Tag: language
(Parenthesis) : Swarm – Becomings
(Parenthesis) : Swarm
developing concept, ideas, form
Confession: for me the process involving humans crafting and innovating artifacts is (perhaps, nearly) as pleasurable and fascinating as the delight and enjoyment of the “accomplished” creation / artifact / best-of-my-ability result.
Today I plunged into a work I project for my future – a collection of poetic writings with a provisional cohesion designated by the titular nomenclature (Parenthesis) : Swarm. I am offering the beginnings, inchoate guesswork, anticipatory effort, languaging hoping to find some concretion or sense – in case others too are fascinated by the ways in which we humans find forms, structures, outlets, mediums for the expression of our experience.
Poetry depends on its realization to activate and actualize its purposes. I think that form and structure, metaphor and language rudiments all occur as potencies – possibilities, options, offerings – to both direct and elicit, open and enclose, what we are moved, determined, or curious to communicate.
Here lies (or rises) the inception of one of this year’s projects for me… for better or worse, I hope it provides instigation or inspiration in you concerning the prospects of concocting, explaining, depicting, describing, or mediating some forms of human experiencings of our living, our worlds.
(Parenthesis) : Swarm
assaying beginnings
(The blue was an empty sector of sky) :
before the ascending clamor of birds,
blackbirds, maybe. Or wrens, sparrows, the murther of crows
at which point : (monochrome)
(Soundless activities = black / white) : an argument of colors.
–
(White page. Blank. Emptiness. A void) : A chaos.
Sounds, ideas, emotions bum-rushing, flood-filling, desire-aching to mark up, cross out, cross-hatch, scribble-claim, create/destroy the unwanting, unwanted : (Blank page. White. Unlined. Refusing).
–
(White noise. A chaos. A filler) : (A Parenthesis) : A Swarm.
–
Rising up or rising down? Its violence, this freedom (this emptiness, bereavement) : this horde.
(If parenthesis sounds aside reflective calm) the lettered patterns are closing in, are pressing, encroaching (an erasured calm).
–
There are (Breath-gaps, Awareness) : while we survive.
Endure infinity, perception, experience : ALIVE (reflect. dream. prepare to become).
(Sleep-freedom) : surreality of anxious dreams.
(The “little deaths”) : vigorous and belabored, exhaustively lusted , our desires.
Like fires, like (Ash). (A remains, an inchoate.
A beginning) : an actuality.
–
If triggering happens – within swarm – directions will alter towards (flow)
An isolation (becomes compatible). (We thrive) or are disjointed.
Differentiation (in accord).
(This is how it ends) : in its beginnings.
–
You arrive – a great undoing – traumatic archive. I retreat
(or receive, select the join). Independence (community).
The surge : (the Swell). We swarm – the two, no six, no twelve
(of Us). The (love) : and discord. (Arrangements) interrupted.
(Habitude) : and nuance. (The Parenthesis) : The Swarm.
Celldom, continued
(click image for work-to-present)
I’ve fallen asleep to the written word spoken for many years now. As when you allow your eyes to relax and the world doubles and then goes hazy, I find written language spoken, or sometimes even spontaneous monologues or conversational chattering to blend like the pitter-pattering of rain. This young lady alternates between Fernando Pessoa, James Joyce and Macedonio Fernandez, occasionally inserting a poem by Rilke, myth from Borges, language of Sabato or Blanchot. I’ve requested Laurence Sterne and Chuang-Tzu.
My statement on file is that “only great literature might help me sort out what it is that is asked of me,” and that the mind ‘they’ or ‘you’ are apparently concerned with will only remain attentive and communicable if constantly nourished by music, language and the visual arts. Otherwise I’ll be shutting it down, I said.
“How does that feel?” you, they, say again. “It thinks,” I reply, “it thinks…perhaps it approaches an ‘idea-feeling,’ as the godfather of novels put it, or ‘intuition’ as used in the history of aesthetics…but ‘feel’ still confuses me,” I say. I need to rest.
I’m beginning to believe I’m caught up in some laboratory system. Led through corridors, slept in cell-like-hotel-room-type spaces, fed a steady array of the food groups, allowed brief walks out-of-doors (always accompanied, but not all in lab coats). I have relatively kind courtiers, but I don’t bother with their names, they/you seem human enough, and we all run similar gamuts of experience, as I imagine it.
Yet I don’t really understand why I’m here, or anywhere, for that matter. Seems an experiment of mind-observation. One fellow (always accompanied by two or more others) regularly asks me questions about what and how I am doing, what I have done, what I think of doing, have thought about, dreamt, (asking ‘feeling’ questions less and less, as it always throws me off my game, resulting in bewildered wordlessness). Today he mentioned ‘memory’ while flashing lights along a bar or tapping on the backs of my hands while they lay on my lap. It’s an odd sort of world to end up in, after all. I said I remembered a waterfall, a pleasantness, that it may have been Gaugin or Courbet, that they might take me through a museum or find some books about that…He dropped in the ‘how does it feel?’ query again, or ‘where in my body does that memory register?’ What to say to these people? “In the mind!” I grumbled, “it is only all in the mind – perceptions, sensations, ideas, messages…all my skin, limbs, nerves and flesh send their impulses through there,” I stated, “let me lie down now.” And thus I am.
They claim this day is my birthday. That I am allowed to have it “off.” I believe you, he said, and left me a genuinely glorious stack of books someone fetched from the library. “We’d still love for you to record your experience,” they added, “if you’d like.” Create my experience is more like it, I thought. Fabulate it into these marks on a canvas lacking color or texture, I thought. Sculpt a word or two in two dimensions, black, white, and yet I do suppose it passes the time (whatever ‘time’ it may be, is). Who brought me here?
The stack on the table comprises a fifth of this weeks requests I write out when they ask me my needs. “Weekly” is a term they use, for some reason I accept it. Exhibition catalogs of Cy Twombly, R.B. Kitaj, Corot and Courbet, Susan Rothenberg, Emil Nolde, Clyfford Still, Millais, Thiebaud, Gwen John, Sam Gilliam, John Piper, always a new Giacometti, the journals of Rilke, writings by C.S. Peirce, Lessing, stories by Brecht, and some medical studies on optics.
It is quiet. I had asked for music by Max Richter or Arvo Part for my “special day,” apparently this was too much, or none could be found. They, or he, uses the term “melancholy” a lot in reference to my musical tastes. And of course inquire (in increasingly subtle terminologies) how that makes me “feel.” Phrases like “how does that occur to you;” “what do you consider regarding this?” “what impressions do these stir” and so on. “Make” me feel, hmmmm. I draw ovaled circles for them, if I’ve a pencil, I have taken to shading them in from time to time, altering lighter and darker passages.
I can’t conceive what their interest might be. My suspicion grows that it’s simply their job. What can they learn from a circle besides what they invent? Maybe it’s their task to confabulate patterns or conclusions, narratives or hypotheses from observing or investigating me, as if I’m a text or a painting. The world is a strange place to endure. I think there are very many rooms in this building – have I been misplaced? From time to time I’ve thought I’ve caught other shuffling souls (I think they planted that idea actually). It is quiet today.
I get some nifty ideas of what to do with my pen from Twombly today (puts me in mind of Mark Tobey), so I clutter up a page with scribbles until it’s a balanced equation of masses and gaps, much like my daughter’s…”What’s that?!” he/you asks excitedly – “your daughter?!” “I’ve always imagined I’ve a family” I replied – “children realize.”
I lie down.
I wake realizing I’d never read of Twombly’s life. He at least had access to crayons if I’m to believe the reproductions in this book, as well as ample unlined paper. But I also quickly recognize that much of it is simply in pencil, yet it provides me with an almost emblematic understanding…like the mapping of eye’s movements they’re so fond of here. Perhaps Twombly inhabited a space such as this as well? This is a touch shaming. No, couldn’t be, I detect oils or gouache underneath some of these. How I adore his busy little stories – like scratch papers of a physicist or schoolboy doodles, notes to the self, etcetera. I’ll copy some as my written reports the next few days and see what you/they make of that!
I lie down.
Celldom
“he accepted each moment
shocked by having a face in the mirror
or torn away from it by the beauty of the world”
– from Zen by Stephen Berg
“…its mumbled inadequacy reminds us always
In this world how little can be communicated.
And for these, they too are only tokens
Of what there is no word for:…”
– from To Dido by W. S. Merwin
Then this is my canvas, my clay, the space I am allotted to “begin.” “To write what I feel” as they put it. From a palette of words, of letters, the shapes of sounds.
What color would they be? What lines and outlines? What surfaces, form? What I am representing onto this blank? When or where or what or how is it / was it present before this? Had I more than a pen I might draw. Monochrome doesn’t suit the subject I observe. (“The greater the challenge” I suppose they or you or I might suggest – ack).
As if it were a can to pour. A brush to dab or spread. A chisel to pound or some multi-dimensional possibility. No – one color, a flat surface, and whatever twisted lines I might make with this dark blood.
“Don’t simply regurgitate your story,” I heard, “write things we don’t already know or are able to find out in multitudes of ways.” This is why “feelings” you say (they say). Do we really have feelings bereft of ideas?
I imagine this is what is meant by declension. Some traceable undoing. Some fodder to deconstruct, patterns or plot recognition: analysis. Is that so? “Feelings” you say?
“I began to write down the things I feel,” I wrote, firstly, quoting them, but quickly realizing that that was a quote of a quote, and perhaps out of context, perhaps accidental, of another I have great affinity for, of mind, form and content, but would not dare or hope to repeat or revise. Stillborn. Abort.
“Feelings.” And how might I gain access to this? These? Are not, spoken, emotions dissolved? Transformed into some other reality? Or fiction? Does anyone even know yet what we talk about when we talk about “emotion”? (I suspect there is a sort of object to them/it out there somewhere to be found and to dissect, describe, observe or experiment with – on the in-fernal-ternet or recordings of the surgings of the brain, the body, our systems). Probably it goes without saying, but I have no “access” here. “In” here.
How then should I represent void? And again I ask – where/who/how ever might void have ever been presented in the first place as some natural sign I might re-present? This is what a medium is for, no? An intermediary between? A vehicle or method of expression, disclosure, communication, power? So what is this barely material of ink and pulp (one color or hue each, mind you!) between?
Them or you and my emotions? Is that it? One unknown and untranslatable to another? I might describe here or caricature the you or them I imagine examining this frame, this “picture,” but who would pretend or proffer that I might, in that process, be knowing them to you? And like the immateriality of an inner world, even if I could copy all the pulses, darts, knots and dashes of a stenciling electric light on some screen or render a mapping of neuronal activities imaged in all my various “states.” What would be revealed in that? What more would ANY of us know?
The electricity and charges my brain produces we might label “agitated subject,” or “concentrated subject,” “depressed subject,” “gazing subject,” “excited,” “disregulated,” and so on. Within each of which (and millions of others besides) the terms occur so ambiguously and objective-arbitrarily we end further away than we began.
Alas, it wearies me to consider. Efforts doomed and erroneous at the outset…scoffable. How did such a project even crop up amongst us? What did we think we might uncover? (Ah, back to the mysterious ocean or caves from which we may have sprung! Our reptilian selves, our triune brains, conjectures, conjectures, wild-ass-hairs of a nightmare!)
“Fine” they gently, politely nod, “fine.” You (me/I) are doing well. Don’t get hung up on “feelings” “emotions” terms – just put pen to paper, let’s just see what comes forth. Don’t get “hung up on words” eh? Yet make more words. Is not inquiry senseless? I rest my case. I drain and break the pen. If only I had flame at my disposal.
Left to Say
What she said was.
And there was so much – too much – movement in the still place.
What she said was
I…
To piece together, pull apart was far too much, was overbearing.
Even I’d be overwhelmed. Why with the even?
What she said was
It is too much.
I…
But I could neither find, nor could I follow, there the thread.
Of what she was saying, is saying, which was…
I cannot.
.
Think of where that leads!
She said
She cannot think of where it goes, where it comes from.
I cannot.
Is what she said.
She says.
I listen like a camera.
I record.
Her stillness moves too much.
Is unbearable, she says, to be unable, to I cannot.
I don’t believe her, though I see it with my ears.
.
She says it is too much, I will not try.
But I am trying.
Which does not change.
Birds are caught in all their movement – silent blur.
She can’t decipher.
What it is.
She will not say. Says I cannot.
I, pressing buttons, click the shutter, press record.
(Depress, record).
She will not can.
I take a picture.
It does not hear.
.
And what she says is
There’s too much for me to wager on a word
Even in flocks
Even in dialogue, or forms of living movement,
Even in swarms.
I blink.
I snap the shutters.
She has said nothing
She will not say
I hold the stillness, how it flutters.
Silence seems.
Seems only.
But what she says is
She cannot.
.
The birds swoop past
And there is nothing
Left to say.
Interstice – 6: the coupling
– 6 –
And then the narrative runs away. Nearly ever a mix of caffeinated alcohol, the disaster of stories unfolds. We yield them occurrence in time. Over time. Across locations. We do not make them this way, or rather, the making falsifies them so. Their occurrence is now. The moment of happen. And the telling is here just as well. The moment: reflect and create, concoct and remember. The moment of happen, and never “again.” “Re-“ is convenient, untrue.
Yet sometimes the rowdiness settles. We arrange as a movement, install, and be/have. Construct forms to obey. She stumbled, or stuttered. Appeared in a robe. When it opened, she stayed. For a while, as a present, be-coming, bright way.
Not undone. No undoing – just fall shy. Language requires alive telling, there to mean – intersection, Interstice: a coupling, a groove and a rhythm. An inexact mirror, a multi-frame change. She (you) and he (I), it (us). Reciprocally linked and unstable, an active, dynamic exchange.
See the couple coupling. A gruff and clumsy wrangle and tussle. Huffs and spurts and clawing. The heaving bodies appear to be taking, eyes lolling back in themselves – the necessary separateness, retaliation toward pleasure. Bodies in command. It’s grotesque. Whoever’s on top is the rider, begun in devotion, become animal. She seeks to please, retreats and surrenders, gives up and in to his thrusting. He becomes tool for her desire, working herself to a frenzy he fears its hiatus, self-conscious, stripped of his surging in fear of mistake. They work it out – a to and fro – back and forth – moving in, leaning back – never quite mated in psyche.
From inches of distance the movements are grueling. A repetitive taking advantage. These bodies have each other, these bodies desire, lust, demand, these bodies know what they want, what they need. The fish flaps on dry ground. In a terror. A panic afraid that relief will not come. Release. In order to experience it fully, each gathers and turns in interior worlds – “this is happening, now – to me, to my body – I must be there for it to occur – entirely.” But there is an other. He/she senses the lover’s retreat. The moment of most coveted convergence, conjunction. They depart to their bodies while they clutch in their rigor. Asynchrony. What needs, needs its doing, is done. Syncopated Interstice of the guttural grotesque…
From one angle.
See the couple coupling as animals. The dog, the bear, the wolf. The bird or bee or dragonfly. The distance. The unawares. What if the lion leaned into the neck? What if the squirrel caressed? If the snakes lay entangled. The cats licking flanks. The stories would pour into morphing. What have we seen? During thrusts and grunts and contorted visage, he melted his nose in her hair, he inhaled and received. Her hand trailed down his back, not in clenching but care, some tender aware, some giving. His palms opened hot on each angle and curve, of the shoulder, the buttocks, the spine. Knee kissed, ankle read by the fingers, mouths meeting again and again. In the angelic grotesque of the bodies is consistently sewn something else. Animals humping and huffing, not by instinct alone, something more. Intercourse – intersection – aural and visual, scent taste and touch.
In distinction, then, from the buffalo that he appeared to be. From the feline receiving her guest. There is more taking place through the need. The senses talk back, they converse – speak and answer, and whisper / respond. Bodies converging in dialogue. Reciprocally linked and unstable, an active, dynamic exchange. Suddenly the gruff and the klutzy seem streaming with gift and create. The blind lust is perceiving; the grasp also heals; the smother mingles embrace. What’s engulfed is also what’s offered.
We muster. We glyph. We resolve. And solve again without solution.
Tangling a language of bodies – a coupling, a groove and a rhythm.
The narrative runs, a disaster of stories, the moment of happen is now.
Interstices…continuing…
earlier portions of this can be found HERE
– 5 –
Narrative seeming regurgitant, redundant, and indulged…yet as it occurred it was quite dramatic. A vibrant life of tragic deaths and violent love. The kind of loving one imagines as a lion gutting prey. That ferocity and devouring.
Language always there, most assuredly, in circularity and dismay, its hesitant encumberance. Its dance of waltz with tango, its distance from its cause. We were ravenous for life, steeled in healing, shriveling seeds immersed in waters. An obsessive metaphor.
She came.
From where? Like lamps at sea. Inside of windows, inside of houses, nonexistent. The sea is no foundation in its turbulence, its depths. I never charted. But there she shone. And there I strove, even while she drifted toward me.
The sky is murky. A sound of panting. My memories faint. I grabbed her collar and held her still, bent down, like that, spread open (in my dreams). They feed, they lion. The forms reverse.
Talking a mean streak. Accidental – no, – unavoidable or some inevitable undoing that I do. I won’t stop speaking, but go on. When I shouldn’t, when I can’t, when I do. I am.
What I say (I said) goes like this, or would have, but the force, the draw, consumption – I speak in digits, speak in code, I squeeze pronouncing. I will not say. What I am saying, if I would not, would have been as it were love. Instead I feed.
And she retracts and she releases, she relents but won’t rely. We’re frightened beings, gorging beasts, so here it is – the valiant story, the fragile lines, the treacherous risk.
I engulf her. Still she comes.
She feasts and I retreat.
The battles rage, my hair grows wild (she makes it so), her full of bruising, fully of greed – my want, my spunk. Our torsos open. We choose withdrawal along with weapons for attack. I bare my teeth and force her hand while she recoils, she hits, she sneaks.
We die away. I have remorse, and so I speak: again, again. Say “what I meant” I do not mean. Say wonder why. She will not speak.
There’s never truce but we find trust, a glyph we muster, when we must, because we want (for something), want (for edges), want (for love).
She says my name. Says “you remember!” And I don’t. Says work from there. My body rotted, her blackened breasts, her flesh unwilling, still we progress. We feed and lion.
A torturous joy. An adumbration.. Spiraled mind and twisting body. And there we are beneath a flow I cannot cease, my acrid words, my oily blunder. Why should I think, and what? While she moves thunder.
With firm resolve. And solve again without solution.
Then here screes the story wrenched of life – away and from – she drains a bank I cannot fill, I rob her purchase. We are one.
The scene begins.
Interstices – continuing in between
more sections arriving from the Beginnings and the Second
– 3 –
Message being – she looked at me, incredulously.
– “What and/or Who – are you?” she requests.
I don’t know. No one knows, I said, half-joking, persisting, prolonging, staying alive.
Longing = staying alive. Longing = I’m still alive. And I look at her, longer. Which means: if only I knew. The interstice (according to me). We converge. A gaze. I must go.
That’s what I wanted. The choice. The decision. A godlike thing for a fragile, finite boy. The both of them: god – a fragile, finite boy.
No one owns.
When I returned, I could have said “My love, I am not present with you now. I am in a future predicted by a possible past. I am afraid. I am not here.”
She might have responded: “I see and hear and understand that you are not here with me. I too will retreat, remove, go away, until you return to me – here, to here.”
I babble on.
But I don’t say “Hello, my love. I am not present.” No, what I speak instead is a muddled report of my feelings and fears, my ideas – my present experiencing – a gummy wad of future and past, uninformed by where I am (with you) or who I am with (you) or when (now). Constructed instead by where I believe I have been (past), where I think we are heading (future), and how I feel about that (afraid).
She recoils.
“I’m going away now” she says. Which is not where I am. Not with me.
But I meant. I meant to say (once I figure out where I actually am): “Hello love. I am afraid. I am past and future. I am absent.”
To which she replies: “Good to know. Tell me when you arrive, here. With me.”
Here now. Or, Nietzschean-ly now/here, is that, and “exactly” : unlocatable. Nowhere. NOW + HERE…present. It can only be lived, not thought. Thought is too slow. Lags ahead, leaps behind.
Oh you, I might have said. And she may have recognized me. Perhaps. Now. Here. Presently – in the nowhere – the between – the “Interstice.” Where what occurs, occurs.
“Hello. I love you.”
– 4 –
Finite, fragile boy. The fragility and finitude are true, I suppose, but not unquestioned. However they withstand (the questioning). They withstand the questioning. Because I don’t know, and it is not wisdom, this cloud of unknowing, it is finitude, and I am fragile, not only because it’s true.
I am fragile because not all the branches hold. When climbing.
– “What is it we are speaking of?” she asks (she – the you – asks me – the I).
Past and future, I might have answered. The unknowing. But did not. Instead said – “unreliable.” Rises, passes away. Novel-to-familiar. First one thing then another, desire fades. I am not stimulus. Enough. For no reason.
I, illogical.
You, burdened. And thus you sigh. (She sighs her burden, a question).
And I retort. “No.” Or, “don’t go.” But you might, because I have gone (or didn’t arrive, not HERE, not NOW, but somewhere else made of cobbled up pasts and unpredictable aheads).
“I love you.”
But how can that be?
It can’t. Yet it is.
Perhaps.
I don’t know. But it is not wisdom.
Interstitial
part two of a rambling….
– 2 –
Suffice it to say, I’m not much into “proofs” – in language or tone. Suspect I can’t believe them.
I won’t be able to prove there’s an interstice – I know that. Won’t even attempt “within reason.” Suggest.
There’s no “let me explain” to this.
– “Explain what?” she inquires, “exactly?”
The point, I would say, exactly, or nearly precise – that there isn’t. I don’t know. But it seems we converge – in some tiny remarkable space within time (or vice-versa) – we’re dis-missed. Or not missed – how to say it? There’s a meeting. It seems. In a margin, or more.
Our hallways (think architecture?) overlap? I don’t know. I’m just saying, in hopes to be, to look at you longer. Longer. It’s a fight against death, that small word. Simply, longer. With you.
Am I clear? Making sense? I don’t know.
– “Clear as mud, what you’re saying” she says, “near ‘exactly’.”
I don’t know. It’s unwise.
And I hum when the words sound just so.
– “Just so, how, exactly?” she asks.
Interaction. Locution. Between. (I am thinking).
“Interstitial,” I say. Interstitially? I wonder. How could I know. It’s all susceptible to the mark. The mark of the question. I think about changing my name. Did before. I like titles. It was “Mark” for the question, the sign, and its music. I would be Mark, Remarking. The one with the curlicue brand, like the Zorro but curved to a point, on everything : ? “My point, exactly,” I tell her (she stays) – leaving my mark. (If she’ll stay, I’ll rescind…anything).
It’s okay. I’m familiar. Not that you’re worried. There’s no worries, it’s all temporarily temporary – both state and enaction. It’s just so (so it seems). “Just-So Stories,” he wrote, long ago, relatively – they’re alike and akin, episodic. We describe.
Neither here and/nor there. Interstitial. In-between. What I wanted to tell her, to say. And I would have, had I known.
– “Known what, exactly?” she’d once said, and I’d stopped, for the meanings were lost, non-existent. Just so.
“That’s just how it is” I had said. And don’t know, was surmising. The world hypothetical and inspired (I’d thought, at the time) – simply possible. I was wrong (perhaps). But she stayed (temporarily). The words lose their meanings.
I hum. To myself.
I write: “This is what I wanted to do.”
All that’s required is a ‘trigger’…a rule.
NANOWRIMO Reminds: Any Excuse to Write
THE INTERSTICE
I told her that I would have told her, had I known.
-“Known what, exactly?” she said, “Really!?” she said.
Yes, I said, yes, I would have explained what I felt to be true – about the “interstice” – what I felt I understood, I would have said.
As usual, the sighs, the diverted glances, the “I-don’t-knows.”
It’s okay. I’m pretty used to it, not that it still doesn’t hurt, or squash some deep part of me – annihilate, erase – but familiarity breeds, and it’s not contempt, at least not for me. More like resolve, or, well, accustom, I don’t know.
Still I would have conversed about the interstice. Or its plural. No one can know what we’re talking about (in my opinion) – that’s why we talk (in my opinion). But I like to look at her. Very much. So sometimes I keep talking so that I can look at her longer.
Thus I would have explained – tried to – about the Interstice…had I known, I tell her.
-“Known what, exactly?” she asks, “Really?!”
It’s okay. I’m used to it – exasperation. It’s a sort of fatigue that settles on my interlocutors – my family, my friends, my lovers – as I triple/quadruple/unendingly (exponentially?) second-(meaningless term in this accounting)-guess whatever it is (emotion, idea, memory, event) I attempt to convey.
I don’t trust a thing as long as it’s questionable, and I’ve yet to discover something unquestionable. I like inventing titles though.
She’s looking at me – softly, sadly, gently and quiet. Sometimes she strokes my hair with her hands and lets me rest my head (the physical part) in her lap. It kind of helps. But the rest doesn’t rest.
It’s okay, for the most part, I’m used to it. It’s “me” as they say, as it were – what I’m used to. It doesn’t matter, or does in unquantifiable ways, but I keep at it. Anyway. I can’t seem to help it. Well, some things do – like vodka, sex, sleep – but only temporarily.
Things are only temporarily.
That’s the sort of idea that keeps me alive. Temporarily. And second-(exponentially)-guessing.
She’s still there. Here. Though. Hence the interstice.
I try to explain.
As if “interstice” possessed meaning – definition beyond the moment activated or utilized. As if it indicated. “Meant” – a convergence-point (limitless above and below and abroad) of conventions of time and of space – a realm that felt (seemed) shared. Held in common. Nothing is “held” – or that temporarily. It seems. I don’t know. It’s certainly questionable – is it – “certainly”?
I don’t know. Which I thought, or I think, is the entry to wisdom, but even that – I don’t know.
She’s still here. And I question – who is it? Who is still here? And what for and/or why? And where is this trembling “here”? I can wonder, after all.
-“Wonder what, exactly?” she queries.
I don’t know. I’m a human. Some odd conundrum of pieces and parts that cohere, correspond or reciprocate in hold-together activities for awhile…call it “organism,” there’s that, it would seem, but seem only, digging in it is hard to convince – a location, identity, consistency, avocation or being. It’s just so – apparently – temporarily.
Exasperating. You see? You dig? What I mean? That’s what we’re after (I think) – what it means. But what that means is uncertain, I think or surmise. We don’t know, it would seem, we’re uncertain.
We ask.
Let me describe this – the interstice…
All my Words are Silent 