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Where Am I?
Where Am I?
“Space seems to be either tamer or more inoffensive than time; we’re forever meeting people who have watches, very seldom people who have compasses. We always need to know what time it is (who still knows how to deduce it from the position of the sun?) but we never ask ourselves where we are. We think we know…”
-Georges Perec-
Feeling displaced, it seemed like the time had come to ask into it.
Judging by the quilted charcoal sky, this must have occurred in the hours between night and day or that malleable period in which what’s bright becomes the dark.
I discovered that I was uncertain as to where, indeed, I was.
I cast about, but given the diffuse and myopic atmosphere, my bearings were difficult to draw.
My question just grew longer.
Within the nondescript what seek we to describe?
My whereabouts. For even about can provide a circumference of radial lines, fashioned carefully.
It seemed to me that I must have been partway. Having begun some time ago, though ill-remembered, I must have set out in some direction, making this a point along that plane or trajectory, on the way to the someplace I am going. But where? Whereto? And wherefrom? (the brain adds wherefore?)
I’m uncertain.
Most people do certain things at certain times, so time must be a deed, I guess. Needing neither to eat, nor to relieve myself, it must not be too early or late, nor a mealtime. The dim and the greys, they confuse me.
The ground being solid, but whether a road or a path or a field lying fallow, I could not say. A fogging has thickened and the chalky gravel pierced with grasses and weeds does not provide location.
The best I can wager is midst. I appear to be in the midst of things: of my life, of this land, of my journey and day (or evening) – beyond this it just is not clear.
By the look of my hands and my feet – we say “character” – it would seem I am no longer “young.” Hair has grown dark in places, I have visible veins, and numerous scarrings and wrinkles. I never expect them to grow and they haven’t for many years, yet they can’t be called webbed with their linings, nor aged. The skin is tanned and supple, not spotted, the knuckles aren’t gnarly or constricted. Improvement or beauty I do not anticipate, but it appears I am not quite undone, not decrepit.
I’d guess I am “over the hill,” as they say, but still in reach of my prime. A certain flair or panache, but the style of the action requires more will. And attention. Strong, yet not powerful. Active, not quite agile. Competent, not convincing.
I sit down. The weeds and the grass are grey-green, grown in tufts. The gravel is packed and yet dusty. The stones are not worn but all small.
I trace my palms over the surface.
My legs feel the pain of my back.
I rise up.
I would find it much easier to lean.
I step forth.
I smell no particular smells – almost rain, dusty remnants, a particular quality of air, but what? (From where?) Neither salted nor briny exactly, I must not be near to the sea. Not fuelly or floral, musty nor pale, I scratch off city and countryside, forests or plains. And not fertile. The air is just as you’d imagine it wherever the sky meets the land – in the absence of obvious effects (are they causes?) – just me.
It hasn’t grown lighter, nor darkened.
I breathe.
From the sound of it (silent) and its fullness, my lungs must be doing their job, performing their roles without much complaint. As also my heart and my brain, liver and plumbworks. I think I may have heard insects or birds, but the distance so vast I’d fail to call the sense knowledge. And I mentioned I cannot see far. These conditions.
I’d say it’s uncanny – to find myself here – but that’s exactly what I cannot find.
I reach out.
I step forth.
I breathe in.
Where am I?
If my memory served, as to where I’d last been, such info would greatly assist me. But the best I remember is “home,” and that has been so many places.
I spread my arms and slowly spin, they cut the air like freedom. I feel like a ray of light or drop of rain, something passing quickly, staying still. As if I belonged…
belonged just here…
but where…
…am I?…
(How long do I have?)
Man-O’-Word’s Summer Reading List
SUMMER READING 2012
from top-to-bottom as they appear at this moment on the table
Fyodor Dostoevsky – Dostoevsky’s Occasional Writings
Joe Bolton – The Last Nostalgia
Susan Howe – The Midnight
Laurie Sheck – Captivity
Ann Smock – What is There to Say?
Jerome Klinkowitz – The Self-Apparent Word Continue reading “Man-O’-Word’s Summer Reading List”
Happy Monday this Tuesday. Begin.
Today I woke up.
I woke up in love. In joy.
A song was sparrowing to and fro in my mind’s sky (Boxer Rebellion – Soviets)
We have new puppies and they are loving and cute.
The heat has broken and there were clouds in the sky.
In love?
In joy?
What might those mean?
We danced the pups to trauma to the Lumineers “Ho Hey”.
Like coming out of a slump.
Like post-coital bliss.
That full, that relaxed and open.
For no particular reason.
For so many particular reasons.
How does the brain chemistry experience?
How do the senses collage reality?
How are we?
I woke today in bliss and joy.
I woke today in love.
.
Happy Monday this Tuesday.
Begin.
A Profile
The Inevitable
What do we mean when we say “that ______ looks so German!”
To write. It.
That unnerving pronoun – the impossibility nothing is.
And probable.
The work of understanding. While standing under rain. The gravity of melancholy.
Resulting in a study of colors. As related to moods.
Desired solitude. Desiring. An oxymoron. (To solitude).
What would you desire in solitude? (While playing with yourself).
The “with” would be the problem.
Ever positing an other.
“we must each retain (and be granted) our uniqueness, even as we retain our relevance –
which is to say our interrelatedness”
-Lyn Hejinian-
In other words it is possible that we yearn for uniqueness and relevance, both requiring something else.
However might one be uniquely alone? And still recognize red?
Or relevance? (in solitude)?
The antimony that meaning is.
Meaning, nothing. Large terms stripped of their content. Yet undone.
If, then. If infinity, then an eternity of incompletion.
Is that what you wanted?
Like desiring wholeness. Oxymoron.
Living is logically incompatible.
Inevitably.
Upon viewing the sketch like a mirror. Its frenzy. Its worry. An uncertain field of marks.
Energy moves.
Impossible object, in other words. The world never calmer than an excited child with a squirming pup, in front of a camera. Using your eyes as camera is moving in barely calculable jitters. Each second.
How we view the world. Ourselves. Skittering fragments, objectless, composing subjective states, the subject of which, well, frankly, is subjectless, being, as it is, subjective.
A field, a spray, a flickering shower. Drowning in waves. Particles and fragments, all strung together without points of contact.
Inevitable delay. Perception. Duller senses.
Process requiring instants = moments = past.
Hardship of irony. What one pays for attention. Tolls of false awareness. Delayed. A logical impossibility. I.e. “presence” (presently).
Lucky for suffixes as arbitrary denotations. Arbitrarying.
Their simultaneity (e.g. –ed, -ing, -“ “).
You might say we “locked eyes” (past tense signifying long enough to catch up to the present experience thereby missing out on the initial wonder).
Processed cheese is not the same.
Fortunately every synapse of the factory also makes up now (as it makes it up) making up experience in order to. Experience.
Some animals delight in chasing their tales (that was a genuine error there, though the audience following Moses following Discontent following Freud). Tails, then. Or heads. Each swallowing another.
You know what I mean. Swatting at air.
Meaning, well, nothing = something (and vacuous nevertheless). Than?
Equals ever updating profile passed, passing, will pass, NOW.
It’s inevitable.
more on marriage 🙂
more reflections on our life together
for Holly Suzanne to years of strange knowing
The Estrangement – Our Union
the moments
so suddenly
and you become such stranger
to me
(I have loved you a very long time)
stark absence
of what’s familiar
remaining so
and unknown
(I keep reaching you for)
this the home we live in
this our marriage bed
these the children we have raised
these our blending heads
(I have yet to know an after)
there exist entire stanzas
of this our musical life
in which an harmony obtains
within these vast cadenzas
(in which I’m caught and mesmerized)
me watching you watching
me watching you
in your soloing flight
estranged and in-different-
(-ly than I this union)
and I wonder
how might I know you ever,
knowing you so well, and being known
bi-you’d, bi-me’d, both by each other
(this joining of mouths, bodies…
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On the Anniversary of Our Wedding
The Forest of Marriage
(Happy Anniversary Holly Suzanne!)
I’ve never felt sexy or young, my memory is chained like an old growth forest accumulating decay. Remains tough to destroy. Why would I want to? Perhaps for you – so lovely to me – youthful, vital, your non-submissive and consistent new growth. Your winding ways, nubile bends – how do you regenerate yourself?
I’ve no doubt my dying fertilizes and enriches, our scent expands. Some wreckage crumbles beautifully, overgrown and softened by corruption. But it’s not the same as planting seeds, a puppy’s not a dog.
Steep. A word for danger and infusion. Calamity filters through.
Seed. It is not uncommon for your resources to sprout fresh things in me. Renewal, come in. I am fertile in layers.
Steep.
I’ve aged tall and long and twisted, hoary with moss and tangled by vine. Formidable, while spongy in places. Your green shoots pierce me, exposing my slowness and rot, my muffling stance. You crack me open, engender new soil. I collapse and give way, I adapt. It’s a marriage.
I wouldn’t say “handsome,” thought at times picturesque – in a rugged way, and worn – tendriled with you growing green. The occasional strength to bloom: I mushroom, you flower. I fungus, you shine. Together we develop our wonder. Some stop and look, others stay awhile, everyone traveling through. The coupling is not unfortunate – providing nourishment and shelter. There’s always damage. Having endured, still I am fragile, and you, with your gentle, tenacious roots, ever purposeful and true, yet transplanted and remaking, storms can threaten with uprooting.
We are called by one name and belong – a vast generality for incalculable kinds. We don’t mind. Old or new it’s still growth; what dies and what’s born construct a joined density. I lean on you while providing shade, you straighten me as you fight for necessary light. We are one seething thing, steamy if un-sexy, cross-generative and moist.
When the fire burns, it destroys and begins. Gaining as much as we lose. It takes time – symbiotic – establishing roots we combine and recover, shed and absorb, co-create and depend. Relying on the same in our differencing.
Reaching again in each instant’s climate.
(I love you beloved wife – happy anniversary – and here’s to continual renewal and the sustenance of old growth)
Character Sketches, cont’d…”The Jealous Husband”
A Series of Stories of Love, by a Husband
Searching for subjects, I began writing the stories of my wife and each of her lovers, as I imagine them, having all dissipated before I was truly “on the scene.” Still they are here. Current as histories are. Not mine (of course), or only when I want it to be.
The stories go like this: with exotic names and muscular bodies; wealth and infectious intellects; and of course style…whatever things I lack I desire…they all possess in spades. Like spontaneity. Torture and foreknowledge = learning from the past. I’m no gardener.
By which I mean to say I lack certain skills possessed by each lover, each “other” – from youth to culture and their quality of independence coupled to vocation (so I tell it). Spontaneity (I feel like I’ve written that before, being a creature of habit and repetition, of comfort, of fear).
The stories play out like this in my head and I’m hoping to inscribe them here – thus trapping them outside, cutting off munitions and supply – exorcising them like literature, something benign and contained. Easily misplaced, forgotten or overlooked. A measure of control and indifference – not the “these are flesh of her flesh, she has ridden their bones” instead a collection by Grimm or some sacred treasury – a set of frights and fairy tales to engage as horrid dreams and improbable possibilities. Child’s play.
Which bothers me. For if I’ve learned anything from writing, it’s the profligacy of error. The obsessive-compulsive drive to adjust, rearrange, endlessly edit and correct. And never end. Stuck in a locking swirl, just so, very like unto a toilet – to revise and submit, revise and submit, then regret. The opening of doors. An idea expressed becomes thing, and a thing is let loose in the world (the real one).
The stories are like this – embodiments of emotions and fears in an effort to be real, meaning actual, which is usually banal, like she says, but not enshrined. Words work as predictive preservers. Untamed and so tangled. I’m unable to let them go. Thus they spawn compendiums – thousands upon thousands of hallucinatory nights (in shining armors) – perpetrating my bride, but not against her will, which sets in motion. Multiplying false realities, now true (being actual). Histories – open to view, corroborations or denials, like the facts.
So I keep on writing these stories, like this, with the yearn to expunge, to transform doubt into trust by its emptying. But keep finding it full, to the brim, and still filling. In the absence of reliable witnesses, (they all being human and involved in the tales – inherently duplicitous), like words. Serving double purposes, like bridges made for both coming and going, and never knowing which.
Life is like this, which is why I write these stories, in this way, feebly uncertain and wildly provoked. If it didn’t go down like I say, how was it really, then? Oh I see! So the stories keep changing, suited to their purposes! Revision, submit; revision, submit; then regrets.
If more persons knew, would the truths wriggle out like perspectives? My idea in writing these tales – make something concrete to chisel and sculpt. Together, perhaps. As a team, like this, retelling the stories according to need – like lying – so we’ll never be sure. And then I’m also causing effects. This is what happens in writing these stories, the truth, with all of its possible endings.
I digress. The stories are like that – my wife and her loves – digressions, diversions and facts. I’ll get to their bottoms and be done with them all! (I hope, if they don’t get to her bottom first!). My stories of anger and loving, my stories of panic and lack.
keeps going and… going and…
II.
“Each syllable an instance
of ourselves bodied forth in the
dimness…
—
…the voice which occurs all the time
while everything else is happening”
-Ron Loewinsohn-
Here I am drawing on Zukofsky
on Wittgenstein, Blanchot
all the others too
because language
is that pre-fab tool
that we fabricate
for ourselves
as it manufactures us
.
Help outside
no help
coming through, as it does
inside, after all,
helping to shape
and discover,
lending forms
and definition
to experiences
otherwise improbable
ineffable
unknown
.
remaining still
outside words’ purview
but almost communicative
almost expressed
anyway, all ways
that come down to
into, as possibles.
.
Rearrange.
.
Bakhtin, semiotic Ecos,
Sebeok, Halliday, Firth and Peirce
not forgetting Uexkull
nor leaving him aside
in his thousands of worlds
circling our own
so Susan Howe and Lyn
Hejinian, Arakawa and Gins
add…
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All my Words are Silent 