repost: Quantum Love Story

Three years ago (yesterday) i went with Saylor and a (future) mutual friend to stroll art galleries in north Miami. Along the way, I learned that my (future) mutual friend was a (present) mutual friend of the woman I was trying, with limited success, to date.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that the evening's events eventually gave rise to the poem below; and the poem below, in turn, ultimately gave rise to a forthcoming chapbook (currently awaiting Saylor's illustrations).

By way of full disclosure, a less poetic, more immediate version of these events lives here; the author does not pretend to know which assortment of words constitutes greater authenticity.

quantum love story

We watched quarks falling in love with neutrinos,
dancing in and out of existence in the skies over Miami.

Once upon a time we were like

but last night we talked about
love with the lights on:

“There is more than enough time for everything.”

Chasing nostalgia and remembering
the lies we tell ourselves when
we’re young and in love.

A cut-up in my head:

missing my sister in rain-soaked galleries

missing my sister in rain-soaked galleries

missing my sister in rain-soaked galleries

Nothing can be written that compares to dusk from the
abandoned high rises overlooking the Bay of Biscayne;

I knew nothing of knock-breathed Wynwood, lies and doubt.

It’s hard to see, searching for poetry
in lust in truth in love. Words are just
letters; sometimes they have meaning.

(I tried to tell her:)

The whole
universe
lives in
the
center
of a rose.

I bent to kiss it and it was gone, she couldn’t

hear me through the murmuring of her heart.

a little over two years ago...

The poem below was written a little more than two years ago, and although I didn't know it the night I wrote it, tiny cracks were beginning to appear in the facade of my would-be romance. At the time I was engaged in an experiment with celibacy, which taught me many things, but few of them were what I expected. The mind's ability to project inductions and fabricate deductions is truly stunning.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that growth, change, and shifts of consciousness always happen just beyond our ability to see them. The precursors, however, become visible if we practice placing our attention on them. For me this primarily comes through dreams, poetry and meditation.

Unfortunately, waiting for a dream to reveal our next step can lead to a long time waiting (believe me, I've tried), and even when they do arrive interpreting them is a hazy proposition. Poetry is more reliable, but inspiration follows its own timetable – not to mention the dangers inherit in mistaking the muse for the Muse.

not this Muse

That leaves meditation, which is far and away the most reliable source of clarity and wisdom I have yet to discover. (And by 'discover,' I mean stumble into.) One of the interesting things about meditation is that its benefits are realized through practice, not the practitioner's belief of its efficacy. This mean two things.

First, practicing meditation will provide grounding, improve focus, and offer peace of mind even if the practitioner doesn't 'believe' in it. My own experience with mantra and japa mala has taught me this. Second, believing in meditation without practicing is no more useful than believing in reincarnation or the Big Bang or the price of tea in China. For me, although rare, this lack of practice usually results either from a perceived lack of time (inevitably false) or pleasurable distraction (self-explanatory).

image from Godard's Pierrot le fou,
one of my favorite pleasurable distractions

Anyway, a little over two years ago I was doing a hell of a lot of meditating. There were flashing lights and revelations and cosmos-shaking insights, but the true benefits of this practice were beginning to show up in more subtle ways. All the flashing lights in the world don't make a difference if we stay stuck in the same patterns, and what good is an insight if we don't integrate it into the way we live our day-to-day lives?

The poem hinted at this process of integration, which was happening in spite of my mind's best efforts to twist the actual situation around into a story worthy of John Hughes or Lloyd Dobbler:

Cusak did for stalking what Madonna did for Kabbalah

I hold meditation responsible for what happened, and more importantly, for all the things that didn't happen. I could have stayed spinning in that cycle for months or even years longer, delaying – or perhaps even denying – the peace, happiness and fulfillment I now (don't) take for granted. And all because...

I didn't listen

When we met she told me she wanted to be alone.
But I didn’t listen and soon I was in her bed until
one day she said she needed to be alone. But I
didn’t listen and this was repeated many
times until one night she told me that
she didn’t not want to spend the
night with me. I looked around
her room and saw the cat on
the bed, a stack of books
on the nightstand and
I realized the only
thing in her life
saying she
wasn’t
alone
was
me
.

there must have been a lot of sin in the air...

yesterday my yin and i were able to open our windows for the first time since early spring, enjoying a pleasant pre-dawn breeze that made the air conditioner superfluous. a mass of cool air has blanketed South Florida for the past 48 hours, and i keep trying not to get my hopes by thinking it will last us all the way to November.

but this is beside the point.

the point is that there must have been a lot of sin in the air yesterday because, by the end of the day, there were 36 cans of Diet Dr. Pepper in the living room, a dozen more in the trunk of my car, and 5 pints of ice cream in the freezer.

this is the ice cream in our freezer, like mana from heaven

when she got home, i told my yin two things:

1) don't look in the freezer.
2) it's not what it looks like.

the root of all this consumption, of course, was the confluence of sale and rebate at the local big box retailer. amazingly enough, however, all this sugary dairy goodness remained pristine and untouched last night, like an avid gamer on prom night. in fact, we retired not long after 9 o'clock and read Murakami in bed. this fact helps to explain not only why i woke at 5am this morning, but also why my dreams were so uncomfortable.

my present pleasant diversion

i'm reading Sputnik Sweetheart and finds aspects of the narrator's life eerily familiar. his relationship to the object of his gaze is not unlike one of my own past obsessions, but this, in and of itself, is problematic – the nature of obsession is the nature of obsession, too well-tread and well-read to be of much bother.

what truly disturbs me, though, is that i identify with the object of this gaze as well. as i read i find myself slipping back and forth, alternately becoming the voyeur and the seen. i think Jean-Paul Sartre had something to say on these matters, but it's too early in the morning to start digging through existential philosophy. suffice to say that this mood found its way into the Dreaming, and i began waking sometime after 4am. eventually i grew tired of falling back asleep, turned on the light, and started reading all over again...

September 11: evolution of a day

2006

i
m
age
miss
in
g

2007

2008

Ladri di biciclette
(re: bicycles & towers, circles & thievery)

Aren't we all?

From the instant we take birth
until our last breath,
we steal one moment

after another

calling it our own,
trying to find our way home.

Wayward minds,
waiting wives,
and children's lonely eyes.

Lonely children's eyes
as they watch their fathers
abandon them on street corners
– for bicycles.

(the dharma can never be lost,
but neither can it be found)

It simply waits while
we run the Roman streets,
channeling Goths and Gauls,
watching movies on Wednesday nights
from the comfort of air-conditioned condos,
watching the rise and fall of post-war Empires
during election years.

Writing responses
to Italian neo-realism,
reminiscing about Luigi Galleani
on recommendation of beautiful Russians,
and looking for the Buddhahood in Mario Buda
seven years (to the day) since eighty-one years
after the first Wall Street attack.

2009

self-plagiarism and repetition along a vertical axis

(variation on "Ladri di biciclette")

From birth
to breath
we steal:

one moment.
one moment..
one moment...

calling it our own.

Children watch
fathers abandon
them for bicycles.

(the dharma
can never be lost
can never be found)

We channel Goths and Gauls
from the cinema-ed comfort of
condominiums, watching Empires fall

in post-election years.

Writing
variations
on responses to
Italian neo-realism,
no longer looking for
Buddhahood, Mario Buda.

Eight years since.
one moment since..
eighty-one years since...
one moment since....

2010

this morning i read:

"I met her near the end of September. It had been raining that day from morning to night—the kind of soft, monotonous, misty rain that often falls at that time of year, washing away bit by bit the memories of summer burned into the earth. Coursing down the gutters, all those memories flowed into the sewers and rivers, to be carried to the deep, dark ocean."

– Haruki Murakami

while drinking coffee in bed;

what happens when the sentence fails
to tether "her" back to the collaged
fantasy of Mardou in September 2007

or

the empty "her" i left the year before?

the intermittent, repetitive "her" of 2008

or

the composite "her" emergent the year after?

what about the "her" oblivious to
punctuation, beyond words and
seen only in the spaces between?

the
boundless
instability of
pronouns never
ceases to amaze
me, mimicking
the function
and folly of
memory
itself.

the last time (two years later)

another version of this poem lives here.

the last time
(requiem for Alexander Solzhenitsin)

prelude:

I suppose one day we will be lovers

and none of these things will have mattered.

or

I suppose one day we will no longer want to be lovers

and none of these things will have mattered.

part 1:

The last time
is ten cherries in a bag,
smelling her on my hands
the whole way home.

I grab a soda,
they ask:

“what country did you get?”

staring at the same curvy mirrors
she chose not to install:

They ask why I didn’t bring her,
I ask: “did you get those mirrors at – ?”

part 2:

The Tao is falling apart
as she tells me:

“You have camel eyes, beautiful camel eyes”

reflecting back the image of her crying
as we made love:

“I can’t, I can’t, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

I ask:

“Do you want to talk about it?”

not until we’ve discussed Kurosawa and
seen how many ways we fall short of the truth.

And all this time in bed

is permeated with the smell of clocks

.esrever ni gninnur

part 3:

Mascara smudged raccoon eyes -
all sex, beauty and Madness.
I see her in that moment,
wild and free and
fractured and lost:

“I want to fall in love with you.”
“I don’t know who I am.”
“I feel all alone.”

We talk around these things, saying nothing, and
I stare at the ceiling, focusing on a point that
doesn’t move. We find our way back
into our clothes:

“I don’t want you to go”

but gravity always wins.

part 4:

She gives me cherries to take with me.
I count, searching for a sign;
there are only ten.

We leave in separate directions:
me east, her west, both headed north,
one short of a prime number.

I found it the next night; her
text arrived at 8:27pm, telling
me that Solzhenitsin died today.

quantum love story

two years ago (today) i went with Saylor and a (future) mutual friend to stroll art galleries in north Miami. along the way, i learned that my (future) mutual friend was a (present) mutual friend of the woman i was trying, with limited success, to date.

but this is beside the point.

the point is that the events of that evening eventually gave rise to the poem below; and the poem below, in turn, ultimately gave rise to a forthcoming chapbook.

in full disclosure though, a less poetic, more immediate version of these events lives here; the author does not pretend to know which assortment of words constitutes greater authenticity.

quantum love story

We watched quarks falling in love with neutrinos,
dancing in and out of existence in the skies over Miami.

Once upon a time we were like

but last night we talked about
love with the lights on:

“There is more than enough time for everything.”

Chasing nostalgia and remembering
the lies we tell ourselves when
we’re young and in love.

A cut-up in my head:

missing my sister in rain-soaked galleries

missing my sister in rain-soaked galleries

missing my sister in rain-soaked galleries

Nothing can be written that compares to dusk from the
abandoned high rises overlooking the Bay of Biscayne;

I knew nothing of knock-breathed Wynwood, lies and doubt.

It’s hard to see, searching for poetry
in lust in truth in love. Words are just
letters; sometimes they have meaning.

(I tried to tell her:)

The whole
universe
lives in
the
center
of a rose.

I bent to kiss it and it was gone, she couldn’t

hear me through the murmuring of her heart.

summer reading list

summer is famous for reading, and mine officially begins when my yin and i reach North Carolina in less than two weeks time. through some sublimely bizarre confluence of events, our arrival coincides not only with Father's Day, but with the official start of summer. we're going to be there eight weeks before moving on to visit friends and family in New York, and in honor of our time there i've fabricated an informal, incomplete syllabus:

Week 1:
Jacques Lacan's Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis

Lacan, besides being a dead Frenchman, is also the author of one of my all-time favorite sentences and is renowned worldwide as one of the most difficult to understand men in an already difficult to understand field and culture.

Week 2:
Slavoj Žižek's The Sublime Object of Ideology

i first learned of Zizek from a friend of mine in her bedroom. unbeknownst to either of us, that particular incarnation of our relationship was mere inches from its dissolution, and we watched a documentary on this mad Slovenian on (probably) a Saturday night in (definitely) Fort Lauderdale.

Week 3:
Kaja Silverman's The Threshold of the Visible World

rounding out the Lacanian contingent is Kaja Silverman who, unfortunately, is not related to Sarah. i learned of this particular Silverman from my thesis advisor, and as far as i can tell this book is about looking, desire and anxiety, two subjects with which i'm quite familiar.

Week 4:
Elizabeth Gilbert's Committed

Ms. Gilbert seems a reasonable way to celebrate the midpoint of summer, especially considering the subject of her first book, Eustace Conway, lives just minutes from my father. in one of those strange quirks of fate, my dad and brother held palaver with "the last American man" about the same time that i was becoming familiar with Gilbert's immensely pleasurable, albeit somewhat problematic, Eat, Pray, Love.

Week 5:
Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle

the Situationist International is undoubtedly one of the most interesting groups that came to prominence during the turmoil of the Sixties, providing cogent critiques of capitalism as well as coming up with kickass terms like Debord's "psychogeography." the group's influence on the Paris uprisings of May 1968 are enough to provoke mist-eyed nostalgia in even the most cynical former and would-be revolutionaries.

Week 6:
René Viénet's Enragés & Situationists in the Occupation Movement

building on Debord's theoretical work comes this memoir from Viénet which, if nothing else, promises to provide a counter-balance to Gilbert's presumably sentimental book from two weeks earlier. i'm totally unfamiliar with this text, but it has some nifty cartoons as well as amazing photographic images from May of '68.

Week 7:
Susan Sontag's On Photography

this is one of those books i've been meaning to check out forever because it seems to be referenced in virtually everything i've read for the past six months. furthermore, i watched a documentary on Annie Leibovitz about a year ago and the idea of one of the world's most famous photographers being involved with one of the world's foremost scholars on photography captured my imagination in some way i can't quite explain. it would be like Roger Ebert dating Julia Roberts, except not really at all.

Week 8:
Jorge Luis Borges' Collected Fictions

i've loved Borges since my second year of college, when i had a mad graduate student named Hasan Malik for my "Intro to Fiction" class at Chapel Hill. this man (Malik, not Borges) is responsible more than anyone else for my love of difficult books. he would pace and curse and sweat and spit through each and every class, convincing a room full of nineteen year-olds (or at least me) that literature could be just as exciting as punk rock. one of the stories we read in Malik's class was Borges' "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" which remains one of the most brilliant, absurd short stories i've ever read, no offense to Donald Barthelme.

(an analytic afterthought)

after giving my reading list the once over, i'm pleased to see that half of the authors (Zizek, Silverman, Gilbert, Viénet) listed are still alive, and only three are Americans (Sontag, Gilbert, Silverman). interestingly the three Americans are also the three female authors, and i'm not sure if this says something about the relationship between gender and translation, gender and authorship, or merely a side effect of my own taste and proclivities.

there are also some missing items from this list, books that i plan to read intermittently and as needed. these include: Rohit Mehta's translation of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, Charles Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal, John Cage's Silence, D.T. Suzuki's Manual of Zen Buddhism, and Osho's The Buddha Said...

all these books are equally obtuse and poetic, written exclusively by male authors equally dead. fortunately, there is only one power-crazed bioterrorist guru on the list (Osho), and i feel his presence is admirably offset by the inclusion of an opium addicted harbinger of modernity (Baudelaire). i'm sure others that will sneak there way in over summer, and my plan is to provide miniature book reports as the summer progresses. with this in mind, please post your suggestions or send an email to:

circlesallthewaydown@gmail.com

many thanks, as ever...

redux (7 June 2008)

1 boy. 1 girl. 1 fish, heart presently (un)broken.

An empty plate
sits next to
a cold cup of coffee,
half-full.

There are bread crumbs
on the table cloth.

I am watching a dog
watching me as I sit
across from

the beautiful woman
with pale blue eyes,
saying goodbye.

things to do in bed (2 years, 2 days ago)

lying
in your bed
the gray void pre-sleep
of disembodied
breathing.
whis
purring aum,
tracing the space
between

us and
dreaming,
nights more frequent
spaces less vast.

ghosts (the Dancer, the Russian, the One that got away)

trying to write her was like Manhattan
busy, bothered,

jerking subway

starts on the A train local
as you cross that invisible line
and leave 116th street station.
saying goodbye to:

the Poet.

and

the Junkie.

and

the Drunkard.

headed uptown
to sweaty August nights,
181st and Fort Washington
with the Dominicans dancing
in the shadow of the George Washington
and the salsa drifting up from the streets
and everything i own in a duffel bag.

i was trying to write her like Manhattan,
but she's more like Paris—
lazy, jet-lagged mornings,
sleeping in with the shutters closed
and a strong dollar buying pan au chocolat and wine,
taking trains from the hills of Montmartre
to Le Select and Champs-Élysées.

chasing:

the Spaniard.

and

the Writer.

and

the shadow of the Guillotine.

but this isn't about

her,

the one i should write like Paris.

or her,

the one i wrote like Manhattan.

or her,

the one i loved in New York and lost in Meudon.

redux (2 March 2009)

writing more like Benjamin

I

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).

Jache, at a Cat Power concert

II

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.

portrait of Avalokiteshvara, taken from my altar

VII

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...

Immanuel Kant, a dead philosopher

VIII

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...

as ever