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.
The sun rose behind the clouds, moving from hidden to vermillion to amber curtains of light pouring down onto the ocean. The full moon hung in the western sky, almost as if it was waiting to hear the "I do," and it occurred to me that the same moon was just beginning to rise in Agra, where my yin was visiting the Red Fort:
how far apart are these places: 8000 miles? a 20 hour flight? 9½ hours worth of time zone?
These places are one moon away from each other, one moon that holds the day in perfect harmony with the night. I thought about these things as the preacher gave his sermon. I thought about four years earlier, when I stepped foot on this particular beach for the first time. So much has changed since then, and yet to the sand and the beach and the ocean and the moon it was nothing. It was less than nothing – a blink of the eye, slip of the tongue, a cliché waiting to happen:
Time is a scam; a beautiful, inexplicably lovely scam.
do these denizens of Agra ever worry about time?
I have heard people liken the mind to a monkey:
"There goes my monkey mind again."
But these types of statements are an affront to monkeys the world over.
The mind - at least the mind prevalent in this part of the world during this time in history - is better compared to the ruthless precision of Swiss watches. A Rolex-ed tyranny of minutes and minutia, seconds and second-guessing. To live and breathe and swing from trees is the privilege and birthright of humans and monkeys alike. Have you ever heard a child ask:
"Do i have enough time to climb this tree?"
How about La Cienega, do you think she wonders about time in Nepal?
No; we were in communication this very morning:
La Cienega wrote:
the author responded:
7:29am in joying india??
7:29am
that is fantastic!
[my yin] is in Agra right now.
7:30am Life is!!! Youno
7:30am
alas, no. school. writing thesis.
saw picture of you and carrots. lovely.
7:30am hmm...thought of you a bunch of times...in Kathmanduhehehe...from months ago! Lost my camera..boohoo
7:30am
we're already planning a future traipse.
cameras are overrated, a poor substitute for the creativity of memory.
7:32am I agree! I actually havent taken many pictures...the crew i was travlling with did! So entering Nepal alone i took on the camera...crossed the border...no more camera!
7:32am
how long are you staying?
7:32am ???
7:32am
beautiful. have you been to Bhutan?
7:33am In love! Yes! It is Beautiful! One of the 13 grandmothers lives there...a nepalese shaman!Hope to connect wioth her when she returns to nepal
7:33am
envy. someday someday someday...
7:34am if you truly desire you WILL make it manifest!!
7:35am
agreed. envy, like all emotions, is beautiful in its impermanence.
7:35am When do you and [your yin] enter into sacred union
7:35am
last Sunday in February.
7:38am Beautiful!!! You are a most beautiful pair!!! May all the love that is, continue to radiate from each of you!!! and spread out over the whole world!!!! Radiant love!!! Yum! Thank you for the blessing of your presence in my life! Often you come into my heart and my mind and i am lost in love and gratitude!!! Please know this! So much love and gratitude!!!
7:39am always and ever the same. love, light, and safe travels. every moment is a gift.
Conversations like these, scattered and infrequent though they be, is why i call her La Cienega:
And while La Cienega is never beside the point, I should nonetheless return to the wedding...
There were three flower girls, the youngest of whom had a shiner and trailed behind her sisters (or cousins) saying "you dropped some" and pointing to the petals in the sand. It was adorable, the magnificent fragility of life and the imponderable resiliency of children. How sad it is that, as we grow older, each of us has to learn that we can be hurt. Even sadder, however, is that we come to believe that we can be injured in a way that dampers our spirit and being.
The preacher giving the service spoke to these things in his own obtuse way. It was a more traditional service than the one my yin and I would have six months later, but I was able to listen for the truths he spoke rather than becoming lost in the semantics. I was reminded once more that the largest difference between Christian theology and Eastern thought (at least as it's been taught to me) is a matter of which state one calls 'acquired' and which state one calls 'natural.'
In other words, how original is our sin?
a Rose by any other name...
Maybe I'll end up becoming a Christian mystic like Dostoevsky and see grand mal visions of the Divine and pen great sweeping novels with unpronounceable characters' names. Maybe I'll write heartfelt accounts of normal people, flawed and anonymous, that come to represent the shifting tides of history as an empire begins to collapse upon itself.
How far apart are 19th century St. Petersburg and 21st century Washington?
The wedding and sunrise were followed by breakfast, and I made small talk with friends and strangers while my mind pondered Dostoevsky. I questioned an acquaintance about her vipassana retreat and asked the server to prepare me a plate without any meat. In spite of this, the ocean breeze smelled like bacon.
After the cake was cut, I wished my friend congratulations. She is one of those special maniacs that does things like build surfboards in her free time and sews dresses for the bridesmaids. I still remember three years ago, when she attempted to set me up with her roommate and fed me a spinach-feta burger with sweet potato fries. The match-making didn't take, though, and that night I walked the beach with Mardou.
But this is beside the point.
The point is that I spoke with my yin after the wedding and gave her a brief recap. She told me about Agra and sent a picture of the Taj Mahal, as seen from the Red Fort:
more of the Taj to follow...
My favorite, though, was this one of her with a half-Canadian:
"looks like you got laid," i observed.
Alas, getting laid is also beside the point... at least for the time being.
My sister
and I go dancing in Miami, two instead of three, us instead of we. Her departure is imminent; neither of us know. When the lights come on at 5am,
everyone in the club becomes suddenly uglier. The bodies dancing in the dark grow faces, chiseled jawlines and beautiful silhouettes giving way to idiot words and various nervosas. We now see who was on what for how
long and how strong; my sister and I become better looking.
We drive to South Beach to celebrate with pancakes:
At
the booth behind us sit two large men, and it is impossible to discern
whether they are siblings or lovers. Either way, there is a special intimacy as one berates the other. The hamburger sitting in front of the aggressor grows cold; eventually his performance causes the whole row
of tables to shake:
(my sister turns around)
"Watch it buddy."
(the man jumps up)
"What the f_ck? What the f_ck?"
(my sister is from Baltimore)
"You're bangin' the table."
(bulging waistband implies gun)
"What the f_ck?"
(my sister is from Baltimore)
"[silence]"
(three men at corner booth stand up)
"Is there a problem here?"
(man turns to face three men)
"What the f_uck?"
(three men step forward)
"Is there a problem here?"
(lover/brother stands)
"What the f_uck?"
(three men in unison)
"We from New York."
(man steps forward)
"What the f_ck we care 'bout New York? "
(lover/brother steps forward)
"We from Camden."
[lapse]
We ask for our tab and leave for home, while unknown rappers exchange numbers in the corner booth of the café. Six months later my sister is gone.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My yin and I leave on our honeymoon three weeks from tomorrow, and I find myself not unlike a cat, long-tailed and neurotic, in a room full of:
Apparently, photographs provide little relief to cliché;
.tnoi peht edis ebsi siht tub
The point is that last year I was doing less backmasking and writing more poesy:
just got home. just decided to write. just talked with my yin. just a mild case of poetry. just listened to two messages. just remember this is all a game. just ten months until the wedding. just one year until i finish my thesis. just wonder what i will dream tonight. just six weeks until we leave for summer. just stacking one word on top of the other. just don't care so much for right from wrong. just regurgitating a form Saylor once admired. just a sliver between the imaginary and the Real. just thinking La Cienega leaves for India tomorrow. just recounted a cadence on the beach in September 2007. just saw the swirling hypocrisy of time wither in the blink of an eye. just recounted a cadence on the beach in September 2007. just broke my own rule about using "friend" as a verb. just remembered the mid-February Fear of 2009. just fifty-two minutes until my sister's birthday. just wondered if Mercury is still in retrograde. just learned Jache is flying for Africa tonight. just spent four hours in a bar not drinking. just experienced a parking lot revelation. just learned my old roommate moved. just "friended" my divorce attorney. just have one research paper left. just had french fries for dinner. just read a rejection letter. just turned off my phone. just saw an apparition. just stopped.
I drove home last night thinking about marriage, ceremony, and ritual, commitment and obligation, thinking about dharma.
I thought about the moment hidden in the pomp, the moment obscured by circumstance:
the moment two becomes one.
I thought about impermanence, how every thing that has a beginning will surely have an end.
I thought about the real, the eternal, the unchanging.
I thought about what I have to offer this union.
No one can give you anything that you do not already have.
Not peace, nor security, nor wisdom, nor wealth is lacking.
II.
Then what is the meaning of this marriage?
Is it a dress?
(once worn)
Is it a ring?
(tarnished)
Is it a Saturday evening in May?
(raining)
Is it ‘til death do you part?
(death is not an ending)
My wish for you, S____, My wish for you, N_____,
is that on those worn tarnished rainy days you
remember
love has no beginning, love has no end.
[lapse]
But this year, at least on this day, there's not a poem in sight. Instead I find myself in bookstores buying road maps and thrift stores buying books and half-lying about my consumption.
I am listening (truly) to a Chinese pop song:
And this, amazingly, is not beside the point, though I have no idea how it connects to all the other dots and circles running around my head right now. I've been able to meditate more this week than I have in the past month, and it's been amazing to watch all the various dreams and memories and visions and desires – repressed and otherwise – bubbling to the surface.
I've been watching Twin Peaks before bed each night, and someday my blog will have something to say about that.
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.
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.
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.
one of the weird things about south Florida is that, instead of four climatological seasons, it has a single demographic Season. this time of year the roads begin to fill with blue-haired women, Canadians, and what i imagine to be rejects from the cast of Jersey Shore.
this is not one of the blue-haired women.
but this is beside the point.
the point is that Season also ostensibly marks the start of my work year, as geriatrics and snow birds slowly fill the theatres and performance venues in every beach town from Vero to Dania. as a result i'm working most every night for the next two weeks, and the next two weeks, and the week after that, and this doesn't bode well either for the health of this blog or the health of my mind.
only one of these is beside the point.
in spite of this i plan to push onward and take advantage of those little gaps of time that inevitably pop up between the chorus lines and Chinese acrobats and state college jazz bands making old jazz standards sound positively ancient. fortunately past (would-be) winters have been productive for me, and i hope to begin posting some older work, revisioned and reinterpreted, as time (and numerology) allow.
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;
the sun rose behind the clouds, moving from hidden to vermillion to amber curtains of light pouring down onto the ocean. the full moon hung in the western sky, almost as if it was waiting to hear the "I do," and it occurred to me that the same moon was just beginning to rise in Agra, where my yin was visiting the Red Fort:
how far apart are these places: 8000 miles? a 20 hour flight? 9½ hours worth of time zone?
these places are one moon away from each other, one moon that holds the day in perfect harmony with the night. i thought about these things as the preacher gave his sermon. i thought about four years earlier, when i stepped foot on this particular beach for the first time. so much has changed since then, and yet to the sand and the beach and the ocean and the moon it was nothing. it was less than nothing, a blink of the eye, slip of the tongue, a cliché waiting to happen:
time is a scam; a beautiful, inexplicably lovely scam.
do these denizens of Agra ever worry about time?
i have heard people liken the mind to a monkey:
"there goes my monkey mind again."
but these types of statements are an affront to monkeys the world over.
the mind - at least the mind prevalent in this part of the world during this time in history - is better compared to the ruthless precision of Swiss watches. a Rolex-ed tyranny of minutes and minutia, seconds and second-guessing. to live and breathe and swing from trees is the privilege and birthright of humans and monkeys alike. have you ever heard a child ask:
"do i have enough time to climb this tree?"
how about La Cienega, do you think she wonders about time in Nepal? no; we were in communication this very morning:
La Cienega wrote:
the author responded:
7:29am in joying india??
7:29am that is fantastic! [my yin] is in Agra right now.
7:30am Life is!!! Youno
7:30am alas, no. school. writing thesis. saw picture of you and carrots. lovely.
7:30am hmm...thought of you a bunch of times...in Kathmanduhehehe...from months ago! Lost my camera..boohoo
7:30am we're already planning a future traipse.
cameras are overrated, a poor substitute for the creativity of memory.
7:32am I agree! I actually havent taken many pictures...the crew i was travlling with did! So entering Nepal alone i took on the camera...crossed the border...no more camera!
7:32am how long are you staying?
7:32am ???
7:32am beautiful. have you been to Bhutan?
7:33am In love! Yes! It is Beautiful! One of the 13 grandmothers lives there...a nepalese shaman!Hope to connect wioth her when she returns to nepal
7:33am envy. someday someday someday...
7:34am if you truly desire you WILL make it manifest!!
7:35am agreed. envy, like all emotions, is beautiful in its impermanence.
7:35am When do you and [your yin] enter into sacred union
7:35am last Sunday in February.
7:38am Beautiful!!! You are a most beautiful pair!!! May all the love that is, continue to radiate from each of you!!! and spread out over the whole world!!!! Radiant love!!! Yum! Thank you for the blessing of your presence in my life! Often you come into my heart and my mind and i am lost in love and gratitude!!! Please know this! So much love and gratitude!!!
7:39am always and ever the same. love, light, and safe travels. every moment is a gift.
conversations like these, scattered and infrequent though they be, is why i call her La Cienega:
and while La Cienega is never beside the point, i should nonetheless return to the wedding...
there were three flower girls, the youngest of whom had a shiner and trailed behind her sisters (or cousins) saying "you dropped some" and pointing to the petals in the sand. it was an adorable sight, the magnificent fragility of life and the imponderable resiliency of children. how sad it is that, as we grow older, each of us has to learn that we can be hurt. even sadder, however, is that we come to believe that we can be injured in a way that dampers our spirit and being.
the preacher giving the service spoke to these things in his own obtuse way. it was a more traditional service than the one my yin and i plan, but i was able to listen for the truths he spoke rather than becoming lost in the semantics. i was reminded once more that the largest difference between Christian theology and Eastern thought (at least as it's been taught to me) is a matter of which state one calls 'acquired' and which state one calls 'natural.'
or, in other words, how original is our sin?
a Rose by any other name...
maybe i'll end up becoming a Christian mystic like Dostoevsky and see grand mal visions of the Divine and pen great sweeping novels with unpronounceable characters' names. maybe i'll write heartfelt accounts of normal people, flawed and anonymous, that come to represent the shifting tides of history as an empire begins to collapse upon itself.
how far apart are 19th century St. Petersburg and 21st century Washington?
the wedding and sunrise were followed by breakfast, and i made small talk with friends and strangers while my mind pondered Dostoevsky. i questioned an acquaintance about her vipassana retreat and asked the server to prepare me a plate without any meat. in spite of this, the ocean's breeze carried with it the smell of bacon.
after the cake was cut, i wished my friend congratulations. she is one of those special maniacs that does things like build surfboards in her free time and sew dresses for the bridesmaids. i still remember three years ago, when she attempted to set me up with her roommate and fed me a spinach-feta burger with sweet potato fries. the match-making didn't take, though, and that night i walked the beach with Mardou.
but this is beside the point.
the point is that i spoke with my yin after the wedding and gave her a brief recap. she told me about Agra and sent a picture of the Taj Mahal, as seen from the Red Fort:
more of the Taj to follow...
my favorite, though, was this one of her with a half-Canadian:
"looks like you got laid," i observed.
alas, getting laid is also beside the point... at least for the time being.
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..."
this afternoon 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.
it is not 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.
last Friday my yin and i went downtown with my brother and his girlfriend to check out Boone's monthly Art Crawl. the four of us get along capitally, and over the course of the evening i began to feel like i was on some bizarro familial double date – a mix between Faulknerian drama Carlin-esque deadpan. but this is beside the point.
the point is that, uncertain of the DBDA's artistic taste, and wizened and cynical from innumerable gallery crawls in North Miami, i went into the evening with a healthy dose of skepticism, expecting a parade a faux rusticism and outsider art tokenism. happily, i was disillusioned.
(if honesty is a virtue, can there be any other type of disillusionment?)
we started our night by walking along King Street, ducking into a storefront gallery where my yin immediately made friends with the woman working on a potting wheel. although unphotographed, this woman hails from the same hometown as my yin, and complained admirably about how much she misses South Florida. looking at an imaginary calendar on the wall, i saw that it was July and thought to myself: "this woman may be mentally ill."
strangers to South Florida, my brother and his girlfriend quickly tired of the complaining woman's antics and walked outside to listen to a bluegrass band giving a free concert on the same spot where my yin and i had abandoned a ghost tour the week before:
next we moved west, like the town's long-dead, somewhat famous namesake. along the way we found an African man carving statues on the sidewalk, but my yin was afraid to take his picture head on, out of respect for the well-known, possibly fallacious superstition regarding the relationship between photographic representation and ownership of one's soul:
an African man, seen from a distance
(if privacy is a virtue, can one ever wield a camera without guilt?)
our next stop was Shear Shakti, where one of my yin's newfound cohorts offers both cosmetological and cosmological services as a yoga instructor/hair stylist. i have only encountered such chutzpah in a hairdresser once before. it was over three years ago, when a woman (who looked like a woman) laughed at me, told me i needed a haircut, and gave me her card. it read: "hair designer."
inside the salon the cohort was absent, but we found her partner, a woman named Charlotte (sometimes?) who gave us a tour of the place. there were reflections standing midair, and Charlotte told us that when the place first opened, only two of the four mirrors were installed, leading customers to wonder if the salon doubled as a topless bar after hours. we all laughed at this anecdote – but the question was never answered.
(if comedy is a virtue, can we take one moment and laugh at our lack of virtue?)
reflections standing midair
lamentably, my yin's cohort was not there but Charlotte told us to come back later because the cohort and wine and cheese would be waiting. my yin and i agreed, and ran into this woman playing a banjo on our way out. introductions were made, then forgotten, and all i remember that the banjo had only four strings, a fact of which i do not approve.
girl playing 4-string banjo
by now 7 o'clock was approaching, and we all walked back the way we came to eat dinner in an old restaurant with a new name. at the table, i listened to my brother go on and on about Floridians in North Carolina – he does not approve.
it was odd, and i felt a strange discomfort pulling me in two directions. on the one hand, i felt the need to lay claim to my "localness" or, if you will, the absurdly vain notion of "authenticity." intellectually i know this desire is preposterous, and furthermore i've lived two-thirds of my life here, but i still felt a twinge of defensiveness, like i needed to establish some manner of provenance to my brother.
(if authenticity is a virtue, can one ever change without accepting the impermanence of truth?)
on the other hand, that feeling of being "from here" has trapped, then tormented, then haunted me, for nearly as long as i can remember. i never felt at home in my hometown, and it has only been in the past few years that i have attained some modicum of comfort in the mountains of North Carolina.
moreover, many of the aspects and ideas in which i find solace are the things that are the most "foreign." the yoga studios and art crawls and organic foods have all arrived to this part of the state during my lifetime, and although they carry with them a sense of familiarity, it is undeniably nonnative at the same time. these things, among others, left me unable to express clearly my thoughts and feeling during the course of our meal. on the upside, however, the tempeh gouda tacos were amazing.
walking back to the car, we saw this machine parked next to the sidewalk:
freaky bone bike
neither i, nor my yin, nor my brother, nor his girlfriend, nor the half dozen other onlookers were able to determine if it was a piece of art or not. this was undoubtedly the most-talked about piece all night, and it also ended up being the last thing the four of us saw together. my brother and his girlfriend were leaving early the next morning for Charleston, and so my yin and i soldiered on.
(if perseverance is a virtue, can we ever reconcile our inborn stubbornness with surrender to the Divine?)
our next stop was like a little piece of Wynwood, as seen thirteen months ago, plucked from its proper place in space and time (and memory, always memory) and dropped onto the second story of a building that once housed a lousy comic book shop. inside was all manners of immature bohemian art, but there was one piece that took my breath away:
the mixed media piece consisted of: 1) the artist lying motionless in a giant pile of wool; 2) printed emails from the artist's sister, describing her diagnosis with ALS and its progression; and 3) a compact disc of a woman's voice (presumably the artist) speaking to the sister, attempting to communicate the relationship between art, the sister's illness, and the impact on the artist.
normally, i find pieces dealing with such issues to be reactive and heavy-handed, but not so in this instance. in fact, it was certainly the most mature work of art i saw all night, speaking simultaneously to both the personal and universal. speechless and smiling, my yin and i stumbled down:
the stairs
only to find a man who shared a name with a famous degenerate. he was wearing a muumuu, had a small canister of herbal tea dangling in a sling around his neck, and agreed to pose for a picture taken with his lady friend:
Tommy Lee and friend
bolstered by this auspicious encounter, my yin and i returned once more to Shear Shakti in search of the missing cohort. what we found was Charlotte instead, who had a cigarette in hand and told us she was stepping outside to "feed her dark side."
a brief aside: as much as i like the sound of "Charlotte the Smoking Yogini," one must admit that this is precisely the danger of Tantric philosophy, which teaches one to embrace the indisputable, unfathomable fact that everything is holy.
and, while the path between austerity and indulgence is undoubtedly a continuum, i cannot help but believe that the pendulum towards divinity turns the other way somewhere far short of nicotine and addiction.
(if austerity is a virtue, can one deny the simple joy of ice cream on a summer's day?)
with the proprietress and banjo player absent, my yin and i met the featured artist, a man named Jimmy who painted on cardboard and made amazing frames out found material, namely the rusted pieces of metal he finds clearing paths through the woods outside of town:
some of Jimmy's art
during the course of our conversation he told about his next show in one month's time. my yin and i assured him we would be there, and left in search of the next stop, a studio/gallery called:
along the way, however, we stopped in a place called Modern Rustic, and met another woman from South Florida. we spoke briefly, and a woman from the local newspaper snapped our picture, possibly mistaking us for old friends. the picture, at least for a time, can be found here. eventually though, we reached our final destination:
inside The Collective
which had this lovely piece of artwork, by an artist whose name i forgot to jot down. more than any other, this 3"x8" piece of wood captured the mood of the evening, the Friday night of Fourth of July weekend:
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