“Between the unattainable intention of the author and the arguable intention of the reader, there is the transparent intention of the text, which refutes untenable interpretations.”
-Umberto Eco-
Category: Writing
Dialogue
by Ryan Drake, 2002
There is a tearing sound, as of something being ripped or sundered. She has begun to speak.
He attempts to listen, as if standing on an island of a busy and multi-laned thoroughfare. She speaks fervently, softly.
There’s the tearing. Something rent.
He is unable to hear. Only reverberations, a type of thrum from heavy traffic.
They are alone in an emptying room.
It is silent, but for the ripping, which also is not.
All of her aimed in his direction, what he has trouble seeing.
He attempts to look, as if through the fumes and smoke of a multi-floored building burning to collapse on the ground.
Her mouth moves gently and fierce.
He is unable to see what she says through the sound of the tearing, his searing eyes.
There are echoes, which also are not.
From a distance, things are still, as if a hobbyist set them in place.
She cries in her trying, directed at him and speaking, nearly a whisper, a message so loud.
The thrum and the shredding, the smoke.
Shifting, sifting to gather himself, redirect, organize, to attend. He tenses himself, tightens and coils, as if a reception machine. He is trying, crying, in a land far away.
Alone, they, the emptying room.
She’s given up, folded over, like craft paper wadded to a discarding ball.
A rivening come to its end.
He’s a radar, an instrument, powered and ready.
She falls explosively silent, unmoved.
He sees her, feels her absence arriving, he strains and he beggars the air.
Diminished and shrinking, she retracts to an inscrutable quark.
And he, aware, and alertly entire, listens and looks.
All I Have is All
this writing inspired by the National – their song “Think You Can Wait”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rx3PW1mqadA
All I Have is All (after The National: “Think You Can Wait”)
On the bench at the temple, he sits. Bushel-barrel of apples and a large Igloo cooler out front of his legs.
Uncertain if he’s there or not.
Hair and clothes disheveled and dirtied, his movements: head in hands, fingers troubling beard as eyes gaze at sky.
It’s all he has.
And a convoluted memory.
Her voice, near the end, shushing “today makes yet another day without perfect love; one more irreparable day.”
The old man on the bus – listening, responding: “No, perfect love lasts an eternity.”
They’ve been away from the baby way too long.
A good night gone.
Now this: drifting, crying, seeking some island.
He’s slipping under with a firm grasp on a devil.
The clouds send him messages, he mumbles:
“Out of my mind,” “way off the line,”
“All I have is all.”
He doesn’t sleep.
Handing an apple to the child, he tries.
The exits are gone.
Though harried by guards at the museum and park, he doesn’t make trouble. Rolls his produce down alleyways, freshens his water from the public tap.
He tries.
The memories.
His mother: “You’ll never get better.”
Clouds: “it’s all you have is all.”
“Did I?” he murmurs, “did I?”
No street finds the child.
No door opens love.
Memory: her smile.
“perfect love…”
He tries.
“Think you can wait?” he says
to the nothing
and no one.
For Communal Delight
If you enjoy, wish to, revel in, feel ecstasy toward, crave and are intoxicated by
the glories of language
I fervently recommend
for your enjoyment!
Anthropophobia: or, the Trouble with Misanthropy
Anthropophobia: or, the Danger of Others
Let’s face it: our primary threat is the Other.
Those alive and breathing, in need.
Replete with sense and emotions, desires.
Thoughts, feelings, and dreams.
Con-fused.
Instinct and culture,
Learning and language,
and bodies:
physiques requiring space,
ears, eyes, limbs and digits,
the nerve!(s) and bellies and hearts.
Brains complete with mind and will,
Choice and intent,
the capability to discern.
Sexual organs,
Breath-pollution.
Stealing glances –
the lechery of looking –
what they plunder to hear.
This multitude of selves and their interests,
their tumultuous clamor to survive
and their ubiquity:
disruption of personhoods and presence
leaving The Exit as the only escape.
Most dangerous, Other:
the contact, connection,
and ability to attach.
Insidious deception –
a paradox of similarity,
of kind –
some others so like
as to be indistinguishable,
from our selves.
Living Traces – Paul Valery
“In the strange faculty of doing certain things irrelevant to life with as much care, passion and persistence as if one’s life depended on them…there we find what is called ‘living.'”
-Paul Valery-
I, for Instants: the writer question
I the Question; I the Answer That Does Not Satisfy
“I am both wound and knife”
“Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river;
it is a tiger that mangles me, but I am the tiger;
it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.”
“The question inaugurates a type of relation characterized by openness and free movment; and what it must be satisfied with closes and arrests it. The question awaits an answer, but the answer does not appease the question, and even if it puts an end to the question, it does not put an end to the waiting that is the question of the question.”
“all things oscillate round me, and I with them, an uncertainty unto myself.
All for me is incoherence and change. All is mystery and all is meaning…”
I am the writer. Am I also what is written?
Both wound and knife.
I am the husband? What the husband does.
I am their father. Am I also their fathering?
I am the writer. Not the writer I believe I am, want to be, imagine. Am I the writer? What is written does not appease, does not satisfy. I am waiting, asking, waiting in openness for possibility. I am the answering I do not desire.
Am I what is written? Partial answers. Fragments pieced together forming questions. I wait. Am I the one who waits? While writing?
I love. Do I love? I answer by loving. I am dissatisfied by my loving – it is not what I had hoped, was waiting toward, believed possible. I am not the lover I asked for.
I feel I am the open, the possibility – the questioning. My answering closes, arrests, delimits me. I am neither satisfied nor appeased.
I am the human. Am I human? If I answer for that I am dissatisfied, given the question, the possible replies.
I write I am the writer, the one writing, this phrase of the question. Its answer never satisfies, leaves me waiting, asking again, anew. The questions.
“the anarchist keeps watch within us and opposes our resignations”
E.M. Cioran
The Temptation to Exist
“’I am both wound and knife’ – that is our absolute, our eternity”
“the idolatry of becoming”
“blasted joys and jubilant despair”
The Temptation to Exi(s)t
We’ve got our words all backwards. Ever trapped in what we deny. Our escape = net.
Space. Time.
If we say it is all relative, yet act. “Choose.” Freedom is nothing. The words, then, are all backwards, you see, we “mean” our opposites.
Desire.
Could cumulate as the evil. But still – you see? Hope for understanding, for wisdom, knowledge, some trivial insight. Log of shipwreck: cling.
Desire.
Another enemy: “intensity.” Synonym “passion,” carpe diem. Opposite: freedom.
In-tense-ity. State of inhabiting tension, clinging to stress, to invite suffering (“jubilant despair”). Opposite: being. freedom.
A blasted joy. (Suffering). Opposite of freedom: want. Making antonyms by definition: “to be.”
If we seize, choose, behave, acquire, reach, speak, move…”the idolatry of becoming” – antonym? = freedom.
Kingdom equals freedom. Queendom. Selfdom. “To be”-dom. Backwards words. Backwords.
Opposite of intense: rest, quietude : thought and action one : in-sane. Opposite of want, greed : poverty : possession-less, without, without within : beggar.
Freedom : opposite : control. Self-, other-, environmental-, habitation-, security-.
Be/have : to exist is to grab, to steal, to do violence. Being + having : system : be/have. Opposite: freedom.
Say it backwards. We say it backwards.
I shout “freedom” driving the blade into my throat, bloody want. Cannot “have.” Are (are NOT = desire to become – false worship – be/having).
Religion : human organization to be/have. Become. To be. Religion as an argument for (against) existence.
Already ARE. Before “being,” prior to “having.” No need : freedom. “Meaning” the opposite of what we say.
We’ve got our words backwords.
Backwards: have-been. There it is clear.
The temptation of the system, the race or kind, was “to be” as something to have, to get, to come into, be-come…that existence was a goal, something to arrive at, achieve, seizing the days, the moments,
Synonyms: act, will, intent, purpose, do.make.say.think. to mean
Synonym: be/having
Opposite: freedom.
Existence having been from the first.
Having been = at the last.
Synonym : freedom : nothing.
All my Words are Silent 