Lips.

Nothing is over, even when it ends End.

We must look elsewhere to know better.

Overheard Gestures

Indulgence

Nice to meee, Nice to know you.

At Best: An Inferior Infant.

but the blank screen blinked.

She, We.

A Conversation in the Night.

Attraction, I'm Afraid.

Who is it Tell me His name

Sight Changes once Feelings Change.

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