24.9.06
23.9.06
God is love. I do not love. God is love. I do not love.
I have to get rid of all my art directly after I make it these days; if I don't purge it I can't stop looking at it and it immediately falls apart. I give it to people and it's alleged to be my gift to them, my narcissism, and they thank me. Why do they thank me? They are taking my monsters and housing them in the cupboards of their viscera and their intentions and their vulnerabilities. Those things get locked in. Why do they thank me? I just lose respect for what hangs around too long.
I slept through ballet because I was up at four in the morning fretting and drinking wine and reading the preface to the Phenomenology of Perception; every once in a while I would encounter a phrase or two that would cause this high laugh to issue from the top of my throat, and I had the feeling of a gradual recovery of this thing I had in my heart at all times as a child, methodical now, reimbursed by my attempts to decide whether or not this thing I was reading could possibly be about science. And I was stretched out on this hardwood floor that never fails to give me splinters and I was knowing I was going to sleep through ballet and the train horns kept sounding through long sheets of rain, passing through the open windows or closed Venetian blinds, drops in the slits perpetuating themselves, polyethylene.
Last night I didn't think that aliens or cyberstalkers were going to come find me in my sleep; all superstitions were sleeping and I wasn't sleeping and I was stretched out across the hardwood floor feeling a hysterical silence awaken and reposition itself behind my eyes, perfect and sensible like a system of wires. I know that there is no such thing as a chemical imbalance, and instead of a therapist and instead of humanism I just have this very old phenomenologist with blue eyes and white eyebrows like Santa Claus, an old man with a PhD whose job it is to tell me every Wednesday that I'm not mindful enough to be a philosopher. He yelled about Myspace and I deleted my account.
I slept through ballet because it isn't what I want, lying in the dark on the hardwood floors feeling that it is my duty and my privilege to be as feminine as is possible, friends with women who follow their boyfriends to New Haven. Jobless and hopeful women, pink subjugated bodies watching their men mill through the law programme at Yale. Women who wait to exhale, women who want to birth your children but not mine -- mine much too pure, undiscovered in peapods, in snow. What if my Freudian envy is not of the phallus but of possessing the love of another woman? Then the fault of Freud is not in his biology, and not in me, but in the very perpetuation of his idea. I slept through ballet because when I was younger I was a Tai Chi master, fasting and walking alone through forests and making effortless motions of knowledge in solitude.
I was never a woman. Nobody ever was. It has always been a lie, and nobody has clean hands. Nobody. And nobody is willing to discuss it for long, to lose blood or relearn old movements. And in the seeds of these images new answers are formulating, new answers to all those old questions about tigers, all those questions John Roewert asked me about phenomenology, on the staircase one night, doubtful and intrigued. When I find these answers unfurling themsleves they will all be running in a stampede across wet green fields, bodies oiled like Spartans, and I will run with them. We will adjust to changing air and the scent of paint and plants, and will retire to respective attics, at all times with the windows open allowing in all noise and ice. And I am going to exhale. I am going to exhale and white air will rush out.
Last night I grew desperate and teary and wanted to move in with my homophobic sexist racist Catholic capitalist Republican Grandparents in Tampa, because of the guarantee there that I would have health insurance for when breathing grows more difficult. I would have a private world and somebody would come in and order me to wake up every morning. Because I wanted to remain the product of that same old sad situation, stealing Xanax. Because I thought about how we ally ourselves with people who share values, sometimes whether they treat us well or not, because we want uniform ideologies, scarcity and necessity. Here it would arrogantly and falsely be about myself, about the sciences. But the real goal here is not myself. The real goal involves Sparta; has more to do with facticity and with overpainted walls in empty rooms, with clean strange basslines and sore sore bones. We are adapting despite fantasies and we are amalgamating disinterested vocabularies, and we are honing our intentions into the slackening threads that connect us to the world, slacken in wonder.
I slept through ballet because I was up at four in the morning fretting and drinking wine and reading the preface to the Phenomenology of Perception; every once in a while I would encounter a phrase or two that would cause this high laugh to issue from the top of my throat, and I had the feeling of a gradual recovery of this thing I had in my heart at all times as a child, methodical now, reimbursed by my attempts to decide whether or not this thing I was reading could possibly be about science. And I was stretched out on this hardwood floor that never fails to give me splinters and I was knowing I was going to sleep through ballet and the train horns kept sounding through long sheets of rain, passing through the open windows or closed Venetian blinds, drops in the slits perpetuating themselves, polyethylene.
Last night I didn't think that aliens or cyberstalkers were going to come find me in my sleep; all superstitions were sleeping and I wasn't sleeping and I was stretched out across the hardwood floor feeling a hysterical silence awaken and reposition itself behind my eyes, perfect and sensible like a system of wires. I know that there is no such thing as a chemical imbalance, and instead of a therapist and instead of humanism I just have this very old phenomenologist with blue eyes and white eyebrows like Santa Claus, an old man with a PhD whose job it is to tell me every Wednesday that I'm not mindful enough to be a philosopher. He yelled about Myspace and I deleted my account.
I slept through ballet because it isn't what I want, lying in the dark on the hardwood floors feeling that it is my duty and my privilege to be as feminine as is possible, friends with women who follow their boyfriends to New Haven. Jobless and hopeful women, pink subjugated bodies watching their men mill through the law programme at Yale. Women who wait to exhale, women who want to birth your children but not mine -- mine much too pure, undiscovered in peapods, in snow. What if my Freudian envy is not of the phallus but of possessing the love of another woman? Then the fault of Freud is not in his biology, and not in me, but in the very perpetuation of his idea. I slept through ballet because when I was younger I was a Tai Chi master, fasting and walking alone through forests and making effortless motions of knowledge in solitude.
I was never a woman. Nobody ever was. It has always been a lie, and nobody has clean hands. Nobody. And nobody is willing to discuss it for long, to lose blood or relearn old movements. And in the seeds of these images new answers are formulating, new answers to all those old questions about tigers, all those questions John Roewert asked me about phenomenology, on the staircase one night, doubtful and intrigued. When I find these answers unfurling themsleves they will all be running in a stampede across wet green fields, bodies oiled like Spartans, and I will run with them. We will adjust to changing air and the scent of paint and plants, and will retire to respective attics, at all times with the windows open allowing in all noise and ice. And I am going to exhale. I am going to exhale and white air will rush out.
Last night I grew desperate and teary and wanted to move in with my homophobic sexist racist Catholic capitalist Republican Grandparents in Tampa, because of the guarantee there that I would have health insurance for when breathing grows more difficult. I would have a private world and somebody would come in and order me to wake up every morning. Because I wanted to remain the product of that same old sad situation, stealing Xanax. Because I thought about how we ally ourselves with people who share values, sometimes whether they treat us well or not, because we want uniform ideologies, scarcity and necessity. Here it would arrogantly and falsely be about myself, about the sciences. But the real goal here is not myself. The real goal involves Sparta; has more to do with facticity and with overpainted walls in empty rooms, with clean strange basslines and sore sore bones. We are adapting despite fantasies and we are amalgamating disinterested vocabularies, and we are honing our intentions into the slackening threads that connect us to the world, slacken in wonder.
19.9.06
Some fifteen-year-old somewhere in the world.
All I can bring myself to talk about is art.
1. At the end of this video there is a performance of "Baboon," from JD's The Coroner's Gambit, that everyone everywhere should see.
2. It is my contention that John's song "Wild Sage" (from newest album Get Lonely; lyrics here ) is narrated by an anonymous one of the mental patients he worked with as a psychiatric nurse in California. The "wild sage growing in the weeds" is a metaphoric reference to the population of the insane, entangled in the panopticon beneath the grit of its institutional power, and despite their status as self-aware individuals capable of complicated thought and emotion, etc etc etc. In other news, I hate interpretation of art.
3. It seems that this is the state of things.
1. At the end of this video there is a performance of "Baboon," from JD's The Coroner's Gambit, that everyone everywhere should see.
2. It is my contention that John's song "Wild Sage" (from newest album Get Lonely; lyrics here ) is narrated by an anonymous one of the mental patients he worked with as a psychiatric nurse in California. The "wild sage growing in the weeds" is a metaphoric reference to the population of the insane, entangled in the panopticon beneath the grit of its institutional power, and despite their status as self-aware individuals capable of complicated thought and emotion, etc etc etc. In other news, I hate interpretation of art.
3. It seems that this is the state of things.
11.9.06
And all the ceilings in New York have come down.
"Boredom is the root of all evil."
[S. Kierkegaard]
I had my first kiss on September 11th, five years ago today. I remember this now, of course, because it is ominous -- this boy would later sleep with sex workers at age fourteen or fifteen, sleep with my closest friend at the time. He would attempt suicide with broken beer bottles to the wrist -- because I didn't return his phone calls. By seeing him as often as I did, I would come to witness a drug war waged with frames of doors ripped off their walls, with rusty nails and gasoline fires. In the depths of rage after an argument which itself would have directly followed a passionate kiss, he punched me in the face until I was bleeding. He once attempted to run me over with his car.
People ask all the time -- why didn't U.S. intelligence intervene in what they knew looked suspicious until it was too late? What should be a simpler question -- why did I keep seeing this boy? I thought I loved him -- what I loved was being ignorant to the fact that some human actions are absolutely intolerable. If I always tolerated him, then he became the limit to my moral world and to my freedom. We would be rendered free of judgment by any greater society. I wanted to live in a world where everything was forgivable, even unrepentant violence -- for in such a world, how could my relatively naive and gentle nature not appear saintly?
When what we want does not fall neatly into our hands, insidiously, we imagine fate edging us along. Rather than admit the necessary fact that we lack, we craft false respite from our striving with illogicality, with superstitions. This abusive relationship I was in could never truly be forged in commitment or freedom; and so we would ask fate to forge it for us. By September 11, 2002, we had broken up, but we remembered our anniversary -- not because it was ominous, but as the first of an indefinite and increasing number of reconciliations. The reconciliations happened just as the worst Hollywood film would have done them. These were the ethics of adolescence, truly, but we were and are living in a cultural atmosphere where immaturity is constantly being mistaken for vitality.
We went to dinner at a restaurant we could walk to from our high school -- he paid for everything, of course. A year after our first embrace, we spoke plainly. He let me know that he "wanted me back." We knew that we could not help but fall back into one another's arms, and so we did, our depravity teetering obscenely between hypocrisy and idealism. And I know that even now, I still want to accord these passions some dignity. Whether I want this out of a desire to redeem our ignorance, or because a part of me still wants to live in that wonderland of universal validities, amoral and boundless -- that is harder to discern.
a
[S. Kierkegaard]
I had my first kiss on September 11th, five years ago today. I remember this now, of course, because it is ominous -- this boy would later sleep with sex workers at age fourteen or fifteen, sleep with my closest friend at the time. He would attempt suicide with broken beer bottles to the wrist -- because I didn't return his phone calls. By seeing him as often as I did, I would come to witness a drug war waged with frames of doors ripped off their walls, with rusty nails and gasoline fires. In the depths of rage after an argument which itself would have directly followed a passionate kiss, he punched me in the face until I was bleeding. He once attempted to run me over with his car.
People ask all the time -- why didn't U.S. intelligence intervene in what they knew looked suspicious until it was too late? What should be a simpler question -- why did I keep seeing this boy? I thought I loved him -- what I loved was being ignorant to the fact that some human actions are absolutely intolerable. If I always tolerated him, then he became the limit to my moral world and to my freedom. We would be rendered free of judgment by any greater society. I wanted to live in a world where everything was forgivable, even unrepentant violence -- for in such a world, how could my relatively naive and gentle nature not appear saintly?
When what we want does not fall neatly into our hands, insidiously, we imagine fate edging us along. Rather than admit the necessary fact that we lack, we craft false respite from our striving with illogicality, with superstitions. This abusive relationship I was in could never truly be forged in commitment or freedom; and so we would ask fate to forge it for us. By September 11, 2002, we had broken up, but we remembered our anniversary -- not because it was ominous, but as the first of an indefinite and increasing number of reconciliations. The reconciliations happened just as the worst Hollywood film would have done them. These were the ethics of adolescence, truly, but we were and are living in a cultural atmosphere where immaturity is constantly being mistaken for vitality.
We went to dinner at a restaurant we could walk to from our high school -- he paid for everything, of course. A year after our first embrace, we spoke plainly. He let me know that he "wanted me back." We knew that we could not help but fall back into one another's arms, and so we did, our depravity teetering obscenely between hypocrisy and idealism. And I know that even now, I still want to accord these passions some dignity. Whether I want this out of a desire to redeem our ignorance, or because a part of me still wants to live in that wonderland of universal validities, amoral and boundless -- that is harder to discern.
a
8.9.06
THE INDENTIONS OF YOUR OVERTONES; THEIR RECOVERY*
when the dipping of the sun is less
a finished gift, more an organ embarassed
to have been, a seeing which draws color
to itself looking less murderous, more opaque
bruise-purple weather to me, seeping
consistent and banal through all diaries
when mornings warp awfully, running water etching
new preludes for a decade which is running
its fingers between my legs despite protest
giving mercy its name, and moving through
radio darkness gritting dirt into dark skins
hovering above that clay, grounding toothless hat-dippers
who forget the grinding of their teeth
when footsteps fall away from paged-novel pulses
and rush plagues, waking, into reclaimed water, fingering
mildew over three stacked nickels, dousing names
that exhibit their bodies in saltwater, schools of public transit
arranging in old teams; they drink the smoke of my tobacco
packed in highways and reclaiming old loyalties, harvested
like laundry stains, extending bloodless legs in broadcast
i change my position
*This is an impenetrable poem which summons up an impenetrable landscape in order to avoid actually explaining how the notion of going home is always the death of ambition
a finished gift, more an organ embarassed
to have been, a seeing which draws color
to itself looking less murderous, more opaque
bruise-purple weather to me, seeping
consistent and banal through all diaries
when mornings warp awfully, running water etching
new preludes for a decade which is running
its fingers between my legs despite protest
giving mercy its name, and moving through
radio darkness gritting dirt into dark skins
hovering above that clay, grounding toothless hat-dippers
who forget the grinding of their teeth
when footsteps fall away from paged-novel pulses
and rush plagues, waking, into reclaimed water, fingering
mildew over three stacked nickels, dousing names
that exhibit their bodies in saltwater, schools of public transit
arranging in old teams; they drink the smoke of my tobacco
packed in highways and reclaiming old loyalties, harvested
like laundry stains, extending bloodless legs in broadcast
i change my position
*This is an impenetrable poem which summons up an impenetrable landscape in order to avoid actually explaining how the notion of going home is always the death of ambition
3.9.06
A, "On Nothing In Particular"
"We never saw one another directly, of course; instead we always looked -- as any individual will always look at any other individual -- indirectly. This means that whatever we saw when we tried to look at one another was entirely mediated by the standards of an instantiated third gaze, which, we imagined, constituted the rest of society."
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