titled 99

It reminds me of that book by James Frey
where he talks about a large quantity small
pieces and uses, ingeniously, the ethical
constraints of doctor-patient privilege to
wrap, cocoon-like, his own questionable
ethics more tightly than the high E string
on a Telecaster two turns too taunt.

Bachelor-like I sit eating frozen pizza with
an absurdly grotesque fork and Beethoven's
only opera playing in the background. The
sound of the keys as I type, left hand clicks
right hand clacks, channeling August 2005
when I drank red wine and messaged with
my left hand, procrastinated with my right.

"There are more lives than this one," said
Krishna, "but you do not remember them all."

I do.

last night's dream

Dream of a parking lot and

unplanned encounter with Nancy

I'm walking down the hill.
It's sloped like the one in the park:

the sky above.

the park dangling in the middle

The town below

falls gently towards the Earth. 

Nancy is getting in her car

| a sports utilitty |

| that barely sque|

|ezes between th|

|e cracked white l

|ines on the aspalt

We're surprised to see each other,
and I nod uneasily as I walk past.

Something has shifted though

and I turn back around.

We exchange a tentative hug and wish each other well.

The trauma has healed. 

The vitriol has dissipated. 

The first six years of the new millennium never happened.

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...

redux: Zazen v. Nancy

This time last year, I read Norweigan Wood and was immediately taken in by its sense of loss. Before even the first page was finished, I found my mind start 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 as if I knew Naoko, but was unable to place precisely how or whom.

Was it Nancy she reminds me of? Those broken cryptic warnings that masqueraded as invitation? Was it her deception or my projection? What difference does it make now, eleven years later? Karmas have been incurred, lives altered, and each of us stumbled into worlds safely removed from the other's.

Was it a trap door?

Ever watched a rabbit emerge from 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.

Back then I was also reading Bodhisattva Archetypes, and I thought about the Zen understanding of a sitting meditation. Iin the Zen tradition the point of sitting is not to attain altered or transcendent states of consciousness – it is merely to sit. (A useful understanding since my current schedule requires that most of my sitting practice has been relegated to parking lots in Broward County.)

Another point that stood 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.

Coincidentally, perhaps, last year was also the time my own teacher began to describe 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 and parking lots.

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 - the atman, in other words.

(C'est quoi disent les Francais? Mais oui, c'est la vie...)

[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...

on the obtuse significance of David Bowie

Do songs tell the future...

or only the past?

Gainesville bedrooms and

the clicking clatter of space heaters

the frigid February cold of early mourning.

Ziggy in the kitchen

Iggy in the bath

Nancy in–

Every rainy morning:

one year bloating into three

into six into the eternity of nothing.

Plastic bottletops

gas station parking lots

the smell of afterbirth in September.

the drive, the gallery, the night

My yin and I returned to Raleigh yesterday, embarking on another weekend with a friend of mine from high school. More than one year had passed since our last visit.

a window memory, reflection-inflected, an already fading past...

On the drive:

I think of the memories locked inside my bones. I remember the thoughts that once populated my mind with such consistency that they took on the quality of constancy: six forks, five fingers, four evers, three hours, two lovers, one cubic centimeter. I see snatches of glimpses, snatches of glimpses; a red door entrance to a second story bar where Nancy once bought stock in Merck Pharmaceuticals five milligrams at a time.

urban horizon blue meets brick red sky...

In the gallery:

I speak with a docent who has asked us to step away from the art. The exhibit is composed of recycled and repurposed and otherwise disposed of material. I ask her if she appreciates the irony of the situation, how her role as museum employee has interpellated her in a manner contradictory to the impetus underlying the art. She says she does understand, and in the conversation that follows I come to believe her.

I tell her that the museum itself, which is housed in what was once a warehouse, represents a curious phenomenon in post-industrial America. Warehouses – the cultural spaces and physical places of the working class – have grown dark and empty and abandoned over the past thirty years, mirroring the hollowing out of the working class by the creeds of free trade and global capitalism that have come to dominate our ever waking moment.

Once empty, these spaces are filled with art objects and shopping malls and luxury lofts – the symptoms of lopsided wealth and trappings of high culture coming to colonize spaces that were once considered not worth possessing.

tiny concrete death masks of Adam Smith and his progeny...

In the night:

I dream of Nancy. She is coming for a private session with my yin and I try to sneak out the door, knowing the trouble that will follow. Nancy sees me.

Irate.

Spiteful.

Odious.

She is Medusa without feminism

X without Haley

memory without the past.

My yin, though, possesses a strength that runs deeper than the simple violence of malice. She ejects Nancy from the domicile and physically pushes her accomplice out the door.

I wake in a gasp.

Thunder rumbles and I hold my yin closer. "I had a bad dream."

(i imagine)

"Come here," she says. "I'll make it better."

Already, she has.

to be continued...

redux: attachment

Part 1

One year ago yesterday I ran into my sister's former lover. He was sitting in the corner of a small coffee shop on King Street (downtown Boone's main thoroughfare) and from the moment I walked in something seemed familiar about him.

"Did you used to live in ____?" he asked.

I recognized the Kentucky in his voice, and somewhere in the back of my mind lights began lighting up one after another: cigarettes, turntables, jealousy and anger.

"Yes," I answered.

photograph of Ryan Adams with coffee

(a short conversation followed

i did not tell him i

once wrote a poem for him)

Looking back now, I wonder about the significance – if any – of our meeting. I do not believe in coincidences; to do so requires that one reject not only the primacy, but even the existence of karma.

Part 2

This afternoon, one year ago, I went to a small storage shed on the north end of the county. Inside were approximately 4000 comic books and my dead grandmother's belongings.

photograph by Stephanie Schneider

(

i remembered

were not there.

some of the things

there

were not remembered.

)

I made what will presumably be my last visit to that same shed two weeks ago. There was a cigar store Indian, a piano, and an oil stain on the floor. Only two of these things belonged to me, and I gave one of them away twice in as many days. The piano now sits in a three bedroom house overlooking a lake.

Part 3

It is neither letting go, nor the thought of letting go. It is the inability to reconstruct a memory that might explain the things I saw; it is the inability to imagine a memory that might make sense of the things I did not.

photograph of a photograph by Patricio Reig

?

?

?

artifact

or

memory

?

?

?

I wrote two-thirds of this one year ago. It is curious to see which of these memories still have emotional resonance and which of them have been relegated to the realm of "things that merely happened"... if such things can even be said to exist at all.

on barbarism, aging and preludes

Yesterday evening on the way to work, I heard back to back news clips on NPR. The first one lasted only a few seconds and informed me that the Obama administration was deciding whether or not to release the death photo of Osama Bin Laden. Apparently the ghoul was shot in the face by U.S. forces, and if the whole fiasco at Abu Ghraib taught us nothing else, it's that U.S. military personnel are always handy when it comes to a camera.

i
m
age
miss
in
g

(thankfully)

The second report was somewhat longer, addressed the unrest in the Middle East, and featured a State Department spokesperson declaring that the Syrian government's treatment of protesters was "barbaric". I certainly don't dispute this assessment, but it was nonetheless a curious statement given the context of what immediately preceded it. The fact that our own government is "debating" the release of the Bin Laden photo seems particularly barbaric to me, not unlike the ancient practice of placing the severed heads of one's enemies on stakes outside the city walls.

i
m
age
miss
in
g

(again, thankfully)

I suppose that – despite our modern era of globalization and technology, terror and media inundation – sometimes the oldest methods are still the best methods. Perhaps there is no deterrent so effective as the image of a corpse, and if André Bazin were alive I wonder if he would reconsider his "Ontology of the Photographic Image".

"The image helps us to remember the subject
and preserve him from a second spiritual death."

But this is beside the point.

The point is that I've been thinking about death a lot recently – not in the way of maudlinism or morbidity – but just in the general sense of getting older. When I was a child, thirty-four seemed very old; it was the age of my father, the age of my mother, the age of maturity and unfathomable responsibility. It was impossible to conceive of myself as such, and I don't think my experience in this regard is unique. Perhaps that's all that distinguishes adulthood from childhood: the ability to imagine oneself as older.

The author, unable to imagine himself as older.

As the name implies, imagination is dependent upon both the intake and output images. But how do we digest the images we see? How do we turn them into the future visions of ourselves? Why do our predictions always seem so faulty? How often do we ask children, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" without really appreciating what it is we're asking them to do?

The author's early imaginations.

Adolescence, with its fascination on the establishment and projection of image, seems especially useful in this way. Frightful haircuts (remember mousse?), dreadful aromas (remember Obsession?), and regrettable fashions (remember the tight roll?) are as essential to those years as Noxema and masturbation. Looking back it seems the entirety of my teenage years was spent learning to navigate the dialectic between things-to-be-seen and things-to-be-hidden:

The poles of the dialectic.

By the end of college, I found myself very wary (and weary) of this dance. Although inarticulable at the time, the gap between image and referent was experienced viscerally. Is our existence nothing more than a play of signifiers? A confluence of culture and biology? Are we reducible to nothing more than the interplay between light and darkness?

The author in the dark, 2001.

I spent some years exploring these questions, without the benefit (or detriment) of guidance, authority, or tradition. I was intent on dismantling every part of myself that was not a result of choice. Camus himself would have been proud.

Eventually I collected evidence of sufficient quantity and quality to answer these questions, and two years after that I bore witness to a graffitied bedroom revelation as to how I might present my findings.

The author's bedroom wall, circa 2008.

While all these thoughts settled, I went back to school and learned a little bit more about the image and how we negotiate our relationship to it. Specifically, I wondered how we reconcile our existence with our memories, or put another way – our experience of the people we are now with our images of the people we were then.

Besides one very long paper and two short letters, I knew that this process would somehow help me learn to articulate those things I could not say ten years ago. This forum has been a part of process, and from the beginning I've looked at this blog as less of a medium and more of a laboratory.

Now, though, my school has come to an end, and it will be at least 15 months before I return (if ever). So...

I find myself with more free time than I've had at any time since that bedroom revelation, which occurred precisely three years ago on the 24th of this month. This, coupled with a comment my father-in-law made yesterday, are clear signs that it's time to start compiling my results and see if I can actually spin them into the novel that's been kicking around my head for the past couple of years.

Time will tell...

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 11th day of Christmas

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

eleven prime numbers

2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17,19, 23, 29, 31 – this is how many prime numbers i've lived so far. i'm not sure why this was on my mind yesterday, but it probably had something to do with my midday intuition that 2011 was itself a prime number.

it is, but this is beside the point.

the point is that my next one won't come until i'm 37, and it seems that monumental, life-changing events fall with disconcerting regularity at these ages. at 13 my parents divorced, for example, and at 23 i met Nancy.

this isn't to say that all prime numbers are calamitous, though. six years later the next prime arrived, and i left Nancy in what remains my most powerful flash of revelation to date. furthermore, when i was 17 i lost my virginity – actually, it would be more accurate to say i was lucky enough to have it taken from me, but this is also beside the point.

how many prime numbers do you have left?

the point is that, at most, i have 18 more prime numbers left in me. this figure is based on the assumption that i will live to be a 122, which is derived by my yin's prediction that i would live to be 132, which was subsequently knocked down 10 years by an unintentional arithmetic error on my part. either scenario is unlikely, of course, and whenever i'm doing something that annoys her i reminded her my scariest ghostlike voice:

"79 more years!"

if i can defy the wisdom of the oracle and manage to make it 80 more years, though, then i will live to the ripe old age of 113, which is not only a prime number but also ends in my favorite number, 13, which i had tattooed on my wrist when i was 23, also a prime number.

(note: all these 'meaningful' prime numbers may be little more than my penchant for number theory masquerading as numerology and superstition.)

since i turned 29, i've come to recognize prime numbers as a metaphor for the relationship between human individuality and what lies beyond. since primes can be divided only by one and themselves, this makes them both exceedingly rare and infinitely plentiful, and i see this as a beautiful allegory for the human condition:

each of us is unique,
each of is like countless others,
each of us find identity in the divine.

thus concluded the eleventh 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."

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...

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...

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 Smiths v. Dorian Gray: 1/0 year/s later

note: an earlier version of this poem appeared here.

n() l()nger

no
longer
raining
and
Gray
out
side

or
the
thorn
side
boy
at
the
door
.
no
longer
the poorly
lit living room
of cotton and Oscar
Wilde. no longer insomnia
mourning and morning. no longer
i still recall: the fleeting feeling
of fleeing interrupted by
the metallic click
of space
heaters
.
no
longer

those
empty
days
and
the
Siren
siphon
of
night.

memory of Sunday morning nostalgia for Georgia

note: this poem originally appeared one year ago today. depending on his or her needs and proclivities, the reader is encouraged to engage the text horizontally, vertically, or any combination thereof.

(any likeness to Tennessee is strictly coincidental.)

Sunday morning nostalgia for Georgia

feeling:

the ennui of

waking

the Smiths

after

making lattes in

Coca-Cola nightclubs.

mixing:

photo developer

with orange juice

and dreaming of

Floridian abortions

and Chattanooga matrimony.

my uncle

died

doing:

nothing.

exceprt from notes on yesterday's meditation

these words originally appeared here on 28 August 2010:

my current journal

"start with pranayama followed by mantra. at some point it occurs to me: i'm just as far from the me i was in 2007 as the me i was in 2003. yet, the distance to the me i was the last year of college – before New York – seems closer than either. how are we to explain or graph these temporal geographies of mind, memory and nostalgia?"

"it was equal parts surprising and profound, obvious and sad. there is no going back to that summer when my enthusiasm for life and spirituality was eclipsed only by my inexperience and naiveté. this is not to lament their passing, merely and observation, because the perspective i enjoy now is informed not only by exuberance, or the novelty of something new, but fortified by the years of perseverance and commitment..."

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...