"But that's not what I said", he said, "You are
Making up a story. I'm not in it."
She slapped the armrests. He glanced at the car-
Light moving on the ceiling. He couldn't
Look at her. She said "Can't you even look
At me when I'm talking?". He said "No. I
Can't even see you. In here." Then she took
His hand, which he left there but limp. Then: "Why
Do you even invite me here? I don't
Feel welcome here. You make me want to leave."
"Again", he sighed. He rolled away. "I won't
Try to stop you this time." He hardly breathed.
The edge of doom: all these brief days and weeks
They had walked it 'til they began to speak.
Monday, August 10, 2009
I Know, Right?
This from On the Road: The Original Scroll version, which is mainly like the other one except it has Wolverine:
And this one:
I had to sleep in the railroad station on a bench; at dawn the ticketmasters threw me out. Isn't it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under his father's roof, then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life.He was hungry.
And this one:
"Where do you live Ponzo?" I asked. "Nowhere man. I'm supposed to live with Big Rosie but she threw me out last night. I'm gonna get my truck and sleep in it to-night." Guitars tinkled. Bea and I gazed at the stars together and kissed. "Mañana," she said, "everything'll be allright tomorrow, don't you think Jackie-honey man?" "Sure baby, Mañana." It was always Mañana. For the next week that was all I heard, Mañana, a lovely word and one that probably means heaven.
Blogging Makes Me Well
Dude, the Modern Condition, and many of its little Sub-conditions, is slaying me. I cannot freekin believe how much it's slaying me. For example: I really need to have some clear ideas and I need the energy to carry them out or I will die without accomplishing anything but my phone rings and the UPS guy wants to chat and my keyboard runs out of batteries, and even if I work extremely hard for a year I will not get close to paying off the taxes I owe for 2007, and won't even begin paying 2008, and will be late for 2009, and will be well into wracking up a huge fee for 2010, which makes me want to bloody well destroy the IRS building and take I rifle out into the desert and not come back, ever. I am so burdened by obligations and responsibilities that I can't even find a way to get started on them. When I drive down the street I want to destroy everything. I don't want to play the game. I can't even think of anything funny to say about this.
To the Unknown Self
Dear Self,
I was going to say that I know what you must be thinking but that really isn't true. I don't know how you view my pattern of bragging and mythologizing and then, for long periods, ignoring you. I really couldn't say if I've ever seen you clearly. I don't know what kind of attention and support you might need. Would you be just as happy to live in complete obscurity? Do you have ambitions? Are you lonely?Is there something that you need?
I've mainly seen you as a fire, sometimes as a useful fire, often as a dangerous or perplexing fire. I get very frustrated with you because just when it seems pretty clearly like the main thing is to control your hunger for everything, you get very dim and I worry that there isn't enough energy in you to keep me alive. Which is it? Or do I have this whole image wrong? I thought you were supposed to serve me; I guess I thought you were me. So what are you?
I now think that the part of me that is talking to you, maybe still trying to bargain with you, is sort of what can be seen in the visible spectrum. That what I would call me at any particular time is a function of how the eyes work and how I am focusing my attention. It changes over time, it always has some particular project or it falls into despondency, it is not still unless something overwhelms it, stuns it. This thing that is talking to You, is it You? Do you accept it as part of Yourself? I recognize the insistence and the prim method of this voice so well. God, it would rather be right in some narrow way than be with what is real. But it's made that way, made to do work, and it's really pretty efficient. Maybe I need to let it off the hook, clean it off in the evening like a gardening tool and lean it in some cool, dim place for the night? Except I don't know how to do that: it's always hungry. I would say I am always hungry, restless, watching. So would you come and be with me if I put the shrill voice away?
I began by approaching you and already I'm thinking about my own care again. But this whole thing is so circular, this whole question of how to manage alone, of how to care for us without any outside attention or stage. I really don't know if I believe it's possible.
All I can think to do is try to see you clearly and listen to you as I would listen to anyone else. Weirdly, your desires are really easy for me to dismiss as illusions. But maybe when you say you want things, even dumb shallow stuff, it means that you really want them. To go outside, to drink coffee, to talk with a friend, to pick up the guitar and make a D chord. I'll try to listen to you very literally. We need to start preparing, or maybe it's just me who does, for when the fantasies of greatness and importance have gone and the physical mojo is a useful, elegant reading lamp and no longer a spot light. I don't even want to plan for this, or think about it.
And it would help if you would try to be mundane, try to use your words. I do know, and I'll try to remember, that you aren't made of words and that words don't describe all of you. There's this image of you as the lowlying darkness of a sort of primordial valley where you exist in an indefinite, inexhaustible form before you rise into the light and take shape, become part of the discrete processes of the language world and the mechanical world. I'll try to think of you there and regard your peace and great lambent energy as mine. But I don't know if I can understand you without words.
Love, K
I was going to say that I know what you must be thinking but that really isn't true. I don't know how you view my pattern of bragging and mythologizing and then, for long periods, ignoring you. I really couldn't say if I've ever seen you clearly. I don't know what kind of attention and support you might need. Would you be just as happy to live in complete obscurity? Do you have ambitions? Are you lonely?Is there something that you need?
I've mainly seen you as a fire, sometimes as a useful fire, often as a dangerous or perplexing fire. I get very frustrated with you because just when it seems pretty clearly like the main thing is to control your hunger for everything, you get very dim and I worry that there isn't enough energy in you to keep me alive. Which is it? Or do I have this whole image wrong? I thought you were supposed to serve me; I guess I thought you were me. So what are you?
I now think that the part of me that is talking to you, maybe still trying to bargain with you, is sort of what can be seen in the visible spectrum. That what I would call me at any particular time is a function of how the eyes work and how I am focusing my attention. It changes over time, it always has some particular project or it falls into despondency, it is not still unless something overwhelms it, stuns it. This thing that is talking to You, is it You? Do you accept it as part of Yourself? I recognize the insistence and the prim method of this voice so well. God, it would rather be right in some narrow way than be with what is real. But it's made that way, made to do work, and it's really pretty efficient. Maybe I need to let it off the hook, clean it off in the evening like a gardening tool and lean it in some cool, dim place for the night? Except I don't know how to do that: it's always hungry. I would say I am always hungry, restless, watching. So would you come and be with me if I put the shrill voice away?
I began by approaching you and already I'm thinking about my own care again. But this whole thing is so circular, this whole question of how to manage alone, of how to care for us without any outside attention or stage. I really don't know if I believe it's possible.
All I can think to do is try to see you clearly and listen to you as I would listen to anyone else. Weirdly, your desires are really easy for me to dismiss as illusions. But maybe when you say you want things, even dumb shallow stuff, it means that you really want them. To go outside, to drink coffee, to talk with a friend, to pick up the guitar and make a D chord. I'll try to listen to you very literally. We need to start preparing, or maybe it's just me who does, for when the fantasies of greatness and importance have gone and the physical mojo is a useful, elegant reading lamp and no longer a spot light. I don't even want to plan for this, or think about it.
And it would help if you would try to be mundane, try to use your words. I do know, and I'll try to remember, that you aren't made of words and that words don't describe all of you. There's this image of you as the lowlying darkness of a sort of primordial valley where you exist in an indefinite, inexhaustible form before you rise into the light and take shape, become part of the discrete processes of the language world and the mechanical world. I'll try to think of you there and regard your peace and great lambent energy as mine. But I don't know if I can understand you without words.
Love, K
Sunday, August 9, 2009
sleeptwitch, nightalk
So, The Wrester? Heartbreaking and undeniably real for starters. My first response is there it is. Like, we are what we are and there's little to do about it except try to plan accordingly in order to spare others pain, where possible? But why did you really like it?
I kept thinking that the line between Micky Rourke playing someone who can only live by his own exploitation, if that's what it is, and Micky Rourke being someone who can only live by his own exploitation, was very thin. That face; my, those blood vessels that carry ravages have been busy. Maybe the real problem with judging others isn't that it's rude, as Protestantism would have it, maybe it's that you can't argue with WHAT IS. But I must admit that I've been drinking. Some beer. s.
Today again to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, this time for the portraits. Wheeled Emma around because she can't stand up for so long. Good to push her weight forward in the world: past John Brown, Joseph Smith, carved walking sticks, whirly-gigs, bust of Jackson, trippy Art Deco grillwork, WPA middling cityscape madness, elevator, elevator, tiny elevator. Ah, what is art but a way to talk without anybody there? And if one biproduct is the amplification of what would otherwise be inaudible for the wrong reasons, that 's not so bad. Make a few brute facts picturesque for the financigencia, fundable. Make an amusement park ride of primal gravity: well. Please send love and blithe spirits upon the tides of dawn, cools of night. Love one's elf.
I kept thinking that the line between Micky Rourke playing someone who can only live by his own exploitation, if that's what it is, and Micky Rourke being someone who can only live by his own exploitation, was very thin. That face; my, those blood vessels that carry ravages have been busy. Maybe the real problem with judging others isn't that it's rude, as Protestantism would have it, maybe it's that you can't argue with WHAT IS. But I must admit that I've been drinking. Some beer. s.
Today again to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, this time for the portraits. Wheeled Emma around because she can't stand up for so long. Good to push her weight forward in the world: past John Brown, Joseph Smith, carved walking sticks, whirly-gigs, bust of Jackson, trippy Art Deco grillwork, WPA middling cityscape madness, elevator, elevator, tiny elevator. Ah, what is art but a way to talk without anybody there? And if one biproduct is the amplification of what would otherwise be inaudible for the wrong reasons, that 's not so bad. Make a few brute facts picturesque for the financigencia, fundable. Make an amusement park ride of primal gravity: well. Please send love and blithe spirits upon the tides of dawn, cools of night. Love one's elf.
Saturday, August 8, 2009
Some Stuff about Pretending
V: "So why does raising a misunderstanding that nobody actually has and then resolving it count as low rhetorical form?" Partly because low persons have used it to coerce America into bed recently. It still hums with the sad fug of loveless sex. So people like Ann Coulter (may she be forced to raise Madonna's African babies Bolshevik) will accuse Obama of steering America towards Socialism, which is alas so far from true, and then explain in these-people-just-don't-smell-the-peril tones about how he's betraying the Pristine Vision of the Founding Fathers. That and bare clavicles will get you rich.
And another reason is that it's so genuinely difficult to understand other people that pretending to understand them easily in order to mischaracterize them has, I think, the broad consequence of giving people the illusion that understanding is supposed to be easy. This sort of mock-patient, didactic name-calling is so much like those grad seminars where everybody talked real fast and nobody really understood anybody else and everybody assumed that they were the only one not understanding and so everyone talked a little faster still. Actually saying something true is difficult and understanding someone else's attempt to say something true is maybe even more difficult. Saying and hearing are more like gardening than like dis- and reassembling a rifle while being timed. The patience and slow method, waiting for foreign and heterogeneous bits to slide together, grow together. Not meant here as a sexual thing, although there is also, weirdly, a strong fascination to what you don't understand that is like sexual attraction. Waiting for things to come together is wonderfully creative and sexy. The Universe's desire to try new combinations moving through us. Pretending, inclining towards, moving with, grokking.
I certainly don't mean to suggest that you have to mean everything you say. That seems like not only a depressingly high standard but also a misunderstanding of how language works. That is, we don't just find words to make the sentences in our heads. We also learn to speak the sentences that find us. Like a new dance form that teaches you an unexpected way to move your body, and you try it and you realize your body works really well that way, that your body is truer, more itself somehow or that it has this unexpected dimension, when it's doing this dance. People like me have to say stuff before they know if they mean it; lots and lots of stuff. We try to minimize and repay the tedium we impose on our listeners. And so another reason why this is a low rhetorical form is that we need the good will of those in whose presence we pretend. Willfully give pretending a bad name? Squander whatever meagre capital that pretenders may have saved up? Madness!
Pretending--or whatever, probably I should be more careful what word I choose here-- is not the same thing as lying. Pretending--fiction, vision, experiment, spirit-talk, art and making, as well as openly patiently reading and seeing and hearing these things--all these are attempts to find new dances that say something about the body, that let the body become itself in some way. And the body is changing, don't you think? Along with the rest of us? And so for people to pretend for the wrong reasons again gives the impression that something difficult and on-going is supposed to be fixed, finite, easy. Or that all pretending is lying. Or that accepted forms of pretending--like religion and annual physical exams--are true. Good understanding and good pretending are difficult and sacramental and sexy. Bad pretending: eegh(shiver).
I know that when I willfully misunderstand and when I falsely pretend it's out of lack of courage. Or maybe another way of saying it is that I don't have faith that the Universe is becoming Itself in me and so I don't pretend properly. And this aloofness is sadder than anything that I suffer at the hands of the Universe.
And another reason is that it's so genuinely difficult to understand other people that pretending to understand them easily in order to mischaracterize them has, I think, the broad consequence of giving people the illusion that understanding is supposed to be easy. This sort of mock-patient, didactic name-calling is so much like those grad seminars where everybody talked real fast and nobody really understood anybody else and everybody assumed that they were the only one not understanding and so everyone talked a little faster still. Actually saying something true is difficult and understanding someone else's attempt to say something true is maybe even more difficult. Saying and hearing are more like gardening than like dis- and reassembling a rifle while being timed. The patience and slow method, waiting for foreign and heterogeneous bits to slide together, grow together. Not meant here as a sexual thing, although there is also, weirdly, a strong fascination to what you don't understand that is like sexual attraction. Waiting for things to come together is wonderfully creative and sexy. The Universe's desire to try new combinations moving through us. Pretending, inclining towards, moving with, grokking.
I certainly don't mean to suggest that you have to mean everything you say. That seems like not only a depressingly high standard but also a misunderstanding of how language works. That is, we don't just find words to make the sentences in our heads. We also learn to speak the sentences that find us. Like a new dance form that teaches you an unexpected way to move your body, and you try it and you realize your body works really well that way, that your body is truer, more itself somehow or that it has this unexpected dimension, when it's doing this dance. People like me have to say stuff before they know if they mean it; lots and lots of stuff. We try to minimize and repay the tedium we impose on our listeners. And so another reason why this is a low rhetorical form is that we need the good will of those in whose presence we pretend. Willfully give pretending a bad name? Squander whatever meagre capital that pretenders may have saved up? Madness!
Pretending--or whatever, probably I should be more careful what word I choose here-- is not the same thing as lying. Pretending--fiction, vision, experiment, spirit-talk, art and making, as well as openly patiently reading and seeing and hearing these things--all these are attempts to find new dances that say something about the body, that let the body become itself in some way. And the body is changing, don't you think? Along with the rest of us? And so for people to pretend for the wrong reasons again gives the impression that something difficult and on-going is supposed to be fixed, finite, easy. Or that all pretending is lying. Or that accepted forms of pretending--like religion and annual physical exams--are true. Good understanding and good pretending are difficult and sacramental and sexy. Bad pretending: eegh(shiver).
I know that when I willfully misunderstand and when I falsely pretend it's out of lack of courage. Or maybe another way of saying it is that I don't have faith that the Universe is becoming Itself in me and so I don't pretend properly. And this aloofness is sadder than anything that I suffer at the hands of the Universe.
Friday, August 7, 2009
That Rhetorical Thing Where You Set Up a Misunderstanding that Nobody Actually Has and Then You Disabuse Them of It.
"...that rhetorical thing where you set up a misunderstanding that nobody actually has and then you disabuse them of it", as you called it, is such a powerful tool, K. It's really a very savvy use of desire, which, of course, is usually totally from the blue and left field, as in: there you are, thinking your chirping little thoughts, fiddling with pocket stuff, when a waft of bacon blows out the door of Trayf's Pizza and causes you to reconsider your plans, about-face, and grab a slice. Perfume, of course is designed to do this, just like bacon. As are ads. All these things set up a tension that must have been in you but dormant, like they're drawing a bowstring. So, what Nicholson Baker calls "...the primitive clawing pressure of wanting to know how things turned out" is the perfume of fiction, leading us on, making the conclusion available, etc etc etc... which is as good an explanation as I've ever dreamed up for David F. Wallace ending Infinite Jest the way he did: a mature reader is happy in the continuance of Don Gately's life beyond the end of the written-down part of it the same way that a mature lover is never really done...in other words: the need for a neat and tidy ending, preferably involving tension building to surprise and concussive denouement is the literary equivalent of the frat boy's one-minute stand. So why does raising a misunderstanding that nobody actually has and then resolving it count as low rhetorical form? Seems like flirting with the reader, giving her options, setting the table, making desire.
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