What’s happening now…and why I’m not writing much – reading, teaching, librarying, parenting…
Tag: exhaustion
Alias and the Ants
Alias observes the ants in his bathroom. Each Spring. Spring or Fall, no matter his warfare – treating / trimming / grooming the perimeter of ‘his’ home – no difference (or differance) – Spring and Fall, a trail, a train, a miniscule “army” (whether ‘Army Ants’ or no, he could not say) of tiny insects crossing his counter from sink rim to (nonexistent) god-knows-where and back again, doing god-and-perhaps-scientist knows what…traversing, infesting, conquering, appearing, occurring…
…Alias is unattended…
Observing ‘his’ (not-his) ants. A collective of interminable insects roving to and fro between a Lilliputian crack along the paint of his lavatory wall (an outside boundary of ‘his’ ‘home’), the cylindrical rim involving ‘his’ ‘vanity’ (does he still possess any of that?) sink, his children’s toothbrushes (the “family” so wishes the infestation undone) and wherever they might journey over the surface’s edge, the drainage holes, the drawers…
Ants.
Alias composes both paste and powder of Boric acid and particled sugar. A supposed deadly mix for puny pests. Like “life” for him. Murderous moments of sweetness colluded with deathly compounds: vodka, cigarettes, illicit sex; bacon, buttery-fried flour, altitude…
Responsibility (instinct) and desire (impulse).
Alias is alone. Most definitely that. Solo and (interpretively) forsaken.
His ‘kids’ are grown. His loves (clearly) outworn. His ‘friendships’ recursive, reductive, assumptive, routine. But the weed-trees, the weather and wear, the spiders, the crickets, termites, and dust…and ants, carry on in a differently (and differantly) incessant way.
Indefatigable. Undefeatable. (Like death.)
That within succulent sweetness, luscious limnings of love, lie poisons and trace, exposures – never a joy without risk, no ecstasy lacking its peril, no thriving without its decease. Positives all laced with negatives, happiness balanced in depress.
Alias gazes. He stares. Isolated, trimming at an untrimmed beard over a sink he did not install, looking (and failing to see at all) into a mirror replicating demise…above a trail of ants he’s fed sugary poison for weeks, which appear to be active and thriving, in differance to his own ‘self’ – choking and chortling on pleasures that keep resulting in pains, experiments emerging as monstrous, efforts destroying their ends.
He sighs, does Alias. However he seeks a team and a trail it leads him to toxin, bane eroding his chance. Considers Laramie, Lucy (his wife), and each child. Ruminates purpose or promise or hope. Wonders how relief repulses its reasons. Why remedy acts against cure. How ants insist on their patterns. Why exultation evinces in ruin.
To read “such a quiet thing as thinking”: A we
The rigor of this program (for me) puts me in 9-10 hours of seminar/symposium per day, 7 days / week, and therefore very little time to process, do self-selected-readings, even journal. At the same time, the strange reality that introduces – of an intensity and exhaustion I truly have never encountered (save perhaps in parenting and certain periods of intimate relation) – presses (prods?) me to adapt, alter, re-think. So, in order to survive, when moments arise for me to work with a pen and blank pages, I am going to post them as a record, as much for myself forward, as for a witnessing from any of you. As you can see, a certain blitzing of the brain/body incurs that confuses or disorients. So this will be a kind of journal / personal notation space for myself (needing witnessed) until time passes and (I hope!) the plenitude of this experience seeps in, along.
Today I found an hour to scribble, and here is how it goes. Drained, depleted, dissolute-feeling, I translated the first week into an expression around a too-much that exhausts, an overwhelm that empties.
To read such a quiet thing
(click title to view)
Uncannily (as many happenings this first week) – the evening’s lecture concluded with a translating of Maurice Blanchot – to the effect of: “we will maintain plenitude in (or unto) the nothing.”
All my Words are Silent 