| grave architecture |
[Apr 18 2009 / 12:23pm] |
hadn't the heart to delete this address, so here i am some time later picking at the scraps of things. It's a sunny day and I am feeling idle. I refuse to do my essay. Typing in this box i get a sense of what i did miss, the sensation of mindless exposition, rattling off neat little parcels of words into space..... I think we change from year to year, i feel i change every day. but i still write in a dreadfully elliptical manner, and i still indulge in maudlin reveries--
in a month and a half i am leaving university. farewell the hallowed world of languor and transparency. paper cuts and coffee-stains on magazines. library receipts with someone else's name. student parties clutching plastic cups and murmuring niceties. a small world sized world. retrospective emotion. i hate the thought of regret, but what i'm often seized by is the wonder of what-if. and a wonder at the distance that accrues between people or the ideas you'd hold of people. inspecifics...and in a year from now if i don't have a job lined up i am coming home, humid, soft, safe and inimitable atlas of my childhood and sleepy adolescence. it's scary to think i'll be considered i am a grown up, twenty two. and of course when i was younger (14,15) i had these expectations of what adults would think like and how sure they would be. i read somewhere we're not hardwired to emotionally anticipate- it's just not in our brains to be able to grasp how we'll feel in the future. i like that, it's exciting.
alright i have to finish this essay or it will be late.
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| book end |
[Apr 29 2008 / 9:10pm] |
I won't be updating here anymore, unless one day years later I decide to. It represents a period of life I wouldn't like to erase but doesn't feel altogether relevant. As words accumulate they get dense with lack of meaning and i find it hard to maintain any clarity; looking back here embarasses me a little bit, a kind of deliberate earnestness I was trying to keep up with but "deliberate earnestness" is an oxymoron.
I'll be at the short fiction blog
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| the moon and antarctica |
[Mar 16 2008 / 2:56pm] |
Yesterday I watched a film called Mister Lonely in a near-empty cinema. I was pretty excited to see it, but I didn't like it very much though it had some lovely moments.
In one scene a nun falls out of a helicopter as she was frantically trying to drop food over parched villages. She fell slowly and her habit billowed outward, blue against refracted blue, the unreliably soft nimbus. She put her hands together in serene prayer, and a few people in the audience laughed, including myself. What could save you, hundreds of feet up in the air, without a parachute, with only your brittle bones, your absurd limbs, your hands pressed together? Watching a small human body struggle through the thankless canopy of sky was beautiful and very absurd. I tried to think of what it would feel like. She whispered to God. She free-fell with a splat onto a field of tall, dried grass. And then she got up in a stagger, she staggered, and then she staggered out of the frame.
Sometime invisibly along I had begun to surrender my propensity for faith, for miracles. It's not some irredeemable hopelessness I'm subsumed by, more like a bleeding-out, the way watercolour spreads across a page, lingering into a gradual, graceful blur. Or the way you put out dry ice and the vapour escapes, and it looks noncommitally mystical, at the same time entirely unremarkable. I guess this is what they mean by Losing Steam.
Yesterday we went to Foyle's, which is this beautiful large bookstore and I fell in love, because I am shallow, with all the intoxicating covers, the arresting images and the delicious blurbs, a digestible world in 400 pages. I got 3 novels, one of them a short story compilation, and right now I feel satisfied. On my better days (this is one of them...and I realise I never write, on better days), I realise it's all about making do, and then when I fall into a rut I forget this perspective, vice versa...I suppose emotion is entirely solipsistic, and the only way to feel from two minds is if you were two-headed, like that mutant in that episode of the X Files. To lure him out Mulder and Scully place a peanut butter sandwich on a tree-stump. He appears, then scurries off at the sound of an authorative "Freeze! FBI!"...because nobody fires a shot so quickly.
When the agents get to the tree stump there is the sandwich, with two bites at a perpendicular corner. And I suppose, a mutant inbred with two mouths panting and running away, scared and dissatisfied. If life were as simple as a monster movie, we'd all either be the lone survivor [lucky you], the slut, the beefcake, the cynic (first to go), the nerd, or the funny guy. One day i want to watch a movie about the daily lives of all these monsters, these one-armed homicidal maniacs, these ghosts, these inbred mutants, a narrative about one of them just chilling out, just enjoying their down-time. Putting aside chainsaws and cleavers and scary apparatus, just settling down to a book or in front of the tv with a peanut butter sandwich, having some thoughts. All thoughts, no knives.
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| mistaking the sea for green fields |
[Feb 16 2008 / 6:15pm] |
Ashley Capps
Ophelia, when she died,
lay in the water like the river's bride, all pale
and stark and beautiful against the somber rocks,
her hair an endless golden ceremony.
She made the water sing for her; it flowed
over her folded arms.
Not so my father's sister Karen,
swollen in a day-old tub of water
when they found her,
needle tucked into the fold of her arm,
her last thing; a wing.
So everything went as nameless as the men
who lifted her naked from the tub,
or those who rolled her
into the mouth of the furnace,
which is what you get
when you don't get a service,
when your mother's years of grief turn
last to rage: I won't pay for it.
Leave me out of this.
And even though they finally said
it wasn't suicide, a mistake-
no one knew what to do
with all of that anger,
or in the end how not to blame her.
Even now, in her unmarked container.
*
People once believed a deeper reason, some dark secret
motivation to the way the lemmings threw themselves
en masse into the sea. Were they weary
of their lives, could they, too, despair?
Or like those second-vessel swine
when Jesus exorcised two babbling men of their demons,
driving the demons through a pack of bewildered hogs--
the way they plunged?
The truth we know now: they leave when food is scarce,
when they've grown too many;
believe the roads they follow
lead to new meadows, a place to start over.
I think of Karen, feeding
and feeding her veins, how it is possible
she saw us all suddenly there-- miraculous
and festive on some bright and other shore,
like the life she had been swimming toward
all along, trying to get right.
Like those sailors long ago,
that tropical disease, calenture-
when, far from everything they knew,
men grew sometimes delirious
and mistook the waving sea for green fields.
Rejoicing, they leapt overboard,
and so were lost forever,
even though they thought it was real, though
they thought they were going home.
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| post-war |
[Feb 13 2008 / 1:20am] |
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At what point do we realize, sharply, the sense of disconnect, the turning-away, the tender surrender to unfamiliarity, to plain gravity, like a milk-tooth. I kept some milk teeth in a little jewelry box but looking at them now it’s grotesque and gory, horror-movie fodder, and vaguely it hurts like a phantom limb, to see a part of me discarded, forever sequestered to a closed-in eternity. Better the casual anonymity of garbage, the glamour and longing of the lost thing. Maybe it’s inevitable. That we lose people the same way we lose teeth, receipts, cards. And isn’t it all relative. The same way significance is acquired, it could as easily be invalidated. Cold thing falling irretrievable. Like a comet, like a comma out of your mouth.
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