the home stretch

by all empirical measures, i am presently in the home stretch of the semester, and as my research paper nears completion to the sound of Rachmaninov playing his second piano concerto, my yin is in the bedroom watching The Simpsons. the past week has seen long days, short sleeps, and copious hours spent in front of computer monitors.

at night i get a strange tingling energy throughout my body, whose cause or demise i've yet to discover. i started a book by Donald Barthelme and wonder what effect it will have on my non-sequiturs. i read Carrol on the beach and imagined thieves in the sand. Jache may or may not be doing better. i wait for the tingling energy to leave or subside. i wait, i wait, i type, i type...

[his] mother's Buddha

"In fáma the subject is often massively projected upon
and adulated at the same time."
- Clarissa Pinkola Estés

yesterday i spent the morning working on a term paper, and in the course of my research i (re)stumbled upon the above quote. its theoretical efficacy is substantial, but as fate would have it, i had an opportunity to examine its praxis later that night:

my yin and i left our apartment at noon and headed west. her best friend lives in a community not unlike Agrestic, and we arrived to find a long table and two dozen place settings, complete with a four-top kids table in the corner. it reminded me of my own childhood, when the various sisters and husbands and cousins and children would gather at my grandmother's house for gigantic meals and subdued squabbling. we ate innumerable hams and turkeys, topped off by a truly frightening, possibly gelatin desert known only as "green stuff."

(digression)

for my part, i would tear yeast rolls into tiny pieces and drench them in homemade gravy until they congealed into a sumptuous half-starch/half-grease mixture. the consistency was somewhere between a thick stew and plaster of Paris, and the entire family was always amazed by my capacity for bread. in subsequent years this capacity has diminished somewhat, although my affection still remains. but this is beside the point.

the point is that we left my yin's best friend's house before the feasting began and headed back to the ocean. after a disappointing Thanksgiving meal (and a sublime, rehabilitating encounter with the yin-in-law's pumpkin loaf), we found ourselves in a penthouse apartment overlooking the ocean, two towns south and eight stories up:

[change tense]

it is a beautiful home, full of people, full of chatzkis, full of interrupted conversations and half-introductions. it is a mad scene that i might enjoy drunken or stoned, but i abscond to the balcony and look out at the surf. it's high tide and the lady of the house tells me that on a clear day you can see the chop where the Atlantic kisses the Gulf of Mexico. it is bizarre only in its utter lack of bizarreness, and i eat chocolate ice cream mixed with leftover cheesecake.

(explanation)

there is a (belated) birthday party in progress, and someone hands me some sort of festive cardboard headgear. i can't tell if it is a princess crown or bunny ears, but being an intrepid sort, i decide to put it on anyway. in the worst case scenario, i'll look infantile, but on the off-chance that it's actually bunny ears, someone might feed me carrots, which i find quite delicious.

a giant cake in sits in the living room, a small piñata hangs in the foyer, and the birthday girl's older sister pulls its strings until candy rains down onto the floor. i tell the father of the child that piñata technology has changed since i was a her age. he smiles and then his daughter makes the rounds, handing each of us a Hershey's Kiss. i get a white chocolate and thank her. the child's name is the same as my yin's best friend's daughter, and this makes it easy to remember.

[resume tense]

the drive back was filled with conversation, and a pervasive intoxication filled the vehicle, affecting even the sober occupants in the back seat. i wondered about la fáma and the candy wrapper in my pocket. i wondered about loneliness, anonymity, and freedom...

(begin poesy)

i wondered about
a green glass Buddha
that sparkled on a Thursday
night in November.

biscuits, Leo Frank, and Thanksgiving

this morning i took a half-Canadian madman (and his spouse) to the airport at 4:30am. my yin decided to join me, and on the way back i was overcome by a powerful hunger for biscuits. i began musing on Church's and Bojangles' and all the wonderful unnamed, independent purveyors of chicken and biscuits scattered around the South. there is a simple perfection to the biscuit, and pre-dawn consumption has been proven (in my mind) to increased feelings of well-being and yummy-ness. the only side effect appears to be an over-reliance on hyphens.

(five and counting)

none of this helped at 5am in South Florida, however, and my yin attempted to quell my desire by stating the potential for biscuits later in the day. we're making the rounds to three different homes today, ranging from the hinterlands of west of Jog Road to the posh of A1A and Highland Beach, but i suspect there will be nary a biscuit in sight. the climate south of Alachua County is inhospitable to all things Southern, and an unspoken, odious attitude drapes over the beaches and canals...

(but now)

my mind turns to the ghost of Leo Frank. i believe he must be watching over us, attempting to set right history and carve out a little piece of heaven for those of us who (pleasantly) suffer from carbophilia. i think of the bagel and the biscuit, of yin and yang,
of Shiva and Brahma;

we have a lot to be thankful for.

first thoughts on Wong Kar Wai's seventh film

thirteen months have passed since i watched 2046, and today we screened Wong Kar Wai's exquisite, approximate prequel In the Mood For Love. much as last September, the experience has left me muddled and quaking, and i find myself unable to shackle the image with the words at my command. a demonstration:

leitmotifs in celebration of Sino-cinema

dreaming of hallways in rack focus
i gazed through

(the blinds of memory, half-drawn)

a patchwork predicated on

the
present's
projection
of the presence
of past

predilection and perception.

beginning

pulling time into focus

(slippage)

(dilation)

pulling time into focus

end

repetition and mirrors,
hallways and telephones,
the rehearsed departure of
wedding bands and restraint,

(not my own)

curtains and mirrors,
light bulbs and longing,
the textured punctuality of
clocks casting shadows down the hall.

walking in the park at night

it's been more than two months since Jim Carroll died, and over the weekend i read The Basketball Diaries for the first time. the journals are remarkable, especially for a 12-15 year old, and i spent some time on the beach remembering my teenage confusion surrounding Leonardo DiCaprio:

"Leo" (actually a Scorpio) is a little more than two years my elder, better looking, and substantially wealthier. the same was true in 1995 when the film version of The Basketball Diaries was released, and his casting left me utterly baffled. the crux of my dilemma revolved around trying to comprehend how a skinny white boy could possibly be a blue chip basketball recruit. eventually i learned that these diaries were written in the early Sixties by an eighth grader, and with it came the implicit realization of the perils of projected my own historical moment onto the art and lives of others. case in point:

Jim Carroll played basketball in a Manhattan without a World Trade Center, a world with two Germanies and two Vietnams, an America wrestling with the delusion of "separate but equal," a New York with Rockefeller Laws as well as a Rockefeller Center, and a Times Square closer to Burroughs' than Disney. i could have told you all of these things when i was 18, but i knew none of them. they were only facts, hollowed of the truth by my immaturity and hubris.

(but last night)

i walked through the park after dark, hallowed by the truth of contemplation and experience. i walked through the park, thinking about the immensity of life and the passing of poets. i walked:

thinking of Jache, thinking of adolescence, thinking of the romantic lies we tell ourselves when we are young and inexperienced.

i thought of how often the abyss is mistaken for the void and how one can ever know the difference without looking. i thought of a misspent youth spent searching for a bottom that isn't there and the wellspring of possibility that dwells within our lack of sophistication. i thought of the beauty and danger living inside our naiveté.

a voice in the dark interrupted my reverie:

(hey man, you straight?)

i walked in the park after dark, thinking of one Germany, one Vietnam, and a Manhattan without a World Trade Center. i thought of wrestling with the ghosts of our delusions. i smiled to myself:

you can still smell the Jim Carroll on me.

"Little kids shooting marbles
where branches break out into the sun
into graceful shafts of light...
I just want to be pure."

(August 1, 1949 - September 11, 2009)

never say "never" on a Saturday morning

Saturday morning, 9:59 am

my yin opened her computer, navigated to the website of a monopoly ticket broker, and waited for 10 o'clock to arrive.

September, 1995

i spent much of my adolescence holding an attitude towards hippies that vacillated between discriminatory and persecutory. a band from Vermont bore the brunt of my ire, and in a comical twist of fate, the first (quasi) adult relationship i had was with a woman who adored them. i wasted no time in attempting to dissuade her, with a strategy consisting primarily of prolonged, repetitive exposure to the Ramones. we soon reached a détente, which lasted the entirety of our courtship.

Friday night, time unknown

a (small) portion of my response - "sure, i'll go" - was based on the (false) certainty that no one ever really gets tickets to see this band from Vermont. their fan base is rabid, irrational, unkempt, unshowered, uncouth, incorrigible, insistent, and inexplicably legion. furthermore, their pervasive Luddism holds a perpetual blindspot: the uncanny ability to gobble up hordes of tickets and watch the same band perform night after night after night after night...

Saturday morning, 10:01 am

two floor tickets, first section, fourth row.

Friday night weirdness

last night my yin and i decided that Thai dining was a moral imperative, and before the night was through:

1) exhibitionist teenagers having sex on a beach chair
2) a man necklaced with his pet possum
3) a lesson in etymology from Adam Sandler's mother-in-law

(but this is beside the point)

the point is that we sat at the edge of the surf, listening to the wisdom of waves mingle with the awkward moans of adolescent lovemaking. it was a strange medley, and the flash of a camera behind us guided the conversation towards photography. as it happens, my yin is an accomplished photographer, and i am something of a photographic primitive.

i suppose the roots of my uneasiness stretch back to childhood, when my mother had my brother and i pretend to reopen holiday gifts in her quest to obtain the perfect picture. it was an absurd, tiresome chore, and by the time i reached adulthood i refused to take pictures of virtually anything. my obstinance left large portions of my teens and twenties undocumented, and this fact has done nothing to hinder my obsessive fascination with nostalgias and memory.

(but we spoke of none these things last night)

last night we spoke of image and objectification, of action and passivity, of gaze and possession, of definition and the object of beauty. i told her (and Laura Mulvey would agree) that in some subtle way the photographer takes possession of the photographed, and turns an aspect of his/her/its being into artifact and commodity.

(that being said)

i do not believe tribal peoples were ignorant or backwards 150 years ago, and the fact that we accept the photograph as harmless does not mean it is so.

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?)

Wednesday discussion of rites of passage and post-industrial society

today after class one of my students asked me if i thought my tattoos would impede my storming of la tour ivoire, and his query elicited a response that somehow segued between the Crusades, rosaries, Vedant philosophy, piercing, and post-industrial capitalism.

i told him that the prevalence of tattoo and piercing culture spoke to something missing in our society, that we had vocational training in lieu of rites of passage, and that perhaps in all the televisions and iPods and blogs and laptops we've lost something along the way.

(Kerouac whispers:

"The Dharma can't be lost,
nothing can be lost on a well-worn path")

midway into my answer, he informed me that his favorite number was 57, and although it's not a prime number, i strongly approve of his irrational affection for a rational number.

(please excuse all further number theory puns)

the conversation was less fractured than this account, and yet i cannot help but feel they are nonetheless of the same essence.

perhaps:

1) the fracture is a matter of form rather than content
2) the loom of insomnia casts its shadow across the night
3) the burden of diachronicity falters as the solstice approaches.

[insert sleep here]

delayed reactions on a Tuesday in November

...and later i thought:

one can only speak of the mind and the manifestations of the mind because there is nothing to be said about that which lies beyond. there is only nothing, only empty, only voidness - and every word spoken about that space is untrue. one can only hope to name all the false things, and feel the emptiness that remains.

(then why speak at all?)

we speak because we must. we speak because we are left with the unfathomable task of our own existence and compelled to tell our selves into being. we speak because we perish in silence, and the difference between (and within) the best and worst of us is impossible to tell. we speak because, even in the futility of the return, we cannot help but litter crumbs.

"Humans consist of a unity of selves...

a union where two roads meet."

- Linda Hogan

dreaming of Rumi on a cloudy Monday afternoon

to describe this love

is nothing more
than naming

the things
it is not.

untitled homage to Sunday matinées

i watched clocks

unwind

on a Sunday afternoon

- three o'clock -

years

running in circles
and connecting dots
that were never

there, even then, there

are

only so many -

things words can say.

there are

only so many

days we name:

how many sevens does it take?
how many sevens does it take?

innumerable.

choking.

punchlines.

dots v. lines

... . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . ..... . . . . . . . t. . . . . . . ....... . . . . . . .... ... . . . . . . . . . . . . h. . . . ............... . . . . . . . . e. . . . . . . . . . . . . r. . . . . . . . . . . . . e. . . . . . . ........ . ... . . . . . . . . . a. . . . . . . ...... ..... . . . . . r. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . e. . . . . . . ........ . . . . . a. . . . . . . . . . . . . l. . . . . . . . . . . . . w. . . . . . . . . . . . . a. . . . . . . . . . . . . y. . . . . . ............. . . . . . . s. . . . . . .... . . . . . . f. . . . . . . . . . . . . e. . . . . . . . . . . . . w. . . . .......... . . . . . ........ ... ...... . . . . . . . e. . . . . . . . . . . . . r. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . d . . . . . . . . . . o. . . . . . ......... . . . . . . t. . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . s. . . . . . . . . . . . . t. . . . . . . . . . . . . h. . . . . . . . . . . . . a. . . . . . . . . . . . . n. . . . . . ........................ . . . . . . l.. . . . . . . . . . . . . i. . . . . . . . . . . . . n. . . . . . . . . . . . . e. . . . . . . . . . . . . s. . . . . . . . . . . . . c. . . . . . . . . . . . . o. . . . .. . . . . . .. . . . . . . .................. . . . . . . . n. . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . n. . . . . . . . . . . . . e. . . . . . . . . . c. . . . . . . ..... . . . . . t. . . . . . ............. . . . . . . i. . . . . . . . . . . . . n. . . . . . . . . . . . . g. . . . . . . . . . . . . t. . ................. . . . . . . . . . . . . . h . . . . . ............ . . . . . e. . . . . . . . . . . . ................ ... .. m.

triskaidekadelphia

the last Friday the 13th, i dreamt of Hitler and Jean Genet, and the one before was marred by the release of some (presumably) lame remake, but today passed relatively quietly. i'm struggling to keep the words moving, but at this point i'm unable to differentiate between the type and the tripe.

my underlying assumption is that i can address the various inevitable deficiencies at a later date and earlier hour, but i can't seem to shake the feeling that i might be doing little more than writing a more sophisticated, long-winded version of one of my student's essays. i've been plowing through them all week, making my neck wonky and earning the ire of my chiropractor. but this is beside the point.

the point is that it is late, i am tired, and the words are waiting...

choosing the right word

most of the world is celebrating Armistice Day today, and i've held an odd numerological romance for the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month since childhood. i don't remember how i encountered this bit of information as a tyke, but i can only assume it had something to do with my love of Trivial Pursuit. but this is beside the point.

the point is that in the United States we stopped celebrated Armistice Day in 1954, less than a month before the censure of Senator Joseph McCarthy. the man's name came to be synonymous with demagoguery, but he was also a prodigious drunkard, and it seems appropriate that the inaugural celebration of Veterans Day occurred while he was still looking for communists and "pixies" underneath the skirt of Army head counsel Joseph N. Welch.

the right word is sometimes hard to find (just ask Flaubert), and this morning i was in the shower thinking about Armistice v. Veterans Day. it occurred to me that the former focuses on the end of conflict, the resumption of peace, a tombstone for "the war to end all wars."

(this was one of the casualties of Eisenhower's America)

the latter valorizes the people who fight war, the instruments by which violence is articulated on a global scale, and this implicit militarization of language (de)forms the structure of society by imprinting and encoding itself into our holidays and common speech. it seems the ultimate result can be only a glorification of war itself, which begs the question:

where is our Armistice Day?

"toasties," pumpkin soup and reincarnation

i've been keeping a cold at bay these past few days, and last night my yin fixed me a grilled cheese sandwich with pumpkin soup and a healthy side of kale, broccoli, ginger and squash. it was yummy and delicious, but this is beside the point.

the point is that we ended up having an amazing conversation about reincarnation and human nature, Bhutan and global warming, Claude Levi-Strauss and post-structuralist thought, Foucault and sex as a discursive instrument of power. (like you do).

we ended up talking about the Self, and how the expansive sense of self can be framed as either:

1) growth

or

2)

... d....................

.i...

..... s .................

........................ s

... i ...........

p ............

............ a ....

..................................... t ..........

.................. i

..................... o .......

n.

my own experience (in the most sublime meditative spaces) is of the latter, and it seems to me that the notion of an evolutionary Self is merely a projection of the ego. it is predicated on some (false) sense of incompleteness or inadequacy, and the illusion of growth ultimately serves to maintain individuality - and separation - by obscuring the egoistic, insistent desire for discrete form.

if one is all and all is one, there can be no growth - only realization.

(the pumpkin soup grew cold)

Fort Hood, Malcolm X and chickens

i drove home listening to a public radio program about the incident at Fort Hood, and it occurred to me how weird it would be if ROTC was renamed the Future Veterans of America. but this is beside the point.

the point is that my anticipation for Armistice Day has hijacked my psyche, and as the interview progressed, i couldn't help but hear Malcolm X somewhere in the back of my head, talking about chickens and roosts in December.

apparently, Hasan was not only a disinterested psychiatrist, but he also kept shoddy patient records. furthermore, they said, he was prone to ill-timed outbursts of religiosity and long-winded interpretations of The Holy Qur'an regarding throats, infidels, and the pouring of boiling oil. as one might presume, these orations did not set well with his colleagues.

what i didn't hear: (a systemic analysis of the event and its context)

according to the reporters, Hasan was either:

A) a nut job
B) a religious nut job
C) a religious nut job terrorist

there was one question, however, that belied the purported portrait:

the host asked about the effect of the incident on the surrounding town of Killeen, Texas. the reporter answered that Killeen was "a military town" and his tone implied that, as such, Killeen was accustomed to a certain level of violence. the interview proceeded without further commentary about Killeen's relationship to violence.

a brief thought experiment:

1) draw a circle called "Hasan"
2) draw a larger, concentric circle called "Fort Hood"
3) draw a larger, concentric circle called "Killeen"
4) draw a larger, concentric circle called "Texas"
5) draw a larger, concentric circle called "America"

sometimes it's difficult to tell which way the circles are going.

kale: cabbage without a cause

somehow my yin just convinced me to try my first neti pot, and although i have not become the dribbling snotty mess i feared, i am also not a particularly pleasant portrait at present. for one thing, i'm using too much alliteration, getting to stuck on the "p" and the "t" and the "r" and all those rascally letters clumped together two-thirds of the way through the alphabet. but this is beside the point.

the point is that i'm teetering on some farkakte illness, and most of my day has been spent consulting various witch doctors, (of the lay variety nonetheless). besides the neti, i've also endured some terrible echinacea tincture, which was dripped directly down my gullet by a half-Canadian madwoman. on the up-side, the next would-be treatment is homemade kale chips topped with a healthy helping of indolence...

Thelma, Louise and me

i watched Thelma & Louise two nights ago and felt a mix of joy and embarrassment with the arrival of the tears. my discomfiture wasn't due to the crying per se, but rather some (false) notion that my familiarity with the medium should render me invulnerable to the Romanticism and blatant sentimentality of the final scene -

but it didn't.

(herein lies the joy.)

the object of my gaze has shifted.

i used to focus on that final still:

the Thunderbird held midair by a snapshot,
the women cradled for an eternity over the canyon
in the moment before they die.

but this time:

the moments before they fall,
they sit in the car, knowing it is over.
it is not the kiss, it is not the "keep going."

the moment of revelation,

one moment is all there is.

that's what she said

this week my favorite professor described the origins of Halloween as a pagan holiday, situated at the end of the harvest season. for those who celebrated, it was a form of ancestor worship - a recognition that the death part of the life cycle was upon them. they believed that the boundary between the realm of the living and the dead was especially thin during this time, allowing passage between realms.

i realized yesterday that much of this week has been just that for me. i've been moving from one task to another, unable to shake the feeling of being displaced in time. past lives have surfaced of their own volition; recollections of the fictions i've called myself, memories unburdened by nostalgia.

i've smelled the late September air of Chapel Hill in 1997, i've felt the January dread of New Brunswick in 2002, i've heard the October sunshine of Lake Lure in 2006. this morning i even felt the November mania of Manhattan, when i had just returned from Kansas City.

i was on my way to Paris, standing blindfolded on the edge of the millennial abyss, wearing a Cheshire smile and oblivious to the portent descending all around me.

i've somehow channeled those people these past days, and last night i went to visit Jache at his new apartment and tell him these things. we stood in the parking lot at midnight and he spoke of circles. i didn't realize it until this morning, but this strange feeling has been just that. i've been sleeping less and dreaming more these past weeks, and i cannot name the reason for the change. but i've been here before.

we cannot help but live with the selves we were, and i do not know if the realms have gotten closer or if the boundary has merely grown porous. i suppose it does not matter. either way, i have lived my whole life straddling worlds, and i used to wish i could simply fall on one side or the other. (a black bird once said nevermore). i've been unknowingly exploring the difference between channeling these ancestors and being possessed by them... perhaps i'm becoming accustomed to the liminal.