i felt the need, tonight, to take a slightly longer route home. fewer miles, more stoplights, and extra time to allow my thoughts to settle after a long day at school and a longer weekend at work. the end of the semester has begun its descent, and i feel the now familiar mix of excitement, anticipation, and dread. sometimes i keep these things at bay with procrastination, conjecture, and memory.
driving at night has always held some inexplicable appeal to me, and it stretches back as least as far as my childhood, when i took day-long excursions to a tiny Kentucky town called Virgie:
leaving Virgie
my great grandmother lived in the same ramshackle house where she raised nearly twenty children during the Great Depression, and all of the surrounding shacks and trailers were populated by kinfolk. my favorite was Uncle Nick, a mechanical genius who invented hydraulic woodsplitters and used to visit us in North Carolina whenever he and my grandmother weren't feuding. Uncle Nick gave me my first Bowie knife and, when employed, worked for the local coal mines that sold off Pike County one bucket at a time:
coal mine in Pike County, Kentucky
across the footbridge stood the country store where my grandmother first bummed a smoke from my grandfather in 1952. this cigarette led to their marriage three weeks later, a daughter the following year, then a second, then a third. these three daughters gave birth to three grandsons, and this odd symmetry held for twenty years until the birth of grandson number four:
my cousin Luke's first Halloween
i haven't been back to Virgie since my great grandmother died. i was in college at the time, which made for a convenient excuse not to go to the funeral. i remember my grandmother calling and telling me how sad she felt to lose her mother. i didn't know what to say, much less how to say it. mainly i just listened. sometimes i still do.
i don't know why all this came up tonight, but those sleepy car rides back from Virgie seem closer tonight than they have in years...
my yin, in her infinite kindness, decided to entertain my finite, yet vast yearning for homemade pesto and quinoa pasta. what followed was a discussion of: 1) Lizzie Borden'sBorn in Flames; and 2) a hackneyed, preliminary exploration into an ontology of pasta.
Item #1
i went into the film expecting this:
"Imagine an America in which 10 years after a socialist revolution, the ladies decide to take charge. That's exactly what happens in this sci-fi allegory. When the leader of a lesbian separatist group dies in jail, her death spurs an uprising that turns the country upside down. Part fantasy, part comedy and part serious social commentary, this new age chick flick has it all: a female DJ who narrates the action, a feminist rock soundtrack and more. "
"These films do not put me in the place of the female spectator, do not assign me a role, a self-image, a positionality in language or desire. Instead, they make a place for what I will call me, knowing that I don't know it, and give 'me' space to try to know, to see, to understand."
neither the former's misleading imprecision, nor the latter's insightful elocution, can compete with the politically beatific low-fi experience of the film itself:
Item #2
spaghetti is the white, middle-class heteronomative pasta whose maddening ubiquity has etched its way into our collective conscious. angel hair is like spaghetti, only less so. fettucini is an egregiously, aggressively masculine pasta not unlike the skinhead subculture, which demands a heavy (preferably white) sauce. linguine is like fettucini, but with more humility and less racism. lasagna is pasta with bread envy.
rotini, farfalle, and conchigle all belong to the mutant category of pasta. some members of this genus, like ruote, qualify as veritable abominations, and should only be eaten in the event of catastrophic (as in La jetée) or utopian (see Item #1) political upheaval.
macaroni, which certainly deserves to be in the above category, somehow escaped such marginalization, but only at the expense of being forever associated with packets of dried cheese. given the unsatisfactory nature of the first three designations, my inquiry has led me to believe that penne is the only viable pasta choice. it is obviously not a mutant, has a circle at either end, and unlike the straight pastas in section one, requires only a single utensil. add to this its association with vodka, and you have a pasta match made in heaven.
according to Wikipedia, Wilco's name means "will comply," and if i had known this fifteen years ago, there is no telling what direction my life might have taken. the following story is a parable in one act, elucidating the dangers that arise when we allow the dialects of our youth to impinge upon the opportunities of the moment.
Act One
i first started not listening to Wilco in college. at that time music critics threatened Chapel Hill with "becoming the next Seattle," and innumerable up and comers made their way through town. i was knee-deep in spending my misspent youth, listening to punk rock, going to school, and playing in two and a half bands.
unfortunately, any artist who held even the slightest whiff of instrumental competence was subject to my disdain and, as a result of my ignorance, each time i saw a flyer for "Wilco" i immediately jumped to the conclusion that the band had taken its name from a chain of gas stations which ran throughout the South at the time:
picture of a Wilco in Georgia
it wasn't until the summer of 2007, sitting in a lousy chain bakery of all places, that i finally heard Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. at the time i was without internet service, and i ventured with some regularity to Panera Bread to use their free WiFi. a burnt cup of coffee and cinnamon bagel often accompanied the process, not unlike the coffee and stale pastries of those Wilco(s/es?) from my youth. this particular occasion occurred sometime in September, after my flirtation with Mardou had come to an end, but before i knew it.
i sat listening, for the first time, to "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart:"
when the song reached its climax amidst the broken sounds and disjointed melodies of the things that might have been, my life shifted in a way that i can only compare to the first time i heard the lonely bassoon that opens Stravinsky's Le sacre du printemps:
Stravinsky's lonely basson
a (still-ongoing) period of obsession followed, and last night the process reached some manner of consummation when my yin and i went to see Wilco in Miami:
the city
the venue
the band
the singer
by the time the concert ended, three hours, two sets, and one encore had elapsed. in my experience, only two other bands (Radiohead in 2008 and Fugazi in 1999) have been able to surpass their recorded accomplishments in performance. Wilco did this, pushing further and further, stretching each song right up until the point of disintegration before allowing it to collapse back into its underlying rhythmic and harmonic structures. two people came to mind.
the first was Saylor, whom i called and left a message during the intermission. the collective ghost of he and Tarah is always evoked by such excursions, and i fondly remember the night we drove back from Miami listening to Brian Eno, berating semiotics, and throwing banana peels out the window. we ended up in an all-night diner sometime before sunrise, and as far as i remember, that was the last night three of us spent together before he left for Kerouac's mythical West.
in homage, my yin and i stopped at a Denny's, got a table, and left without ordering. one might call it a modified "dine and dash," which provided all the thrill of the dash without the moral consequences of dining.
the second was Mardou, whose presence and absence are forever intertwined with my memory of the summer. ironically, Wilco released Sky Blue Sky that same year, whose opening track provided closure to the wound opened by Yankee Hotel Foxtrot:
Epilogue
both Saylor and Mardou live in San Francisco now, and my yin and i plan to make a pilgrimage sometime before year's end.
my mother left a message for my yin this morning, and among the various sentimentalities and salutations, she offered to give my yin her wedding dress. hearing this statement, i was struck by two sensations:
the first was a deeply warm emotion, fueled by the knowledge that my mother has kept the dress preserved for more than three decades, safeguarding it in an airtight box through fifteen years of marriage, two moves cross country, and twenty years of divorce.
the second was the unmistakable shock of trembling Freudian horror.
Saylor once drew, from (my) memory, a picture of she and i. this illustration's referent occurred on a Saturday night in September 2007:
"transgression"
4am against the w a l l sitting
armstouching c l o s e getting c l o s er, until we s c. o.. o... t to make roomforonemore, and then
its handonherthigh close,
..................palm ........facing away
for appearancesake.
[lapse]
"I fell sick and unhappy because I could not make a great sweet union of the moment of life – now this is 45 minutes after, it will pass but it is sad and true."
in a not unusual case of delayed reaction, i have finally managed to upload a (short) video from the most recent Art Basel. this artwork was one, maybe two, blocks from the tacky hedonism of Lincoln Road, and what i loved about it was its unique mingling of con/text.
it was something that could not be owned.
or, rather, owning it would would destroy its value because its meaning was inextricably linked to the glitz and glamour and consumption surrounding it.
the art without the consumption was trite; the consumption without the art was life.
the eye____of the______camera was______too______small to___________see these______ things.
perhaps that, in conjunction with my sloth, is why it's taken me so long to post it. i know it cannot mean the same, no matter how many bit and bytes stream across the screen; the video below is what wasn't:
i first saw Whip Itsoon after its release at an absurd cinema near my university. it was Monday night, and my yin and i snuck in one bottle of water, homemade granola bars, and a black bean burrito. but this is beside the point.
the point is that i initially read the film as clearly feminist - female protagonist, a spectrum of strong female characters, sisterhood, implicit (interracial) lesbian romance, etc.
i shared my point of view with a friend from school. she, in turn, informed me that i was way off base.
[lapse six months]
yesterday we screened Whip It, and this time i could not help but see the awkward melange of competing discourses. a brief rundown:
1) 3rd wave feminism weighs in most obviously, with Ellen Page buying her boots, buying her skates, and consuming her weigh towards equality.
2) this is pocked and peppered with pustules of post-feminism, most notable the women's love for make-up and Drew Barrymore's pummeling of her boyfriend at the party.
3) undergirding it all, however, is a strong foundation of traditional patriarchal values. this is where Daniel Stern comes in, as the emasculated father who sets his house back in order by reclaiming his manhood and "allowing" his daughter to become her own woman.
during this weekend's bout of respiratory infirmity, i found myself bed-bound for 23 out of 24 hours on Saturday. it was a beautiful day, and rather than spending it on the beach with my yin, i was forced to convalesce in a small bedroom, alternately robing, disrobing, and rerobing my day away. but this is beside the point.
the point is that there was an upside to this experience, namely i was able to catch up on my film viewing, making up for the lost years when my spectatorship was so abysmal as to go beyond passive into the realm of impassive. but this is still not the point.
the point is that i was able to rewatch Lost in Translation, which i last (and first) saw on 27 August 2004. at that time, for various reasons, i wrote to a former lover whose family immigrated from Kyoto. we had met junior year at college and, in spite of a malignant break-up of my own making five years earlier, we had reconnected via email. below is a portion of that email, punctuation unchanged as a testimonial to my state of mind:
"... also i was gonig to write you this morning anyway because i've been having really bad insomnia for the past four or five months and so last night i finally watched lost in translation (i bought a tivo a week ago and record movies and the like while i'm at work). i had tried once before but had failed to finish it because it was paced just too darn deliberately. the pace hadn't changed and this time i was ready for it, and i thought it wsas pretty good. still not up to her first movie (virgin suicides) or the reviews it garnered, but pretty good. anyway the reason i was going to write you about it was that it's set in tokyo (and a a train station in kyoto) and i was wondering what the deal was with those little backpack-type things that the women in the kimonos (traditional?) have. every woman in that attire had them be her waitress or bride or anonymous woman on the street. is there a function to those things or are they purely fashion?"
in the intervening years another figure crept into my subconscious mind, and two nights ago i dreamed of Mardou. the dream felt like this:
this morning, feeling better, i wrote Mardou an email, just like the Japanese girl all those years before:
"dream of you, undertaken in a sickened condition on the Saturday night of time change:we're in an elevator after some manner of unknown, transgressive encounter. your hair is dyed past blond into whiteness, approaching the outer fringes of blue. there is an awkwardness between us. when i get off at my floor, you tell me you didn't think it would be like this, implying that my goodbye is cold and thoughtless. upon waking, i realize it is the elevator scene from Lost in Translation, which i had watched before bed. you were in it, i suppose, because you are somehow tied to my idealized Tokyo. weird."
a forensic typing expert might (or might not) be able to ascertain something about the author of the emails by examining them side by side. for the purposes of my own self-query, however, i ask only:
how is that we account for these cycles in our lives?
the substitution of one thing for another, the sublimation of desire, and the coincidental nature of our existence. Donald Barthelme once asked:
"Do you encounter your own life as gratuitous?"
(if) the answer is "no",
are the things that appear again, and again, again, and again, again and, again...
are these things nothing more than a matter of punctuation?
or are they really not the same; the meaning merely
it's just a cold. i'm not contagious. no, it's only allergies. i was much worse yesterday. i'm sure it will be better tomorrow.
Part 2
“The cinema cannot show the truth, or reveal it, because the truth is not our there in the real world, waiting to be photographed. What the cinema can do it produce meanings, and meanings can only be plotted, not in relation to some abstract yardstick or criterion of truth, but in relation to other meanings.”
i plan to write on two films that share a common conceit: an earnest inquiry into the nature of time, memory, and being. they share little outwardly. one is an admixture of photo essay, travelogue, and plagiarized ethnography. the other is overly stylized, episodic, and intermittently profound.
what is the appropriate way to approach the unspeakable, and why does Japan serve as an imaginary site of reconciliation for both films?
the first is a problem of form, the latter a problem of content.
Part 4
i smelled a piece of frozen salmon today. the stench lingered in my nostrils for some minutes, until i chased it away with the bitterness of echinacea tincture. tears ensued and i dried them with a frozen piece of chocolate toast. my yin procured this treat from a local bakery and, although it is perfectly edible, it pales in comparison to the dreamy mountain breads of North Carolina.
Part 5
montage, from time to time, takes the place of sincere expression. and yet, no other form is so well-suited for the communication of ennui; one can almost taste:
the lurking listless restlessness,
the spaces in between.
Part 6
Both narrators demonstrate the liminality of being and self, pulled between the paradox of memory, on the one hand, and historic materiality on the other. In [film one], the narrator attempts to position himself firmly within the material by his use of documentary footage, political content, etc. The obsessive lyricism, however, continually pulls the viewer out of the "documented" and into the narrator's interior world, which is always distanced from the lived experience of the subjects documented.
In [film two], the narrator attempts to position himself firmly outside the material realm by use of romance and fantasy. This obsession, however, is interrupted by the episodic construction of the narrative, the intrusion of documentary footage, and by the passing, yet crucial, mention of political events that alter the course of the narrative. The viewer is thus expelled from the narrator's insular world and pulled back into the material. This threat of "the real" looms just beyond the film's periphery and periodically ruptures the diegesis, drawing attention to the insurmountable distance between memory and experience.
Part 7
i'm sure it will be better tomorrow. i was much worse yesterday. no, it's only allergies. i'm not contagious. it's just a cold.
i was introduced to falafel in the fall of 1993. it was a blockbuster year for my taste buds, and saw my initiation into of all manners of exotic cuisine, ranging from baklava to bagels.
(yes, i was that sheltered)
in fact - in spite of my frequent outbursts of culinary disgust - i am willing to try virtually anything a minimum of one time. sometimes, however, an experience scars you...
last night my yin and i drove to see Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderlandat the IMAX theater forty-five minutes from our home.
we left early to avoid the rush hour traffic and arrived early enough to pick up our tickets and stroll along the Fort Lauderdale river front. along the way, we encountered a giant whisper contraption and innumerable grizzled men in various states of homelessness. both the novelty and the men occupied the same real estate, vying for primacy in a small park that teeters on the brink of degeneracy.
we took pictures of the contraption but not the men:
the relationship between the above image and the things not seen is best described by:
which we encountered not long after the park.
in theory, these rails travel all the way to Key West where one might revel in tales of Ernest Heminwgway's drunken genius or stand in reverent awe of Harry Truman's Little White House. in reality, the bridge only lowers for the passage of trains and leaves the anonymous bearded drunkards huddled under the north side of south bound bridges.
yesterday afternoon i lay around half-sick and cranky, under the weather from some manner of microbial infestation in the upper goozle region of my throat. as is my tradition, i spent the first part of my convalescence watching a film for the things i didn't see before:
i saw this film the first, and only previous, time more than a decade ago at an unknown date and known location. i have reconstructed a memory of what it must have been like: i am alone in my bedroom with a 19" color television, DVD player, and VCR. my roommate may or may not be next door. the film was either rented at a hip video store in Carrboro or a defunct video store in Chapel Hill. the cost was either three dollars (in the former) or 1/5 of five dollars (in the latter). i am either dating an opera singer in Durham or a Japanese girl at work. photographs may or may not resolve the issue.
one of these men is a killer:
David Harris, date unknown
Randall Adams, 1976
the answer to that question, if knowable, relies upon memory:
the memories of the men above, the memories of the people who saw them, the memories of the people who think they saw them.
how does one resolve the inevitable gaps between them?
the solution, if extant, presents itself in the forms of artifacts:
a stolen blue car, a license plate, a .22 revolver.
what meaning do these objects hold except in the memory?
the commas in the first sentence of the second paragraph serve as metaphors for breaking points in time; they are evidence of my own memory protruding into that of the men above. it is the job of the filmmaker to reconcile these discrepancies. Errol Morris does so with a long take of a tape recorder, containing nothing more than the first man illustrating the distance between memory and artifact. this distance suffices for truth in the mind of the spectator.
and yet, there is no reason to believe this tape recorder is in any way related to the sound of the man's confession; the image is linked to the sound by nothing more than the semiotics of cinematographic causality. facing this crisis of indexicality, we search for comfort in meaning...
last night, some friends invited my yin and i over for dinner. we enjoyed a delicious vegetarian meal, and i managed to make it through both turnips and Brussels sprouts without (undue) drama. after dinner, we shared a pot of Jasmine tea and began talking about memory...
souvenir given to me by my yin after a trip to the New York IYI
these items take on not only dimension (the surface area they occupy in our mind) but also authority. their weight is unevenly distributed, and our beings bend and flex under the strain of their meaning. their very materiality provides a continuity absent from the moments we merely live and remember.
and yet, we also pass judgment on these artifacts, either magnifying their significance or downplaying their importance by casting dispersions on the people we thought we were when we created them...
perhaps this conversation is what the stage for:
we meditated when we got home, and i felt myself being pulled inward from the moment we stepped inside the door. eyes closed, i heard sounds bleeding together backwards and forwards in time and felt my awareness shifting subtly in unpredictable ways - amorphous, contiguous configurations giving way to cubist energy formations in red.
at the end of the first hour, we heard birds singing preternaturally loud outside our window. it was as if they had wedged their beaks into the cracks between panes in attempt to rouse us, and my yin decided to go to bed.
i stayed another hour, shifting my legs occasionally and pulling a shawl across my shoulders. near the end i felt as if i had to find my way back into my body, as if i was on the brink of slipping away indefinitely. these were only the beginning of the visions, and i half/napped for a half/hour, half/dreaming of the nearfuture.
i saw myself brushing my teeth in the mirror, but chose instead to circumvent the mechanism of time and machinations of fate by going straight to bed, minutes before midnight...
i had strange dreams all night long:
a dream of my yin in a theater, trying to take publicity photos or head shots. nothing is working. the angles are wrong; the colors aren't mixing; the dream shifts to an airplane. it's a small Cessna, not unlike the one from which i jumped on 6 May 2007...
i have a journal that proves it:
journal dated 2007, April 24 - May 19
my yin is waiting to commit suicide, and has sticks of dynamite taped to a baseball bat. she plans to jump out of the plane and then detonate them. after take-off i realize that perhaps the explosion might not kill her, and if so, she would have to wait and fall and dread all the way to the ground. i try to convince her not to jump by telling here these things, but the dream ends imprecisely.
i do not know what time i wake from the sound of her alarm, so unlike the singing of the birds...
synecdoche |siˈnekdəkē| noun a figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole or vice versa, as in Cleveland won by six runs (meaning “Cleveland's baseball team”).
yesterday morning:
a dream my hometown, between the towns, standing in the parking lot of a gas station where my father used to stop and buy me beef jerky. Jache drives up in his car, maudlin, determined, and suicidal. no words are spoken, but we see each other; he takes off around the curve and smashes in to the embankment.i run down the road trying to catch up to him. i see that his car is smashed, flipped, rolled over, and laying on its roof the. the windshield is shattered and smoke rises from the undercarriage. Jache is standing by the roadside, relatively unscathed. he stumbles off to continue his quest, and i feel a somber, terrifying certainty that his troubles have only just begun.
last night:
i watched Synecdoche, New York, trying to decide if it was a statement to which i am willing to devote two weeks of my life. i have seen it once before, but this time i watched with the eye of a would-be academic:
the film is interesting but disjointed, and the last several moments - from the time Caden formally cedes his role as director to Ellen - offers up an ambiguity that seems to undercut the first hour and forty-five minutes of the narrative. it is odd, but self-consciously odd.
unusual enough to trigger curiosity, but not truly bizarre; subtle at times, but too pronounced to become enigmatic:
fade in from black, fade out to white; it's 7:45 in the morning, it's 7:45 in chalk.
the world is crumbling outside the window.
in spite of this, the time disjunctions seem haphazard, as if Kaufman had a good idea but then got lazy. (as i, myself, am prone to do). basically, i'm unable to tell if the film actually interrogates itself in some incredibly nuanced manner, or simply comes up short. in one way, the film is as incomplete and incomprehensible as life itself, but something about the tone is off.
it is not the joyousness of simultaneity, but rather the nihilism of a mortality divorced from purpose. Caden's final words on the bench speak to his own failure of acceptance, and imply the existence of an extra-diegetic narrative certainty rather than the impossibility of continuity both within and without the film text. maybe in this way the film works precisely because it succumbs to the same flaws as its hero. maybe.
twelve hours ago:
i spoke to Jache last night, an hour after he wrecked his car. he was relatively unscathed.
this was not written on the day, but on the day before, after watching Sans soleilfor the second time and feeling the sadness wash over me. i am left with the knowledge that nothing worth saying can be said, that every image lies.
a morning i do not remember
if ten people were to read this tonight, it wouldn't make any difference. if i chose three friends, three strangers, my mother, my father, my lover - who would come the closest to hearing the space surrounding the letters?
a day i do not remember
memory functions only in absence, snapshots surrounded by the void. we draw imaginary li(n)es connecting A to B. i see me with my grandfather at age two, and crying on the first day of school at age five. i cannot help but draw a trajectory between them.
and yet, i do not truly know the location of either. they are merely two locations, adjacent exhibits in the museum of my memory, but separated by three years in the ocean of time. i can account for neither their proximity nor distance.
i started the film looking for something to write about, something academic, and left it realizing there was no point. even if i wrote an essay and filled it with 4500-6000 of les mots justes, it would still be absent of meaning. this is the tragic, inescapable double-bind of language.
by morning these feelings will be gone and still the words will remain. a page full of tombstones to the me i was the night before. film is no different. each frame is a eulogy, every splice its own purgatory. i recall the images of myself that exist not in memory, but only in the artifact:
a night i do not remember
Marker's Tokyo is gone; Hitchcock's San Francisco has been overtaken by artist and muse. my own film has grown so thin that i can see the shadows lurking the closets of our eyes. i listen for cadences; my lover is snoring with a yellow blanket pulled across her face.
there is a rhythm to our collective blinking, and one can count the worlds that might have been in the moments our eyes are closed. the average person blinks 15 times per minute. there are more than 6.5 billion people in this world. the seductive deception of arithmetic leads me to believe that there are nearly 100 trillion chances for revolution every minute.
but none of this matters. the gulf between experience and memory has already grown too large, and by morning all this will be gone. i will be asleep within the hour and know that all those revolutions, all those worlds that might have been, may only arrive in my sleep:
yesterday, as par the course these past six weeks, i found myself rushing about with approximately 17% less time than comfortable. i needed groceries, and was somewhere between the nutriitonal yeast and tempeh when a familiar voice stopped me:
"what? you didn't recognize me."
(i look up from my preoccupation)
"i didn't even see you."
(i reach to hug him)
"no, don't."
(i don't)
"i've been sick."
(i whisper)
"swine flu?"
(he smiles)
"i thought it was that at first."
(he pulls up his shirt)
"look."
(dozens of small scabs cover his torso)
"measles?"
(i step back)
"close. chicken pox."
"you never had them?"
(enter doubt)
"i did. they came back."
(i step back)
"i'm not contagious anymore."
(i step forward)
"my guy says i have to get my system alkaline."
(i agree)
"alkaline is the way to go."
"where you been?"
"work and school."
(answer by rote)
"you still hanging out with that girl?"
(i smile)
"yeah."
(he smiles)
"get out."
"we're getting married."
(he laughs)
"get out. you turned her?"
(i laugh)
"that's the second case i've heard of recently..."
it is a pleasant coincidence, and i am able to extricate myself from his prolific, formidable powers of bavarder without making myself late. i leave by promising that i will call him next week, and look forward to a more substantial reunion.
Jache came over yesterday and told me about bodhisattvas. his explanation included: one sheet of lined paper (from his algebra notebook), black ink (from a ball point pen), and words (from the English language). the words were: "poet, artist, yogi" and connecting these words were lines of both the straight and squiggly variety. some of the straight line had a positive slope (where m≈1.73).
many months ago i told Jache the story of Ramakrishna, a Bengali saint from the 19th century who was a Brahmin priest at a temple of Kali, the goddess of destruction and destroyer of illusion (which is why i smile every time i come to your house and see Kalis Funeral Home). Ramakrishna converted to Christianity one day (much to the befuddlement of the temple goers), promptly had a vision of Christ, and said "yes, this is a true path to god." he then resumed his priestly duties and stopped being a Christian. a few months later, Ramakrishna pulled the same caper again, this time becoming a Muslim. he promptly had a vision of Muhammad, said "yes, this is a true path to god," stopped being a Muslim, and resumed his duties as a priest.
Sri Ramakrishna
III
Jache came over yesterday and told me about bodhisattvas. the words were: "poet, artist, yogi" and he related them to the tale i had told him of Ramakrishna. Jache said: you're not a poet, you're not an artist, you're not a yogi. you're a bodhisattva, you're like Ginsberg, you are meant to play and dance in the world. Jache left and i felt clearer, letting his wisdom (he is only 21) wash over me.
Ginsberg, before he got old and fat
IV
last night i had the courage to call you back. i slept nine hours, soundly, after a miserable sobbing slumber and nightmares the the day before.
artwork created by a dream
V
this morning i looked up the word bodhisattva because, although it sounded nice to hear Jache call me one, i really had no idea what it meant. i found it in my fancy computer's dictionary.
idealized representation of my fancy computer
VI
bodhisattva|ˌbōdiˈsätvə; -ˈsət-| (also Bodhisattva) noun (in Mahayana Buddhism) a person who is able to reach nirvana but delays doing so out of compassion in order to save suffering beings.
the definition i found spoke to the conflict and churning i felt inside, the unquenchable thirst for the divine, the persistent ineffable pull of the earth below, the rose born to die in an empty lot, the beauty of decay - not just in juxtaposition - but within its own being. i heard echoes of Kant: the thing in and of itself, the thing in and of itself, the thing in and of itself...
Jache asked about my dreams; i told him i had not remembered them in weeks... except for one about flying off of a cliff in a car. in the dream i looked at the driver from the back seat and calmly said "you have just killed us," and then slowly began repeating my mantra. i woke thinking, how odd.
envelope in which i received my mantra
IX
last night: i called you back, i slept nine hours. i woke this morning but did not remember my dreams. it is a curious thing because somehow this montage must have appeared in the night.
ubiquitous photograph of Walter Benjamin, harbinger of dreams
X
when the gods seek comfort, it is to discarded words they pray;
XI
in love with the constellations, the peaces within the pieces, the moments in between...
leaving Virgie
coal mine in Pike County, Kentucky
my cousin Luke's first Halloween
