my life ≠ ballet

it's overcast, i'm listening to Peter Murphy, and the past three days have found me boxed into a theater with a dance company from Great Britain. if my life corresponded to their ballets, it might read like:

Act 1: Shuffle It Right

i picked a random card from a tarot deck this morning:

"Dropping the Past"

i watched my mind wander to the wondering of past nights. i've been having odd flashbacks of long car rides to Raleigh and dreams of calling a former lover. her answering machine picks up and tells me that although no more messages will be accepted, more than 100 people are sending good vibes.

Act 2: Movements From Petrushka

i asked a Turkish woman:

"how many times have you heard this song?"

"twice a day for the past year."

"that's more than 700 times."

"yes."

i did not ask:

what is the relationship between puppet and string?

Act 3: Blow Over

all this will blow over

these fragments of the past

i am to me

as Alice

is to Glass.

sunshine, eternal and spotless

our Tuesday Night Movie Club met this past Wednesday, and it seems my abiding desire to have a recurring cinema discussion group is becoming a reality. it's an exciting prospect, and we're at the stage when people take those first steps beyond friendly acquaintance into friendship and intimacy. there is a tingle to the experience, an air of anticipation as we share memories under the cloak of mythologies yet to be exposed. it was in this atmosphere that we we watched
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind:


i saw the film for the first time not long after it came out, during a hazy section of my life when i was deluded enough to believe i had married my own Clementine. i remember us talking about how much i was like Joel, and when she admonishes him in the bookstore:

"Too many guys think I'm a concept, or I complete them,
or I'm gonna make them alive. But I'm just a fucked-up girl
who's lookin' for my own peace of mind; don't assign me yours."

i had a flashback to February 2000, when my future Ex told me much the same in a bank parking lot on a Sunday morning. i had driven all night from Manhattan to Gainesville, crazed and frantic to see her, after turning down my dream job in a courtyard apartment in the West Village. at the time i thought it romantic, but as the years wore on, i came to know that i had ignored the warnings of Circe.

this is the point.

when i first saw Eternal Sunshine, i was too consumed by my own mythology and illusion to really pay attention. this week, however, i saw for the first time the tension between the film's existential content (memory, identity, the problem of choice) and its absurd romanticism. the narrative's meant-to-be-ness obscures the fact that Joel and Clementine's insecurities and resentments are destined to recur and sabotage their love. these foibles are inside of them
- inside of us - and we cannot help but project them outward until they are fully embraced.

the truth is obscured, not obliterated.

i focused on the existential.

without memory we live in stasis, growthless and confined. this goes beyond the transitory nature of relationships; it goes further than the cursory glances thrown at mirror and reflection. knowledge of self is sustainable only if it is etched into our consciousness, and the mind must record the experience of transcendence no matter how poor the fidelity. these flashes of insight, of wisdom, of beauty, art and love - these are the things that give us a reference point, the ability to know there is (at worst) the possibility of something more than the tiny boxes into which we circumscribe our being.

punk, Leblanc, and how to spend your misspent youth

i'm reading a book for my feminist cultural studies class:


and, as chance would have it, i spent a substantial portion of my own misspent youth immersed - and occasionally enmeshed - in punk subculture. furthermore, the time period of Leblanc's ethnography (1993-1995) overlaps with the formative portion of my own experience, and during last night's discussion's i felt the twinge of adolescent bravado creeping back into my veins.

but this is beside the point.

the point is that the book, although only concerned with the place of women in the scene, does mention tangentially that boys gravitate towards punk subculture in an attempt to assert and establish their own masculinity. i had never thought of it in this way, but the idea held an immediate resonance.

i thought back to my own initial exposures to punk - the gateway drug of Nirvana's Seattle, the Sex Pistol-ed epiphany of Dallas, the DIY Durham debacle that was my senior year of high school - in retrospect all of these memories fit neatly within Leblanc's construction. at the time i was completely unaware, and as i matured (so to speak) i credited the initial flight from the mainstream as some hyper-individualized, faux-romanticized act of agency.

it never occurred to me as a crisis of masculinity.

eventually the scene came and went, which is to say that i came and went, and pinpointing my exact exit is difficult. before leaving college a whole new set of pretensions had emerged, and by the time i reached New York in 1999, the punk aesthetic had disappeared almost entirely...

except for one fateful blue-haired trip to Gainesville.

drills, neglect and Ceauşescu

i just had my teeth drilled by a Romanian dentist, bringing the wheel of karma round full circle on my long history of neglect. but this is beside the point.

the point is that in her enthusiasm, my dentist broke out some bizarre electrified implement and told me that - in order to fill the monumental cavity extending rootward in my lower right molar - she needed to cut my gums.

"that's a saw?"

"yes."

"what's the pad for?"

"grounding."

"will any stitches be involved?"

"no."

i agreed, closed my eyes, and deepened my breathing. the strange smell of plasma filled the room as the as the meditation took hold, and i felt the electricity referring across my gums and into my tongue, causing a slight twitch that was barely perceivable underneath the second shot of Novocaine.

i can only assume from the amount of gauze used that there was a lot of blood, and at some point everything began spinning counter-clockwise. i opened my eyes to regain my bearings and saw a mimeographed Soviet bloc diploma. i wondered if i had fallen into the morphined dreamscape of Burroughs' Interzone and closed my eyes once more.

[lapse]

"i have to teach at 4."

"that's fine."

"will i sound like the village drunkard?"

"maybe...

but it won't be because of me."

i thought to myself: long live the spirit of '89.

on turning 33

this one feels different.

i don' know why.

i don't think it's the math.
i don't think it's the trinity.
i don't think about it at all.

but i feel it.

i went for a ride today in a convertible, blindfolded, and had my chart read by a woman who isn't my mother. she told me my Gemini was ascendant. she told me i form meaning by means of montage and juxtaposition. i placed what she said next to the other thoughts in my mind and ate cheesecake under the watchful eye of a macaw named Taco.

i took off the blindfold and saw a room of friends i once knew as strangers. i read well-wishes from people i love in San Francisco. i did not want to think about the night ahead. my best friend cried in my living room. he asked me to give him permission to feel okay.
i walked him to his car and told him i was getting married.



i watched the woman i love age fifty years in the blink of an eye.
i loved her still. i loved her dying and frail.
i loved her after i was gone.

this body i call my own will not survive.
someday these words will wither into dust.

on reading Bazin:

yesterday i found myself in that spacey caffeine headspace of too much theory and not enough praxis - so i decide to practice.

i closed my and eyes and repeated the gayatri mantra until i found myself floating above a cloud of thoughts. i looked down and saw the workings of the lower mind; i saw Bazin bickering with his own "Ontology of the Photographic Image:"

(Que dirait-il?)

he says:

The image helps us to remember
the subject and to preserve him
from a second spiritual death.

i ask:

is not every moment its own death?

he says:

It is no longer a question of survival
after death, but of a concept,
the creation of an ideal world
in the likeness of the real,
with its own temporal destiny.

i ask:

is there any world but the ideal?

he says:

If the history of the plastic arts
is less a matter of their aesthetic
than of their psychology then
it will be seen to be essentially
the story of resemblance, or,
if you will, realism.

i ask:

what is the aesthetic?

he says:

The expression of spiritual reality
wherein the symbol transcended its model.

i ask:

and what of realism?

he says:

It is purely a mental need,
of itself nonaesthetic,
the origins of which must be sought
in the proclivity of the mind towards magic.

i ask:

how does film alleviate this need?

he says:

The solution is not to be found
in the result achieved but
in the way of achieving it.

i ask:

how is this achieved?

he says:

By a mechanical reproduction
in the making of which
man plays no part.

i ask:

why do we find comfort in the lifelessness of the machine?

he says:

The photographic image is the object itself,
the object freed from the conditions
of time and space that govern it.

i ask:

why do we find comfort in the lifelessness of the machine?

film theorist André Bazin, looking very hip

(worst) working title (ever)

last night marked the inaugural meeting of the Wednesday Night Movie Club, a group that emerged from a graduate seminar about Sex, Violence and Hollywood. i've long fantasized about being a member of a book or movie club, but up until now circumstances have prevented it from becoming a reality. but this is beside the point.

the point is we watched Out of Sight, a film i hadn't seen since it came out in the late 90's. in fact my only recollection was of George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez in the trunk of the car:

what struck me this time, however, was the editing sequence that begins in the hotel bar in Detroit. the disconnect between the visual and aural is sublime, with the conversation seaming together the bar, the bedroom, and the sofa.

it's not often that Hollywood films allow sound to break free from the tyranny of the image, and i found myself being seduced by Soderbergh, much like Karen is seduced by Jack:

... watching for cadence and cadences.

obituary for Chocolate (le téléphone est mort)

i adopted my telephone in March 2007. it was born somewhere in Asia, the child of globalization and post-industrial capitalism, and traveled around the world only to be abandoned inside a big box retailer in South Florida. it had a clever name, cost nothing, and i fantasized that the woman who sold it to me might give me her phone number in her demonstration of its utility.

[lapse 15 months]

i dropped my telephone in a glass of water. it was immersed only momentarily, and i feared for its life, imagining all the digital horrors and mechanical nightmares that would soon follow. i made frantic visits to various vendors and shamans, terrified by the thought of being incommunicado. they told me to let it dry, and i spent a restless night dreaming about tin cans and fishing line. i saw a giant serpent wrapping itself around the neck of our planet, keeping us all connected. the phone survived.

[lapse 18 months]

i turned on my telephone on Sunday evening. it booted up only partially and then proceeded to loop from title screen to black, from title screen to black. the next day i made an apathetic visit to a single vendor who told me my phone was dead. i left the store, half-mournful until i considered how many looks are wasted each day checking the time, checking the messages, checking the battery life. i dreamed that night of a world with less things keeping us connected - it continued spinning all the same.

[lapse 12 hours]

i woke this morning, phoneless and smiling.

Man On Wire

there is a man standing in the air where two towers once stood.
he has red hair, black pants and no fear:

Philippe Petit, 7 August 1974

wire-walking entails three movements: lateral, vertical, and torsion.

it spins back and forth,

back and forth,

back and forth.

the wire is a metronome.
the man masquerades as conductor.
it is a symphony of dialectics, mystery and chance.

the towers are 27 years from collapse.

wars will follow the collapse of the towers. the wars will be fought to make us safe. more people will be killed making us safe than were killed by making us unsafe. free elections will follow. the president's brother will be linked to a truck carrying 50 kilos of heroin outside of Kabul.

there is an unrelated traffic stop on the other side of the world.

this will occur 32 years after the wire walker's arrest.

the day of the collapse i will be in New Jersey. i will be staying in a motel room with two cats and one ex-wife. the television will not mention the man on the wire.

the motel room is separated from the traffic stop by 5 years.

it spins back and forth,

back and forth,

back and forth.

"One should count each day a separate life."

i ate a fortune cookie today;
most of the stories are unread.
she takes decaf in her own cup.

"I'm communicating with you...

i had vegetable fried rice for lunch.
one quote comes from the first story.
there are four minarets in Switzerland.
the other quote comes from the cookie.
there are 348 days remaining in this year.

across a vast gulf of
ignorance and darkness."

it is illegal to build minarets in Switzerland.

i drank half-caffeinated coffee in my own cup.
Muslims account for 4% of the Swiss population.
there are scraps of the Sunday Times in my bag.
there were two stainless steel cups on the counter.
his new book is called The Enchantress of Florence.
out of those, how many do we really pay attention to?
i have a book of stories by Donald Barthelme in my bag.
i heard Salman Rushdie interviewed on the radio this morning.
there was a parking lot reconsideration of this morning's waking.

acrobats, dreaming and King

i'm spending my weekend surrounded by Chinese acrobats, and other than a six hundred bill for take-out, the experience has been rather uneventful in spite of all the juggling, plate spinning, and chair climbing.

but this is beside the point.

the point is that last night i heard the voice of Martin Luther King on the radio as i drove home from work. his articulation and tone were impeccable, and it left me remembering a dream i once had of the Sixties. i once imagined the decade as magical, romancing the notion of a nation that might have been different. i wondered what it would have been like to have been with Kesey in '65, or San Francisco in '67, or Chicago in '68.

over time the veneer separating my romanticism from that of Byron, and as i grew older my dreams grew darker. i fantasized about the the Weathermen and the Symbionese Liberation Army. i heard Greenwich Village echoes of March 6th and sang lullabies to Patty in the dark. i watched the year of my birth creep closer and closer until nothing remained.

Nina Simone's voice snapped me back to the present, back to 10:30pm on a Friday night. my yin was waiting for me at home bed, and i dreamed that night of a Balinese god who rolled out its tongue three times - chin, abdomen and floor.

with the final roll, the reality of the dreamscape splintered and i felt myself being swallowed by something i could not comprehend. it was as if every molecule, every atom, every quark collapsed into oblivion, leaving me swimming in the primordial dust of the cosmos. i breathed in the universe and woke the next morning with a hangover, still in the dreamscape, wondering about Arjuna and the vision he was granted by Krishna:


i woke this morning groggy and exhausted. my yin was sleeping beside me and what remained of the dream was little more than a page full of words. i wrote down what i could remember.

i am not an archer, i no nothing of the deities native to Bali, and mine was not a vision of Krishna. but i wondered what was lost in the night... and the taste of sand still lingering in my mouth.

Visions of Newport 1965

I dream of you

in the arms
of the cowherd boy

under a grand piano
in a Philadelphia mansion.

What mysteries do you see:

the Giant Poodle
abyss of enlightenment

eighty-eight keys
set to Shostakovich?

The sacrament of Leary

a lifetime
spent scrying

poker table diamonds
from the safety of pews.

yogurt, metamorphisis and Osho

last night my yin came home as i was cleaning up from making yogurt, and i excitedly told her that we could start recycling a portion of each batch, putting it into the next concoction, and stretching out a single packet of starter for up to five generations.

simultaneous to this monologue came the dawning awareness that my staunch position as a non-hippie is becoming untenable. my ambivalence regarding this subject is well-known, and i rue to even consider the implications of my descent into hippiedom.

sadly, however, even i find it hard to deny when the kitchen has metamorphosed from a place where food is prepared into a place where food is grown. but this is beside the point.

the point is that later that night we discussed the contents of the workshop she helped lead that night. our conversation was couched in the language of the seminar originators, but basically turned on the tension between percept, concept, and communication. to illustrate my perspective, i pointed to a book:

me: "what am i pointing to?"

yin: "Buddha."

me: "the book."

yin: "trick question."

me: "how?"

yin: "the Buddha...

you knew what i would say."

the exercise highlights the everpresence and malleability of context, the contention regarding scope and scale, and the assumptions already made before we even speak a word. had i walked into the room and pointed at the object in exactly the same manner, her answer would have likely been "book." the room was the context; the book became the text.

(so to speak.)

but - by picking up the book - the context was collapsed into the rectangle, drawing emphasis to the image and eliciting her answer. all this happens simply by virtue of living and operating in the world, by nothing more than believing in this maya enough to feed and breathe and drink our bodies.

(so what?)

the presumption that the size of our own context is undeniable, universal, or commonsensical is both absurd and damaging. there are (at least) as many ways of Being as there are beings, and one of the things i love about my yin is her willingness to indulge my fondness for engaging these matters while lying in bed.

(so hum...)

"And everything and nothing is as sacred as we want it to be."
- Beth Orton

my doppelgänger, the monkey

internally recurring dream - living in [my grandmother's] basement, a duplex where i never see the other occupant. this goes on and on and on. i begin to doubt my sanity, thinking my cohort is merely a fragment of my own psyche.

i leave, he stays.
i stay, he leaves.

[my yin-in-law] is there part of the time, perhaps visiting. i keep going to an abandoned mine area like Ore Knob. scorched metallic earth. i look there for weapons to use against unknown enemies and myself.

i come, i go.

there is a party at my apartment, but i do not see my doppelgänger. there are monkeys everywhere and time wears on. my sanity grows thinner and thinner. eventually i leave the basement. trying to exit, i'm impaired and crash into boxes scattered throughout the garage.

my doppelgänger emerges.

i take my gun and aim at my own head, meaning to kill him. he is a monkey though, and i change strategy. i shoot him and flee into the road and onto the basin below. another monkey runs from his condo, carrying a bullwhip. it lassos me, but i catch the whip with my arm, spin the animal around my head, and toss it into the creek. there are more coming for me

- dozens more -

and i know eventually i will grow tired. i have been had . the monkeys had it planned all along, slowly driving me mad. the whole time i thought i was training the monkeys, sneaking behind their backs, getting drunk - this whole time they were actually training me. i want to die. i want to escape...

i know it's too late.

- written upon waking, 1:35 am

befuddled musings of a western amateur regarding the thought of Eastern masters

my yin and i had dinner with a friend's place yesterday. she served this bizarre, cold soup that was comprised of avocado and grapefruit, and i found myself dipping my spoon back into the small blue bowl three times. it went something like this:

dip;

mind says, interesting;

mouth goes, "ugh!"

dip;

mind says, interesting;

mouth goes, "ugh!"

dip;

mind says, interesting;

mouth goes, "ugh!"

but this is beside the point.

the point is that what became clearer (?) to me during the course of our conversation was the relationships between the approaches of Vedant and Buddhism.

in Vedant, everything and everyone and every moment is self.
it's all "self, self, self" until the cows come home.

(upside)

this is a useful way of framing things whenever one feels put upon, hurt, or wronged. it takes one out of the headspace of victimhood and redeposits her back into the One, allowing her to see that she is still whole and that nothing important can ever be lost or broken.

(flipside)

"self, self, self"

can easily become

"me, me, me"

- or worse -

"mine, mine, mine."

in Buddhism, there is:

no self,
no i,
no me.

(sunny side)

it's easier to focus
on others because:

without a "me,"

there is nothing

- emotional, intellectual, physical, or otherwise -

to be obtained
from anyone.

(backside)

the lack of self could lead to (especially for me)
the descent into nihilism (pun not intended for a change).


this idea of no self has a resonance that i'm only just beginning to explore. it helps to untangle some of the subtle egoistic knots i've tied myself into recently by projecting conceptual frameworks onto the atman.

there may not be a damn atman for all i know, and i'm committed to unraveling myself until either it - or nothing - remains.

a mild case of poisoning in the name of mental health

as part of my latest experiment, i dosed myself last night with 425 mg of cascara sagrada. i've been doing a cleanse since Monday, and other than nabbing some Wilco tickets yesterday, the past days have been filled with a mix of sadness and anticipation. i have two competing theories regarding the source of these emotions, but
this is beside the point.

the point is that my better judgment has kept me within 15 feet of the bathroom most of the morning, an experience akin to intestinal house arrest. this current cleanse has eliminated sugar, caffeine, coffee, milk, bread, and cheese, leaving few culinary treats beyond the occasional herbal tea and tree bark laxative. this, coupled with other unmentionable sundry factors, has left me with the words of degenerate genius Charles Bukowski ringing in my ears:

"I worry too much about my god damned soul."

rediscovery of existential dream from October 2009

a dream of my own death sentence,
an exile to some rocky alcove by the sea.

i have thoughts of escape,

but

want to face my destiny.

i wonder:
should i:

wait to starve

or

swim into the sea.

i'm afraid the water is cold;
the sensation of drowning;
a wave splashes my leg;

my fears are quelled.

yet -

i still do not know.

(instead)

i stand by the pebbled rocky shore

waiting for a sign to die

not knowing how i got there.

"prelude"

cool mornings, Rivera Beach, and the mobbing of birds

yesterday my yin and i drove to West Palm, across to its illustrious island, and parked in a small park overlooking the intrcoastal. we took a nice long bike ride (a belated new year's treat) in the chilly 50° morning air, and ultimately reached a small pier looking out at the barges and slums of Riviera Beach.

it seemed odd that a single narrow channel of water could represent such a large divide between rich and poor, and i wondered idly what criminality lay hidden in the mansions and bathroom stalls of the wealthy. but this is beside the point.

the point is that a family of four joined us on the pier, set their bicycles by the rack, and pulled out a large box of Goldfish to feed the mulatto gulls loitering about. the children yelled their enthusiasm as the birds swooped down to snatch them out of the water, and then more gulls arrived to grab them mid-air. the parents reveled in their children's excitement, and soon the whole scene became little more than a screaming gull-ridden mob scene.

whatever discrimination the family had once possessed was now gone, and the parents were so wrapped up in their children's pleasure that they lost sight of the whole - feeding junk food to wildlife, the noise endured by the house next door, and the impending excrement that was about to fall on the other occupants of the pier.

ultimately the box flew into the water, and the parents looked at us to see if we had been watching. i held the father's gaze, and he and his wife hurried back to the bike rack, pulling their children along behind. the box was left floating in the water.

my yin and i spoke about what just happened, noting that this ugly scene came to be through nothing more than a parent's desire to see their children happy...

but it was desire nonetheless.

an overcast brunch on New Year's Day

i spoke with my mother yesterday, and i was surprised to learn that she's been reading this blog. specifically, she mentioned a post from a couple of weeks ago that enumerated various potential (and former) variations to the size of our family. but this is beside the point.

the point is that our conversation was cut short by an impromptu rendezvous with my yin-in-law and her beau, and although this encounter did not begin what has since transpired, it has served as a catalyst.

(i felt the shadow of these things as we took our seats)

we were bombarded by wind and overcast skies, and after relocating to a table alee, an odd frenticism slowly crept over the meal, replete with a waiter whose IQ likely hovered in the low 70's. his hands trembled, he messed up orders, and he said things like:

"i'm not that stupid...

i'm not gonna grab it out of your hand...

i was already doing that..."

every word he spoke was permeated by a fear of not being good enough, and somehow i was the only one tuned into these things.

when he walked away, i whispered to my yin that the man needs compassion. conversation ensued, and i shared my observations with the table. the space softened, the mimosas arrived, and nearly two hours passed before we left.

[shift tense]

back in the parking garage, a car backs out in front of us, oblivious to the fact that we are behind him. my yin reacts, "that guy doesn't even see us," and as we exit into the streets as the rains descend.

i think aloud:

"it's the responsibility of those who see to watch out not just for themselves, but also for those who do not."

rabbit rabbit