Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Saturday, April 17, 2010
from Branches Without Leaves
an essay on a word
9.
The rain makes her crazy. The smells. Not able to walk around outside. She takes off, runs, leaps, climbs the neighbors’ fence, gone. Only instinct, the desire to keep going. After a squirrel, a smell. She’ll endure the consequences later, now, she doesn’t think, just goes. Later, she’ll reflect on her actions from her time-out place in the basement.
When one thing disappears, something else takes its place. Sometimes it doesn’t seem like it, or it isn’t apparent. One day I was missing you, but thanked you, quietly, for giving me the opportunity to do some things: adopt Tash, listen to myself, do more yoga, sleep in the middle of the bed. One day I forgot altogether, and then remembered: Friday happy hour, eating with friends, snow in the woods, breaths instead of thoughts.
Tash is always in trouble. She runs away and climbs fences. She gets into the garbage and pulls out things to lick like wrappers or plastic bags, or things to tear into a million pieces, like empty milk cartons. Still she is all love and energy. Her whole body wiggles when I walk in the door. She sticks her nose right up against mine and stares deeply into my eyes like she knows we are connected, like she is telling me everything will be fine, we have each other. She jumps on the bed and curls up with her body pushed as close to me as possible and we keep each other warm.
Some Buddhists say that emptiness simply means inconceivable, or infinite, potential. In order to have the opportunity to realize this potential, one must surrender to complete emptiness, release attachments, trust in letting go. Pure possibility. Like a tree with no leaves, heading into spring.
an essay on a word
9.
The rain makes her crazy. The smells. Not able to walk around outside. She takes off, runs, leaps, climbs the neighbors’ fence, gone. Only instinct, the desire to keep going. After a squirrel, a smell. She’ll endure the consequences later, now, she doesn’t think, just goes. Later, she’ll reflect on her actions from her time-out place in the basement.
When one thing disappears, something else takes its place. Sometimes it doesn’t seem like it, or it isn’t apparent. One day I was missing you, but thanked you, quietly, for giving me the opportunity to do some things: adopt Tash, listen to myself, do more yoga, sleep in the middle of the bed. One day I forgot altogether, and then remembered: Friday happy hour, eating with friends, snow in the woods, breaths instead of thoughts.
Tash is always in trouble. She runs away and climbs fences. She gets into the garbage and pulls out things to lick like wrappers or plastic bags, or things to tear into a million pieces, like empty milk cartons. Still she is all love and energy. Her whole body wiggles when I walk in the door. She sticks her nose right up against mine and stares deeply into my eyes like she knows we are connected, like she is telling me everything will be fine, we have each other. She jumps on the bed and curls up with her body pushed as close to me as possible and we keep each other warm.
Some Buddhists say that emptiness simply means inconceivable, or infinite, potential. In order to have the opportunity to realize this potential, one must surrender to complete emptiness, release attachments, trust in letting go. Pure possibility. Like a tree with no leaves, heading into spring.
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
from Branches Without Leaves
an essay on a word
6.
scribbled on scrap paper. you want to keep doing this into the future. sign here. date it. write it. say it. live it. the narratives we tell (ourselves). you tell hybrid stories. fact, fiction, sound misplaced, modifiers, dreams repeated as misheard memories. you decide how to narrate my past.
(Rankine: is he dead? is she dead?)
present elided by blurry images. you paint between lines you have drawn by hand.
(no one deserves to be shot 41 times.)
re-create events for some character who has my initials, is not me. I am in a room with no door, no window, a phone that doesn’t call out. when it rings I talk to you but there is no one the other end. I can’t find my stories. filed in another room I try to narrate them for you but there are no verbs, or articles, available. I realize there is no phone. I am talking to the face I imagine is you, projected on the wall. when I wake I am on the floor. suffocating. repeating the same 3 line story wondering if you can hear me. a chant. trying to catch my breath. repeat. what happened to that paper? the one you signed? in a file with my stories. the stories you told before you disintegrated on the breeze. you are in front of me. cannot speak. mumble in nonsense syllables. lips contort. my hand goes through your chest. I wake in the corner. why did you, I repeat. I crawl into the closet. curl on the floor. the dog snores. your face moves out of focus.
(Rankine: what’s the use of forgetting if its followed by dying? this is the most miserable in my life.)
an essay on a word
6.
scribbled on scrap paper. you want to keep doing this into the future. sign here. date it. write it. say it. live it. the narratives we tell (ourselves). you tell hybrid stories. fact, fiction, sound misplaced, modifiers, dreams repeated as misheard memories. you decide how to narrate my past.
(Rankine: is he dead? is she dead?)
present elided by blurry images. you paint between lines you have drawn by hand.
(no one deserves to be shot 41 times.)
re-create events for some character who has my initials, is not me. I am in a room with no door, no window, a phone that doesn’t call out. when it rings I talk to you but there is no one the other end. I can’t find my stories. filed in another room I try to narrate them for you but there are no verbs, or articles, available. I realize there is no phone. I am talking to the face I imagine is you, projected on the wall. when I wake I am on the floor. suffocating. repeating the same 3 line story wondering if you can hear me. a chant. trying to catch my breath. repeat. what happened to that paper? the one you signed? in a file with my stories. the stories you told before you disintegrated on the breeze. you are in front of me. cannot speak. mumble in nonsense syllables. lips contort. my hand goes through your chest. I wake in the corner. why did you, I repeat. I crawl into the closet. curl on the floor. the dog snores. your face moves out of focus.
(Rankine: what’s the use of forgetting if its followed by dying? this is the most miserable in my life.)
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Monday, April 05, 2010
from Precarious Life
by Judith Butler
I do not think, for instance, that one can invoke the Protestant ethic when it comes to loss. One cannot say, “Oh, I’ll go through loss this way, and that will be the result, and I’ll apply myself to the task, and I’ll endeavor to achieve the resolution of grief that is before me.” I think one is hit by waves, and that one starts out the day with an aim, a project, a plan, and finds oneself foiled. One finds oneself fallen. One is exhausted but does not know why. Something is larger than one’s own deliberate plan, one’s own project, one’s own knowing and choosing.
Something takes hold of you: where does it come from? What sense does it make? What claims us at such moments, such that we are not the masters of ourselves? To what are we tied? And by what are we seized? Freud reminded us that when we lose someone, we do not always know what it is in that person that has been lost. So when one loses, one is also faced with something enigmatic: something is hiding in the loss, something is lost within the recesses of loss. If mourning involves knowing what one has lost (and melancholia originally meant, to a certain extent, not knowing), then mourning would be maintained by its enigmatic dimension, by the experience of not knowing incited by losing what we cannot fully fathom. (21-22)
On one level, I think I have lost “you” only to discover that “I” have gone missing as well. At another level, perhaps what I have lost “in” you , that for which I have no ready vocabulary, is a relationality that is composed neither exclusively of myself nor you, but is to be conceived as the tie by which those terms are differentiated and related (22).
What grief displays, in contrast, is the thrall in which our relations with others hold us, in ways that we cannot always recount or explain, in ways that often interrupt the self-conscious account of ourselves we might try to provide, in ways that challenge the very notion of ourselves as autonomous and in control. I might try to tell a story here about what I am feeling, but it would have to be a story in which the very “I” who seeks to tell the story is stopped in the midst of the telling; the very “I” is called into question by its relation to the Other, a relation that does not precisely reduce me to speechlessness, but does nevertheless clutter my speech with signs of its undoing. I tell a story about the relations I choose, only to expose, somewhere along the way, the way I am gripped and undone by these very relations. My narrative falters, as it must.
Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other, And if we’re not, we’re missing something. (23)
For if I am confounded by you, then you are already of me, and I am nowhere without you. I cannot muster the “we” except by finding the way in which I am tied to “you,” by trying to translate but finding that my own language must break up and yield if I am to know you. You are what I gain through this disorientation and loss. This is how the human comes into being, again and again, as that which we have yet to know. (49).
I do not think, for instance, that one can invoke the Protestant ethic when it comes to loss. One cannot say, “Oh, I’ll go through loss this way, and that will be the result, and I’ll apply myself to the task, and I’ll endeavor to achieve the resolution of grief that is before me.” I think one is hit by waves, and that one starts out the day with an aim, a project, a plan, and finds oneself foiled. One finds oneself fallen. One is exhausted but does not know why. Something is larger than one’s own deliberate plan, one’s own project, one’s own knowing and choosing.
Something takes hold of you: where does it come from? What sense does it make? What claims us at such moments, such that we are not the masters of ourselves? To what are we tied? And by what are we seized? Freud reminded us that when we lose someone, we do not always know what it is in that person that has been lost. So when one loses, one is also faced with something enigmatic: something is hiding in the loss, something is lost within the recesses of loss. If mourning involves knowing what one has lost (and melancholia originally meant, to a certain extent, not knowing), then mourning would be maintained by its enigmatic dimension, by the experience of not knowing incited by losing what we cannot fully fathom. (21-22)
On one level, I think I have lost “you” only to discover that “I” have gone missing as well. At another level, perhaps what I have lost “in” you , that for which I have no ready vocabulary, is a relationality that is composed neither exclusively of myself nor you, but is to be conceived as the tie by which those terms are differentiated and related (22).
What grief displays, in contrast, is the thrall in which our relations with others hold us, in ways that we cannot always recount or explain, in ways that often interrupt the self-conscious account of ourselves we might try to provide, in ways that challenge the very notion of ourselves as autonomous and in control. I might try to tell a story here about what I am feeling, but it would have to be a story in which the very “I” who seeks to tell the story is stopped in the midst of the telling; the very “I” is called into question by its relation to the Other, a relation that does not precisely reduce me to speechlessness, but does nevertheless clutter my speech with signs of its undoing. I tell a story about the relations I choose, only to expose, somewhere along the way, the way I am gripped and undone by these very relations. My narrative falters, as it must.
Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other, And if we’re not, we’re missing something. (23)
For if I am confounded by you, then you are already of me, and I am nowhere without you. I cannot muster the “we” except by finding the way in which I am tied to “you,” by trying to translate but finding that my own language must break up and yield if I am to know you. You are what I gain through this disorientation and loss. This is how the human comes into being, again and again, as that which we have yet to know. (49).
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
from Introduction to A Stein Reader
Ed. Ulla Dydo
No time, no space, no center, standard, or authority. Stein wrote in a world changed by Einstein and even more by Heisenberg and Schrodinger. She knew she was one of them, constructing for words what they had constructed for quantum mechanics. On 25 May 1928 Dorothy Dudley Harvey wrote to stein from New York...Harvey described Stein with a quotation from Russell ["Physics and Metaphysics"] as a visionary in the world of the new physics.
"Nowadays, physicists, the most hard-headed of mankind...have embodied in their technique this insubstantiality which some of the metaphysicians have so long urged in vain."
In connection with grammar I thought at once of you, and wondered, knowing little about them, if you have not been one of the metaphysicians as an artist, with whom the physicists have just caught up.
No time, no space, no center, standard, or authority. Stein wrote in a world changed by Einstein and even more by Heisenberg and Schrodinger. She knew she was one of them, constructing for words what they had constructed for quantum mechanics. On 25 May 1928 Dorothy Dudley Harvey wrote to stein from New York...Harvey described Stein with a quotation from Russell ["Physics and Metaphysics"] as a visionary in the world of the new physics.
"Nowadays, physicists, the most hard-headed of mankind...have embodied in their technique this insubstantiality which some of the metaphysicians have so long urged in vain."
In connection with grammar I thought at once of you, and wondered, knowing little about them, if you have not been one of the metaphysicians as an artist, with whom the physicists have just caught up.
Friday, March 26, 2010
from "Things to Do Today"
by Joe Wenderoth
1. thaw the wounded
7. decrease the drama to the point of gesture, phrase, a weathered and weathering yard
10. organize and dispense an imperceptible the
19. determine the cause of the cause
22. set the famous criminals free
26. make the beautiful go to work
37. prepare the eyes for the oncoming absence of voices
42. produce a striking likeness of any one unproductive moment
53. clarify a morning posture
59. insist on the sad waste at the heart of all honest work
70. control the urge to farm
75. rehabilitate the truth tellers
77. practice saying something
79. try to fluster the bulk of language with the idea of buried faces
80. discontinue the breadth of the applicable horizon
87. mimic the open area
90. post signs indicating relevant battlefields
92. make the faithful look at us
93. weep new syllables
1. thaw the wounded
7. decrease the drama to the point of gesture, phrase, a weathered and weathering yard
10. organize and dispense an imperceptible the
19. determine the cause of the cause
22. set the famous criminals free
26. make the beautiful go to work
37. prepare the eyes for the oncoming absence of voices
42. produce a striking likeness of any one unproductive moment
53. clarify a morning posture
59. insist on the sad waste at the heart of all honest work
70. control the urge to farm
75. rehabilitate the truth tellers
77. practice saying something
79. try to fluster the bulk of language with the idea of buried faces
80. discontinue the breadth of the applicable horizon
87. mimic the open area
90. post signs indicating relevant battlefields
92. make the faithful look at us
93. weep new syllables
"54. sing of eyes freezing, thighs giving birth, what have you"
--Joe Wenderoth, "Things to Do Today"
have not into cold
a flash of cutting crisp
in the dead
of terror
shivers what freezing
birth white frost
giving new
slide screech shatter
finger
nails
lengthen scratch a
formidable horizon falls
into disrepair regard
silences in flesh
composed sweet
notes ring
fast
--Joe Wenderoth, "Things to Do Today"
have not into cold
a flash of cutting crisp
in the dead
of terror
shivers what freezing
birth white frost
giving new
slide screech shatter
finger
nails
lengthen scratch a
formidable horizon falls
into disrepair regard
silences in flesh
composed sweet
notes ring
fast
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
from Don't Let Me Be Lonely
by Claudia Rankine
Define loneliness?
Yes.
It’s what we can’t do for each other.
What do we mean to each other?
What does a life mean?
Why are we here if not for each other? (62)
Define loneliness?
Yes.
It’s what we can’t do for each other.
What do we mean to each other?
What does a life mean?
Why are we here if not for each other? (62)
relates
“Of this kind is the distinction betwixt figure
and the body figur’d; motion and the body mov’d.”
--David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature
your marble sphere my box
dimensional
the words laid one on top
across
broken letters
an articulation of history through space
on the page
who was defeated
whose artifacts
weapons
kiss me present tense against shining marble
does not move
its form holding together
molecules
straddling
how much means
across letters objects
viewed from every direction
will not simply show and tell
and the body figur’d; motion and the body mov’d.”
--David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature
your marble sphere my box
dimensional
the words laid one on top
across
broken letters
an articulation of history through space
on the page
who was defeated
whose artifacts
weapons
kiss me present tense against shining marble
does not move
its form holding together
molecules
straddling
how much means
across letters objects
viewed from every direction
will not simply show and tell
sustain sun in through the window unexpected listening masks a visual sensation narrates the lines set against her, can you tell me how and in what manner? not angry but potential, under the surface, bare tree branches of the inconceivable. hope has feathers you know, little else. concrete array of vocabulary intoned against, detour instead, storms lingering. grey orange mix with silent refrain—repeat and hold back—the coloring texture noisy scattered maneuvering. the body impulse, intoxication, monologues of manic silence.
Friday, March 05, 2010
from "Poetry is Not a Luxury"
by Audre Lorde
If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core--the fountain--of our power, our womanness; we give up the future of our worlds.
For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt--of examining what those ideas feel like being lived on Sunday morning at 7am, after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth, mourning our dead--while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while we taste new possibilities and strengths.
If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core--the fountain--of our power, our womanness; we give up the future of our worlds.
For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt--of examining what those ideas feel like being lived on Sunday morning at 7am, after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth, mourning our dead--while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while we taste new possibilities and strengths.
Friday, February 26, 2010
one notices the slivers of pale flesh in the ash. she is come undone. flakes scatter a breeze it will be impossible to close our eyes without the smell, of ash, of flesh. heat amplified against flame and a forgotten history, never recorded by victors or anyone else. we tie our ends with neon ribbon, pretend there is a common story that would make us feel better, that we could remember fondly, that we could displace into lines of feeling. Pale, gruesome, emotion. she led us to believe there was another way. instead, coming to this.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
from "Proportion Surviving"
by Renee Gladman
For years I had known that if there was a wall between where I was and where I needed to be, I did not want it there. Some people have personal goals that are demanding. Certain goals make it impossible to lounge around in bed.
For years I had known that if there was a wall between where I was and where I needed to be, I did not want it there. Some people have personal goals that are demanding. Certain goals make it impossible to lounge around in bed.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
from "Translation"
by Renee Gladman
I love this town. It's still vibrant though I have not seen anyone in years. I am not in jail--they have just gone. I cannot remember where I was when I came back to find them gone--maybe at the river or drying my hair in the hot part of the forest. All I know is the sudden ghostliness of it. Imagine having loved something for so many years that you don't see it anymore. I mean, you feel it, but so synonymously with the flow of your blood or taking in air that the beauty seems to be about you. Life was that dynamic. We could not love ourselves more. Well, imagine coming home to a one-hundred-mile expanse of beauty that you always have thought of as yourself, and finding on that day that it exists without you. Furthermore, contemplate the disturbance of that compounded by the apparent exodus of those who, in your mind, were extensions of yourself.
I love this town. It's still vibrant though I have not seen anyone in years. I am not in jail--they have just gone. I cannot remember where I was when I came back to find them gone--maybe at the river or drying my hair in the hot part of the forest. All I know is the sudden ghostliness of it. Imagine having loved something for so many years that you don't see it anymore. I mean, you feel it, but so synonymously with the flow of your blood or taking in air that the beauty seems to be about you. Life was that dynamic. We could not love ourselves more. Well, imagine coming home to a one-hundred-mile expanse of beauty that you always have thought of as yourself, and finding on that day that it exists without you. Furthermore, contemplate the disturbance of that compounded by the apparent exodus of those who, in your mind, were extensions of yourself.
Monday, February 22, 2010
from Don't Let Me Be Lonely
by Claudia Rankine
Or I remember that the last two sentences I read in Fanny Howe's Tis of Thee before falling asleep the previous night were: "I learned to renounce a sense of independence by degrees and finally felt defeated by the times I lived in. Obedient to them."
Or, well, I tried to fit language into the shape of usefulness. The world moves through words as if the bodies the words reflect did not exist. The world, like a giant liver, receives everyone and everything, including these words: Is he dead? Is she dead? The words remain an inscription on the surface of my loneliness. This loneliness stems from a feeling of uselessness. The Coetzee's Costello says in her fictional lecture, "for instants at a time I know what it is like to be a corpse."
Or I remember that the last two sentences I read in Fanny Howe's Tis of Thee before falling asleep the previous night were: "I learned to renounce a sense of independence by degrees and finally felt defeated by the times I lived in. Obedient to them."
Or, well, I tried to fit language into the shape of usefulness. The world moves through words as if the bodies the words reflect did not exist. The world, like a giant liver, receives everyone and everything, including these words: Is he dead? Is she dead? The words remain an inscription on the surface of my loneliness. This loneliness stems from a feeling of uselessness. The Coetzee's Costello says in her fictional lecture, "for instants at a time I know what it is like to be a corpse."
Friday, February 19, 2010
in one postcard, an image of a girl, layered, purple, half smiling. the landscape, distinct and European, old buildings, a cafe, sipping coffee facing the street watching each passerby stroll through life continuous and still. captured, the intent of sharing adventure, a scene of symbolic space: we are here, we have discovered architecture, we may decide to never return home. romantic notions of food, drink, visual collaboration of time split and standing.
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