television, paternity and automated tasks.

my yin and i are staying at her mother's place for the weekend, and last night i watched television for the first time since December, when we spent a few days with my dad in North Carolina. apparently time spent at our respective parents' homes is directly proportional to our television consumption, but this is beside the point.

the point is that i have finished grading the last of my finals for this semester, leaving the summer wide open for creative endeavors. i decided to start by backing up the contents of this blog in preparation for this summer's planned move from this lovely site provided by Google to my own domain. the task was not nearly as Herculean as i had feared, and now all that remains is the process of learning how to use iWeb or some similar contraption.

my latent Luddism notwithstanding, i hope to have some progress made before summer's end, coinciding with the completion of my next collaboration with Saylor:

For a Russian Girl Who's Never Been In Love
(except with an older woman)

in the meantime...

For An American Girl With a Czech Surname (who got away)
1st edition chapbook, limited to 50 copies
(suggested) contribution $5.00
email: circlesallthewaydown@gmail.com

redux (7 June 2008)

1 boy. 1 girl. 1 fish, heart presently (un)broken.

An empty plate
sits next to
a cold cup of coffee,
half-full.

There are bread crumbs
on the table cloth.

I am watching a dog
watching me as I sit
across from

the beautiful woman
with pale blue eyes,
saying goodbye.

Night and Fog

last night my yin and i went to a birthday gathering for a friend of ours, and arrived to find three Buddhists sitting around a table, drinking liquor drinks and eating chicken nachos. although this sounds like the start of a really awesome joke, it is also beside the point.

the point is that we left after 9pm, when the heat lightening began giving way to the heavy smell of coming summer rain. we biked home before the downpour, got chased by one dog, and settled in for the night to watch Alain Renais' Nuit et brouillard:

the film was recommended to me some weeks ago by a professor on my thesis committee and, seeing as how he is also the one who turned me on to Sans soleil, his suggestions have taken on a certain gravitas, comparable to that of Bazin or Benjamin.

but this, too, is beside the point.

the point is that i was unprepared for Nuit and brouillard, in spite of having watched Hiroshima, mon amour less than a month ago. the film is thirty minutes of Dachau - images far harsher than any i had ever seen before: a basket of human heads, a pile of human hair the size of a gymnasium.

even seeing these things, it is difficult to imagine the enormity of this evil, and even more incomprehensible to think of the infrastructure required to enact it. the film made these things explicit, making mention of the most mundane aspects of building a concentration camp: architects, building contractors, plumbers - an army of regular people making bids on the latest juicy government contract.

i tried to fathom an entire society mobilized in the name of warfare and killing. failing, i turned to math:

6 million/5 years = 1.2 million/year
1.2 million/365 days = 3288/day
3288/day = 137/hour
137/hour = 2.28/minute
2.28/minute = 1 person/25 seconds
every minute of every day, non-stop, for 5 years

how many 25 seconds have elapsed reading thus far?

[lapse]

i woke this morning with heavy, sore eyes and a rumbling anxiety in my stomach. i do not remember what images i dreamed in the night;

and yet, if we stop looking, how can we ever hope to remember?

things to do in bed (2 years, 2 days ago)

lying
in your bed
the gray void pre-sleep
of disembodied
breathing.
whis
purring aum,
tracing the space
between

us and
dreaming,
nights more frequent
spaces less vast.

last night, the morning after

from my journal, 4 May 2010

i drop off the recycling and realize i can leave the bed sheets with M_____. as i park, i'm nearly certain that i see N_____. she sees me see her and i park - the instant panic of apparitions and i feel Jache somewhere over the Atlantic, traveling to A_____ to escape her scars.

she does not follow me and i call Jache, leave a message. i walk to the building and see my old neighbor, who tells me M_____ no longer lives there. we talk some, but under the growing cloud of revelation as i begin to understand this is one of those moments whose transition and impermanence is undeniable.

i can feel it on my skin - birth, deaath, sacrifice and mourning - i can taste it. stronger than the cadence on the beach in September, more forceful than a kick to the gut. i sense

G____ and K______
Jache and N_____
M_____ and me.

i see all the living and dying present in every moment, and i feel a tremendous reassuring peace in all this spinning dizziness, the confluence of passing and emergence.

it was M_____'s leaving that triggered it, and in that instance i realized that this place, this concrete structure, this edifice of memory had finally been untethered from the portico of my mind. i watched it float away on a Monday night, trapped inside a balloon, engulfed by the deceitful aura of re/membering. i drove home eyes open, blindfolded in the dark.

i got home and talked with my yin, shared these things with less eloquence, and wrote a poem before the thoughts grew too hazy or still. i went to bed before midnight and dreamed of a revolution in the streets of Miami. i'm there with my yin-in-law and we roam the streets safely, knowing we are among our own.

Liberty City, 1980

just (since 9:13)

just got home.
just decided to write.
just talked with my yin.
just a mild case of poetry.
just listened to two messages.
just remember this is all a game.
just ten months until the wedding.
just one year until i finish my thesis.
just wonder what i will dream tonight.
just six weeks until we leave for summer.
just stacking one word on top of the other.
just don't care so much for right from wrong.
just regurgitating a form Saylor once admired.
just a sliver between the imaginary and the Real.
just thinking La Cienega leaves for India tomorrow.
just recounted a cadence on the beach in September 2007.
just saw the swirling hypocrisy of time wither in the blink of an eye.
just recounted a cadence on the beach in September 2007.
just broke my own rule about using "friend" as a verb.
just remembered the Fear of mid-February 2009.
just fifty-two minutes until my sister's birthday.
just wondered if Mercury is still in retrograde.
just learned Jache is flying for Africa tonight.
just spent four hours in a bar not drinking.
just experienced a parking lot revelation.
just learned my old roommate moved.
just "friended" my divorce attorney.
just have one research paper left.
just had french fries for dinner.
just read a rejection letter.
just turned off my phone.
just saw an apparition.
just stopped.

do not watch this movie unless...

as part of our weekend-long celebration of her birthday, my yin and i went last night to see this movie:

which is best described as The Da Vinci Code meets the rape/revenge genre meets Sweden for brunch. it made me think of a class i took last semester, and the week we spent talking about vampires. we had watched this most excellent film:

which is best described as a thoughtful reworking of the vampire genre. but this is beside the point.

the point is that somewhere i heard the former film compared to the latter, and i walked into The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo expecting it to be something other than what it was - a dreadful display of sexualized violence, gratuitous sodomy, and the restoration of not one, but TWO patriarchs through the pain of a young woman.

more disturbing, however, was the reaction of the couple in front of during the second rape scene, when the protagonist gets revenge on her attacker. although my eyes were turned from the screen in an attempt to mitigate my intake of violence, i couldn't help but hear the man and woman in front of us laughing and cheering as Lisbeth tortured her probation officer.

i thought about desensitization, and how frightening it was that anyone could find pleasure in the images being shown on screen. i though about cinema, and how problematic it was that the apparatus had turned the people in the theater into a group of reluctant voyeurs (like myself and others) and gleeful sadists (the young couple in front of us). i thought about leaving, and how perplexing it was that i was willing to tolerate this in order to see what happened next.

[lapse]

my yin and i talked about the film on a bench outside the theater, discussing the things i have just written. we came home and attempted to wipe the images from our minds, and yet - even this morning - pieces of the plot keep popping into our conversation. i don't know what to make of this, except to say that watching the film is inseparable from doing harm to oneself...

these are the decisions we make

or don't make

every moment of our lives.