Tabula rara

Red Tide

2009-07-10T23:48:00.000-07:00

I remember being terrified of Puget Sound at red tide. I’d thought it had been filled by night with headless bodies and the blood of animals. Was it true that the bottom of my rowboat named Heather, but missing the R, would turn pink at launch?

But the discussion I had a few days ago of a year that I could name with nothing but youth has come to the corner to meet the test of my I, lines undone, a cornea in lash. We had asked on the phone, and with another in those woods, in June, of nothing less than our own mortality. And we said, holding hands and knowing that we wished we weren’t afraid to cry,

Goodbye, you, youth. I loved you from the first time I really wondered about truth, and I hope to see you in the afternoon paragraph, in the old note found, in a talk that may never ever happen. Under your cap. Music played, but under dust. In the memory of the piece that went out when my eye came aligned. Know my last secrets, soon, and we'll say, grown.

2009-03-23T05:15:00.000-07:00

Skins.

Riding a train at night in this part of the country takes me to many places. Looking out those dingy Amtrak windows, the posts, wooly dark trees, even the fluorescent lights and old signs at suburban stops look at though they have just been taken out of packages. Then they rub together, those new old things, like two ribs of a sweater, or a dirty secret on the edge of a mostly true truth. Even money’s smell, or the industrial zones in those moments have an indescribable attraction.

I never told my mother that in the summer of 2000, I arrived very late each Sunday night in the big City. I walked through a long, white-tiled empty tunnel to get to my subway line, stumbling over bags of groceries bought in the much cheaper Philadelphia super markets. Sometimes in the middle of that tunnel, when I was afraid that I was not actually alone, I would say something out-loud, as though to reassure myself that my body and brain were still safe. These train trips were always about skin, shedding it, stretching it, finding new crevices and old white scars. I recall the disruptive clarity that each of those trips brought and that the train on the Eastern Seaboard still brings. Each time I find myself covered in details, all wrapped beautifully, but sharp, like pin pricks.

2009-03-18T23:52:00.000-07:00

Big man on campus.

Last spring I imagined a scenario in which a professor, 40 something and attractive, entered a lecture hall and wrote a series of words on a blackboard. His poor students had expected some sort of normal exam, with questions that at least remotely pointed towards the course material. But they saw, with a mixture of shame and glee, that they were to define four of the more elusive philosophical terms of the last centuries and a dirty name for female genitalia. So far this year, I have seen nothing of the sort. Instead, encounters that might appear similar, at least as I am able to remember them, have proven to assert their inexplicability on every occasion. It goes to show that any romantic quality that I have attached to the ideas of uniqueness and constantly being able to surprise myself is frequently put to the test.

It is these little events that make the University both awesome and awful. Sometimes there is the impression of talking to a bear having recently come out of his hibernation, albeit a productive one, whose beautiful Castilian becomes emissions of raw whar raw, midair, and mid-conversation, in the head of the conquered opponent. Other times, short girls with long hair proclaim their eminent genius, after having gotten some bad news on some writing. Then there are afternoons of little exchanges of intuitions and revelations always trying to be done again, only to show themselves incapable of happening no place but in another place.

And then there is the Big Man on Campus. I hope she is the sneaker, the clandestine hooded men I always thought we were, the notebook scribblers, the knight prowler, smelling of old ink, letters, and their bunch of flowers. Her secret plotter, always climbing through the high back door.

2009-02-03T00:20:00.000-08:00

Its February.

Every time I walk into my classroom this semester, the board is filled with math equations. Today, as I hollowed out a place among numbers for my definitions and reading questions, I wanted to cry. I thought of the image of a dead child being used as a doll by orphaned children in a story I was about to reduce to sound bites, in all, rather unforunately, a good prelude to a discussion that would end in my public humiliation while the students asked me to define, in rapid succession, ontological, Sehnsucht, and devorar.

2009-01-12T22:01:00.000-08:00

Old souls

A few days ago running, I found myself tripping over my own feet and the curb trying to avoid some young skateboarders. The kids witnessed my fall, thinking, I knew, but only 5 minutes later, look at that lady on the ground!

I am not a girl anymore and am probably older than most of their teachers, but just then I forgot. I have always felt when falling from bicycles, horses, monkey bars, bleachers, Uhaul trucks, or on top of fences, that midair I am lifted up by either my grandmother Mimi or God. One of them makes me fall just so such that I receive little lasting harm, only some memento of that moment of sharp surprise that after gives me recollections, previously unbeknownst to me, and a different sense of self. Rare events, they are.

My grandmother and I used to talk about being psychic. We went to a real one once, if there is such a thing, and did several tarot readings. We believed in intuition and all that communication that goes on without talking.

2009-01-02T00:17:00.000-08:00

New Year

The day after Christmas, I stared into the touchpad of a microwave wondering, en route to pressing some of its buttons, where I was. It is these moments when the mind takes off into an urgent and nervous questioning from a blank slate that make me want to say my name aloud.

It is the New Year, but there is not much to review. Confession and love spill out in buckets, falls of months of a collected slow-drip of thinking, seeing, and making up. It is then that now, perhaps because I am older, or just more vulnerable, that the whole hand is revealed, inviting not only a divulgence of all past strategies, but a look at their result and an affirmation that in the end, there was never any actress. Those tell-all moments happen to be intensely private. There is some sort of self-confession that happens first. We, meaning, us ourselves, are the first and last rival.

The literary references have come undone. Hiding seems cheap, although I wish it didn’t, or maybe I am just not good at it. When I put on mascara today, I sucessfully went through a number of faces of friends and family as though in an album perfectly arranged. I thought of some on horseback, others without bodies at all, everything familiar, yet unexpected. Countless shivers, tears there were. Oh sentiment, I've got you.

2008-12-03T22:33:00.000-08:00

“Its all quiet when you’re six feet under.”
—Dad, for generations.

I finish my weights in the women’s gym. While I generally try to stay out of there because it is not very motivating, for some minutes, I accept its poor light and spirit because I haven’t yet been brave enough to bench press among the grunting boys.

A woman was working with her gentle personal trainer. The coach told her, although the client didn’t look too spent, that she could “stop at any time for a rest.” I lifted my bench bar laughing obnoxiously, thinking of me and my parents reeling in the 90’s, and them still today, under workouts of E.V., Eastern European, American, but all his very own motherland. It is impossible not to comment and take note of such manifestations of both remarkable appeal and strangeness, those workouts, like the number of Spanish women running in Converse sneakers in Retiro Park, are for the ages.

One day I went to school and my literature teacher who lived next door told me that she saw us running around our backyard lifting stones and sparring. Usually we did this in the gym at my school, but it must have been closed that day, leaving no choice except “Bulgarian Rock Workout” either in the backyard, or on the soccer field, which was actually worse, since there we had to pull the goals around the field.

There was our then carpe diem, shouted in all its variant forms. No rest for the worried, wanting, always, to build it harder. Thank goodness we had an excellent teacher to indulge us. It is no wonder why we love him so much.

2008-11-25T23:46:00.000-08:00

See you later, at the Kingdom.

At the end of summer, a friend recommended a song to me that I resisted liking for quite some time, for reasons that are too confused and personal to explain. She gave it to me the day before or after we found ourselves weaving, grimly drunk, down my street in search of a quesadilla.

These days, I have found myself up on a soapbox much more often, feeling old, offering advice to those a few years younger, like, “Mean is always better than pathetic!,” and “At least we are not ugly!,” and “You know, _____, we are going to do this!, and “Start your argument by finding out why someone else is an idiot!.” And the worst, well, they seem to take it seriously. Worse than that, I think I am serious.

“Because the keys to the kingdom got locked inside the kingdom, and the angels fly around in there, but we can’t see them,” (Josh Ritter, Girl in the War. The Animal Years) there is a line I could write with my fallen powder soap, the kind my mom used growing up and the kind I have on my laundry shelf, ever losing its blue sparkles, turning whiter thinking of having to spend its last minute in the bottom of my ugly machine.

The problem, I say, is that I cannot tell the ideas I know are there or would be there in 10 years, because they are locked in a ruddy, weeping kingdom. And what’s really the worst, is that I know that I can slip under the door, but won’t let myself fit for fear that when I enter, everything I thought I would someday know about perception, and pieces, imaginary wholes, and transcription, would be fearful and emphemeral, knowing nothing.

2008-11-03T01:17:00.000-08:00

Dork, really.

These past couple years in winter, I have taken to dressing in combinations of black and brown and blue, with belts, tucked in shirts, and tight vinyl jackets. I have a pair of boots that somebody described, with what seems like an uncanny precision, as Eastern European cowboy boots. I don’t wear these outfits out of the country, for fear that I will look like a foreigner, trading them instead for high heels, skirts, and a black briefcase that make me feel like a miniature dinosaur named Paloma M. Bamford.

In June I decided to begin taking a fashionable language that will also benefit me professionally should I ever learn it. I go into the city, in my brown and black, pretending I belong to the urban tribes, toting a fancy dictionary I cannot really use in a LL Bean inspired boatbag that says neurotic. It even has holes and its dirty to the point of disgusting, with neon green paint on the outside and coffee and ink spilled inside. It never gets clean, even if I wash it on hot. Really, how ironic and fashionable, with my super long hair that is better darker, and my German pencils that I stole from a Spanish library. I produce jokes with an elaborate orchestration that I rehearse in the shower. I remove the ring on my right hand, placing it on the table in a ritual of sticky affectation, as though it were an impediment to writing. I will never join Facebook.

I tell somebody I love I could never live in Seattle because the weather is terrible, the people move and drive too slowly, and my brother says there are mainly dorks living there. It is probably all true, really. But I sit here late at night, trying to pull it together, and I find myself stuck, without wanting to admit it, to the Washington State Evergreens. The singer of my favorite band is 32, born in 76. He went to a big rural high school where I went as somebody’s prom date in 1996. No matter what I do or read, the words of his songs account for a great part of my experience, or at least one hiding in the pocket of my dirty neurotic bag. Some are incredibly sad, about guys who didn’t know where they went, people with shoes attached to a sinking ground, other people on the backs of motorcycles, trying, unsuccessfully, to fly away, and reflections on accident, those are the worst. 9 years of university education and I find myself lost in the lyrics of an indie rockstar, not just tonight, but for the last several years.
Black, brown, and blue, but with trees and the first home allover.

2008-10-27T22:21:00.000-07:00

Directions

The other week, I sat with two friends in a Berkeley apartment. And by the time it was over, the two visitors had left belongings that for serveral days, I pretended were not meant to be.

A shiny patent leather pencil case, black and red, silver inside, filled with my favorite writing implements that I use mostly on Thursdays. They draw characters, making shapes that my ear tells me it hears from dictation exercises. A word could mean bitch or barnacle, I can't be sure.

He left 2 chapters of his dissertation, an envelope of letters, all staples and tacks. There are tables and parts that should just be omitted. Cut the crap, he said. We should burn its pages.

The host said she feels invisible. The last English muffin pizza is our corner of the University. The stain on the couch five minutes after is a sign that it has finally folded into its own plate. I wanted to say that I think of us as sweaty mustangs without saddle marks and shoes, but we are literally fieldless and I cannot smell the friendly caller.

I bought that pencil case in early September. Only when I open it, do I see myself strutting up Bancroft Ave last fall, imagining with every step things that are only remembered once. I play Feist I feel it all too loudly on the Ipod. I sing in a loud and confident voice. In a tight green tanktop, I have 50 pastures and there are 5000 more coming tomorrow. I still have the boots.

2008-10-12T22:41:00.000-07:00

Crestomatía.

But Leona knew that such elegant entertainment entitled the host to something more than a guest who was merely there to be gaped at, even when he asked for nothing more; so she rose to her feet as soon as she was able and serenely broke into full-throated song. Her friend regarded such an evening as a ripped-out page, alive with all sorts of suggestions and ideas but mummified, like everything torn from its context, full of the tyranny of that eternally fixed stance that accounts for the uncanny fascination of tableaux vivants, as though life had suddenly been given a sleeping pill and was now standing there stiff, full of inner meaning, sharply outlined, and yet, in sum, making absolutely no sense at all.
Musil, Robert. The Man Without Qualities. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1995.

I had been intending to comment this passage from a translation of Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities, but wasn't able to say most of the reasons why. It surely had to do with fragments, but I discovered, finally, that it also had to do with friends and forgetting.

Do you know that when you see someone you know to have missed and you approach them, that a big, unintentional smile appears? He caught myself smiling, but sad, as he got up from an iron chair wobbling on the sidewalk. 2 old books in hand.
For him and him, Crestomatía, they said.

When Ulrich regards the encounters with Leona as ripped-out pages, and when she feels the need to start singing, they are talking about things like the fragments of the Amadís de Gaula. They are four fragments usually housed at the Bancroft library at Berkeley, but that are now lit up, opened up to folio 1 verso and 2 recto on a bookstand at an exhibition at the Spanish National Library in Madrid. The pages not shown in the case sit scanned, ready to be paged through with the swish of a finger in another sort of light box. A display built for admiring and experience, it tells us both that the book is an artifact, an object to be gaped at, and one we wished we could read. The observer-participant can pick up a virtual magnifying glass and focus on the old words.

And one passage lights up, such that he can try his hand at paleography in order to fail, touch the screen with his finger, and reveal a modernized transcription of one of the most complete sections of the manuscript.

A display of uses, we learn that this is all we have left. It is not the reading we want to do, this paleography, a course on 15th century hands. Even if we look closer, with an imagination like Ulrich, we will see an Amadís frozen there with a big unintentional grin. He plays from our current point of view a tyrant and his smile is mocking.

We know though, that it is actually nothing of the sort. He never expected to have gone to bed this way, to force most of his readers to guess at the exact telling of his adventures, stopped stiff and lost in the dark corners of his boots. Instead, history served him and us a sort of undone Crestomatía, like the smiles, like our sleeping lovers.

2008-09-24T15:30:00.000-07:00

Uncle Walt, beautiful Walt.

O ME! O life! of the questions of these recurring,
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill'd with the
foolish,
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I,
and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the
struggle ever renew'd,
Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see
around me,
Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me
intertwined,
The question, O me! so sad, recurring-What good amid these, O me,
O life?

Answer.
That you are here-that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

2008-09-12T14:50:00.000-07:00

Open season

In the current Pennsylvania Gazette, there is an article by an alumnus entitled "Rage." I rarely read Gazette articles in their entirity. Although I probably should not admit it, I typically flip to the back and read the obituaries to see if any former professor has died and then toss the magazine in a basket of forgotten bills and coupons by the front door. The feeling I get reading the obits is one that I simply shouldn’t. It is exactly the same feeling I get every year when I excitedly page through the US News and World Report University Rankings, standing half hidden at an airport newsstand.

The magazine is a good one, just like the University’s excellent student paper, which used to boast a prose better than many respected city dailies. But I have given it up, like many things, for reasons which I haven’t taken the time to identify.

But this article caught my eye. It features a picture of two bulls bloodying their horns through a barbed wire fence. One of the paragraphs reads in this way:

Though perhaps, if some ineluctable and tragic gene is at play, they cannot help themselves any more than those mammoth black bulls, big as railroad cars, scarcely human, we once watched in a Montana field. They were separated by a barbed-wire fence, and though they looked at one another with menace, we thought, “The barbed wire will keep them apart.” It didn’t. Their faces already thick with blood and dripping snot, they saw only each other as we approached. What a calm summer day it was, with bluebell skies and space that went on forever. There were no other cattle. There were no other creatures except these two. There was nothing to goad them on.
-Nick Lyons

I do not have much love for my alma mater. When the current students call for donations, they always ask me to tell them some of the fondest memories of my undergrad years in Philadelphia, betting on the fact that nostalgia is expensive. The last time they caught me in a bad mood and I was honest. I told them I was a transfer with very few friends who studied about 15 hours a day for all the wrong reasons. I went to one football game, can sing only one line of the fight song, and do not communicate with a single classmate. But I wear a class ring, because, well, I don’t know why, and I miss eastern cities terribly. Then I told them that they were doing a good job and gave them 30 dollars.

And for some reason, that conversation reminds me of the bulls butting heads through the wire fence. Why not spare these kids some melodramatic account of half of my undergraduate experience? There were no other cattle. It is things like these that really make me wonder. The unexplainables, the gut reactions that are often violent and ugly, but sometimes, even if very rarely, are beautiful. I spin my ring on my right hand and still refuse to ask it why it is there. The cows eventually quit. And the old alumna carries on, looking for new fences.

2008-09-08T13:49:00.000-07:00

A book.

Although immobile on a wooden table, the book’s pages continued to fall. Each of them felt unpopular, making the claim midair that the floor is the greatest friend of those out of favor with themselves and others.

In the beginning, an author had written of dark places. Drawn alongside sidewalk cracks big enough for only a tiny pinky to enter, was a lengthy piece about a third floor room, always seen as though through an eye that cannot see center. Here, through this eye, text and image swirled and turned same. Left was an acrid taste with the texture of a beard not quite long enough. Nothing seen or unseen.

There were other stories, one about a woman slinking around a lost city. She and others had convinced themselves that they were indeed good through daily manifestations of self-imposed misery. Another told of a sweet boy who by wondering too much where, exactly, he was, had lost the only book he knew how to read.

But it was the bottom right corner of the book’s last page that had been folded upwards and sewn to a wax nob fixed to its upper half. This triangle pocket held worn type pieces from another era that had spent their last days forming words for posters advertising theatrical productions. It was clear from the painful marks they left on the pocket that long before they were actually discarded, the pieces had lost their ability to imprint. Someone had scrawled angrily on the outside of the folder 3 complaints and a bracketed reflection that spoke like an incantation:

Characters not words!
You never could remember my name.
How could I have forgotten!

[Note to self: Not a dialog]

The colophon read today’s date and one of three years past. A palm had sweated and made a mark on the page. Inside its strange shape were two souls grabbing hands. It gave the impression of August. What was needed was a re-enchantment of the world.

2008-09-01T18:52:00.000-07:00

(touch)

There was no gesture, just new lines on eyes and a pain deep in the muscle, always worse in moments in which the clock has slid to stop. We thought, without words, of 5 days of this past January, the last 3 Augusts, and the late morning hour that never quite arrives.

These are the moments in which the absent comes to be. It appears to arrive in an irregular fog, but cannot, no matter whom the imaginer, be felt. The touch of the missing, like the impossible indelible mark of a lost second, stands in an urgent pose in a corner yet to be found. Where, when, do we find our teller of touch? Not, I doubt, in time.

2008-08-22T00:10:00.000-07:00

Truth, no. 353, the title of an unsolved mystery.

And she had finally found it, in a tiny closet called room on the corner of two everyday streets. The message rested on a creased paper and was poorly responded by a character more literary and again, by the men who posed it.

Some people feel a need to bring about the very thing that will most torment them.

2008-08-12T00:40:00.000-07:00

White Heat

It is time to return to the orange exercise book that I haven’t opened since January. What a cold month to write about heat, but then, in those rainy moments, I felt pure Eastern Summer and a peculiar energy.

Mais à présent, il faut encore écrire dans le petit cahier orange disposé un peu de travers, de gauche à droite, pour redresser l´écriture. La couverture est déjà tachée, déchirée en plusieurs endroits. La couverture est déjà tachée, déchirée en plusieurs endroits. Les lignes écrites à l'encre bleu-noire par le vieux stylo noir démodé (que je viens de remplir) progressent régulièrement sur le papier blanc quadrillé, lisse, sur lequel la plume, en glissant, n'accroche pas.

I remember one June in a country town in Pennsylvania riding bikes with my cousins. We went for hours in the evening, listening to the buzz of crickets resting their ugly legs on the haze of the humidity. We rode on long driveways and real streets with neighbor kids. My borrowed bike had a white basket with flowers on the front. Inside, I carried grass and dying insects.

Si certains phrases son barrées, d'autres se développent sans une hésitation, se ponctuant presque d'elles-mêmes, il me semble.

But when I brought the bike into their shed for the last time, I felt defeated. The times I can see most clearly from my childhood are those in which I can recall having felt that I was growing old before I should have. There were still so many bugs to catch and all those blades of grass to uproot. My shirt with only 1 big stain and me with no appetite meant that it was no time to go home.

La partie gauche du cahier (le revers des pages) est à présent plus épaisse, et il s'agit de refermer peu à peu l'ensemble sur lui-même, de ne rien omettre, de ne rien oublier, de maintenir ainsi le corps penché en avant vers la table tirée près de la fenêtre ouverte, le bras recouvert du tricot gris, le poignet, la main gauche posée à plat sur la page, trois doigts de la main droite refermés sur le stylo (le pouce, l'index replié, le majeur)—les deux autres, serrés, effleurant le papier—; la feuille, la plume d'or brillante, les lettres régulières formées par l'encre de gauche a droit, l'une après l'autre;

We left Pennsylvania that summer anyway, and in early September, I went back to school, a place, through not much fault of its own, where I was one of the poorest students. It is for this, that I meet with surprise and also acceptance, that I occasionally take great comfort in tasks that resemble the daily work assigned by an inventive primary school teacher.

And now I know, that the end of the exercise is scarier that what it is to start. These lines here are part of a passage in Sollers' Le parc (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1961) that even I can understand in French. I have filed it here for no reason other than that it has taught me about blank space and what kind of time it is.

les espaces blancs entre les mots (et d'une ligne à l'autre—la main progressant, se relevant, revenant, repartant—tous les mouvements possibles viennent logiquement se choisir, s'imprimer; l'ordre de ponctuation—ce blanc peut être considéré comme repris au temps, ce point lui est infligé au contraire—donne acte d'une instant mis aussitôt en espace limité); le feuille blanche soulevée faiblement par l'air qui, á travers les platanes et les tilleuls, vient de l'avenue ensoleillée. Il fait beau, tout le jour.

Because this white space too, leaves it mark like the black period and the straightish n; in a sense, it marks doubly, forcing that which came before it, and its partner after, to consider, even more, who they are.

2008-08-04T00:18:00.000-07:00

August this year.

And it came out like red dust, blown here and there by the wind. It was one of those times that one wonders why he couldn’t possibly remember anything bitter, since he had thought of it so many times before. But then like fading tire tracks, the vines dissolve inward. The lines rub themselves soft, and our hands grab differently.

2008-07-29T00:16:00.000-07:00

Desire, admire.

Late night, he has been rotating a couple novels. He says this is what he does to punish himself, what for, he cannot be sure. He had simply decided that more suffering was needed because he was tired of calm encounters.

It all started last week at a medical appointment. These specialty doctors, you know, who speak with the patient for under 10 minutes after having made them wait 25 in the exam room and at least 2 and some months for an office visit. They speak as though looking into a microscope missing its slide, or whose organism is too small even for the magnifier. Everything in those rooms seems pretend, even the way in which the doctor asks him to stretch out his frail arm, always preceded by a mister.

He cannot be sure. But the certainty, he discovered, resided in how there could still be some surprise. A young woman urologist looked at him with a certain admiration, one that could be called desire. He wanted it to be desire, or so he thought, but he could respond back only thanks kiddo, as though he were congratulating his grandson, mixing sentiments of both appreciation and relief, for being kind to elderly strangers. He did not desire him, no, and thus, not her and her, not he.

Poor logic, this was. And so he sought to know melancholy, the other side of the limit, with old music and torn novels.

2008-07-28T01:36:00.000-07:00

Big miniatures.

He reaches out to touch his cheek, then lets his hand rest there, cradling his old-man’s head. It is the kind of thing a woman might do, a woman who loved one.

J. M. Coetzee, Slow Man. New York: Viking, 2005: 5.

I cannot figure out the perspective of these lines. And that is precisely the point, if anyone called author Coetzee had wanted to make one. What I will say here, although I would have liked to have willed myself otherwise, author, is that this is the beauty of J.M. Coetzee: to find what nobody would remember to put into words. He has that knack, of which Eliot writes in the Four Quartets, to capture what has always just fled minutes ago, having left only a ring of confused haze and tingling fingers. No message.

One day some months ago, at someplace in Berkeley I don’t remember, I told someone kind, a big-miniature, that I am an inventor of scenarios and dialogues. This is a means of having comebacks for all occasions and for assuring some sort of rhetorical force, even though, since it couldn’t be any other way, these comments would be inherently weak in their core, lacking the genious (and thus force) that only fear or frenzy can inspire.

And then days come, like one very recent one, in which I remember that it is a lot better to be surprised. It is when I come back with a comeback more poor than Heather Bamford, author, could ever imagine, that these novel lines shoot sharp stones through the scenarios, them, there, reeling in all their very human melancholy.

He reaches out to touch his cheek, then lets his hand rest there, cradling his old-man’s head. It is the kind of thing a woman might do, a woman who loved one.

The double his, whose his, a sudden movement that nevertheless looks like a patterned behavior, an act predictable, but directed at one, who is both nobody and obviously his.

Somehow author Coetzee seems to trick fate and manages a mechanism for recording the lost seconds. Other days, say these lines, it is better not to read at all. But mostly, these lines are some I'll never forget, because they are anything but of kind .

2008-06-11T11:05:00.000-07:00

In media res, 2.

Today is the day I discover what type of reader I am. I take the hand of my friend and we enter the last chapter of J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello in which the protagonist, writer Elizabeth Costello, sits in a purgatory that demands she write a statement of belief.

She is not actually my friend. We are play-love and not-quite-hate, alternatively performing the roles on different days. We sit at concrete tables engaged in checkers with shirts tucked in. She tells me that we must stop having the same conversation, rotating discussion and lamentation of the same figures on whom dust so desperately wants to fall. When, this black, on red, will we turn the board over and make a new game.

With what parts?
I tell her I have given too much. I have given away the best pieces of me and their histories. I have nearly surrendered the people that will make my clock go tick long after I’m dead, my most inner rind. I fear that I have told too clearly what I believe to a board that respects nothing.

I begin writing, sketching out the streets, living rooms, classrooms, parks and bikes of the board. The paper is cheap, but the pencil good and I could go on feeling its impact all day. There is the risk of tearing the map, since lead rarely works subtly on a child's tablet. I draw. This time I will use organic material, teeth and hair, fingernails and flaps of skin. This time the players will have to move the humanity about the board, thinking in each play of the person to whom it belongs. What I believe will not enter the half-listening ears of the participants, but rather will come legible only with the permanent taking, and not simply as a token, of person.

2008-06-08T23:51:00.000-07:00

In media res, 1.

My tongue is as dry as paper; we have arrived in the desert. This is what I tell him, anyway.

My woman has taken another woman.

But what was the use, telling W a story could be nothing but anticlimactic and therefore produced not even a false catharsis; dealing with him was simply this way. I always suspected that he knew every secret I just barely had the courage to tell. Then, once told, he would never confirm that he had known all along, stealing both the calm that comes with the relation of an already known story and the giddiness of revealing something entirely new.

You know, says W, what I have always told you about the bag. You must only allow lovers, like your lost woman, to be an adornment, keeping them at arms length. Like a woman’s purse, one decorated with large rings protruding in all directions that she must hold (never clutch) somewhat as she would the hand of a tuberculin stepson, even though she has the incredible urge in every moment to allow it approach her core and to snag her most dear dress. This is always your flaw. Do you see?

I tell him that I see that he has been reading good fiction out-loud, nights, and is now engaged in an air-writing of a book with me as principal character that he thinks could win an internationally recognized literature prize. Then I go live: You are far from it, I say. Your metaphors are an army of dummies with dull sticks for weapons. I solicit his reproach for my piteous poetry such that I can produce a more effective loneliness. Either this or I must convince him that my woman never existed at all and that her leave-taking was nothing more than the final step of an ongoing imaginary amusement.

2008-06-04T23:48:00.000-07:00

Radiant beat, raucous scraps.

Today there was a pivot, a message from the blackboard on wheels. A wind, that city kind, full of the breaths of too many faces and words muttered, nearly always to a rear-view.

And I emptied a great backpack of things, frivolous requests I would have asked of friends in the coming days and plans of buildings I’ve lived in. Then there were notes, all of them less than half-finished, written in a hand that mimicked computer font that oftentimes didn’t adhere to standard rules of word separation. That was then the intent. Many spaces were left out and the signatures came at the top, such that the content, what had managed to arrive to the page, was at odds with the sender. What does it mean to do on purpose? I wrote in answer to one of the notes. To another, just I know, and still another, a favorite axiom of timid, but usually clever tutors, when in doubt,

leave it out.

I always would have guessed that the notes would go this way, covered all the while with embarrassing saliva from a bitten nail. Had I unzipped the front pocket, a round pool of ink would have poured into my hands leaving on its glassy surface snippets of a few faces unnecessarily forlorn, and always, at the same time, radiant.

2008-05-29T11:27:00.000-07:00

Humbly yours (just kidding, maybe).

Today my psychologist friend told me she has a client that reminds her so much of me, that she is in danger of breaking into our shared slang during sessions and talking about her love life.

The client waffles between wanting to put her face on the university flag as a material-symbolic declaration of her brilliance and, alternatively, wondering how, exactly, she has managed to trick them all for this long. The writer writes with felt scraps and an urge to represent herself, all the while thumbing, numbly, a pink eraser and a brown paper bag.

But today I am interested in another story. In 1799, Goethe published “Der Sammler und die Seinigen” in volume II of Propyläen (Propylaea), a journal he started with Johann Heinrich Meyer. This is a series of fictitious letters whose translated title is “The Collector and His Circle.” Various characters, including a collector, a young girl Julie (niece of the collector), the editor of a journal, and a philosopher participate or are named in a correspondence concerned primarily with the creation and communication of the aesthetic criteria of a circle of friends. I am not sure of the identities of the characters, or if they correspond to real life philosophers or writers—Goethe included, although it is possible, according to the editor of the volume I am reading (John Geary, Goethe, Essays on Art and Literature) that “the philosopher” is Friedrich Schiller, who is identified as such in letter 5 and who wrote the letters with Goethe. Neither do I know how this piece fits with other Goethe writings. I read primarily for passages that could make me think about collecting and desire, want for touch and physicality and above all, representation and spontaneity.

In the last room upstairs where the best portraits are displayed, you may have noticed a connecting door; actually, it leads nowhere. In former times, when this door was opened, something more surprising than pleasing was revealed: my father, arm in arm with my mother, stepping forth, so to speak. The effect was startling because of the portrait’s realism, produced partially by the setting and partially by art. The portrait showed my father dressed formally, as if he were returning from a dinner or soirée. It had been painted in this location and for this location, very painstakingly, the figures in perfect perspective when viewed from a certain vantage point, and the clothing superbly realistic. To make sure the light from the side would be just right, a window had been reset, and everything was arranged in such a way that the illusion would be perfect. Unfortunately, this work of art, which so closely resembled the real thing, was destined to share the fate of real things. The canvas had been set into the door frame, and as a result, was more vulnerable to the dampness of the wall. The effect was even more damaging because the closed door prevented proper ventilation. Thus, after a harsh winter during which the room had not been opened, we found the picture of Father and Mother completely ruined, which saddened us all the more because they had died shortly before….After my parents’ death, the family did not remain together for long. My sister died while still young and beautiful, and her husband painted her in her coffin. Melancholy prevented him from painting his daughters because, as they grew older, they seemed to divide their mother’s beauty between them as it were, and he was too saddened by memories. He took good care of the small objects which had belonged to his wife and often painted them as still-lifes with perfect realism. These he then presented to the dearest of the friends he had acquired during his trips.

The effect of the painting is not pleasing, but one of startling perfection, one created by both art and its surroundings, which, in turn, become inseparable from the art itself. The way the portrait is set in the door frame such that each time the door is opened it is revealed is particularly fascinating; the details of the portrait, the clothing, etcetera, while they could surely be studied individually after the initial “revealing” of the portrait with each opening of the door, are seen not as separate elements or jigsaw puzzle pieces, but without seams. In this way, the picture does not demand interpretation, but rather is the spectacle, perfectly procured, with a window reset, and everything arranged in such a way that the illusion would be perfect. The fact that the door leads or means nowhere must in part be what Jean-Luc Nancy is talking about (although I have yet to understand much of anything at all of his Birth to Presence or his idea of presence) when he says that presence itself is birth, the coming that effaces itself and brings itself back. Always further behind, always in advance of itself. When an earlier thought said “the Idea!,” or when it said, “praxis!” or when it said, “to the things themselves!,” it meant only this. Only this birth, this “nativeness” that is not signification, but the coming of a world to the world. This will take quite some time and much more reading to understand, but for now I’ll take nativeness. Eventually, as the picture of Mother and Father is destroyed by the dampness, the special effects are no longer able to be effected, the picture loses this nativeness, that which is the whole picture and circuit of elements that were able to initially bring it to life and to make it reveal.

The husband of the collector’s sister is a painter of objects which belonged to his wife. These are also painted in perfect realism, as still-lifes given as gifts to new friends. This is an incredible exchange. I wonder what the husband hopes to achieve in gifting representations of the relics of his wife. Are these pictures, still views of what are probably already still objects, a way of giving over to his new acquaintances a testimony of his belief in the power of representation? Where are these representations in time, or are they not in time at all?

At the end of one of the letters in which the niece of the collector supposedly takes over, she says that he instructs her to communicate to the recipient that he remains “humbly yours,” since he still believes in the old-time formalities of letter writing. These send-off messages have always fascinated me. Yours (my favorite). Best. Best wishes. Regards. Kind regards. Warm regards. Sincerely. Sincerely yours. Cordially. Fondly. Etc. Humbly yours is something I’d never think of, flag or no flag. But what Julie says about the use of send-offs and what she considers the current custom is intriguing:

We are no longer taught to do that, and such a formal curtsy does not seem natural or affectionate enough. A simple ‘good-bye’ and an imagined handshake, that’s the best we can do.

An imagined handshake. How does it go with ‘good-bye,’ which she seems to see as more genuine than the formal curtsy? I am not sure. Other letters are signed “eternally faithful,” “Friend and servant.” All the ways we sign our letters, on given days, maybe on others, with gifts of paintings of the relics of an expired loved-one. Today is humbly yours: with flag or an admission of fakery? In any case, its painted.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, and John Gearey. Essays on Art and Literature. New York, NY: Suhrkamp Publishers New York, 1986.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Birth to Presence. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1993.

2008-05-13T22:53:00.000-07:00

Occasional fires, word of mouth.

Usually I look at my shoes, pretending to wonder how the leather soles are so worn out, but wondering, more truly, and really, how I might stuff the present and previous speakers in the lace holes such that I can make a speech.

It is never about wanting to say anything in particular. It is a want to achieve an uncontrollable urgency to put myself on the spot, such that when it is finally my turn, I am dying to tell them what emerges from what in those moments seems like a spectacular panic. This is what it is to be elated, to produce for a present moment that conceals all the pasts and particulars that came before it, duping the public into believing that the tale told could never have any antecedent, but, rather, was just word of mouth.

2008-04-27T20:27:00.000-07:00

About Times.

After a series of unfortunate events, a woman, aged 30, from an anonymous industrial city has died. She leaves behind a loving family and three friends, whose names cannot be mentioned. So went the only slightly uncommon obituary. Born was a new style of quizzical journalism, in which death notices containing several unanswered questions appeared as headlines. Two pages later, at least 1 of the headline questions was to be answered in the first paragraph of an unrelated article. In death, such was the case: a happening that simply alerted the public's attention to something that had long been a custom.

Regarding our 30 year old notice, in parenthesis, two pages later in the third sentence of a pedestrian article appeared the words:

Of writing, writing, all writing.

2008-04-10T22:46:00.000-07:00

Day strange.

The last thing she spoke was of an enterprise of vacillation that exited her soft mouth like the buzz of a spring bee. She stumbled out of the shower with soapy head and laid on the bathroom floor. There were yellow-jackets, rubber ones, inside her eyes and she tried not to faint, digging the end of the towel into her cheek.

Then soap in the eye, three distressed whines. And a long pause that lasted an entire day. She calls it the image of the band. It is the one for those who see things they didn’t know existed. Objects with legs and springs, broken—both, and reflections, here.

2008-04-05T00:54:00.000-07:00

Private-eye

Private sighs, usually in relief. Tossing moldy bread in hand of dirty dish. Shirts their owners used to like, but now regret ever having bought. Too early thinking, food, sweat, and too much breath on laps. Having eaten too much, look, three paper cuts; see pants zipper to dry skin. Soap in eyes, meat with fork, we dig in the recycling bin. Sometimes thought worse than a partisan plodding, you, history, but here, are dead tired, and hardly wait, the insides' mind's nearly and newly forgotten aches.

We write these lines in letters to lovers, seated at an old piano bench. The letters sit on scales, yellowed music once used in lessons and rehearsed conversations. Now we send the missed squeaks in the direction of stars in grayed eyes, hoping soon for more blue-green.

2008-03-18T11:55:00.000-07:00

Querido Marzo

Querido Marzo:

Me preguntó mi sobrina: ¿Cómo se dice March en español? Le contesté: ayer. Quería también usar un adjetivo, quizás incluso un artículo, siempre indefinido, pero no sabía dónde colocarlo.

Mañana cumpliré años. Hoy tengo treinta y muy pronto tendré mucho más; es decir, esta semana es sobre todo acerca de años. Todos los momentos van despareciendo y recuerdo sólo los recuerdos de mis primeros marzos, que fueron peores que éste. ¿Sabes qué? Tú los conoces todos, pero siempre pronuncian mal tu nombre.

Pero no sufras, mi querido Marzo, porque los meses, los nuestros y el tuyo, apellido y sobrenombre, no valen la pena. Estamos aquí para encontrar las semanas, los cinco dedos de nuestros días de trabajo y la huella de la mojada mano. La mesa está vacía, pero te invito, igual.

...

2008-03-10T22:38:00.000-07:00

March 10

Today after attempting to recall library books from myself, a strange feeling of calm came over me in the form of a humorous cynicism. I walked out into the warm air hoping it was a couple years later. I remember about this time last year sitting on grass outside an academic building talking about apocope, misreading, somewhat intentionally, an important article by Rafael Lapesa. We produced noch and nuef singing blades of grass with a lighter adorned with astrological signs. We lit little Alfonsine fires, without wanting to know too much. Now, it is mostly all about an ongoing and always unpublished appendix probi, which I cannot complete, of my mispronunciation of any French word imaginable and all of my other daily errors, which are most likely without any counteracting corrections.

Discovering that neither of us had eaten lunch, or breakfast really, a friend and I came upon some scraps from a meeting. They looked too old to eat. Yet, we figured, that if we died from this hours old cheese and dip, we would not have to be present for our upcoming qualifying exams. I wrote my epitaph.

Here lies Heather M. Bamford non

sequitur

Besides. Today I had finally figured out something big about imagery and presence and material culture in the Middle Ages. And as usual, the answer was in a tomb, which, also happened to be right there in the book. My friend was becoming a historian. Amazing!, our coast was clear.

And so we ate the old cheese, even though we nearly died trying. We weren’t even able to consume, fully, many of the bites that we took in. But we sat there, nearly mid March, doing our books, sharing that moment's nervous shreds.

2008-03-03T21:44:00.000-08:00

Dear Februaries.

He strained his neck to look up at the light post, from which he expected to fall a dead bird or 10 kilograms of used writing tablets.

The cursive on their pages was that of an unsleeping man inventing parts of an old play. Although he had seen the program, each time he remembered the characters they came out differently: as medicine men with vials harnessed to their backs, as straining, weak right arms, as naked, short-haired women bathing in cold water against a rural setting. The thick black glasses of an elderly man. Rare, warm, April days. A man he was certain was Saint Thomas Aquinas. And Georges Bataille as a young adult. That picnic basket he would never pack.

He stared at the tablets. He said aloud: Nothing. He sat on the curb and opened the third tablet. But nothing still. And then he looked at his palm, held it up to the light, and out came written there, on that skin surface, the writing from all of the blackboards he had seen in his last 12 Februaries. On his thumb, the initials of every lover he’d had, and on a ring that he had forgotten he was wearing, some music whose notes were sketches of faces belonging to persons he considered to be good company. The resemblance was uncanny.

And then again, up at the light post. A new tablet fell, its leather cover without scratches, the paper never subjected to pen. And it was there that he began to read in the loudest voice the surrounding trees and wind would allow, the wordless text of the newest march.

2008-02-29T00:01:00.000-08:00

R: Ronald.

Three hours ago, midday, I recalled a strange childhood custom of reading the telephone directory upon awakening from a bad dream. I would repeat the names in the T’s, Tennessee, Terrance, Titan, Tyler. And I would save Ronald as surname for last. He, as he is now, was a spot of contraband, an opportunity to call out of order. I always thought I knew him; he was the only face I could see emerge out of what were then not much more than figures. The figures, letters, turned out to be impossible to print. Their appearance on the page was nothing more than an average magic trick. By the time I could read Ronald, the perspiration from my night sweats had dried. And by the time I had seen him, he had already left.

2008-02-24T23:48:00.000-08:00

Piteous pond.

It was one of times I almost came fully awake. This one was a scene of instruction, but the entry point was an enormous breast. My face pressed against a veiny flesh smelling of soap and rubbed lotion. My right eye, still badly damaged from the accident, was pinned in the valleys filled with ink carved in the pupil desks, too small, anyway, for American college students.

These ones were engaged in an exam in which the professor had written four words on the blackboard. Over the words he wrote “Define” and underlined it.

HEURISTIC

ONTOLOGICAL

PUSSY

EPISTEMOLOGY

The professor had fled, stopping to hide behind the half-open door of the lecture hall to stare at his subjects. He nearly fell in a heap, laughing hysterically, drooling uncontrollably, sending text messages to a colleague about the sheer idiocy of these young scholars. It is amazing! He cannot believe he did it. Oh reverie! And inside I heard the younger voices, calling him crazy, motherfucker even, before picking up their pens and putting through their papers.

2008-02-23T23:19:00.000-08:00

Month’s end.

I am to call the older man Father. The father wears a green sweater with holes in the elbows. There are two rings on his thumb extending from just below his nail to the wrinkle marking the bottom of his knuckle. I wonder how he writes with a thumb so sick and sutured. I cry out on his behalf. But then I realize that it is actually my own case I’m pleading.

“How could this happen?” I say. Of the deafness I am supposed to notice in the Father, I hear everything. From shoe-soles to the long white hairs in his ears, he believes to be living in a tin lunch box. Among smells of old salami, fallen pieces of cheap cheese, smears of peanut butter and lemons, he has been writing his two lines for the newspaper. For when he passes.

2008-02-17T11:46:00.000-08:00

New England revolt, circa November 1998.

Wei, Shan and I sat in bad seats straining to see Tori Amos bang on her piano at UMass Amherst. It was about New England winter and how that had met Tori’s sweaty taut belly crawling on a black Yamaha. We had been in Boston or New York just before, like most weekends when I tried my hand at small college, but there, in that shitty venue, was our biggest Eastern city. All this was good to remember in a single sheet of dirty paper.

2008-02-11T22:11:00.000-08:00

Empirical pine.

For him it had become apparent, after having gotten too close to the screen, that the picture showed yesterday. But there was something about this distance that wouldn’t let him leave, or, for that matter, allow him to identify the matter he saw as the things he knew or thought to be there.

If I had to call it something, he thought, I would give it the name of them. And if I must explain them, I will call it pieces of pine. No, not the trees, but the verb, pine, stretched and shredded, folded, necessarily fleeting.

He wondered, lastly, about whether one reflection of the yesterday, one contemporary moment of the photograph, could leave an indelible mark on his large glass table. In the end, while he knew it was theoretically impossible, he swore, meaning nothing, that his table told him about later today, through trees.

2008-02-06T22:20:00.000-08:00

Present box, ring.

It was the lifting up of a book and an encounter with an irreversible ring on a wooden heirloom. A strange mixture of guilt and gut feeling, of having known that the indelible would be there and then finding it just so. A reaction most visceral. A certain reflection, the kind that happens with an intensity and that afterwards puts its patient into a deep sleep.

But before he had seen boiling pots, four, and had suspected that these were the anger of others. But they meant nothing in the end. What sat on the table instead, apart from the fired-on circle, was a box of electronic messages turned shiny enamel, pencils and envelopes, museums yet to be visited, shredded ribbons and rocks, and hundreds of dead ladybugs, bodies piled in the shapes of the nasal letters. It all belonged to him, he knew. Without being able to move beyond description of the things in front of him, he sat in a shallow heap, asking, where do we go from here.

2008-02-05T22:10:00.000-08:00

Telegram.

No next. Times liar. Still yet. We know nothing. Like this. Free first. But lastly. We sign. His name. Sake our. Black marker. Met that spot. On. Neck at night. Time sheds. Skin. Proofs. Tissues. Tear photogenic. Meaning. For morning. Comes. This hard. Onto. Logical intercourse. Change me. Too.

Softest marrow.

2008-02-02T23:40:00.000-08:00

On my street.

They are ripping out furniture and bathtubs from a defunct hotel on my street. There are dumpsters full of rotting wood and old porcelain, glass and broken mirrors. It’s a sad sight. You get the feeling, looking at the pieces of furniture, and smelling that smell, that nobody loved it. I’m sure its not true. There must be former owners, maybe even patrons, who feel pained seeing the furniture and bathtubs broken into useless pieces on the street.

I feel sorry for the hotel. I wish I could give it one last night of glory. Maybe I’d jump on its beds and enjoy a good meal in its restaurant. Then I would get in one of its showers and steam myself before putting myself to bed in its sheets. I know its too late. I can’t check in. But next time I walk past, I’ll pretend that the bed and tub and dinner table are still standing. I will tell it that its musty smell and dirty carpet are charming. I’ll hold hands with the chandelier and dance on its linoleum. And then I’ll kiss it goodnight on the cheek, cupping its ragged face in my hand. I know it would be worth it. To notice one more time.

2008-01-31T19:00:00.000-08:00

Vavtyzo / baptism: word holy water.

The spellings are at it again. Yesterday absolute went without its e and theater, realize and feces had all turned British. There was an editor’s interpretation of medieval grafía por todas partes. Billboards which advertised for easy, but very beautiful vautyzos and care and peace for those fanbryentos. Writing did spins, no one had ever expected this stage of slip. This is surely the type of change that reminds you, however weakly, of some summer winds that stop just as you are about to complain. The unidentifiable, but very reverent fragments of a letter found under the dirty skin of a yellow wallpaper. Yes, these days there is a new lettering going on, definitely purposeful. The question is who is it that does not want us to catch up? I can imagine only a tall handsome phantom with wicked grin and handwritten dictionary. Each day he rips out pages of misspellings and lets them fly. The words end up everywhere, stuck to paste, paper and without pins. In the places of these torn pages grow new ones. His confusion is all telling, but we know nothing. The worst of it is that we like it, more than a little. We want his water.

2008-01-30T00:39:00.000-08:00

Months in the making

We were months in the making, he and I and our orange trees. These we found in neighboring backyards and on long walks in the lower hills. For months I tried to raise one in an old bucket on our small patio, but all that grew were skinny branches and the sourest limes with yellow rings circling both ends.

What I hoped to find were secrets told in the semblance of a sturdy scaffold with a reassuring layer of dust on its edges. Many times I tried to sort out my motivation for the trees, what would make me want to erect such a complex of vines, pimpled skin and pipes. I am certain that I never came closer than the image of a sweating and famed newspaper reporter exiting a building early morning, having entered just an hour earlier, half-asleep in the dark.

2008-01-26T08:50:00.000-08:00

Trace

He had discovered that in her book, his was a hastily drawn sketch. Beside the oval face and pointed nose was a clock with hands made of neat lines of some of his favorite verses. These were copied in another time, he thought. Her hand drew blood, now, it was all atonal. His feet squeaked dirty rivers on gravel paths. He cried embarrassment of the most unforeseen kinds; wrists having created sweat on chair arms on an important date, our spilled wine on the fur coat of a most important colleague. Now there was only the possibility for suddenly or without anticipation. He had lost his place in any game of calculation.

It was afternoon and around him, shots fired, a gun fight had broken out in the park and its people scattered, except two, who maintained their game of catch. It was really a ball game of one, but still they smiled and maintained the appearance of utmost confidence, caring only for their chaotic complicity.

But for him there was a sudden longing for things to be arranged. He bought boxes of new oxford shirts, pinned and stuffed with paper. The boxes, in whom, never in this case in which, neatly folded shirts were his desperate mummies of calm. He placed these on his worktable arranged in bookends like all his volumes. He began writing with the boxes, left to right. He traced round cuffs, stuck himself together with pins. There is only counting. He orders, hoping with each breath he becomes stone.

2008-01-22T00:23:00.000-08:00

Textiles.

We sit under the light of one lamp, three fireless faces engaged in a game of dominos with ancient arrowheads. These are sharp, brittle, but our use marks a double perversion, a blood-letting of snags that we might proudly admit as defeats. The binding has given way. Carried by wind and guttural reactions, the movie times from the Sunday paper have come loose, now we duck and cover, 7’s and 9’s.

Mine were the minutes of poorly filmed videos, yours the fibers of stuttered dinner poets, and theirs, all at once, the destruction of every Saturday night invention on war, country and technology. Here we are stealing, minutes, dinner, hypotheses, noise, seated on burning carpets made from files stacked high, those that give us our reactions to red wine, that make our most interior sweaters. Our game is infinite and forlorn; we have burned our best faults and in the ash, these, the good, the bones of the house, and the finger oil of our most tattered pages.

2008-01-21T23:15:00.000-08:00

[Recommendation.]

Listen to Jonny Greenwood’s score for Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will be Blood. For an abbreviated version, try first Oil, then Prospector’s Quartet, then Proven Lands. Not easily forgotten.

2008-01-20T18:43:00.000-08:00

Histories, hands.

The soft pages of a battered leather bound copy of Herodotus, these are the only papers left. He is accustomed to writing stories in the evenings, but tonight he finds himself without surfaces. Palms, once a possibility, are no longer. There he finds deep cuts; theirs is a graveyard, of events that appear even more desperate than those told in the sheets of the Histories. Will he dare to put fountain pen to palm, before doing a drawing over of the Greek? For this is no translation, no, but his education in print, the bones of his masters.

He picks up a small stone from the black earth beneath his feet and places it on a series of words in the second sentence. This is to steady the page for writing, but instead it falls through, penetrating both paper and leather skin until it meets his own. It lands forcefully in the deepest cut of his left hand. His only choice is to fill the trenches with cobalt ink, part by part. These will make unfathomable rivers. He cries out from the point of his pen, he smirks, his mouth droops. He remembers only once more, the voice of his mother telling him to wash his hands for dinner. He responds weakly in his last breath,

I forgot, I forgot.

2008-01-19T01:53:00.000-08:00

Opened end

They died slowly. As punishment, his and theirs, they carved the letters of their headstones with a pin, ensuring that even after having lived, well, their names were blurry. There is no reading here, words of the literate exit misspelled. The doctors, at best, have memorized the sonnets of lesser poets and drone them in a pitiful mumble. They had once believed that they would be buried as toponyms, pieces of patria, unpirated, both hatted and booted. But here they rest in the cheapest boxes, our filthiest sleeves, ajar.

2008-01-17T12:41:00.000-08:00

Soft stones.

We are the sums and signs of contradictions. Whole piles of papers months in the making burned to start an unneeded fire. It was ninety degrees cold the reports said later, it was about our desperate need for an unbreakable, slowly dissolving spyglass.

From where my head sits on the pillow, I see only the colon of the clock. It is effectively numberless. There and then, there is a crying that starts with a tensing of the abdomen. It is a heaving of numbers, red lines piling at hard angles. They will come together, regardless. I make my 10:04 the next morning. I will be copying things from a book. Dead voices, or ones entirely fraudulent, my sweaty mouth all over translated words. These, significant nothings, but the makings of something, are just bilish echoes of something previous. Here, we can only begin to wonder, just how unwelcome we are, as guests.

2008-01-16T12:28:00.000-08:00

Factual fictions.

I found I was wearing 10 contradictions, one for each pointing finger. The falling became even faster and the ironies made their way to the surface, coming out hot and red. They will start their writing soon I thought, not in a graceful script, or block capitals, but in a clear printing that might be used as a model for school children. It is the most mocking hand.

This rock-looking surface is surely not granite. My shoe leather is not leather. My boarding pass is always invalid. Horseless equestrian. Lying philosophizer. Illiterate writer. Unnamed nick-namer. Boygirl. Embarrassed exhibitionist. Untamed alumna.

I am back on the wheel, I whisper to a muttish police dog. He lifts his head and his masters do not think I am a druggie, just a dog-talker. They ask me if I am going back to college. Oh yes, I say, I am going back to college. I think of my fan of alumni magazines, enough for half my fingers, enough for all of my ironies. One hundred thousand collages. 3 armies. A new city. I look again at the dog and mutter in a fluttering tone That Fortune, her and her stopless sentences.

2008-01-15T13:27:00.000-08:00

Ideas 3 minutes.

He realizes that he has remembered badly. The neighborhood, once towering, a real metropolis, is dingy. There is honking, sad empty storefronts, and he is always cold, under silk, fleece and down.

But then he realizes that in the sidewalk cracks hide all the ideas he thought he would remember,

A pair of folded, moisturized hands, a picnic basket packed filled with a vernal feast. February melancholy, the aching pimple a forefinger's length from the ear. The family car, a reassurance like a loud knock on an oak banister to assure that she is really alone. Their Friday headache, a full storm in a water bucket. His first BB gun, the failure of what he thought was an infallible footbridge.

but didn't. He goes about collecting them, as best as he can, on scrap papers. But his ink runs, his pants pocket forms a large hole, his jacket one bigger. His fingers are the last betrayers, the pictures and phrases slip through like the finest baking powder. Nothing will hold them, neither can they be seen in the distance.

2008-01-14T09:33:00.000-08:00

An exemplary life.

It is dark again and they write her 1984 night visions. The wallpaper horses have turned wild, savages, with manes and tails ringing through yesterday’s newspaper planes. But tonight, she is in a drawing, at the furthest point of the lower right corner. Arms have become orange sticks, face scarecrow, feet and hands at impossible angles. She drinks from a rectangular pool, carelessly colored. Her back is waxy, not from a crayon piece used in drawing, but from an observer’s attempt to capture this and other nocturnal spectacles in record time.

Thus is it to be written in impatient fictions. Nights and days, great and grievous moments arranged in episodes, squeezed, all alien, none mine.

2008-01-13T09:20:00.000-08:00

Heat

The orange exercise book appears as a sun shade about twenty pages in. But anyone who has sat through an East Coast summer knows the trick of an awning. Those rubbery tarps suspended on restless strings protect those in the house, but not what sits underneath. The awning patrons melt just as the diligent exercisers who strain their fingers to find a comfortable seat in the paper squares, cubes that never seem to make any lines at all. Each stroke of the pen threatens to drip the sweaters into the box below, or to pull them upward. Dripping wool.

The forward progress becomes, then, just a mockery of the heat, the telling of the most constricted vision whose cool and possible refreshment are nothing public. Those inside rest their no longer wearied feet; they cannot benefit from their cool. After having entered, their outdoor vision of stone steps down to the ocean became just a polite note, their oasis, a glass of soft water.

2008-01-12T00:12:00.000-08:00

About rain and a movie about Nietzsche.

Exonerated by illness, he walks up to the mailbox, shoeless in heavy rain. It is a similar feeling to the pity we feel for an old man struggling to eat his soup, a dribble drops as he tries to recall the color of grass shaded by trees. It is fall and he loves her, no, he needs to, but he runs into her carrying a lampshade instead of an umbrella. His perfect image becomes just a funny play, seated. He looks for an old postcard from his lover and instead finds his most personal notebook torn to pieces, the words, all the meaningful ones, puddled on the floor.

2008-01-11T13:56:00.000-08:00

Thursday, two.

There is the hollow click of clock hands,
attached to wrist or wall,
whose glue drips,
telling of its growing detachment.
The keyboard letters become the tiled roof
that tracks the slip of shoes
and at the bottom,

well,

sit the ladies in waiting, the tiniest shards
of only bracketed time.

2008-01-10T20:38:00.000-08:00

First floor.

There are a lot of beautiful places in Le Parc. The I of the book is an observer, what he tells reads like a diary gone public. His writing can be sensed, but it is not a writing on paper. It is head writings, sharp strikers hitting foam.

I’d say that if the I is present somewhere, he is in a theatre, seated with his orange exercise book, wishing at the moment that he had something more discrete and black, without squares. He writes his observations about the stage, of women under lights, of the lipstick balled up in the corners of the lead actress' mouth, of the long, curious, blue scuff that makes an arrow pointing north. In a careful hand, despite its being worthless, he writes these are the smells I see. When he opens his book later, its all colors, cool lamps of green, red and blue, the squares have gone missing: they are out, walking, up to the park.

2008-01-08T01:55:00.000-08:00

Woodfire

I am one to mourn things before they happen. This is something I’ve done for as long as I can remember: the death of our parakeet, my own failures in sports, school, family and friends, the loss of favorite jackets, irreplaceable buttons, the fall of Saturday high noon, and the much more important deaths, of people, limbs, and youth.

If I could, I’d write out my mourning on a piece of wormed driftwood and put it in the mail. But I’ve already done it, a band of lost boys in an otherwise desolate town have put my wood and worries to good use. They are burning big fires, taking my projected losses as fuel for their artful battles. Each night they dance with sour breath to what I and they could lose. This, really, is the only way to go, to burn with feverish movements both the drifting wood and all that made us write it, a commemoration only in the making.

2008-01-06T13:47:00.000-08:00

Cite reading.

I went reading above the pages of a book. I wondered if this is what it feels like to be a tiny girl running between the top and bottom pieces of a fluffy white duvet. I could see the surface below, and the white uptop, but I was able to run with unrestricted movement, sinking, rhythmically, in both floor and ceiling. It wasn’t an inventive reading, but one floating above the words, guided by the holey strokes of a crayon pencil. I skipped the author’s argument and read only the quoted passages, dash-whole-dash, which were mostly from Marx. Today I want to revel in these details, to write in the citation, the little text, maybe somewhat unknowingly, presented as that which is irrefutable; it is, if only in that, unlike the argument of the author, it is already accepted as being worthy of critique and commentary. My tendency today and these citations are sites of some of the secrets of page, pen, and paraphrase. Am I crazy, thinking, that I can avoid the author’s reading altogether, that I can pretend it doesn’t exist? Can I really go back to what I consider the text? I think I managed it here, even in the presence of over 500 pages of detailed argument, plates, index and bibliography. We can read between, but I suspect, that it will always feel unorthodox, like bed-linen, but not necessarily poor, scholarship.

2008-01-04T12:03:00.001-08:00

Philosophy try-on.

There are often pieces of clothing on the corner of a street about a block from my house. Today as I lugged my books in the rain to a small library, I thought about trying something on: shoelaces, a holey sweater vest, what looked like a baby sock, a vinyl belt. A while back I was talking about living the ideas I read in books. Then it was seeing the ideas I read in books in life. Then, and maybe still, a deciding to go with or go against the ideas I read. In the latter of this most recent phrase, there is a touch of the attitude of a person who no longer wants the watch that he had gleefully just bought after seeing it on the wrist of his friend. We want to own our things. Their beginnings and middles and even their last parts.

And now it also has to do with clothes and presence. I read about experience and optimism in a book. I put them on like the dirty kid-sock left on the corner. In the sock, I see some others, those not mine, those in my drawer, behind my dryer, maybe my nieces’ socks stuffed in the crevices of the backseat of my sister’s car. It is not a simple trying on of clothes, but a finding of clothes that remind us of those we supposedly already own, those we can’t remember owning, or those we’d never think to own. This wouldn’t work the same way if these clothes were not found, hanging on trees at a strained reach, as we pass by on the sidewalk.

The brown vinyl belt sits on my waist and demands me to think where I have seen it before, experience goes to work, and I sort through a series of denials and sighs of admissions. It wraps around my arms and legs like a serpent who knows it shouldn’t. It does anyway, and I go about inventing the story I’ll tell next time anyone happens to ask the right question. It will begin with a when, a who, or a what. The how and why is just lost, writing.

2007-12-29T11:52:00.000-08:00

Midday

I began to wonder why we were traveling this way, as a metal subterranean mole with wax wings. I went faster, holding my burning candle, farther, but the car stayed put and I arrived at the station, before both car and fellow patrons. I looked for the rest, but there was no one, no place. I even checked off the back of the train for stragglers.

Do you know, then, what it is to stand on a bar patio under a cold sky, with phone in hand, mind engaging, if not fingers, in four conversations at once? One with the strangers, another with the friend, another with a person not present, another yet with all those you can’t quite remember, but wish you could see more often? I say, nearly always, that I am one for moments. I live tiny video reels that somehow disappear moments after their making, or if they are lucky, receive a second life in a reworking the next day.

And today I thought about my movie. All that came were flashes and two still pictures, one of a very specific exerciser, standing in a moderately familiar place, in a black shirt turned a blacker black, hair wild, hands on his lean hips, standing over a puddle of sweat. The other was of a bowling alley, with lanes that went for miles, but to no particular place. Conversations that roll down a waxy floor, each in its own very separate and non-transferable lane, thus are the moments of the most vigorous exercisers. To be sure, there are no fellow patrons here, no matter how connected in certain moments the moments might feel. For they, reels and exercisers, still pictures, are always in mid-conversation, in the midst of all and none, burning candles, farther.

2007-12-26T14:44:00.000-08:00

Vitamin we: our little secrets.

The night before last I saw real live glockenspiels in a formal setting. They were accompanied by bells and a big bad drum. On top of all these sounds was my idiotic hushed laughter, going like an unruly wave through the glock chimes and drum beats, me contemplating and making up my history with these pretty instruments. I actually asked myself: what, exactly, is wrong with you, Heather Bamford? It was like those times in geography class where we'd draw boobs in the margins of our sprial notebooks.

Lately I have been thinking about all the little things about us that only our partners know. These are some of the most real secrets, since, in most cases, we would never think to tell them. Such is the human in his or her domicile, relaxing or working unaware of these habits and compulsions. They go unnoticed, even if they most certainly were not, at first, by our partners. It is not enough to say they are "part of us”; no, our functioning depends on them, and they on our functioning. They are also very precariously placed organs, easily displaced by living with someone new. I confess here, as an example of what I just described, to the consumption of approximately 30 Halls Vitamin C drops per day. Sometimes more, but usually not less. We have a mason jar by our sofa that Sam bought specifically for this purpose that holds 4 large bags (80 count) of the things. These come in orange, lemon and grapefruit, the last one being my favorite, and I can identify all three flavors through the nearly opaque wrappers.

Those wrappers are all over every place I walk. In many buildings in Berkeley, several reading rooms of the library, the photocopy room, the grocery store, the taqueria by our house and especially the sidewalk of our street, for blocks. Now, you think: this girl is crazy, or, that is not such a big deal. Neither are entirely correct; you can never be really right about someone else's house secrets, because even their owners can't explain them well.

So think about your little secrets. What do you leave around your city and sidewalk? Will you think to tell someone of one of these habits, risking, in that confession, its very extinction? What exactly, is wrong with you, Heather Bamford? Many many things. Big bad boom.

2007-12-24T09:39:00.000-08:00

In universities, pine.

Yesterday I saw my walk through central and west Philadelphia in shoeboxes, my this very December and my 1999-2001 dollhouse broken down. Have you ever seen in your mother’s closet colored shoeboxes, stacked floor to thigh-high, of the brown flats, the ankle boots, the practical Saturday walking shoes, the high-heels she wore before giving birth to you and all your siblings, the black patent-leather ones she might wear, with a certain and very describable apprehension, once a year?
I wonder: can you see it, the crackle of the paper of the saved shoeboxes, one full of shoes,

worn once, but never since, then put back in the box,

and another, with those bought and then, once home, never thought to be worn?

On Locust walk, the main pedestrian drag of the University of Pennsylvania, I walked to my old house on 40^th and Pine, then and still across from a defunct retirement home. The walk looked so short and small, not long and deeply, like I had wanted to remember it. The wind blew and it poured, but it wasn’t tragic, no, not nearly enough. First I thought briefly of a time running late to a class, my walking shoes caught in the crumbling mortar of the cobblestones, mud met rain, wet my face, all me wondering what I’d say that day about Caribbean literature, while two girls ridiculed me skinny. I then did remembering on the bridge, running up its North face in heels. I stood over the busy street underneath it, listening unimpaired and well-rested to the traffic I’d heard so many times distorted. I thought: what a box that was, the one I lived then, in which every Thursday night I’d lift my lid from a routine of relentless and unforgiving study, one that I fear I could never replicate now, to engage in a ring of activities on the very edge of my box-top. It smelled of patent-leather and grimaced. It was close to the kitchen, but never ate. A room, otherwise well-furnished, decorated with cheap area-rugs. Here, on the edge often damp with whiskey or sweat, I did distortion, of me, probably of you, and certain pieces of university hierarchies. Each Saturday I put myself back in, scuffed and no, not dirty, but rubbed new. Boxed and upstairs, as I should have been. It was always all over again or it had never happened at all, city style, downtown.

worn once, but never since, then put back in the box,
and another, with those bought and then, once home, never thought to be worn?

And sometimes I want to write myself back into that 21 year old room, a shoebox downstairs in my same dollhouse, but I am no longer looking to wear patent leather. I am playing for keeps, stomping around the university house in heavy work-shoes, knowing full-well that I am making holes in both floor and ceiling.

2007-12-18T20:01:00.000-08:00

Pivot.

My body claims that if I don’t sleep tomorrow, it will leave me for good. My back has already moved on and ears and eyes, hips and knees, have getaway plans in the making. Our tumultuous relationship of 3 x 10 years is under review and I am stuck between the categories of unable to judge and high performance, having long erased the possibility of low producing. What still remains, is not applicable, and what has emerged is pure invention.

Today I found myself sitting in front of one of those pivoting blackboards attempting to analyze the syntax of a string of Latin with several individuals looking on. I am too old for this, I think; I say, instead, a string of words, sounding out the sentence in the rhythm of a patient reading an eye-chart. There is beauty in these emissions of poorly translated text. Think of yourself translating something you have never read. Maybe you drop your pen on the floor after glancing at the sentence such that you can try to recall what the Christ eurus means. And then you find no other excuse and are forced to begin, losing control of the volume of your voice and the first word comes out in a breathless shout: Gird! weapons.fierce.battleline.men-faces.of-stone.tools ages-counted-on.ring=of mother. And then you wait for some sign of exasperation from the examiner, whether or not he or she is actually present, before sitting down in a tense heap. The pivoting blackboard takes a turn, mocking any possibility that you take a bow.

And my body is on its way out, looking for its eastern wind. It wonders which category we should circle in this tired state. Unable to judge. So I’ll stutter it out, me and my tense heap, taking one last trip through the trials that await poor translators. My examiner, in turn, stands ready with the key to the eyechart, with the ring of the mother which counts the ages. With these he threatens even my eastern wind; thus goes the price of the pivot.

2007-12-14T09:02:00.000-08:00

Survey.

And last night I had a grand plan of reading the Georgics and writing about VIRGIL and the signature, not necessarily all at the same time. I studied several passages of book 3 in detail, trying to memorize a little, look at syntax, and swoon with the English translation, and was overwhelmed with fatigue. This frequently occurs. In the event that I have time to engage with a literary work I find that I am so exhausted, I end up asleep on my couch.

I think: maybe if I broke some ribs, I would have no choice but to recline peacefully in my fluffy white bed with my dog and my pretty new computer for note-taking. Reading.

I ask: Must I suffer some rib-breaking accident to engage in the activity in which I am supposed to be engaged?

This is not to say that I do not take some pleasure in the way I often have to read and write about things, a method which would mostly closely correspond to a land survey guided by a bottle of inexpensive chardonnay. I hardly drink at all, it is not there that lies the comparison. I explain. When you are driving and you see a slim and tanned worker, operating some camera-like device (you see, I am wont for vocabulary, and thus, the picture, there to the right, like a seductive judas) you wonder: why this spot for analysis? How did you come to place you and your device on the pavement in this spot? Does accurate data come out of that thing? Do you think about how people see you and your device as they drive by in their cars, wondering exactly how it works? There is something sexy about measuring out in the open, a scientific exhibitionism that is both experimental and entirely calculated. [*This sentence is to be studied.] Its quite possible that these questions only occur to me. It is I, afterall who am walking around Berkeley these days with a bag embroidered neurotic.

And today, I think, I ask, how I come to put my pole in a certain place when beginning a new project. Admittedly, one of my favorite things to do latenight is to open a book I have never read to a random page and to comment a passage entirely out of context. This is absurd, probably, but it gives me great pleasure. Freed from all the sayings and analyses and idiocies of such and such critics (and the very pre and post story of the book in question) writing becomes real entertainment.

These ruminations on reading and method, life and times, are somewhat the product of my last week in a small library where I sat inventing ideas about some images and a repetitive text that surrounds them. The project was a true chardonnay-survey made worse by my disgust with any study or theory I considered placing in the pages of the paper. Nearly everything I could have used as a guide I didn’t. The goal here, however, points to an irksome paradox, since, I somehow convinced myself that such a recourse, which was likely initially inspired by sheer laziness, could allow the book to talk for once, not through my current philosopher-interest, or a particularly good or bad article, but as closely as possible through or in reaction to its own voice. I am liking more and more the point and shoot method these days. How does one reconcile this with the need to know well the bibliography on a certain subject? The question here, then, is one of knowing how to know the ideas of others and also how to ignore them.

So I will go on with my chardonnay surveys, treating myself, occasionally, to latenight commentaries out of context, trying to know the bibliography and to forget it, all at the same time.

2007-12-08T12:23:00.000-08:00

Of riders and all the mortals I miss.

... And today I can think of no one at all, no single soul, but rather the body of people who have told me stories that came in just one sentence. I mention one of many here.

Around 14 years old I had a friend of 22 whom I greatly admired. We indulged in music, riding, even a little whiskey. I wrote her bad poetry, some of which I may publish here in the next days. I realize only now how creative and extraordinary she was, the kind of fiery brilliance of mind, one which at the time, I partly attributed to her being older, but that I now know to simply belong to those lucky few whose heads are imbued with both an enormous capacity for methodical analysis and creativity. This might not seem wise to many of the readers here, but anyone who has ever had a conversation, those types in which the air around you becomes painted with pieces of text, pictures, objects, things realized that you can both recognize and that are completely new, but above all, you know that they are just for that conversation, in that moment. It is a state that is most closely identified as euphoria or extreme sadness, both states that can only be reached not on purpose. We were engaged in this way, me amazed at how her mind, one of which I had and have only bits and pieces, had carried me there. We stood in the corner of a freezing barn, frost on the metal handles of horse water buckets, my nose dripping from a mid winter cold. I wore a pair of fringe chaps and a filthy wax raincoat. She turned to me with a face whose sharpness reached scorn and said of her horse Friday:

He has realized that he is mortal.

And I saw exactly what she meant, the horse’s newfound affection for us a direct result of his then illness, an awareness and first step to what afterwards became his death. But it was more than that. It became a shared secret, a staple and securing stitch in our complicity.

I wish I were seated at a table with all these riders, not with the us’s of us today, but with the me and we’s from those specific moments. I would visit each person, changing to the me of those moments as I passed from chair to chair. What a table it would be, one engaged in moments between mortals who themselves wouldn't quite believe it, in exchanges not reached or conducted on purpose. In the end, they'd talk of nothing more than their own mortality, one partner in crime to another.

2007-12-05T19:57:00.000-08:00

Has you changed where you stay at?

Tonight I stood on the corner of my street and looked up at a light post that illuminates a small park. I smelled what I knew was a wood stove, but I didn’t think of families and firewood, friends and big area rugs, my mom and dad’s piano, my nieces, us in wool hats in Idaho, or the smell of the yellowing pages of my grandmother’s books. No, just a picture of me sitting in a metal chair looking in a mirror asking myself what are you doing? The only answer I could hear from this quiet conversation was a faint echo of one of the most eloquent refrains I’ve ever heard a good friend utter in different forms over the years: “change where you stay at”. Yes, change where you stay at, which apparently for some of the self-absorbed begins with a conversation with the self in the mirror. This doesn’t really seem like a normal refrain, certainly not what we’d typically call eloquent. When C. A. and I found it on the change of address slip of a fabulously well-written satirical paper [actually the question: “Has you changed where you stay at?] in Seattle, we knew it was for keeps. A couple of literature dorks and a slip that solicits a change of address with an inventively poor grammar.

So no, I am not actually going to move house, as some of the brits would say, but try to move my thinking a little, if for nothing more, to realize how poorly I write myself sometimes. And I make no secret about it: except for in the case of some saints, some children, and most suffering victims, at the end of the drawn-out hour, in the tiny sliver of gray glow of the waning moon, the most guilty author is nobody but oneself. So we change where we stay at and grab on to the nearest good friend, who is probably too, on the move.

2007-12-03T00:49:00.000-08:00

Retrograde.

A line of quotations, 3 views of backward.

Le papier brûlait, et il était question de toutes les choses écrites et peintes, projetées là de façon régulièrement déformée tandis qu’une voix parlait...cette page ou surface de bois brunie s’enroulant consumée.

Philippe Sollers, Nombres, roman, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1968.

J. D.: … I have always had "school sickness," as others have seasickness. I cried when it was time to go back to school long after I was old enough to be ashamed of such behavior. Still today, I cannot cross the threshold of a teaching institution (for example the Ecole Normale, where I taught for twenty years, or the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, where I have been teaching for six years) without physical symptoms (I mean in my chest and my stomach) of discomfort or anxiety.

Jacques Derrida, Stanford Presidential Lectures [responding to "A Madness' Must Watch Over Thinking"].

I say the world is sick

You say "Tell me what that makes us darlin'"
You see, you always find my faults
Faster than you find your own
You say the world is getting rid of her demons
I say "Baby what have you been smoking?"
Well

I dreamed,

I dreamed…

Tori Amos, “Upside down.”

2007-11-28T17:21:00.000-08:00

4-square

This evening I walked as cube. This is only partly metaphorical, since I actually did see myself as a sharp-edged square, one with slots of different shapes cut into a shiny top. 4 sides, divided-core.

And my corresponding shapes went sliding in, as though they had always known where they were going and what they were. Yes, one of these moments of extreme self-awareness, in which it becomes absolutely salient who and what I am. I won’t reveal my shapes here, any attempt to describe them would end in an unruly combination of self-deprecation and arrogance. These twins, however evil, each in their own ways, made me see me clearly. I accept, j'accepte, I’m even glad. Its both better and a little worse than I thought.

2007-11-24T21:10:00.000-08:00

Life in times

Last night sitting in the opera I began to think about time travel. No, not what it would be like to have lived 20-50, 800 years ago, but about how we go about doing time and how we see our own travel. In one of the beginning scenes of the opera, a car with headlights on sits center stage. To depict its motion, a car is shown on a screen behind it driving forward, the wind created and resisted represented by lines of all lengths. The orchestra plays softly, a song that sounds like a sea-saw bearing roughly equal bodies. This was by far my favorite element of an otherwise entirely bizarre production and it angered me that people were amused. I wanted to yell that this part is not kitsch, like some of the scenes and scenery had been, including a giant heart-shaped bed with satin sheets and a trap-door in the middle that swallowed lovers. It was a serious statement, even if no one ever intended it that way. What kind of streaks does my passage in time make, are they dark gray, bright red, or do they make an undulating riot of big screams and smaller shouts?

I wonder, but not enough, since how sad it would be to track all our progress, the steam of all of our arguments, the murmur of quiet cries, every gurgle, drip and drop of wine and unrememberable time. Streaks, pounds of sand, oh me, oh mine.

2007-11-17T11:18:00.000-08:00

Teatro medieval / medieval theater.

Act 1

I remember because I was terribly frightened. I was in my bathroom with a 103 fever hallucinating and dripping sweat on the tile while my boss told me on the phone that I had better find some other RA’s to finish stuffing the envelopes that I had to stuff and to finish my part of some report we had in progress. I responded by vomiting on the receiver. This was surely divine intervention and when I think of it, I am inspired to produce one of those Episcopalian expressions so important to my primary and secondary education, praise to thee, Lord Chirst.

It was talking with RBK last night that we came to some insights about pain and its relationship to presence. Think about it: what is the worst physical pain that you have ever felt? Can you remember, really? Alternatively, have you ever had a visceral presence experience in which you come to experience pain you've felt? Is it true that we won’t let ourselves remember or, on the otherhand, recall our pain through presence?

Act 2

Yesterday riding with a consistent flow of nitrous oxide, I was thoroughly disoriented, also exhausted, and experiencing with perverted glee the noise and flashes of my surgeon’s bloody gloves. It was one of those beautifully primitive moments where I wish for a scribe, no, not one with a slow pen but with a speedy typewriter, one with an enhanced capability of prediction. I thought of chessboards, batalla en campo [no] abierto, war games for pleasure that at the same time, always make certain that the right people will win. I temporarily decided that Alfonso’s chess treatise is in part a way to legislate a type of play that mimics war. Maybe its a legislation of war and social relations via play. Instead of depicting the multicultural environment of the court, we could say that the Libro de ajedrez reasserts social hierarchy and relationships by always depicting the endgame, the point in a chess game in which the method by which the slightly superior force can win can be analytically demonstrated.

Act me

As I saw the bloody thread used to sew up my lower socket and the felt the dentist push the right side of my face directly into his chest as he struggled to extract my top tooth, I wondered, I speak fairly seriously now, if when I surfaced from that white coat I would have lost my liver, a rib maybe. In the place of teeth, what were they putting in there? Those sockets weren't wholes. Or holes. Would he hold up one of my organs on the tip of a lance made of am amalgamation of dental instruments and yell with acculturated glee: Teatro medieval!

That would have been a good performance.

2007-11-15T00:49:00.000-08:00

Witch flight? On using drums and glockenspiels to run away.

Last night I sat here reading Latin wondering what it would have been like to live in a time in which writing sentences like Noli fugere mecum moriaris oportet would have seemed relatively normal. Sometimes in class I can’t help laugh aloud or read in a totally affected tone sentences like these, adding a few apostrophic interventions and delighting in the English present subjunctive: OH! Do not flee: it is fitting that you die with me! But my reading Latin is not really reading. What comes out is as though deciphered from a careless manuscript hand in low-quality ink. My reading, if danced, would look something like those interpretive dances our music teacher taught us in elementary school. That poor woman, if she only knew how many nights my siblings and I ridiculed her in our living room, a critique with choreographed movements spanning a whole 7 years, me 8, my sister 15, brother 13. Ms. M.M, wherever you are, hold not this multiyear critique against us, I will always remember you because you were sympathetic to my desire to be a boy. You gave me the giant drum and stick and the actual boys those damn glockenspiels. I got to be the evil sun in the musical who shot arrows at the group of peasant girls running in skirts in circles, while still more girls did little ditties on still more glockenspiels.

So tonight engaging in a little Verdian Macbeth, I thought of glockenspiels and drums. I began to wonder how many of us are probably more than a little like Macbeth, addicted to calling upon our witches who conduct us and others swiftly to the dark depths. mecum moriaris oportet. Its different, and maybe much more sad, I suspect, for those who can see clearly that the very prophesies they seek are nothing but trouble, but can’t or won’t resist anyway. I think here of no one else but me, wanting to bang on my big bad drum knowing that it would really be easier on nearly all occasions to glockenspiel-it. The curious thing, however, is that I suspect that the dance to the drum is nearly as rehearsed as the running in circles to the high toll of the glock; in the end, whether shot sun-arrow, or soon to be wounded girl, we’re always fleeing something, bellish twinkle or drum boom.

2007-11-06T23:48:00.000-08:00

Mindmap, seasonal me.

Today was a day of all seasons. I went around, from fall leaves to cut grass of summer lawn. About 2:15 today I found myself struggling up the hill to campus. It was early winter, I had lost my breath. I pretended to want to think about high spring, anticipation of vacation, completion of projects, warm wind, but closed it out. In my attempts to turn off high spring, she collided with my deepest blue, producing a spark that I hadn't seen since a day running in Retiro (Madrid), in June.

That day in the Retiro I experienced something that I could never retell, nor remember. Then I called it a conscious moment, now, surely in part, I’d evoke presence. But its so much more than presence, more than my living theory. It is a living of seasons, the taking of snippets I’ve lived, all united in a way I could never fully understand, and the producing of pictures, visceral sensations. Today, mid-hill, came a most vibrant image of a map. This is not a made-up metaphor, exaggeration, or blog-talk, which is what I typically do here and in most conversations. I saw so clearly, so violently, a coming together of scraps of colored paper, from all directions, even those I didn’t think possible in a three-dimensional space. The papers came together with the bang of a slamming of a hardback book, that sound, you know, both hollow and painfully sharp at the same time. I bit my lip. Yes! I said.

This is me, this is the map I make.

I will never tell these pieces of paper for real, for true, nor could I. The edges curl with tension, they threaten to set themselves on fire. There is no like in this land. The map, despite its odd shape, has a very defined edge. In its borders at its sharp edge,

the battle-line,

[acies, aciei, feminine]

rim of the cup,

ridge of blade,

one knows for certain that either way, whether in or out, there will always be a falling, for better or for worse, for highest high and most low, low.

For thus my seasons run, from fall, to summering lawn. Map of my ages, those roads without middle, meandering up, down, and anyplace but inbetween.

2007-11-05T00:51:00.000-08:00

Out of character. See my corrections.

I have been dressing up for nearly 30 years now. We all do this to some extent, we may have a couple registers of clothing that make us feel more or less professional, more or less old, more or less a certain gender, nationality, or ethnic group.

I like to think I can dress parts, play people. In highschool and on visits in college, ECD and I would go to secondhand shops or the type of mall stores with names like RAVE! and buy articles of clothing, out of which we would construct outfits to wear around our hometown, a particular horse show grounds, or our respective schools. It was not about putting on clothes, it was a form of public play, most likely with the goal of soliciting as much attention as possible. Once we bought 1970’s silk lingerie and paraded around a Stanford dormitory drinking brandy and pretending to smoke long cigarettes, which were most likely straws.

After a rather dicey encounter at a job in Washington (only my closer friends will be able to measure the irony in this statement), I reacted badly and lived a series of strange night and weekend lives. One lasted 3 months, during which time I invented new speech patterns, a Southern Maryland accent, and bought two bowling balls. I considered a set of acrylic nails, bought black jeans, many spandex shirts. I misused the English past tenses, apocopated the g from everything…gettin’, beggin’, balllin’, bowlin’, workin’, drivin.’ All the g’s later took their revenge upon me in the form of a certain graduate school.

So it was of these experiences that I thought yesterday as I donned a blue skirt, put on as much eyeshadow as I could muster, wrapped my hair in a high ponytail and set out for a tanning salon in San Pablo. I stopped at a donut shop where people were buying more lottery tickets than donuts. I bought some of each. Proceeding to the salon, I munched the donuts, realizing I don’t even know how the lottery works in California. These are no Dunkin Donuts. I got crumbs and some chocolate frosting on my trashy white shirt. When I stepped out of my car, instead of emerging as character, I kept thinking how goddamn uncomfortable my vinyl boots were. I have blisters. I see the chocolate on my shirt. The sugar hurts my ailing teeth.

But I stripped them off, donut grease, those boots and skirt and jumped feet-first in the tanning bed, having slapped a heart sticker on my left lower abdomen. I emerged fried and indeed, with a cute little heart on my tummy, but my plans for tanning bed daydreams had gone array. I had though that authors like Johnathan Frazen, whose the Corrections and other books I really enjoy, would be great for this blue and booted girl with heart burned-in. Maybe not just Corrections, but the Corrections with an US Magazine on the inside or at least read concurrently. But alas, I jumped in and fell asleep and woke up bewildered, wondering how I’d ended up there. Double bind! I exclaimed.

I thus failed at play. I sit here on my couch, in my usual spot, that looks like it does nearly every night of the week with my computer, three piles of books, many which I extracted and failed to read, student papers, dishes, bottles and plans, plans putoff. Its not that I can’t pretend anymore, but much worse: all the characters ride within at all times, drivin' knights, veergin [sic] varlets. Blue eye shadow and Brutus, and donuts, my Derridean delight.

2007-10-28T01:58:00.000-07:00

Of old dogs and flying carpets, my days to Dad.

Today running through a small park near our house, I was moved to tears at the sight of an old, limping white terrier. Dogs big and small racing for frisbees around him, growling and yelping like they do, as he hobbled silently out of my way, his left leg dragging on the asphalt.

This week has been about missing and remembering. I looked in a pan one night and saw the disgusting kitchen of a house I lived in on Pine in Philadelphia. That kitchen unleashed a series of pictures that one might find in a photo album sitting on a coffee table in a HBO series. Most of them were made up, vivid scenes of cafes, writings, faces of friends I didn’t have, with seemingly strategically-placed bizarre elements: sheets of piano music, grease-stained donut bags, a knife with peanut butter on it, wool ski hats, a half-tumbler of Wild Turkey, and pieces of Chihuly glass. These are not pictures of what I would have liked to have then, but more what the now me wants me to remember as having had.

I tell you of one of today’s pictures that came with the limping dog. We were on the Warlock, your blue sailboat that always reminded me of a floating lion’s den. I’m 5 or 6 years old in body with my now mind and we are seated by the helm and I get a sip of beer. It was the early 80’s and we were still throwing cans overboard. In crushing the can to throw it into the drink, I cut my hand. We engage in philosophical conversation and read some Elliot, using pages and pages of poems and aphorisms to stop the bleeding. We talk for hours, about travels, trades and people, and above all, transportation: planes, boats, the pants of pickpockets, the vessels that take our time.

My nostalgia. I generally fly by night too, on carpets with big holes right in the middle. I feel these holes and fill them with the peanut-butter knives of our past, our pieces of Chihuly glass, wool hats, our story together. I wonder if I will have enough pictures to fill the holey, maddening carpets I will probably always choose. I wonder what the limping dog did, of what he thinks as he struggles out of the way. What is in his limp: a fall from a fantastic carpet or a dutiful life of heavy work?

Whatever comes, runs on rugs, or a dog’s ever patient and consistent loyalty, I am here for all pictures.

HMB

2007-10-26T09:53:00.000-07:00

New drive, take 1.

I have no excuse for my memory trips now. I am back on my own little 12 inch computer, courteously rebuilt by some young technical wizard. I had forgotten that the screen is roughly the size of an American picnic napkin and am baffled by how shapes and colors appear, as though viewed through a squinting eye. I thank the dinosaur for his kind service, ye tyrannosaur, behold your lumbering body! you may now shed your last shiny scales such that I have an excuse to buy a new machine for our pictures and music.

For our pictures and music. In 2001, I moved me and my Volkswagen to Washington, DC and befriended a particularly tormented musician and comic. Our friendship went up fast and crashed with an even more brutal force, concrete hard. Our passions for own highs and lows corroded a lot of what we had together, mostly music, moods, and witty banter.

Sitting in my tiny studio apartment, we listened to music, singing the harmonies all night, until we reached Elliot Smith, whose music is so sad the harmonies come out like little puffs of air. We’d fall on the floor in a heap, aided by some terrible red wine we’d bought, giving in to his voice. That voice, it’s the voice of someone who has never determined or considered how to help himself, grainy and tragic like those tiny rocks of sand you get in your eyes while trying to say a loving, most meaningful goodbye to a friend you hadn’t seen in years. I was always fascinated by the sadness that this human being is able to achieve in audible and marketable form. I appreciate it even more now. Really, if I could function at all being that sad and could pass it on to my friends, we’d win all the big literary prizes with our fiction inspired by real life events! of fiery gloom.

But we haven’t fallen apart completely. He writes me every year on his own birthday, telling me he is supposedly a year older. He sends a picture and mentions something we did together. He is one of those old friends I don’t like to admit that I think of late night or early afternoons, but sometimes its just impossible, pieces of music, art, three sentences of a book, a turn of phrase. Tonight it was of course Elliot Smith and before that, a distinct form a longing that reminded me of mine from those days, one with so many questions and an aching, arched back. So puff went my harmony of Elliot Smith last night around midnight, I grabbed my own hand and gave in to some voice, an old and maybe a new longing.

2007-10-24T23:49:00.000-07:00

Philadelphia vignette.

This evening I have had a foot in Philadelphia. Tonight I made myself eggs and caprese salad for the third time this week. I am slightly allergic to eggs, but somehow think that by consuming them more regularly I will force my body to accept them. Ridiculous as this seems, it is actually even more absurd than it might first appear, particularly since I am convinced (thanks to you, Emily D.) that I gave myself the allergy by eating them twice daily from 1998-2001.

So tonight stirring the eggs I took a little trip back to my roach infested kitchen on Pine Street. My grandparents would only enter the foyer, my best friend in Philadelphia at the time refused to see me at my house. I recall telling him that this refusal was the only part of his all-encompassing snobbery that I ever fully accepted and regarded as legitimate. A homeless man slept in our basement at night, gaining access through a broken window we never thought to fix. Rats or squirrels ran in the walls. It was an enormous house, me and my 7 men, all of it all dirty.

I didn’t really think much about the roach kitchen, however, it was just what first came up from looking at the bottom of the pan tonight, which like a silver one-way tunnel shot me to the $4 black non-stick I used during those years. Pan bullet to breakfasts and shopping trips with friends I probably didn’t have, nights in the library looking for revelations in the aisles of PQ’s. Me sitting in the beautiful Arts Library pretending to understand three pages of Bourdieu in French (ha!) that some cute grad student had given me. Midnight trips for milkshakes for those days where my tiny clothes had begun to drip off my body of bones. There are other pictures that came too, but they are not for anyone to see, especially me.

Philadelphia is a place I continue to regard as sweet, even though starting with the first blizzardy day I arrived there, January 1998, at least once a day, no matter what the company, I felt as though I were in the middle of an unknown field with no phone, sandwich, or cup of water. What made it worse is that I never came to accept my woe, and thus allowed myself only an inner wailing. Surely when I glance back or go through the one way tunnel these cries turn into pretty harmony, roaches becomes me understanding he from Röcken with utter clarity at age 19, my eggs as attractive as clean bed-sheets. In the end, all of these are just memories, pictures in pencil. At play.

2007-10-22T23:01:00.000-07:00

Periodicals unbound, how a history is rewritten.

Its no secret that I have been thinking a lot about presence, those welling up moments in which a piece of past that one never knew would be recalled again makes a head-on appearance, front and center, sting, or event of ecstasy, right on the forehead.

I return to a fragment of a CS Lewis citation that I cited two entries back:

I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. (“The Weight of Glory.”)

It is now clear to me that it is not only the secret that has the potential to give us joy or pain; nor is the joy and pain simply in our inability to recall and describe the presence moment. The intensity, sorrow or near-manic glee is also in our rewriting. I have said elsewhere that rewriting is an insufficient name for the process that our presence moments bring on, and now, frankly, I know it to be so. Presence moments, while it is difficult to say whether they are out of time, or, alternatively in all times, are above all visceral. Blood rushing from tingling feet to head, contracting of abdomen, stomach turn, hairs on end. Our rewriting begins with bodily change. It then forces us to see what history we have been creating, obliging us to acknowledge and commit to paper, to hold ourselves accountable and check our progress against those internal, somehow forgettable emissions of Yes, I did it!, I will cope better this time, I am finally getting somewhere, I have been here before, I have fallen further than before, I know I will go on, and farther. These snippets, periodicals unbound, are what we use to write out new histories. They too, are pieces of presence; markers that make us remember our current story such that we may go rewriting it, this paper to those.

Finding the theory in life is also pleasurable and painful. It is a most beautiful and tragic representation of our ability to intellectualize events, people, conversations, and at the same time, our incapacity to convince ourselves not to hurt, to feel jealousy, hatred, loss, remorse, or a desire that we shouldn't.

So we go on missing and failing to recall our periodicals unbound, the ink of our present and future histories, until we feel that most visceral attack, presence: unbound, unbound.

2007-10-19T01:37:00.000-07:00

Marmalade, meet Sunday Mourning.

Last week I found myself at a public reading of some creative writing. I sat there a bit confused entertaining myself by imagining life in several of the new books to my left.

Illiterate spy
Mourning lover
Monday editor
Present learner

I also considered Sunday mourning and spy-lover, surely there were other combinations. Those in the above list were strangely not more difficult to imagine than the characters already written.

In my personal penchant for the utterly absurd, I have often thought about what it would have been like to go for an MFA in Creative Writing. If I had, I would probably write things about moonlit catacombs, horsehair shoelaces and aprons of filthy parchment. Marble earlobes, midnight heart of hardened wax, marmalade fireflies, and caskets of rain. I would make those mouth sound effects to win over the hearts of my bookstore audiences. Piff pulse pop.

There I would go, to bookstores and cafes, reading in an affected voice the stories of my defunct heart, telling with sweaty brow the skidmarks on my defective soul. One line from my second story would probably go something like this (the first one is erased):

Awkward young shadows near sleep, our slides drip texture on the paintless wall of our withering wells. We make movement, if only to prove that we have not yet descended into our most certain dance of deep.

On a more dark day, or as an epilogue to the young shadows story, I’d end up at my feet:

Barefoot and upset, I grab my right big toe and pull out, casting beams of yellow sorrow on the bitten floor. It is only worth noting, as we all know, because I cannot determine whether I do it to see if I can pull it off or, rather, to show myself that I cannot.

Creative writing, creative writing. With regards to the MFA and its relation to the absurd, it is not as simple as creativity is not taught. It is finding it and then hoping we find it again. I ask now: when will creativity come running with me? Although I couldn’t possibly remember, I imagine that creativity is more the Illiterate spy - Mourning lover - Monday editor, the blaze of glory than your typical marmalade fireflies fluttering about a casket of rain.

2007-10-13T13:47:00.000-07:00

Email 8, presence, tattoo refused.

This week I have written myself 8 emails. Me (8) sits in my gmail mailbox with paragraphs upon paragraphs of what is largely indecipherable text. No, it is not purposefully cryptic, for the sake of novelty or self aggrandizement, but the result of genuine confusion on the part of the author. I figure that this is the project of the pilgrim whose object of desire is a most wayward devotion. An errant and erring wanderer, heading not for the flames, but straight for a dehydrated heart. Drained well.

Excerpt from yesterday’s.

Today 2:30. Gray. I looked through slatted blinds that shouldn’t have been drawn. Gray sky more grayed by slats fitting the window with a new, dirtier pane. I had a welling up, an embarrassing longing that I worried was visible on the outside of my clothes. I often get this feeling, of wearing my experiences or thoughts on my clothes, particularly when teaching, or sitting in seminar. I think that my favorite green Sharpie has betrayed me and is writing the thoughts that should be most interior all over my face and arms. My problem is that I let myself go too long and before I know it I am covered in ink. But it won’t smear and I look up at the professor or my students, mouths agape. I am angry. I critique them, and tattoo their readings of me on them. I tattoo you with your misreading of my motives. You, on the otherhand, cannot see my theme, I thereby tattoo yours to you. You, there, make like theory and say I am a performer. No, you. Tattoo.

Last week I stumbled upon a C.S. Lewis text titled “The Weight of Glory.” He preached it at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, in Oxford in 1942 and it was subsequently published. I do not typically read C.S. Lewis, but this passage I really like:

In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

I am in a moment of burgeoning presence. Bigger, more painful and fiery by the moment. At first I started to write nostalgia, but C.S. Lewis is so right in this, that puts a piece of dark cardboard on my slice of presence, fitting perfectly its imperfect shape, drumming it out, unhappy rhythm.

the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence

Again I am on the dinosaur computer with music of my past 7 years of life. I see a fleeting view of the Potomac River (Washington, DC), shifting faster, than me, my Passat. The more I try to name and describe it with things, the more I lose. Ben Folds, Rockin’ the Suburbs is the music. I had memorized the entire CD and we, even when he wasn’t there, yeah, you, D.G., sang the harmonies.

This is a most insufficient retelling. I cannot write the presence. I have written memories. Is this the tragedy, our deficient tellings of the presence moments? That is surely why they are so “beautiful”, however. Wonderful welling, insufficient telling. We describe memories. We experience presence.

These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers.

The more it disappears, …it disappears. And this is key complication of the presence theory. Presence inspires rewriting without it itself being able to be described. How much of the presence moment, which cannot be described, remembered, or written, is in our revised history?

Desire for our own far off country. This is the pain and the pleasure; we recognize presence only when it comes again. The archive of presence is not on any map, and surely if we could find a map, the pit of presence would cease to exist.

2007-09-26T14:21:00.000-07:00

Paltry perversions, a page from my preemptive homage

Yesterday was a day of what many would consider paltry perversions. Fun with floorshows and the like. Thinking about language and where we put words. Fascinated by bizarre, overly literal translations of Latin prose whose purpose is purely an exhibition, a floorshow really, of one's mastery of ridiculously named grammatical concepts (some of which sound mildly erotic). I name a few here in hopes that they might render a good floorshow, even though at first glance it may appear impossible of something so named: double dative, historical infinitive, subject accusative, and my personal favorite, for reasons that need not be mentioned, ablative of degree of difference. During my run yesterday evening, I brainstormed a few ideas for a curious birthday card I plan to make (in the form of a “preemptive [academic] homage") for a friend, including details of page layout and ink color, dedication and photos. I wonder how I can be so enormously entertained by such things, it is not clear whether I should be content or concerned.

All that being said, I've decided that "floorativity" is actually a good way to force myself to come to grips with what [P`] really means when I use it. Not that it will always mean the same thing, but I should at least have a baseline established to which I should never feel necessarily any need to adhere, but that is simply there (but in motion). Some questions about floorshow and floorativity:

1) Is it somehow more productive to consider floorshow as something opposed to predictable? In a floorshow, how much is choreography and how much is unraveling or coming to without the steady crutch of a script? From what or because of what is the script made?

2) Can we order, or create a hierarchy of floorshows, or must this be impossible? Is one floorshow of a given text really singular, in every way, such that it cannot be compared with another? Is a floorshow wholly defined by its difference (its difference from itself), or is its identity in part created by its difference from other floorshows?

These are questions to ponder. More than likely they are nothing more than entries in my own preemptive homage, a book that renders nothing more than the impossibility of honor to the homaged. We'll see, we'll see, even the paltry may at times, plant seeds that eventually give rise to a pretty good show.

2007-09-24T21:04:00.000-07:00

Dear It, yield at least a few good floorshows.

These days I just love the word it. I once believed that the English language, at least in its basic uses, letters and emails written in a standard communicative prose, did not leave much room for playful ambiguities, for opportunities to create one's own reading event, his or her real life textual performance and the like. Let it be known as a side-note that I am so sick of the word performance that this entire week (including if it comes up in seminar), I am going to replace it with floorshow. Until Friday I will be all about floorshows of language and text and floorativity of language, gender, and myth. Maybe I’ll keep it up a little longer should it prove an interesting experiment.

It. In the past weeks, I have found myself purposefully writing ambiguous phrases with it. I provide a few examples without any context, because, frankly, that is the point. These its appear several sentences away from any identifiable associated object or idea.

I made it. I held it yesterday. I went for it. Yesterday to it. Let's do it. My mysterious it. Mother of it. It is what I mean. I think you it. And so on.

Contrary to what may seem an absolute certainty, the majority of these are not euphemisms for sexual activity. If that were indeed the case, what fun would it be, since, everybody knows how it typically ends. Using it offers the opportunity for play, more live-moments, good floorshows. Writing it instead of cookies, kiss, article, movie or buzz, buzz, buzz, allows for endless floorativity. A stringless balloon not impermeable to flames, pin-pricks, and the honeyed-paw-swipes of a grizzly, no, but capable of ingesting them all, allowing nothing to stop its most ultimate realization. It.

2007-09-20T13:09:00.000-07:00

Canines and marmalade.

One of my dog’s many neuroses is her fear of loud noises. Noises that her canine ears interpret as loud are not so to me, probably not to you either, the moving of trash cans, the flap of vines on an open window, the flop of a pancake flipper, your typical pips and pops from engines and high school students. Today it was the slam of the back door I had propped open to hear the wind, its slam rocketing her into my mid-day liquid city slumber. She had jumped right into the bathtub, which I was pretending, oh yes, I speak in earnest, was a pond of marmalade. I looked her straight in the right eye, telling her to get out, my jelly-jam less sweet with my (precious) pooch in tow. I put her out, she jumped back in and eventually I gave in—no, not to the dog, but to my fascination with the ridiculous. I then allowed her to sit on my right foot and I washed her beard with pineapple shower gel.

2007-09-13T00:57:00.000-07:00

A pointed paraphrase.

So much I am itching to write so much that I have hives no not bee hives but me hives trying to rise up through my dehydrated flesh pulling forward ears back

headed straight for those billions of buzz words

this our string

of ephemeral flood words that only speak moments of now and hardly evers almost always running precariously but with desperate ambition on the rim of the cup, driving trusty tracing
to ride the coattails of desperate invention and to take witness to the personification of the Derridean assertion

[if there could ever be such a thing]

that archives are about the future! and it is time right now

this one here is a clock having lost its hands but that keeps perfect time

feverish gaze spitting sparks resisting tugs of tracing climbs on

heading not east west no not even northward just without breath

but on air

towards the nearest edge.

2007-09-04T17:45:00.000-07:00

Spectacle fever, open my red Atlas of learning.

Saturday I found myself in the art store in a moment of paint and picture fever. I held before me two miniature canvases, each about two inches by one inch long with treated surfaces—one rough, like a beard gone one week unshaven and the other, rubbed deceptively smooth, only a careful, non-calloused fingertip capable of detecting its mini ridges. Standing at the counter in front of several other patrons and my bewildered husband, I rotated these unpainted paintings, incessantly, progressing frantically through a slide show, the old fashioned kind, of possible realizations, group manifestations, if you will, of the rebellious chorus that has once again taken to singing in my head. I thought not only about filling these two canvases, but about collections I could make with the produced pictures. Galleries of images I would give to her, him, or them filled imaginary white walls.

What, really, is better than a gift of spectacle?

I eventually came to, to the laughter of my dear partner and other patrons. I had gone away, to another Utrecht, neither Dutch nor an art store, landing on a welcome mat of a generous patron of non-artists.

And once again, I am fighting to find a resting place between overzealous, often unproductive creativity and traditional approaches to study and to literature.

What, really, is better than to be learned?

I cite a translated passage from Philippe Sollers Le Parc that describes a young boy’s interaction with an Atlas.

“The atlas stayed open on the chest-of-drawers. The child wanted to become an explorer, a geologist, an archaeologist and he will not be separated from his favourite book, the big red atlas. In the evening, he would take it with him to bed—it was with the aid of the atlas that he made up his stories; he could not be caught out on the names of the towns, the colours of flags, the ground area of different countries, the depths of the different seas; he would draw maps, colouring them in, recopying them, tracing them with obstinate precision. But what he liked most of all was making up new captions for certain illustrations. Or those pictures that are composed in such a way that they reveal, sometimes from only one angle of vision, a figure hidden in the landscape which at first sight is quite invisible….he preferred, by means of a story he would make up on the spur of the moment, to link together the colour photographs (which, in fact, had no apparent connection) in the big book he had found in the loft. Having set it up on the arms of a chair that faced the audience gathered together in the study (a chair concealed behind the blue curtains of the window), he hid behind the stage he thus set up, sat down on the floor, knocked three times, drew the curtains, began his lecture, his hand outstretched over the back of the chair to turn the pages, and became angry if someone wasn’t listening."

Philippe Sollers, The Park. A.M. Sheridan Smith trans. New York: Red Dust, Inc. 1981. 28-9.

The big red atlas is both storymaker and teacher of precision, that diligent act of tracing. What does his audience note in his lecture, his making of connections between pictures that have no apparent connection or his mastery of geography, his obstinate precision? Surely its both that make him want them to listen, gifts of spectacle and learning.

2007-08-23T00:19:00.000-07:00

If I were a woman.

This afternoon reading more of a late 15th century romance called Tirant lo Blanc, I found myself studying a passage in which the heroic knight (Tirant) begins to relate advice to a damsel with the intriguing preface of If I were a woman. It was in this pronouncement that knight and I became aligned. Our swords touched in some gesture of unity inspired by a common move toward a game of bizarre gender-play.

It is officially the end of summer. Tomorrow is the end of my post vernal fantasy that I am a brilliant boy undergraduate learning an ancient language on the brink of writing some fabulous series of texts that no one can identify as academic or creative, but that they just cannot put down. An august novel at age 19, fists above those stories in the New Yorker, more arcane than the stuff I desire to study now, a starmap of the best ideas I’ve ever thought, galaxy of gut feeling, and so on.

As a girl who grew up wanting to live as a boy, playing ninja in the backyard and wearing my brother’s clothes, I am in one of my phases in which I am uncomfortable with people calling me girl. So much so, that in a recent meeting, I turned to my bewildered lunch partner, as if intoxicated beyond belief on my glass of ice-water and told him:

What good would it be to be considered a “woman academic”? I just want to be a scholar. (which basically means, I’ve come to realize in my years of academia, a male scholar).

After numerous episodes of similar comments flying out of my mouth, I have surmised once and for all that I am afraid of women. It was earlier this year that I came to understand this quite well, the words of Dar Williams' fabulous song about women fearing women “As Cool as I am” making perfect sense. I turned to a female colleague one day in the stairwell and said with utter disgust and honesty: Yes, it is beautifully written. You know it must be true because you also know how it pains me to admit it.

Oh yes, this is something I will have to fix. Why do I genuinely celebrate the triumphs of men? My congratulations, that’s terrific, even my you go bitch! to a male friend is genuinely happy and celebratory. Oh, if I were a woman. My all-female highschool and the memories of my year and half of girl-college are all in tears.

So as I walk away from my galaxy of gut feeling, heading into a year that will require much good behavior and holding it together, probably a lot of if I were a woman, I will hold onto my august novel, trying, albeit ambivalently, to turn to a page that paints something between Tirant and me as damsel, and me and Tirant embracing as fellow knights.

2007-08-12T22:23:00.001-07:00

A bit of august motivation

With a giant grammar test on the way and some tricky pieces of text to revise, I need a pick me up from one of the best. Yes, at times like these sometimes we need a good Englishman, especially one urging on beautiful virgins like Robert Herrick (1591–1674).

--

To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
The higher he's a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he's to setting.

That age is best which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times still succeed the former.

Then be not coy, but use your time,
And while ye may, go marry:
For having lost but once your prime,
You may for ever tarry.

-Robert Herrick

2007-08-05T16:54:00.000-07:00

Spoonview

To Mimi

Once upon a midnight moon, my grandmother spied with a telescope of spoons.

She saw no craters or shadows, neither angels nor saints in parade,

Just devils, blindfolded, engaged in a somber game of charades.

In the next season she will pass the tele-spoons to me, because she

Will no longer need spoons to see, and it will be then that we see,

Her there, near me,

The whole of the devils’ humanity.

"What had we been missing? Why not until now?", I’ll say

And she will answer,

"We have been looking at them as if they were night,

for it is day, day! that they play.

2007-08-03T08:18:00.000-07:00

New window: a taste of what remains

..........................

…………....................................................................../

//……………………..................................................../

………………………………………................................//

............................................................................................./

A few months back while I was on my version of vacation, a friend sent me a text he had written. I opened the file and was presented with 7 pages of lines and dots, the angled lines jutting out from the dots running towards the edge of the page, seemingly strategically placed. There was a space where a title would have been, two lines for an opening citation or a dedication, and row after row of neat lines of pin-prick dots. Of the bibliography, what did remain were partial references, shadows of names of cities, footprints of some punctuation, page numbers, and the surnames of selected authors. In a period of increased eccentricity and self-indulgent peculiarity, it looked to me like a fascinating work of modern art, one that had dotted and jutted itself into an academic book.

…………../

//……………………

What became clear after I had written a brief email to the author was that it was not the art it had seemed it was; behind the lines, or ahead of them, were words made up of characters of a language that my pdf reader and computer couldn't recognize. Only lines remained, just dots did, yet it kept its form as text. I maintained that I could read it.

………………………………………/

…………………............................................................................../

I was reminded of this yesterday afternoon as I sat looking out my living room window reworking an interpretation of some philosophy that I used in a paper I wrote a few months ago. After deciding that I was attempting to theorize a text that is built upon its inability to be read and worse yet, voices to itself and to its readers a desperate plea to be burned alive, I decided that that reading was a cop out and falling pray to the game that the text itself establishes and in essence, constitutes. My thought process went like this:

I said: There is no line of thought!

Then I said: There is every thought! Work these remains.

…………………………………….../

Yesterday morning on a Latin exam I could not recall the word for maintained and substituted remained. This may sound like an idiotic substitution and it was, yet in my 5 minutes I had to finish a longish sentence in Latin before the papers were taken away, it seemed like an acceptable option that would at least demonstrate that I knew how to use the bizzare construction he was asking us to produce. What remained of my maintain was the verb maneō and a fleeting feeling that it was close enough. I tried to write a crafty little marginal note to the instructor //………, something to wrap around my maneō, oh figura of maintained!, but I doubt it worked.

He will say: There is no line of thought!

And I have said: There is every thought! Work these remains.

What is it worth, our capacity to work remains, to make new windows from those footprints of text, flashes of light, colored, maybe tainted, with giddiness, that at least in appearance, constitute no line of thought? Perhaps this is precisely what we are supposed to do, to encourage movement and seek to capture something in motion, the fluid freeze: in order to be able to work remains (not work with, but work), nothing can be buried, still, stuck in a single pattern of sending. I cannot stop thinking about invention as the best form of biography, possibly because this is the only Derridean idea that has ever made perfect sense to me. It has complicated, at any rate, my notions of arriving and notarriving. There is stillness in both the archive and in the invention. While it is possible that nothing arrives to us from the depths of the archive, invention, that best biography, the ink of passionate lovers and the yearn, that fiery suspension, is only possible because we haven’t yet received anything and perhaps know that we never will.

Here’s to maintenance of movement and a tumultuous ride with the remains; send me a new window.

2007-07-29T10:02:00.001-07:00

Two thoughts plus 1.

Mortal City.

Folksinger Dar Williams hails from Northampton MA, making her heroine, at least it was that way in the late 90’s, of many students at Smith College. So many nights we powered up to Dar’s earnest voice, yelping “Party Generation” out of our rooms in the Quad, readying our vocal chords and bellies for beer punch and whatever fruit and cheese selection we had purchased for our house party. I saw Dar in concert three times in my 1.5 years in Northampton and still have all her albums.

For the first time in several years, I listened to Dar’s 7 minute Mortal City on the album of the same name. I listened to this song nearly every night as I tried to fall asleep in my two years in Philadelphia, a summer at NYU, and the first year I moved to Washington, DC. Even if you lack confidence in my choice of music, to be sure, a legitimate reservation, I urge you to listen to this poem. A text it is, one for and of seemingly unnavigable, heartless cities. It tells of the encounter of two searching souls over a chance spaghetti dinner that end up in the same bed on the first date not out of sexual attraction, or even loneliness, but out of pure necessity. A power outage makes it impossible for the male party to go home. Their conclusion, reached through the acting out and remedying of aching heart, is that the city breathes.

...He said you're not the only one, the streets were dark tonight,
It was like another century, with dim lamps and candles lighting up
the icy trees and the clouds and a covered moon.

She said, “What kind of people make a city where you can't see the sky
and you can't feel the ground?”

…

Dar Williams, “Mortal City”, Mortal City, Razor & Tie, 1996.

...............................

Visual

It was Thursday that I decided that I was in desperate need of some visual stimulation, a sensation and revelation that always comes when I find myself at a loss for words. In my attempts these past months to produce a good creative piece, I have come to understand the importance of image as inspiration. So I packed my bags for SF Moma, met a friend, and put myself in front of paintings and other attractions.

I had primarily come for Martin Munkacsi’s photography, which I had been intending to see since May. The pictures were still there, yet not still at all. In a photo of a motorcycle creating an enormous piecey splash I found the acceleration I want to create and capture in a text—the capturing will not be one of perpetual spinning, but of a fluid freeze, a snapshot whose black blood made from a mixture of organic material, squashed strawberries and stems, cumin, and sweat, never dries. I am debating about purchasing the exhibition catalog only because (apart from its being very expensive) I think that the images suffocate bound up in a book, as opposed to being framed and pinned (both to and by) a wall.

We ended up on the second floor in front of a tall tree photographed and painted on curling paper (Tacita Dean, Beauty), and with Hamilton’s Indigo Blue, a system of 18,000 used blue uniforms, a living human being sitting at a wooden desk, a Pink Peal eraser, eraser shavings, and a book called International Law Situations published by the Naval War College. I disrupted the system, or viewed badly, somewhat on purpose, fixating on what at the time, I thought was the human element, or at least the most present, breathing one, staring at his face for over 3 minutes trying to see if he, in turn, would disrupt his system. He did not, any variation of his licking of the eraser while looking left, erasing letters in ink, and sweeping of the eraser shavings with his palm was imperceptible. I wondered and hence, performed the experiment I just described, if making way for a new history, one not printed and published by the Naval War College, for example, could be done systematically. Is the best way to undo a system the carrying out of a set of actions as systematic as the series that built it? The play between the attendant's movements and the pile of still blue is unsettling. In its repeating, the motion of the man becomes as still, somewhat more so, than the uniforms behind him.

N.B. Click here for an illuminating text inspired by Indigo Blue.

.................................................................

+1

Unsolicited, because, well, he is just like that, on Thursday Sam rented me a documentary about the philosopher Derrida. He then typed a word document detailing operating instructions for the television and DVD player in our living room, since, after a year of attempts to explain the workings of the three remotes, our television and its associated electronics, he has determined that these machines constitute a system that I do not understand.

Towards the beginning, in a clip from a conference given at NYU, Derrida speaks about biographies of philosophers and says something to the effect of:

The biographer who interprets a passage of the philosopher in an inventive way is a better biographer than the intellectual writing a book to be published by an authoritative press; the latter attempts to stabilize the image of the philosopher, while the former understands that biography is external to philosophy.

Our best homage, then, is a reencounter with the text, an invention. If biography is external to philosophy, the homage we create, our inventive reading is not just not biography, but also something not published, finished. It has as its spirit, at least, a present that despite its fluidity, is most mortal. In order to remember him, then, we must allow our interpretations to die. Assurance of the mortality of our readings is the only assurance of new invention, the creation of bleeding memories.

2007-07-22T12:30:00.001-07:00

Dreaming on both

--

Thou hast nor youth nor age
But as it were an after dinner sleep
Dreaming on both.

Measure for Measure, 3.i
also Gerontion, T.S. Eliot.

What a strange old age and adolescence graduate school can be. Friday I spent 35 minutes studying a word in an early 15^th century French manuscript that looked like “decoipuent.” Although there was a kind scholar sitting less than 3 feet away who could not only identify the word, but also tell me its precise meaning in that particular context and the reason for its spelling, I kept on, my lumbering and ineffective scrutiny, likely made worse by my inability to sleep these past days.

Thou hast nor youth nor age

What I wanted to see, and in fact, what I was seeing in variant form, was déçoivent (meaning, in this case, deceive), but couldn’t figure out what that “p” was doing there. Was the scribe, otherwise so careful and cunning, perhaps particularly, as I have noticed these past days, in his modification of key pronouns, assimilating from the word puet or peuent, also present in the passage?

Oh unetymological p, why were you tricking me?

Yes, it turns out that it was common in Renaissance French to insert unetymological consonants in the middle of words, thus decoipuent. We should read the c as c with cedilla and ignore the ‘p’. Part of my delay in asking, apart from not wanting to disturb him from his own work, was and is always a fear that the answer is utterly obvious and, further, one that I should have known 4 or 5 years ago. By the grace of God, the most benevolent one there is, I disgraced none of my teachers and it wasn’t entirely apparent.

What became clear, however, was not only how much I rely on my patient teachers and the teachers of others, who happen to be in the library, but also on my good compañeros, those fellow graduate students who help me in the formation of questions, and in the process to determine if others are embarrassing to ask. I wonder: will there be a time in which I must rely purely on my own knowledge of Renaissance French? When I ask nobody but me all questions, idiotic and otherwise? Will my youth and old age leave me nothing but middle, Middle-me, nobody’s graduate student, and nobody’s real teacher, reliant only on my own skills in French paleography, the Trésor de la langue française, and a daily juggle between the lumbering fatigue of an insomniac and, on the otherhand, a hyperactivitiy that cannot be contained?

But as it were an after dinner sleep
Dreaming of both.

Like I said, a strange adolescence. I will try to wrangle my colleagues on both sides, those not older and younger, no, because, at least from my view, this academia is much like unetymological p, an unlinear, uniquely evolved age. No, I will try for a handful of those middle and those not, trying to make me a frame such that the performance of unetymological p, and at times, what seems like a lot of decoipuent, is most productive.

Here’s to Dreaming of both, a wish for a more fruitful, but also and always necessarily unusual celebration of a forthcoming inbetween.

2007-07-17T21:50:00.001-07:00

Dic, duc, fac, fer with heart and the dork that may have made her: a little Sollers and Derrida.

This past weekend, between house guest entertaining and excessive eating, I have been engaging in disorganized, but not lifeless study of a translation of the introduction to the first section of Derrida’s text Dissemination entitled “The Time before First.” I am wandering my way through the smallish Derrida anthology, likely not a very popular one because I bought a used copy for less than a couple of coffees at Starbucks, in pursuit of some new questions or some satisfactory, albeit temporary, answers to some current ones. Why this anthology? I am not entirely sure. At present, I am in a bizarre place in my studies in which I am fascinated by the process of learning grammar and reading grammar books. I am desperate to chant my Dic, duc, fac and fer don’t say "e", because it isn't there! and the others. I have flashcards and use mechanical pencils.

There is relief and a little disgust in my grammar obsession. As much as possible, I adopt my undergraduate student self in my moments of drilling verbs. She is a good student. I have learned that there is still an obedient and diligent me left, pieces of that desperate little emaciated dork who sat in the front of the room, breathlessly taking in even the most terribly boring lecture read from a professor’s 1970’s yellowed, handwritten notes, but she does not live in my study of literature. My current theory, to which I will madly clutch for a good bit of time, is that big ideas and beautiful writing come from reading as much good writing as possible, good discussion partners, desire, and rebellion. It is really dic [imperative say] duc, [impv. lead] fac [impv. make] and fer [impv. carry] with heart.

“The Time before First” dialogs with several texts of the French novelist Philippe Sollers, in particular with Nombres, but also with Le Parc. I have only read a few passages of Nombres and Le Parc and all of that was long ago. I know now, however, that I must read these texts in their entirety. I cite a little Nombres, then provide a few comments on Derrida’s sayings about it. His probably couldn’t be called a reading or a commenting, more some type of observations out of time. Whatever it is, “The Time before First” gives rise to a stunning conversation between some words that appear in Sollers' work and Derrida:

“il fallait donc repasser par tous les points du circuit, par son réseau à la fois caché et visible et tenter de rallumer simultanément sa mémoire comme celle d’un agonisant parvenu au moment tournant…Prenant une tête au commencement et la confrontant avec ce qui l’a façonnée, et lui permettant un moment de dire ce qu’elle rêve ou pense.
Nombres, roman. Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1968; 108.

[It was thus necessary to go over again all the points in the circuit, or its network, at the same time hidden and visible, and to try simultaneously to revive its memory, like that of a person dying who has reached the turning point. Taking a head to begin with and confronting it with what made it and then permitting it to say what it dreams or thinks.]

Speaking of a moment out of time in which a head is allowed to speak what it dreams or thinks after having met something that had a pivotal role in its beginning, Soller’s writing draws ideas not necessarily that constitute a deconstruction of the notion of author, or even ideas of the fragmentation, the flying away of voice, but of the idea of origin. Are we thus eager to say that there are not, there won't be, and there were not any authors because we are uncomfortable, at least to some extent, with any attempt to pinpoint an origin of a particular text? Yet, it is not that there is no origin, for, as the above passage notes:

Prenant une tête au commencement et la confrontant avec ce qui l’a façonnée, et lui permettant un moment de dire ce qu’elle rêve ou pense

If we can confront the head with what made it, we admit, then, that it was made: it came from someplace. Perhaps this is some of what this passage tells: that we, people and texts, all came from others.

After a beautiful passage on Nombres as a poem in a raised voice, something that could be useful for some of the poetry I have been attempting to read, Derrida comments on the nature of expropriation of voice in Nombres, how the voice and voices are taken:

Expropriation thus does not proceed merely by a ciphered suspension of voice, by a kind of spacing that punctuates it or rather draws its shafts from it, or at it; it is also an operation within voice. Mainly, if thought belongs from the beginning to no one, if ‘impersonification’ is what is initial, then this is quite simply because the text never in fact begins. Not that its rifts are erased or its ‘positive’ ruptures blurred and blended into the continuum of something always-already-there. But precisely because the rifts in it never stand as origins: they always transform a preexisting text. No archeology of Nombres is possible from the moment they are read. You find yourself being indefinitely referred to bottomless, endless connections and to the indefinitely articulated regress of the beginning, which is forbidden along with all archeology, eschatology, or hermeneutic teleology. All in the same blow. ‘The new text without end or beginning’ can be neither maintained nor contained in the clasp of a book. The text is out of sight when it compels the horizon itself to enter the frame of its own scene, so as to ‘learn to embrace with increased grandeur the horizon of the present time.’

(Derrida, “The time before First”, in Julian Wolfreys, ed. The Derrida Reader: Writing Performances. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1998: 132-3).

It is not, then, that there are no beginnings, that everything becomes one big gray continuum, or a blob sitting in an inbetween space that we cannot define, but that is nevertheless the place of action, (this is a conclusion I often reach after reading Derrida), but that we cannot identify anything that looks like an origin in a text like Nombres. Even in its making, in its birth, the text is already in progress: not becoming part of the continuum, but because parts of its birth, its most organic material, are other texts. In a sense, reading a text involves the creation of type of eternal present, a space in which it both runs away, is out of sight; at the same time, however, the text encloses itself in a circuit of a very present present. But is every text in motion, is there anything that can be done to lead and guide that very present present? Are the processes of running away and enclosing in the present contradictory? Can one thwart the progress of the other? The image of the head being confronted with what made it, perhaps a little Ovid, a controversial Roman, letters, the frantic writing of colleagues and enemies, and then allowed to dream or think is a beautiful one that has given me new energy. I will even show it to the dork in the front row, since the rebellious me, while not necessarily able to identify her as a beginning, likely owes the dork quite a lot.

2007-07-05T18:02:00.001-07:00

Diary of a massage, my Philadelphia fire.

Although she claimed to pull out poison, she rubbed big images, those hand-brushes. I am not one for professional massages. I am afraid of too much dislocation, both of limbs and right brain. Too much touch can be bad for dative of the possessor, and attempts at decorar, even household duties. Dishwashing. Derrida deciphering. Drying dripping dog. Here are three pictures I took from the rub while I let myself out almost all the way, except for the littlest bit I kept intact, to make sure she heeded my advice to keep my arms on the table.

Left calf lecture with Holly at University of Chicago, 1996, Toni Morrison, “The Trouble With Paradise”. Me 18, us sitting in a pew in Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, Toni talking, showing myth, unpacking and repacking paradise, her voice reading and me thinking about Sixo’s (Beloved) language, his giving up on English. I had given up before too, but for different, probably much less tragic reasons. My sister and I sat together listening to her talk and gave up nothing. We grew older and younger all at once, neither our pushing forward, nor pulling our back created a standstill, no, no, we made a rising up. A new reunion, a meeting place and hand clasp of intellectual curiosity that we had never before shared. Midwestern humidity, the smell of big old city, and her fiery hum told me that this literature thing was for me.

With middle part of my right arm went Julia, Summer, Laura and me sitting around the seminar table at Kelly Writer’s house, those dejected or, alternatively, heady graduate students in English and creative writing talking about Bourdieu and Max Weber. I tried to look eager and learned, not quite believing that an essay about carpet fibers had landed me in that class. The professor was writer Lorene Cary, our project was to read, discuss and teach some of the works of John Edgar Wideman to students and members of the community of Philadelphia. The carpet fibers, which I painted as pillars standing strong in resistance to their own filth, dirty head and unhygienic core, an unbodily resistance did me no good for writing the poetry we were suspected to produce on a weekly basis or, in particular, for teaching highschool students. In my years of academia thus far, teaching Wideman in that Philadelphia highschool was the most difficult thing I have ever tried to do. I remember sitting on the subway en route hoping that it would get stuck, I desperately wanted to not arrive. My invented stories of paper tigers, all those Sunday debates about aesthetics and sexuality, dances with tea and pastries and high-quality paper meant nothing in this context: these students demanded an honesty, a most inner truth, that I wanted to leave on the L-train. It is not paper, its not a discourse, there is no such thing as erasure, no place for the flâneur, a fiery phoenix, or performance: its a single show with the most final answer. My yearn sent out to the farthest pasture, I was trying to tell about another Philadelphia Fire, one that my students could see that I couldn’t understand.

“If the city is a man, a giant sprawled for miles on his back, rough contours of his body smothering the rolling landscape, the rivers and woods, hills and valleys, bumps and gullies, crushing with his weight, his shadow, all the life beneath him, a derelict in a terminal stupor, too exhausted, too wasted to move, rotting in the sun, then Cudjoe is deep within the giant’s stomach, in a subway-surface car shuddering through stinking loops of gut, tunnels carved out of the decaying flesh, a prisoner of rumbling innards that scream when trolleys pass over rails embedded in flesh. Cudjoe remembers a drawing of Gulliver strapped down in Lillput just so. Ropes staked over his limbs like hundreds of tiny tents, pyramids pinning the giant to the earth. If the city is a man sprawled unconscious drunk in an alley, kids might find him, drench him with lighter fluid and drop a match on his chest. He’d flame up like a heap of all the unhappy monks in Asia. Puff the magic dragon.” (John Edgar Wideman, Philadelphia Fire. New York: Vintage, 1990; 20-1).

It was the touch of my left hand that pulled out my missing of the East Coast, Philadelphia, New York. I desperately miss the Philadelphia Fire, probably because I never understood it. There is something so fascinating about living in a place that you consider unmasterable. There is university confusion and challenges and then there is city unknowing, the turmoil and crisis that comes from attempting to navigate tunnels carved of decaying flesh, those sprawling rumblings of lighter fluid that float monks of Asia, fried chicken bones, the perpetual pronouncement of “unable to judge”, wonder, wonder, and breath, breath.

2007-06-28T00:01:00.000-07:00

Seeing ocean in the pineapple trees, a reflection on the limits of like.

"So then love walked up to like
said I know that you don't like me much

let's go for a ride
this ocean is wrapped around that pineapple tree

and is your place in heaven
worth giving up these kisses
these, yes, these kisses…"

Tori Amos, Cooling (To Venus And Back: Still Orbiting). Please click the link and have a listen.

2007-06-26T21:19:00.000-07:00

Creatures of the deep, fleeing satin: I miss you.

Today I finally gave in and went to a fancy salon for the first time in Berkeley. And yes, it was Festoon on MLK, dear Festoon, complete with its own Pomeranian. I look like I am dying to move to Los Angeles, spent way too much money, but my hair smells so good. The color is bright and even. It looks like I have a haircut for the first time in 6 years. She even sold me a hair product called “sea spray” because she decided I was a creature of the deep. I didn’t let her cut too much.

I have been doing a lot of missing these past days. Pre and a little post missing. Hair I think I could have lost. That I might lose or will have lost. Girls and men flown and fleeing. Some sea spray threatening to evaporate and more already dust, mere dust. Hair ribbon threatening to fall to the floor.

Today was one of those days where I realize that I’m shy when I feel my ribbon slipping. That when it counts, when floor is about to meet satin, when we go unraveling and I desperately want to communicate more to a loved-one than mere swoon, I can’t say a thing. Sea spray washed away, girls and men gone missing, and me, stuck and silent, language lost, unraveling ribbon in hand staring at the door from which they all departed.

Oh Fallen hair,

unraveling ribbon,

lumbering creature of the deep,

speak!

2007-06-24T22:41:00.000-07:00

________________ (You fill in)

Proust describes description and the acts of hasty drawers:

Doubtless the Swann who was a familiar figure in all the clubs of those days differed hugely from the Swann created by my great-aunt when, of an evening, in our little garden at Combray, after the two shy peals had sounded from the gate, she would inject and vitalize with everything she knew about the Swann family the obscure and shadowy figure who emerged, with my grandmother in his wake, from the dark background and who was identified by his voice. But then, even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of other people. Even the simple act which we describe as “seeing someone we know” is to some extent an intellectual process. We pack the physical outline of the person we see with all the notions we have already formed about him, and in the total picture of him which we compose in our minds those notions have certainly the principal place. In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice as if it were no more than a transparent envelope, that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is these notions which we recognize and to which we listen (Proust, In Search of Lost Time Volume I: Swan’s Way, Moncrieff and Kilmartin trans. Modern Library, 2003; 23-4).

This is perhaps the standard, the intellectual process that Proust describes, that filling-in of the transparent envelope. We paint the shadow of noses with brushes of first, second, maybe third impressions. The “seeing someone we know” becomes an event, and a ritualistic one indeed; we go by yesterday’s idea, last month’s news or gossip about him, instead of engaging in the more difficult intellectual process of trying to see his present. The narrator appears to paint this method as a fault in his grandmother and in the general public. We are all bad fillers-in, too quick to see transparent. I fill out your cheek with one paint-laden wide stroke and stop listening to your voice just as soon as I have identified it.

turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will

Then there are the skilled painters who are able to pull out to the canvas elements of your character that you had thought deeply hidden, secret to all expect to those to whom you had accidentally revealed them, to the person you live with, or to intimate friends of 20 years or more. These can frighten as much as the hasty fillers-in. One of these painters of innards, somehow pinned and subsequently pictured me as a fly-by-night traveler and unsolicited, provided me with about 3000 words worth of emails and instructions on how to navigate certain central and southern regions of his country. He helped me to make plans.

Tomorrow is a good day to do this instead of writing weird stuff alone in an attic! Make a plan now!

It is true, I go to places, having decided that they would be my destinations 5 minutes before, without street maps or the subway map, bus schedule dripping, threatening to wash through my back pocket. I fall apart a little each time I walk out the door, even in Berkeley, never ceasing to leave little fragments, earring glass, or glossy laminated maps, those stacks of pre-counted change behind. I sit on the train rubbing the corners of a headphoneless ipod on my thigh, thinking if I circle it one more time, it will omit sound, be made man, or generate two Bose earbuds (because I always imagine more than I had to begin with).

Despite all this and the fact that in general, he is a very loving, perceptive person, I nevertheless asked myself, upon reading what he sent and our contact while I was away, how does he know all this? How can he fill all this in? This is no simple nose-drawing, he has figured a piece of my core. When I look closer at his production, though, it becomes unclear as to whether his painting is engaged in a pulling apart or bringing together.

Salvador Dalí, Desmaterialización de la nariz de Nerón.

Nero, oh Nero, is your tyrant being extracted as fast as the pomegranate is crushed? Or is it your love of the arts that is pushing your quartered bust together?

When we move beyond Swann's grandmother's injecting and vitalization, the thick brushstroke that completes the check, what is our motion

is it an untimely revelation that takes apart, or an admitting, a giving in that draws us, we bodies and we souls, together? The figure who once thought herself obscure and shadowy emerges clear as Berkeley summer, early afternoon, for the painters, actually quite transparent, as one had told her recently. But maybe the quick drawers also have it right. Our voices are transparent envelopes, able to be viewed, maybe even heard, but not read by all. It is the painters that can somehow fill-in, it is they that can read those illiterate and illegible archives. Ding Ding.

after the two shy peals had sounded from the gate.

They paint pushing outward like the exploding pomegranate and putting together (but maybe separating as well), as the quartered chest, both frightening and vitalizing the figure in their series of strokes.

2007-06-20T02:14:00.000-07:00

Love, Laughter, and a liver-punching American Hollow: good thing there's friends and bad movies.

This past weekend pulled at many of my emotions, strings of head and heart, my inner timeline unraveled. Pieces of cut up past, present and future I had left as a trail to find my way back, from someplace, probably many places, nearly all flew away, except the stickiest pieces, those that are always with me, my desperate need for love and laughter. There is no sugar or intent in that alliteration; it is by chance, reflection of the unplanned, most inherent nature of my need to be close to people. Truth be written, if I had my way, I’d sit next rubbing elbows at least three times per week with my loved-ones, close friends, and those I most admire. Without being campy, which is something I despise, we’d write together and make bread-crumbs to pick up in some time future. There’d be lots of hugging, hand-holding, and good-natured punches to the liver, because everyone knows that’s the one that counts. This weekend and lately I have engaged in some liver-punching. Not enough though, there are many livers I’d like to punch, but am afraid they’d take it the wrong way. On Saturday, my sister, brother and I made a book together for our parents with tape, scissors and glue. We cut and taped and discovered that we are all a little in love with T.S.Eliot. My brother often thinks about Bernard Shaw and my sister knows our childhood in music. We played out our missing, which was probably more than each of us had ever imagined, also our mourning and wishing in the form of pasting in. It was easily one of the most amazing experiences of my adult life. It is for that reason I don’t want to tell it too much.

Today and last week I am feeling a little intellectually stuck. Yesterday I went searching for a yellow raft in the form of an attempt to read, in a concentrated fashion (but also all at once), pieces of 5 books on Provençal texts in the 12th and 13th centuries. Some reading that I browsed out of the PC3300's. It was a controlled browsing, I picked out one sure thing and a couple before-reads, a few others that are probably no good at all. Then I read some really cool and beautifully sad Ausias March poems in a bilingual edition. I cried about not being able to read the original well. I actually threw a pencil out an open window into one of our rose bushes. It may have done a little good (it didn't hit any livers). The consolation is that, I hope, it can’t get any worse. The reading woke me up, but as assurance, just in case the sleep should continue until tomorrow, I bought a new visual stimulation book and pulled out an old one. I’ll mention the new and then return to the old, which I’ll probably do for quite some time.

The new is Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer by Peter Turchi. I found this recommendation at Design Observer, a fascinating blog on design and culture. Peter Turchi is professor and chair of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and is the co-author of two other books on writing, The Story Behind the Story and Bringing the Devil to His Knees.

The old has been with me for some time. It is Rory Kennedy’s American Hollow, with photographs by Steve Lehman. American Hollow, which still has a space on the Washington Post website, tells of seven generations of the Bowling family of Kentucky and Kennedy’s experience living with them. The book is a companion to an HBO documentary, one I saw in 1999. This portrait of this family’s Appalachian life is breathtaking, if for nothing else, for the hardships that this family has endured. It is a wonderful mix of visual images, video, and text by Kennedy and testimonies of the family members themselves, Kennedy’s transcriptions of their voiced words, Lehman’s of their faces. The faces and words meet in the movie, which is also very present in the book.

I remember presenting this book to one of my professors about 7 years ago. He was a kind and very important soul in the land of academia, even though I didn’t comprehend it at the time. His class was a fascinating one on the production of the Residencia de los estudiantes, in particular, on Salavador Dalí and Luis Buñuel. Showing a group of undergraduates Chien Andalou and Las Hurdes: Tierra sin pan (Land Without Bread) as well as hundreds of Dalí and Lorca works) and then submitting oneself to a round of 15 page papers on said material in which young Americans butcher your beautiful language is venerable indeed. I told him in the most terrible Spanish that I had to write on Lehman’s photographs as film: still images made active and moving by the captions that surrounded them, ending with some ridiculous connection to the energy and subsequent paralysis garnered from the pushing of a cow off a high hill in Land Without Bread, and ending in the eye-slicing in Chien Andalou. I am not sure how it is possible that he understood anything I said, but he pretended that he did, reacting, perhaps intentionally, as though he were annoyed. He said something, that, pathetically, I have heard again recently:

Let’s get a few things straight. Would Lorca say he was just Preciosa’s painter? Would you tell Dalí to write you a Gradiva Rediscovers the Anthropomorphic Ruins, and expect to be get a painting? An image is an image, a text is a text. That we cannot make-up. Even in your movie.

That we cannot make-up. I ended up writing on William Tell in Chien Andalou with a good bibliography because I too, can be utterly lame and did not want to get B+. But my B+ (or worse, much worse) mis-infomed movies are still pending, obviously. I’ll never give them up. I ran many of those today and they came out in half a notebook that will never surface. It is in the B string area that I will actually find my overman, that which, the from which, and my with which that will push me to write something good.

In my movies it is all liver-punching and hand-holding, the together bread-crumb tearing among friends who have come together for what they didn’t have, or, alternately, for what they have in common.

2007-06-14T22:30:00.000-07:00

Avalon I am. Of a horse and erudite colloquialism.

Today while running, I wasn’t riding with a group of fellow runners, no banner or erasure, just with my old horse Avalon, going in a class at a Los Angeles horse show I’ll never forget. I was riding it, unfortunately it’s a memory, but still a pretty good one. We flew, nearly fell off, and put on a good performance.

Like most things, with riding, my performance fell almost always at one of the extremes. I was what you’d call an art rider, my production either a stormy, dark-green filthy disaster, or colors and shapes and textures and canvas of impressive. Either way, a little unbelievable. To this day, I think the impressive part always seemed better because at times I was so awful. Really awful. I had a little following only because in the end, it’s the terrible or the excellent, the clinically insane, outrageous, brilliant, tyrannical or unbelievably weird that people bother to talk about. I rode with two wonderful teachers who I desperately miss, although I’d be hard pressed to admit it to one (who I actually love very much). Our arguing usually became and threatened to overcome us, he pushed and I always pulled. We won though, and that was something both of us wanted.

That year at Los Angeles was bad. I had screwed almost everything up and really suffered for it. There was the typical tournament of fights and points of contention, me losing on all of them, per usual. There really are only so many fights to be had. Then they repeat. My last opportunity for redemption was a big money, prestigious class. I usually know when the this is its are, they sit someplace between being temporarily ignored and permanently banned. I went in the ring, turning on my current soundtrack, probably some Tori Amos or Sinead O’Connor song, and right away knew I was in the zone. I had entered. Avalon knew it too. Once there, in that zone, going in that dusty ring, I pulled out the bag of traits people had begun to associate with my riding. Of course, all of these tricks gravitated around over the top, always overdone, most of which I was trying to eliminate: pretending to nearly fall off after bigger jumps to emphasize the style and power of my horse's jump, galloping (instead of pleasantly cantering) at single jumps in the middle of nowhere to show that we could produce beauty at any pace, winking at the judge. Etcetera.

Here is me throwing my hands up my horse's neck, ducking, and letting my leg slide back to indicate that her jump is so round, I can barely stay on.

We rode, I ran my tricks, won, and was told I had half vindicated myself for an otherwise terrible week. Today I thought about bags of tricks, the traits that become associated with us and how we perform them because in some way, they come to constitute our identities. How we fulfill the expectations of others because in part, they are ours. If people think I’m crazy, I’m crazy. If I think I am Avalon, I’m still crazy.

I remember sometime ago when I had the opportunity to talk at considerable length with a scholar I admire over too much red wine, maybe even after each of us had some tequila. I told her, probably slurring and I think in Spanish:

I want to write like you. You have such a beautiful erudite colloquialism.

I think I even cited something from one of her books, a passage I’d talked about with someone else I admire over too much red wine, and she even cried a little, (N.B: there is too much wine in general at academic meetings, dinners, and parties) telling me:

That is what I try to do. I’m so glad its noticed.

Erudite colloquialism is something I see in the texts of somebody I read a lot, probably and (hopefully) more than he knows . I try to copy this person’s style, but can’t quite get it, it hasn’t and probably never will become me, because I’ve decided that erudite colloquialism only comes when you really really know your subject and many related ones. If you read Derrida in translation, this really comes through: sentences that seem plain, stripped-down enough until you get to the end of the page and realize that you’ve read what would resemble, in three dimensional form, the peg-board and rubber band art-project of the most hyperactive and disturbed child in the 2^nd grade. Tension, taut, straining rubber pulled too many directions and threatening (but never able) to burst. There is something so alluring about this style, not just for the energy it contains, but for its trick: one gets lured into thinking the text is simple only to realize they have no idea what its saying, popular turn of phrase ends in unknown, the forever re-reading of sentences.

So I keep riding, on the hunt with Avalon for my erudite colloquialism and big blue ribbons received through genuine effort iced with a bag of tricks, my flying and flagrant fakery, going with and against my teachers. Perhaps it has always been my attraction to pulling, to the making and false-harnessing of rubbery energy, that makes me want to never stop running and riding.

2007-06-05T15:18:00.000-07:00

Park Ride

Today was a day of much mental stimulation, overload of art and vivid images of the Passion of Christ, retraer of nails, blood and lamenting Virgin, the most frightened icebergs I’ve ever seen, morning and mourning with Dalí’s Ruinas antropomórficas, more Bataille, attempts to think about excess, both mine and in the Middle Ages, an engaged reading with a creative essay, some loneliness, a good amount of confusion, and one of strangest and best Tori Amos songs I’ve found yet.

I went for a gallop.

I know I had a conscious moment while running today. I was desperate for my unreliable head-typewriter to preserve it, but it was moving too slowly, its clumsy ink and strikers stabbing and bleeding at quicksand, the image, image after image, already sunk. There was no capturing and good thing for that; a successful recording and probably even this, the writing of just the most minuscule fragment, the three lines found on 532 year old parchment hiding under a hastily placed pastedown, would and will make it a memory.

It was something out of the Philadelphia era when I went fishing for the meanest and most unattainable friend I could find with my stories as bait. Hook of frailty, Virgilian face as worm. I counted the girl runners in the park, this evening there were 8 among the many men. These women and I were riding black horses, galloping through the trees of the park, turning landscaped spaces and fountains into green, fenceless expanses. We carried a banner over our heads that was made of pages of the Lapidario sewn together with red thread. In the front at times, especially when I closed my eyes, were the only women I wrote today. They had bigger spurs than the rest; their horses carried their heads higher and sported neck armor of blue feathers. It was our turn, hour of the subaltern scribes, and we were all, the dozen

minus two,

running like mad, counting the silence between the striking of a horses hooves as loaded non-syllables, spits of sound that refused to join together. Seeing a flint or archē or plunk coming together, one of us destroyed the vowels, sweeping them under our saddle rugs or sticking them to the margins of the banner.

We had smooth red leather saddles, but our horses went without bridles: we guided them with our lean legs and the energy garnered from feuds between our conflicting philosophies and past, present, and future arguments.

We held pinwheels made of coplas of Berceo and when they spinned then made the image of Chagall’s angles. One of us rode backwards using the shiny, mirror-like tail of her horse to write our pastoral landscape. Some of our mouths tasted like metal, others burned of mint, everything bouncing off our tongues coming out blue. In our right hands we held big black erasers engaged in a constant rubbing, undoing the possibility of memory, leaving only rubbery flakes of conscious.

2007-06-04T09:09:00.000-07:00

Calvin D. Bamford Jr.

N.B. This post is my best transcription of the heartfelt scribbles I produced sitting in direct sunlight at the train station at El Escorial on Saturday, June 2.

For as along as I can remember, my father has been doing. Doing always, doing by day and in night, in the short hours he manages to convince himself to rest. He is the traveler, of countries and technology gadgets, machinery and fine food. Traveler of yardwork, Wharton, desert, and pond. At home, in hardship, sickness, crisis, in the towns and cities and countries we visited when my sister and brother and I were young, in each, everywhere,

night,

day, and dusk,

he traveled the same: pulling us through snow and rainstorm,

The shades of night were falling fast,
As through an Alpine village passed
A youth, who bore, 'mid snow and ice,
A banner with the strange device,
Excelsior!

in car, plane, and boats, many boats, in countries in which none of us spoke the language, receiving lower than market value on art, rapid or slow-moving vehicles, wonderful and mediocre wine, leather goods, and baskets, necklaces, china,

His brow was sad; his eye beneath,
Flashed like a falchion from its sheath,
And like a silver clarion rung
The accents of that unknown tongue,
Excelsior!

securing us seats on overbooked flights, demanding and receiving cheaper rates on just about any service imaginable, obtaining access to places restricted, closed, otherwise defunct, damned, or, on the other hand, reserved for some elite to whom we did not belong. He is a re-locator of dislocated elbows and shoulders, teacher of piano to the blind, sailor, pilot, finder and maker of wind, swimmer, runner, builder and philosopher. Tired, sick or full of life

In happy homes he saw the light
Of household fires gleam warm and bright;
Above, the spectral glaciers shone,
And from his lips escaped a groan,
Excelsior!

he is creator and convincer with words.

So it was of my dad that I thought the other day as I stood in the Sala de los investigadores at the library at El Escorial, which is easily one of the most impressive places I have ever entered, and tried to explain to three men in dark suits and a curator why I should see the amazing alfonsine Lapidario h.I.15 (Lapidary, Alfonso the Learned).

"Try not the Pass!" the old man said:
"Dark lowers the tempest overhead,
The roaring torrent is deep and wide!
And loud that clarion voice replied,
Excelsior!

Truth be told, I had litle good reason why I couldn’t see the facsimile that they offered me. Just when I thought I was becoming more whole, I found it wasn’t me there, but Cal in figure of Heather speaking a Spanish that belongs to neither of us and giving some series of reasons of which I have almost no recollection. Several tactics were tried. No cries of peasants, monks, or maidens pulled us back (although, sometimes they are hard to resist).

In pursuit,

"Oh stay," the maiden said, "and rest
Thy weary head upon this breast!"
A tear stood in his bright blue eye,
But still he answered, with a sigh,
Excelsior!

"Beware the pine-tree's withered branch!
Beware the awful avalanche!"
This was the peasant's last Good-night,
A voice replied, far up the height,
Excelsior!

At break of day, as heavenward
The pious monks of Saint Bernard
Uttered the oft-repeated prayer,
A voice cried through the startled air,
Excelsior!

A traveller, by the faithful hound,
Half-buried in the snow was found,
Still grasping in his hand of ice
That banner with the strange device,
Excelsior! […].
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

we went on, carrying our banner with the strange device staring directly into the eyes of the doubting suits. Small girl (my cooking is making me ill) with voice of man producing, what were probably emissions from anything recently read, until the main suit said:

Vale. [alright]

in resignation.

Excelsior!

2007-05-31T16:43:00.000-07:00

Of scarecrows, fakery and approaching 30.

Today I realized that I like being almost 30. Since I turned 29, I have tried to convince myself that this year I actually feel older. The birthday this year was uneventful. I was ill by 6pm because my friend had passed his doctoral exams and a few of us had gone for beers and pizza. It then seemed like it would be a nice gesture to eat donuts and smoke cigarettes, mostly so we could use what we were calling “The Alfonsine lighter” (reference to Alfonso X, the Learned, King of Spain 1252-1284) that boasts astrological images. Sam and I went to César like we’ve done twice a month since moving to Berkeley in 2005 and he gave me nice presents from 4th street and some pretty Loeb editions of Ovid. None of that is very 30ish, not at all. Maybe the Ovid, but not even that, because I mostly like those editions because they are aesthetically pleasing, fit nicely in my purse with the multicolored diamonds or a pair of jeans with large pockets, and come in handy should I desire to cite the original Latin. Large pockets, purse of diamonds, burning Parliament, flaking glaze of starbucks bearclaw, 29 came in and I realized I’ve come in a little too.

When I lived alone in Alexandria in Northern Virginia, I was a scarecrow, a body that resembled a stick, with eyes that appeared large and unusual for lack of a face and because they were made of a found, unorganic material. My clothes would walk around Georgetown (the neighborhood, not the university), they drove a fast red Volkswagen Passat, went on an occasional date and had chit-chat conversations with co-workers. The scarecrow sometimes ended up on the Hill or doing work in a government office (she really hated that), rode in her car for entertainment, stood in the Smithsonian asking for the art to bring her to life, and drank liters of caffeine to make her sticks work. She invented questionnaires at her bosses’ request with phrases like “unable to judge”, “shows improvement”, and “baseline performance” and sipped cheap office tea. She danced on Thursday nights until 3am to Depeche Mode in sexy pocketless jeans. She bought many kinds of perfume because the crow figured sweet scents would move her. Made millions of photocopies. Baked muffins on Sunday. No painting, no espresso, no speedy ride in the VW, no process of reproduction made her a whole.

The scarecrow life, the Alexandria epoch, was an unlived one. Living as a pile of sticks is not even as good as thinking you’re a faker,

¶ living as a person convinced that their existence is pure invention, a product not of any personal effort or work or internal goodness, but of mere chance and a highly developed capacity to delude others.

At least the fakers have a sense of core, even if they are terrified of it. The crows can’t even find the source: there are no organs, there’s nothing to be hidden or overcome. It was Carla N. who put into live words something I’d read over and over in a novel close to my heart. We were prowling around the Library of Congress in search of lunch, me angry after I’d received a series of returned request slips with “not on Shelf”, “book misplaced”, and “have only vols. 3 and 4”. In the journal I requested that I couldn't find anywhere else in the DC area or on the East Coast, the article I needed was sliced out. I was boiling, ranting about this and that of the government and the Library (which, in general, is a wonderful resource), how my paper for some seminar would be shitty and she said:

-What, afraid they will find out?

--“Find out”?, scarecrow and I said.

-Yeah, find out. That you’re a faker. That you make it up as you go along, that you are one step away from the revelation, the unpretty one.

Unpretty revelation indeed. I’ve come to understand that fakers can generally identify other fakers: they often end up having the unpretty revelation in the presence of another faker and for a brief moment, experience the removal of the heavy trenchcoat and layers of paint disguising what they preceive as their ugly, real cores. The fakers, both the witness and the performer (their both performers, really), are then forever connected, even if they fall out of friendship.

Ugly core, fakery, I’ve found that I don’t care so much anymore. Today I realized that the scarecrow has burned to the ground. Perhaps it’s the influence of pragmatist philosophy (although, in truth, I’ve discovered I don’t really belong to we pragmatists) and notions that well, as long as you realize the limits of your idealistic, or deeply pessimistic views, as long as your consider that its all relative, and are aware that we are all spinning webs of social constructs and something-nothings, and semi-understanding, almost arrivals, near (mis) deliveries, sorta ungrammatical events of half-erasure, pseudo performances, our rewriting and producing in the passe-partout, between the lines and in the margins, then fakery is just fine.

I don’t delude myself completely. I’ll never give up the idea that I am a faker, never, because in my view, the fakers can’t survive without the possibility that they are living an illusion. To live an illusion is also to create one and thus, to be an inventor. It also allows for change at any moment and perhaps most importantly, absolves a person of a certain amount of responsibility. Should something go wrong, well, it was all just made up, my core didn’t do it.

Oh well. Like I said, it doesn’t really matter. As long as you’re not a scarecrow, maybe its ok to be paranoid that they might find out, or, for that matter, it may be just fine if you live your whole life as a faker. I figure some of what used to be my fakery has turned real, and probably some old real turned fakery. So get out that Alfonsine lighter and set all the scarecrows, all those “unable to judge”'s and “book not on shelf”’s aflame. Throw the cheap office tea to the wind! And have no guilt about misunderstanding completely, but pretending to understand fairly well: anything Derrida; go cite the Latin from the Loeb after having read only the translation, and leave the guilt to the core. The ugly revelation is sure to come someday and until then, maybe our image of its becoming will produce some interesting inventions.

2007-05-27T18:59:00.000-07:00

Ode to my husband, the possible appeal of my sea trash, and why we publish.

My partner is the best one, let it be known. This morning as we munched down our 5^th chunk of manchego at the table in our rented attic apartment, I began to wonder how I managed to secure such a great husband, considering my present, past, and most likely future state of mind, my sea-state filled with soggy trash. This line of thinking continued, even intensified in scope and irony, as the day wore on. We spent 2 short but wonderful hours in the Prado (free on Sundays), particularly awed this time by the Dutch and Flemish painters Bosch and Brueghel. We then walked Madrid for 4.5 hours, spending a brief period in a tiny renaissance-medieval interest bookstore, in which my husband searched for texts he thought I might like, having taken careful note (as he does with almost everything), of what I read and who I mention. It was after 20 minutes in the tiny bookshop and his presenting me with three books I actually wanted to buy, that I began to wonder:

What does he see in my sea trash?

I only bought one book because we are short on Euros. Gonzalo Menéndez-Pidal, La España del siglo XIII leída en imagines.

This afternoon we ended up in the Madrid book fair. It was then that I was sure that I must have the best one and that my sea trash had some appeal (more than likely my grandmother’s faces, definitely not my unspooled yarn). As we wandered through hundreds of people, stopping at the booths, my patient partner stood by me while I elbowed my way up to the counters trying to spy a potential purchase. I didn’t care if anyone thought I was Italian, or even American, I wanted books. As further testament to Sam’s goodness, he said he’d go again to the book fair so that he could carry books back for me when he leaves this week.

Sam doesn’t read Spanish, but he reads me. Well. And over and over again. Patiently. As I have said several times in the last months, what’s left of any proof that I am an extremely flawed, but somewhat decent human being is that good people are still around me. There is no egotism (or false humility for that matter) in these statements. Just me.

In the state of crisis that I left Berkeley (which I care not to comment here), I forgot to bring my Carte Postale or the translation I have been consulting (Post Card), so I cite something I used in a paper this semester. I still wonder how it is and was, in spite of Sam and several loving friends, that I produced my 70 pages of academia without incompletes. I was disappointed for the most part with what I wrote, but am happy to know that at least in one case, there is room for improvement and even the possibility of writing something good.

Qui écrit? A qui? Et pour envoyer, destiner, expédier quoi? A quelle adresse? Sans aucun désir de surprendre, et par là de capter l’attention à force d’obscurité, je dois à ce qui me reste d’honnêteté de dire que finalement je ne le sais pas. Surtout je n’aurais pas accordé le moindre intérêt à cette correspondance et à ce découpage, je veux dire à leur publication, si quelque certitude m’avait à ce sujet satisfait.
(Jacques Derrida, La carte postale: de Socrate `a Freud et au-del`a (Paris: Flammarion, 1980, 9).

[Who is writing? To whom? And to send, to destine, to dispatch what? To what address? Without any desire to surprise, and thereby to grab attention by means of obscurity, I owe it to whatever remains of my honesty to say finally that I do not know. Above all I would not have the slightest interest in this correspondence and this cross-section, I mean in their publication, if some certainty on this matter had satisfied me.]
(Derrida, The Post Card, Alan Bass trans. Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987).

It was in a romantic, most likely fatigue-inspired moment in Sevilla that I decided to include this citation at the end of a paper for a professor who had rolled his eyes more than once (but amicably so) at my love-affair with Derrida this semester.

Fatigue or wine inspired, this is a fascinating idea: what brings us to publish, to show others our work? Why do we write in these public spaces, journals, books, blogs, and to whom is it directed? Why, for example, do I write an ode to my husband in this public space, rather than writing him a private letter, or saying it to his face? To show (who?) that I know and love him? Why, and this is a digression, but nevertheless fascinating, do we sign on to Google chat or Skype (or any of the others), with no intention of sending or speaking a word? What does it mean to sign on and put up the “do not disturb?”. There is some lovely element of voyeurism and exhibitionism in all of these “publications” that surely warrants at least a performance on this measly blog.

I would be lying if I said that I that I didn’t know for whom I was writing on this blog. I know, generally, who reads it on a regular basis. Some of them might not even admit to reading it, but that’s beside the point. I also read blogs that I wouldn’t admit to checking and reading on a daily basis. Its there that lies the rub and perhaps the answer to Derrida’s questions. Our push-pull, love and near-hate, combination of fascination and disgust, that makes us produce, wonder, and write.

We all keep reading and writing, we maintain and perpetuate our ever wondering. I keep writing for them and for others, some lost, who could never read my blog. I write to make my trash a little less trashy, a bit more grandmothers’ faces, and less my

soggy yarn.

2007-05-24T13:18:00.000-07:00

El mar verde que llevo adentro y que está alrededor: cuento sobre mi retraso y cansancio

Hace mucho que no escribo ningún texto en español, ya sea un trabajo académico o una entrada de blog. Así que aquí va, mi intento no del todo inspirado de lo que acabo de comentar, lo “hace mucho”, sino también de otro intento, una tentativa para animarme y darme algo de energía para disfrutar en este país absolutamente maravilloso. Como ya dije en otro momento, tengo un cansancio y un retraso tremendo. ¿Retraso de qué? En la vida, en los libros, cuentitos, responsabilidades, besos, muchos besos, entradas en mi diario personal, en el correo, ya sea gmail o el “correo normal”, en las amistades, familia, mi perrito, y en los estudios que deseo realizar.

¿Cansancio? Principalmente en todo el cuerpo. La verdad es que (se puede notar que he dejado de escribir verdad en letra cursiva, es que ahora tengo otras preocupaciones) he estado en España hace unos 8 días y la estoy pasando muy bien. Ayer, por ejemplo, tuvimos la suerte de pasear por el Parque Güell en un momento donde había unos cuantos turistas. Hablamos como solíamos hacerlo hace mucho tiempo sobre libros, películas, amigos, familia, y cualquier cosa a excepción de la universidad, la que de momento, me gustaría enviarla al fondo más profundo de mi mar verde oscuro. Fue muy agradable. Dos chicos de Madrid sumamente borrachos, luego de haberme escuchado pronunciar medio párrafo por suerte sin anglicismos, me comentaron que iban a mudarse a Italia para lavar mi moto tres veces al día y darme de comer postres de chocolate. Me dio muchísima gracia. El parque y el paseo, también geniales.

pero me duele mi cuerpo.

Me duele todo el cuerpo, lo que es el cuello, las manos, espalda, pies, piernas, codos, pulmones, cerebro, rodillas, ojos, incluso las orejas. El corazón. Siempre el corazón. Además, no tengo moto y no me gusta el chocolate.

Me duele el cuerpo pero estoy logrando escaparme de mi mar verde oscuro, y la basura que llevo adentro está tomando una forma distinta. No quiero recordar nada en particular, memorizar ninguna escena, ambiente específico, y por supuesto, no quiero vivir in time.

Time past and time future /Allow but a little consciousness. / To be conscious is not to be in time / But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden, / The moment in the arbour where the rain beat. / The moment in the draughty church at smokefall / Be remembered: involved with past and future. / Only through time time is conquered. (T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton, II)

Mi deseo es estar consiente, tener un tiempo, una serie de horas o unos cuantos días que sustituirán los largos períodos perdidos el año pasado y luego saber después (sin recordar) que he tenido unos momentos en la iglesia at smokefall.