1. I need to find a way to make everything normal again. I’ve been looking at my life and all I see is emptiness. Yes, we’ve had a child and she is the most amazing and fulfilling thing I have ever seen, but everything else about myself seems hollow and empty. Downloading movies, an insatiable need for ripping dvd’s (so disciplined I am, as if it was a business), endless and recording and encoding of movies… I don’t know, there’s a hole and I’m in it and I don’t know which way is up.
2. She’s gotten into the habit now, after an angry spell where she’s been jolted suddenly or picked up when she didn’t want to be, that as she settles down a type of complaining sing song language comes out of her. And at first she complained off to the side, as if talking to an imaginary friend, but more recently she talks to us directly, letting us know that we upset her greatly and how she felt about it and even how it frightens her still. It’s not total nonsense or the aftershock blubber of a crying fit; there’s a cadence, specific stops and starts and the movement of a mouth on the verge of articulating language.
And we laugh and laugh with a glee that must be maddening to her: This is serious business you two, are you two making fun of me or what?
3. Things between us worsen then strengthen then worsen again. I think my condition is worsening and as I am getting older, while the edge of sorrow has dulled, I feel as if the schizo-ness she mentioned in recent days is the indication of a greater breakdown. I feel as if I’ve been decomposing for a while now and I really don’t know how to light the darkness that is my heart these days. I am so frayed and terrifying alone and I wish I could have been a better man, a better writer and not live like this in an apartment above my parent’s home and not work nights like some addict and never see her for hours at a time. I wish it had all been different and pushed myself off course of this career track instead of being afraid of failure, of this I am certain I would have failed as a professor. I would never have gotten even past the dissertation part, I did not have the conviction for it.
We should have left Albany first chance we got, but I was greedy for you and our time together and weak for not going further on my own, so delusioned to take Michael Blitz’ foot steps.
4. Ah, such as it is, leave it be, leave it be.
Category Archives: general
Children beyond our imagination
and so we lived quiet lives of sweet subjugation to our children. Lives of rustling grass and soft cars faraway on asphalt. We spun tales of the big city as night fell and dreamed of the daily routines our children fell. We nursed them and tossed out into the wild when they thought they were ready. Oh sure, we clung to them the way a rock climber the sheer of a cliff but their legs and voices grew stronger than our brittle bones, we were far too old for them anymore. She struck the big city upside its head and it dances to her tune. He, on the other hand, much kinder, has Thoreau’d himself further than we have, writing in and of the emptiness of Montana. This is what I dream of, write of, breathe of, of children stretching beyond the you and I we could have been. Children beyond our imagination.
And here we were, holding and dreaming, holding the last vestiges of our youth, cuddling our daughter while she took our youth from us. It’s bitter, but it is true. Our daughter will never know us as we are now, will never know the zest and heat of our ideals, the silliness of our bodies. She’ll be embarrassed of us at best and perhaps wonder how we must have squandered a youth that she will make better of. She’ll never know.
peach tracing paper before it tears
as she’s all limbs and angry mouth and her skin is peach tracing paper before it tears and she is the not-me that I’ve been dreaming about since her conception and even before, the not-me that can be all the things I could never have been and will no longer be.
Serious eyes and perfect fingers, lips that sharpen into ‘O’ and the mock surprise of raised eyebrows. This little bundle that fills heavier and heavier, this reach of flesh apart from myself. Personality out of nothing, out of gestures, out of a nervous system that still doesn’t know the difference between night and day.
This past Sunday I had not slept the night before on shift, nor throughout the following day. I could not, too excited and forward looking, the day with my daughter after missing her for so long, missing the not-me that she can be, the not-me that I can pour myself into and keep pure of the mistakes and fears of my own.
Even the first nights in the hospital and home, she cried in her sleep. So little time on this earth and already the nightmares have begun. Who was it that said that the normal state of the human mind was one of anxiety’ I held her close to my chest through the shudders wondering how much of my sadness have I already passed on’
Washing dishes over the sink, my wife wept today. We’ve been unbelievably strained. We miss each other, but I think we are also different to each other. How much of it is has to do with change, with the arrival of our daughter, or fear of own future together, a sense of anxiousness about how long will this center, as if, now having brought a child into the world, no longer just a couple, but now a ‘family’, the clock is suddenly ticking to an end.
How ridiculous to fear an unimaginable future.
Would you have picked us if you knew
everyone wants a piece of my little girl and they won’t leave her alone. They want to hold her close to their chests and hold her in their hands. They want to feel that something I feel when I hold her almost all in one hand and she bops her head up and briefly makes contact.
She sleeps legs curled up like frog in the center of my chest, face pressed into soft of my neck and her arms in splayed wide embrace. There is nothing like this in world, and they all want a piece of it. They want to feel it again and want to know what it feels like for the first time.
But she is mine and only ours and she’ll always be ours and we will always suffer for her, we will always feel a pang of despair when someone else picks her up and turns away from us with her in their arms
(My mother had done exactly this, our daughter was beginning to ball and I asked for her and supposedly my mother hadn’t “heard” me and turned away from my outstretched hands and my heart panicked)
First born, first cursed with all this anxiety and love and hope and fear. Ah my poor little one, would you have picked us if you knew what you were in for?
Every day of my life is getting quieter. Everyday of my life consists of a little more peace, a little less static, a little more music.
A father of all things
I became a father on March 4 @ 9:09PM and I really don’t know how to be one. I look at her now and especially when she is crying and I really don’t know what to do. If there has ever been a more pressing need to change, to change again how to approaching living, it is (again) now.
Cliches.
When could I have ever been ready to be a father. I know she only belongs, I look at her the way I contemplate the design of my hand. She is mine, mine as Morrison wrote in Beloved.
I would like to say that I moved (back again) to art, to making pictures with words, to making movement with words and lines, to making something out of nothing as I literally have in the quick breath and swell of skull and aged fingers of my daughter. Right here in front of me, this thing, breathing, demanding, crying, feeding, alive, alive, as if all of this has been a dream without resting, a dream without failure. I’ve been a lucky one, I’ve struck it rich with this woman who has endured me and endured with me.
From nothing something comes, a child plucked out of the womb, just like that, a rabbit out the hat. Don Byrd, “…a strange way to make humans.”
I need to write you and maybe the story of my life. I will need to write. I need to change (again) into something more, a father of all things. Would anyone have believed it?
skidding across pot holes
1.
There are many things to write, one after another. It�s hard to keep track. It�s hard to keep all the things in one place long enough to put a word to it. So then it comes down to lots of words. Like a parking lot. A lot parked of words. A lot of parked words waiting for their trunks to be opened and one thing and another fit in, one after another. Too late, too late, like a highway. Try to catch a thought at eighty miles an hour for a center spot in a lot like this.
2.
A March baby. The ides of March. Ioanna of the winds, in like a lion, out like a lamb. Will you cry and keep mommy frayed at the nerves? Daddy�s like a cut tree: rootless and felled, hard to move at the sound. I dreamt you and of you. Still not real even with my hand on your mother�s belly in the dark, every night and morning.
3.
Eighty on the way home, surreal state until someone else swerves, or the tires feel like they�re going to buckle, then it�s jagged edge and fear and more surreal than ever. Will I ever get home? Can I stop here? Or maybe here? Sunlight over the edge, shot through the eyes, skidding across pot holes, home stretch and the last cigarette of the night plumes the lungs.
4.
What will I pass down unto to you? Ted says his two sons are remarkably different already. The child is born made, not molded. Already and the oldest has only just broken four. The younger is barely two. And you can tell, even from here, you can tell. Already different, one listens the other�s unruly. One plays with you, the other finds you in the way. Barely an impression, or at the very least, it doesn�t seem that there�s been an impression yet to have been made. Already there, marked distinct, fingerprint of God.
5.
She could not measure the heartbeat, the fetus would not hold still, no markers to be made of this child. You got a wily one here.
6.
You are no longer strange to me and I find a pocket there that I would like to snug into, crook in your neck that I want to nuzzle. A little bit of beast for you that has been tamed. And I can only go on like this for so long, putting it to words before I realize the immensity of not being able to put any word to it. At any angle, the skin tone is the same: always soft, full hue, fresh and thin skinned, as if fresh skinned, rice paper, delicate but never fragile. You�re my crumbly girl, but you endure. That�s what you�ve gotten from your mother, a quality of perpetual endurance.
7.
There was a time I could bang out a page in under five minutes. It didn�t always make sense, but there was a stream, a well worn stream, but something to dip into nonetheless. It�s taken over forty-five minutes now in 2004. You�re only two months away.
cant stop this feeling
Sometimes I want to feel nothing
not die necessarily, just feel nothing
be nothing, stop all this feeling
I can’t stop this feeling anymore
the band never got it, or maybe they did and the producers, the engineers, the executives
made it into a pop song: I just can’t stop this feeling anymore
not this (particular) feeling (as opposed to that one)
but rather the being of feeling, this perpetual state of feeling, of roving, of in and out and sliding around the pores.
I just can’t stop this feeling anymore, this hounding at all the crevices
all the body is an obstruction with orifices
all we do is figure out ways to violate those orifices even more
I want to fuck you sometimes my love in such a way that I am consumed by your mound
that I disappear inside your vulva and am swallowed whole by your cervix
no. I do not crave the womb.
I want to be eaten by that which I drive into.
I want to a part of that which I rip apart.
I want to be the tearing and the friction
the membrane and the wound.
A scar looking for rupture.
all the answers of a theoretician finally admitted to
who i thought had all the answers of a theoretician finally admitted to ignorance with ?i?m dropping this course..i don?t know what i?m doing, you know what you?re doing,? which was nice to see.
I pushed into recognizing who i was as we waited for the lynx and everyone else still comes of particularly dense or slow or much more normal than i ever hoped/feared to be: things are sure different in albany.
Other than a (deceitfully) breeze: just create mein Fraulein. Translate as big trouble: nothing (really) since ?from where you are?. Have had a bit of spatterings (?only this?, etc) and ongoing pieces with no direction (?you, interrupted? ?blue doors?).
My gosh it just strikes me that no one knows where to go with this thing but everyone has an issue to start from.
discovered (thru an email discourse of sorts) my ?issue?: what would be a world of meaningless relationships, or rather, a word with incorrect meanings: constant diverting of ?truth?, a bounce around your expectations and hurt you silly in the sense kind of thing?
That?s all folx.
after the second week and the juices are more or less
After the second week and the juices are more or less dripping from my mouth as if i�ve been infected with rabies:
here we stand.
there�s blanchot and the nothing (i feel as if i�m repeating myself from my other journals; constantly re-fracturing it, re-saying it, whatever it would be at the time until it sinks down out of my dreams as i think i dreamed about this last night, or have been overall of all my courses) of writing, the futility of saying what one means and meaning what one says, as if i do experience it (somewhat) in this way, but not exactly, or have lost it?
Then again the whole idea as writing as this path to hell is a bit romantic in itself.
Despite what deleuze and guattari (via joris) would like us to believe about kafka (one heck of a party guy) i find it hard to disavow the previous (conflicting) knowledge (if it can be called that at this point) of kafka teeter totting on the verge of madness (memorial note: elam listing off nietzsche as having infected himself with syphilis, amongst other mad writers).
Returning to blitz�s statement: �..how what one knows knowledge and what knowledge is. (somewhat)�
is this what he meant? Is there such a thing as a fully functional integrated body of knowledge that is coherent to itself? Or should i think of it as a relation, a parody of my own body, that the whole thing sits there (and farts around), with different textures and different kinds of limbs and extensions that sometimes seem to have a mind of their own?
This appears to me to run back to the saussurean idea of an overall (if now unseen) structure?
Also an interesting query: the removal of the personal (I) into the impersonal (he) as stated by blanchot and practiced by auster (as in the invention of solitude, how obvious now; and in the new york trilogy), is this what i�m doing in referring to myself as you (addressing myself, a reflective activity to verify that i am, and am at an end of this, no?)
But the idea presented by joris (via, supposedly, by deleuze and guattari, but i haven�t seen it yet) that we are an accumulation of everything in our writing and that�s ok for that to end up there (to paraphrase joris: �that it�s okay to use more than one language� language ranging anywhere from different tongues to dialects to other even mediums)
joris: what makes d&g so fascinating is that they leave behind, break the two major discourse, ways of approach to literature, the psychoanalytical (freud) and the socialistic (marx) and offer us something wholly different: the author, his work, his diaries, his letters, his life and the life around him: an intertexuality of his life, an interpretation that weaves and is based on the weaving, the texture of his life(/)work as a whole.
which in a sense, leaves us back to blanchot: the writer never realizes his work: he dies before the work is finished. is then criticism also a part of the work?