thisness, thatness, lastness

Last paper, last class, last lesson... Will he ever teach again?
Will he ever learn again? Did he ever in the first place?
First place, last place, last place he thought he would ever be.

What about the road not taken? The paths unchosen?
The torn lederhosen of Nancy, lost in Avignon, before the fall.

Autumn ghosts of Burger King parking lots and nausea,
diarrhea and repetition, after Freud, before Lacan
invisible memories and broken plungers;
New Jersey, December and petty larceny.

Do you remember the beach in August or only the Light?
Forgotten spring times, fecund and profound:

Did it start as suddenly at it ended or was it always there?
Or was it here: fort, da, fort, da

clocks have a way of filling the room

fort, da, fort, da

I wondered
two days ago
what it would be like

fort, da, fort, da

if anything

fort, da, fort, da

Summer is her now; humidity and balm and summers gone
He once said he would trade them all for an extra day with her;
now it seems each day we spent was one I lost.

What a difference a bay makes...

Yesterday my yin and I went sailing with her second cousin, his wife, and my yin-in-law. It was my first, and last, free Saturday for quite some time, and the next two weeks promise to be a blur of wedding preparations, thesis revisions, garlic-infused music festivals, presentations on Hemingway, lectures on La jetée, unintentional rhymes and potential unavoidable insomnias.

But, for now, this is beside the point.

The point is that yesterday was my second time ever on a sailboat, and I couldn't help but think about the similarities and differences between them. If one were to balance the former against the latter, it would look something like this:

similarities to the left, differences to the right

In fact, other than the salt water, the jib line and mast, almost nothing was the same. I tried writing about it this morning:

[Nancy, San Francisco, summer 2005. One on, one off, an airport security checkpoint. She's unable to find her license, but she looks for it at the bottom of the brown plastic bottle once filled with small white pills. Apparently there's no cure for aerophobia.

I remember how embarrassed I felt. I remember how I wanted to go out our last night but she was too sick to leave the house. I remember worrying and wondering and knowing how she must appear to my family – how I refused to see what was so obvious to everyone else.

That day on the bay, which might have been so beautiful, was awkward and strange – just like every day with her. It's still stupefying that I could have ever mistaken such sadness and tragedy for love, that I could have ever called that sham of a marriage the rest of my life. To have had that experience and survived it is truly a gift because it has allowed me to know how dark, flawed and imperfect life and love and relationships can be...

But yesterday, now, what a difference a bay makes...]

Biscayne Bay, 2011

San Francisco Bay, 2005

regatta on the horizon, 2011

regatta off Alcatraz Island, 2005

the captain, 2011

the captain, 2005

my yin an I with our new singing bowl, 2011

i

m
age
miss
in
g
Nancy and I, 2005

4 questions, 1 answer

How does one measure the distance between then and now? How does one account for the things not seen? How does one understand the connection between that bay and person in 2005 to the bay and person in 2011? Does the truth lie in the missing images or the images missing?

Little more than pixels and memory:

the precision of one matched
by the infidelity of the other.

on the 7th day of Christmas

on the seventh day of Christmas my true love gave to me...

seven hours waiting

just to say, "rabbit rabbit," which is good luck to say the first thing of every month. i don't know when or where this tradition originated, or even if it's actually a tradition at all. i first heard about it on a live Jawbreaker album, which i purchased in Kansas City (Kansas, not Missouri) in November of 2000:

obviously, they didn't break the bank paying a layout designer

the band had been disbanded (see what i did there?) for years by the time the album was released, but i had managed to see them once in Chapel Hill during college. two years earlier, i had missed them at a tiny venue in Durham; and two years later, their seminal album:

clock, matches and cannon

took on an importance to me that bordered on the obscene. the details are beyond my present time constraints and attention span, but these lyrics from "In Sadding Around" give some idea as to my state of mind:

Sleeping off the last five years takes another five years.
Recovery in lieu of being here right now.
When I throw myself at your feet, you know it's to be walked on.

We're breaking up every single night.

If I had a choice don't you think I'd make it?
I lost my voice. I hope I didn't break it.
Little demons by my bed whisper secrets.
The kind you never hear.

I dip my toe in this cold, cold life.
I want to dive, but I can't find the faith.

You with a view so unlike my own; I'm trying on your eyes.
So I let go, fall to the ground – It's a long way down again.

Petty cons keep peeling back my ears. We make plans.
Collaborate and give to you my better half.
Until now just dead weight, a prisoner of doubt.
In a cell we kiss and tell all our keepsakes.

Sore, hit the floor. Got my first glimpse of the sky.
The stars were on your side.
Who would've thunk the thirteenth fell on Friday?

I say hello and it's goodbye again.

the back cover of my journal:
November 7, 1999 - January 18, 2000

not long after that i met Nancy, and the song transformed from requiem to prophecy. but, for the time being, this is beside the point.

the point is that the album still serves as something of a sublime object for me, embodying all the potential, sadness and loss that spun like an invisible mobile around my twenty-two year old head:

an artwork by Marcel Duchamp

thus concluded the seventh day of Christmas.

on the 5th day of Christmas

on the fifth day of Christmas my true love gave to me...

five broken things

well, not really, but our attempt to watch Jean Renoir's The River was foiled last night by a recalcitrant disc and my yin tells me i'm free to use creative license on this one. at this point i'm unable to tell what i think of the film as a whole, except that there's this delightful voyeuristic game being played with the cinematography. it seems to intentionally keep the spectator further away from the Indian subjects than from their colonizers, and i'm especially intrigued by Melanie, whose mixed ethnicity serves as a metaphor for underlying cultural tensions:

Melanie and her father...
i've always been a sucker for a miscegenation backstory

it also has a shot of what is, without a doubt, the greatest tree in the world:

like a giant globe growing out of the earth

appropriately enough, i had been reading about Renoir earlier in the day in my on-going attempt to regain momentum on my thesis. here's what André Bazin had to say on the man:

"But simply being realistic is not enough to make a film good. There is no point in rendering something realistically unless it is to make it more meaningful in an abstract sense. In this paradox lies the paradox of the movies. In this paradox too lies the genius of Renoir, without doubt the greatest of all French directors."

who am i to argue with Bazin?

the argument is beside the point.

the point is that after the deceptively pleasant lull of jute plantations and the colonial Ganges, i insisted on something with tensions more obvious, Stanley Kubrick's 1950's noir classic The Killing:

clown with tommy gun - yikes!

all i know is that Quentin Tarantino should be court-ordered to pay royalties to Kubrick's estate because The Killing lays out as impressive caper-gone-wrong scenario as i've ever seen. the film keeps the spectator hoping against hope until the final moments, and features one of the most unlikeable femme fatales in cinema; a woman who is attractive, but whose beauty is insufficient to overcome her loathsome nature:

parts of her performance reminded me of Nancy

thus concluded the fifth day of Christmas.

3 days in Gainesville

day 1

my yin and i drove up to Gainesville on Friday morning so i could present at this conference at the University of Florida:

she had returned from India only two days earlier, and being a true trooper (a trueper?) she agreed to come with me in spite of her jet lag. our drive was uneventful, and we arrived in time for me to catch the final afternoon session.

but this is beside the point.

the point is that the keynote address was given that night by "mumblecore" director Andrew Bujalski. i was wholly unfamiliar with his work prior to his talk, and he spoke for about an hour or so before finally introducing his latest film Beeswax:

this film blew me away: 16mm, understated, and permeated with a wonderful tension of what lies ahead of us, just beyond our field of vision, on the other side of the morning. the characters themselves remain largely unknowable, not in the Brechtian sense of distantiation, but in the same manner as our everyday encounters. the film is a fascinating exploration of the forces that structure quotidian, and it begs the question:

how well do we really know what motivates the actions of those around us?

Bujalski spoke to this in his keynote, telling us that he like to keep his performers confused because real people rarely have the same clarity of intent and purpose as the images of people we see on the screen. this made sense to me, and i thought of a playwright friend of mine i had seen the week before. we were once in a seminar together, and she had written of Brecht and Godard. i wondered what she would think of Beeswax, or if it was any of mine.

day 2

i presented a paper on Chris Marker's Sans soleil on the second day of the conference:

my paper dealt with memory, which is unremarkable given its author, but i was caught off guard by the questions that came at the end of the presentation. i had prefaced my talk by referencing my interest in Vedic thought, and specifically mentioned smriti vritti, a thoughtform of the past that imposes itself upon the present.

a number of questions arose from this brief aside, which was intended as nothing more than window dressing for the paper proper. and yet, this was what spoke to people – this was what people wanted to know more about. it reminded me that one can never know the karma created of our words any more than we can know the reason why we speak them.

this is the sublime space of not knowing what comes next, when we speak from our hearts and rely upon the mind only to provide the words that others might comprehend.

but this, too, is beside the point.

the point is that i saw one of my best friends from high school that night, the one who introduced me to Nancy on a cold January night in 2000. we reminisced our various exploits in the company of two dogs with eight legs and three eyes between them. he apologized for that fateful introduction, and i told him there was no need, that she remains my most important teacher to this day.

day 3

the third day was more relaxed; everyone knew each other, and my own anxiety regarding my presentation was no longer corrupting my consciousness. the panels were excellent, and the midday keynote helped to wash away the bitter aftertaste of the one the night before. the man was humble, soft-spoken, and had the self-assuredness found so often in those who have less life in front of them than behind.

he spoke of stasis and silence, and their ability to communicate knowledge in a way impossible with words. he described a barrier as "that which can be crossed," and of all the speeches and presentations i head over the weekend, his was the only one that approached the realm of poetry:

but this, three, is beside the point.

the point is that my yin and i left after his lecture, and it was the perfect way to close out the weekend. we both had to teach early the following day, and on the way home we saw one final notable sight, something that made me wish i had my camera.

we stopped at a rest stop somewhere south of Orlando, and out of the corner of my eye i saw two Buddhist monks walking inside. the one on the right held a small white box in his hand, and i rushed ahead to see if my imagination had commandeered my visual cortex:

it didn't, and my mind flooded with questions, all of them an attempt to resolve the contradiction in front of me. why? how? but– maybe... there were a million broken utterances lurking in the central Florida night, but i decided to do nothing. as we were leaving i told my yin, "maybe i should have talked to him."

"don't worry," she responded. "you can always ask him next time."

Zazen v. Nancy

i started reading Norweigan Wood this weekend and was immediately taken in by its sense of loss. i didn't even make it past the first page before my mind started drifting, and i could smell the cold German mist of the narrator's world colliding with the humidity of past life Floridian summers. i felt like i knew Naoko, but was unable to place how, or to whom.

was it Nancy she reminds me of? those broken cryptic warnings that masqueraded as invitation? was it her deception or my projection? and what difference does it make now, a decade later? karmas have been incurred, lives have been altered, and we have both stumbled into worlds safely removed from the other's.

was it a trap door?

ever watched a magician pull a rabbit out of a hat?

those six years stand like a giant pillar in my life, blocking a clear view of what came before and bathing the years since in its shadow. is it messianic time flowing in two directions? everything before and after anchored to the memory of what came to pass, of what lay ahead. sometimes i walk around that pillar and watch the shadows stretch across the ground, but the sun is never moving.

i continued reading Bodhisattva Archetypes over the weekend, and i've been thinking about the Zen understanding of a sitting meditation. in the Zen tradition the point of sitting is not to attain altered or transcendent states of consciousness – it is merely to sit. the concern among practitioners is that these other states of consciousness can lead to attachment. sublime attachment, but attachment nonetheless.

another point that jumped out was the notion of 'no-self,' which has a certain linguistic resonance with my dormant nihilism. no-self is not a purely negative construction, however, but an understanding that there is no personal existence except as it relates to all other beings. i've heard my own teacher, recently, mention his changing understanding of a 'transcendent individuality' that exists as a way station (or stomping ground) between the identified, limited self and re-immersion into the Godhead. the Zen understanding of 'no-self' seems to overlap with my teacher's 'transcendent individuality,' though i'm not certain either the dead Dogen or the living half-Canadian would care to hear so.

but this is beside the point.

the point is that no-self holds resonance my deepest meditations, which seem less like an expansion of self than the dissolution of self. (not that the expanded sensations don't exist, it's just that they seem somehow to be more 'me' and less free.) the no-self is also easier to reconcile with my concerns regarding the balance between the material and metaphysical realms. unlike the yogic concept of the atman, which is ever unaffected, ever outside of relationship, the no-self lends itself more easily to seeing ourselves as constituted historically as well as atemporally, helping to understand one's place in the world for those 23 hours each day that we're not transcending our living rooms.

the only problem is that, while my sitting practice resonates with the no-self, the experience that started me on this whole rigmarole four years ago is beyond my comprehension unless it is framed within the notion of some sort of unaffected, unchanging core of existence.

[lapse]

a man walks into a store.
the clerk asks, "atman or no-self?"
the man answers, "one of each please."

[return]

either way, it doesn't really matter. the answer (which is the question) will reveal itself in its own due time. until then, one continues to sit...

10 weeks and counting since

modified journal entry, 18 June 2010

I drove the stretch from the end of the Turnpike up to Cordele, which meant driving through the Ocala-Gainesville-Lake City corridor. Those invisible, unforgettable towns of O’Brien and High Springs and Live Oak haunted me, and I was literally retracing my past, passing by the signs for all the towns once – and ever? – soiled with N____.

The peanuts I ate that morning hung at the top of my stomach, a cramping reminder of the nausea and pain of North Florida, and the allergies kicked in next, leaving me with the headachy breathlessness of unidentified allergens and nostalgia. Twelve hours later, with everything quiet except for the sound of my yin and her cousin talking downstairs in the kitchen, I saw so clearly that my body was taking on the pains of the things my mind could not bear.

Seeing the banal green signs, I gave them only the slightest mention, like stopping at Leo’s for a slice or returning to visit Ocala Nikki, scourge and scoundrel and saint of Silver Springs. But underneath the flippancy of these utterances was the dreadful tissue-bound memory of soul-sickness and unspeakable miseries trapped inside the marrow.

By the time we switched drivers in south Georgia, I laid back and slept through Macon where N____ and I once stopped and took pictures of the graveyard:

Macon tombstones circa 2003

I finally opened my eyes at I-475 with Atlanta in the horizon, where a whole new set of flashback, beauty and trauma awaited me...

dream of former lover and future novel

1:35am

dream of train, beach, sand, and J______. the train is moving; the train is time. i step out on one edge of the platform and take a picture. i take pictures from all angles. N_____ is there; she is J______'s best friend. i take various photos from various angles.

as i walk down the platform i age. i take pictures, trying to remember all the things that were. i catch glimpses of J______
in the passing train. i cannot believe it is her. i take pictures, wondering if she will be there when i get back, wondering if
she has forgiven me.

eventually we are face to face. i begin sobbing, not knowing if we will speak, not knowing if i will live long enough to explain and make it all up to her – not knowing if she will listen.

in the back of my mind, i start writing the story both ways, so that art will be made if she listens, art will be made if she doesn't listen. this creative force – this manipulation – pulls me from the experience, pries me from the dream until i wake in bed, half-panting and wondering what just happened.

will i ever be able to write this book and give form to the things i feel and felt and explain it into being? am i lazy or just too afraid to try? how will i know if i don't give myself the time to finish?

on former lovers turnng 30

"When I was twenty-two yesterday meant something to me, and I dreamed of making her happy, promising vacations in Helmand and whispering forever in abandoned tobacco warehouses. I staged elaborate displays of immature love in an attempt to ward off impermanence, and made promises in the dark with words I understood in context..."

a house in Gainseville, circa January 2000

"The house was two stories and, with the exception of the grow room, every inch was covered in newspaper and excrement. The kitchen sink overflowed with week-old plates of spaghetti, curdled bowls of cereal, and a cast iron pan slowly falling apart, spilling its rusty water across the counters and dripping onto the floor where a small incontinent dog sat lapping it up from an abandoned pot of pinto beans that never made it to its destination. The bean water gave the beast terrible flatulence, and it ran wall-eyed and wild from one floor to the next, relieving himself in the kitchen and then dribbling his way up the stairs to the landing which led to the bedrooms. The urine soured the pine boards, and one was left to walk atop a repugnant canine masterpiece, as if Pollock and Warhol had collaborated post-mortem to produce abstract expressionist piss art."

first thoughts on second parts, continued

"Cecilia was beautiful, thin and cruel. She had two inches of sable hair styled forward in spit curls, a holdover from her dalliance as a skinhead, and now dated only black men and DJ’s, an unanticipated consequence of her burgeoning Puerto Rican pride. She smoked long skinny cigarettes, and drank vodka from plastic cups on Saturday nights, casting half invitations to rooms full of strangers and sleeping alone. Corola was artistic and kind, as pretty as her sister, three minutes younger, and deferred to Cecilia on the grounds of wrath and whimsy. She lived her life in the endless subtle trepidation of the heavy girl, and their apartment was filled with cheap cabinet doors and random scraps of wood, each adorned by one of Corola’s paintings. She performed an endless labor of repainting them in rotation, and the layers of acrylic told the story of her love and hate for Cecilia. They were forever tied by obligation, genetics, and habit."

first thoughts on second parts

"She ran in to use the bathroom on her way to work, left her bicycle on the stoop outside and disappeared down the hall. Black braids were threaded with reds and violets, and I sat blue haired and paralyzed, transfixed by her Medusan post-modernity, a vision of Nancy in oversized Adidas and flared denim overalls. Angel wings spread from shoulder to shoulder, and in the center of her chest sat a powder blue cut-diamond heart. I watched her from the safety of the sofa, hood pulled up over my ears, listening to Cecilia bait Corola about her job at the drive-through window. It was their apartment, and they had been fighting since the womb."