a little something I’ll be working on through the Fall… believing, against all odds that there really IS a book in me somewhere….
Tag: love
Invisible Man Chronicles, cont’d
III.
Rattling bones, deep-falling diaphragm – through continuous sightings and encounters with “H” (“her”) these consistently occur – even over hours, days, and months.
I might say that what characterizes our particular version of intimacy are curiosity and wonder and the ecstasy of discovery and finding – imbuing apparently abandoned spaces with vitality and imagination.
A week later was a potluck for the visiting artist. Small-talking with “her” in the kitchen – I felt inadequate to be occupying her time and “let her go” to mingle with the many I was certain were desirous of her indomitable and imaginative company. I spoke with her partner, the farm-inhabiting-best-friend-artist-lady, and H sidled in. There was much laughter (their minds are contagious and entertaining – as if the structures of adulthood and professional culture never quite ‘took’ or corralled possibilities)…around “her” my breath dissipates. We’d both been hired as rural mail carrier associates with joint training to occur the week following; both commissioned to respond to this artist’s intimately relational performance work; both in love with abandoned places and their loss and decay – both committed to discovering lost or overlooked things.
There we were.
I in poverty.
Day one of training sat us next to one another, her length and beauty, doodles and read-alouds from the training manual enthralling. I worked to breathe and lived through my peripheral perception – registering her movements, hair, wrist, knee, hands, mouth pronouncing acronyms, quirky nervous habits, footwear, scent and clothing…
She suggested (did she?) lunch together. I’m quite certain that converged through a clumsy stumbling and fragmented semblance of conversation. I had planned only banana and peanut butter on my budget – yet each day we went – for that amazing hour – somewhere I’d never been before in a city I’d spent over three decades in and around. An abandoned hotel, a nature trail, small chain restaurants, of which one, perhaps, constituted a first “date,” as, after placing our orders, she removed to the restroom and I was left to pay the bill! (Delightful things like that).
Blessings. I was gaining practice in “soaking in the good” – a strategy instructed through my therapy, and H was much better than I ever imagined, a remarkable alchemy of behaviors and body parts – co-constituting an unknown ‘ideal’ to my mind, sensations, experience and history. I was dumbstruck, amazed, bewildered, befuddled – in other words – alive and in hope.
I’d been asking her coterie of creator-friends to visit my home for fire or food or an art-making party – to no response or avail. Everyone taking a read. She agreed, then doubted, then declared she thought she might appear via an internet message. Thus she arrived, of a Sunday afternoon in April, to my home.
We parlayed and exchanged – art, family, friends, lives, plans, hopes, strategies, likes and dislikes, ideas and tears, meanings and lies and other truths. I ached toward her – finding romance and desire and a periscope of loving peeking out, looking round, checking for safety. It isn’t safe. It’s unlikely, bizarre, fantastical : sixteen years between us and four marriages – her blossoming while I fade to grey, her popping with –larity, my struggling for place. She asked me to sit next to her.
The sides of our arms. Legs. Eventually fingers becoming entangled. We talked staring straight ahead, caught in some astronaut training module machine, no gravity, no reference, dizzied and desirous, disbelieving and desirous, frightened and desirous, with just the right amount of belonging and estrangement, novelty to craft courage and excitement throughout our neural nets.
We concocted funnel cakes of cinnamon and sugar, mustard, jalapenos and sausage. They flopped and sickened, we laughed and she left. I think perhaps we loved, even then, that day. She left behind a bevy of hands from a book she created, by extraction. Our hands were open, our minds and hearts, a letting-go, with patterns and a freeing, a dance: in common, in Kansas, in history, in hope, in commitments, in fears and neuroses.
Letting-go.
Invisible Man Chronicles, continued
These consist of my attempts to account (to myself mostly) for the past 6 months of my somewhat turbulent season…
Read part 1 HERE:
II.
“Dying seeds split towards open…”
“I was about to ask you to speak to me stories of how we met,” she murmured as we waited for sleep, “I never tire of them, how they change as we go, all our perspectives…”
And we begin.
“How was it for you when I entered that kitchen?” I ask, for what occurred in me I am still – four months later – unable to give voice to, just as I was unable then.
What I can say is that I entered anxious, uncertain, afraid and filled with grief – but knowing I must begin somewhere, try, introduce, extend myself, my life, beyond the coil I’d created of children, survival, and pain.
An old yellow farmhouse replete with water pump, out-buildings, repurposed windmill-like sculptures, abandoned well, mannequin-legs lined windows, rust, piles of parts, cats and kittens, bunnies and snakes. The home of two lively artists, the wife soon to be known to me as “her” best friend. Corn and wheat fields with their fences and rows, tall prairie grasses, birds of prey, and heat and wind is what I stepped out of my car toward this April Kansas day.
I carried a backpack of notebooks, pens and books, a small cooler with two wrapped bratwurst, a liter of vodka and TexSun grapefruit juice cans (my armory against strangers and surprises, perhaps against myself) toward the homestead’s screened-in porch.
Opened the door to a greeting androgynous mannequin and a doorway to the kitchen.
I turned the latch with an apologetic and nervous smile as if to express “None of you will know me and will probably wonder why I turned up here in your home.” The lady of the house greeted me and quickly introduced me to a workspace full of smoking hams, tossing salads, and baking grains. At the island stood…and here I blank out.
My torso, from lowest throat through loin-bottom, floods with feeling, with absence, with amazement and hunger. The first sheer drop of a roller coaster. Catching air off the road. Losing your hold on the side of a mountain. What seemed so certain – a mountain of absence and grief, a path of sorrow, loss and regret, misplaced footing, and fright like a life-ending fall… or life-fulfilling…
All I remember was a brain flushed with “who IS that creature?” – large glasses, Dukes of Hazard or Wild Western clothes – a button shirt tied just under the breasts, long and limby body, mass of hair the color of ripe dusty wheat – long like the Kansas horizon. I nodded politely to each, walked through three rooms and out the front door into air. I had lost all my breath for that journey.
Confused and baffled by the overthrow of my reason and will to be a severe and grieving abandoned invisible man, I set off to examine the property, to photograph remnants, to see as far as I could see and let the wind blow this internal combustion away.
Part of me knew I’d survived. What undid me was turning out not to be mortal. Perhaps I maintained the resilience and adaptation of a child with a little less flexibility and imagination, but the floods and droughts had not burned me fallow. It frightened me.
Eventually I conversed most of the evening away with “her” young, thoughtful boyfriend, engaged the generous and open artist-in-residence and made more plans to enjoy this group of hopeful, resourceful humans… while “she” moved about like the grass and the wind, the trees bending, swaying – each too large to comprehend, each farther than the eye knew how to see.
One learns a landscape by living in and with it over time…
Invisible Man Chronicles – Pt. 1
The times have been odd and I’ve been at pains to record them. Here is a series I began recently in attempts to account for my life over the past 6 months or so… for what they’re worth. In this current apparent “season” of ongoing stress related to surviving I am culling old notebooks for substance and will begin posting as I find time to type them. \
Invisible Man Chronicles
Six months ago, things were different. I found myself unable to breathe, in England, windswept and drowned out in a kind of panicked grief – a she had proficiently evacuated my life, my home, a marriage… a business, a practice… The weather was cold and drizzly – melancholy, hibernatory, reflexive. One might say: “Winter.” My return would be to four children, now employment, no sustenance, no inner strength, little support and a home hardly emptied of her artifacts. She had literally flown away.
Seasons in Kansas are cyclically exemplary. Summer – hell-hot, a dry blowing flame, readings often surpassing 100. Winter is a subzero freeze – bitter blizzards and veils of ice – both producing post-apocalyptic land. Autumn, as is idealized, a gradual and colorful falling away – temperatures, foliage and field – a clear and moist sarcophagus. And Spring. Spring is explosive – blustery, redolent – a balmy turbulence of expansion and growth.
Some have suggested that landscapes, climates and geographies form the tangible shape to our thoughts and personalities and beliefs. It makes many kinds of sense.
When we experience loss we consider to be great, we often find it inexplicable, and it may exhibit many qualities in common with fallow fields of Kansas Winters. Clinging to cold and dark uncannily, as if depressive states were somehow desirable. As if persisting in sorrow might validate what grew there before. What cannot repeat (we think) – bumper crops and windfalls – the decay of which we experience as hopelessness, helplessness, a ruin. Plumbing gone bad, a roof worn away, the appliances failed. Eyesight, blood pressures and flesh. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold – wisely penned, and yet the Seasons.
When a wheat crop fails to a Summer’s drought and burn – there is thorough discoloration and a withering. The rusty dun of a malpracticed rain dissolved by menacing sun seems a sign of things gone wrong, things never to be the same. And it is so. In some various version of “now” – growth is undone, production waylaid, and a pestilent edition of dying appears to have its way. We cherish that in our bemoaning. Misfortunes as notches on a belt that signify toward some later date: “We survived.” “We survive.”
Certainly not forever, but perhaps another season. Another cycling of the clock. We sleep and we wake, and “every day begins the same.” Every week and month and year.
That apparently demolished – scarred and furrowed stillborn field, however, hasn’t lost capacity, only a season’s fruit, a momentary harvest.
I shackled myself to determined grief. Treating my earth with lyme. Still its soil didn’t die. Flowers and grasses were never erased, only unsung and silent, covered, eventually, by a type of ashen snow – very difficult to see.
The lesson I find ever-so-hard to incorporate is that the responsibility of flourishing or dearth lies not on the soil, the weather, or farmer – wind, sun, rain or seed – not even diligence, care or quality. Rather, its growth or despoiling depends on the entire orchestra of factors.
What blooms for a term, given other conditions, even ever-so-slightly adjusted, may miserably deteriorate, may “fail to thrive” or “take.” Human infants, ant colonies, milo crops and butterfly paths, wildlife populations and the microscopic advance of forests all share this cosmic weather – growth and decay depend on convergence.
A determined depression, a strange and celebrated joy – can be deranged by simple sounds or gestures, weathers or tastes.
Helplessness altered towards hope by some unexpected “yes.”
I was contacted to compose a responsive work for a miniscule fee in relation to a visiting artist. I was given employment, extremely part-time it appeared – as a rural mail carrier ‘associate’ – filling in for regular carriers days off. And yet they were SOMEthing, a shift in the breeze, a change in barometric pressures, percentages of precipitation, doors opened with smiles.
A bonfire had been planned at a farm to forge acquaintance with the visiting artist – two weeks of work from Brooklyn, NY. In my selected sorrow I avoided meeting people or mingling in groups, even contacting more than a handful of friends (often reaching out and then canceling in efforts to conserve energy for survival). Yet work (survival) was serious business and necessitated uncomfortable measure. I went to the farm and the fire, and from there began a new history. New season. Dying seeds split toward open…(to be continued…)
Abracadabra Cliches
“The outcome belongs to nobody,
the approach, however,
depends entirely on us.”
-Edmond Jabes-
The temple always crumbles,
this is not a complication.
The birds arrive from here and there, departing.
A canvas is made from canvas
composed of canvas still beyond.
.
I’m writing words
knowing they are fashioned without meaning
until read by you or me
or still something further in,
between,
.
making all of us disciples
and messiahs
in our gleaning expeditions
with embodied repetitions
re-membering in minds…
.
recapitulations with their novelty
of time and place and person(hood).
.
And our present filled by abracadabra’d clichés:
yet let’s meet there – (here) –
with wonder and amazement
and a just amount
of what’s familiar…
.
to you and I and all of us
in now.
Revisiting “I”-dentity
“I”-dentity: and/or “I” is a product of the Other and the Us
I wouldn’t know how to tell you my story, though life knows I try and have tried (as if someone cared).
What is it to you? And “I”? Is “we”? When the parts are estranged, differentiated – unknown and uncertain? If the question of being is YouMe + We?
My approach to myself as an Other and Us.
Thinking in time with the seasons – their perceptible growth and decay. Their relations.
For all the world in the sheer ice of January the wheat crop is dead… but it rises late in the Spring.
The drizzling, chill fog is burned off by the Summer.
I succumb to grief, and then joy, but grief will come again (and then joy…and then grief… and then)…
Fall and its gradual dying: discoloration, departure. What we experience as lengthening quiet.
I thought it was over (this “I”), again and again. But it always turns out it is ready to bloom and express, given certain conditions (the “I” and what blooms, as well as conditions – differing every time).
Not quite fallow – apparently. The seeds and resources are there (that’s the HUMAN) – called out by consortial action.
So “I” is the product of the Other and the Us. Always more than one and all their relations. Sea, land and sky, our cells and their content-rich contexts.
I’ve been abandoned and resumed without loss each mysterious gain. I’ve betrayed and discovered new friends. We don’t remember where to categorize pain: is it “bad” is it “good” – but then simply it is just like we and the other and the us.
“I” dent. I am in-formed while in-forming. When I move, lie or make, I am changed.
It’s not fault of an-other, an outside, an “external,” nor “me” in my body, my space and my time, but the “we” is the cause – the “us” in relation: all is com-pound, com-plex, and co-herent (“co-here-in-it”?). Here together we change and are changed. And thus love.
And our fear. And we forecast by memory.
“I” am not “I” as “I” was. Nor like the “I” “I” will be. Which “I” cannot predict for all its co-dependence. Which we labeled “dis-ease” and no wonder – it makes us uneasy being out of control.
Yet we’re only an “I” in a context. A context of other and us.
When the “other”s keep changing (be coyote or mountain, NY or SF, literature, germ, snail or partner) the “I” also shifts and adapts, becomes “else,” becomes novel, strikes a balance with all that is “us.”
So give credit where credit is due (or a “cause”): whatever your “I” equals a me + a you – and is describable in manifold ways – as a god or the weather, a child or a feather, and is probably always ALL AND.
So no “OR.” Choice is an additive move.
TV news brought us the phrase “and now this.” Exponentialed via World-Wide-Web, and most probably true (or maybe it’s real). Connections incalculable, meshwork beyond comprehension, impossible untangling deciphers…now this and now this and now this = “I” (and “you” and “us” and “we” and “world”).
Terms are confusing.
We Are. Con-fused beyond knowing.
There is no other way (then/than) To Be.
“I” as a product of Other and Us.
Ever-Unprepared
It’s said that “readiness is all,”
yet the readiness required
has no subject, and its object
can be anything
which portends – what – ?
we do not know
which is the point
and is beside it
.
Turns out that knowing
neither how nor when nor what
nor where nor why
can still be useful –
ever-unprepared is our preparing
for all we cannot fathom
.
getting used to
every there becoming here
drawn by perception
and a yes however secret
she arrives
and I, unready
.
open eyes
and take her in
with an open-handed
readiness,
is all,
and I receive
these many things I cannot fathom
.
into this here
where I, bewildered
and ever-unprepared
and open-handed
.
allow her to arrive
and arrive
and arrive
in waves of all
and getting ready
Eradicating Borders
A work in progress…
if i build it…perhaps it will come.
Boomerang
Another “aside” – writings that happen in the meantimes…
Boomerang
I consider myself ‘straight as an arrow’ that swerves like a boomerang. In other words, I ruminate clear sensations, desires, opinions – consider, and then revise. It all comes back to me.
When I was a child, I thought as a child, behaved as a child…but now…now that…well, I’ve put away the childish things. Now I’m just a fucked-up adult. It’s hard for me to tell from what’s coming or going.
She’s cumming. Now she’s going.
I saw a coyote the other day. I was driving in the country, speeding along a gravel road. A grey coyote, large, apparently healthy, came streaming through the corn or wheat or soybeans pacing my van like a dog. These things surprise me. And happen.
Now she’s going.
Like a coyote I set out to pace her, run alongside, track and trace her. She’s cumming, I’m breakneck, I’m hungry, I’ve got her, I’m with her, we’re “in” as it were…
She’s going.
I run straight and fast and hard and she knows it. I’m honest. I can’t tell truth from lies. She loses me, I parallel, and now we’re neck-and-neck, side-by-side, and sprinting, I’ve got her, she’s stretching, I’m on her, she’s spreading, I’m ravenous, she’s daunting, I fear, I crave, on point, in flight, the Caravan has nothing on me.
If I were a sailor. An aardvark. A policeman. I am none of these. But I love her, she outpaces me, I can’t catch, and she looks back, and she’s cumming, and now going.
I wish.
And that would be how it would end, with my wishing, her being, my envisioning and inventing and conspiring, but there’s more. And the coyote, and the rabbit, and the hawk and howling wind. And the mountain and the river and the ocean and breezy glade. And there’s life – yes, there’s that, and we’re here, or somewhere, and everything rushes, and to be honest I don’t know deception from reality, my perceptions and illusions are the same, but I dream. And a coyote, and a boy. And a human and a male. And she’s a lady and a wolf, a rodent and a scream, and we tossle and we fight, and devour and delight, and it’s all a simple game – a complex, coordinated, disjunctive weather of dance that never quite syncs up, and that’s okay, because the coyote thrives in run, and the owl lives for the hunt…the mouse delights in escape, and the thought its incompletion…
And I straight as an arrow, swerving like a boomerang.
Difficulties & Pronouncements
What happens when I avoid “required texts”…
Difficulties & Pronouncements
For this is what I do.
When facing difficulties, Harlan makes pronouncements. Conundrums = hypotheses. “Yes, I love you, consistently,” he might say, but does not think, for Harlan does not think, he behaves, that is, he acts habitually.
Sometimes I think I am a writer.
For instance, Harlan might be confused or confounded by the behavior of others, particularly those with whom he shares his life, interacts with daily, corresponds. He might find himself baffled, able to find no explanation or solution for a “problem” – (situation in which he does not know what to do) – and therefore announce that which he considers a “reality.” E.g. – when happening upon his children bickering and unable to agree on peaceable courses of action, he might state: “it is common for people to consider the ‘ways they do things’ as the “correct” ways TO DO things…but when such consideration involves more than one family, group or person, there is often conflict, i.e. – ‘what should be done?’” Thereby solving nothing, nor finding any resolution, only offering up his own feelings of helplessness as a catalyst.
He looks at her.
Sometimes I look at you.
Sometimes I think I am a writer.
For instance, Harlan might find himself bewildered by mixed emotions (a “difficulty” in his habit-of-being) and, instead of naming the mixed emotions and going from there, instead might pronounce – “humans are complex interfusions of emotion and reason, biology and philosophy/psychology – we aren’t yet quite sure what con-spires to activate and animate us.” Thereby solving nothing, nor finding any resolution, only offering up his own feelings of helplessness, his own uncertainties, as a potential catalyst to reason.
Reason fails.
Reason is insufficient.
Harlan speaks to me about the insufficiency of reason: “Say, you know how we often try to make lists of what we ought or need to do? You know, IF we (perhaps) performed the following activities, accomplished the following feats, we might feel some sense of order in our lives, some sense that we were possessed of a direction, a purpose, a…modus operandi, and therefore felt that LIVING made a kind of SENSE?” I nodded. Sometimes I think I am a writer, and therefore listen carefully.
Anyway, plans are confusing because so regularly undone.
He looks at her. They gaze. I (also) look at you, but your eyes are closed. Still I look, and look again, and look more (at you, wistfully – imaginatively ‘into’ you) and just am looking. Harlan and Meribeth are actually looking AT, perhaps ‘toward’ or ‘con-spicuously’ WITH one another. I’m just borrowing, observing, wishing, and longing-for.
Harlan says – (there is difficulty) – “isn’t she beautiful?” (a sort of backwards pronouncement – he thinks, well, not ‘thinks,’ rather ‘feels’ [or whatever] she is beautiful) – often we respond out of habitus, instinct, notion – I keep looking at you, hoping I’m, well, wishing (sometimes believing) that I’m a writer, after a fashion, of sorts, perhaps or probably…
Harlan states the obvious obscurely when faced with problematics. Harlan is attracted to Meribeth, and Meribeth to Harlan, but such a combination of lives, of persons, of families, of children, of burdens and complexities = DIFFICULTY… and difficulty (for Harlan) stimulates the regurgitation of flimsy “absolutes” – or conventional, accepted “Truths” – therefore Harlan simply states – “I love her Nathan, god knows – or Whomever – or No one – that I desire and adore and wish for and ache in relation to that lady, Meribeth.” I know that, I say, being acute and observant, sometimes thinking I am a writer and therefore privileged to description and awareness.
The kids cry. The movie’s over and it’s far beyond ‘bedtime’ on the absolute clock of shoulds and woulds (for “good” parenting). Harlan says – “Brush ‘em and orchestrate [they don’t know that word, but clearly understand what it means, unlike machines or ‘predictive text’] yourselves for nighty-night!” Harlan looks at Meribeth – the sort-of ‘fun aunt’ or ‘older girl cousin’ or ‘delightful female guest’ the kids have been curious about this evening and attempted to entertain or woo or utilize to their own purposes THIS evening – with a kind of drunken swooning, a kind of animal desire, a kind of helpless confusion and bewilderment – and Meribeth looks back at him with a kind of “Am I all that? Am I really distinct, different, unique-in-the-world, exceptional?” look… and the kids begrudgingly and grumblingly rumble off toward the bathroom because Harlan’s voice has a certain gruff, man-like edge to it (a growling of a different sort of desire from authority – the older ones might tick it the ‘daddy-voice’). I notice all these things because I consider myself a ‘writer’ – a person attuned to the subtle realities of human-animalness, quirks of idiosyncratic behaviors – someone predisposed to inventing or discovering or collaging words from language into odd combinations of metaphors that might shake loose emotions related to the ways our particular species behaves (NOT thinks or reasons, or rather AND thinks and reasons) in this world – and Harlan exhibits clear, semi-drunk desire for Meribeth, and Meribeth mirrors a kind of dumb, flattered and pretend-complimentary bewilderment to Harlan’s aching want, and I jot scribbly notes into a little travel notebook with sketches of London on its cover, and people are confused and want each other [or SOMEone] and I chuckle at the ingenuity of children, and wonder at the difficulties and pronouncements that accompany the rest of us.
“It’s a boatshitload,” Harlan says.
All my Words are Silent 