Now, normally I don't like to play around on the internets too much. It's not really my cup of tea. Porn? Sure, there's porn on the internet, but you can only watch so much before you need to start watching harder- and harder-core stuff, until you need to see two female midgets covered in poop just to be interested. So I don't watch much internet porn, because it's a gateway to internet snuff.
There's also news to be followed, but I hate reading the news. It's depressing. There's always another mass shooting spree, another Republican telling someone to fuck off, another economic plan that looks like a rich person wrote it as a way of getting his rich buddies to high-five him, another celebrity doing something embarrassing, another war in some foreign country that is tragic in the same way that Lucy pulling the football out from underneath Charlie Brown is tragic: you wish it would stop happening, but you are powerless to make it cease. It's always the same.
Mostly I use the internet to check my auto-email-bloated gmail account or find directions, and that's where it stops. But lately I have been in between jobs - I have a job, but the trainers keep pushing back the starting date to where it looks like I'll be lucky to get paid by Christmas - and I don't have cable, and Netflix doesn't run properly on our apartment complex's over-burdened WiFi, so I've been doing a lot on the internet lately. It has been shockingly unproductive.
Let's start with Facebook, which I used to frequent every day until I realized that I was so uninterested in the mundane trivia of the lives of people I know (many of whom I only know on the internet) that I couldn't look at another request to play Farmville without being physically ill. Well, I've been at it for the past few days, and I have so much of nothing to do that I find myself enthralled by the "hilarious" pictures people post and their hiking, biking, and motorcycling adventures, even though I am not really interested in any of those things per se. I find myself posting just to read my own posts, hoping that people will "like" them or - dare I dream? - respond to them. Meanwhile, nothing productive is being accomplished, I'm just holding court with the ghosts of people's lives, a kangaroo kingdom where the artifacts are photoshopped or instagrammed.
The bulk of my time has been on 4Chan's random board, where the most despicable human beings dwell in the darkness of their filth. It's like traveling to a pirate ship, except that there is porn, and intersex porn (can anyone say "trap thread"?), and Rule 34 (look it up) porn, and occasionally scat porn, and REALLY creepy stuff I don't want to even mention. Beyond the porn, there are endless political debates between downright cretins, and there are threads devoted to marijuana, and there are threads designed to incite the viewer to do damage to the feelings and property of other people, and there is just so much fear and loathing. /b/tards (self-affirmed moniker) use the n-word and call each other faggots the way most people inhale and exhale. It is the absolute dearth of decorum and decency. I kind of like it. But it's actually a counter-productive website, as it instills negative value into your life, actually makes you a worse person for being there.
I created some memes on quickmeme.com, which is a way to pass the time if you are particularly cruel or witty, neither of which I am. My favorite was one that pictured The Most Interesting Man In The World from the Dos Equis commercials, which read, "I don't always eat wings, but when I do, it's red wings." I am proud of this as I would be proud of teaching someone to read, which is probably what I actually ought to be doing with my free time instead of finding creative ways to belittle people with unfortunately popular photographs on the internet.
Tonight I experimented with chat rooms and ChatRoulette-style websites. Big mistake. It was a seminar covering what I had initially discovered in college in 1999, when I first visited a chat room: chat rooms are gay. Not as in bad, but as in they are full of gay men trolling to find other men to participate in clothing-free chatting with vigorous hand motions.
To be fair, not everyone in the chat rooms is gay. A fair number are straight men holding out hope that women will be attracted to a live image of the men ruthlessly fapping away like they are trying to start a goddamned FIRE with that thing. I saw more men rustling their jimmies tonight than I ever need to see in my life. It's not like they wait for you to say, "May I please watch you try to give yourself a hotdog handshake right now?" NO, they just come on camera (no pun intended) guns blazing, knives out, if you know what I mean.
And there is the occasional woman, some of whom are even quite attractive. I logged onto ChatRandom.com and saw a nice young lady I tried to strike up a conversation with, but she wouldn't have it. I guess "total creeper here" is not the way to approach the young ladies. (I was trying to joke, but I forget that there is only one person in the world who would take that as a humorous comment right off the bat, and she's my girlfriend.) I left the site ashamed, probably creeped that young lady right the fuck out.
Non-cam chat rooms are even more of a headache. Case in point, Omegle.com. Half the time, the other person has a connection so slow (or their typing speed is that of a sloth on sedatives) so that you can't really have a conversation that isn't one-sided. "Hey...asl [age, sex, location]...are you there?...fine...be that way...connection terminated. The other half the time, you end up with someone who insults you right off the bat, or someone who is clearly batshit crazy. "Hi." "SO TELL ME WHAT YA WANT WHAT YA REALLY REALLY WANT" Okay, then. I want you to stop.
The only really useful site I found is CounterPunch, which is an anarcho-leftist publication that really brings me down. The utter hopelessness of the left to change anything in this country is shameful. But that's not what I'm here to talk about. I'm here to tell tales of the internets!
That's all I've got so far.
If there's more to it, please tell me. Leave a comment or email me at andrewkottwitz@gmail.com.
Thursday, August 23, 2012
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
I Am Over If
"Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken."
-Rudyard Kipling, "If"
I have never even read the Dumas. Nor fils nor pere. It was a gas. Or it was supposed to have been. We smoked Gauloises on the Canebiere and talked about what it would be like to speak French and live on the French Riviera, the famed mystical place spoken of so frequently on broadcast primetime television shows in the late 80s and early 90s. You always wanted to go there and I always wanted to be with you.
It's too late. You can't appropriate someone else's dreams, or you just end up with poorly transplanted nightmares. It's a shame I never had my own dreams, but I have always been a little blessed, you might have said, "bless-ED," as in "poor of spirit." Your dreams just seemed like they were so much more attainable and formed. I want the airy night to seep into my skin and become a china pattern that will withstand the test of time, like Wedgwood, the summer wind to caress me and change form into a miniature butterfly dancing a graceless, tripping rondeau through my hands to describe an eternal feeling of awestruck compassion for the world, as the evening on the downs in London when I discovered that the faerie kingdom awaits those who see with the patience and wonder of a child's eyes. You want to get a decent set of china that won't chip too easily when you get married, but you never want to marry. It's more practical, you say, to marry for gifts and divorce after one tax year.
Looking up from your roll-top desk one night, over your cat's-eye glasses, with a wink you said you thought your tax return might afford you a vacation this year. My taxes were left undone, as I knew I'd be left owing as every other year, so I slouched over to you to squeeze you and hold you tight, my arms slung over your neck from around the back of your chair.
You called me a heartless pussy. So right you were, I don't think you will ever know how right you have been about that all along. But I did it for you, everything for you. It was easy enough to save up the money, even for that machine-bought package of Gauloises with the fleet bell-helmet of Mercury emblazoned on the vein-blue box since neither of us smoked any more. We didn't need much, just airline tickets, backpacks full of dried food goods, and a few Euros bought dearly at the airport. Your genuine, industrious frugality and my petulant cheapness masked as attention to less worldly concerns complemented each other in the realm of travel. Just to be there, halfway around the world on a day with nothing more than the blue sky opened at our feet like the petals of some miraculous flower left here for us by the gods, that was enough.
The bleached-white stone and stucco of the villas and hotels slackened everything, gouging into us and slashing across our foreheads, and turned our footsteps into halting, altitude-sick affairs. The heavy Mediterranean air with its taste of salt mixed with bottle after bottle of spring water with effervescent bubbles turned us each into a tug buoyed by carbonic gas, dragging our precious cargo along endless promenades and diversions, over sea walls and under bridges older than our family names. How could we lose, the sun damning us to half-steam, but some internal sense guiding us to the Isle d'If? If.
"If," your response was always "If" whenever I asked where you would like to go most in the world. It took research after some fair-handed stumbling in the right direction. Eventually I learned to reply, "Marseilles, I hear, is nice in the summer and autumn."
"The famed Chateau d'If is, in fact, a military installation," I wanted to murmur when we arrived by ferry, "and like all military installations, If is essentially a rock with barracks on top. We'll be lucky if there's grass." There was none. If was a prison, much like Alcatraz, and has finally become a tourist attraction. It reminds me of Dover Castle, preserved so well that there is almost nothing of value to be gleaned from the visiting of it. If was never tested, never given over to enemies, never escaped. If was an isolationist hellhole and has become a different kind of vortex, a drain on attention. If was never a sight for sore eyes, but I kept my mouth shut.
My own Iron Mask I wore for hours as we climbed stairs and searched every nook and cranny of the place for traces of historical and literary relevance. Your childish face went girlish to the point of cloying, beckoning saccharine; it was a mystery to be uncovered for you, and the only joy I got from the place was watching you fall further into the trance you had woven for yourself from old books and realistic dreams. If had you under its spell. You had lost your head, and I tried to keep mine for the both of us. I tried not to tire by waiting. But the waiting left me wanting.
By the time we returned to Marseilles proper, our micro-vacation was coming to a close. Your expectant eyes were hesitant at every turn. You really looked like a rabbit on the run. I know I should have been full of love and appreciation for your enchantment, but as we dined at a simple peasant cafe watching the sun set over the Bay of Marseilles with the imaginary Iberia in the distance, all I could think about was what a wasted day the Chateau d'If had been. You have never been more beautiful than you were that evening, in a simple floral dress with white azaleas woven in your hair - when you came down from the hostel steps to meet me outside, smoking cigarettes again, Eliot's "La Figlia Che Piange" rang in my head like a fire alarm - your smile an intoxicant more powerful than any wine I have ever tasted, your laugh and cajolery urging me, a stoic for today, to breathe life and you into my lungs, to allow the moment to wash over me.
It was impossible. The sun crashed behind distant clouds and I wracked us on unfamiliar shores, icy and impenetrable, more like fjords thousands of miles North than the byzantine, fingerling-shaped cavities more conversant with this arcing French coastline. The rabbit-delirium of your eyes solidified so instantaneously into glacial venom, I almost fell out of my chair, frozen.
You swore you had lost a friend that day - "Where did you go? Where are you?" you asked, and my reply was deafening: silence - and I was to see later just how lost I had become, and how Antarctic you could be on the airplane ride home, the telephone calls, the pleading late-night knocks on the doors, the dazed, blinding, wandering ecstasy of anguish visited upon me by my own shame. "Not even the man I hate." You sneered, "Not even a man."
A question burns through me, through this promontory sheet of ice I wear like an albatross, my face pressed out into the searing wind, a question I cannot bear to speak aloud. It scours the corners of my mind, banishing the doldrums to elsewhere wherever they are found. I am haunted by the beckoning words repeated like an incantation raising spirits of love's labor lost, at once soft and sharp, a featherbed of nails. These memories rend and destroy, slowly, churning every part of my existence into debris and dust; when they recede I will be an unkempt cemetery, horrifying, sepulchral grotesques of granite strewn about. When they recede perhaps I can again ask my question, in the burgeoning sprigs of fresh grass, clumpy and lush, by a cool stream near no bridge or wall. When they recede perhaps I can be a man. When, O when, will the sun shine again?
-Rudyard Kipling, "If"
I have never even read the Dumas. Nor fils nor pere. It was a gas. Or it was supposed to have been. We smoked Gauloises on the Canebiere and talked about what it would be like to speak French and live on the French Riviera, the famed mystical place spoken of so frequently on broadcast primetime television shows in the late 80s and early 90s. You always wanted to go there and I always wanted to be with you.
It's too late. You can't appropriate someone else's dreams, or you just end up with poorly transplanted nightmares. It's a shame I never had my own dreams, but I have always been a little blessed, you might have said, "bless-ED," as in "poor of spirit." Your dreams just seemed like they were so much more attainable and formed. I want the airy night to seep into my skin and become a china pattern that will withstand the test of time, like Wedgwood, the summer wind to caress me and change form into a miniature butterfly dancing a graceless, tripping rondeau through my hands to describe an eternal feeling of awestruck compassion for the world, as the evening on the downs in London when I discovered that the faerie kingdom awaits those who see with the patience and wonder of a child's eyes. You want to get a decent set of china that won't chip too easily when you get married, but you never want to marry. It's more practical, you say, to marry for gifts and divorce after one tax year.
Looking up from your roll-top desk one night, over your cat's-eye glasses, with a wink you said you thought your tax return might afford you a vacation this year. My taxes were left undone, as I knew I'd be left owing as every other year, so I slouched over to you to squeeze you and hold you tight, my arms slung over your neck from around the back of your chair.
You called me a heartless pussy. So right you were, I don't think you will ever know how right you have been about that all along. But I did it for you, everything for you. It was easy enough to save up the money, even for that machine-bought package of Gauloises with the fleet bell-helmet of Mercury emblazoned on the vein-blue box since neither of us smoked any more. We didn't need much, just airline tickets, backpacks full of dried food goods, and a few Euros bought dearly at the airport. Your genuine, industrious frugality and my petulant cheapness masked as attention to less worldly concerns complemented each other in the realm of travel. Just to be there, halfway around the world on a day with nothing more than the blue sky opened at our feet like the petals of some miraculous flower left here for us by the gods, that was enough.
The bleached-white stone and stucco of the villas and hotels slackened everything, gouging into us and slashing across our foreheads, and turned our footsteps into halting, altitude-sick affairs. The heavy Mediterranean air with its taste of salt mixed with bottle after bottle of spring water with effervescent bubbles turned us each into a tug buoyed by carbonic gas, dragging our precious cargo along endless promenades and diversions, over sea walls and under bridges older than our family names. How could we lose, the sun damning us to half-steam, but some internal sense guiding us to the Isle d'If? If.
"If," your response was always "If" whenever I asked where you would like to go most in the world. It took research after some fair-handed stumbling in the right direction. Eventually I learned to reply, "Marseilles, I hear, is nice in the summer and autumn."
"The famed Chateau d'If is, in fact, a military installation," I wanted to murmur when we arrived by ferry, "and like all military installations, If is essentially a rock with barracks on top. We'll be lucky if there's grass." There was none. If was a prison, much like Alcatraz, and has finally become a tourist attraction. It reminds me of Dover Castle, preserved so well that there is almost nothing of value to be gleaned from the visiting of it. If was never tested, never given over to enemies, never escaped. If was an isolationist hellhole and has become a different kind of vortex, a drain on attention. If was never a sight for sore eyes, but I kept my mouth shut.
My own Iron Mask I wore for hours as we climbed stairs and searched every nook and cranny of the place for traces of historical and literary relevance. Your childish face went girlish to the point of cloying, beckoning saccharine; it was a mystery to be uncovered for you, and the only joy I got from the place was watching you fall further into the trance you had woven for yourself from old books and realistic dreams. If had you under its spell. You had lost your head, and I tried to keep mine for the both of us. I tried not to tire by waiting. But the waiting left me wanting.
By the time we returned to Marseilles proper, our micro-vacation was coming to a close. Your expectant eyes were hesitant at every turn. You really looked like a rabbit on the run. I know I should have been full of love and appreciation for your enchantment, but as we dined at a simple peasant cafe watching the sun set over the Bay of Marseilles with the imaginary Iberia in the distance, all I could think about was what a wasted day the Chateau d'If had been. You have never been more beautiful than you were that evening, in a simple floral dress with white azaleas woven in your hair - when you came down from the hostel steps to meet me outside, smoking cigarettes again, Eliot's "La Figlia Che Piange" rang in my head like a fire alarm - your smile an intoxicant more powerful than any wine I have ever tasted, your laugh and cajolery urging me, a stoic for today, to breathe life and you into my lungs, to allow the moment to wash over me.
It was impossible. The sun crashed behind distant clouds and I wracked us on unfamiliar shores, icy and impenetrable, more like fjords thousands of miles North than the byzantine, fingerling-shaped cavities more conversant with this arcing French coastline. The rabbit-delirium of your eyes solidified so instantaneously into glacial venom, I almost fell out of my chair, frozen.
You swore you had lost a friend that day - "Where did you go? Where are you?" you asked, and my reply was deafening: silence - and I was to see later just how lost I had become, and how Antarctic you could be on the airplane ride home, the telephone calls, the pleading late-night knocks on the doors, the dazed, blinding, wandering ecstasy of anguish visited upon me by my own shame. "Not even the man I hate." You sneered, "Not even a man."
A question burns through me, through this promontory sheet of ice I wear like an albatross, my face pressed out into the searing wind, a question I cannot bear to speak aloud. It scours the corners of my mind, banishing the doldrums to elsewhere wherever they are found. I am haunted by the beckoning words repeated like an incantation raising spirits of love's labor lost, at once soft and sharp, a featherbed of nails. These memories rend and destroy, slowly, churning every part of my existence into debris and dust; when they recede I will be an unkempt cemetery, horrifying, sepulchral grotesques of granite strewn about. When they recede perhaps I can again ask my question, in the burgeoning sprigs of fresh grass, clumpy and lush, by a cool stream near no bridge or wall. When they recede perhaps I can be a man. When, O when, will the sun shine again?
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Rejection
Weight of the world comes sliping down over my halter-bit, and strikes back at my neck. In giving myself to this intent, I have come further than ever, tendons straining and breaking at the thought of pushing one more day through the muck. Your favorite doctor is the one who gives you this broken formula, the solution to your answers, the nagging question underneath the ringing ears and the days spent scarred and weary returning from the Outlands.
I walk up from the beach and struggle to discern one thing from another. There are diseased-looking pieces of driftwood here, branches involuted and upheaved from somewhere strange and unworldly. An endless shore, the drift stretches for miles. Above, only an almost cloudless sky, with a curved knife-edge of white at the horizon, a slipknot around the breaking waves in the distance. A seemingly eternal high-pressure front sweeps the sky clear of anything clouding the transparent, seamless blue. In the morning the sun glares through a specter in red, and at night the purple-black bruise darkens slowly until the sun disappears and the entire sky switches to black in an almost singular effort. The single feathery cloud at the eastern sea horizon never leaves, never grows, never flutters an eyelid. At the outer edge of the world, there must be torment and turmoil, there must be somewhere displacing all this serenity so that it spills over onto this land here. It can't be this way everywhere.
'How did I get here?' This is the arbitrary question of the day. It is as arbitrary as any other question, as the questions of concern and pity and doubt: 'Are they looking for me?' 'Will they ever find me?' 'What could it matter anyway?' The endless repeated mantra of self-delusion that once kept me afloat has become a comfort rather than a neurosis. The more pressing questions of shelter and food and companionship are taken care of before they are even described by the mind's formless paintbrush.
The temperature is cool at night, but not uncomfortable, and during the day becomes hot but not unbearable. There is plenty of shade at any rate to shield one from the sun's impenetrable stare, underneath the broad-leaf palms up on the sandbar just below the dunes. Eating is unnecessary; I have not been hungry for weeks, having last consumed a half a coconut and the mild, watery milk contained within. There are plenty of fallen coconuts and very little effort to break them open. Very little energy required, too. A real hearty meal is only a sincere pleasure if it is preceded by a hard-won battle with Labor, who is conspicuously absent from here. My skin has begun to hang from my bones, my ribs yawn through the musculature meant to bind them, and my back, though I cannot see it, is surely punctuated by the rounded, bony protrusions of my scapulae and vertebrae. My eyes are likely as hollow and sunken as a half-coconut in the sand. My teeth haven't begun to ache, so I assume they are still amenable to pestulary grinding; coconut flesh is soft, too.
As for companionship, there is none necessary. Every day is more beautiful than the last. I rarely feel alone, and contemplation of the weary forms that wash up on shore and are subsequently dragged back to sea - bundles of thick, ropy kelp, crabs, the occasional tortoise, and seagulls and terns, in addition to new sepulchres in the driftwood graveyard - keeps me endlessly fascinated. I make the same observations, nearly every day a repetition of form and function, never recording anything nor feeling the urge to make contact with the system I have run across: this endless devoury, the cycle of birth and rebirth, death and decay.
Nor have I any urge to share: 'What would be the point?' I am bound to ask myself when the urge arises in my gullet, and I choke it back. 'My observations and sequestral existence are so far-removed from anything called human that I should be hardly any more sensible than a preverbal child.' Some speak of the presence of a Divine Power - I have heard them before, at least, in a life before this one - but I have felt nothing like it to speak of. If this feeling of peace and well-being of which they speak is unattainable through action, why should one seek to attain it? Grace, as I know it, is given to me here on this windswept spit of an island.
Over the dunes are the other side. There is no discernible way around them. They stand, immovable and impassable, except overland. I have hiked, on my first arrival here, for hours and days, in one and both directions, with no progress toward any obvious end; there are miles, and miles only. The dunes are relatively easy to surmount; it takes about an hour of scrabbling upward, throwing the body at odd angles and pitches, occasionally grabbing onto scrub-grasses. The important thing is forward motion, continue ahead at all costs, or else the shifting sands and gravity simply draw any object tumbling down. Static inertia is not achievable for any body among the dunes, except the hardy scrub-grasses. I have imagined that were I to inhabit this part of the island, making upward progress as slowly as possible, perhaps at the rate of one step per day, I would be able to transmute and learn the secrets of the dusty, dry grasses, fasten myself tenaciously to the side of the dunes, and wilt, blowing away over time. There is no real desire to this kind of annihilation; simply going up the dunes is enough for me at this time. There is no particular satisfaction from achieving this goal, but the process of meeting an objective (or giving in, failing, tumbling harmlessly down the sandy incline) assuages the guilt of a worthless, priceless, powerless existence.
From atop the dunes I can see nothing new. A gaping blue pool surrounding me, the thin line of this land stretching to infinite distances. One night, I waited until the sun went down to watch the stars from here, and was given a spectacle like I have never witnessed. The sky was seemingly half-white with stars. As yet I haven't felt the need to repeat this show; it remains etched into my consciousness from here on out.
On the other side of the dunes it is the same as what I have come to feel is 'my side.' There are the same palms, coconuts, small scrub grasses and life, and it seems almost a mirror image of my side, so much so that I have never descended to the beach on the other side, so certain that I am that the water is the same water, the crabs the same crabs, and the wind the same wind.
I want for neither fire nor water, nor consort nor companion. My heart is at peace, beyond reception or sympathy. Bloodless, loveless, harmless, bodiless, devoid of even void, this whisper in my ear whispers no regret, no longing, only sibilant sighing.
I walk up from the beach and struggle to discern one thing from another. There are diseased-looking pieces of driftwood here, branches involuted and upheaved from somewhere strange and unworldly. An endless shore, the drift stretches for miles. Above, only an almost cloudless sky, with a curved knife-edge of white at the horizon, a slipknot around the breaking waves in the distance. A seemingly eternal high-pressure front sweeps the sky clear of anything clouding the transparent, seamless blue. In the morning the sun glares through a specter in red, and at night the purple-black bruise darkens slowly until the sun disappears and the entire sky switches to black in an almost singular effort. The single feathery cloud at the eastern sea horizon never leaves, never grows, never flutters an eyelid. At the outer edge of the world, there must be torment and turmoil, there must be somewhere displacing all this serenity so that it spills over onto this land here. It can't be this way everywhere.
'How did I get here?' This is the arbitrary question of the day. It is as arbitrary as any other question, as the questions of concern and pity and doubt: 'Are they looking for me?' 'Will they ever find me?' 'What could it matter anyway?' The endless repeated mantra of self-delusion that once kept me afloat has become a comfort rather than a neurosis. The more pressing questions of shelter and food and companionship are taken care of before they are even described by the mind's formless paintbrush.
The temperature is cool at night, but not uncomfortable, and during the day becomes hot but not unbearable. There is plenty of shade at any rate to shield one from the sun's impenetrable stare, underneath the broad-leaf palms up on the sandbar just below the dunes. Eating is unnecessary; I have not been hungry for weeks, having last consumed a half a coconut and the mild, watery milk contained within. There are plenty of fallen coconuts and very little effort to break them open. Very little energy required, too. A real hearty meal is only a sincere pleasure if it is preceded by a hard-won battle with Labor, who is conspicuously absent from here. My skin has begun to hang from my bones, my ribs yawn through the musculature meant to bind them, and my back, though I cannot see it, is surely punctuated by the rounded, bony protrusions of my scapulae and vertebrae. My eyes are likely as hollow and sunken as a half-coconut in the sand. My teeth haven't begun to ache, so I assume they are still amenable to pestulary grinding; coconut flesh is soft, too.
As for companionship, there is none necessary. Every day is more beautiful than the last. I rarely feel alone, and contemplation of the weary forms that wash up on shore and are subsequently dragged back to sea - bundles of thick, ropy kelp, crabs, the occasional tortoise, and seagulls and terns, in addition to new sepulchres in the driftwood graveyard - keeps me endlessly fascinated. I make the same observations, nearly every day a repetition of form and function, never recording anything nor feeling the urge to make contact with the system I have run across: this endless devoury, the cycle of birth and rebirth, death and decay.
Nor have I any urge to share: 'What would be the point?' I am bound to ask myself when the urge arises in my gullet, and I choke it back. 'My observations and sequestral existence are so far-removed from anything called human that I should be hardly any more sensible than a preverbal child.' Some speak of the presence of a Divine Power - I have heard them before, at least, in a life before this one - but I have felt nothing like it to speak of. If this feeling of peace and well-being of which they speak is unattainable through action, why should one seek to attain it? Grace, as I know it, is given to me here on this windswept spit of an island.
Over the dunes are the other side. There is no discernible way around them. They stand, immovable and impassable, except overland. I have hiked, on my first arrival here, for hours and days, in one and both directions, with no progress toward any obvious end; there are miles, and miles only. The dunes are relatively easy to surmount; it takes about an hour of scrabbling upward, throwing the body at odd angles and pitches, occasionally grabbing onto scrub-grasses. The important thing is forward motion, continue ahead at all costs, or else the shifting sands and gravity simply draw any object tumbling down. Static inertia is not achievable for any body among the dunes, except the hardy scrub-grasses. I have imagined that were I to inhabit this part of the island, making upward progress as slowly as possible, perhaps at the rate of one step per day, I would be able to transmute and learn the secrets of the dusty, dry grasses, fasten myself tenaciously to the side of the dunes, and wilt, blowing away over time. There is no real desire to this kind of annihilation; simply going up the dunes is enough for me at this time. There is no particular satisfaction from achieving this goal, but the process of meeting an objective (or giving in, failing, tumbling harmlessly down the sandy incline) assuages the guilt of a worthless, priceless, powerless existence.
From atop the dunes I can see nothing new. A gaping blue pool surrounding me, the thin line of this land stretching to infinite distances. One night, I waited until the sun went down to watch the stars from here, and was given a spectacle like I have never witnessed. The sky was seemingly half-white with stars. As yet I haven't felt the need to repeat this show; it remains etched into my consciousness from here on out.
On the other side of the dunes it is the same as what I have come to feel is 'my side.' There are the same palms, coconuts, small scrub grasses and life, and it seems almost a mirror image of my side, so much so that I have never descended to the beach on the other side, so certain that I am that the water is the same water, the crabs the same crabs, and the wind the same wind.
I want for neither fire nor water, nor consort nor companion. My heart is at peace, beyond reception or sympathy. Bloodless, loveless, harmless, bodiless, devoid of even void, this whisper in my ear whispers no regret, no longing, only sibilant sighing.
Saturday, January 23, 2010
It Sleeps In The Cupboard Next To The Flour
There’s a hold on my soul. Someone’s waiting there on the other side, but I am not fucking returning it yet. The fines keep mounting. They never get paid. I keep waiting to hear from the abyss, a letter informing me of the state of my account, politely assuming that I am driven by a fear of consequences, assuming that I am driven to make my payment schedule more manageable, assuming that I have peace of mind in the distance, off there away from here somewhere, waiting for me, as if my serenity were simply something to be traded for the past due balance I have acquired. My load grows heavier, and all I can say to you is, “Give me more.” Every time I walk into the library, with my soul under my arms - it is not a slim volume - fluttering gently (as the little spritle's feathery wings tend to do indoors) and sending little tufts of down whispering to the floor, the librarian gives me an evil eye. She has been watching me. She has been Keeping Track. She knows me.
I usually smile back, no matter how sour her face gets. I want to let her know that I am unruffled, if my soul is a little uneasy. I am perfectly content. She keeps one of these old-fashioned ledgers, the kind with columns built in, for marking the books, call numbers, names, and dates she loans out. She sometimes pretends to make a little note in her ledger when I walk by. I know she has nothing to mark in the space next to my name, because I have seen the column headings, and there is nothing of subjective value to be recorded there. Only concrete fact finds a place in her leather-bound kingdom. She cannot place a check in the box marked ‘douche bag.’ There is no box marked thus, and she is too dim or lazy to create one. Until I return my soul, she has no right to calculate a fine, and she knows it as well as I do. The librarian’s cat’s-eye glasses dangle precariously above the precipice of her nose. A gold-colored chain hooked to the arms of the glasses sags behind her neck, covered in back by a foreboding curtain of wheat-colored hair. The neck under that hair must be white as driven snow, but I wonder if anyone has ever seen it. She would be sexy, even, if she didn’t look so terse all the time.
My soul was sitting on the magazine shelves, uncategorized next to Sports Illustrated and Sporting News, when I found it. Maybe if the librarian spent more time re-filing books and less time judging people I would never have stumbled over my soul in the first place, so I guess I have to thank her for that. Maybe that’s what the smile is for: “You keep it up, you are doing good work: look at what I’ve got.” I was just looking for back issues of Spin magazine to read up on what I’d been missing. I know Spin isn’t necessarily everything, but it beats Rolling Stone these days.
So there my soul was, wrapped up in a yellow baby blanket, one of those unimaginably soft, hypoallergenic things that end up so covered in vomit and burp-up that they are crusty and useless. This one was still good, although there were a few flecks of blood from where my soul had bled a little. My soul coughed and creaked a little when I opened it up, as I imagine the door to a long-sealed mausoleum would if it were disturbed. I used to carry my soul around in that baby blanket all the time, because I was worried it would burn or peel, but it kept squirming out. In this way I knew it had recovered and needed to be free. More or less; I can’t just set it into the wild. It was never feral and so would be devoured in short order. To let it loose among those volumes of dense, mysterious encyclopedias and cutting psychological thrillers, not to mention the SF mind-benders…things could get dangerous quickly. You have to work up to these things. I’ve been introducing it to Curious George and some young adult fiction, a few mealy-mouthed spiritual texts, and collections of ghost stories here and there. When it gets stronger, it can begin to trudge through the classics and the canon, into the outer reaches of the philosophical void, or even into Romance or Westerns. I have no prejudice. But for now I keep it on a short leash with close scrutiny.
It’s not as if I am not taking care of my soul, and besides, it’s mine by all rights. I accidentally donated it when I gave away a bunch of books. It must have jumped into the box; it’s my fault for not paying attention, but you’d think the library would be more forgiving about that kind of thing. No, sir. “Yes, we do have a soul here, sir, but it’s in the archives.” I didn’t have time to wait two weeks while they dusted it off, so I gave up hope and just went about my business for a while. Since it was the only library in town, and I like to read but have scant spending money, I kept returning, without any thought of my soul. It just didn’t occur to me.
Until the day I saw it on the shelf. I am not giving it back. I may have to move, change my name and face, my social security number and banking information, my identity, so that I can live and again borrow books from a public library. I may have to learn a new language, take up exercise or recreational drug use, take part in a race for public office, set myself on fire, or eat strange and beautiful creatures I had previously thought were mythical. My soul will be my guiding light. The red tape, the bureaucracy of naming and of facts, the struggling against the restrictive would all be meaningless were it not for the singularity of my purpose, the wholeness and ineffability of my soul.Inscrutable, inseparable, indestructible. We will, must, conquer; and we will, must, be conquered unto ourselves.
I usually smile back, no matter how sour her face gets. I want to let her know that I am unruffled, if my soul is a little uneasy. I am perfectly content. She keeps one of these old-fashioned ledgers, the kind with columns built in, for marking the books, call numbers, names, and dates she loans out. She sometimes pretends to make a little note in her ledger when I walk by. I know she has nothing to mark in the space next to my name, because I have seen the column headings, and there is nothing of subjective value to be recorded there. Only concrete fact finds a place in her leather-bound kingdom. She cannot place a check in the box marked ‘douche bag.’ There is no box marked thus, and she is too dim or lazy to create one. Until I return my soul, she has no right to calculate a fine, and she knows it as well as I do. The librarian’s cat’s-eye glasses dangle precariously above the precipice of her nose. A gold-colored chain hooked to the arms of the glasses sags behind her neck, covered in back by a foreboding curtain of wheat-colored hair. The neck under that hair must be white as driven snow, but I wonder if anyone has ever seen it. She would be sexy, even, if she didn’t look so terse all the time.
My soul was sitting on the magazine shelves, uncategorized next to Sports Illustrated and Sporting News, when I found it. Maybe if the librarian spent more time re-filing books and less time judging people I would never have stumbled over my soul in the first place, so I guess I have to thank her for that. Maybe that’s what the smile is for: “You keep it up, you are doing good work: look at what I’ve got.” I was just looking for back issues of Spin magazine to read up on what I’d been missing. I know Spin isn’t necessarily everything, but it beats Rolling Stone these days.
So there my soul was, wrapped up in a yellow baby blanket, one of those unimaginably soft, hypoallergenic things that end up so covered in vomit and burp-up that they are crusty and useless. This one was still good, although there were a few flecks of blood from where my soul had bled a little. My soul coughed and creaked a little when I opened it up, as I imagine the door to a long-sealed mausoleum would if it were disturbed. I used to carry my soul around in that baby blanket all the time, because I was worried it would burn or peel, but it kept squirming out. In this way I knew it had recovered and needed to be free. More or less; I can’t just set it into the wild. It was never feral and so would be devoured in short order. To let it loose among those volumes of dense, mysterious encyclopedias and cutting psychological thrillers, not to mention the SF mind-benders…things could get dangerous quickly. You have to work up to these things. I’ve been introducing it to Curious George and some young adult fiction, a few mealy-mouthed spiritual texts, and collections of ghost stories here and there. When it gets stronger, it can begin to trudge through the classics and the canon, into the outer reaches of the philosophical void, or even into Romance or Westerns. I have no prejudice. But for now I keep it on a short leash with close scrutiny.
It’s not as if I am not taking care of my soul, and besides, it’s mine by all rights. I accidentally donated it when I gave away a bunch of books. It must have jumped into the box; it’s my fault for not paying attention, but you’d think the library would be more forgiving about that kind of thing. No, sir. “Yes, we do have a soul here, sir, but it’s in the archives.” I didn’t have time to wait two weeks while they dusted it off, so I gave up hope and just went about my business for a while. Since it was the only library in town, and I like to read but have scant spending money, I kept returning, without any thought of my soul. It just didn’t occur to me.
Until the day I saw it on the shelf. I am not giving it back. I may have to move, change my name and face, my social security number and banking information, my identity, so that I can live and again borrow books from a public library. I may have to learn a new language, take up exercise or recreational drug use, take part in a race for public office, set myself on fire, or eat strange and beautiful creatures I had previously thought were mythical. My soul will be my guiding light. The red tape, the bureaucracy of naming and of facts, the struggling against the restrictive would all be meaningless were it not for the singularity of my purpose, the wholeness and ineffability of my soul.Inscrutable, inseparable, indestructible. We will, must, conquer; and we will, must, be conquered unto ourselves.
Monday, January 18, 2010
Water, Light, Music, Food
Warm sunbeams compose a symphony to my rain-wracked face,
Revive my arms with subtle soothing hymns, singing "Hallelujah,"
Flood the south face of the house, the dining room awash in amber,
Sky cracked open by branches of manifold maples. The sun hums
In the wake of heavy, gray Winter, the foam atop icy black glass.
Depthless basso stillness, rolling beneath and stretching infinite
Out to the horizon, agitated ever so gently, abides never so clearly
As on these days the sparkling sunlight lives there liquid, mercurial,
Twinkling like wind-chimes on the doldrums. Countless points of light
Assail my vision, my lids heavy, contented, satiated on this bright feast.
Revive my arms with subtle soothing hymns, singing "Hallelujah,"
Flood the south face of the house, the dining room awash in amber,
Sky cracked open by branches of manifold maples. The sun hums
In the wake of heavy, gray Winter, the foam atop icy black glass.
Depthless basso stillness, rolling beneath and stretching infinite
Out to the horizon, agitated ever so gently, abides never so clearly
As on these days the sparkling sunlight lives there liquid, mercurial,
Twinkling like wind-chimes on the doldrums. Countless points of light
Assail my vision, my lids heavy, contented, satiated on this bright feast.
Friday, January 1, 2010
New Year's Resolutions
I resolve to be a better friend, lover, son, and brother.
I resolve to give more of myself and take less from others.
To the eight directions I scatter my ashes,
The feeble and useless wastrel that I have been cast
Into the wind and rain, into the mouth of the cave.
Submerged and bloated, my only consolation gleams
In a shimmering square that lets the light in overhead,
A diaphanous, pulsing window shuffling toward sunset.
I resolve to bleed fear and hatred from every pore,
To wring these foul humors from my bones and sinew
Until I am purified and made whole, alive, again.
I resolve to tan my remains, stretched over my skeleton.
When my artifice fits the construct, the stuff of me,
Snug like a baseball glove, worn and leathery, chapped
Somewhere between good use and good form, let me die.
Take me out some sunny day, and remember.
The smell of oil and leather, the old satiny palm,
A crease between the ring and middle finger,
Cuff splashed with a bright red label: Rawlings.
I will give you what I can, what I have and am:
Protection, a soft fleshy barrier, worn to fit.
I resolve to give more of myself and take less from others.
To the eight directions I scatter my ashes,
The feeble and useless wastrel that I have been cast
Into the wind and rain, into the mouth of the cave.
Submerged and bloated, my only consolation gleams
In a shimmering square that lets the light in overhead,
A diaphanous, pulsing window shuffling toward sunset.
I resolve to bleed fear and hatred from every pore,
To wring these foul humors from my bones and sinew
Until I am purified and made whole, alive, again.
I resolve to tan my remains, stretched over my skeleton.
When my artifice fits the construct, the stuff of me,
Snug like a baseball glove, worn and leathery, chapped
Somewhere between good use and good form, let me die.
Take me out some sunny day, and remember.
The smell of oil and leather, the old satiny palm,
A crease between the ring and middle finger,
Cuff splashed with a bright red label: Rawlings.
I will give you what I can, what I have and am:
Protection, a soft fleshy barrier, worn to fit.
Monday, November 23, 2009
Night-time screams out in yellow in my ears. "There is somethin' out here! You want to breathe this cold air!" A lot of nights I used to spend just walking around, with really nothing to do. All was right with the world, in a way that I fear I can never get back. I would trek around the byways of cities in which I lived, overground route-finding, zigging from zag to zag, looking for things going on. As a kid I always wondered what happened to the world after dark, where everything went, what went on in the places I recognized during the daytime. As an adult I have grown to learn that nothing happens anywhere, not even during the daytime. But especially not at night.
You learn the most about a city at night. During the day you can learn about what a city once was or wants to be, but all the cultural exhibits, streetside plaques, and brand-new buildings tell you nothing about what it means to be in the city from day to day. All I have ever known about any city I have known because of the streets at night. During the day you go to an art museum, you walk around and see everything plainly: here is the dock, there is the bridge, over there is something else entirely. What is it? Oh: only another bridge. Geography is garish and renders itself unnecessary when the sun is out. There is no need to worry. If you get lost, you can look a little harder, you can find a way to get to where you are going, even if you have to ask someone on the street. Look over there. There's the bridge we just crossed. It's pretty much the same as this bridge over here. Let's cross this one now, we can still see the bridge we just crossed anyway.
But at night, cities have a different feel. Liquid blackness fills the spaces that used to render themselves so clearly, so vividly. Now the bridge is a tunnel, a horizontal abyss dripping with oily darkness. These bridges all look the same: this isn't right. Was I just at this bridge? There's no one around to ask, and the streetside plaques are all tarnished and smeared with food and food grease. I just want to get home now. The art museum is lit up like a French whore, but it's not even open. There is no good art now, except the art of getting my ass home. You walk around and look into windows here and there, trying to discern what it is that people are doing with themselves. Trying to join them, if only for a moment. The whoosh of buses on wet pavement form the structure of the soundscape and yells, sharp metallic clicks and tire squeals, fill the framework with wordless terror. The night is constructing a cage for you, made of your own fear and loathing. You are here, you are separate from those people who live among the willing, the indoors are for them. You have somewhere to be, but where could it be?
What you learn about cities at night that you cannot learn during the day is what the city does with its leisure time. The city doesn't like work much. No one does. The city works because it has to pay rent, commutes and recoils in frustration at the amount of pollution in the air. The city has to do what the city has to do. All cities do this, and no one city's work is really substantially different from another's work. Some work in factories and some in offices, some have to smile when they sell you back your soul, and some only really need to be there to make sure you aren't going to steal anything, but every city shows up and suits up because it has to. But what cities do during their leisure time is different: it is everything.
Does the city have a penchant for strip clubs, prostitution, gambling, drinking, drugs? Does the city simply fall asleep in front of the latest Must See TV shows, only to wake up hours later to reruns of previous Must See TV shows, with a terrible taste of dead skin and bacteria in the mouth, to drag its sorry ass into bed with its clothing on? Does the city ever sleep?
Some cities are quiet, in the outskirts and suburbs almost all are. Some cities are so lively they practically punch you in the gut when you walk into the night air, dressed to kill. There is a time and place for all of this.
You learn the most about a city at night. During the day you can learn about what a city once was or wants to be, but all the cultural exhibits, streetside plaques, and brand-new buildings tell you nothing about what it means to be in the city from day to day. All I have ever known about any city I have known because of the streets at night. During the day you go to an art museum, you walk around and see everything plainly: here is the dock, there is the bridge, over there is something else entirely. What is it? Oh: only another bridge. Geography is garish and renders itself unnecessary when the sun is out. There is no need to worry. If you get lost, you can look a little harder, you can find a way to get to where you are going, even if you have to ask someone on the street. Look over there. There's the bridge we just crossed. It's pretty much the same as this bridge over here. Let's cross this one now, we can still see the bridge we just crossed anyway.
But at night, cities have a different feel. Liquid blackness fills the spaces that used to render themselves so clearly, so vividly. Now the bridge is a tunnel, a horizontal abyss dripping with oily darkness. These bridges all look the same: this isn't right. Was I just at this bridge? There's no one around to ask, and the streetside plaques are all tarnished and smeared with food and food grease. I just want to get home now. The art museum is lit up like a French whore, but it's not even open. There is no good art now, except the art of getting my ass home. You walk around and look into windows here and there, trying to discern what it is that people are doing with themselves. Trying to join them, if only for a moment. The whoosh of buses on wet pavement form the structure of the soundscape and yells, sharp metallic clicks and tire squeals, fill the framework with wordless terror. The night is constructing a cage for you, made of your own fear and loathing. You are here, you are separate from those people who live among the willing, the indoors are for them. You have somewhere to be, but where could it be?
What you learn about cities at night that you cannot learn during the day is what the city does with its leisure time. The city doesn't like work much. No one does. The city works because it has to pay rent, commutes and recoils in frustration at the amount of pollution in the air. The city has to do what the city has to do. All cities do this, and no one city's work is really substantially different from another's work. Some work in factories and some in offices, some have to smile when they sell you back your soul, and some only really need to be there to make sure you aren't going to steal anything, but every city shows up and suits up because it has to. But what cities do during their leisure time is different: it is everything.
Does the city have a penchant for strip clubs, prostitution, gambling, drinking, drugs? Does the city simply fall asleep in front of the latest Must See TV shows, only to wake up hours later to reruns of previous Must See TV shows, with a terrible taste of dead skin and bacteria in the mouth, to drag its sorry ass into bed with its clothing on? Does the city ever sleep?
Some cities are quiet, in the outskirts and suburbs almost all are. Some cities are so lively they practically punch you in the gut when you walk into the night air, dressed to kill. There is a time and place for all of this.
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