the divine general
is kicked back at his holy desk
helmet tipped down over his eyes
snoring
on the wall behind him
a map of the universe
yellowed and faded,
curling at the corners
someone has written in Sharpie
on the general's helmet
“God is Dead”
then crept out of the room
snickering
and, below,
the spavined old women
clutching wooden beads
in shivering hands
bend their bonneted heads
murmuring like a newsreel
the songs of Heaven
and the burnished-eyed,
spring-young men,
chins thrust forward,
resolutely march
forever through fields
toward a many-handed,
million-named enemy
with only philosophy
to protect them -
this year the trees shall
unburden themselves of pages
in place of leaves
and shrink themselves
in the process,
turn to wizened old men,
stooping over graves
and clucking their tongues
and
in the encroaching dark
as the sun goes out
with a mutter, and
as the stars begin to
sizzle in the skillet
of the sky,
the gloating sound of
the dead rises
from the horizon
like an orchestra warming up,
then,
wind,
and nothing further
but the cruel wink
of the moon
over the empty churchyards
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Thursday, November 24, 2011
triptych
first,
rage -
a quiet, invidious force -
a cold wind seeping into
the cracks
of the teeth,
a gathering knot
of electricity,
seething in the veins.
its partner is sadness,
trailing behind,
mournfully,
yet dutifully,
tightening the strings...
then,
the third,
unnamed,
with scissors -
& last,
gray-cowled regret,
oscillating between
what is now &
what once was,
somehow inveterately
shuddering
caught in a trap
whose jaws
open, close,
and open again
without words
rage -
a quiet, invidious force -
a cold wind seeping into
the cracks
of the teeth,
a gathering knot
of electricity,
seething in the veins.
its partner is sadness,
trailing behind,
mournfully,
yet dutifully,
tightening the strings...
then,
the third,
unnamed,
with scissors -
& last,
gray-cowled regret,
oscillating between
what is now &
what once was,
somehow inveterately
shuddering
caught in a trap
whose jaws
open, close,
and open again
without words
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Eigengrau
the sudden saccade
of the eye
from one dark
to another
& the lip jerks
to reveal bared incisor
the embyronic shadows
conceal still
the cowled demon
of nightmare,
huddled, unbreathing,
diamond-bright eyes
fixed on the bed
the hiss of dream,
departing -
a crack in the window
through which a
trysting lover is going
psst
psst
the bedside lamp allows
only a quaver of littoral light -
the bulb may burn out,
pulses weakly
in electric thrust
& does not
dispel the demon
there is no one
at the window.
there is no one
in the corner.
there is no one
in the bed.
the room is empty
and the light is on,
and yet, hear:
the snap and pop
of sinews tightening, and
the cavernous yawn
of something still waking
of the eye
from one dark
to another
& the lip jerks
to reveal bared incisor
the embyronic shadows
conceal still
the cowled demon
of nightmare,
huddled, unbreathing,
diamond-bright eyes
fixed on the bed
the hiss of dream,
departing -
a crack in the window
through which a
trysting lover is going
psst
psst
the bedside lamp allows
only a quaver of littoral light -
the bulb may burn out,
pulses weakly
in electric thrust
& does not
dispel the demon
there is no one
at the window.
there is no one
in the corner.
there is no one
in the bed.
the room is empty
and the light is on,
and yet, hear:
the snap and pop
of sinews tightening, and
the cavernous yawn
of something still waking
the dogcatcher: scene
1
weirding hour -
raining again.
headlights in
the desultory dusk,
questing up fog-laden streets
cold in the cracks of my teeth
shaky fingertips
hurried, arrhythmic steps
spindly trees
flailing and moaning
like flagellants
unable to reach the whip
stoplights sag, sway,
blinking
in confusion -
red, red, red
and the streetlights reflect
in the mirror-wet asphalt
like an eldritch arena
waiting for some
awful battle
to begin -
2
father's waiting at home
with a handgun
nestled in his arms
he murmurs to it
as if to reassure,
but his eyes keep flicking
to the door
his index finger runs
down the barrel,
slowly
outlines the trigger
the crescent moon of his smile
trembles over the
horizon of his lips
and sets again
as if afraid to rise
the rocking-chair creaks
in supplication
and he ignores it
3
my heart is
squirming around
inside my ribcage
like a child held
too tightly,
as i slide the key
into the lock
the door is heavier
than usual,
as if complicit in
some awful crime -
the hinges
squeal
inside,
the shadows flock
like disrupted birds
worrying at one another -
they splay themselves
over the white waste
of the walls
as if furtively,
guiltily,
hiding something -
4
the van parked
down the street
idles,
sighs -
in the back,
a horde of muzzled dogs
whine,
pawing at their snouts
eyes murderous,
sinews taut
in the front seat,
the dogcatcher taps fingers
in an ostinato
on the wheel
one two three four
five
one two three four
five
Monday, November 14, 2011
prosopagnosia II: en route
In the black car with a sunroof.
Or the Ford F-150 pickup truck.
Neither of these; sitting on the side of the road, sign in hand.
Borrowed cigarette hanging out of the mouth.
Acrid smoke singeing the throat.
I cough three times.
The black car with a sunroof went by an hour ago, then it went by again. And again.
Hard to tell if it's the same car or if they just appear the same.
The driver reminds me of someone I know.
Today the heat is so intense it can almost be seen, and seen through. Its clear, diamond-tipped presence actually somehow makes the day a little more transparent.
The roof of the world is bluer, somehow.
Nothing else has changed.
The trees are full green, no stop.
We are in the throat of summer.
The inside of my nostril itches and I scratch it with a fingernail.
The driver of the black car is my friend Freddie.
It's entirely possible that it isn't.
Though he looks somewhat like him.
Not-Freddie is wearing
a green Celtics jersey with white outlines
a black baseball hat (brim forward)
dark sunglasses
He has tattoos.
He drives by too fast for me to see the detail.
Perhaps he is driving by because he knows I am there.
He can't know that I'm there.
He's driving by too fast.
It's entirely possible that it isn't Freddie.
There's that story about the farmer who goes to the market and sees Death.
Death makes a threatening gesture.
So the farmer runs away to Samarra.
The farmer's neighbor goes to the market and sees Death and says, “Why the threatening gesture?”
Death says, “That wasn't threatening, it was surprise. I was astonished to see him here in Baghdad, because I'm supposed to see him tonight in Samarra.”
That story hinges on Death's gesture.
The Ford F-150's gone by a few times too.
Brown exterior.
Three different drivers.
I think.
One's a woman, one's a man.
The other one, I can't tell.
Though when I was a kid I jumped off the barn.
Cracked my skull.
That's when I started forgetting names.
Faces just don't stick in my head.
How some people say, I never forget a face, I'm the opposite.
The heat of the summer crowds in.
The highway steams, the asphalt is brand new and blacker than black.
The yellow lines are brighter than neon.
In the black car with the sunroof.
Someone is asking me if I'm all right.
Voice from the backseat.
Static interferes and is replaced by the sawing of an electric guitar.
Freddie Front-Seat is wriggling behind the wheel with his lips puffed out.
He does that when there's a song he likes.
Priscilla in the back is handing me a joint.
I know it's not just a joint.
Acrid smoke singeing my throat.
I cough twice.
We are going to the coast no we don't know which one.
I don't ask questions I just get in the car.
The things that are true provide a framework for life.
Without the things that are true life has no framework.
I light up a Pall Mall and it takes a full five minutes to spark the Zippo because I'm staring at the flame.
The rumble of the engine like a captive, simmering beast under the hood.
Its breath seeps out around the edges like paint thinner against the day.
The colors wobble and slide down the canvas of the world.
So hey I say this isn't happening huh some kind of dream.
Must be the drugs they exchange like a handshake with their eyes and burst out laughing like a sunshower.
It's Green Day on the radio.
Night, rain falls.
Boston-bound from Maine.
F-150 truck rattling over the bridge.
The city growing up from the bay in front of us.
My left ear abruptly goes deaf.
The driver is Anja, a blonde with a nose-piercing.
Too much mascara.
She's crying, that's how I can tell.
It's been a week since I've had a drink.
I am missing the fourth and fifth finger on my right hand.
It makes things difficult to grab.
For three days I have been coughing up black sputum.
Despite all the vitamin C.
I say hey baby don't cry this is just a dream passin by.
She doesn't even look at me like I'm not even there.
I look out the window.
It's not a dream, it's a music video I saw when I was twelve.
Hard to tell which one.
Once you realize it's a dream, it's so much easier.
Permeable world.
Walls you can walk through.
Must be the drugs. A sick bloom of laughter.
Laying flat on my back at the beach.
The surrsurrant roar of waves breaking.
A breathy noise from nearby.
The steady beam of the lighthouse, sweeping sternly around.
Up on the widow's walk we clash like armies.
Lips, teeth, tongue.
We are ocean-wet.
The salt dries on our skin, shrinks us together.
Lightning against the black, way out to sea.
God's Holy Camera.
I say hey baby don't cry this is just a dream passin by.
The smoke from something burning on the beach.
A few houses down.
Could be some madwoman with a grudge.
And an ax.
A can of gasoline and a cigarette.
Tomorrow's papers tell the story.
She walked out to sea and didn't come back.
This is the story I tell my friends at the bar in a froth of drunk.
The stories we tell our friends are lies.
The only thing holding the framework of the world together is lies.
The rivets in the girders of truth.
The only cigarette I have I bummed.
Funny how you smoke a bummed cigarette so much more delicately than any from your own pack.
All the way down to the filter.
I cough three times.
The cigarette I bummed was a Marlboro.
The tips of my fingers tingle.
When I was twelve I saw a drowned ghost in the river. It was all in black and wore a hood.
Everything in the world seemed to point to it.
Everything in the world turned gray around it.
It didn't make any threatening gestures.
I have this fear about the deeper dark.
The dark behind the dark.
The dark of the hallway and the dark behind the beds in the rooms in the hallway.
The dark you can't see.
No light escapes but the wobbly red LED lights of the digital alarm clock.
On my mother's side of the bed, on the nightstand.
Beyond them, the shades are drawn, but I know the woods behind the house are on fire.
I can see the flames reflected in my father's glasses.
When he turns around to face me, the reflection doesn't move.
When he grins, the fire moves closer.
Like a game of red-light-green-light.
And he won't turn back around.
Green light.
And Freddie Front-Seat is talking about his girl on the coast the one who left him three summers ago.
I ask him if she's the one and he says
She's one of the ones.
His grin is wolf-like.
He doesn't slaver though it seems like he could.
My selfish heart murmurs something to me.
In the black car with the sunroof.
Or the Ford F-150 pickup truck.
The murmur is the sound of the shadow in the river.
It got inside of me.
The sound of someone drowning.
At the beach.
On the widow's walk.
Laying flat on my back.
Fireworks overhead.
In the future, Nevada will be the new coast.
Nowhere Beach, NV: Come to Where the Water Is!
On every sign in the desert.
The highway crumbles into the water.
On the shoulders of the road, children make sand-castles crowned with asphalt diamonds.
I take a smoking spliff from a friend's hand and suck greedily on the tapered end.
I cough once.
If you think about the deeper dark you invoke it.
It comes rushing out of the blindness.
Like a car without headlights.
Turns them on at the last second.
Before it hits.
Or like a silent train.
And you're balancing down the trestle with headphones on.
Unfaithful husband vs. the Eumenides.
All kinds of horror come about when you're not looking.
When your back is turned.
When your eyes are closed.
Underneath a closed eye the eyeball moves herky-jerky.
As if struggling to see beyond a membrane.
Not-Freddie and Priscilla are the Grim Reaper and his gun-moll.
Freddie smiles at me, though he looks surprised to see me.
When they pull over.
In the black car with the sunroof.
We are driving full-throttle, no stop, towards a bloody horizon.
Where the sun settles on its haunches to lick its wounds.
Everything else is memory.
I am on the side of the road with my sign.
The sign reads Samarra.
Or the Ford F-150 pickup truck.
Neither of these; sitting on the side of the road, sign in hand.
Borrowed cigarette hanging out of the mouth.
Acrid smoke singeing the throat.
I cough three times.
The black car with a sunroof went by an hour ago, then it went by again. And again.
Hard to tell if it's the same car or if they just appear the same.
The driver reminds me of someone I know.
Today the heat is so intense it can almost be seen, and seen through. Its clear, diamond-tipped presence actually somehow makes the day a little more transparent.
The roof of the world is bluer, somehow.
Nothing else has changed.
The trees are full green, no stop.
We are in the throat of summer.
The inside of my nostril itches and I scratch it with a fingernail.
The driver of the black car is my friend Freddie.
It's entirely possible that it isn't.
Though he looks somewhat like him.
Not-Freddie is wearing
a green Celtics jersey with white outlines
a black baseball hat (brim forward)
dark sunglasses
He has tattoos.
He drives by too fast for me to see the detail.
Perhaps he is driving by because he knows I am there.
He can't know that I'm there.
He's driving by too fast.
It's entirely possible that it isn't Freddie.
There's that story about the farmer who goes to the market and sees Death.
Death makes a threatening gesture.
So the farmer runs away to Samarra.
The farmer's neighbor goes to the market and sees Death and says, “Why the threatening gesture?”
Death says, “That wasn't threatening, it was surprise. I was astonished to see him here in Baghdad, because I'm supposed to see him tonight in Samarra.”
That story hinges on Death's gesture.
The Ford F-150's gone by a few times too.
Brown exterior.
Three different drivers.
I think.
One's a woman, one's a man.
The other one, I can't tell.
Though when I was a kid I jumped off the barn.
Cracked my skull.
That's when I started forgetting names.
Faces just don't stick in my head.
How some people say, I never forget a face, I'm the opposite.
The heat of the summer crowds in.
The highway steams, the asphalt is brand new and blacker than black.
The yellow lines are brighter than neon.
In the black car with the sunroof.
Someone is asking me if I'm all right.
Voice from the backseat.
Static interferes and is replaced by the sawing of an electric guitar.
Freddie Front-Seat is wriggling behind the wheel with his lips puffed out.
He does that when there's a song he likes.
Priscilla in the back is handing me a joint.
I know it's not just a joint.
Acrid smoke singeing my throat.
I cough twice.
We are going to the coast no we don't know which one.
I don't ask questions I just get in the car.
The things that are true provide a framework for life.
Without the things that are true life has no framework.
I light up a Pall Mall and it takes a full five minutes to spark the Zippo because I'm staring at the flame.
The rumble of the engine like a captive, simmering beast under the hood.
Its breath seeps out around the edges like paint thinner against the day.
The colors wobble and slide down the canvas of the world.
So hey I say this isn't happening huh some kind of dream.
Must be the drugs they exchange like a handshake with their eyes and burst out laughing like a sunshower.
It's Green Day on the radio.
Night, rain falls.
Boston-bound from Maine.
F-150 truck rattling over the bridge.
The city growing up from the bay in front of us.
My left ear abruptly goes deaf.
The driver is Anja, a blonde with a nose-piercing.
Too much mascara.
She's crying, that's how I can tell.
It's been a week since I've had a drink.
I am missing the fourth and fifth finger on my right hand.
It makes things difficult to grab.
For three days I have been coughing up black sputum.
Despite all the vitamin C.
I say hey baby don't cry this is just a dream passin by.
She doesn't even look at me like I'm not even there.
I look out the window.
It's not a dream, it's a music video I saw when I was twelve.
Hard to tell which one.
Once you realize it's a dream, it's so much easier.
Permeable world.
Walls you can walk through.
Must be the drugs. A sick bloom of laughter.
Laying flat on my back at the beach.
The surrsurrant roar of waves breaking.
A breathy noise from nearby.
The steady beam of the lighthouse, sweeping sternly around.
Up on the widow's walk we clash like armies.
Lips, teeth, tongue.
We are ocean-wet.
The salt dries on our skin, shrinks us together.
Lightning against the black, way out to sea.
God's Holy Camera.
I say hey baby don't cry this is just a dream passin by.
The smoke from something burning on the beach.
A few houses down.
Could be some madwoman with a grudge.
And an ax.
A can of gasoline and a cigarette.
Tomorrow's papers tell the story.
She walked out to sea and didn't come back.
This is the story I tell my friends at the bar in a froth of drunk.
The stories we tell our friends are lies.
The only thing holding the framework of the world together is lies.
The rivets in the girders of truth.
The only cigarette I have I bummed.
Funny how you smoke a bummed cigarette so much more delicately than any from your own pack.
All the way down to the filter.
I cough three times.
The cigarette I bummed was a Marlboro.
The tips of my fingers tingle.
When I was twelve I saw a drowned ghost in the river. It was all in black and wore a hood.
Everything in the world seemed to point to it.
Everything in the world turned gray around it.
It didn't make any threatening gestures.
I have this fear about the deeper dark.
The dark behind the dark.
The dark of the hallway and the dark behind the beds in the rooms in the hallway.
The dark you can't see.
No light escapes but the wobbly red LED lights of the digital alarm clock.
On my mother's side of the bed, on the nightstand.
Beyond them, the shades are drawn, but I know the woods behind the house are on fire.
I can see the flames reflected in my father's glasses.
When he turns around to face me, the reflection doesn't move.
When he grins, the fire moves closer.
Like a game of red-light-green-light.
And he won't turn back around.
Green light.
And Freddie Front-Seat is talking about his girl on the coast the one who left him three summers ago.
I ask him if she's the one and he says
She's one of the ones.
His grin is wolf-like.
He doesn't slaver though it seems like he could.
My selfish heart murmurs something to me.
In the black car with the sunroof.
Or the Ford F-150 pickup truck.
The murmur is the sound of the shadow in the river.
It got inside of me.
The sound of someone drowning.
At the beach.
On the widow's walk.
Laying flat on my back.
Fireworks overhead.
In the future, Nevada will be the new coast.
Nowhere Beach, NV: Come to Where the Water Is!
On every sign in the desert.
The highway crumbles into the water.
On the shoulders of the road, children make sand-castles crowned with asphalt diamonds.
I take a smoking spliff from a friend's hand and suck greedily on the tapered end.
I cough once.
If you think about the deeper dark you invoke it.
It comes rushing out of the blindness.
Like a car without headlights.
Turns them on at the last second.
Before it hits.
Or like a silent train.
And you're balancing down the trestle with headphones on.
Unfaithful husband vs. the Eumenides.
All kinds of horror come about when you're not looking.
When your back is turned.
When your eyes are closed.
Underneath a closed eye the eyeball moves herky-jerky.
As if struggling to see beyond a membrane.
Not-Freddie and Priscilla are the Grim Reaper and his gun-moll.
Freddie smiles at me, though he looks surprised to see me.
When they pull over.
In the black car with the sunroof.
We are driving full-throttle, no stop, towards a bloody horizon.
Where the sun settles on its haunches to lick its wounds.
Everything else is memory.
I am on the side of the road with my sign.
The sign reads Samarra.
Sunday, November 13, 2011
prosopagnosia (with apologies to D. Markson)
I've always wanted a brother.
This is a thought which propels me through life like an outboard motor; leaving a muttering, ruminant wake behind me.
Or perhaps it's a father. Hard to tell.
Regardless, some kind of masculine figure.
Like a statue at the foot of my bed.
Or a painting, one of those English Lords with their hounds, on the wall opposite my bed.
I don't really use my bed to sleep anymore.
My grandmother didn't either, after a time. She'd piled all the toys from each Happy Meal she'd bought over the last three weeks on top. Clothes in plastic, books, papers. A mound of ephemera.
Her bedroom always had a strange smell, and the shades were always pulled.
I have a few friends, though I would consider none of them brothers.
In fact, I get teary-eyed when I see a father-son moment on the television.
Even if it's only a commercial.
Sometimes I'll see a group of guys walking down the street and I become cancerous with envy.
They walk so easily in tandem and I, I trip over my own damn feet.
I am somewhat afraid that I will turn into my grandmother. She wandered through a kind of fog that only she could see, towards the end. And always worrying.
Maybe it's a family disease. A external locus of control. Nothing to do with me except for how I was put together. Faulty parts.
Car manufacturers usually recall those cars whose brakes are faulty.
When I drive, I like to drive very fast.
I remember I turned off my headlights one moonless night in the country.
Whipped around the curves like a frightened ingenue in a noir film.
Almost crashed.
I don't drive so much anymore, though I miss it.
I'm a pedestrian. I hate that word, and I love most words.
Borborygmia, for example.
Or anaphylaxis. Medical terms really are the best. Granuloma, dyskinesia, catatonia. Fomite, dendrite, neuropathy. Cortex, intravenous immunoglobulin. This last, I know, treats hypogammaglobulinemia, a primary immune deficiency, and inflammatory diseases like Kawasaki's disease.
They say you can't learn anything from television. I tell them, everything I learned from television, I verified on Wikipedia.
Just kidding. [citation needed]
And so in the waning days of November.
When does a month start to wane? I suppose it'd be right after the half-way mark.
Today is November 13th. So I suppose this is the gibbous days of November.
The sun is still near to us. Not as near but still near.
I wonder exactly how far it is.
Aphelion is a good word, too.
So is perihelion.
The closest approach of Pluto is called perihadion, and farthest is apohadion. -hadion from Hades, which is hell. I like to call the closest approach of Hell, when times are really bad, perihadion.
Everything is circles. I used to draw circles, endless amounts of tiny, inked-in circles whorling across the margins of every notebook page.
That was in middle school.
My teacher told me to “cut it out” and I took scissors to each page in defiance.
Or maybe I didn't, maybe I just wanted to.
This, as I write it, is kind of like a memoir and kind of also like a conversation I'm having with myself.
At least I can be guaranteed of an intelligent conversation.
I think that's one of the worst jokes ever created. Just as bad, if not as bad, as a diner in a restaurant holding up their empty plate to the busboy and saying
We didn't like it very much.
Oh you sly dogs. How clever you are.
But still you have to smile and laugh as if it is the first time you have heard it.
An amnesiac would make a better waiter than me.
Really only someone with retrograde amnesia.
Like that guy in that movie. Couldn't make new memories.
But then how would the waiter remember the drinks?
He could tattoo it on himself.
He does anyway, metaphorically.
And somehow it's easier to make friends when you lie, even if it's just a little one. Everyone lies, I think it's just easier for most people to gently elide over the truth with something fictional.
Novels exist because of this. So do movies, and television.
I spend a lot of time in front of the television.
I am usually biting my nails until they bleed.
I am usually also stoned.
I prefer to say “high” because stoned sounds so violent.
Giles Corey leaps to mind.
The farthest approach of a black hole is termed an apomelasma, and the nearest, perimelasma.
Perhaps that would be a more adequate descriptor of the bad days. The lonely days, when it feels like there's a great sucking thing at the foot of my bed.
Or at the other end of the couch, where I wake up.
In the hole where the statue would be.
Or the painting of the English lord.
Some days I feel like Colin, the puling, pathetic invalid from The Secret Garden, jealous of Dickon's wick.
No innuendo there, Frances Mary Hodgson.
If this were a play, I'd list out the people I know like a dramatis personae, so you'd be better acquainted with them.
I don't “know” many people.
Who does, really. We all just kind of hang around each other relative to each other's natural gravity.
Someone the other day was telling me that we don't know why gravity exists, we just know it does.
I met this someone in the great gray hallways of the Internet.
I imagine the Internet is full of the sound of doors, constantly opening and closing. Some of those doors have locks and deadbolts.
I met this person because all my life, I have wanted a brother.
I put the laptop at the other end of the couch and leaned back like I was just waking up and there he was.
Just his face, but he was smiling.
Through a beard.
I have always wanted a beard.
I'm almost to the place where I have a beard.
Though when I was buying cigarettes the other day, the guy at the register said he didn't recognize me, that I had more “fungus” on my face.
I haven't smoked in six months.
Three weeks ago, I started again.
That might be why.
Not that he said I had more “fungus” on my face, but that six months had gone by.
Why he didn't recognize me, that is.
When I look in the mirror, I don't recognize myself.
Not because of my beard.
Though that might be why I grew it.
To dysrecognize myself.
I don't think that's why, though it's a theory.
That could also be why I tried to kill myself.
So everyone else would dysrecognize me.
I don't think dysrecognize is a word.
And when I told you that the Hum was worse that day, I said it while making kind of this phrenological semaphore over my skull.
You said sometimes, you speak so dramatically.
I tried to pretend it didn't hurt but it did anyway.
When I was a kid, my teachers always said I was “sensitive.”
I imagined all of my nerve endings somehow closer to the surface of my skin, sometimes even sticking out of the pores, like invisible tendrils waving ethereally in the wind.
If someone got too close, I'd get shocked, like an overabundance of feeling would incapacitate my brain.
Kind of like a reverse jellyfish.
A therapist told me that I have an eidetic memory for negative things people say about me, so I tried to apply negative mnemonics to learning.
Flashcards, if I got them right on the first try, earned me one lash of the whip.
Just kidding.
Though in fourth grade, I did pretend to have epilepsy. I did it so convincingly that they scheduled an EEG for me. Electroencephalogram. I remember laying in the dark and hearing the scribble of those little pens over quadrille paper.
I remember thinking it looked like a seismograph and I wondered if they were looking for earthquakes inside of me.
I suppose, in a way, they were.
My grandmother, along with all of her other junk, had a silver can that, when shaken, continued to shake seemingly of its own accord. It was called Earthquake-in-a-Can.
Maybe that's where I got the Hum. Like the Bottle Imp. From the Can.
100% Genuine California Earthquake! The side of the thing read.
The things they teach kids.
I am of the opinion that you ingest what you learn and sometimes what you ingest can make you sick if it's not cooked properly.
The cooking properly comes from the teaching.
We don't have enough good teachers. There's only a small amount of people with the patience to cook, and even smaller amount of those who want to be paid a small amount to do it.
We all wish we could do something with our lives that didn't equal out to money, though we all do it anyway.
Money is the universal language. It's accented by different denominations, from different countries.
I would prefer to be dumb.
Or have my metaphorical tongue cut out.
Rather than speak money.
There's no grammar to money, no tense. It's all present tense. I have this amount of money. Now I do not have this amount.
Today I have to decide if I have enough nickels in the paper roll to buy lunch. I already know I don't.
I speak so dramatically.
And when I told you the Hum was worse today, I meant it, and I did everything I could to try to get you to understand, but I wasn't speaking the right language.
If I gave every person a hundred-dollar bill before I asked them if they understood what I meant, I bet every single one of them would say yes.
Though you really should account for that contingent of the honorable.
And of course, the wealthy. The wealthy look at the hundred-dollar bill like I look at a penny on the sidewalk.
A tails-up penny.
Of course you were concerned. You're always concerned. You should be.
And every week at the end of my session she asks me about my safety. It's a polite way of asking if I'm going to cut the cord.
Off myself.
Kick the bucket.
Jump off a bridge.
Take too many pills.
I say things like no, no. Absolutely not. I couldn't.
Truth is, I could.
But I won't.
Freud calls it Eros and Thanatos. The life-urge and the death-urge.
I prefer Libido and Destrudo, or Destrado.
I will, someday, write a book entitled Destrudo, or Destrado.
The death-urge.
Everything has an opposite.
Except for me.
Then of course there's the two sides to everything I think.
The Apollonian and the Dionysian.
The classic internal struggle.
Maybe I am a collection of multiples that each have their own opposite. A collection of multiples has no singular opposite, other than a collection of no multiples, which is essentially a black hole.
Perimelasma. Sounds like a type of cancer.
I suppose a black hole is a kind of cancer, like a tumor on the skin of space. Perimelanoma.
I am told that I catastrophize. That means I am always thinking about what will go wrong rather than what will go right.
During my session last week, the therapist asked me if I had been diagnosed in the past and if so with what.
In the mental hospital, they told me I had Borderline Personality Disorder. This means I have mood instability as well as idealization and devaluation episodes. It also means I have unstable interpersonal relationships.
I have started keeping this journal to chart my thought process. This is why it isn't the most reliable.
Nothing about me is reliable.
Some people say that the term Borderline Personality Disorder should be renamed to Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder.
I think I like the first term more.
They diagnosed me within a half-hour. Opened up the DSM-IV and pointed to the entry. F60.31 in the ICD-10, where it says traits relating to BPD are influenced by genes.
Think they would've recalled me by now.
My attempts to recall myself ended badly.
Swiss physician Theophile Bonet used the French term “folie manico-melancolique.”
This basically transliterates to craziness of a manic and sad nature.
In 1946, Melanie Klein first used the term “projective identification” to describe the following feeling.
I see you feeling something and you can't feel it, so I feel it for you.
But I can never know how you are actually feeling, I'm just imagining that I know.
A kind of emotional contagion.
I have a very vivid imagination.
You are very catching.
All of you.
Or perhaps I'm the one who is sick.
Seems that way.
I find that alcohol is the best medicine for my brain but the worst for my heart.
The cigarettes don't help either.
I find that cigarettes are the best medicine for time but the worst for my lungs.
I miss cocaine.
I was trying to talk to one of you when I ended up in the hospital. I was trying to tell you how I felt and I think you were uninterested, or you had enough on your mind.
Years prior, at four in the morning, we sat on the curb outside your house and you said I could call you anytime.
You said you'd always answer.
You never did.
Proves to me that you shouldn't rely on things said at four in the morning.
Or past midnight.
Or at all.
Lately I've been drinking a lot of coffee (black) because I miss the rush and twitch of amphetamines. It helps me write. I am halfway through a novel that I'm afraid I won't finish and harbor this secret intimation that it's already dead in the water.
Floating corpses, mottled flesh, belly-up.
I think we drank a whole fifth of whiskey between the two of us that night.
Maybe a few shots of Dr. MacGillicuddy's, too.
And some beers.
What I had to say spewed out of me and hit the sidewalk with a sickening slap.
All I could hear was the racheting ricochet of billiard balls. The jaw-crack of stick hitting cue ball.
Your blank eyes.
I walked down the yellow lines the whole way home.
I stole six Xanax from my sleeping roommate and took a blade to my arms.
Maybe it was less than six.
Or more.
I remember the whorling police lights outside the window. Someone called the cops.
It was me.
Or it wasn't.
The ambulance ride to the hospital, about ten blocks away, cost $600.00 USD.
Six years later, I still haven't paid it.
Or maybe it was five.
Years later, that is.
It was the night before the fourth of July.
A blue piece of paper made it okay for them to bring me to the mental hospital.
Terrible name for a place like that.
Hospital, that is.
I woke up and wrote poetry with a pencil that I had sign a safety contract to get.
I wrote about a Holocaust victim whose name was Eva. I don't remember the poem now but it had to do with God.
In the hallways, a kid with a beard and holes in his socks walked endlessly around.
Peripatetic. Another good word.
With a Bible in his hand.
I asked a nurse what happened when he finished.
She said, he starts over again from the beginning.
She didn't know how many times he'd finished and then started over.
I didn't ask.
I met someone else there, too, and his name was Seth.
I tried to teach him how to solve a cryptogram.
He kept pulling his pants up because they wouldn't let us have belts.
When I left three days later, I left the cryptogram for him.
And my phone number.
When I left, I got in the van and the radio was playing “Doctor, Doctor” by Robert Palmer.
I thought that was weird.
When I got out of the van at my house, the radio was playing “Sick Sad Little World” by Incubus.
Or perhaps not, though I remember the song was appropriate.
I asked the driver if he had a tape in there, playing all these songs, like someone would play scary noises on Halloween.
He didn't.
And I didn't ask.
Though maybe I should have.
Fifteen minutes after I got home, one of you knocked on the door. You hugged me very tightly.
I remember that I was confused as to why you were hugging me.
We stood in the door at the bottom of the stairs where I had been dragged out by the paramedics.
Or maybe it was the police who hauled me out.
I wonder how the neighbors felt that night.
I moved out of that apartment years later and returned to it one drunken night.
With two guys.
They put porn on the TV and I said I had to leave.
I'm glad I did.
Though part of me wishes I'd stayed.
My old bedroom got turned into a game room.
There was a dartboard on the wall where my bed used to be.
I think I did drugs fifteen to twenty minutes after we stopped hugging.
We used to call it Diet Coke, because it was Adderall.
I was the one who made the joke first, though it became widely used and I was never credited.
At this time, I guess it doesn't matter.
You used to call it Orange Sunshine, but the pills weren't always orange.
We also did Concerta.
I remember one time we were on our way to Boston in Lindsay's car and I was separating the capsule to make sure none of the green, non-snortable bits were in the mix.
I loved that feeling. Utility. Functionality.
Having something to do is important to me.
They say sharks can't stop moving, or they die.
They even sleep while they've moving.
Violent sleepwalkers of the deep.
Although I guess you'd have to call them sleepswimmers.
Aquatic sonnambulocomotion, perhaps.
I never learned how to swim.
I almost drowned in an inground pool when I was six.
My mother doesn't know how to swim, either.
My uncle had to save me.
I am mildly hydrophobic as a result.
I have dreams of driving over a bridge when it collapses.
I could probably make it to shore if I tried.
How hard is it to keep yourself afloat?
Not speaking metaphorically, of course.
My therapist tells me not to let the anxiety get ahead of me, and I reply that it already has.
That's usually when she asks me about my relative safety.
I say no. No, of course I can't do that. I couldn't even if I wanted to.
She always appears unconvinced.
I think I might scare her a little.
I kind of hope I do.
I told my therapist about the Hum.
When I say I told her, I mean that she had me do a freewriting exercise and I wrote about it.
I wrote that the Hum is worse today.
That was the first sentence.
I may not have capitalized the h.
I wrote how my thoughts are like comets streaking across the sky.
Over the gray, tilled fields of my brain.
Caressing the fields with their hairy tails.
Lighting up everything with an eldritch luminescence.
Eldritch is a good word.
So is etiolate.
Though they mean two completely separate things.
At one-thirty in the afternoon, the sun is already going down.
I was so excited to discover I have $25.00 in my savings account.
I was disappointed when I discovered I couldn't withdraw it from the ATM.
T.S. Eliot's 'Rhapsody on a Windy Evening' is one of my favorite poems.
The last twist of the knife.
I was disappointed when I found out that it was the basis for the song “Memory” from Cats, the musical.
I generally like musicals.
Especially Sondheim.
A Little Night Music is my favorite.
Probably because I also like Ingmar Bergman.
It's not gloomy, it's profound.
La lune ne garde aucune rancune.
The loops are getting smaller, though there's more to say. Recursive iterations tighten the spiral each time.
The last twist of the knife.
T.S. Eliot says,
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
When I say I love you, I mean it.
Or I don't.
The heart speaks a language the tongue is deaf to.
All thuds and growls and sighs.
This is a thought which propels me through life like an outboard motor; leaving a muttering, ruminant wake behind me.
Or perhaps it's a father. Hard to tell.
Regardless, some kind of masculine figure.
Like a statue at the foot of my bed.
Or a painting, one of those English Lords with their hounds, on the wall opposite my bed.
I don't really use my bed to sleep anymore.
My grandmother didn't either, after a time. She'd piled all the toys from each Happy Meal she'd bought over the last three weeks on top. Clothes in plastic, books, papers. A mound of ephemera.
Her bedroom always had a strange smell, and the shades were always pulled.
I have a few friends, though I would consider none of them brothers.
In fact, I get teary-eyed when I see a father-son moment on the television.
Even if it's only a commercial.
Sometimes I'll see a group of guys walking down the street and I become cancerous with envy.
They walk so easily in tandem and I, I trip over my own damn feet.
I am somewhat afraid that I will turn into my grandmother. She wandered through a kind of fog that only she could see, towards the end. And always worrying.
Maybe it's a family disease. A external locus of control. Nothing to do with me except for how I was put together. Faulty parts.
Car manufacturers usually recall those cars whose brakes are faulty.
When I drive, I like to drive very fast.
I remember I turned off my headlights one moonless night in the country.
Whipped around the curves like a frightened ingenue in a noir film.
Almost crashed.
I don't drive so much anymore, though I miss it.
I'm a pedestrian. I hate that word, and I love most words.
Borborygmia, for example.
Or anaphylaxis. Medical terms really are the best. Granuloma, dyskinesia, catatonia. Fomite, dendrite, neuropathy. Cortex, intravenous immunoglobulin. This last, I know, treats hypogammaglobulinemia, a primary immune deficiency, and inflammatory diseases like Kawasaki's disease.
They say you can't learn anything from television. I tell them, everything I learned from television, I verified on Wikipedia.
Just kidding. [citation needed]
And so in the waning days of November.
When does a month start to wane? I suppose it'd be right after the half-way mark.
Today is November 13th. So I suppose this is the gibbous days of November.
The sun is still near to us. Not as near but still near.
I wonder exactly how far it is.
Aphelion is a good word, too.
So is perihelion.
The closest approach of Pluto is called perihadion, and farthest is apohadion. -hadion from Hades, which is hell. I like to call the closest approach of Hell, when times are really bad, perihadion.
Everything is circles. I used to draw circles, endless amounts of tiny, inked-in circles whorling across the margins of every notebook page.
That was in middle school.
My teacher told me to “cut it out” and I took scissors to each page in defiance.
Or maybe I didn't, maybe I just wanted to.
This, as I write it, is kind of like a memoir and kind of also like a conversation I'm having with myself.
At least I can be guaranteed of an intelligent conversation.
I think that's one of the worst jokes ever created. Just as bad, if not as bad, as a diner in a restaurant holding up their empty plate to the busboy and saying
We didn't like it very much.
Oh you sly dogs. How clever you are.
But still you have to smile and laugh as if it is the first time you have heard it.
An amnesiac would make a better waiter than me.
Really only someone with retrograde amnesia.
Like that guy in that movie. Couldn't make new memories.
But then how would the waiter remember the drinks?
He could tattoo it on himself.
He does anyway, metaphorically.
And somehow it's easier to make friends when you lie, even if it's just a little one. Everyone lies, I think it's just easier for most people to gently elide over the truth with something fictional.
Novels exist because of this. So do movies, and television.
I spend a lot of time in front of the television.
I am usually biting my nails until they bleed.
I am usually also stoned.
I prefer to say “high” because stoned sounds so violent.
Giles Corey leaps to mind.
The farthest approach of a black hole is termed an apomelasma, and the nearest, perimelasma.
Perhaps that would be a more adequate descriptor of the bad days. The lonely days, when it feels like there's a great sucking thing at the foot of my bed.
Or at the other end of the couch, where I wake up.
In the hole where the statue would be.
Or the painting of the English lord.
Some days I feel like Colin, the puling, pathetic invalid from The Secret Garden, jealous of Dickon's wick.
No innuendo there, Frances Mary Hodgson.
If this were a play, I'd list out the people I know like a dramatis personae, so you'd be better acquainted with them.
I don't “know” many people.
Who does, really. We all just kind of hang around each other relative to each other's natural gravity.
Someone the other day was telling me that we don't know why gravity exists, we just know it does.
I met this someone in the great gray hallways of the Internet.
I imagine the Internet is full of the sound of doors, constantly opening and closing. Some of those doors have locks and deadbolts.
I met this person because all my life, I have wanted a brother.
I put the laptop at the other end of the couch and leaned back like I was just waking up and there he was.
Just his face, but he was smiling.
Through a beard.
I have always wanted a beard.
I'm almost to the place where I have a beard.
Though when I was buying cigarettes the other day, the guy at the register said he didn't recognize me, that I had more “fungus” on my face.
I haven't smoked in six months.
Three weeks ago, I started again.
That might be why.
Not that he said I had more “fungus” on my face, but that six months had gone by.
Why he didn't recognize me, that is.
When I look in the mirror, I don't recognize myself.
Not because of my beard.
Though that might be why I grew it.
To dysrecognize myself.
I don't think that's why, though it's a theory.
That could also be why I tried to kill myself.
So everyone else would dysrecognize me.
I don't think dysrecognize is a word.
And when I told you that the Hum was worse that day, I said it while making kind of this phrenological semaphore over my skull.
You said sometimes, you speak so dramatically.
I tried to pretend it didn't hurt but it did anyway.
When I was a kid, my teachers always said I was “sensitive.”
I imagined all of my nerve endings somehow closer to the surface of my skin, sometimes even sticking out of the pores, like invisible tendrils waving ethereally in the wind.
If someone got too close, I'd get shocked, like an overabundance of feeling would incapacitate my brain.
Kind of like a reverse jellyfish.
A therapist told me that I have an eidetic memory for negative things people say about me, so I tried to apply negative mnemonics to learning.
Flashcards, if I got them right on the first try, earned me one lash of the whip.
Just kidding.
Though in fourth grade, I did pretend to have epilepsy. I did it so convincingly that they scheduled an EEG for me. Electroencephalogram. I remember laying in the dark and hearing the scribble of those little pens over quadrille paper.
I remember thinking it looked like a seismograph and I wondered if they were looking for earthquakes inside of me.
I suppose, in a way, they were.
My grandmother, along with all of her other junk, had a silver can that, when shaken, continued to shake seemingly of its own accord. It was called Earthquake-in-a-Can.
Maybe that's where I got the Hum. Like the Bottle Imp. From the Can.
100% Genuine California Earthquake! The side of the thing read.
The things they teach kids.
I am of the opinion that you ingest what you learn and sometimes what you ingest can make you sick if it's not cooked properly.
The cooking properly comes from the teaching.
We don't have enough good teachers. There's only a small amount of people with the patience to cook, and even smaller amount of those who want to be paid a small amount to do it.
We all wish we could do something with our lives that didn't equal out to money, though we all do it anyway.
Money is the universal language. It's accented by different denominations, from different countries.
I would prefer to be dumb.
Or have my metaphorical tongue cut out.
Rather than speak money.
There's no grammar to money, no tense. It's all present tense. I have this amount of money. Now I do not have this amount.
Today I have to decide if I have enough nickels in the paper roll to buy lunch. I already know I don't.
I speak so dramatically.
And when I told you the Hum was worse today, I meant it, and I did everything I could to try to get you to understand, but I wasn't speaking the right language.
If I gave every person a hundred-dollar bill before I asked them if they understood what I meant, I bet every single one of them would say yes.
Though you really should account for that contingent of the honorable.
And of course, the wealthy. The wealthy look at the hundred-dollar bill like I look at a penny on the sidewalk.
A tails-up penny.
Of course you were concerned. You're always concerned. You should be.
And every week at the end of my session she asks me about my safety. It's a polite way of asking if I'm going to cut the cord.
Off myself.
Kick the bucket.
Jump off a bridge.
Take too many pills.
I say things like no, no. Absolutely not. I couldn't.
Truth is, I could.
But I won't.
Freud calls it Eros and Thanatos. The life-urge and the death-urge.
I prefer Libido and Destrudo, or Destrado.
I will, someday, write a book entitled Destrudo, or Destrado.
The death-urge.
Everything has an opposite.
Except for me.
Then of course there's the two sides to everything I think.
The Apollonian and the Dionysian.
The classic internal struggle.
Maybe I am a collection of multiples that each have their own opposite. A collection of multiples has no singular opposite, other than a collection of no multiples, which is essentially a black hole.
Perimelasma. Sounds like a type of cancer.
I suppose a black hole is a kind of cancer, like a tumor on the skin of space. Perimelanoma.
I am told that I catastrophize. That means I am always thinking about what will go wrong rather than what will go right.
During my session last week, the therapist asked me if I had been diagnosed in the past and if so with what.
In the mental hospital, they told me I had Borderline Personality Disorder. This means I have mood instability as well as idealization and devaluation episodes. It also means I have unstable interpersonal relationships.
I have started keeping this journal to chart my thought process. This is why it isn't the most reliable.
Nothing about me is reliable.
Some people say that the term Borderline Personality Disorder should be renamed to Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder.
I think I like the first term more.
They diagnosed me within a half-hour. Opened up the DSM-IV and pointed to the entry. F60.31 in the ICD-10, where it says traits relating to BPD are influenced by genes.
Think they would've recalled me by now.
My attempts to recall myself ended badly.
Swiss physician Theophile Bonet used the French term “folie manico-melancolique.”
This basically transliterates to craziness of a manic and sad nature.
In 1946, Melanie Klein first used the term “projective identification” to describe the following feeling.
I see you feeling something and you can't feel it, so I feel it for you.
But I can never know how you are actually feeling, I'm just imagining that I know.
A kind of emotional contagion.
I have a very vivid imagination.
You are very catching.
All of you.
Or perhaps I'm the one who is sick.
Seems that way.
I find that alcohol is the best medicine for my brain but the worst for my heart.
The cigarettes don't help either.
I find that cigarettes are the best medicine for time but the worst for my lungs.
I miss cocaine.
I was trying to talk to one of you when I ended up in the hospital. I was trying to tell you how I felt and I think you were uninterested, or you had enough on your mind.
Years prior, at four in the morning, we sat on the curb outside your house and you said I could call you anytime.
You said you'd always answer.
You never did.
Proves to me that you shouldn't rely on things said at four in the morning.
Or past midnight.
Or at all.
Lately I've been drinking a lot of coffee (black) because I miss the rush and twitch of amphetamines. It helps me write. I am halfway through a novel that I'm afraid I won't finish and harbor this secret intimation that it's already dead in the water.
Floating corpses, mottled flesh, belly-up.
I think we drank a whole fifth of whiskey between the two of us that night.
Maybe a few shots of Dr. MacGillicuddy's, too.
And some beers.
What I had to say spewed out of me and hit the sidewalk with a sickening slap.
All I could hear was the racheting ricochet of billiard balls. The jaw-crack of stick hitting cue ball.
Your blank eyes.
I walked down the yellow lines the whole way home.
I stole six Xanax from my sleeping roommate and took a blade to my arms.
Maybe it was less than six.
Or more.
I remember the whorling police lights outside the window. Someone called the cops.
It was me.
Or it wasn't.
The ambulance ride to the hospital, about ten blocks away, cost $600.00 USD.
Six years later, I still haven't paid it.
Or maybe it was five.
Years later, that is.
It was the night before the fourth of July.
A blue piece of paper made it okay for them to bring me to the mental hospital.
Terrible name for a place like that.
Hospital, that is.
I woke up and wrote poetry with a pencil that I had sign a safety contract to get.
I wrote about a Holocaust victim whose name was Eva. I don't remember the poem now but it had to do with God.
In the hallways, a kid with a beard and holes in his socks walked endlessly around.
Peripatetic. Another good word.
With a Bible in his hand.
I asked a nurse what happened when he finished.
She said, he starts over again from the beginning.
She didn't know how many times he'd finished and then started over.
I didn't ask.
I met someone else there, too, and his name was Seth.
I tried to teach him how to solve a cryptogram.
He kept pulling his pants up because they wouldn't let us have belts.
When I left three days later, I left the cryptogram for him.
And my phone number.
When I left, I got in the van and the radio was playing “Doctor, Doctor” by Robert Palmer.
I thought that was weird.
When I got out of the van at my house, the radio was playing “Sick Sad Little World” by Incubus.
Or perhaps not, though I remember the song was appropriate.
I asked the driver if he had a tape in there, playing all these songs, like someone would play scary noises on Halloween.
He didn't.
And I didn't ask.
Though maybe I should have.
Fifteen minutes after I got home, one of you knocked on the door. You hugged me very tightly.
I remember that I was confused as to why you were hugging me.
We stood in the door at the bottom of the stairs where I had been dragged out by the paramedics.
Or maybe it was the police who hauled me out.
I wonder how the neighbors felt that night.
I moved out of that apartment years later and returned to it one drunken night.
With two guys.
They put porn on the TV and I said I had to leave.
I'm glad I did.
Though part of me wishes I'd stayed.
My old bedroom got turned into a game room.
There was a dartboard on the wall where my bed used to be.
I think I did drugs fifteen to twenty minutes after we stopped hugging.
We used to call it Diet Coke, because it was Adderall.
I was the one who made the joke first, though it became widely used and I was never credited.
At this time, I guess it doesn't matter.
You used to call it Orange Sunshine, but the pills weren't always orange.
We also did Concerta.
I remember one time we were on our way to Boston in Lindsay's car and I was separating the capsule to make sure none of the green, non-snortable bits were in the mix.
I loved that feeling. Utility. Functionality.
Having something to do is important to me.
They say sharks can't stop moving, or they die.
They even sleep while they've moving.
Violent sleepwalkers of the deep.
Although I guess you'd have to call them sleepswimmers.
Aquatic sonnambulocomotion, perhaps.
I never learned how to swim.
I almost drowned in an inground pool when I was six.
My mother doesn't know how to swim, either.
My uncle had to save me.
I am mildly hydrophobic as a result.
I have dreams of driving over a bridge when it collapses.
I could probably make it to shore if I tried.
How hard is it to keep yourself afloat?
Not speaking metaphorically, of course.
My therapist tells me not to let the anxiety get ahead of me, and I reply that it already has.
That's usually when she asks me about my relative safety.
I say no. No, of course I can't do that. I couldn't even if I wanted to.
She always appears unconvinced.
I think I might scare her a little.
I kind of hope I do.
I told my therapist about the Hum.
When I say I told her, I mean that she had me do a freewriting exercise and I wrote about it.
I wrote that the Hum is worse today.
That was the first sentence.
I may not have capitalized the h.
I wrote how my thoughts are like comets streaking across the sky.
Over the gray, tilled fields of my brain.
Caressing the fields with their hairy tails.
Lighting up everything with an eldritch luminescence.
Eldritch is a good word.
So is etiolate.
Though they mean two completely separate things.
At one-thirty in the afternoon, the sun is already going down.
I was so excited to discover I have $25.00 in my savings account.
I was disappointed when I discovered I couldn't withdraw it from the ATM.
T.S. Eliot's 'Rhapsody on a Windy Evening' is one of my favorite poems.
The last twist of the knife.
I was disappointed when I found out that it was the basis for the song “Memory” from Cats, the musical.
I generally like musicals.
Especially Sondheim.
A Little Night Music is my favorite.
Probably because I also like Ingmar Bergman.
It's not gloomy, it's profound.
La lune ne garde aucune rancune.
The loops are getting smaller, though there's more to say. Recursive iterations tighten the spiral each time.
The last twist of the knife.
T.S. Eliot says,
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
When I say I love you, I mean it.
Or I don't.
The heart speaks a language the tongue is deaf to.
All thuds and growls and sighs.
Thursday, November 10, 2011
psychopomp
How does any dream begin? A slow leading of the hand into the gray space between. There is always a space between. You can't be bothered by the way the world feels or how you're sitting in your chair or how you can't take your eyes off of that one thing that they see like a star in the gray. And just like looking at a star in the night sky you squint at it to see if it's moving very slowly across the sky if it's even a star at all. This is the way to enter dream. Your body is stilled and your breath is even - it has found a rhythm intrinsic, a primordial beat, and, craning its ear, bends in to listen and keep in time. Your heart follows suit, the muscle slowing in agreement with your your breathing, like an instrument in an orchestra being told legato, legato, pianississimo.
Then it is the jawbone. Teeth held together all day finally part wistful ways, the jawbone sinking rapidly until it hangs slack, opening the cave of the mouth. The jawbone is tied however it is to the muscle of the mind, and with its slow decline, something in the middle of your skull irises open. You are assembling images now in the cutting-room of your mind's eye, sitting cross-legged on the floor, arranging brilliantly alive photographs and holding them up to the light. Each one of these is a memory, a memory that beats with sound and light. You turn the memory one way and it refracts a brilliant flash at you; you turn it the other way, the same thing happens. You become dazzled by the memory, as if in a kind of shock, sink willingly into it.
And there you are, whoever you are. Dark-haired and dark-eyed, furrow-brow and smile, laying on your side in our bed. In the dishwater-yellow of the morning, floating there. I watch you fall asleep and more than often I watch you wake up. There are nights, sure, drunken nights when I fall into bed having gone to sleep a long time ago, but more than I often I am the last one to drift into the gray. I remember I said I was smoking again and you were so angry with me. I hurt you with something I did and it was something I said I couldn't control but something which I knew I could, if I tried hard enough. I think it was that which hurt you, and that which now hurts me. In the dream I have yet to hurt you, yet to lie or cover something up, even though I'm in the business of covering things up. We've only just met. I told myself I wanted a relationship because I write about relationships but only ever the end, and I found you. I don't trust people in the world, and so I turned to another world, and I found you. We talked online for months before we actually met, in that vast, disembodied hive-mind of the Internet. I imagined our meetings as taking place in your room. When I saw all four walls for the first time, I laughed, then peered at your computer screen as if hoping to see the wall of my room displayed on your screen still. Like looking through a wormhole.
You were always patient with me until suddenly you weren't anymore. Perhaps it's because I didn't change and you did. Do you remember when I told you I felt like I was cursed? You laughed at me, and then apologized when you realized I meant it, and then apologized again. That night in the parking lot outside of that restaurant. It had rained and the street-lights seemed to blaze through from underneath the asphalt, like some eldritch arena. Our brief pas-de-deux. Perhaps it's because I always said I was wrong but mostly felt like I was right. Maybe it was the day I decided not to talk until the sun set. Maybe it was both of these things, or none of them.
In the dream, I know suddenly that I will wake up from the dream and feel nostalgia for a memory that doesn't exist. Maybe isn't even mine. Probably culled by cryptomnesia from books, movies, songs, colors. In the dream, I know I will wake up from the dream and feel shame until the morning I wake up and feel wistful. In the dream, it is July and without, it is November. There are always storm-clouds threatening and outside, on the lawn, children are playing a game they've just made up. This is why I never wanted to get out of bed in the morning, I say to you in the dream, even though we've only just met. This is why I stay. Lingering on the threshhold like someone caught in a recursive loop of goodbyes, feet pointed horizon-ward but eyes pointed back. In the dream you frown and tug at my earlobe. There is something we're supposed to be doing and neither of us mention it because it has suddenly become the least important thing. We are bubbled off from the world, a closed system, a binary star.
The mind knows nothing lasts and the image shifts and you're gone and so am I. Perhaps this is just how the memory of a dream works - you only get moments. If the waking mind could remember the entire sequence of a dream, like a movie memorized, it would cease to function normally and live entirely within that dream. After this, I only remember pieces. Different seasons, different colors. Even faces of people I've lost to the years, to communication's halt. Non sum qualis eram. On the train, there are two of you ghosts, one I lost recently and another a long time ago. I feel intense guilt radiating on the inside of my ribcage, like I'm Claudius at the dinner-table and you're Banquo's ghost. One of you still wears the beard I last saw you with, and the same blue sweater. You have an enormous suitcase and you're fiddling with something very small on the top of it. You do not notice me and I do not draw attention to myself. You're either embarking on a long journey or returning from one, I can't tell.
The other one is someone I lost very recently, but I can't make out their face. They are badly burned and their flesh crisps away like bark on a burning log. They are blaming me and I apologize, but words are never enough. I want to go back, I don't know how I got on the train to begin with. This isn't any click-your-heels moment, there's no no place like home. If I just try to will myself back to you, it'll work, I'll be right back there in the morning-room and I'll have just met you and I'll have yet to lie or cover anything up and just let me go back there and the rattle of the train stops
Then it is the jawbone. Teeth held together all day finally part wistful ways, the jawbone sinking rapidly until it hangs slack, opening the cave of the mouth. The jawbone is tied however it is to the muscle of the mind, and with its slow decline, something in the middle of your skull irises open. You are assembling images now in the cutting-room of your mind's eye, sitting cross-legged on the floor, arranging brilliantly alive photographs and holding them up to the light. Each one of these is a memory, a memory that beats with sound and light. You turn the memory one way and it refracts a brilliant flash at you; you turn it the other way, the same thing happens. You become dazzled by the memory, as if in a kind of shock, sink willingly into it.
And there you are, whoever you are. Dark-haired and dark-eyed, furrow-brow and smile, laying on your side in our bed. In the dishwater-yellow of the morning, floating there. I watch you fall asleep and more than often I watch you wake up. There are nights, sure, drunken nights when I fall into bed having gone to sleep a long time ago, but more than I often I am the last one to drift into the gray. I remember I said I was smoking again and you were so angry with me. I hurt you with something I did and it was something I said I couldn't control but something which I knew I could, if I tried hard enough. I think it was that which hurt you, and that which now hurts me. In the dream I have yet to hurt you, yet to lie or cover something up, even though I'm in the business of covering things up. We've only just met. I told myself I wanted a relationship because I write about relationships but only ever the end, and I found you. I don't trust people in the world, and so I turned to another world, and I found you. We talked online for months before we actually met, in that vast, disembodied hive-mind of the Internet. I imagined our meetings as taking place in your room. When I saw all four walls for the first time, I laughed, then peered at your computer screen as if hoping to see the wall of my room displayed on your screen still. Like looking through a wormhole.
You were always patient with me until suddenly you weren't anymore. Perhaps it's because I didn't change and you did. Do you remember when I told you I felt like I was cursed? You laughed at me, and then apologized when you realized I meant it, and then apologized again. That night in the parking lot outside of that restaurant. It had rained and the street-lights seemed to blaze through from underneath the asphalt, like some eldritch arena. Our brief pas-de-deux. Perhaps it's because I always said I was wrong but mostly felt like I was right. Maybe it was the day I decided not to talk until the sun set. Maybe it was both of these things, or none of them.
In the dream, I know suddenly that I will wake up from the dream and feel nostalgia for a memory that doesn't exist. Maybe isn't even mine. Probably culled by cryptomnesia from books, movies, songs, colors. In the dream, I know I will wake up from the dream and feel shame until the morning I wake up and feel wistful. In the dream, it is July and without, it is November. There are always storm-clouds threatening and outside, on the lawn, children are playing a game they've just made up. This is why I never wanted to get out of bed in the morning, I say to you in the dream, even though we've only just met. This is why I stay. Lingering on the threshhold like someone caught in a recursive loop of goodbyes, feet pointed horizon-ward but eyes pointed back. In the dream you frown and tug at my earlobe. There is something we're supposed to be doing and neither of us mention it because it has suddenly become the least important thing. We are bubbled off from the world, a closed system, a binary star.
The mind knows nothing lasts and the image shifts and you're gone and so am I. Perhaps this is just how the memory of a dream works - you only get moments. If the waking mind could remember the entire sequence of a dream, like a movie memorized, it would cease to function normally and live entirely within that dream. After this, I only remember pieces. Different seasons, different colors. Even faces of people I've lost to the years, to communication's halt. Non sum qualis eram. On the train, there are two of you ghosts, one I lost recently and another a long time ago. I feel intense guilt radiating on the inside of my ribcage, like I'm Claudius at the dinner-table and you're Banquo's ghost. One of you still wears the beard I last saw you with, and the same blue sweater. You have an enormous suitcase and you're fiddling with something very small on the top of it. You do not notice me and I do not draw attention to myself. You're either embarking on a long journey or returning from one, I can't tell.
The other one is someone I lost very recently, but I can't make out their face. They are badly burned and their flesh crisps away like bark on a burning log. They are blaming me and I apologize, but words are never enough. I want to go back, I don't know how I got on the train to begin with. This isn't any click-your-heels moment, there's no no place like home. If I just try to will myself back to you, it'll work, I'll be right back there in the morning-room and I'll have just met you and I'll have yet to lie or cover anything up and just let me go back there and the rattle of the train stops
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