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[20 Dec 2009|02:10am] |
"I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing." --Faulkner
I would like to live somewhere south. Where one goes barefoot. Wrinkles and a straw hat, dust everywhere. The cost of living is so low- a dollar a day or something. In the middle of nowhere, in some beautiful dry heat, or at least near a body of water. People come and go, like dreams, and I dream like it is real. During the day-- a vegetable garden, a market, a stray dog or two and at night a keyboard and hands and fingers rolling like waves. A cup of tea. A warm heart. Hand-written letters, parcels in brown paper.
I don't think I will go to graduate school. I can see myself: flabby and anemic. Disconnected and starved. Cheap thrills. The approval of superiors. A kind of watchfulness all round. Trying to make like Kant-- make my life like clockwork in the hope that it will produce something if I swear to be exacting, if I promise precision. Solutions for non-problems. Growing old with an attempt at dignity but feeling so root bound, like everything is curling in on itself. All these indirect means of getting what I want. All these indirect steps towards where I'd like to be.
There would be hardly anyone around me at all. People would come and go like dreams: touch and let go. Touch and let go. Synapses sparking and a sea of insects at night. Outnumbered! shalom, oh bright-eyed ones.
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| Postal |
[14 Nov 2009|11:42pm] |
Bonds droop and drag
and only kick up dust
that slows me down,
obscuring vision,
obstructing airways.
The brown dust rises in the dry heat.
You arch your neck, nostrils sky high
like the snout of a hound
buried in an avalanche.
But instead of settling,
the dirt swirls like
ash of autumn leaves that once,
on pavement, over asphalt,
in bricked corners and cluttered alley ways
used to do the twist in drafts,
spouting draughts of shouting laughter,
igniting wonder
or an eerie gleam of the eyes.
The ghosts of our excitement
hover over the neon light,
which is red and like a squeaking Sibyl
hovers over an unseen doorway.
When it is raining or cold
or when the peculiar circumstances
wrought by chance
unsettle your iron vertebrae
now swimming stiffly,
When the lonesome unknowing
is rendered a sinister place
and you are lost in the current
because there is no money to buy gloves or socks
although it is deep into autumn
When you have sent, uncertain, post
for the first time in years
tucked carefully into large manilla envelopes,
corners snug and smooth,
and the address is printed carefully
and everything is bundled
and warm like winter squash
although there is no money to buy gloves or socks
although it is deep into autumn
you are warm in your private endeavour,
your quiet attempt at redemption
until you notice the full set of stamps
left in your wallet.
For weeks you are worried sick,
you are thinking of the casual mockery
stirring the hearts of post office
drudgery
and when,
one morning, the gloriously dead are returned to you,
bare bones without flags
When all of the secret life like sap
is drained from your bones
despite your vigiliance,
your jealousy,
your deep roots fumbling onward,
when the blinds feelers choke each other like
incestuous sisters tangled in sheets,
pulling their hair so tightly
neither can crane their neck to see
that is when you crumble within the cuff
that is when you press your cheek against the bar
and old faithful will still prop you up like a puppet
will still bury you beneath scouring steel wool like blankets
will enclose you in stiff remembrances:
candles, saltless dinners, weakly warm cups of coffee,
the same tender whisper, the same hollow plea,
the same dull assurance.
The sturdy alloy unmoving and your resistance weakened.
With your skin against the steel there is a transfer of heat:
you close your eyes
your hair stands on end
your hackles rise up from your spine
your extremities turn blue
your lips a thin unspeaking line
your pages curl and fold and crackle,
bone dry
and in time, with exposure and deprivation,
the steel feels like life,
the terror feels divine.
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[01 Nov 2009|12:52am] |
There is nothing about the sunrise that breaks anything. In the pre-dawn, unbecoming, early hours, somebody bleary-eyed fails to notice the barely perceptible shift, as light refracts through an arc so huge you’d have sworn it straight. Boundaries are indefinite.
Then the birds sing, two minutes earlier than the night before, and somebody gets piqued about it. Somebody whose existence seems to depend on the utter impenetrability of this, that-- the old monstrous vigil, the anti-peace, restless tract of pacing. Pat, pat, pat.
A sound like light spilling past the door which is open just a crack.
Somebody shuts the door. With laboured breath, somebody closes the blinds. With heart racing and mind chasing. With white fingers like tender roots, somebody kneads and burrows through the great composite earth of her memory. Sifts through thousands of separate particles which gently desquamate her inessential parts, eroding her.
But in truth she looks buried, in fact she feels blanketed.
She threads together the disparate parts, luxuriates in a patchwork shroud.
If I was not born anything, permit me please to resist becoming anything.
Her fingers flitter like possessed, tangled things, like earthworms consuming, composing. They leave a trail of ink like fertile muck.
They call her Penelope.
***
For awhile when she was young she broke horses. She remembers the feverish moments before mounting, the ritual brushing and cleaning, the tightening of the girth and the pinch of teeth, the stomp of feet and how you always watched your back. Three year-olds fresh off the racetrack. Bridled but barely, with every movement threatening dissent, huge hearts on glistening chests spilling up the elegant throat of these nearly-winged things.
All earthbound, this sport. You let go and you are hurled headlong. In the lurching yet fluid moment, in this pounding, rollicking gallop, there is a certain cadence that would leave you breathless. There is a rhythm so wild and free it stomps out your medulla oblongata. And suddenly you find yourself breathless, reeling, and the horse is foaming at the mouth.
Some days were discordant. Her muscles would not relax into a fluid thing. She held on too tight when she should be letting go. Miscommunication, or how to shatter the confidence of a young and eager thing. And step by step, systematically, the creature would lose heart, would crumble and rail beneath her, heaving under her thighs, shifting between her feet, tossing and grinding its jaw under her very fingers gripping leather, and leather gripping skin. And it felt like an abomination, an unholy thing; and still she could not help but try and somehow set it right, say the right thing, find the pattern of movements to ignite these movements into a ritual, these moments into myths, these moieties into meaning. But she never quite managed that paradoxical feat: making an effort to relax. The exertion was too great, she only crumbled beneath it.
And so some days she was carried away into pure spirit, enraptured, and other days her body failed her, her insides squealed and screamed.
She fled from this memory like a banshee out of Babylon.
*****
She had hands that looked old at the age of fifteen and knees so bony, the cartiledge of the caps surfaced like a lost island. Like hovering things over slim pickings, half convinced.
She misused words but barreled on, occasionally falling into a kind of rapturous lilt. At her best she didn‘t use words like things or even materials or pieces with which to construct. She used words as the wind uses the world, passing through, exploring invisible enclaves. It felt like hot breath on the heart, a stiff wind on the back of your neck, the ticklish draft of a spider frantically spinning, the drift of the frenzy enough to raise the hair on your arm. You shudder, scratch and swat. But you do not bother looking. A haunting is something both impossible to understand and ignore.
Her trouble amounted to words. She did not know her own strength and she took frantic, bucking joy in testing it out. Early on she invented identities, styled personal tragedies, garnered sympathy, carved out conflict and drama in her life and while the thrill of change and the sensation of mastering of destiny passed the time, the deadening boredom, thumping out time in suburban adolescence. While the thrill passed the time she got away with feeling nothing, in the long run. In truth it was more flighty than treacherous, but she evoked airs so well those around her swore they smell a traitor. And thus, at arms length about her, a gulf of doubt. A kind of mystery that appealed only to the morally challenged, to believers at a time of a certain crisis of faith. How even Mother Teresa had a forty year crisis of faith. “As for me, the silence and emptiness is so great that I look but I do not see, listen and do not hear. The tongue moves but does not speak.”
*********
(And although looking eyes could not build sights and straining ears could not produce sounds, lo, lo, lo that wagging tongue, slopping about in low tones, what language it evoked! Like the first language, like the original languages, so primitive it was almost nonsense, words wagged, thoughts lagged, emotions dragged, ragged, bedraggled.)
******************
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| Salem Bitch Trials |
[01 Nov 2009|12:26am] |
“This room is too small for a four post bed,”
she said with her usual almost washed out,
nearly shaken off sneer,
the result of some bracing wind,
some violation in the city streets,
harried and hassled in transport.
He protested weakly, his words gentle
and spilling, mellifluous,
his posture obsequious:
indirect, to the side, bent as ever
from his height, beautiful large
hands making perfect spaces for
the good things that would make their home,
richly roasted coffee beans
and new leaves unfurling at every sill
corners and cupboards for blankets
slippers, a stack of fresh towels,
drawers spilling with exotic cutlery,
and every surface fit for a sacrifice,
purified and bright and daring
to be stained.
She shut her eyes to most of it,
the mornings were bright but too cold,
so she stayed shut in the too small room,
cramped at the makeshift desk
for despite everything she still thought
independence was bringing a book with you
every you went. The truth is she
lives here without a backbone,
sinks low to the ground, slightly asphyxiated,
shallow breathing, something chest-crushing,
something organ-grinding. She swims
in smooth shards of future ruin:
coffee grinds and dirt and dead leaves,
dust and shattered glass, loose knives
curled for gutting,
polishing her underbelly, cursing and grimly
inhaling as the sweet air strikes sweet headaches,
that rack the skull through the gums to the brain.
Clenched jaw.
Consider her toxicity,
as she flutters her hands, eyes pleading,
posture hollowed all out as if to say
I don’t know how I became so toxic,
I want to tear off every part of me that hints at warning signs,
or fire truck glowing emergency light groaning do not disturbs.
I want to rip out my teeth with red-handled pliers,
run my tongue, flex that muscle
over the tasty gushing grooves of absolute vulnerability.
On the posts of the bed he ties ribbons and shoelaces,
patiently waiting,
ceaseless readiness without anticipation.
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[23 Oct 2009|04:19pm] |
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"Since there are no longer, for the intellectual, any given categories, even cultural, and bustle endangers concentration with a thousand claims, the effort of producing something in some measure worthwhile is no so great as to be beyond almost everybody" (Minima Moralia, Adorno)
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| Consider |
[25 Sep 2009|12:41am] |
“Now it gets complicated, the campaign and the chances and the strategy; and complication is dangerous, because the truth is rarely complicated. Complication usually has more to do with mixed motives, gray areas, compromise.“ David Foster Wallace
I have a waitress voice. I put on a bizarre hybrid of a blue-collar Canadian and the Coen brothers’ Fargo. I say, “Absolutely” and “I’m so glad” with absolutely specious authenticity; I say “guys” to frequently and kick myself for it. I balance four hot plates and I do not slip. I navigate the crude humour of the back kitchen and the sly, watchful glances of my greedy co-workers, capitalists with ponytails, who shower me with backhanded compliments, who steal my pens and tables. This is the job that steals my evenings, my weekends, that is burying me well like a fox in a hole. They call me a natural.
I have a cute voice; I have a dead voice. If there were a horror movie about my relationship, I would ruffle hair and soothe through traffic by days, slide on the ground to prop up your two-d figure into 3-d status, I would cheer with laughter and nonsense and puns and self-deprecating humour and silly rhymes. And then by night I’d be a dead girl, a weird cold shell of a thing with an eerie glint to the eye, a deafness to almost everything, a muteness seizing over me like a fever. Seal off myself in a kind of vacuum. Irrelevant, untouched, shooting backwards into time past, present, and future. Drifting off on dreams, eyes shut, hear. Irritated by any and all that brought me back into the specificity of this moment, the pinprick sensation of that one caress, that frighteningly accurate appeal in his words I don’t know where you are right now but…nothing. That is all that can be said. There is a centre that does not crack.
But by morning I am loving, I would like coffee and a joke and a plan and a place. I would like to go for a walk, feast my eyes on the cluttered cityscape, the dirty streets of little Portugal and little Korea, the cheap dives and good digs by day, the look of people walking around shell-shocked, stunned by the sun and the day, which is new, but feels like an old memory. The skies, the tree-lined streets. It’s all a bit unnatural.
And then in the meat of the day I am lost to the mind, I am grasping at anything. I am hunting around for others who think like me, for an alma mater and a test score and a perfect phrase that might get me an “in” to a “means to an end.” Things gnaw at me here, nothing gets done promptly, I write down too many scraps of things for later, for later later. Later comes lightly, stealthy. A stealing thing. I have a year off. It is time to write. It is time to write myself into something, into ideological becoming.
And because I’m fucking starving during this time, y’understand, I’m literally killing myself starving here, and so I’m stuffing myself with anything I can find because I feel so fucking impoverished, with my scraps of written things. With my duty and destiny all splayed out in front of me. And I’m crippling myself, in a way, feeding this. How in times of anxiety your hands casually wander down into the pants. Easy Easy way out. Cripple cripple don’t shout.
Pretty images don’t come much, anymore. Although last night he stunned me, opened me up to a kind of surprised ecstasy and I wondered why I had to be so goddamn ornery. So fucking contrary. So contradictory, so silent, so absolutely unwilling, seeing but unbelieving, uncompromising, so retentive of anything I had ever once offered, or given, in these terrible holed in, fuck off please, Thomas-don’t-care-to-see-you’re-fucking-bleeding-again,-Jesus moments.
I am worried I am learning very little about people these days. All holed up.
The amount of fucking energy I am putting into this bullshit excuse of a direction, hell, it isn‘t even a concrete direction, it‘s words all strung up in the pattern and sense of a direction. Part time course year off applying to school in the fall Masters United States ye’Idunnowhut. It’s staggering. Y’understand. I stagger under the weight of this. But there’s barely even time to put it down. Surely this crushing is unbecoming. In a sense or two.
I laugh, because I wanted to include all these senseless things in something that they call a personal statement or alternately, a statement of purpose. I wanted to include all of these senseless names, insert one senseless name into this fucking document, like a thank you on a liner note, ha-ha. I’m trying to randomly insert and infuse all of these makeshift documents, these records and written down quotations, these lists of things to do, these rewrites of old fucking rotting shit I imagine I can send off, cart off, the dip of inequity, the tip of ubiquity! I keep trying to make all this marginalia holy. These little things, imbued with being. Be-littlin’! Be-littering. I carry all of these notebooks around with me anywhere, they contain things like quadratic fucking equations and astericked notes on how to calculate the percentage of a percentage of a… and permutations and combinations and notes on factorials of exponents. They contain things like “addicted to the thrill of dynamic conversation” (ha! hack!), “saturated with cultural and political ideology, personal myth-making and multiple draft theory of identity, the indirect and problematic nature of language and the written word as seemingly objective, when in reality language is a living utterance, shining with the meaning of past, present future…” in caps, astericked and underlined, THE DISCOURSE OF UNCERTAINTY exclamation point. “Why is chance and fantasy consistently more appealing to me than fixity and reality? And when did this happen?” A failed portrait of myself as a content housewife with dusty bookshelves: “Life would be certain and regular and words would mean by the way they are used and defined and invented and DEMONSTRATED and the inflections and everything would sink and swell harmoniously and surrounded by such melody, without a note of the harsh dissonance of doubt and lust and dishonour I would sight and sink back
float languorously.”
A golden thing that I have loved and loudly admired.
Destined to turn the spinning animus of you, the spun, threading, swimming gold of your intentions, your thoughts, your history, into a broken thing. A receiver with no telephone line. Dead signal, but such a pretty sign, regardless. Words in a vacuum.
But you do not dwell here, geist. You don’t live in these endless pages of distractions, mostly numbers, sometimes lists and goals and plans, interspersed with confessions just seedy enough to hold these things close to my heart, as if they were worth something. As if it mattered if I were found out for the liar and thief that I am.
I am not only wasting my life, I am deceptively stealing the blood-life from others. These good and warm years of living.
But you do not dwell here, geist. These distractions are like tiny fractures. It is not in the pieces but in the fissures that you flow.
“I still make myself in honor of something else, something separate and apart from my coughing father, my grumbling mother, the cat that scratches and cries at the door, the boy who pulls me apart, splays me and pins me up like a rare species of butterfly, beholds the folds of anatomy, spreading gently, almost saying, ‘It is good, it will be loved.’ I still make myself in honor of something else, despite my pinned down limbs. I play along, a coy traitor, but rest assured I do not indebt or indenture myself. Something still rumbles beneath this comfortable mess of blankets and limbs. I read aloud to him and he pretends to listen, I think he pretends to listen. If he listens he makes no sign of it. No sign. Both enduring and ending. Ending only to endure. Enduring only to end. Switch things around, cause and effect, good and bad, true and false, I and thou, until they make sense.
Now and then he pretends to understand and then he apologizes for pretending.
He thinks it is the best thing.
These days I crave something like Dostoevsky in his pajamas jumping up and down, waving his hands madly, flying at me for abandoning the field. For abandoning clarity. For abandoning the truth of small things. For holding on to small things out of familiarity, comfort, the feel of ‘em in my hand, lining my pockets, stuck to the roof of my mouth, hidden cocoon like when others are pounding to be let in. Legless bugs, stumbling blindly about.
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| The power went out. I remembered some things. Scratched 'em out |
[27 Aug 2009|02:49pm] |
Howler, hearken.
Grew up on Stravinsky,
dissonance disgorged our childhoods
dangling in
thick drips
a socket to the ground.
A word on what was found
the day I lay my ear to the ground:
you bellow buried beneath,
shimmer your strings,
like ribs rich sand can't drown,
like glowing bones with quivering hymns,
no notes but strokes,
ripped tangles of lashing, thrashing sound.
You effuse most effluvial,
bass-note throat:
a death rattle wave
moribund, resonant,
fecund, profound.
I, pulse quickened,
heart racing.
Bright hair gently bracing
bone,
"I'll a huff
and a puff
and I'll blow your soft down,"
I, razed peach, tracing,
battling time-healed effacing,
a sound to purge your heart.
A hymn to eviscerate your home.
With whispers lacing,
hush a sound like menacing,
Stravinsky grinning-grimacing,
like kicked-up dirt
conjured dust devil hurt,
I am twisted and bound but unbroken
only to be shattered by an unsaid promise
the aftermath's ease will render you dead or inert.
Foot up,
face first,
plug your socket to the ground.
Know that I found you in a nightmare,
riffing an eerie outpouring of many waters,
mop in hand.
Drench, quench, or wrench,
you river-ran through me,
with a sound like spun fantasy
tightly wound.
Spin spin round
wait wait resound
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| These ideas excite the hell out of me. |
[19 Aug 2009|08:01pm] |
"Proust was a Neuroscientist" is a book that my friend Alison recommended that I read after I went on a long and well-worn rant about the dubious nature of positivism, or the deep belief that science has the ability to explain all aspects of human experience, and that ultimate and perfect knowledge, with the help of science, is attainable.
Written by Jonah Lehrer, the book demonstrates the way in which artists, from Walt Whitman to George Eliot to Marcel Proust, challenged the scientific status quo before or around the time that it was scientifically overturned. In the wake of these synchronized ideas, the new consciousness that emerges often affirms the artistic values of freedom, will, possibility, creativity, imagination, chaos, playfulness and above all, meaning-making, while overturning ideas of genetic predestination, all forms of rational and biological determinism, the "knowledge/information" model of DNA and memory, and the general scientific definition of humans as the rational animal. Lehrer repeatedly demonstrates that an authentic epistemology based on true understanding can be found just as well in a literary and aesthetic approach to life as it can to a supposedly true scientific approach, requiring dialogue between entities, multiple interpretations, flexibility, while at the same time, in order to satisfy us, a degree of cohesion and elegance.
On DNA:
"From the perspective of genetics, life became a neat causal chain, our organism ultimately reducible to its text, these wispy double helixes afloat in the cellular nuclei. As Richard Dawkins declared in The Selfish Gene, 'We are survival machines-- robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.'
The logical extension of this biological ideology was the Human Genome project... an attempt to decode the genetic narrative of our species. Every chromosome, gene, and base pair would be sequenced and udnerstood. Our textual underpinnings would be stripped of their mystery, and our lack of freedom would finally be exposed... everything from cancer to schizophrenia would be eradicated.
Nature... writes astonishingly complicated prose. If our DNA has a literary equivalent, it's Finnegan's Wake. As soon as the Human Genome Project began decoding our substrate, it was forced to question cherished assumptions of molecular biology. The first... the dizzying size of our genome... 3 million base pairs.... Most of this excess text is junk... more than 95% of human DNA is made up of... introns: vast tracts of repetitive, noncoding nonsense.
By the time the Human Genome Project completed its epic decoding, the dividing line between genetics and genetic filler had begun to blur. Biology could no longer even define what a gene was. The lovely simplicity of the Central Dogma [DNA made RNA that made protein. We are elaborate sculptures of protein, therefore we are the sum of our DNA] collapsed under complications of our genetic reality, in which genes are spliced edited, methylated, and sometimes jump chromosomes. Science had discovered that, like any work of literature, the human genome is a text in need of commentary, for what Eliot said of poetry is also true of DNA: 'all meanings depend on the key of interpretation.'
What makes us human, and what makes each of us his or her own human, is not simply the genes that we have buried in our base pairs, but how our cells, in dialogue with our environment, feed back to our DNA, changing the way we read ourselves. Life is a dialectic. For example, the code sequence GTAAGT can be translated as instructions to insert the amino acid valine and serine; read as a spacer, a genetic pause that keeps other protein parts an appropriate distance from one another; or interpreted as signal to cut the transcript at that point. Our human DNA is defined by its multiplicity of possible meanings; it is a code that requires context.... By demonstrated the limits of genetic determinism, the HGP ended up becoming an ironic affirmation of our individuality. By failing to explain us, the project showed that humanity is not simply a text.... Our nature, is endlessly modified by our nurture...
But if DNA doesn't determine the human brain, then what does? The easy answer is: nothing. Although genes are responsible for the gross anatomy of our brain, our plastic neurons are designed to adapt to our experiences. Like the immune system, which alters itself in response to the pathogens it actually encounters (we do not have the B cells of our parents), the brain is constantly adapting to the particular conditions of life. THis is why blind people can use their visual cortex to read Braille, and why the deaf can rprocess sign language in their auditory cortex. Lose a figner and, thanks to neural plasticity, your other fingers will take over its brain space. In one particular audacioous experiment, the neuroscientist Mriganka Sur literally rewired the mind of a ferret, so that the information coming from its retina was plugged into the auditory cortex. To Sur's astonishment, the ferrets could still see. urthermore, their auditory cortex now resembled the typical ferret visual cortex, complete with spatial maps and neurons tuned to detect slants of light. Michael Merzenich, one of the founders of the plasticity field, called this experiment, 'the most compelling demonstration you could have that experience shapes the brain.' As Eliot always maintained, the mind is defined by its malleability.
This is the triumph of DNA: it makes us without determining us. The invention of neural plasticity, which is encoded by the genome, lets each of us transcend our genome. We emerge, characterlike, from the vague alphabet of our text. Of course, to accept the freedom inherent in the human brain-- to know that the individual is NOT genetically predestined-- is also to accept the fact that we have no single solutions. Every day each one of us is given the gift of new neurons and plastic cortical cells; only we can decide what our brains will become.
The best metaphor for DNA is literature. Like all classic literary texts, our genome is defined not by the certainty of its meaning, but by its linguistic instability, its ability to encourage a multiplicity of interpretations... the same book manages to inspire two completely different conclusions. But there is no right interpretation. Everyone is free to find his or her own meaning in the novel. Our genome works the same way. Life imitates art"
Just the other day I told Jeff that I find astrology as probable a framework for explaining people and relationships as I do science. Asshole that I am, I read aloud the last paragraph, substituting literature, with "astrology" and "horoscopes." Although amused, he remains entirely unconvinced, in a most Aries fashion.
Anyhow, Lehrer goes on to talk in more detail about the brain. Only in the last two decades has it been accepted that the brain regenerates itself and that neurogenesis actually exists. People believed that unlike other body cells, the neurons you had were the neurons you would be left with for the rest of your life. The concept that the brain remained unchanged is a recent example of a popular scientific notion that took years to expel despite new evidence that falsified it. One reason why scientists may have missed neurogenesis is because that primates in laboratory conditions make poor subjects for studies of neurogenesis, which is likely linked to learning and memory.
In 2000, a series of experiements by Karim Nader, Glenn Shafe, and Joseph LeDoux, demonstrated that the act of remembering changes you. The scientists conditioned rats: loud noise = shock. As predicted, when injected with a chemical that stops new proteins from being created, the rats could not create a fearful memory.
Now here's the kicker: memory has a couple of different parts to it. It remains popular believed (as of my 2008 PSY100 class) at different parts of the brain create memories and different parts of the brain retrieve them. However, this study suggests otherwise. A strong association was created between the loud noise and the pain. Next the inhibitor stopped the process of "retrieving" memories.
"According to the dogma of remembrance, nothing much should have happened. The long-term memory should exist independently of its recall, filed away in one of the brain's protected file cabinets. After the poison was flushed out of their cells, the rats should remember their fear. The noise should still remind them of the shock.
But this isn't what happened... the original trace also disappeared. After only one single interruption of the recollection process, their fear was erased. The rats became amnesiacs.
At first glance, this experimental observation seems incongruous... we like to think of our memories as being inscrutable impressions, somehow separate from the act of remembering them. But they aren't. A memory is only as real as the last time you remembered it. The more you remember something, the less accurate the memory becomes."
If personal identity, or the mind and interior self, is linked to the brain and our genetic DNA, what does it mean if our brains are constantly regenerating? If personal identity, or the mind and the interior self, are linked to our experiences and memories, what does it mean if our memories are plastic and only exist in our act to retrieve them? If memory is not an end but only a process of meaning-making... grooves of thoughts and patterns of being.
Neither object matter nor subjective experience is reliable. Both are simple vaguely coherent, patchwork blankets... the beautifully constructed identity. Our common coat of arms.
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| "When all the senses are stilled..." |
[13 Aug 2009|04:06pm] |
"When all the senses are stilled, when the mind is at rest, when the intellect wavers not-- then, say the wise, is reached the highest state. This clam of the senses and the mind has been defined as yoga. She who attains it is freed from delusion. In one not freed from delusion this calm is uncertain; unreal: it comes and goes. Brahman words cannot reveal, mind cannot reach, eyes cannot see. How then, save through those who know him, can he be known?
There are two selves, the apparent self and the real Self. Of these it is the real Self, and She alone, who must be felt as truly existing. To the woman who feels Her as truly existing She reveals Her innermost nature.
The mortal in whose heart desire is dead become immortal. The mortal in whose heart the knots of ignorance become untied becomes immortal. These are the highest truths taught in the scriptures."
For me, the main question when I look at Hinduism and yoga's conception of reality is whether or not I believe reality to be what is permanent and stable and not what comes and goes. Often I take an approach that embraces change, the elasticity, the playful bounce in words and experience, encounters and interactions with others, and the flux within perception, experience, and self.
Sometimes I wonder if I will ever fully be able to accept in practice that "change" is what is permanent and stable. It's something that's difficult to meditate on and to lose oneself in because it's an aerial thing, it's a thing of water flowing. It is not the ground beneath our feet that roots slip and suck through. It is not something through which we can run and drain, it is something that runs through us and drains us.
I often feel that my mind is constantly reaching for something more like earth than wind or water.
Then there is the "problem of desire." I certainly relish the stir and excitement of desire and the liveliness of pleasure. But perhaps a more essential part of me relishes the stability of a return home after a pilgrimage-- of a fixed holy place, of hallow things and sacred words, repeated.
But desire can occasionally push past the brink beyond the self, into new territory. Sometimes it is foreign, the roots do not take. Wilt and writhe because you cannot acclimatize! Sometimes one thrives, boasts new growth. Spread yourself around. And sometimes I am taken by the wind and leave my head behind and wake up without pain or memory.
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[25 Jul 2009|09:37pm] |
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Number crunching. Word weighing. Truth testing. I want to do right but not right now. I phrased as delicately as possible on the restaurant table the three things, heart, body, head. I think two out of three is all right, all right, darling, because we’re all right, aren’t we? I think two out of three is pretty all right but is it human? Or is it grasping? Reaching? Is it tight-lipped compromise? Is it beast like? Is it monstrous? Is it an automaton? As soon as It was out and with his warm heart he embraced It and with his lean body he cradled It. It was a most welcome confession, it was veiled in lace. Later when I spoke (something about recaptured rapture, something about LSD, although I shut my mouth as I dreamed about encountering Ginsberg‘s beard in La Honda in the redwoods and just spouting words into its unwieldy, unyielding magnificence) he simply nested into my chest like a child, not watching the television, simply basking in comfort and I felt like a bastard. In the sense that I had no birthright for this comfort. In the connish sense of a smooth-talker, a liar. I felt like a bastard for biding my time for spelling things out in a subtle language like you are everything except A, thankfully I don’t know how much I really need A, this one thing. Because A could be Academia, A could be an Acquaintance, A could be Absinthe one thin night in Paris and a stranger on the street. A is my head and A proves the most mutable. With the possible exception of my heart, and the emotional part of the equation which seems to mutate in the way that series circuit can mutate. On, boom, off. A is ghost like. Sometimes it is so light and so out front you leave your body’s heavy substance like a spritely thing through the fog left by the late July rain. Or in the redwoods on LSD. A is ghost-like and Now. One is not reminded of the heavy corporeality of the body, the steps you’ve yet to take to get to your grave. You're at your job flicking a large earwig off the back of your now-tan calf. And all this damn back-pedalling and how it feels utterly inconsistent with this high falootin’ concept of growing old. The day I realized it was the day I realized I could never have children whose parents did not talk about books or ideas at the dinner table. That was the day I realized it. I think this makes me a snob Something about petit bourgeois being either those with money and no culture and those with culture and no money. And so I confess my epic bourgeois fear of producing children, or a legacy, or a life, with no money and no culture. No language or currency. Just being.
And I rail at my resistance to it, because it could be an epic trip, and all of these preconceived notions I’ve had of what it would be like to co-habit with another thinking person are probably complete bullshit, because I tested most of my notions about thinking people in university and found myself to be utterly disappointed by the straitened birth canal of the modern mind. Most thoughts need to be surgically removed. People truly can barely feel the contractions of the world vibrating around them. They can hardly bear the pain it takes to push although they complain often enough about the burden of one who bears. Yes you have a brain. Yes you must bear-- you must bear witness. And that is what I need the most. A keen set of eyes, a witness, a mind separate and distinct from mine and not subject to the vacant-eyed nod to the deferred opinion of Our Mother of Pussy who most naturally delivers but unfortunately, finds herself curiously unable to shut her trap now and then. And the things that come out: utterly unfamiliar, foreign. And yes this is grotesque, yes I’m talking about afterbirth but what does it take for someone to recognize these things as home? This slopping mess of life? The utter hilarity of it? He laughs when I notice things like Space Age Shelving, the sign on the Smart Centre, asking what distinguishes a space age shelf from an ordinary shelf. Asking, hypothetically, what some distinguishing features might be. Lucite? LED lights? Questioning, you know, how technologically complex a shelf can really be. I would have killed for just one thing, just a couple words strung together, a thoughtful reply like "tiny drawers". And the laughs would spill like jewels from my chest. Yes, dear. Brain porn. That’s what I’ve been doing every night. But too much flying solo and you start to feel a little crazy, a little anti-social. Suffice to say I need someone to talk to. A con artist. In the versational sense.
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[11 Jul 2009|05:32pm] |
For the past two months I have been living in a city that is like the suburb’s seedy uncle. I dart through it like a jackrabbit on the turn pike, travelling from work, coming home or from Toronto, or by bike. Lately I have been lightning quick, eyes averted. I’ve been rolling stop signs and barrelling on. On Canada day I felt proud and resentful of the people I was surrounded by at the lakefront. As we marched in with our joint ablazing, long driveways in older neighbourhoods rolled onto Simcoe and on them, citizens of Oshawa had been drinking since lunch time. Women danced for the cars in traffic, cajoling. Men joked and jeered each other roughly. Everywhere, young families navigated the tight sidewalk and traffic copped road. Mothers who were kind, mothers who were bored, mothers who were impatient. Fathers who were loving, fathers who were hard, fathers who were exasperated. Children with a loose rein and accidents waiting to happen.
On the way back home, a city bus shuttled these patriot lovers back to the parking lot of the GM plant. The bus moved as slowly as the sea of people walking North, the lake and their ten minutes of budget busting effervescence at their back. Trucks, because everyone drives trucks, tried to cut off the pedestrians, who damn them bitterly as they drive on ahead. Cutting throat and getting ahead boiled the blood, stirred the pot, of these too-human characters. Their bursting anger, unwarranted and unnecessary, stuns and stupefies their more passive companions, these jackrabbits darting through, these deer paused and ear straining. Like an animal, it is though when they go dumb they lose their instincts. Headlights-- “Move you fucking asshole! Can’t you fucking see us on the road? You goddamn idiot. You stupid idiot. Jesus fucking CHRIST.” The women is 170 lbs, 5 foot two, wearing faded black sweat pant shorts, flip flops, long burgundy hair running down her back, pale skin blotched with feeling. She is walking a pit bull puppy who, oblivious, runs ahead only to stop and sniff at a dandelion, a fencepost, a beer can, before abruptly getting jerked in the throat. “ You think that just because you’re in your big truck you can do whatever the fuck you want? Are you fucking BLIND?” The woman’s companions walk in front, behind, and somewhat beside, one pace back. The man behind keeps kicking the dog a little before it gets jerked again, hoping to help. No one chimes in. No one lets go. Across the road, a man in a large, pale brassy coloured truck with toy-like plastic edging around the tail gate, sharply makes a left into the sea of people. The crowd holds him back from a speedy escape. A tattooed man in a sports jersey chases down the truck, shouting expletives. The truck slows down and the man on the sidewalk approaches the passenger side of the window. He shouts, “You want a piece of me?” The truck speeds up, taunting. The man is pushing a stroller. He chases the truck again, “You want a piece of me motherfucker? What the fuck, asshole? Pull over!” and so it goes without the mention of the child. A woman, perhaps the child’s mother, follows with a boy of about five a few paces behind. You can make her out by the rapid way she approaches the scene, from which all others either freeze to watch or avert their eyes and dart by. She walks quickly, in a direct line. We do not hear what she says, if she says anything at all. We crossed to the other side of the road. I could not help but notice that everyone on a bicycle looked like they’d had a few DUI’s under their belt. At the side of the road, a man helps a boy of about ten do up his shorts. They shift and shuffle by the side of the road. The boy carries a puppy in his arms like a baby.
This year the fireworks were different. Not just your typical Walt Disney shooters and spherical bursters. This year they had dandelion seeds that blew in the wind and sent out astral rays. They had a polka dot mirage of gold and silver glitter, that lingered in the air, intact, mysteriously. They had a firecracker that was like raining gold and the sparks lasted almost until the black water of lake Ontario. The beauty of those long, floating, dropping lines was staggering. People cried out, in spite of themselves. Trite phrases, “SO beautiful” and "Have you ever?!" and of course, the quiet blood rumble of Oohs and Aahs, the sound of a heart thumping to send blood rushing, and from this, our senses firmly erect. We sat down on a blanket close to the water. I wanted to go right down to the rocks and dangle my legs but we had already set up. I took out his camera, after a sigh, and began fiddling. When the fireworks started he took over to "try and slow down the shutter speed", his default technical phrase for any time we try and shoot something difficult. At first the hair on my neck raised a little and I jutted my head out, like any noble Taurean grown belligerent. But as I lay on the backpack, now devoid of precious breakables, and watched the fireworks migrate closer and bigger, dazzle sharper and brighter, as I captured the flow of real time which felt like the cycle of breath when you let go, give in to that medulla oblongata, I felt the ecstatic relief of returning to a part of me I thought I had lost. Of the absolute self-reliance of an aesthetic of spirit which ignites in humble things, combusts in dry hearts, thunders in the boilers of great steam rolling seas of people, barreling along like trumpet song. Seedlings of song. Flickers of quiet flame. And even the bull must delicately lip clover such as this. Oh world, speed blurs what you are missing. Race on. Cram a bit more into each day. Burn out and slap your child unjustly. Dust-like human beings. I suppose I am in love with departures and beginnings.
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[15 Mar 2009|01:19pm] |
Preface
The classical canon stood as a pedagogical model of rhetorical eloquence and as an ideological model of poetry-making in the service of empire-building. Defoe's rehearsal of contemporary opinion in A Vindication of the Press (1718) is typical of two centuries' worth of English criticism in the way it itemizes the palpable benefits of literary production. Defoe's catalogue is also typical in the way it projects ultimate evaluative authority onto a rhetorical fiction, in this case the “impartial reader.”
Today, canon formation...
we listened to the metaphors that were mixed
they set our heart on fire
myths wrongly interpreted
I will not clean my room in an attempt to forget you
I will not clean my room in an attempt to forget you
are are sparkled with broken glass
you are the streets that I know
and it is the knowing that took us here
what was at once new and familiar
Warm-up
I threw out the poems of john keats you gave me
and almost picked up his life instead but thought better of it
what's always getting the better of you
i had been warned in the summer that the story might put a damper on the year
which we knew would be difficult enough.
the dissonance of literature students searching for true traces in history:
sales figures of first editions and early manuscripts and the ways they circulated.
who read them and how this might matter.
i had been warned in the summer about the image of drowning
where there is no sound and there are no words.
you know this isn't true and that the experience would be rich
you might even hear your lungs battling it out
there might be sounds like crushing or muffling or
gurgling or bursting but never mind these things.
the end of an era.
the age of johnson.
I will not stop being a reptile. I repeat,
we couldnt stand not being understood so we became academics
but to justify our existence we took a historical approach to things
we tried not to let the power of our expression get the better of us and in our papers
we do not include the exclamation marks in our marginalia
there were a lot of things that I couldnt get down on paper
like how what counted in reception is the way people read
and how that signals an attitude towards language
these beliefs that run deeper than their external appearances
deeper than words or the criticism itself or what it signifies
I can't unwind
my brain is wrapping around on overdrive
the head ache is a dull testament to our evolution as a species
our foreheads rose, our skulls stretched and the matter within is groaning
it's like the signal that's trying to tell us
what does the pain feel like to you?
And this: the secret key to our unique identity.
it feels like a burn
a kind of seering that wipes out everything
even its own trace in the end
its in the temples and across your forehead where your third eye once was
its about to change everything
I wanted to say
the way to control him is with breathing
you breathe real slow and he thinks your asleep and backs off
I write with my eyes lclosed because the monitor is seering
the monitor the mirrored window (and all that I can never overcome)
it makes sleeping easier and thinking more difficult
I slow down my breathing as though I am sleeping
we are close enough to listen to each other breathe
I can feel his heart beating quickly and he makes small movements,
changing and shifting, as though he is trying to get comfortable
as though he is trying to sleep
I just breathe slowly and evenly and lay very very still
I think about things that I wanted to say
how when I was child I can't really remember
any twenty year olds moving back in with their parents
and then I do but they are so apart from the forts
and the fields and beneath the bridge at deverall park
and the path between the two parks, deverall and jack wilson
and how you dont get that often anymore,
a way between parks,
paths from and towards pure pleasure
utility above and beyond and below
and the hydrolines in the fields that signalled something different.
That suggested something, in their marked contrast to the shifting and enormous sky,
their straight lines and their inner parts working, running the city
like blood and above it the sky and no kites and how with lightening
it flashes and burns in an instant sudden and unknowably and how
with these lines we grid and measure and pump and pool and the danger
is the same but the signs mark it
no kites
pick up after your dog
the by-laws that mediate between our differences
all that I do is I breathe slowly and suddenly I understand
that he is aware that I can feel his heart pumping
he gets self conscious about it so then he starts to breathe slowly too,
mimetic because
oh-my-god-she-knows
what else is there to do with that crippling self-consciousness?
Nothing so he mimes because
he doesnt know how to act and
he breathes slow.
This is a Turing test
And now I test the truth of his explanation
(I quizzed him earlier when he took off his jeans and put on his pajamas
I asked him if I was talking too much when I told him how much is changing
how its all happening so fast
how there are people out there that seem like they are like me too
not just us you know how there are people,
other people doing what I am doing and as I say it
I think about what this really means.
But for ten minutes he hasn't said anything,
he didn't appear to respond to the sheer cadence of these thoughts,
the rocking quality of them that was lifting me up into a rollicking gait
as I wandered around the room collecting tiny pieces of trash,
cigarette butts, tin tea light remanants, small bits of paper,
the lids of previously discarded bottled drinks,
scraps and traces and I put them in a plastic bag
which felt like trash to begin with already
sealing up and containing and it soothed me,
the rollicking pace of my cadence.
And maybe it soothed him or maybe he wasn't listening but I asked sharply,
“Am I talking too much or something?” And he said no and he told me he was tired
and so at that moment when we have both slowed our breathing to the same speed,
unequally measured, I tested him.)
I lay very still and he fell asleep.
I thought hard and fast and wandering
how the past four days I vividly remember
a piece of the mise-en-scene of the dream,
the layer of the place and the feeling and a few
scattered images and sometimes there are words
I thought about how maybe everything was just
learning to control your breathing
I wondered if the eternal occurs on an
inhale (I am nourished) or an
exale (I am purified)
and how that unknowing is our very limitation
because we are marked by the rhythms and we respond to the cadences
whether we want to or not,
O,
O,
O, medulla oblongata
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[05 Nov 2007|11:04am] |
The Escher stair walls directed nothing, signified nothing, but reflected light better than any mirror and the colour in the place, although sparse, was a deep pool sort of hue, a glittering liveliness as if the actual objects protested the uncertainty of their high-ceilinged enclosure. The curtains were barely curtains, sheer, hiding nothing, the windows unscreened sweat layers of clumsy white paint. It was the type of room where obsessed with ideas (stricken, sprawled, frog legs splayed and pinned) her left breast would fall exposed out of the towel, or shawl, or too large sweater lazily draped around her shoulders for the squirrels and pigeons of surrounding rooftops to see. It was the type of room where the dust collected and spoke legions on the yellowed soles of her feet. It was the type of room where she radiated both gloriously and toxically, providing for and killing her sometimes bedfellows that could not secure firm footing, the polished wood glorified the perished grains the swirled sunken cell harmonies, petrifying the roaches and his large feet. Her left breast, small and soft and hearkening promise fell out beneath the folds and they licked their lips with greed and loneliness, the contingent tides directed by her, cold and ungiving but reflecting some sort of promise in their brightly lit eyes, feasting.
He looked on, steadfast. Sometimes she was obscure, clouded her heavy lidded eyes and his senses with scent, nearly dripping. Sometimes she was enigmatic, her full belly sharply double crossed with ribs and racking chest bones concealing glistening, pumping organs. Mostly she was terrible, a false submissive entreating, a false prophet cradling his head at her breast, a false heart shuddering and grinding at the possibility of a hardened halt and the freedom in returning to the grave. He looked on, steadfast and drew her out thread by thread, spread her everywhere manically, splayed her thoughts and pinned her down, thinly pressed her in every direction, wide eyes looking and he needed her lightness so badly that he unravelled her over and over laboriously he tolled, and struck and kneaded and sowed and she soon had to steal seconds for her defenses, for her retreat, and he was the boy that tried to snag the moon and reel her in and the gravitons conspired destruction and desperately he spread her into smaller parts, blazoned her bit by bit wide eyed mesmerized and she could not refuse him these relics, being his tomb and the left breast fell out and he hungrily lipped his lips, maddened by her aridity, his wet eyes rolling in grief and fear. The waves crashed demanding a particular status against the brick, he knelt at her feet with his head in her lap and she sat straighter than a fresh gravestone, steady.
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| roach poem i |
[27 Sep 2007|09:03pm] |
in this geo-windowed catechism of natural light,
this dust scratched gem of polished wooden floors and
sweating clay-coloured walls lie the keepsake corpses
of German cockroaches.
a proclivity for secrecy, love of sliding bones
and small, tight spaces
contractile tissues like
throats, made the stringy connectors
quiver with dizzy anticipation: here is a chance for
a link, and with a link a set, and with a set
a delicate clasp, a needle in your eye or two hooks, click
click curled lick from the quick, surrender swift!
and i rift, adrift, eagled o’er bald
split o’er sawed, crow cock cawed
outlawed, i spill thence from the east, a roach,
encroached a fine feast.
in the light we are marooned, yellow-bellied
streaked with violet light and violent flight.
out of breath out of breadth stuck on racks sunken sacs
the heaviest death, the gentlest rest, on our backs
the transient light welcomed examination,
with legs curled high she reeked of expired salvation
for the fissures and cracks he wrenched and rubbed
raw her spinal retaliation
and pinned to board she spilled an egg sac of seed
hooks and eyes, crumbed intelligent lies, feelers for
spies, muffled throat cries; all of her cracked mirrors,
wet fevers and tender trials,
unwincing
he pinned all
unreviled, to the lapels of giants and rapists
and thieves.
dust and insect bones crone melodious
elegies up all our sleeves,
catacombs echo simpler reprieves.
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[05 Jun 2007|12:17am] |
I like to relax by reading celebrity gossip. I’ve created an intimate psychology of all of them, based on an UC filter that castrates and criti-sizes the leaking written world of web, press and Viacom. I see in their faces, paraded or paparazzi-ed how they’re really feeling. I can read their body language. I see and love that it’s guarded, how hard they try to protect themselves from clarity the thrashing light. They feel like me, unbelonging, scrutinized, short-gened and knob-ankled and all our other gritty knots showing.
I fumbled in the dark on my way home. I was exhausted after a sleepless, drunken night with a perfectly inscrutable gentleman. I had combined things, strung them together and watched for the reactions. Combustion in an engine, the lingering sickly sweet smell of gasoline. Or sometimes a memory: a glass casserole dish filled with water and an ancient box of food colouring and oh the insatiable reflective orifice, our eyes! I dazzled him, I dizzied myself, I was reeling. The problem with artificial is that at first it’s unfamiliar, see. You remember real leaves, the thick, rich luxury of their waxy green, the light catches them brilliantly, a shimmering car on a desert highway, only muted with the wet, damp, gravity-stricken reality of life forms, stolen carbon sinking heavy. But look how we’ve blended the two already: the green apparition car shimmers in the distance, you can almost hear the engine and the wind is hot and you didn’t know you could sweat this hard and fast and Christ a pane of ice, look at that façade of indestructibility. Look at that car body. Look at the engine and the glass in the windows. Look at the foul-smelling interior. See it in junk piles in forty years. See it incinerated, blown in the wind. And look at your polyester leaf on the tropical houseplant next to the water colour (chug chug chug). Now that’s magnificence. Now that’s eternity. Once you embrace that, that’s change and transformation. Once you embrace that—
He walked into my life suddenly. Came up unexpected. I’d come home from the dark gentlemen and he was a boy. When he came, he’d parked further away and I met him on the corner. Now I know what he’d been like then. Nervous, certainly. Fumbling to open doors, trying to remember what gentlemen in movies did (got laid). Annoyed at paying for parking. Sipping warm syrupy pop sticking to a hot plastic holder in his unmuffled car. Delighted by the straightness of my teeth. Walking long, lean, a step too big. No dancing around like a fairy-man yet. No wings, yet. All earthbound, this one. I’d set my sights higher. I sat on the concrete against the brick building and just fumed at the tops of apartments. Positively curdled with electric antagonism toward the city, bending over and pressing down on me, cartoonishly, I dared pursue a storm. He shivered first with his mouth when he was cold. Obvious, boyish, honest yet sideways. A hint of a whistle-in in that uncomfortable, shaking and pointless intake. The falsely quivering lower lip, a vibration. Remark. He also raised his eyebrows when he did it and it made it sound like a shiver of anticipation. We spoke without words and I left them, traitor. I haven’t written, really, since I went deep, rolled over again and again and again till I found myself burrowed or buried, depending on future events and neuron wiry communication towers (lookie, Lou, they make ‘em look like trees- there’s an idea, hey?).
Although I do not write, when I lie in bed I jumble around words and try to make meaningful phrases. They are not words I think of, but words in his room. I’m going to do the whole thing one day and write a book of poetry out of them. A poster of old JD and her.
Taste anger.
Tan lie, trap man.
He has already written his word-bound, root-bound history and I’ve already written mine. We were carbon and we burned up and now we’re effigies, perfect polyurethane (… although I’d rather be polyurethra-ed) copies. It was too meagre to make sense. My body is buzzing or burning or suffocating or seizing.
But my malnourished belly was bloated full and I lay down and eclipsed some moons with my head and understood the relations between everything. Jumble. First the meaning, the real thing. JD. And then the name. A giant leap. The sound. And then the symbol for the sound. And then the letters. The individual alphabet. And then the tinged inflection of our interpretation. Oh fucking communiqués, I thought I had bled you dry. But here, here is the soma, here is my curling dendritic tree here are my blazing axons. Compute. Or in the language of twenty year olds and other beasts, bend over and receive. Split and seize, and push her away gently the second before you pull her toward you tight, so she’ll never know for sure what’s real. Quarks jumble, and she trembles, and maybe it’s false and far removed but shake your brains out hard. I’m telling you. It’s all just a trip that depends on a view, a viewer, you.
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[05 Apr 2007|12:39am] |
Quixotic by Ira Sadoff
Sometimes he's breezy with you, nudging
a sleepy kind of come here and kiss my forehead,
so the trammeling is spotty, like foreign policy.
Your malleable brightness is alluring,
if you're shiny he's blinded by the pants of you.
But we don't like to see him like this, in the daily
decimated world so full of metaphor it makes you hunger
for a piece of flat road going nowhere,
where you can hum the Dies Irae from anybody's requiem,
and not mean anything by it. Maybe
you don't buy it. But what a well the self must be
if you could find it. I mean how our minds fill like buckets.
Or perhaps I mean it's easy to empty,
to say somebody else is empty,
hypocrite powermonger heartless shit for brains.
Where you are then is a mystery. Running into a spiderweb
on your way to bed. Or everyone has a version
of you, but it's not your version.
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| Don't know about that parallel processing. |
[20 Jan 2007|11:25pm] |
The landscape begs to be silenced in shrouds buzzing indignantly at its old bones, branches and abandoned park benches.
Scanning the scenery buzzards catalogue in long lists, anticipate licked alliterations or thundering rising crescendos.
I have a bad prayer planted, burgeoning to be uttered aloud, allah, hallow ghosts shallowly chaliced grave grails.
This is my body. These are my ribs like handprints. Swoop and dive, brush and push Singing Howler lean in those lips.
He responded to her recklessness echoing up and back into the snowfall the next morning with softer bruises in shades of opalescent.
That soft stuff muffles she murmurs into his shoulder the vibrations ripple in waves, comb open some parted lips, summon some snowfall.
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| Keep warm. |
[13 Nov 2006|02:10am] |
I let him rest his tired clean head of hair on my cold shoulder. I behaved beautifully, I was stoned and benevolent stone. Last year I had surprise, desire, fear. This year I have apathy, boredom bad habit, and smugly superior satisfaction. Here there grow a great many things that are unspeakable. Whorified and blind he's got hang-ups unhung and large fumbling hands and no language. He doesn't know no and he don't know hate lowing deep in morning loins. I swore I swear to never utter, muted, whispered, stuttered, so sleep dear unspeakables, fall down like pigeon feathers in snow, be wet, be guttered. Be pushed aside noiselessly like carnage. Be wiped and scoured into the grain, deep in the wood, blood. Nestle down your roots. There is an ice age coming. If you, little ones, are any fine indicator, you will be frozen stiff, corpse copses. Unmoving sprouts, stunted and shrinking. Freudian and frigid. Delicate and pure. Can't talk about you, terrible experience. Can't acknowledge your presence, sweet bad decisions and daily routines. Falling on me flapping on a prayer mat flag.
Slip in the door, under the crack. Stay at the back and watch with your lidless bored eyes. Survey. Here is a glacial lake. Here is a path for an ice scrape. Here is a great brute Zamboni rumbling, circling slow. Here's a bone collar for skin draping, a hanger for a hanging. Tightly around the neck, shawl yourself about your old gnarled shoulders. Tighter it's cold they're calling for. Snugly smugly bare bear. Watch don't make yourself sick watch.
Here am I, slipping in shoes, shoveling snow off the ice, glaring bright lights, narcotic nicotine narcissist nihil nihil future forecasts nihil nihil a liar lies all the while. Can't speak right now. Hot head? Scalp crawling? Limb sprawling? Damp bed? Flusher-ed? Can't speak about it. Watching ceiling, ok? In a rare attack of tact, contact, head on cold shoulder, knees, toes, beetle roast and ice froze. How I coast, coast coast on my ceiling skates coats the insufferable with dashes of plaster ceiling snow and on my shoulder, dote stark schemes and stole-d tropes. I will wear your pulled tan hide with more sorrow than pride keep me warm in my unreflected life keep me blind in my wormless frozen grave.
Skin of my skin, kin for my kin, and he was less skin than scared and he was less scared than kind and I could not pull his head to my chest to comfort him, I could not stir in my respite in your hide. Silence froze the seconds and sex sowed the stole stitched skin to my unmoving bone, be gone, be gone, I'm sorry, be gone.
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| Keep out, keep out, this is not a welcome mat! |
[01 Oct 2006|10:41pm] |
If introspection, good reasoning and an accurate memory are valid inputs for the process of justification, I'm an absolute irrational mess and the outputs are starting to show it: greased up machine-head with dandruff and a scalp that bleeds in libraries and broad daylight.
Future children, there will be change because there is frustration and there will be clarity because there is a sneaking trickling light electrocuting my red-cluster-celled eyelids when I try to sleep in the afternoon. I hate smoking cigarettes, suddenly, I tolerate bobbling heads and bottled blondes and I can't drink anything anymore but a litre of white wine, no more, no less. Naked grapes, penises peacefully protesting sexual suicide in the form of premature placidity and my genital-wound that gapes. Mr. Goldman, is there a proposal on those pursed lips? Is there a ghost of a whisper? Or is that almost-always-openness merely an invitation for infection and insert? An insert like... maybe we'll rescue rebellion in our refusal to ever heal… an infection like… maybe we're fucking killing ourselves… an input like… aligned allusions and excessive alliteration… there is no knowledge here.
Tactlessly tacking tags to trash might organize your goddamned junkyard but it won't keep away the flies. Words don't work. A snapping dog that snarls might and so she considers becoming a bitch that bites in the real world instead of one that slowly slobbers silver saliva in a pseudo one.
Mr. Goldman gives me a choice, here, see? His teeth gleam, his gums rubbed ruby. (I need a bazooka to my head before I'll ever have the spine to control these ruminating ruins, before I'll channel the ceaseless chatter, before I'll chisel away the weasel in me and prop up rigid easel, a body for this spirit, a vessel for this sense of direction, propelling me bleary-eyed and half-blood salivating.)
If I stay and write and try to keep track of things, attempting justification, attempting reliability, tagging this and that as such and sorting through the genetics, checking history and sources, impaled and empowered by a memory that falters and conquers at regular intervals I'll still run the risk of having justified beliefs that are false. (Reliable's inescapable shadow is fallible and oh, what a fall!) So I snarl them out cautiously and hope that my spit will make them stick the test of tell-tale time.
And if I go out there, as I've tried, if I live in the now and abandon the pen and its ego and I track the truth intrinsically, categorically, Cartesian-like, time-slicing the current into bits of currency I'll run the risk of having truth and never even fucking believing in it. That's how the world feels now without these letters trailing behind me, like idols towering over me, it feels like I'd find all of this meaningful if I could only remember a reason to justify. If I could only work out how the dollar got its value as it burns a hole in my palm. But it's hard to remember and be instinctive when you're scared and faced with the whole truth in an instant for your absorption, O boneless sponge. Justify becomes just defy and you try to steel your spine and brace your brain and keep your upper lip stiff and you bite and bruise your way out and fumble for an off switch in a room that's blinded you with light and you miss the point.
So you go to bed and there are flitting fairy lights repelling gentle sleep. Twenty minutes and a self-induced orgasm later, it's five in the afternoon and you're dreaming of a lapdog with a bulldog face that's trying to rip out your throat.
( PS )
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[07 May 2006|03:12pm] |
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I walked from Queen West and Dovercourt to Bay and St. Joseph. Perspective is a funny thing. Hidden in trickling trellis, tree lined streets, a crumbling comic book store: a retrospective about a Montreal cartoonist cultivating a history of chauvinism, preserving it through noise: the way its tin roofs rattle me, the way its loose screws tinily tremor, in-‘er ears. A boarded up building with junk glued to the sign. Apologies: thanks for your years of support but the shop has closed due to retirement. I want to get to know every corner of the world. I want to feel it the way I used to want to feel people by putting my fingers in the inside of their mouth, scratching their roofs and itchy teeth. I want a protégé again: followed through gardens and between corn stalks by my smooth walking, shit-talking funny curly follower whose glance is the only thing creating and separating this word and that. I don’t like to admit it, but I need that, the glance. O fascination: women may have constructed themselves in light of the male glance, pretty pretenses and lisping affectations, powder and snow white arms. I’ve constructed my whole world for you, watcher. It isn’t about how I looked when I reached on the coffee table: it was about why I did it, the way I moved, the inner suggestion of something latent, boiling up and spilling over in that mechanical movement. In short, I want to give you a way, show you logotherapy. Woman’s guide to meaning. If we rip out their eyes or yours and there’s no more spying. We’re free to kiss our girlfriends and spit on our dead adoring fathers photographs. We’re free to wear loose skirts and squat in the dark. I’d finally be free to write instead of just distract you with apostrophe. O, meaning. O, city. O, o, o, eros. Throwing bricks in a glass house. Huffing and puffing but you can’t ever blow rubble down. I’d have blessed a horizontal line on top of the vertical clear blue. A real cross with a real promise of ruin. It’d have been everything I’ve ever craved when I look at retrospectives and wrecks, when I talk about how I can’t get attached. Creation without you ‘cause I’d have been the girl who got knocked up and finally ignored (nothing like this potential invisibility where I flicker in and out of your tunnel vision). I’d live in Lyon with Louisa nursing a lion-child. I'd lie down in the dust of boarded up shops, defy our little premature tombs: where we lay at night. I think that's the purpose of sex. A big, joyous, brainless fuck you to my death and yours.
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