Re-membered: 25 September 2010

fragment #1

Wake and make coffee, journal, probably read some – what happens on these forgettable mornings doomed to anonymity? One task flowing into the next without even the structure of routinization to etch its meaning into memory. Maybe this lack of memory is the meaning. Perhaps I've been reading too much of alienation in Shibuya, Shinjuku and Japan. Tiny unpronounceable fragments signifying an immense landscape - as much psychic as geographic - of which I've never known.

A former lover, a girl with a grandmother in Kyoto, may have told me of these places, but if so I've long since forgotten.

What I do remember is calling there one December. She had left index cards with phonemes written on them (black or blue, I do not know which) so I could call grandmother's home and ask to speak with her. I do not remember the conversation, but one year later it no longer mattered.

There is no greater distance than the width of a bed between lovers, one of whom is already gone.

This is not the girl with a grandmother in Kyoto.

fragment #2

We left at 8pm, dropped leftovers at home, and went to the inlet in search of a drum circle. I didn't want to be there, but went anyway, remembering how my earlier agoraphobia had proven fatuous and empty. We found no one that night but fishermen and geriatrics, burnouts and immigrants, a strong breeze and the outgoing current rushing under the bridge. There was a deceitful full moon behind the clouds, promising to reveal itself.

We drove home moonless and silent.

This is not the drum circle in question.

fragment #3

The final thing about that night in September, just shy of two years ago, was the strange tongue-tied sensation while talking to J___ and G_____. I couldn't quite express myself, or perhaps the words got bruised as they traveled through the air, contaminated by all the things that went unsaid before. I envy, sometimes, the (apparent) ability of others to say what they mean, or at least not notice or care how their words are destined to fall short of true communion.

I got a flash of this in bed yesterday morning, when I looked at her face after making love.

In that moment I gained an understanding into the nature of images. Her face, only inches away, was nonetheless separated by an unbridgeable chasm. The eye is forever flawed, forever searching for what is outside of itself. It relies upon the hands, upon the lips, upon the touch to bring it closer to the things it holds most dear – but it can never be one with them.

So long as we are dependent upon images, we are locked in a world of infinite superficiality, a world without depth, where every passing gaze promises to bring us close, but only pushes us further apart.

This is not the image in question.

All fragments originally written on 25 September 2010 and taken from:

The journal that spanned from summer to fall.