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.

remembering three days in Gainesville

day 1

Last year my yin and I drove to Gainesville on a Friday morning. I was presenting at a 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 the jet lag. Our drive was uneventful, and we arrived in time for me to catch the final afternoon session. Neither of us knew that in one year's time, I would be exiting the academy, rendering superfluous and obsolete the dream I was chasing during those days at UF.  This would not be the first time Gainesville played host to my future disillusionment.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that the keynote address was given that night by "mumblecore" director Andrew Bujalski. Prior to the talk, I was wholly unfamiliar with his work, 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.

(One year later, the read prophetic.)

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 liked 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 graduate 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.

(The importance of these questions, 

and of the superimposition of thoughtforms, 

only continues to grow with each passing year.)

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 Nancy remains my most important teacher to this day.

(This same friend, 

not by coincidence, 

wrote me this very morning.)

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, when a windbag from Harvard bored everyone out of their seats. The man on Sunday, though, 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 heard 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.

(The definition of "my camera" has since changed;

the same can be said of all definitions.)

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 did 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."

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...

re(re)Listening to NPR in Atlanta

Part 1: for Plums and peaches

I listened to the voice of a woman
I knew nearly fifteen years ago, when
we teetered on the edge of adulthood.

I heard things that were, things that
were not, things that might have been.

I heard the girl next door
humming arias in the dark.

I heard Durham in August and
the diminishing of colloquialism
of South Carolina after the Return.

It was not like listening to the past.

Or living in Atlanta,
Manhattan and Denver.

Part 2: one year later

I visited the voice seven months
later and found photographs of an
unremembered me: a birthday party
and broken asphalt. I wondered if the

woman who kept it on her bookshelf
owned the memory in the photograph.
In some ways that day will always belong
to her, and I left unable to distinguish

how much of my re-collection was nothing
more than a picture of a picture. I wondered
how many fragments of my being are left scattered
in Atlanta; how much of my Self is left unremembered.

author, voice, and bookshelf

Part 3: two years later

Two years later the
memory of Atlanta
is fading. This year's
sojourn was – like life –
layover rather than
destination. End points
are odious and elusive:
every time one appears,
a beginning takes its place.

I had a dream about
the woman in Atlanta
(the one in memory)
earlier this week. She
served tea to fifteen
Chinese children. I
woke from the dream
and sent word to Chicago.

I've never been there, and
so it lives not in memory
but in imagination. Identical
twins separated by time,
united by desire. Bough and aft,
forward and back, the face of Janus
haunting every moment called now.

the first version of this poem appeared here

bear(d)s

My yin and I are leaving on our honeymoon in less than a week, and today marks the last time I plan on shaving between now and sometime the end of next month. I've grown a beard only once before, at the end of the last millennium, when I was on tour with a well-known modern dance company. I referred to it as my "protest beard" to anyone who would listen, and when asked exactly what I was protesting, I would respond in my very best impersonation (which was not very good) of Marlon Brando in The Wild One:

"Whadya got?"

But this is beside the point.

The point is that I'm protesting nothing this time, merely responding to the inconveniences of spending so much time in a tent. Running water will be a luxury for at least the middle third of our journey, and I don't want to be shaving in creeks at sunrise every morning when I could be snapping photos with our new camera, currently en route:

I do not remember the last object that inspired such obsession.

Furthermore, my yin's cousin is especially heavily-bearded, and I need all the lead time I can get before we reach his home in Boulder one week from tomorrow. It would be shameful to show up with a scraggy little beard that could be mistaken for simple laziness, or even worse, the inability to grow facial hair altogether.

There is nothing more untrustworthy than a clean-shaven outdoorsman – and this applies even to temporary, honeymooning outdoorsmen like myself. I'm of the firm belief that growing a beard brings one closer to nature, which is especially important in my case because I have a substantial, imaginary fear of bears.

They have one on the state flag for heaven's sake!

I've been told this fear is both unnecessary and unfounded (as opposed to contrived and perfomative), but I have seen proof of what happens to city slickers who go off into the woods in search of themselves.

for my response to Grizzly Man click here

Although my mountain upbringing and the fact that my surname is a corruption of the word "bear" would probably protect me from the worst of the maulings, it still seems prudent to enter Into the Wild:

[slippage: 34 months ago

At what price freedom?
If one must go somewhere to get it
is it really free at all?

I have not truly considered
the size of this life
how infinite and small my being.

Contemplating dharma and meaning;
there are untold possibilities
stretching in every direction from this single moment

and these twenty-six letters are not big enough.

Imagining myself in the wilderness
with only pen and paper.
The writing would change
but the pads would still be filled
the intricate balance of dandelion and larva.

Caterpillars spinning their coffins.

There is no end.
There is no beginning.
And one of the meanest lies we tell
ourselves: there is something better than now.

The breath in lungs, the blood in veins, the pen in hand.
I cannot write what is touched and if it were to open, if it were to open…
There is nothing more than what is, and what appears is, truly is not.

Was the path I took any less desolate than that of Alexander Supertramp?

and return to present]

with as much facial hair as possible. I do not want to end up like those dreamers and fools in Alaska...

my yin v. Amanda Palmer (redux)

One of these women is my wife:

The other, my pretend girlfriend from October 2004 - June 2008:

And this time last year, while writing a research paper on Amanda Palmer, I learned that she and my yin share the same birthday:

tomorrow.

The idea started looping around in my head as I went deeper into the project, and I began thinking about how much time I was spending with Amanda late at night, how much time was spent looking at pictures of her, how much time was spent reading her words, how much time was spent writing about what she means... eventually my mind turned to the fight between my yin and Igor Stravinsky.

I started wondering what would happen if my yin and Palmer were to meet, and I remembered the time Jonathan "The Herring Wonder" Ames fought David "Impact Addict" Leslie in the Box Opera:

Ames and Leslie square off in 1999

I had driven non-stop from Lawrence, Kansas, to Manhattan trying to catch the fight, but by the time I arrived I was too tired and sleep-deprived to stay awake past 125th Street, much less all the way downtown. As fate would have it, my yin and I will actually be passing through Lawrence this time next month, perhaps even staying the night. I wonder, idly, if we might run into the ghost of Bill Burroughs.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that i remember Ames writing about the upcoming bout in the New York Press, attempting to assess his chances:

"Leslie is white, 42, stands 5-feet 10-inches and weighs 178 pounds. I’m white, 35, 5-11 and weigh 152. He has a lot more fight experience, but he’s a bit slow and has been known to wear himself out as a passionate denizen of the New York’s nightlife. I on the other hand have not smoked crack cocaine since 1994, but I do bleed easily from the nose. I’m not sure who has the advantage based on the above facts."

Inspired by Ames' example, here is an approximate breakdown of the difference between my yin and Ms. Palmer:

Palmer is white, 35, reasonably famous, and has no eyebrows. My yin is tan, 34, reasonably anonymous, and has eyebrows – although I do not know how this affects her chances. Both are now married: Palmer to a famous writer and my yin to an unknown writer, who read the comic books written by the famous writer when he wasn't quite so famous.

This comic is now more than twenty years old... time is a scam.

Both practice yoga, but my yin never does so while drinking beer, which has to give her an edge over Palmer. Also, to my knowledge, my yin has never smoked crack cocaine (undoubtedly a plus) and goes to bed earlier than Palmer, who is well-known to suffer simultaneously from jet lag and mania.

Amanda Palmer in vrksasana

my yin in virabhadrasana (three)

Not all the cards are stacked in my yin's favor, however, because unlike Ames (who ate herring in order to gain a psychological and aromatic advantage), I refuse to kiss her if she chooses to eat gifilte fish as part of her training regimen.Furthermore, if Ames' experience is any indicator, my yin's Jew(ish)ness may be a disadvantage, because he was pummeled by the goyim Leslie over the course of three rounds, like some twisted inversion of David and Goliath.

But these things may never come to pass.

Probably, I will eventually stop rehashing last year's posts and get back into a regular routine with this blog. I have been appalling (impressively) overtaxed for the past six months, but there only two dozen or so final exams left to grade. Then I am officially done with the semester and can start moving towards whatever the next chapter is in this fiction we call life. Until that time, however....

v.

Palmer better get ready to rumble.

re: Neko Case

"I have waited with a glacier's patience."

Neko Case, poet and priestess

I was listening to the above chanteuse yesterday, as I'm prone to do at regular intervals, and the following song came on:



As always, the lyric about the glacier's patience jumped out at me, but this time it echoed the underlying tones of a conversation earlier in the morning with my half-Canadian friend. He, you see, is a True Believer; while I, on the other hand, am what one might call a True Skeptic. This makes for some interesting philosophical diversions.

This is usually beside the point.

But not this time.

I typically wear the student hat in our relationship, which is a nice fit for a True Skeptic. I like to think of mine as a fedora like the one my great-grandfather Paw-Paw used to wear. He would walk into my grandmother's kitchen every day to pick up the newspaper and sit at the dining table, rapping his knuckles on the hard oak while my grandmother poured his coffee. That hat never came off of his head.

As a True Believer, my half-Canadian friend is perfectly suited for the role he plays as well. In this way he provides a nice balance, helping me to see things in a way different way. As Blake Schwarzenbach once sang,

"I'm trying on your eyes."

poet and oracle, he translates Rousseau in his spare time

Our eyes are still our own, however, and the interesting thing about being a True Skeptic is that growth, wisdom and revelation almost always happen in contradictory ways. This is the advantage of being a True Skeptic; I can observe the qualities of True Believer (i.e. certainty, bombast, and universality) and respond with complementary virtues like nuance, gradation, subtlety and doubt.

During our conversation, though, I understood a little deeper the implications of the differences between these two temperaments. Taken to their ill-logical extremes, Skepticism gives way to nihilism and Belief can lead one to follow paths better left untaken. I told my half-Canadian friend that our respective lives testified to this.

He said nothing.

I don't know if this silence was a moment when we swapped hats, or dismissive, or simply a lull in conversation. But I do remember a night in December of 2006 when Brahmacharini Sumati Chaitanya gave a satsang on the fourteenth chapter of the Bhagavad Gita. She confirmed my suspicion:

"Silence is the only teacher."

priestess and Priestess

Experience is silence, and as I journaled yesterday afternoon, this is what came out of my pen:

The trouble with a True Believer is that its inherent imprecision (i.e. belief in something someone does not know) can lead to little more than abstraction and confusion. Being too concrete, on the other hand, can lead to literalization and the loss of esoteric meaning (the "Virgin" Mary, for instance). This allegiance to fact over truth is the pitfall awaiting the True Skeptic.

That's why poetry and songs and music are so important – they provide a balance between the concrete and the abstract. What does it mean to wait with a glacier's patience? It is simultaneously familiar and incomprehensible. Furthermore, if you scaled the size of human to the size of a glacier, it would be the equivalent of trying to moving a few inches over the course of an entire year.

Can any of us really fathom what it would mean to move that slowly?

If we cannot truly understand this experience, which anyone can with a stopwatch and ruler can watch and see and measure, then how can we claim knowledge of the vision Arjuna begged Krishna to take away?

the Greek word 'hubris' comes to mind

That's why Neko Case, like Sumataji, is both priestess and Priestess.

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.

dreaming of someone else's Paris

Last night I dreamed of someone else's Paris,
the torn out pages of a journal: a city less cruel
than the one I saw raining ten years ago.

Atop le tour d'Eiffel, tears turned to ice as they fell
through the overcast January of love's demise
into the patient waiting waters of the Seine below.

No umbrellas are sold in the Parisian winter,
pas de parapluies, pas d'imperméables, pas de cartes:
je pense donc je suis, je suis donc j'aime, j'aime donc je souffre.

No one can tell the rues from the ruse, even in the Paris daytime,
even standing in front of le Métro avec une petite dictionnaire –
je ne comprends rien de cette chose qui s'appelle l'amour.

I don't know why I dreamed of her last night
mais je souhaite qu'elle soit heureuse,
j'espère qu'elle ne rêve pas toujours de moi.

this journal witnessed the day, not the dream, in question
7 November 1999 - 18 January 2000

4 years + 1 day ago today...

sunrise

i awoke in a motel room in St. Augustine before sunrise and ran to the beach. i had not seen the ocean in years, 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.

morning

my father and i, both history buffs, 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.

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.

night

to my knowledge i wrote nothing on November 9, 2006, and in retrospect i find it a beautiful coincidence that that day now exists as both a 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, 11 years ago tonight

eleven years ago i was in Kansas City, working as a production manager for a famous modern dance company, and halfway through a tour of the Midwest. i was in the middle of a catastrophic love affair, and the object of my desire lived in Bronxville. 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.

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: the dance of Shiva and Shakti. to this date i have never had a better illustration of the dangers of conflating duality with the Divine, and looking back, i see them as textbook cases 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, but (right now) this is beside the point.

the point is that, for whatever reason, i found myself curious this morning about Halloweens past. where i was, what i was doing. i was able to remember, 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...

(re)Listening to NPR in Atlanta

Part 1: for Plums and peaches

I listened to the voice of a woman
I knew nearly fifteen years ago, when
we teetered on the edge of adulthood.

I heard things that were, things that
were not, things that might have been.

I heard the girl next door
humming arias in the dark.

I heard Durham in August and
the diminishing of colloquialism
of South Carolina after the Return.

It was not like listening to the past.

Or living in Atlanta,
Manhattan and Denver.

Part 2: one year later

I visited the voice seven months
later and found photographs of an
unremembered me: a birthday party
and broken asphalt. I wondered if the

woman who kept it on her bookshelf
owned the memory in the photograph.
In some ways that day will always belong
to her, and I left unable to distinguish

how much of my re-collection was nothing
more than a picture of a picture. I wondered
how many fragments of my being are left scattered
in Atlanta; how much of my Self is left unremembered.

author, voice, and bookshelf

an earlier version of this poem appeared here

1375 days ago today

have you written
any poetry
lately
she asked

well i remember
one i wrote
one thousand
three hundred
seventy-five days

ago today

she asked:

"Are you an artist?"

I f a lt e re d

what i meant to say:

"I'm living."

(I guess this makes this
an artist's commune)

my life as Picasso:

my longing an O'Keefe:

my words Duchamp:

"The word 'art' interests me very much.
If it comes from the Sanskrit, as I've heard, it signifies 'making.'"

thank you
i said
for
asking

New York is like...

i first saw New York when i was eighteen years old. a woman who was not yet my lover lived on Long Island, in the same small fishing town where Jack Kerouac lived after achieving his celebrity. at the time i had not read Kerouac, and his eventual, looming presence was wholly absent from my mental geography.

but this is beside the point.

the point is that i was more concerned with other imagined shadows, and i went searching for them in the alphabeted streets that run parallel to the East River. this romance grew over the coming years, and in keeping with my own mythology, i moved to New York immediately after graduating university. in time i would come to know that what seemed like fate was nothing more than the tired pull of the city, the cliched story of town and country, the familiar parable of innocence, disillusionment and returning to the places you thought you knew. last week, and the photo essay that follows, were/are precisely that:

(apparently) i (don't) love New York
(any more)

day one

my yin and i arrived on a Thursday afternoon, and traveled to the Lower East Side to peruse the galleries that have popped up in the last decade. on the walls i saw portraits of ghosts i chased fifteen years ago:

R.I.P. Joe Strummer

somewhere in the back of the mind i couldn't help but smile at the memory of myself in the fall of 1995. the extent of humanity's collective hubris is truly amazing, but nowhere is it so pronounced as in the self-concept of an eighteen year old male on the precipice of a new romance. it became difficult for me to separate the city from the woman, and ironically enough i would find myself making the same mistake four years later. this, too, is beside the point.

my yin and i strolled onward, and one of the great joys of New York, then same as now, are the absurd promotions and storefronts. for example, where else but Manhattan would it ever be appropriate to use the following images to advertise a children's hospital?

people send their children there?

in other places we saw instances of accidental profundity, which happens to be my favorite type:

the awning makes a valid point

we also came upon one store in which my yin will never be allowed to set foot:

never, never, never...

these charming curiosities begin to lose their luster, however, when one begins to look a little closer:

day two

my yin and i took the train in from Scarsdale on the second day, transferred at Grand Central, and finally came above ground in Union Square. throughout the summer Miranda July (one of my favorite Renaissance women) has had an installation scatted along the park:

only in New York would a 2:1 concrete to grass ratio be called a park

her work, as usual, was simultaneously clever, accessible and interactive:

approximately true

others, while not as sophisticated, were nonetheless entertaining:

hopefully, that is...

after perusing the art we headed to the Integral Yoga Institute, where my yin used to volunteer and eventually took her teacher training. we took part in the midday meditation and then sat down to eat lunch with a very skinny swami. although i had heard rumors that the IYI served nothing but brown food, the meal was quite delicious, especially the red dhal.

moving further towards the Hudson River, my yin and i took a stroll along the High Line. in spite of being full of tourists (like us), the old abandoned train line has been turned into something truly unique, allowing visitors to gaze out on some of the new condos that sprung up as part of the previous decade's real estate boom:

curvy building

angular building

and groovy windows

when we finally came down from the High Line, we strolled through Chelsea to check out the sundry art galleries that have dominated the New York art world since the Nineties. the best among them was not a gallery at all, but this building:

150 W. 17th Street

which houses all manners of Himalayan art. among my favorites was this statue:

my love of fornicating Buddhas is well-documented

and these costumes, which my yin and i may use as inspiration for our respective wedding attire:

his and hers?

day three

our third day began in Brooklyn, where my yin and i had spent the night with a friend from her Williamsburg days. after a tempeh breakfast bagel, we headed over to PS 1 and saw a lousy exhibit entitled "Greater New York":

"Lesser New York" would have been more accurate

that night we met an old friend of mine from North Carolina. although we hadn't seen each other in years, his assistance some time ago made a great impact on the eventual direction my life would take, and after a(n unbelievable) meal at Zen Palate i had an opportunity to thank him, something i had been meaning to do since 2006. unfortunately, our post-meal constitutional ran later than expected, and my yin and i ended up missing our train back to Scarsdale by approximately ninety seconds:

by the end of the day, my yin and i were exhausted

day four

museums. museum. museums. we started our fourth day at the Whitney, using the member cards loaned to us back in Westchester. an entire floor was devoted to the work of Christian Marclay:

thank heavens for free passes!

although i had never heard of Marclay, his whimsically indeterminate composition methods astounded me. my yin and i ended up staying for two separate performances, and unbeknownst to me, my yin took this groovy picture while i wasn't looking:

me, with graffiti score in background

to top it off, Marclay is still alive, which is more than i can say for most of the artists in the next museum on our list:

the Metropolitan Museum

the place was an absolute madhouse (it was a Sunday afternoon) and our entire reason for being there was to check out the bamboo on the roof:

much better than steel and concrete

sadly, the skies were overcast and threatening, so my yin and i had to sneak up a half-guarded stairwell to even get a peak at the installation. a sign said that 5000 bamboo poles were used along with miles and miles of nylon rope:

allegedly this ramp can hold 400 pound visitors

afterwards, my yin's photographer friend met us outside the Met, and the three of us took a bus downtown to Alphabet City where our journey began. she showed us pictures of a haunted house in Michigan and told us about the hoarder who was renting her apartment. ironically, none of the pictures from that coffee shop came out, and the only explanation that comes to mind is that my yin's friend is some sort of photogenic black hole, literally distorting the camera's optics so that she can later use and redeploy it to her own ends:

i
m
age
miss
in
g

after this encounter we all took the L train to Brooklyn once more and had dinner with my yin's cousins and their respective mates. the six of us shared a fantastic vegan dinner, and aside from one carnivorous New Zealander, everyone went home smiling, happy and full.

day five

our final day in New York was rainy and, appropriately, fell on a Monday. we went into the city early and milled about Greenwich Village, idly talking about what it would take for us to live in New York again. it was a strange feeling because we both want to want to live in New York – but we don't.

the city has lost its sheen somehow, and i don't mean in the typical "good old days" nostalgia. the city has changed, undoubtedly, but not nearly as much as me. whereas i once saw only excitement, now i cannot help but see all the anxiety and agitation that masquerades as creativity or mania.

the one image that captured it most clearly for me was walking up the ramp form the Metro-North in Grand Central Station. the people all piled on top of one another, pushing and bumping their way towards the exit. they looked exactly like cattle lined up in a slaughter house, and it made no difference if the person was headed to Wall Street or the Bowery (except, of course, the Bowery is no longer the Bowery). every one of them was caught in the same game, stuffed into one metal tube after another and whisked around in the bowels of the city.

we went home early that day and had a quiet meal in Scarsdale with our hosts. we talked about the city, about art, about history and the upcoming wedding. we talked about so many things that it was soon approaching midnight, and my yin and i excused ourselves to go to bed. she fell asleep before me that night, and i lay awake in bed wondering if perhaps we should leave immediately instead of in the morning.

it was a foolish idea, an idea that i would have followed ten years ago, and that is precisely the difference between

the me i was

and

the me i am.