OOOOOOOO, I am still so shy.

There was something unreal. About his gesture. Still, I am. Shy there. There, a touch. Between two. There is an introduction of bodies:

Happy to meet, he rises. Says hello. Still, I am. Shy. There, there a touch. You don’t have to speak at all. Still, I am. Shy, just lying here. Still, I am happy to meet. He rises. My face, a flower, falling open. Red, red, I am a rose. He rises. Smelling for my scent, his nose scratching at my skin. My eyes, a mirror, see his skin. Cocaine scratching his nose. I am, still, shy. Shoving itself into my mouth, words. I am sinking beneath weight. Words weigh a fucking ton. Silent, I am, still shy. His hand a spoon. Feeding its way into. My open lips. Pursuing, a tongue. Numb and beating. Blood rush, numb. Palpable, beating. Cocaine skin, his nose scratching. I can can can, “Taste you”. Up down around and around. I am coming. Still, I am shy. I am coming. I am still. So happy to meet you. I am shy, lying here. You don’t have to speak I said. Still, I am here. Here I am, shy. Imagine something else, lying here. Hand presses. Your body feels like dough. Pressing the muscle of my shoulder. Molding me. The perfect lover. To not be. Still, so shy. Closing the lids of my sight. Lying here, imagine you are someone else, somewhere other. My eyes pretend to dream. His tongue pursuing my open lips. I fall away. Red and beating. My hand grabs. An impossible sky. Imagine somewhere. Fingers feel wet. I see sea. I am always so close to coming. There, there a touch. Smelling for a scent. Fish. Nose scratching at my skin. My open lips, a wound. Fish flying for freedom. I see sea. Eyes pretend to dream. You can be anyone. I see myself. Running toward a beach. Naked skin, like a fish. I see sand. You can be. Still, I am shy. Anywhere. A castle! I see myself. Running toward a beach. I want to be someone in a castle. Feet press against the sand’s skin. I am falling. My body shaped as an arch, I imagine. I was meant to be on my knees. Hands feel powder. Fingers beneath the sand’s skirt. Prodding for a pearl. Pearls crushed into powder. Cocaine for the rich and famous. You can be anyone. Nose scratching at skin. Breathe, the beach. Blood rush. Smells like sea, beating. I can can can taste the sand. Through my nose. My eyes closed. Pretend they are dreaming. I can be anyone. Half my size. Like a pearl, cocaine. Words weigh a fucking ton. I see myself without them. Words dragged down the sand’s floor. Away from me. In a net, imprisoned with the shells. I am shy, still. You don’t have to speak at all. I feel so much lighter. Like the beach. My flesh is pink inside. I can can can, “Taste your pearls”. Between legs shaped as a diamond. I am addicted to your smell. Like the sea full of fish. Fingers feel wet. My eyes are dreaming, I imagine. Chelseeeeea, you are a mermaid. I like swimming in your water. Can breathe you all day. His nose scratching at my skin. The rich and famous live off cocaine. Can breathe you all day. My eyes are dreaming a beach. Left alone. I am shy. Still, all by myself. I see sea. I can can can, “Taste you”. Imagine you are somewhere other. Teasing my skin long into the night. It owns us both. I race to the sea, naked. I can be anyone with my eyes closed. Pretending to dream. Half the weight. Without words. Meanings are less. I will be light. I like the beach without shells. Looks pink, like flesh. I stare out into the sea. Breathe, so light, the air. There is nothing to see. In the sea, an impossible sky. Void of color, the sea, a black hole. At night, I go missing, in the darkness. I can’t see myself, looking into the mirror. No reflection in the sea. Imagine you are someone else, lying here. There is no one else I can think of. When everyone is always staring at me. No words. I am, still, so shy. Just breathe. The pearls. Smells like sea. Tastes like sand. I can be anywhere with my eyes closed. The sea, a type of glass, stretching for miles. I can be anyone without words. The sea like a mirror of glass. My knees pressing into skin. Breaking, the floor of the beach. Breathe. No one in the mirror. Heaving. Missing in the night. I am nothing when I am shy. You don’t have to speak at all. Through my sleep, I speak of the future. My lips like a flower falling open. So close. My lips, so red, like petals. I’ll mold you into the perfect lover. Pulling loose, my rose. So red like a mouth beating. I can can can, “Taste you”. Nose scratching my skin. Breathing in addiction. I am so close to coming. Turn them on. I want to wake to light. See myself hovering over the mirror. OOOOOOOO. In your eyes. OOOOOOOO. I don’t care if I am. Still, shy, on my present-bed. Our limbs ribboned in the center. I am so close to coming. OOOOOOOO. Into sight. He rose. So happy to have met you. OOOOOOOO. So happy I made you come. What did you imagine, lying here? The future reflects itself. In light. I see. The sea. In your eyes. A mirror. Image of my face. A thousand words of weight. All ending with OOOOOOOO.

going hungry - book review.

sunday new york times book review GOING HUNGRY: Writers on Desire, Self-Denial, and Overcoming Anorexia

"the anorexic surfaces, though, not simply in pursuit of an empty 'gossip girl' perfectionism, but as a figure who equates her unsated hunger with nobler concentration and moral purpose. she reimagines restraint and mythologizes it as virtue..."

from am to pm.

This afternoon, on seventh street, standing next to a man, I tried not to stare as he pulled out a key from his pocket and shoved it into his ear to remove wax, or a built up of some sort. Discovering he hadn’t been successful, he used his long pinky nail to go diggin’, than placed his unburied treasure between his front teeth and made a quick sucking sound that could barely be heard over the conversing cars. But I—I heard and saw it all, just out of the corner of my eye and one ear alone. Yesterday in the park, a man brushed his teeth while he sat on a bench in the sun. Early in the morning, a woman watched the neighborhood wake up as she sat restless in her wheelchair. There were no legs in her pants. Between C and Layfatte five men said, “You’re sexy” because they saw the way you touched your hair, liked the way you touched yourself, imagined how might—if you let them see you letting yourself. The way you bite your bottom lip makes them think you’ve got appeal, but really—you think—I just hold my tension in my jaw. Early into the evening a helicopter looked like it was landing on the sea, but as I looked out the cab window all I could catch in sight was a passenger, with his chin up, shaving after work. At dinner I sat at the end of a long table and faced a mirror that was probably twelve feet long. If I was “in-the-moment” I didn’t think to look up and see into myself or if I was distracted enough I may have just looked through myself. I don’t know, I hadn’t been thinking about it, but the times I had, and staring straight ahead of me, I saw myself—I’ll tell you—I was surprised. I walked behind a couple on the way home and watched as her left arm glazed over his warm blue back, her head titled to his side the entire way. I thought about the texture of romance. How romance is being able to feel skin even through layers. I didn’t even have to close my eyes and try, I could just remember: steel gray sweaters, wondering whether the fabric was an illusion, thinking it was his substance that you wanted to feel close to, his invisible shirts you could touch a million times more, one hand kept at the bottom of his back. I remember winter, lips purple in the outside air, frozen fingers poking out of pockets just to put around his back, lips kiss kissing kissed, winter, melting. I know in the fall you are suppose to see colors on the trees, but all I saw today was the world become greener—dark, warm, like the walls are falling in on you, but you aren't fearful. It felt like the hunting camp, being in the middle of nowhere you knew and nowhere you needed to escape from. It tasted of the red wine we drank, flies drowning in our plastic cups, their wings half beating causing ripples (or was that caused by something else?), nothing in between the desire for intoxication because there was nothing to worry about—just flies stuck between teeth and not sleeping with each other, unless of course we wanted to—but those aren’t things to worry about, just fun, just games. That’s how the night tasted. Like wine. Like flies between our teeth. And that’s how I felt. Warm. Like the world was growing darker in romance. When I passed through the park and he sat there with his dog. I saw him seeing me and watched as he looked into the air, through the tree, with everyone looking at a “what is it?—a twig”. And then, how he let his eyes fall and look back at me. That’s how I felt. Warm. When I tried to keep his stare. But couldn’t. Had to turn my face away from the fence. Because he made me smile, made me laugh. Because he broke me down. Surprise is what you feel, when a man resonates because he got you to smile without having to do anything at all, yet by doing so many few things. A man that can distract me from myself. That can match my thought. That is aware of what I am choosing to see out of the many images before me. The things I don’t expect, seeing myself act in unexpected ways—those surprises—are what I can taste. And I wish my eyes were cameras and by blinking I meant “smileeee”. Then, maybe, I could capture more of what I feel, capture what I see and haven’t been able to keep.


And so many times I say ‘you’ I mean to say ‘I’. And so many times I say ‘you’ I wish I could say ‘you’. I mean both.

to do so you can be.

I remember the first time my father visited me in Manhattan. I hadn’t been there for more than three weeks. But according to my sister, it was enough time to put on weight. Even then, I knew that sometimes all one needed to feel secure was sight—that one thought the visible was enough to make a fair judgment of the state of another’s interior. But the truth is, one can’t have an accurate intuitive insight into another’s being if it is based solely on aesthetics. The vision I had of myself was unlike what others saw, but one thing was the same; we all had visions, and despite how or even why they varied, they all were involved with what was “out there”—a sense distinct from any other because its distance disallowed the intimate details unveiled when at close quarters. My appearance could not possibly speak for the content of who I am (I intentionally do not use ‘was’ because who I ‘am’ depends upon my past) but only—if at all—the quality. Any new self-awareness I may have had could only be accessed at a very private level. And I believe that was why it was unfortunate that a weekend visit was made significantly, although unsaid, for the purpose of shedding light on where I was with my disorder. It was also unfortunate that my better eating habits (I never did not eat, therefore when I say this, I mean to say my consistency with eating protein) did not seem to support the physique I greeted him with when he arrived. The past three weeks had been busy, I had been moving boxes up four flights of stairs, putting together an apartment and trying to settle into some reality of living in my dream, Manhattan. But I suppose when it comes to your health, especially when it is really on the line, there are no excuses and should be none. I am so often at odds with myself, and I think my writing is where this surfaces—this back and forth, this questioning and reasoning, language helps me make sense of my psychic text, and there is no disputing than it takes longer than you think. I remember just before my father left he took me to the Vitamin Shoppe. It is something I had been excited about doing, and that excitement can easily be likened to that of a child. It is embarrassing really—how I acted like a child—a young woman imprisoned by a mind she had when she was in her youth, small, undeveloped but still expecting to grow. And what I remember most from his visit was being in that store, the store I had been excited to go to, and suddenly not wanting to spend money on products I knew would make me look better, on vitamins I knew would help me be healthy. Just reminding myself of this experience shows me how difficult it is to write with absolute truth, to perform based on self-awareness, to live in favor of one’s self. It is hard for me to accept what I write, “The exterior does not correlate to the interior,” without struggling to admit how my actions have contradicted what I truly wish and feel I should be doing. I like to say that actions do not speak of one’s feelings—that once something is enacted, something genuine also goes missing—but I cannot help myself from seeing how, despite my awareness and sense, I resist my desires, and when I do “follow my heart” (yes, yes, a cliché) I also feel like I am punishing myself, like I should feel guilty, that there is going to be a consequence. And despite my ongoing philosophy that our exteriors do not illuminate any sort of interior truth—despite my frustration with even close family and friends when they thought my appearance did convey how I was mentally progressing or not—despite my hope all along that I was a smart girl, aware enough of the situation, that I knew "what this all was about", I so obviously did not know what I saw, I did not see what I needed to know and I did not know enough to be aware of what is unquestionably important. I wonder whether all my senses will ever merge and make me whole. It seems like that is always the goal—the reason people go to therapy because there is supposedly a way to be everything and yet, nothing that isn't sensible or not pure—supposedly once we see we are doing it wrong, we can learn to do it right. And because of this over-evaluation it sounds possible to be that single person you know you should. But also, once you sit back and just listen to yourself think that way, don't you come up for air and the first thing you want to say is, "It's all bullshit. It's all yet again another ideal. No one and nothing is perfect. Maybe the point of life is to accept that you're never going to get it all right, and so, try and be the best you can be at being human, at fucking up, at going against your heart because you'll never be happy just playing it safe."

Below is the piece this is in reference to.

Corned, like mice, in the cubby of the room my professor and I spoke of my pursuit for the plotless novel. We have been meeting for a year and a half now, but she probably knows more about my interior thought pattern—the struggles and triumphs I have faced as a young woman wanting desperately to write her life, to uncover treasures deep beneath the mess of a life—than anyone, ever. And with that said, she may believe in my potential for literary success more than anyone as well. She is a brilliant woman with a fragile figure and focus all her own. I believe she has a remarkable gift for finding the passages in hundred pages of text that are marked by beauty, and could easily have disappeared between the thousands of letters crawling across pages. Recently I found out that she was valedictorian, not to mention her study at Columbia and Oxford and her closet friend Derrida. Her mystique fascinates me. From our time together, there is no doubt I have given her access to my obsessions, the themes of my thoughts and alas, the secrets that reveal themselves—barely at all—on the last layer of my text. And the more she shares with me about myself, the more I believe she knows the story I will write—that I want to write, but have avoided—before I realize it is what I am writing. 

When I read my sister a new piece of writing—again spontaneous, raw, touched only once and created instinctively (?) impulsively (?)—I had not told her what my professor had told me a few days before; that she had no uncertainty that I can write stories. She said that as of now I write deeper into the story—what the story means once it is dissected, evaluated and internalized—and she believed that because I always start after the story and apart from the actions of the event, I will be able to write a better, more successful narrative because I know what it is all about—what the character feels and why. 

My sister finally spoke to me candidly. Saying that in the beginning of the piece I wrote her, she thought that I was using a voice that could be successfully used for my longer fictions/potential novel. But then she said the language became mentally exhaustive when I read it to her. This is something I was told last spring—that stories that were personal read like philosophical texts and because of that there was no space between the sentences that the reader could come up for a breath. This, too, ultimately frustrates me and was a challenge I worked on this summer in my writing course. A voice that was more natural and inviting, that in a way was more real to fiction. But then my sister said just what my professor had, but in words that hit home more, and were in a way more enticing for me as a writer. She made me realize that these texts that I have been writing are like a detailed outline, research and interview of what the character felt at every angle—an intense probing as to see what will motivate the character to act. I think that is what my work has been, a mental anguish to understand and know the psychology and philosophy of characters. It is what my blogs and meditative writing has been for—the larger story, the actual story, the story I am bound to write. So often I wish I could hand over everything I have written—every fragment—every post—every digression from action—and be told what it all has been truly about, what is the story I need to tell. 

i have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when i have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. but i have never yet found that story. and i begin to ask, are there stories? -the waves, virginia woolf.

Something Can Be Made of Silence

For him, my place was not familiar. It did not even seem like something he may have known, nor something he could try to remember. His being here (where I presently am) was the first time, of many times, I instinctively hoped. Although, I must make your aware, how instinct races beneath the conscious, and therefore, this hope could not be separated from the blood it is mixed in and which keeps me alive, pursuing life. Does that mean it means more or matters most when I figure who it is I am? You must understand, that not even I was aware of what I wanted then. It is only now, that I have begun to see myself acting and think of why I chose to be that certain character I was being. Now let us go there, September seventh, the fall of my final year. 

I imagine not far beyond reason. And I tell you this, expecting you can now trust me and believe my mind was seeing realms of possible realities, confirmed likely by logic. So there he is, I imagine, enclosed in that uncomfortable space that elevators are consistently in the presence of. 

Do you ever wonder how that it is? That every time you treat yourself to an elevator ride, kindly giving your legs a rest break, you become more preoccupied with what a nuisance your body is, just standing there soliciting nothing usable—skin and smell, oh and that god awful sight of yourself that you would rather not be associated with. Are people staring at you or their own hopeless figure frozen in quietude and mirrored between the frame of the sliding door? How we wish we would remember to take the stairs, instead of subjecting ourselves to otherness. But how dependable we are of falling victim to our games of self-consciousness—always purposefully forgetting there are routes for avoiding human contact, that awkward tension when we do not know if our want is another’s want. Perhaps, we are unwilling to travel the distance taken by the unanimous. It could be that, unlike “them”—the nameless, faceless, beings of nonbeing—we want to be seen and consumed, a want that wills us into sharing space, even though we would rather cease to exist during that elevator ride, than continue feeling like we stand alone in the presence of one or many.

He stepped onto the carpeted hallway of the seventh floor. His body two doors down from where I eat, sleep and try to live. Breathing six floors of air out, while the elevator continued its advancement in spite of him, he thought now in the absence of others, That was not so bad. And in reality, it hadn’t been, but it takes a moment after the moment being reflected on to feel how weightless affects are. Moments tick in time, and we forget the moment we were in, or at the very least, the majority of what we were thinking mattered. 

I answer his knock by opening the door and pulling him closer into the space I have tried to make reflect my present being. Everything goes spilling forth into his eyes: my face aged by the three years of our absence, the apartment’s scent like my very own second skin and my voice which speaks for my presence but, also, reminds him of the distance between now and then. A distance consumed by darkness that eventually comes to light, which at that point is where it stops and some place other starts. A distance that spans time, a time made valuable not by sight but by the resonance of speech, where my absent voice sings a repetitious note of a time that ceased being, the collection of moments before the second I said, “We are over”. Ah, but now I must see that my language had no strength and my voice did not keep its reason, for he is back and it is all because of me. 

“You came!” I say inside his embrace, but I know I felt nothing, not even warmth as his body pushed through mine. He holds a glass I had given him moments into his arrival, and through it I can see his hand trembling. With a gesture of immediacy, I pour in wine so a substance thick with color can fill the transparency of our unsettling engagement. It is obvious we share a similar unknowingness of the reason we are together again, and so I comment on the weather. Yet, in a rush to avoid either of our interiors, I forget how meaningless exteriors are. “It has been one of my favorite types of day,” I reveal with a confidence that seems removed from myself, almost like I am impersonating someone I think I should be. Overcast, he laughs not sure if he should. You have always been so facetious! I feel as if I am standing in the same situation I had left us in—small, supercilious, like his presence is inspired by the need to teach me how to think. “Overcast is a fine way to be,” I answer, this time taking total control of myself. 

I notice there is nothing to be said, which makes me think how the perfect silence would be perfect to have, to find, to create. He speaks immediately after my thought, just as I expect he will, since he always had—an effort that succeeds at being just as successful at refraining from having to hear me, and wanting to listen to me. Aren’t you going to introduce me? No one knows who he is and lets face it, we are in Manhattan, no one cares either. We do not exist unless we have a name. Not true, I think of many I have only seen but never formally met. Well, I must have a name if I have been talked about. “Who says I have told anyone about you?” What’s got you? He looks at me like he is looking at someone I have never been. The weather? I am only being playful. “It comes with the territory.” Well, I’m a guest. “And you have never been playful.” Hey—he makes my voice turn silent, my words lose their meaning—I love you. Spaces come between his words, so it sounds like he has intentionally hinted toward fragments of being—nouns without purpose. 

Hours lost their importance, as the night owned us both. I became drunk because it was the only emotion I found available in my apartment. The only emotion I wanted to indulge in; something separate from myself, I could blame my behavior on, if need be. Within this place of mind, our breaking up seemed to loose its’ meaning, and it was as if the only thing that had any life was our bodies approval of the other. 

I fought nothing. I was so over it: the act of being between a barrier, the art of caring. If my mind had been present I am sure it would have responded just as my body had—logically, conveniently—judging off of facts, “My body has slept in his before, there is no mistaking, a heart can only experience what it has not known.” 

And so I felt nothing of it, when he bent my body in two—taking advantage of its halves. Mouths upon the others gaping hole, darkness tongues can go exploring through. The moment between a beating heart, I waited for his tongue to move, to trace circles of hope inside my mouth, to charge my body with life. I waited for something I expected we all are responsible for, that we all can give, and found myself waiting for longer than I could before becoming weak.

His hand pressed into the muscle of my shoulder, while his other closed the lids of my sight and, prowling, wrapped around my neck, until I became tighter and tighter, my breath less and less. I went along with him, thinking I had to—pretending his perversity had never been a secret, like it was a direction my body knew by heart, as if it were the reason we came together. 

With my body shaped as an arch, I imagine he thought I appeared like the character for the role, like I was meant to be on my knees. I stare into the impossible sky, a canvas colored by nothingness, and think of the message he is telling me—a conversation between sexes—and wonder whether he is listening to me as my body speaks. Loud slaps against my ass, nothing similar to an applause, and I feel nothing of it. Not until now do I think how easy it is to go missing in the darkness, when the night owns us all; how easy it is to play your part, to pretend to be an expert at what you do not know because it is embarrassing not to know. And so I act like I have done what he needs a hundred times before, as if in silence we share the same gesture, that we depend upon the same wants and needs. 

On that bed—that bed which is mine—I respond as if it is his, feel like he does not talk to me because he does not know my name, that he will keep me only during this night and then I will have been had. But it is not until now that I can liken it to those elevator rides, the consistent hope they present you with for the moment when you can exit where you are and be where you had been waiting to be. That distance after the moment defined by profound silence, where you thought only to yourself despite the body beside you, where staring at you is some other you that you felt you were but did not want to know. The distance after he has come, where hovering over you is a body you have seen before, but with mouths holding in the silence, you feel you could never know. So you come to show something can be made of the silence, but it is not until the moment after speech that your secret is revealed to him: “I hadn’t a name to say because I never knew you so you would exist. 

eugene mcguiness by way of uk.

soul seeking mind: a poem.

I wonder whether what matters means anything. Or is what we think have nothing to do with us, only a voice we trust exists and have decided to believe in once in a while? A philosophical poet we claim ourselves to be, just so we feel we are responsible for something greater that has been or is preoccupied with being produced. This thing above our bodies, that we cannot touch nor feel, but think can be found within us—what is it, this mind, that I wish I could feel matters? I grow larger, thicker even, with frustration—an effect of this knowingness of myself being, despite having a life in reality where I do not see myself as or for what I am. Although, I am, showing up somewhere, a breath spreading on a mirror and in it is someone present I cannot catch, someone I cannot pass through without breaking through things, less abstract than I. Blood before the heart beats is a complexity that perplexes every listening ear, but I tell them all the same, how I feel it is what defines me as often as time lasts. It will be forever, until I see some other kind of life. Imagine that! I barely can see it happening, but maybe all I have to do is continue after now, and maybe then my mind will have arrived at the distance it knows it needs to go. Even though my body does not feel it is moving with my mind, does not know whether they are partners in love.

my thoughts hadn't an intention.

It was morning for me, for others it was just another time in the day. A day that had been waiting to be started—to be opened—so the world could move through it, shuffle their feet, tare apart the grass and let the hours fall behind them, like light betraying a shadow’s back, barely projecting its presence at all. Devastating, is it not? How time easily objectives itself into roles of being and nothingness. Moments significant within the walls of an instant—a heartbeat’s repetition of now, now, now—when one needs its presence most. And then, just as our barrier begins to fall forward, we pick up our feet and run from the corner in our heart that felt safe—where feeling felt comfortable and effortless. You hear him gaining speed before your eyes can commit to seeing him turn and go. But you scream after, for your instinct is to believe a voice will penetrate through a man’s refuge—that confine where he seals silence shut. Do not question this shelter, he built the structure himself. And his heart will let what it needs slip beneath its door, for it is beyond the reason of his hands. Like a constant reminder—a frame of film purposefully placed on pause—your voice will resonate between the walls of his mind, if it is you that is his moment, the moment that will last. But you do not believe me, simply because you cannot trust your truth. He runs away from reason, circling time, so you cannot take one way to find him. His body reduced by distance, making you feel like you could hold him if you had him again—carry him in the closure of your control. But your feelings have not made you think, and therefore you do not question this likelihood. You are tired and time turns sleepy with you. Two mouths open in the night, the air is lipless, so you lay alone. Your last thought is your first thought. And if only you could have remembered the day you saw him and the future at once, that space that caused you to whisper, “One day his tongue will stop tracing my skin with hope”, you would have known the memory between the beginning and the ending, the moment presence stood in place. You fall between darkness and light, the moment hovering over a dream, a night away from the day being an afterthought. Sleep exhales a breath of permanence over your lens, heavy with forgetfulness. But sleep only lasts for hours and then you are awake with sobriety, when what you need is time to forgive. Time, you think, begins again in the morning but in the light what will the day mean?

damien jurado

this last one is a cover of sheets, but just as good.

please listen to damien jurado's new releases from his album, caught in the trees. he reminds me of pedro the lion. i discovered him through this website's podcasts. download them here because, well, why not indulge on something free from itunes? 

and to quote my sister, "you must be in a different place, a pretty good place of sensibility, to listen to this type of stuff and not feel sad." this vibe places me in a trance of "happiness" and i hope it can do the same for you.

clarice lispector

Around him, an emptiness blew, in which a man finds himself when he is going to create. 

Desolated, he provoked the great solitude. And, like an old man who has not learned to read, 

he measured the distance that separated him from the word 

-Clarice Lispector, The Apple in the Dark.

Clarice’s writing occupies this unlikely space, the immeasurable: the distance that separates us from the words. It’s the measure of a void, of an abyss that opens itself in the infinitesimal instant in which the words acquire sense. That’s why it feels as if she is writing right in front of us, in order to reveal to us, in its total nakedness, in its pungent abandonment, the act of writing itself.

this is everything, if not, the only thing.

confusing genres

last night, the professor said that serious writing has nothing to do with the writer, that the only thing that matters is the reader. i can agree that novice writers write, to an extent, for themselves. they may not know why they write, and it may be the last of their concerns, but they do and feel they need to for themselves. personally, my writing is (and use to be more) self-indulgent - in the sense that it is vague, evasive and details are placed because they are a personal attachment to a past that is never explained in my writing. for example, a dreamer may wake up at seven. why seven? she may touch her face having felt snow sliding down her cheek, only to be surprised that it is her own tears and that she is lying on a bed where snow can't fall into. why snow? why tears instead of snow? why the two mentions at once? perhaps she wakes abruptly, paralyzed with fear that she is entrapped in a net. why a net? and then, she discovers she is resting in a hammock, but does not remember why or how she got there. why a hammock? why the absence of memory? these are all choices and these are also all chances that a writer takes. 

details come to me not after consideration but because details are the only thing that comes to me when i think. details (the number seven, snow in the morning, a hammock...) are what comes before the scene of memory. perhaps it is not the moment i invent, but the moment which presents me with the chance to exaggerate upon a memory. this could be what makes me a beginning author, sure. but even after development, i hope i never have to write for the reader alone. i hope i always write because the act of literature should be a dialogue, a moment when time is being shared and experience exchanged. this is where i think authors fall short: they write having found a story to tell, a story that will seduce a reader, that will charm, that will suspend disbelief, but they write driven by the story and they forget completely that they must live as the character, they must feel the choices the characters have to decide upon that shape the story, they must be within the interior. <the most antagonizing feeling as a reader is when you feel for or feel before the character does. authors shy away from the commitment to becoming the life in which they create. they forget the interior city (the nerves, the pulses, the digressions, the fragments, the spaces in between rising and falling actions, the pulse of the event) and they become too focused on the exterior city. why can't authors be, at the very least, encouraged to write within a life; instead of writing on a life?
i want to write a novel where the the character's body falls open and exposes the hidden manifestations of a life that is internalized, what those removed from us cannot see. and then, when i want to see a life, when i want to watch a story be told i will either go outside and travel the streets or i will turn on my television. 

• Importantly, I want to stop falling back on myself to write within. I want my main focus to be another's life so separate from my own imaginings. A few days ago I read some comment that someone had written me a few years back. Of course, the few criticisms will stand out from the praise. And maybe that is something to be thankful for. The comment was along the lines of thinking "my personal philosophy" was being the beautiful face sitting beside a window at a cafe, staring out into the world, while others walked by trying to look into who I was. She went on to say that I analyzed that behavior and that struggle. Then she went on to assume that I lived off my parents financially and that I should think about getting a job, struggling and falling into the city. When I read this comment/criticism/advice a few days ago, it did sting a bit. There were the small reasons, like she was devaluing struggles that did not mirror the "I eat a few times a week-live in the park-trying to find an apartment where I can sleep on the floor with five other people". I do think there is something genuine and not artificial in struggles that are small but that plague an individual for a lifetime, stunt their growth, inhibit them. But that was not really where the comment stung. It stung because I was born into a life that has been to my advantage, I have had to create struggles, find challenges that were not imposed upon me. And because of that I worry all the time that I have no story to tell. Friends laugh at me and want to slap me around every time I say such things - claiming that I, too, am discrediting my own past. Last year in a conference with a professor, she told me she believed I was avoiding my story - that I was avoiding feeling what my life is overwhelmed by (trite or not, it is real). I am sure there is more truth in all those possibilities, than not. But overall, I just want to get away from myself. I want to be in situations where I am not given a choice. I want to live another's life, so I can forget any importance or pressure of telling my own. Dream? To graduate, the summer of 09' go back to Africa and "help" the underprivileged children. I want to experience not having a choice about food, when you eat, what you eat, how much you eat. I want to see a child cry for food with the hope that I will never, ever think about pushing away food. So I can feel sick about ever choosing to say no to certain foods, to starve, to look disadvantaged. And then, I want to write about that, about them, about me after them. 

One Cannot See His Thought.

Fragment: a presence half accepted because that which is absent is more present in the mind than what physically appears on scene. Fragment: a part of what makes a product whole, absolute, more of what it already is. Fragment: a becoming. Fragment: a potential for something more definite. Fragment: recognized for being less definite, but more distinct. Fragment: a curiosity inspired by mystery. Fragment: a stream expressing people, places or things, actions, states or occurrences, attributes, modifications or details chosen and placed one after the other on a line in time that does not complete an inscribed moment or has been erased from the materiality of memory. Fragment: a thoughtful spitting out of scraps but swallowing, like a black hole, of knowledge or mindful material. Fragment: to be left with less than what one expected to have. Fragment: what one has thought to know, seen to know, remembered to know. Fragment: the process of elimination. Fragment: the liminal space between forgiving and forgetting. Fragment: the liminal space between thought and speech. Fragment: the liminal space. Fragment: all one thinks he wants the other to know. Fragment: all one knows to tell, to share, to reveal. Fragment: an opening up and a shutting down. “One knows not all of his self.” A fragment? “One knowingly thinks not to share all of his self.” A fragment? I must keep thinking to know some things of everything. I will let you know. 

My eyes looked out the window, but not my mind. It was held up elsewhere, behind the present physical sight, which the skin of my eyes was covered with. Perhaps my mind came across a wish wafting between the boundaries of its brain. If it did, I regret having not had my eyes to see the memory of a future moment. I need thought only for that, not eyes. Insight but not sight. Possibly soon though I will see what my mind had been thinking, for a wish is in the process of becoming closer to the now: a moment in time I was imagining when my eyes looked out the window and I thought of nothing close to what they were seeing. I am sure it was not that there was nothing to see. But rather a void of what I wished was happening immediately in time. I cannot remember the hour, but perhaps it was nighttime and there was nothing but thick black air hovering outside the window. It is possible; anything is. It may have been a black hole in the sky. That would explain why I have no impression of the experience—to my knowledge, the moment would have been emptied into the deep dark hole, leaving me after with no memory. It sounds sensible. But then again, I do not know. My mind and eyes did not show up together and one must have both present to be left with everything closest to reality. I think so much is true. I will tell you one thing I am completely certain of though, if I had seen any stars, I would have wished to collect them to glue to my ceiling so the black hole in the sky could not swallow them. I was not thinking at the time I saw stars.

head throbs.

Tomorrow I have to wake early, and think. Let thoughts arrange themselves—or fail to arrange themselves—and have that disorder take me somewhere, to some sort of truth, some half story. Clumps of projects are being called up, and I know with that I am suppose to deliver something of myself. Meeting an expectation would not be good enough. I must exceed it for my own self-approval. I said I needed to wake and think because I feel like with classes having begun and speaking one-on-one with professors again, I should have something to show from summer—a story that has shaped me—substance to share. But I just don’t know. Much has happened to me. Small moments of being that will thicken with time and larger happenings that will become lighter once distance lets the mind breathe. But as of now, everything feels like hours that have only fallen upon each other—days that have folded one upon another, leaving me with a pile of calendar days but no clarity of each event. Currently I have no strong grounding/opinion on why I have done what I have done. I feel more of nothing. And I wonder whether it means that they were superficial moments, moments void of meaning, meaning founded on non-meaning. Or maybe, feeling the meaning will come subtly, when time thickens and I have forgotten to think “what is”, “what was”, “what matters” its purpose, its importance. Whenever I go searching, I see nothing. What is meant to be is never forced into being or becoming.

• I have been placed in a graduate fiction course and an advanced poetry course. I do not know what to think of that either. I am in a writing course that theorizes the fragment. Ideas are surfacing—an extended fragment, a lucid streaming, dialogue half invented and half spoken, the undertone being the presence/absence dichotomy. I realized the motif was all I have been working on: light/darkness, in sight/out of sight, wakefulness/sleep, truth/dream, not real/unreal, self/other, breathing/breathless, artist/muse, forgiving/forgetting, I could go on and on. Had a bottle of Pearly Bay and Indian food tonight. Indian food is my favourite—makes me delirious—but I have not had it from a restaurant since Paris when they stole $1500 from me within my first 24 hours of being there. And yes, I guess I have been bitter this long. Both were delicious at the time, but as expected made me sick after. I tried to nourish this with mindless reality television and a one am shower. My head is still throbbing. Six hours until I begin thinking, thoughtfully.
  
  
• A professor called this weekend. He said I was impressive, but that I sounded ahead of myself. He said it was not personal, but he felt like he sensed an urgency in me, as if everything needed to be planned, goals decided, a future given some faint order. I did not know what to say and so I did not deny it. I said that there has only ever been one option and that is to start graduate school immediately, and because of that decision or rather, non-decision, there is an urgency, traces of a plan, much hope and pressure. He responded saying, how one must not forget that once graduate school is finished one begins at zero again.
  
  
• Anais Nin said psychoanalysis changed her life and opened up her fiction. I think the only way to let your mind rest, yet simultaneously acquire knowledge, is by reading Anais Nin's journals. If you want sensibility, I highly recommend her diaries. Trust me. If there are three things I have avoided that have been repeatedly recommended to me, they are: Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust and therapy. My professor said, "Chelsea I want to read you, as I want to read Proust." The speed at which I wished to create only intensified from then. I have taken in the above in only small dosages because I feel they will provide clues and something close to an answer. And I do not know if I am ready for it. I almost want a moment of being absolutely careless before...before...just the opposite.

stations of the body.

Each month she waited for blood, a sign she was still alive. She had no mind for a child yet, being she was still one herself. And a child cannot care for another child. But maybe accidents change you over night, create you out of time, make you wake with a new life where your role is Other.

• I can't keep from listening to Chad VanGaalen. I am learning that when my mind won't focus on text it is better to leave literature bookmarked and turn on music. It is a product of the most intoxicating senses. Its effect overwhelms me, but in doing so helps me forget the pressure I constantly face to write, to find a story I can feel, but I am not a storyteller. I care about essences - what one does not perceive to be present because it has not yet been absent - what one has not identified he appreciates because he is too far past assuming it will always be alive. 
• A great writer must be a poet thinker -Jacques Derrida. 

eye am writing a silence.

what does one do, having found a flaccid figure, stretching long into the afternoon? the time between affect and effect is the chance for gesture: to be made, to be had. she is sleeping in the most vulnerable pose, when her mask is off and hanging above the handle of the door, where she exits out and falls into the cities' veins, a type of life. (watching herself sleep would terrify or worse, humiliate, even her). hidden and unnoticed feelings show on her face (the future reflects itself in light), you see her as she is, as she sees herself. and even you wonder with us, "do you like it" "can you keep her"?

a dialogue in silence

with hearts against solitude, we attached ourselves to a silent romance. trying to get along, we hoped to outreach time, turning back only to see our self passing. but found ourselves taking more in from the nothingness. who would have known how silence could sound, unless one let his self listen to it speak? 

your hand through.

the space between an untraceable gesture, there was nakedness swallowing the rest.

what an interesting, for lack of a decided word, last 24 hours. 

a letter: "you can't determine what you really need, quite, yet...Chelsea...because that can't come from anywhere else than where it comes from..."

it is much harder to listen than it is to speak.

the minute-humming days, like flies, buzz home to death, 

and every moment is a window on all time. this is a moment -tom wolfe.

listen, i wanted to ask you...do you, inside yourself, well, in your in most depths, do you have the impression...but i really do mean: - in your innermost recesses, that you can manage to see yourself with some degree of clarity...do you have the impression that you know who you are... 

-sarraute, you don't love yourself.

*

Extracted from a larger working process entitled, A Sense of Scent:

"What else is it you miss?" Lawrence asked believing he knew already.

These conversations. They are everything. They are everything important. Before today, we had not spoken. We went too long having them, that it has not once felt right not having them at all. It has almost been a year now and I have felt so deprived of meaning and have grown more silent not having someone I want to talk with. I figure, why talk then? Why should I ask questions when I know so few are truly listening? It is human nature to talk at each other and not to each other. It's not even romance I am saying people are without, but connection, the desire to be talked to and have someone to share with. I have tried. I meet people and ask questions out of curiosity and of course, courtesy. But then when anyone reciprocates, I can tell they are not listening for my answer but a confirmation of their own thoughts and feelings. They want words that will turn their feelings into facts. They want to hear themselves in others. Oh, I have grown so silent knowing all this. Now I ask the questions in my mind and hear what I know they would answer with. In a way, I am lucky. I hear them before they hear themselves. And I save our selves the breath needed for pretending our answers actually obey the questions. 

"You can't force awareness, Claudelean. Not everyone wants to be seen. Not everyone wants to know how they look either."

*

and yet there are moments when some of us go on a little voyage of discovery outside, 

and from there, taking up their position at a distance, 

they examine themselves...and they like what they see 

-sarraute, you don't love yourself.

i ain't first in line for the funnel:

updates: hopefully tomorrow will be a productive day where my mind can fluidly think. perhaps, some rays on the balcony with good company (aka the speakers). forget fashion week, there is a ridiculous flux of music heading into town that needs just as much attention. free east village radio day to night concert this saturday. 7pmish - mark ronson added to the line up. accompanied by food and visual projections. at night, ps1's last summer bash is in full swing, so head over to water taxi beach for the beach party, 8 pm, $5 - and worth the pocket flow - because jeremy greenspan of junior boys is going to be spinning beneath the stars. tuesday at mercury lounge 5 o'clock heroes is playing (riiiidiculous, i've had them on repeat for the past nights, so this will be a sweet treat). anyway, words tomorrow. but now, quotes:

to drink a lot: to hit the bottle, to tipple, to drink like a fish -aristide bruant. 

a beautiful subject can be the object of rueful feelings, 

because it has aged or decayed or no longer exists -susan sontag.

my eyes are scales, weighing the sensuality of women -blaise cendrars.

one must try, at least for a while, to look less horrible than before: 

clothes, shoes, hair, and oh, that sad, tired face 

-verlaine to rimbaud.

*

and, yes, i am entirely aware of my problematic skin and lack-of-a-waxed lip. now you're aware of it too :]

share your scar with me.

My biggest. No, that is not the word I wish to use to convey this. My heaviest. The most intense, potent… My most devastating fear of 2008 will be finding myself (watching myself, residing within myself, half removed and othered) with an inability to write like I mean it, to tell because it matters, to shape because my instinct is to craft—to choreograph souls in motion, the body as it is guided by the mind’s feelings—out of sync with reason, moving to pulsations that cannot be heard but only felt. Impassioned by the gift to make silence speak, the voices vibrating on the walls of solitude heard. I want to write as if words were a dancer’s feet, never lifting her sole from the page of the ballroom floor. A hunger, an obsession, a conviction that carries me and that I carry within. Words strung together like beads on a delicate string of sensibility: a writer’s sensibility that my mind talks in inwardly, a sensibility my own life supports, mocks, is pulled from. Some believe in theory this is the feminine way: accents of the female’s heart, motivated by her challenge to be heard—to be remembered—to be memorized—to have a voice that pulls in soul’s preoccupied in dispersing themselves with only an insubstantial trace of what they were. I want to be the voice that exposes what generations claim we need to swallow down—hide—because we are demanded to be stronger and passive aggressively pressured into seeming unconcerned and in control. But we rarely ever are what we appear as. In certain cities we emerge onto streets seeming unique—roaming different neighborhoods, we are responded to with unfamiliarity, in different tones of language, as if our representation has been altered—one changes his hair and it is like at the same time one wove his self a new face. I remember receiving the Highschool superlative for “Unique” and thinking how easily one could trick the mass by sight, and that was why I did it, to know ahead of time how superficial standards and qualities could be. I remember meeting men and being complimented on my “look”—a boyfriend telling me he loved me because I was unique; I remember being offended by these titles that were suppose to/are used to convey more, but in truth say even less. Titles that roll off the speaker’s tongue and do not stick to the subject’s skin, revealing how little effort one is making to see to know you. Our interiors fool the exteriors and our exteriors fool us into thinking our interiors should reflect a change, as well. But really, we are composed of more similarities than dissimilarities. We differ in the way we play into the performance of life. But we all have cast ourselves in the same role (maybe even for the same spotlight to be illuminated under, as if the sight of one under such lighting will change our skin, but alas, how we shed it so easily)—the actor pretending to be perfect, to master his lines, to fit the part. It does not exist. Yesterday was the first day of classes. I am enrolled in a Graduate Fiction course. The professor sat at one end of the oval table, and I at the other, trying to absorb inspiration—possibly even through a locking of the eyes (a committed stare)—I have hoped all summer for. But all along, as his speech spun around the students, I traced words across my page, in fear that this semester I will be unable to think of words to write deeply with, as to leave letters craved on the desk, my thoughts engraved wherever my mind goes wandering. I fear application dates will arrive from nowhere fast and I will manically search spaces looking for my manuscript of substance, only to find it wafting in and out of rooms, an air of intangibility that I will not be able to showcase as a solid—the surfacing of my self. The professor attended Columbia, my dream my hope my aspiration, and told us on the second hour, “It is impossible to write the perfect story. Very few can do it.” My pencil swam in cursive waves in the corner,The Sharing of the Imperfect Story. “Write a story of a scar of yours. You will have a few minutes. Do not lift your pencil from the page until the timer sounds.” I hate these activities, I thought. I hate in class writing. I hate being unable to think, to spread out and listen to myself. They remind me that I am not a storyteller. “BEGIN.” Stretch. Scar. Mark. Scar. Still there. A scar. Memory. Still there. Of a pill that caused the stretch that caused the marks that turned into a scar. A scar that is there. On me. A scar. In me. A memory. Of the weight. What is worse: the scar or the memory? The memory. The story I remember or the story’s effect? The effect. The effect causing another story. A story with a different memory. A memory with a scar. A second scar. A different scar. A scar that does not show. That did show physically. Just not now, physically. But internally a scar that scarred, bruised and burned. Burned sight. Losing weight. Weightless. A figure scared. An interior wound. And then we read aloud, one by one, the story of our separate scars. I spoke, all the while hearing my thoughts say, How trite of me, how trite. I walk out onto the street, music bleeding through my conscious’ conversation. I think of the effects of music—how if it were not for it, I would remain in my apartment, ripping off clothes, searching closets for material that conceals, exhausted by what I see—the I have to see—that I am seeing what I am choosing to see. Despising that this is my interior battle—a superficial secret—a stupid waste, of me. I thank music, how it pushes me forth, keeps me moving ahead, passing through hindering momentary mentalities and into a feeling as momentary but more enchanting and invigorating. Musics way of encouraging the body to move forth, the mind to keep speed with sound as it flows. A man stops me. Laughs, sympathetically, that I wait patiently to go around a slower walker, instead of pushing through. We speak. “Are you an actress?” No. “What do you do? I write. And yourself? “A jewelry designer. I sell every week on 130 Spring. Tell me, what is your favourite gem?” Oh! I don’t know, I don’t know. “Well what do you like?” Ornate pieces. Simple clothes and shocking pieces that hold a story and make the character. “Underworld. Gothic?” He recommends a film to me. “What’s your name?” Chelsea. We shake on it, our names resonating between us. “Chelsea, I love it. That’s a name for a writer. Come this weekend between eleven and eleven, I’ll have something designed for you, free of charge.” I give him a piece of paper. He uses his pen and writes down the address and his number. “Call me before you come.” I wave goodbye, cross the street, underneath an awning, considering my life, how those are my weekly interactions, the unexpected, the small gestures, the meeting and not shying away. I think of how I feel like I am cut into halves—selves divided by cities—two characters exposed depending upon the certain crowd. Sometimes I feel like I have two selves that live separate lives and writing is my effort to have them meet and walk into each other to form one whole. Two yards and I’ve thought all this when a man says, “You must make your men happy.” Oh no! I laugh, flustered, aware of how in Manhattan inhabitants are traveling faces. “Well it is only my opinion. I think you are stunning.” I thank him and carry on, walking over the street with the subway underneath, like a grid, air from below pushing upwards, making my red skirt fly up around my waist like Marilyn Monroe. A group dispersing in front of me, holds high banners promoting the premiere of 90210. At this point, I am weaving through crowds of confused students trying to be on time to a class. A man giving away promotional chap sticks, turns and falls into me. I ask for a chap stick. He places one in my hand, apologizing over and over to the ground, not looking up at me. It’s okay, I tell him and thank him for the gift. He looks up as I try parting ways, “Take another. Have two. Please.” No, no, no worries. “You’re beautiful. I want you to.” I take it, thankfully, but hate how I—and others, I am sure, daily—are bombarded by compliments based on physicality. As if beauty becomes a reward that must be recognized and responded to. I gave a speech to freshman NYU students. I knew that it could not possibly be what the NYU chair wanted me to share, because it did not mirror his own words of wisdom. I had not lived in the dorms, I had not been accepted as a freshman, I have never eaten in the dining hall, I have not made friends at school. Quite simply, I have not had the experience one envisions while at Highschool. I do not have the story that I expected I would deliver. I have faced what students fear when they watch their parents leave and realize they know no one. But still, he insisted I speak. And so I did, candidly, encouraged by my potential of representing hope. The hope that you can have a goal you dreamt for yourself, but did not originally meet, and still achieve it a year and half later. That you can bounce back—use depression to inspire you. That you can fear being alone and have to be alone, only to discover the opportunities it provides. The hope that maybe there are two plans or more for you, that are better than your original design. After I spoke, he told my father how much I had revealed, how sensitive it had been. But then as he was saying goodbye, he told me that he had seen a picture of me, and thinks I “should be a model. Just be a model.” It was flattering, but it also felt cold, although I know he did not mean it to be so. I had just given a speech and small talked for multiple hours with parents about my intellectual dreams and educational pursuits. And yet, at the final hour one of the heads at NYU told me I should use my face for a career. Everyday, I try desperately for less and less of appearance and attaining this supposed look decide me and defeat me. I try and see my extra weight as a fullness that I cannot naturally or not obsessively get rid of—and therefore, something that is me and that I will keep confidently. I weave through the park close to my apartment, listening to music. I try and think about what my past modeling career actually meant to me. And I decide that I grow nostalgic over it because it represented a period in my life where I was unaware of perceptions (despite the paradox of being in an industry based on perceptions) and I was fearless—a time when I did not feel my body on me. And now, after the fact, awareness is my only tool for making art, for living, for producing matter and meaning. And also now is a period in time when beauty is believed to be significant by many members of this generation. That is why I fear being unable to write. Writing is like a drug that keeps me healthy. It is the reward of growing up and becoming aware. Writing is a way of making sense out of beauty—figuring out what it truly means beneath the surface. After one has penetrated through the appearance of beauty, is there anything there? Is it empty—perhaps a black hole where all knowledge is lost—or does it possibly bleed? To me, writing is like music, it keeps you moving forward—looking for patterns in words, structured like a dream, and it keeps you listening for the sound of a certain sensation that will consistently move you. An art of living, you can rely on. One day I had an exterior beauty I believed was beautiful and was paid for having. Another day, I woke up and I had changed. I no longer believed my exterior was beautiful and I ceased being paid and left the agency. It came and went, just as a dream does. No matter the phrasing of the compliments I receive nor the amount, I do not rely on it because I do not believe it. I write from the interior and expose it to exteriors. It is the only thing I rely on—the only thing I believe will keep me from regretting something I use to be: a face who was unaware, a soul that was naïve and a body that was young.

zaki ibrahim

undertones of macy grace but more controlled. download a few tracks for free here.

and then a tune that reminds me of a moment that will forever go unforgotten. i will never let the memory fall away from me: a family drive down the highway, the four of us in a new silver mercedes, the windows down, the wind passing through us, and my dad - the slowest driver - flying faster than ever before, as a family singing to tracy chapman's new album, playing louder than the police sirens that chased us a few good miles. it didn't matter, the song wasn't over, our voices were just beginning to be tuned, and we went, not willing to wait, at any price, regardless of any law.

past, rest less, even when eyes close inwards.

strange things happen and unexpected. not that i to you. want to expose myself. and flesh touching flesh cannot explain. innumerable cells. spreading inward. so isolated in the mind a human figure. let not darkness fall. on the space of missing memory -rosmarie waldrop, blindsight.