"But still, what I want to talk about is the rasp of moments that curl my hands. Don't look at me like you don't know, you feel it too. It's the press of your own history, it tightens your fingers together like wet knots.
[...]
But it comes from all the things that collect around you, too, in a table you shared, the notes you keep. The decor you prop about your house. A shirt with a button missing from being pulled open too quickly. It can live on in the whole of a city, it can be so large. There are things everywhere, but it can come from the smallest of them, too. That's what I'm really talking about. Once a thing has been shared, it does not become merely yours, not ever. Shirts and tables. Everything participates in the flowing accumulation of who you are, and nothing ebbs. All of it can be contained in a dish, you know. This dish, and you can break it, you can break it, break it
like this,
and this one too,
and this one,
and this one. You can break them all, okay, alright, but you can't get rid of anything, no matter how much you try to spit it out. This is such a fury, and isn't it funny how you can stand and watch yourself and your tight fists lose it just trying to unleash everything else. But still it all stays so close, and because of that it heightens, frenzied. You can't kick off who you have been. No matter the gloss you spread, who you have been with someone, it is there, in the sheets of your bed, on your walked streets, the films you have watched. It's in your outlook. No matter what, it spirals in and about.
[...]
Yes, that, maybe it is why people throw things away. Sweaters and glittering collections, pictures, letters. But doesn't that ignore the actual moments and the way they persist, the one right now and those ones coming? There is no such thing as forgetting. Not when you try to build your forgetting with such purpose. You can get rid of things, or you can break them, but there will always be your moments. They are always seeping, no matter the wish to refresh.
[...]
It does. It does. But when you learn enough, you learn you can allow it to meet you, because anyway it is coming at you, it's spinning about you, dust kicked up at every step. That's what's in the approach of a moment, you know, the steel of its weight and feel. It's always there, and what it requests--and what I think people recede from--is to allow it, to take it and turn it to warmth. When the moments live in you, you can live with them, and each could be a point of celebration, you know? No thing as forgetting, but there is a choice in the way a moment is recalled. When you have scars, you can think to when they came, or you can brush them over or deride them for what you feel to be a defect. But I love scars, the little ones on hands or as a fleck near someone's eye. They punctuate your skin, they're what give you your body. That's what we can talk about, the way it could be good. Someone said once that the past blooms because our emotions regarding a moment don't arrive until the moment has gone, or like that anyway. And, I think, with the reach of each moment into every other, they bloom and bloom again to become more and more real. Those moments, they are your deepest wealth, and they stay on."
Saturday, October 13, 2012
Sunday, September 30, 2012
Scratch on walls somewhere.
That was the summer of rage. Months of swirling inconclusiveness spent dizzy and veering and hushed. It was a swell of days into which my body pushed. Rage, not as a buckling state of frantic and wild living, but leaping into bewilderment and its turns, keeping a lean against its hold. The delirious shout down during a long dive to pools that brim with the surprise of memory and the known folds of future. Draw it as a knot where rage is an activity that courses along the bends, always pushing, always pulling.
The long mess of those days were sketched as a heaving affirmation, one that would writhe within the cracks that cover oneself, and would make an account of living only as a series of affairs that seek to edge past a shadow. And that was a summer spent alone, sometimes, and sometimes not alone. I look now at the paint left by some voices here in this house, rings on my tables and ghost flecks on my couch. And a slow growing water stain on the ceiling in the corner of a room. These are the strands left to pick out now and tuck into a coming autumn. Some strange feet on my floors, steps that pressed sometimes once, sometimes enough to make paths that might still be soon swept over. All of these a rage in its moving parts. Phrased into the mold of skin and the tic of hands dragging through new and lengthening hair.
Rage is always with--it is always with whatever is its lack. It is a relation, and in spite of itself, in its burst and reach for reassurance, it is always only kept in relation. Its reach is a drag through vapor. It is where everything is a remains of possibility. Nothing else but the fleet of its moment, not fear nor regret, only the pine of its activity. Existence. And those were months of wooded quiet.
That was a summer which turned out a joyful rage and all its costs of aches in the morning and slow sips of recovery. Rage does not make you strange to yourself, I think, but it is yourself finding what is already there and strange within. It is a foamy realization and fulfillment of absence. You can clench its taste on your back teeth. And at its end, when the summer calms into the cool, it lets loose the swell. This summer I made kinds of music in hot rooms, drove past the night and drank into the sunrise, wrote passages in the breeze of a porch. I held a familiar fur, and I thought and threw. That was the summer, one which wanted nothing, except, and what did it get, but.
The long mess of those days were sketched as a heaving affirmation, one that would writhe within the cracks that cover oneself, and would make an account of living only as a series of affairs that seek to edge past a shadow. And that was a summer spent alone, sometimes, and sometimes not alone. I look now at the paint left by some voices here in this house, rings on my tables and ghost flecks on my couch. And a slow growing water stain on the ceiling in the corner of a room. These are the strands left to pick out now and tuck into a coming autumn. Some strange feet on my floors, steps that pressed sometimes once, sometimes enough to make paths that might still be soon swept over. All of these a rage in its moving parts. Phrased into the mold of skin and the tic of hands dragging through new and lengthening hair.
Rage is always with--it is always with whatever is its lack. It is a relation, and in spite of itself, in its burst and reach for reassurance, it is always only kept in relation. Its reach is a drag through vapor. It is where everything is a remains of possibility. Nothing else but the fleet of its moment, not fear nor regret, only the pine of its activity. Existence. And those were months of wooded quiet.
That was a summer which turned out a joyful rage and all its costs of aches in the morning and slow sips of recovery. Rage does not make you strange to yourself, I think, but it is yourself finding what is already there and strange within. It is a foamy realization and fulfillment of absence. You can clench its taste on your back teeth. And at its end, when the summer calms into the cool, it lets loose the swell. This summer I made kinds of music in hot rooms, drove past the night and drank into the sunrise, wrote passages in the breeze of a porch. I held a familiar fur, and I thought and threw. That was the summer, one which wanted nothing, except, and what did it get, but.
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
Sunday, August 19, 2012
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Loose vegetation, pockets of stones.
Music in the park the other day, and when I was walking through a crowd of vendors I ran into someone I know. She introduced me to her twins, who each offered to slap my hand. And almost the very first thing they did was to share some of their watermelon slushie drinks. This is something which does not cease, it keeps in my thoughts.
I am unsure of the contours of sharing. This past weekend, and for the third time, some thieves climbed inside my car. My wallet was taken, along with the change in the console which all must have added up to twelve dollars. I try towards a political outlook that does not mind this, except for the task of replacing all my cards which would be of no use to anyone but me. When I've lost a winter hat or mittens, I consider it fine that someone who needs that thing will be able to make use of it. But I also had a fat old iPod that was taken, one that I've had for seven, maybe eight years. It's something I would use every day, a thing I have carried across continents and through my most exhaustive growths and losses and changes of circumstance. I have little worry about money, about accumulating belongings and the curious security that some deep furniture gives. Thievery is only a problem because of extra-material investments that people give to the objects that surround them, both in their want to have and their want to keep. But I would not have given away a thing that I carried in my pockets for so many years, and I wonder if that shapes me a thief. There is a song on that iPod with the lyrics "Things are looking up," which are loud and burst with the song's music. I have never known what the song is called. Someone I have known would shout its lyrics out loudly while we roamed about in their parents' van, and would tell me that they were only doing so for me. I knew, and said that I know, and I know, and I wonder now if I am a thief, not for taking but for wanting to keep.
I could not share what is behind that. It is something beyond, and suddenly an object that, when so invested, turns and shines as an idea. Now, these two new people shared with me their drink, they shared what they had to give, and maybe here that's all there is.
I am unsure of the contours of sharing. This past weekend, and for the third time, some thieves climbed inside my car. My wallet was taken, along with the change in the console which all must have added up to twelve dollars. I try towards a political outlook that does not mind this, except for the task of replacing all my cards which would be of no use to anyone but me. When I've lost a winter hat or mittens, I consider it fine that someone who needs that thing will be able to make use of it. But I also had a fat old iPod that was taken, one that I've had for seven, maybe eight years. It's something I would use every day, a thing I have carried across continents and through my most exhaustive growths and losses and changes of circumstance. I have little worry about money, about accumulating belongings and the curious security that some deep furniture gives. Thievery is only a problem because of extra-material investments that people give to the objects that surround them, both in their want to have and their want to keep. But I would not have given away a thing that I carried in my pockets for so many years, and I wonder if that shapes me a thief. There is a song on that iPod with the lyrics "Things are looking up," which are loud and burst with the song's music. I have never known what the song is called. Someone I have known would shout its lyrics out loudly while we roamed about in their parents' van, and would tell me that they were only doing so for me. I knew, and said that I know, and I know, and I wonder now if I am a thief, not for taking but for wanting to keep.
I could not share what is behind that. It is something beyond, and suddenly an object that, when so invested, turns and shines as an idea. Now, these two new people shared with me their drink, they shared what they had to give, and maybe here that's all there is.
Saturday, July 21, 2012
Not in the features.
"This afternoon some woman, kind of old, was flirting with me. While she was talking, I was thinking, older women just don't seem to sweat the way that I do. We were standing in the middle of the sun, right where its rays point, and I was thinking, and I found myself with some kind of resolve about women like her, women who are a generation, two generations, beyond mine. I thought, all those young women out there, walking around in the summer, they don't deserve admiration the way that this woman does right here. Young women, they get leers that are violent, they get systemically pressed upon by young men, by all men, and they do not deserve that. But in a way they also do not deserve admiration for beauty simply because they are young, in the same sense of systemic violence, because sometimes a desire which simply admires also runs parallel to violent desires. Whatever honest admiration is, it is so often directed towards the same typifications that are directed towards those who have to endure the absurd forms of violence that are cast. And women like this one here who was talking with me, she is beautiful in a way that is excluded from those directions, you know. And it has nothing to do with who she is. But I know that even the way that I'm thinking about it right now doesn't reach the complexities, and is probably wrong and makes more of a mess, but I try and work through that. And I thought, maybe those small looks that one might give, getting off the bus or wandering through produce at the store, or being introduced to someone outside a library, those looks met between two people where one just thinks in a grocery store, bursting in an instant with their brains that you are a beautiful human being, and that for a second, this one second where for the only time in my life I see who you are, I don't care about the price of these avocados or anything, those looks should all go to the women who stopped getting them decades ago. And when I am waiting at the crosswalk next to an older woman who wants to cut her hair or do her god damn nails, or who stands in a way that knows her very own sexuality, I will want her to know that yes, she is beautiful, and let any structural definitions of beauty go to hell. I can't stand how so many movies are about youthful love, or about the taboo of relationships between characters with large gaps between their ages. This woman called herself an empty nester, and that's why she had two pets now, to feel less like one. And she was just beautiful in ways that the world does not let the word to be defined. It drives me crazy. Anyway, she told me that I looked like Robert Redford in one of his old movies, and I didn't even know what to say, I said probably I wouldn't be able to handle a gun in the same way that he is in those old ones, and it made me just want to tell her that yes, in the world, and even despite it, she is incredible."
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
High enough to lose.
And there is no promise to where wisdom comes from.
My next door neighbour is one of those thousands of people who walk about this city without a shirt. He works out. He is in high school, and I can not remember what his name is, though it is too late to ask again. But I do not think that he remembers mine either, because whenever he sees me he calls me "bro." Hey, what's up, bro. What's going on. Hey man, I say.The other afternoon he saw me leave my house on my bicycle to buy beers, and then saw how messy I was when I returned home. The store is three or four blocks away. Maybe I don't think that people should be walking along the sidewalk without a shirt, but maybe I realize that if anyone is going to do so, it should be someone like him and not me.
What he seems to think of me is that I must be some smart person because I am always reading and writing on my front porch, sitting in the eye of a stormy spread of papers surrounding me. When inside, though, I am making snacks and watching films. What he does see, perhaps he connects it with a kind of wisdom I must have to share with him about the future. He asks me what I write about. I tell him that I write about questions, inked to understand how I have come to be who I am, to learn about decisions and the mix of personal and political histories and why anyone ever does anything. I tell him that I am writing things for school that are quietly about these things of my own, though for the sake of academics they are dressed in a way that is broadened into the political roles that literature has in history. He asks what my investments are in thinking so hard through everything, and tells me that he could never do that, to spend so much time with books and pens.
He is graduating from high school, and is taking time away to figure out what he wants to do. He wants to know whether this is the right decision, or if he should be going to college like most others he knows will be doing. I tell him that sometimes it can be fine to wait for something you want. Or if you are unsure whether you want it, or whether it is an unconditional desire, find the side to which you are pulled. Other things you want may not stay, but your want may stay with them. And I stop, I take my drink, and I say, well like, anyway, the way they structure school makes it to be important only if you know what you want from it. If you are in school and do not know why, then it may be best to devote some time to other things, or to figuring out why college would be what you want. He listens yet. I tell him that some time away might be very good, to wait, to let some wish scratch up an ache. You can work and make plans, but then if you know what you want then you have to do it. He is young, and maybe these are important things for a person to hear, but I am unsure whether I know how to say them in a way I believe. I tell him the things he probably should hear, things that I am not always able to mean, at least in the sense that they should be a sprout from my own experience. But I tell him, and he receives it like a kind of pearl, impregnable. And I am thinking to myself how all the things I say have a doubled meaning.
He talks to me, and I tell him these things. He leaves, and when I go back into my house I forget it all.
My next door neighbour is one of those thousands of people who walk about this city without a shirt. He works out. He is in high school, and I can not remember what his name is, though it is too late to ask again. But I do not think that he remembers mine either, because whenever he sees me he calls me "bro." Hey, what's up, bro. What's going on. Hey man, I say.The other afternoon he saw me leave my house on my bicycle to buy beers, and then saw how messy I was when I returned home. The store is three or four blocks away. Maybe I don't think that people should be walking along the sidewalk without a shirt, but maybe I realize that if anyone is going to do so, it should be someone like him and not me.
What he seems to think of me is that I must be some smart person because I am always reading and writing on my front porch, sitting in the eye of a stormy spread of papers surrounding me. When inside, though, I am making snacks and watching films. What he does see, perhaps he connects it with a kind of wisdom I must have to share with him about the future. He asks me what I write about. I tell him that I write about questions, inked to understand how I have come to be who I am, to learn about decisions and the mix of personal and political histories and why anyone ever does anything. I tell him that I am writing things for school that are quietly about these things of my own, though for the sake of academics they are dressed in a way that is broadened into the political roles that literature has in history. He asks what my investments are in thinking so hard through everything, and tells me that he could never do that, to spend so much time with books and pens.
He is graduating from high school, and is taking time away to figure out what he wants to do. He wants to know whether this is the right decision, or if he should be going to college like most others he knows will be doing. I tell him that sometimes it can be fine to wait for something you want. Or if you are unsure whether you want it, or whether it is an unconditional desire, find the side to which you are pulled. Other things you want may not stay, but your want may stay with them. And I stop, I take my drink, and I say, well like, anyway, the way they structure school makes it to be important only if you know what you want from it. If you are in school and do not know why, then it may be best to devote some time to other things, or to figuring out why college would be what you want. He listens yet. I tell him that some time away might be very good, to wait, to let some wish scratch up an ache. You can work and make plans, but then if you know what you want then you have to do it. He is young, and maybe these are important things for a person to hear, but I am unsure whether I know how to say them in a way I believe. I tell him the things he probably should hear, things that I am not always able to mean, at least in the sense that they should be a sprout from my own experience. But I tell him, and he receives it like a kind of pearl, impregnable. And I am thinking to myself how all the things I say have a doubled meaning.
He talks to me, and I tell him these things. He leaves, and when I go back into my house I forget it all.
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