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.
Category Archives: words
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?
after don byrd’s crib crash
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.
rust
like gears wearing down
the pumps heat up
steam starts to blow
you tell me to shut up.
teeth start to grind
tension: a coiled spring
wheels come to a halt
hate to me you bring.
a scowl a giggle a shrug?
all I need is a hug
to say I’m forgiven
to get what I’ve given.
so little a thing
a loose screw a lip
pulled back sneering
curses on the tongue tip.
lashes of nails
rip ripping the machine
broken junkyard parts
promises thrown into the bin.
a scowl a giggle a shrug?
all I want is a hug
to say I’m forgiven
to get what I’ve given.
and every anger is a moment in hesitation
And every anger is a moment in hesitation: where do you stand on the verge of?
Why do you turn away (as my father did and still does in my mind, turning forever away, his shoulder forever turning into infinity, my father infinitely abandoning me), how could you commit this sin to me to us, shunting us into a corner of silence, the most unbearable silence, one of distinction, you had done it on purpose, you went out of your way to silence me to silence it: don’t give me this shit about not wanting to say something that you can never take back: you already thought it and the turning back was already gone from that moment on: when you already have closed your mind to any other point of view other than your own, when that is where your being ends and the other side of the world begins, if you end at you and there is no one else to consider, than you didn’t have to say anything at all. Then, on top of everything else: “if i lived on my own i wouldn’t have this: i wouldn’t have to answer to anyone.”
Wake the fuck up. Or better yet: do you know what you have done?
a paper heart, bass ale and nestle chocolate
Of course the preoccupations must always come first, to divert you understand, to slip a hand and pull out the undercurrents from under you. Always to avoid it all cost: it cost much more than you could ever imagine.
You your body and everyone else who you brought along namely her: what happens if you keeping turning and you find yourself tizzy with no direction.
Write boy, write it all boy: why would you speak the silence that i loved to me when you turned thought it was a wall?
Here and on it goes, on the screen, onto page-mode, a simulacrum of a journal. It�s not there when you go to sleep! You can never touch do you understand?
�Would you like to touch my dildo?� she said as she stroke the inside of my thigh.
�I�m not a woman� i told her and she whipped herself into a frenzy because i was so convincing.
Isn�t this dastardly?
And of course you fall in love again and everything repletes/erases itself with a paper heart, bass ale, and a chocolate bar to boot.
On on on it goes, you interrupted against the rails and plaster like paint crud between the fingerprints.
And mother calls. Oh shit.
Hurricane season on the NYC end. Mz had called moms to check if the parental guidance was still monitoring. Alls well until manana when Eduardo makes a hit along the pretty much white coast of Mass/Cape Cod and Wrong Island.
Signing off onto the internet where mindlessness is a precursor for false advertising.
Cut off
When she had left him, he decided to remove every inch of his skin that she had ever kissed, touched, or licked. The pain was bearable, especially after he had removed his left eyelid (gently, gently, she had pressed the edges of her lips against it one night when he had awakened from a nightmare), the membrane was too thin to merely slice the uppermost layer. Having one eye remaining open for always was a sensation that overcame any other possible mutilation. In fact, he was surprised that carving off his nipples, excruciating as he thought it might have been (each with a swift twisting stroke, one following the other, almost with the same deftness of the flick of her tongue as she had moved from one to the next), was nothing compared to the raw quality that the left eye had continued to see for a number of days, until it dried up, becoming useless.
The majority of the work he had done himself after having his scrotum removed and the testicles placed back into the abdomen. He had to go practically to the other side of the world to have the procedure done (a friend, who had gone to the airport to pick him up on his return, had noticed something in his step that made the friend uncomfortable and ill, but this friend would be unable as to explain why). From then on, he, himself, held a scalpel in either hand, without any sort of anesthesia, but with the help of his memories, meticulously went about what he had set out to do. He started with his face, the eye first, then the lips, which came off quite easily (when he had pulled the bottom one in particular, for the blade to slide across more fluidly, he recalled, and could actually still feel, her teeth playfully biting it). In front of his bathroom mirror, propped on a stool to give him as full of a body view as possible, he had worked his way down (his legs bearing the longest scars eventually, her having entwined her own about them), five or six towels underneath the steel supports. It was not a quick process, the face itself (where her fingers so often lingered on his cheeks and neck as she slept) took a full day and several hours after dinner. Never did he perceive the peeling tissue as his skin, equating it instead with uncooked pork, whose texture was similar. He was merely removing dead meat from his face, meat that had no purpose, not even fit for consumption, diseased.
In the middle of the night, he would awake, startled and sweating, the more recent of the wounds stinging (her voice in his ear, fresh, warm, close), having suddenly remembered, through his dreaming of her, a specific spot he had missed. He had tried to remain on, and skim from, one area of his body at a time, in an organized and orderly manner. The most difficult in getting to, nothing to do with a degree of sensitivity but with the mechanics of his shoulders, was the plane of his back, its indentation at the center. To solve this problem he had gotten fresh towels, arranging them by the door of the bathroom, opening it inward, placing the handle of the scalpel into the space between the frame and the door so that it would jut out. With his right-hand pulling the door firmly closed, his body practically sideways, he moved onto the blade until he felt the desired spot (her fingers would sprawl themselves wide, nails etching, digging at times, just below the shoulder blades, where her forearms were tight against the back of his ribs), piercing around it, and shift himself accordingly, in a semicircle, switching angles to close the loop. When he had done so, he used a sterilized fork to peel off the skin, a piece sometimes falling off the prongs of the utensil onto the red blotched towels.
It would only be after each successful operation, never during, he would keep his mind sharp and concentrated then, that waves of nausea and dizziness washed over him, and he would bite down on his tongue to bring himself back into focus (despite the fact that it was the tongue that she had most contact with, he could not bring himself to the point of severing it, he was sure he could not live without speaking). Afterwards, having given himself enough time for the brunt of the pain to be smothered by drugs prescribed from the operation abroad, he would carefully climb into bed, fresh gauze wrapped about himself, onto seven or eight layers of bed sheets. Each morning, numb but clear headed, he would change the bandages, checking each laceration for infection, applying creams, iodine, washing off the previous night’s applications. He had saved the hair for last, the body done (she used to scratch his head as they watched T.V., or tug gently tufts of it before she would climax, his head between her thighs). With a pair of shearing scissors, he cut as close as possible to the scalp. Because the sink was more or less always moist from the week’s constant rinsing off of blood, clumps of hair had clung together, resembling fur. He finally recognized himself again. Until then, he had seen himself as something other than a person, more as material, a meat sculpture for an artist motivated by both an objective application of technique and a deep-rooted blind creative passion (mimicking the same recklessness with which she had taken off his clothes). Now, however, his name returned to him, a sense of ownership for the body before him: a sculptor recognizing himself in his work, the marking of his hand on the work itself, and the effect on him of the work being finished.
It was on that night, as he lay in bed, he felt that she was very near, almost atop him, not merely in his thoughts. He could not explain this knowing in his mind of her presence but he got out of bed, walked down the dark hallway, approached the front door, and slowly put his hand on the knob. Inexplicably, he then thought of the number of phone calls that were on his answering machine from his friends and his employer. They were, at first, concerned, then distressed, wondering, if he was still alive, why had he disappeared off the face of the planet? None were from her. While working, he had not answered the phone or the door when someone rang, keeping most of the lights off (as how often it had been with her here, dark and silent).
Turning the knob and pulling, he realized that what he had done to himself was not solely because of her. Opening the door, he stood there, the night clear, the air hugging him, cold and fresh, the street empty, seeing no one.
X-mas Shopping
and so we like
shopped until we dropped, literally
over the food court rail, falling right into santa’s little
sit-on-his-lap-and-beg-for-that-sega-genesis-saturn-64-bit-system-and-be-terrorized
-as-an-elf-insists-that-you-turn-away-from-the-fat-drunkard-and-smile-for-the-fucking-camera hut.
terry fell onto santa’s lap just as saint nick was getting up,
one big, “ompff!” and a whole mess
of calamity
with the six year olds still waiting on line.
some idiot started cheering and then the rest of the little mob took it for a show,
like we meant to fall through the reindeer and bust our asses in santa’s little workshop,
and before we knew it,
we had little snot-filled tykes tugging on our legs, all cheerful excitement, begging for us to,
“do it again!! pleeese!!! mister, mister, do that again!!!”
dying time
i always said that i would
and i did, i did
i thought, always thinking
that you’d notice
i always told you i would
i would notice if you died
and i thought, i thought
that i would always think of you
but i had been dying
for a very long time now
a very long time thinking of dying time
of you, on my bed
while i was dying
and you didn’t notice
that i wasn’t there anymore
before you had thought to think of me
lighting a cigarette, you had to leave
you said, ‘look at the time’,
walking away from the bed post looking
like i was dead and i was
one last time thinking:
i’d notice if you were, i’d notice
i always said i would
i always said.
why is it
(just when I thought I was all barbed-wired-meat)
Why is it I love you more and more, without cause or explanantion, without heed or warning, this growing within me, this suridty, so sure and ready, so eager, to hold you and fall forever, to rest and finally take off my face, my clothes, my skin, to lie with you naked and free of the world and hold you in my arms and to be held, all the raw points out, all the nerve endings open to your touch, to love you as I�ve always wanted to love and be loved?
(every breath I�ve held in me was marked up in sadness, full, damp, a closed room, silence and dust)
Why is it you have come at a such a perilous point in my life, when I have finally forgotten much more of myself than what I remember, what it meant to be alive in another person�s eyes, your eyes dazzling upon me like a warm friend, like a name remembered that would be at the tip of your tongue, or the pleasure of hearing your heartbeat after a long run.
(everything electro-light-colors-faded-through-rainbows and eyes-by-the-dozens-to-see-one-thing-more)
Why is it that you have such a hold on me, it traps me in folds of skin, feeling trapped in being in only one set of skin, one set of nerves, one set of sounds that are only my own and not yours also, how incredibly small I feel, how I feel I could squeeze into that one corner that would bring me to you, how impossible to feel this compression when there is all these miles between us.
(One moment-splice-unbearable-figment of a memory where your skin is pressed against mine and the doors are closed)
Can you explain why I love you in this way, why it grows the way it does, in all directions, like the sea, where did all this space in my heart come from?
(twinkle-toe-under-the-sheet-anitcipation for your voice to come to me)