The persistence of memory as it crawls through my skin: re-invention I think I came off to them as being stuffy or witty or over exerting myself into their clutches: “so you’re not in the doctorate program?” I wanted to ask “how do you know?” but I was afraid the answer was going to be like “well, what you said before about being the new guy and re-inventing yourself came off as something a first year MA would say just to get the ball rolling, you know” and he would look at me and add, “someone who didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about when confronted with the big leagues.”
And he would be absolutely right. Oh god, how I miss the falling of writing, the sky dive head over heel freedom of going anywhere and not having a thing to really say. To let it just all hang. To stare at this keyboard and slowly mouth out the words out of my head and just follow them without having to prove anything: to breathe instead administrating CPR to my literary corpse of lung sorts. To re-introduce myself to language and let it all hang about the rafters until it congealed on its own.
That’s why you haven’t been writing old boy: you’ve waiting for bestsellers when you haven’t dug around in the garbage enough: what happened to the fun of it old boy? Y’know, the doing and writing for writing’s sake, when it was all you had and you hung onto it like a vein.
Yes. I now understand when the shit is ready to fall out of my ass and I have to stop.
Later. Welcome home.

to start with her, because it had started with her. She had spread her legs at a point I’ll never remember and somebody must have PUSH! And out I came (and isn’t that strange that we never remember, blessed to never remember, that, but keep track of the day as the years go by)

to start with her because I did. This, this book did not start with her, but I’ll get to that at some point, maybe, maybe not, depending if I have much of other things to say, but I doubt that will happen, I will get to that because you’ll need a reason for all this, an explanation for these words, these inks stains that are never going to be seen as simply stains, but as ‘words’, as ‘never going to be seen as ink stains’ (and there’s something fascinating to all that, to the idea of writing on paper, drawing lines that mean much less than what the writer writes and much more, as in, other than what the writer intended)
to start with her and I write of things other than her

to star with her and the things that brought me to her, her to here, here to the life that had happened upon her. But the words: ‘life happened upon her.’ Listen to that, another digression from the start. Life happens upon us. We, in being born, did not ask of it. People, such as parents, are accidents. Nothing in life is ever planned out. One can say, ‘I will go out and do the laundry today’ and go out and very well do the laundry. One can then turn and say, ‘am I not now a prophet?,’ smirking. Yes and no: you did what you wanted but you did not expect for there to have been so few people at the laundromat; you did not expect to be caught staring at someone’s underwear by an eight year old girl; you did not expect for you to have lost a sock, or for the day to be sunny when the forecast was for rain. The fact that a car heeded the traffic light and did not mow you down while you were crossing the street; the fact that you are still living and breathing is a culmination of random events. You think you have control over your life and, to a very limited extent, you do. However, one never knows what people they will meet today, even if they’ve seen the same people for years. Point being: suddenly, every time, anytime, all the time, ‘suddenly you are alive and breathing and you have nothing to with it.’

to start with her, and it is very difficult after the initial push to continue. The idea fades or becomes something else until the motivation changes also. It had started as: ‘To start with her…’ and it is now: ‘My throat is dry. The phone has not rung. I am waiting. I am thinking ‘someone else has not called’, and I wonder if anything had happened. I am waiting for someone who is not the her of the moment, or the her that I began with, but an other her someone else entirely who, when I pay attention to, receives much of my attention. This other ‘her’ who we’ll get to at some later point other than this page.’ And, of course, it is much more than that. Lost in the translation, so to speak and so, to ‘speak’, much of the translation has to be lost or I wouldn’t be speaking, I’d be thinking, and I’ve done enough of that, for now. Now I cannot simply ‘think’, I don’t have much time, I need to think and write, that’s the point of this: to see how much will I think to write and what I write of my thinking. I don’t have much time to just think anymore than Life at its end

to start with her, that brought about me, that brought me up. That, the latter, I know, or most of, from about age 2, everything before is retelling, from her and a smattering of others, it is not much, not chronological I don’t think she has even tried to place it in some proper order, or maybe she does not want to speak of it, or maybe it’s left and a little sorrow rest in her mind for that blurry thing that was once the memory of her childhood. I think it’s a combination of it all, I could be very wrong. There are a limited amount of truths that one will get when one asks questions of another. There is only so far that another will let one prod. There is a border that defines another’s sanctuary, a place that nothing in the real world is allowed to trespass, a line that, once past it, even her son is held as a stranger.

and to start with what I know and don’t know; to piece the little I have and to start with her, by filling in the spaces around her, of what she had come into, of what was around her, and eventually, brought her here, to get here eventually; the here and now because I know more of that, of the her and now (But when one reads a novel, let’s say a mystery, with a number of pages missing in and in-between the beginning, can one ever understand where and what exactly is going on in the novel’ Can one actually see the ‘whole painting’ when it is not presented in its totality’ Is it the same painting’ Is the outcome and all the loose threads tied up just as neatly when one has not had all the facts’ But there is the limit of what can be asked, a point where one must understand and accept what one is given only, and to interpret as best as one could and to move on from there; to accept and discard; to, somehow, face incompleteness and, not fill the holes, but to move through and reach and forget)

she had started in a shack and born, literally, onto the earth, for there were no floors. Where she was born was in a shack and onto the earth, her mother giving birth without painkillers or delivery rooms or doctors or nurses; without any release except to give birth, to release the seventh child from her womb. To pause, to side step, to regard ‘the seventh child’: there were six previous others, five of which survived; four boys, two live to this day, and the rest were girls; three others came after the seventh, three more births, one of which was stillborn; the first birth to die was a set of male twins, that starved, or were strangled, depending or your point of view, from lack of their mother’s milk. It sounds harsh, almost inhumane to even consider such a possibility in this day and age, but this is not then. Then was a shack that a man and woman put together with their bare hands, where electricity was seen only at night, in the clouds of storms, where all their children were born in this shack, for there was no way to reach a doctor (he was in another village and that’s what doctors did: traveled within a particular ‘state’, for lack of a better word) and so, also, the majority of times without medical supervision and in the beginning, with a mid-wife until the mother could do it on her own, onto the earthen floor, in sunlight or candlelight, with, as the first born got older, one of the siblings running to the creek to fetch water (most probably; these things are imagined, assumed, filling gaps, for there was no running water, before they even had a pump, there was only the creek, five minutes away running time) and another cry, another baby.

this is mostly snippets, this starting, this moving in time back to proceed forth from now, to here. This not of her memory, it is what is left of mine from what she has told me. To break the sequence of the beginning and to have my own memory before: there, going home from somewhere, I do not remember, it does not matter

not a word
a word in my skull my skull rattling on
and on sideways against the floorboards: I mourn
for a world that I will never know and only know
in forgetting, or is that in passing? the passing lights before my eyes
the flash before my eyes tells me something tells me that I am
late for my own wedding I am late for my own funeral
that I am late (again, again, and again)
with the word of the moment that the word and myself haven’t arrived
and look who’s attended, look who’s here.
I am building a thing
I?m writing to not say anything. I haven?t much
of a choice: it all falls rather over and over.
I?m writing to forget
that I do nothing by writing, that there is nothing further than this
pushing
and its entrails.
fingerstalks of knowing and a trace, just the barest trace that it can be added up to seem
that if looked at the right angle, it would appear to be
solid, that it would solidify under the conditions.
there is no one condition, no living condition to which to all to apply:
just a plurality of conditions, party favors, and old torn magazine ads.
and this pushing implodes: it has yet to bloom, explode, carry itself
instead of being pushed, pushing
this struggle to grasp anything in my head. there?s nothing. it all goes. I can not say
surely that I know one thing. not even my name: it?s been passed around. Wherewhat am I? wherewhat when I thought it all boiled
down to ?who..??
psyche of logic, reason of the soul: a word for the mind, but
after all the exegesis and theorization beyond the neuro-scape and pre-wiring, one thing:
I move through a world I can not and do not see for what it is
I feel a world that can not and does not belong outside
that the world is a figment of the systems within me, the imagination of the wiring and never ever really there.
The realization is this: there are no words
for the discomfort, no association to link myself up to, no memory to call all my own:
I forget much more often. I?m not forgetting
more, as in ?more?, but rather, ?more quickly vast timely amounts.?
in other words:
everything is a surface
with no tensile strength, no weight: every word is as it appears.
I?ve been talking more
and more out
loud rather than writing just to feel my voice leaving.
It was the promise of language that held me together.
although offered a line of flight, never the props of wings: offered chance to redemption
effaced
as often I have seen. sometimes I feel
as if my fingers have a mind of their own often times making such typographical errors (leaps of syntactical structure, word forgetting)
such beautiful errors that I am
forced to take credit: are they mistakes or a jump in logic, a short circuit
of copper-less wires that has given breath to light?
I?ve just read the phrase ?the appropriate dna samples? and felt immediately a pull to write, to tie them down, to ?appropriate?(verb) the phrase. I read about a yawning of the mind that the skin loses itself in its own consumption, obsession with form: I?ve read and read and realized that I?ve learned nothing. what can I recall, what can I put into words for you? What representations of dna strands can I mangle in representation for your pleasure? What sense of right or wrong can I bring forth to the page with a level of honestly having been there?
what can I say to you but of all things that I can not say?
I?ve lied. I cannot and will not build a thing (to wordlessness): I want this to lean
towards meaning, to the facilitation of words
again. I want to start from the ground and word myself up from the soil like Adam:
I want to roll the dust in my mouth
and make work.
I want to make words real and I don?t know how. Did I ever? How could I have ever. But how did I then? If I knew
from the elemental truth then how did I ever get here?
You were young
and now? Now why here, why come this far?
even if I could ever truly feel the distance crossed across the base of my heel and the palms
of hands, if my mind could crawl
the ground for me, how could I ever know of the distance crossed? Has there ever been any?
Have I come this far only by a sense of proprioception?
(there is something in its meaning, in this word, of all things -a word-, once known, that makes this word above all others ring with a truth, ring with grit stuck between this thought and the tooth. it gnarls itself into my thoughts and continues the push, to push, this push. Is it/it is this word I have lived for and continue to write for, even now, even in this age of cybernetics, of regulation and line/s of flight/s)?
this word, proprioception, means: an internal knowing, an internal sense, of place, of where, of distance;
an alignment of the bowels with the motion of the earth.
how grand, how wonderful to be able to find place
again, to know where you are and where to begin. I read recently
(reading, reading, and only scraps, romanticizations of writing, stick)
somewhere,
?…as feminists writer were figuring the relationship between the body and writing…?
and I thought to myself, yes of course there, it has always been there:
writing as a body
and working of the body and the body as a writing of work
and the fractalizations, the impli-multiplications of thought-strands
became blurry and lost to me but the singular strand remained: ?the relationship between…?
somewhere else, I heard, I remember, a proposition:
?..that the mind-state is actually one of anxiousness, of anxiety, and that we construct ?causes? for this state of being post hoc, post mortem, and we cannot reconcile ourselves precisely with our ?selves?. We cannot bear to…?
I am still and always will be lost and frazzled and confused: I will always be unsure of my place.
even when sleeping in your arms
of all the things I could have said with this
I am brought to tears
that I did not.