#thatworldisgone

I walk past Sublime covers
that are not, feeling closer
to the frightened tourist and
drunken business traveler
than I do to the twenty
something that I once was.

Time has reassured me

that I will never know

the heights that might

have been or the lows

that surely were or the

vast 

middle path

that lies between

the two.

Tonight I will sleep

in a luxury hotel three

blocks from the capital

as a result of no particular

fault or success of my own.

Tomorrow I will wake

with a case of amnesia, one 

thousand miles from home.

Monday night in Austin

More information 

less knowledge

more choice 

less freedom. 

I think of my daughter. 

Her boundless energy

and deceptive wisdom. 

Have you ever heard

the silent psalm?

the bouncing koan

of the cosmos?

She has. 

Without sanctimony 

or drunkenness  

or the ill-conceived 

conceit of poetry - 

Monday night in Austin. 

Still on Our Honeymoon... Budapest, Day 10 (St. Stephen's Basilica, International Design Show, Danube Cruise)

My yin and I started our last full day in Budapest by heading down to St. Stephen's Basilica:

Where rests the 1,000 year-old holy right hand of St. Stephen himself ("Ishtvan" in Magyar), the first Christian King of Hungary:

Now dismembered and mummified appendages is nothing special for famous European churches, but there was a nice touch to this one: you could drop in 100 forints (about 50 cents) and the small box would light up, illuminating the relic and allowing visitors to see the hand without the glare of the glass case. I wonder what Ishtvan thinks of all this:

"You're going to do what with my hand?"

Anyway, we took obligatory shots of the altar:

And domed ceiling:

Before finally finding our way to the candles:

I don't know why, but ever since I first went to Notre Dame more than a decade ago, I feel compelled to drop a few coins into the box and light a prayer candle whenever I visit a Catholic church:

When I first started this, I didn't attach any specific significance to the act – it just seemed like a nice thing to do.  But this trip I found myself appreciating the ritual itself, and I suppose this is a large part of what draws people to organized religions in the first place.  They fulfill a very basic human need to organize and make sense of a world that often appears to be without order or any guiding force. This is an illusion, of course, but it is a very persuasive illusion. Simple acts like these, repeated tens of thousands of times by tens of thousands of people, connect us back into the larger truth that we are all connected.

[lapse]

When we exited the church, I stumbled onto the bank my yin and I would use if we lived in Budapest:

Any financial institution that has art nouveau on its facade:

And crazy fish holding up its awning is good enough for us:

Next, we hopped a metro and headed away from the city center so we could go to Hõsõk tere ("Heroes' Square"):

Behind my yin, you can see the Millennium Memorial, which was completed in 1900 and exemplifies the same turn of the century exuberance that we saw at the Municipal House in Prague. On one side of the square is the Museum of Fine Arts and on the other is the Palace of Arts, neither of which we visited.  The park behind this monument is home to one of Budapest's famed thermal baths (Schéchenyi), but my yin and I had to pass on this because hot tubbing, even funky geothermal Budapest hot tubbing, wouldn't be good for sidecar. So, we decided to take a walk down the tree-lined Andrassy Way:

Having maintained a pretty ambitious pace for the entire vacation, my yin and I decided to take it easy after lunch and check out some local boutiques:

Which were clearly geared for Western tourists, but still had that funky Budapest vibe:

I'm not quite sure how to describe this atmosphere, except to say that it is halfway between American indy craft culture and post-Soviet aspiration. During this jaunt we stumbled onto a eco-design fair:

 
That epitomized this same impulse – repurposing the past without obfuscating it – and in the process creating an intoxicating, quirksome aesthetic:

Blister pack Tiffany lamp

Mason jar and table leg chandelier

After this, my yin and I went back to hotel to shower and rest up for the main event, a cruise on the Danube that allowed us to see these breathtaking views of Budapest after dark:

Parliament

Chain Bridge and Buda Castle

Matthias Church

Liberty Statue

 

Hungarian National Theater

Palace of the Arts

All set to the sounds of live music:

Suffice to say, we loved it:

And when we finally returned to the dock, we crossed back to the Pest side for a late dinner:

We found Macska our first night in town, calling upon the wisdom of the interwebs to find a vegetarian restaurant. As you might guess from the marquee, macska translates to "cat" in English:

Funky hand rails in the upstairs loft.

The first time we went to Macska, it was a quite Wednesday night, and the own (who spoke excellent English) made us feel more welcome than any other restaurant on our vacation. The hand-written English menu had several vegetarian takes on traditional Hungarian cuisine and, for reasons still unclear to me, burritos. She gave us salty biscuits called pogača, which might be Magyar for "delicious."

This was Friday, however, and the entire downstairs was packed with Hungarian twenty-somethings playing foosball and drinking imported beers.  (Hungarian wine? Yes. Hungarian beer? Not so much.) My yin and I were able to find a spot upstairs, though, and plopped down on the cushions strem across the floor of the loft. Next to us was the funkiest radio I have ever seen, which allowed you to tune into countries as opposed to frequencies:

We spent the next couple of hours lounging and eating and savoring our final night in Budapest. We gave thanks for the opportunity to travel, to be together, and to be embarking on the next chapter of our live. At times it still seems almost like a fairy tale:

Erzsébet Bridge, Budapest, October 2012

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.

Homecoming

My yin and I are on our way back to North Carolina, almost a year since we last departed. Unlike the previous two summers, this year’s excursion is merely a vacation, a much-needed, much-delayed respite from the Florida summer. I remember last August, when I strapped a bed frame to the roof of my Jeep and wondering whether or not it would be able to stand the 700+ mile trip back to Florida. Amazingly enough, the only difficulty I had was during the first 3 miles on the Blue Ridge Parkway between my father’s house and Blowing Rock. By the time I reached the Green Hill Inn, an errant piece of duct tape had pulled loose and was flailing like a wounded bird in the cool morning air.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that I had grown attached to our summers in the mountains, and more than once I’ve felt that wishing twinge of nostalgia, the slippery slope of “I remember when…” that oftentimes finds its way to becoming “… it should have always been.”

But this is not the way of the material world.

Everything that has a beginning has an ending, and the pain we wrongly attribute to the ending itself its actually caused by the attempt to hold onto something that has already passed.

Vacations (like this one) are a good opportunity to remember...

In Response to Alison Luterman's "Because These Failures Are My Job"

These images are neither the ghosts of the past

nor the promise 

of a future.

They are merely an observation:

everything that can pass

will.

     But let also us remember: these failures –

whether "offering"

or "apology"

or "thank you"

 

 – are miracles nonethless.

Last night's dream and soundtrack

Press play, then continue...

Dream of a giant collegiate cafeteria.  The ages of students range from mid-teens to late-twenties,  and Foster the People's "Pumped Up Kicks" is pulsing over the sound system. I notice first and second-year co-eds moving their hips to the music, unconsciously playing their part in the mating ritual that gives rise to birth that gives rise to death that gives rise to birth that gives rise to...

(whisper, "liberation")

I see them age ten years in the blink of an eye, twenty more in the time it takes to take a deep breath. I see them not as young beautiful bodies, but as old beautiful spirits, trapped inside an aging decaying form...

 (whisper, "nothing")

The food on the buffet is overcooked and lifeless. I search ardently for something that isn't meat, futilely for vegetables that aren't oversteamed and drowning in cheese. In the corner I see my boss, alone at a booth under a stairwell. She is sitting alone with two glasses of red wine, both hers, and a pay telephone on the table. 

(whisper, "awake")

repost: a date that will live in (in)famy

part 1: two, and three years ago

Dia de playa

uno, dos

part 2: five years ago

Two Birds, One Fish (heart presently unbroken)

wind

surf

silence

white noise

blue ceiling

green sea

tide in, mind out

a raft

a cinder block

flippers

and snowshoes

scuba

and tank

siphon

and tanker

salt mist spray I taste

brent crude and oxygen

union and undertow

waves crash

(super novae)

in to oblivion

ebb and flow

constant as the moon

part 3: thirty-one years ago

"Darby died from an oki dog"

September 26, 1958 - December 7, 1980

part 4: seventy years ago

"...a date which will live in infamy..."

view of Pearl Harbor in December

part 5: two thousand four hundred one years ago

from Chris Marker's "The Owl's Legacy"

5 years ago, today

sunrise

I woke in a motel room in St. Augustine before sunrise and ran to the beach. It had been years since I had seen the ocean, and at that moment nothing seemed more important. Three weeks earlier, I had experienced a vision of myself as a toddler, sitting on a bench looking out over the water. The beach in the vision was located at the intersection of Memory and Imagination, somewhere off the Outer Banks of North Carolina:

author, circa 1980

morning

My father and I visited the Spanish forts that overlooked the bay. Walking around the ruins, I wondered how much blood had been shed, how many lives had been lost. I thought about the men who died in sight of the bay, the men who never touched the water.

Castillo de San Marcos

midday

We stopped at Cape Canaveral and took a tour of the grounds. I was surprised by the amount of wildlife surrounding the launch pad and fascinated by the sheer scale of the operation. I thought about the men and women who touched the sky, and the perspective that must come with experiencing one's own body as weightless... one's own planet as distant and small.

 

evening

I arrived in a strange town with everything I owned, or at least everything I wanted to own, in a single bag. It was not unlike my move to New York seven years earlier, except that the sturdy green canvas had been replaced with a flimsy blue linen. That night I purchased a college-ruled composition pad and a new pen. I had been using ballpoint for ten years at that point, and I decided it was time for a change.

181st Street and Fort Washington

night

To my knowledge I wrote nothing on November 9, 2006. In retrospect I find it a beautiful coincidence that the date now exists in both metaphorical and indexical limbo – the chain of signifiers was broken on that day; it exists between these journals:

__

and these pens:

__

There is nothing more important than the space connecting one moment of our material existence to the next.

It is empty, 

yet full;

present, 

yet absent.

The pens and journals and sentences left behind are merely the sedimentation of memory, artifacts of a past that (n)ever existed, monuments to the life that was.

Meaning does not come from words;

but from the silences between them.

random thoughts, Kansas City, 12 years ago tomorrow

Twelve years ago I was on tour in Kansas City, at the halfway point of our journeys through the Midwest. I was in the middle of a catastrophic love affair, and the object of my desire lived in Westchester County, New York. She was a dancer, two years younger than I and a decade wiser. The ramifications of this obsession would not be made manifest for months to come, when i encountered the Dancer's reflection on a Saturday night in Gainesville.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that, in time, I would come to know that those rapturous months with the Dancer, and those torturous years with the Mirror, were in fact part of a single experience, what one might call sukha and dukkha.  To date I have never seen a better illustration of the dangers of conflating duality with the Divine, and looking back, I see it as a textbook case of projection and transference – the beatification of the Bronxville beauty on the one hand, and the malificent masochism of the Mirror on the other.

(Everything i saw in them was inside of me;
everything i saw in them was also in the other.

A man named Peter once told me: 'everything is in everything';
a woman named Lauren once sang: 'everything is everything':)

They're both right.

One year ago, I found myself curious about Halloweens past - where I was, what I was doing. I remembered, more or less, who I was for the past several years, but how about further back? I wondered who (I thought) I was a decade ago, but found the documents incoherent, lacking or absent. I stretched back one more year, to 1999, and this is what I discovered:

"SIN": 29 September - 7 November 1999

31 October 1999

Day thirteen is a day starts with a call from J______. It woke me up, and I was so happy to hear her voice and her choice. Sometimes I think there’s some psychic (but deeper, more emotional) bond...

I caught myself thinking this morning
and asked myself how the idea got inside:
I would be gone before you arrived. It was
the sound of a heart closing like a wound
– but I keep on picking at the scabs...

Gin at three, a tape, and a boredom thick enough
to grasp. I walk through the bookstore with my hands
clasped together to keep from shoving books off the display.
From where does this urge arise? It's not right to pawn
and merchant and whore these ideas and thoughts
and words under fluorescence and Muzak...

In Kansas City the nights are so quiet that
the table of three next to me becomes
deafening compared to the peaceful
lull of New York’s eight screaming
millions. I’ve read all my books;
and will have to read Kerouac
again, but then why did I buy it...

The penguin man cackles
at the table of three – not the
endearing cackle of Bobby, but
the sound of a small-eyed, hook-
nosed gentleman with glasses and
the manner of someone who is not
unhappy, but never laughs without
restraint. That deep hysterical laughter
of the mad, when your eyes water and you
gasp for breaths not for the oxygen, but only
to have another lungful of laughter, to spew into
the night until your sides ache and your bladder pains...

I finished The Bell Jar tonight, and
it’s fascinating that she turned her
depression, its simplicity, into a
novel. That’s how it is; that feeling
of watching life happen in front of
your eyes, the disbelief that what one
sees is invisible to everyone else. But
what frightened me was the calmness
with which she described it, and I
wonder if she was so removed when it
happened? I have always with me that
sadness, and a desperation to escape
its grasp, like clawing at some invisible
tie around the throat, like the lungs
were some never-stretched tendon,
feeling the pain of movement and
yearning for the freedom of mobility...

I
use
words
fast and
easy and
ambiguous
and so undefined
and unrefined and
unresolved and dissolved
and undeclared and uncleared
and I don’t explain and assume
you just know as I know and never
even have to ask if you know what I mean...

Watching
the Kansas
City streets
I miss New
York. I feel
tall enough
to see the
West Coast
burning two
thousand
miles away
and New York
engulfed in its
tungsten flame
one thousand
miles east, as
Hollywood and
Times Square
watch over me...