I’ve taken someone’s advice and picked up David Levithan’s The Lover’s Dictionary – what a potent little delight! Immediately slid into place with Alain de Botton’s On Love and Macedonio Fernandez’ The Museum of Eterna’s Novel; Jesse Ball’s The Curfew and The Way Through Doors. Also moved me back to Daniel Handler’s Adverbs and (so-far) wonderful Why We Broke Up. In the process, feeling forever stunted as a “writer,” I cracked A. Alvarez’ The Writer’s Voice yesterday to these jewels:
“For freelance writers like myself who belong to an endangered species which, as long ago as 1949 Cyril Connolly was already calling ‘the last known herd in existence of that mysterious animal the man of letters,’ writing is less a compulsion than a misfortune, like a doomed love affair. We write because we fell in love with language when we were young and impressionable, just as musicians fall in love with sound, and thereafter are doomed to explore this fatal attraction in as many ways as we can…fifty years of writing for a living have taught me that there is only one thing the four disciplines have in common: in order to write well you must first learn how to listen. And that, in turn, is something writers have in common with their readers. Reading well means opening your ears to the presence behind the words and knowing which notes are true and which are false. It is as much an art as writing well and almost as hard to acquire.”
It is clear that we called for the meeting to leave something behind.
I don’t believe that either of us questioned its integrity, intentions.
We both of us asking to know.
It had been long in coming, decades. Still not yet old we hoped to find some kind of truth and choosing. A discovery discovering. Both an offering, a revelation, no lives to be lost.
I had never seen her this way. Never this close nor this complicated. I allowed her to undress, even asked her to. I did my best as well, to arrive ready, with a thousand masks.
Long navigation. The years had dug channels, paved roads. The routes were secret, but we remembered, as if written on the palms of our hands. We read them with our eyes, began to retrace.
I made the first call, in order to argue, to work something out. Why we never, nor knew. Our stories paralleled – the subterfuge, pain, and the pathways of scars. We dug to heal, opening the wounds.
We held it together, even with weapons. To cleave – cut and joined. Rifts and bridges. His truths were all lies, logically constructed. I sprayed mine as graffiti on his monuments, defaced. Undone.
I guess each truth is a lie to something else. Our stories held water and ran. We found ourselves somewhere in their flow and stood together as a base in cascade. In the thundering rain the masks dissolved and our veils clung to our bodies, sheer.
What we experienced together we did not forget, but forged a place for it. Here and now. We began. Possessions and pasts stolen, we clung and feigned, using only our skin and joined breaths – our voicings. Fluid in a world of statues.
Something fell away, eventuating our silence. We departed the space we had filled, abandoning its form bags packed full. I felt I’d left something behind, still checking my pockets and luggage.
He preferred the weight he carried, holding him secure and anchored to the earth. I chose the flight, and the destination, returning us unharmed. My pillowcase was empty, nothing lost, nothing gained. Of much was made.
I guess we masked our joy in difficulty.
Which fell to the ground in our separate ways.
“This is how we originate and how we are formed: a slapdash piece of work, subject to the vagaries of time and the blunders of brief opportunities”
When I think of you, think about us, I want to. That’s exactly what I want to do: be done with mysteries, be one in fact.
But when I look at you, when I touch, taste, smell and listen you, I cannot conceive it. Can’t even imagine comprehending all that’s unknown, inexplicable. And I’m afraid to. That too, I’m frightened of some unfathomable overwhelm.
Yet from a distance, I mean, from here, now, it feels plausible. To declare all mysteries, one to another, in song or verse or gesture. Enaction. To enact our mysteries and imperceivables all at once in some enormous chaotic unison, unashamed. What is there to be ashamed of? Secrets are not mysteries, only their private signs. What forges them is larger and unclear. Diversity and variation – these we celebrate – no?
Step out of your houses and enact your whole selves!
We will bewilder one another – not such a bad catharsis!
Running, perhaps amok, perhaps silenced to a shuddering ball – who knows? It’s a mystery!
Perhaps we’d shout in brand new languages – delighting everyone’s ears! Perhaps we’d alter the surface of the earth, its environments?
Would that we were one expressive impressive cacophonous voice!
Would that we were?
I’d split into a willow tree dropping language-boulders from my fragile limbs. I’d erupt a perfect mountain steaming as a cold clear lake. I’d mud. I’d sprout as a milky pasture of weeds.
You’d Sousaphone in primary colors woven as a world-shawl. You’d be all the quiet stars, glimmering in their conflagration. You’d whisper through grain and aspen, moving through air like helium.
We’d crash without injury, fomenting monuments of grandeur. Melding our mysteries. You-topia. Humana-topia. “Other”-worldly.
Perhaps.
Perhaps a universal dancing, a carnival of beauty so trouncing our balancing globe as to shatter it, sitting afloat or casting about – some atmospheric inferno. Perhaps a gaseous stench would burst forth, a deadly poison. Perhaps disaster. Apocalypse of invisible revealed.
We could surely say “we know not what we do” living mysteries, eh?
“Off the hook” even as it gores us.
Earthquaking order in riotous glee.
The maniac’s laugh.
A universe of blindness and flare.
Breaking the eggs, precarious shells.
No wonder veneers. Elaborate mechanisms.
Flexible and porous, rigid and finely tuned.
It wears out, the strain and stress: containing, defending.
What if we went right on ahead?
Plunged up out of deep waters, rocketing down from our skies?
Going through with our propensities: explosion/implosion?
What do you imagine? The beginning? The end?
A flood, a conflagration? Some perfect balance?
We hardly know ourselves, one another…
secrets give way to hiding, large blank territories blocking the unseen, from ourselves, one another…
equilibrium-fear
we call eco-system, survival, “life.”
Undoing?
From here, right now, I want to release, to channel and broadcast – to expose without imposition, sing that I might hear, dance that I might see, enact in order to know…become some inward/outward thing, supernova and black hole at once…
You know, I honestly don’t know why I think of the many things I think of. “About” usually, yes, usually I can surmise why I stick to a thinking project – it might be something that troubles or worries me, maybe it involves something about which I care deeply or enjoy – then I’ll ruminate around on the subject or object for awhile, attempt to figure or follow the thinks, arrange some digits or sounds, contents, feelings or symbols until I make fit or get lost in the simple joy of tinkering.
But then other times, and really quite often, I can’t locate the instigative trail or balancing of reason for why (or how) items pop into or swish by my apprehending (apprehensive?) brain.
For instance, just now (and it’s precisely the unknowing that prompts me to write about it, to squeeze it through language), I was sitting quietly to desk after a very full day of soccer games, bicycle rides and birthdays, perusing Ron Loewinsohn’s Goat Dances, Anne Carson’s plainwater, Jon Anderson’s The Milky Way and Robert Creeley’s Collected Essays – a very normal way I have of grounding myself, discovering a location by mapping found paths, when sploosh! across the internet of my mind zipped:
“I guess I always read and write as if my life depended on it”
And then I stopped. Closed the books, slid them aside, rested my chin in my hand and gazed toward nowhere, wondering what question that sounds-like-an-answer phrase was responding to or anticipating.
Why would I think that?
Lost in language like dancing and syllables, stars and night skies, withs and relation and choros, why would my only clear thought (recognizably anyway) be:
“I guess I always read and write as if my life depended on it”?
When something stops me like that, and I already hear a rhetorical response, but no answers satisfy and questions only multiply exponentially…
I grab loose blank notebook pages and a ball-point pen…
and begin doodling, dabbling, and “showing my work.”
“I guess I always read and write as if my life depended on it” (implied automatic resonant answer: because it does) leads precisely (in this case, given all the contingencies and conditions) to the chicken-scratching rambling preceding this period.
In other words, not to a solution, or perhaps even a working equation or problem, but simply to activity. Reading, writing, thinking it out in lines, shapes and signs.
Now during all this scribble-sketching around the inceptive phrase, my bodymind has been mantra-ing responsorials: “because it really does,” “because I’m not even aware of things happening until verified in language,” “because life just occurs and I don’t know about it until I manifest the experience some way – bounce it off of a counterpart or internal funhouse mirror (other’s words) to learn what it is and isn’t” and so on…so-called “reasons” I guess? Hypothetical rationales for the random (apparently) phrase having typed itself in my nervous wirings?
The only “fact,” as I experience them, is that this phrase: “I guess I always read and write as if my life depended on it” clearly spat itself across the innards of my cranium while I was going about the very normal activity of recovering, soothing, pausing and nourishing myself on books at hand, wishing somewhere it hadn’t taken me all day to reach this quiet, wishing somewhere that all conversations went like this listening, wishing somehow I had something that felt like it needed to be written down, wishing somewhere that I understood myself.
And alas: a baffling sentence in response to no one silently carves and engraving on my consciousness:
“I guess I always read and write as if my life depends on it”
My entire body replying: “well…YEAH! It does! It’s the only way YOU know that there’s possibly LIFE at all, and not just sensations, emotions, thinkings and dreams; reactions, responses and stimuli! Without reading about it or writing words out I personally have no concrete object to sound my experience against, to test a happening – everything else out there from spouse to “god” is always moving, shifting, adapting, changing…just like me.”
“I guess I always read and write BECAUSE my ‘life’ depends on it”
“It is already late when you wake up inside a question” -Anne Carson-
It takes some prodding. Prodding and probing. You must have set out, been triggered or poked or otherwise disturbed. In the first place: to ask.
So something, anything, disturbs you. Annoys, feels good, causes you to move out of a way, or adjust. Friction. Something like pain or a sharp thrill, label it fear, designate desire. In any case – unrest, discomfort, necessity.
There’s the rub. A displacement of sorts, like an involuntary glance, or tripping on sidewalks. Awareness. I have legs. Eyes. An elbow. Breath. A need for a restroom, that kind of thing. Self/other; here/there; now/now. Force, motion, mass enter the vicinity. You become aware.
To right yourself, “get your bearings,” “take stock” and what-not usually begins in some knee-jerk instinctual mannered-reaction, as it were. Pierce-poke – wince and recoil. Delight – magnetism and submission. You are not awake, only slightly coming-to. Displaced, disturbed, floundering for shore.
An experience is occurring and senses churn, mind starts mapping, here and now are tired of hiding – regardless of the fun of the game. You startle and seek, calling things names deep in your head, listening for echoes that mate. Radar of accounting and imagination, disjunctively it gradually becomes “all systems go.”
Go where?
And how do these systems “go”?
Who is it that’s waking?
The entire propensity expanding the proverbial “What the – ?!”
Whether infant or sage, and all of us, after all, somewhere in between.
“People really understand very little of one another”
-Anne Carson-
You might say we studied one another through a thick fog. Or learned one another in the dark, guessing, reaching, feeling our way.
For many years.
We were determined.
Recording nuances, memorizing beats, mimicking rises and falls. Taking fingerprints with our bodies, collecting snapshots for official documents. We created and invented artifacts together in order not to know – who was who and which was which. We merged as often as we could, and more than often asked.
We still remember general shapes and movements – tones, colors, outlines. Each a sort of negative of the other – surfaces accepting imprints, continuous translations.
You could say we were scholars and specialists. At times we counted hairs, many times while splitting them. From observation it is hard to tell bodies tangled in fighting from those wrestling in love. Unfettered laughter from convulsive wails. We learned to do so by watching them changing one to another and back again. Momentary gradients. We were able to dance on thin lines.
In earnest we catalogued vocabularies by rote, genetics, neuroses, causes and effects, our marriage a lab of research and experiment. Encycopedic and replete.
Through interference of weather and evolution’s inexplicable leaps we adapted apparati for morphing data, constructing theses. Compared and bickered notes and conclusions, matters and intention. Interpretations varied.
More astrology than –onomy, more alchemy than chemistry, we carried forth our quest. Meteorology, geology, archaeology we sought of one another, growing compendiums of analyses and flow, catalysts and katharses.
Our distance became cosmically microscopic, mythological and rite. You might say we were studying one another in a great fog. We kept on receiving each other in the dark.
“And our personal stories are the only moves, the only moves that help us postpone, at least for a while, the predetermined ending to our game. And even though we are going to lose the game from the strategic point of view, the idle moves of our stories always postpone the end. Even if they are stories about failure.”
2. From Li-Young Lee’s Book of My Nights
The Hammock
When I lay my head in my mother’s lap
I think how day hides the stars,
the way I lay hidden once, waiting
inside my mother’s singing to herself. And I remember
how she carried me on her back
between home and kindergarten
once each morning and once each afternoon
.
I don’t know what my mother’s thinking.
.
When my son lays his head in my lap, I wonder:
Do his father’s kisses keep his father’s worries
from becoming his? I think, Dear God, and remember
there are stars we haven’t heard from yet:
They have so far to arrive. Amen,
I think, and I feel almost comforted.
.
I’ve no idea what my child is thinking.
.
Between two unknowns, I live my life.
Between my mother’s hopes, older than I am
by coming before me, and my child’s wishes, older than I am
by outliving me. And what’s it like?
Is it a door, and good-bye on either side?
A window, and eternity on either side?
Yes, and a little singing between two great rests.
A book I am reading asks, in its title, What is there to say? Another, next to it on its anticipating shelf, states “very little…almost nothing.” Are they in conversation?
In completing Dust by Arkadii Dragomoshchenko for perhaps the ninth time, I come across a phrase I’ve starred and underlined in three colors: “We talk only because of a persistent desire to understand what is it that we are saying.”
If someone took the time to calculate how many times the word “other,” used to refer to a subjective entity, occurs in philosophical texts post-Heidegger.
What is being?
I often experience the anomalous reality of hoping wildly in the midst of despair, a fervent belief in oxymorons – things like “Poetic Influence” and “Romantic Love.”
How music crafts melancholy and joy.
Perhaps someday we will concoct a system of chaos.
The weather is large enough.
I say “I love you” because I’d like to understand it.
Edmond Jabes has it that “the words of the book were trying, in vain, to say Nothing” (writing of sacred texts) or, in other words, some persistent and extravagant Babeling into Derrida’s vast abysme of origins and effects. What is impossible. “Our persistent desire.” So Jabes asks “Is our relation to the world first of all a relation…to an expectation, a hope of world pregnant with all possible beginnings?”
I ask myself, then, what is it I have to say? The echoing answer “very little…almost nothing.” Persistent desire.
All my Words are Silent 