free chairs, Twilight and dusk on a cloudless Thursday

i walked across campus at dusk carrying two chairs, one of which was broken, and thinking about vampire movies. this week our class screened Twilight, and the film left me simultaneously bored, repulsed, and reluctantly curious about what comes next for Bella and Edward. we discussed the film in a windowless room on a cloudless Thursday afternoon, and in spite of our unanimous disapproval, the class couldn't stop talking about it.

(my mind turned to Julia Kristeva)

i considered her consideration of the abject, and our fascination with the things that repulse us. Kristeva says we are forever tied to the things we push away, that they define us by telling us what we are not. they are the boundaries within us, the things that allow us to name the difference between "me" and "not me."

(exit Kristeva stage left)

and if what is "not me" is "not you," then perhaps we can be naked enough to let go of our artifice. perhaps we can realize that there is nothing that is "not me." perhaps we can realize that there is nothing that is "not you." perhaps we can sit quietly. perhaps we can embrace the full extent of our being and stop the insipid insistent severing of body and mind.

(and what of the spirit?)

the spirit knows the body and the mind. it knows the playful futility of the boundaries between. it knows the abject. it knows the beauty of a collapsing sun. it knows our nightmares and holds the sleeping hand of Oppenheimer. it knows this fiction "i" call "me" is not my own.

(i dream of Ginsberg's footnoted obscenity:)

"The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy!
The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy!"

(how does Kristeva answer:)

the boundlessness of our existence? the unspeakable immensity of our being? the fragility of desire? the vulnerability of embodiment? the burden of the mind? the impermanence of self? the contemplation of equanimity and the realization that everything is holy?

(i dream of Moloch.)

i dream of a mirror
in a windowless room
on a cloudless Thursday afternoon.

(what did we push away?)