I hear a soundless thunderclap,
see lighning not against the horizon,
but dimly illuminating two inches …
how absurd.
Then I think, I mighty spectator,
cannot illumine my way out of a tin can,
and I am oddly jealous.
It’s a courtship dance,
a call to romance,
and I who’ve suffered my last chance …
think how absurd.
In truth …
I envy their simple majesty.
I who have no thunderclap –
quiet though it is –
and who have no lighning –
I woo with words and …
that truly is absurd.
If my life right now was an album title it would be:
Remembering to Breathe –
You can’t count moments of pain without
comparing them to moments of joy. Neither the world
nor us was ever entirely composed of pain.
In fact, it was only the smallest amount.
Pain accruing? It comes, goes, disperses,
as does joy. Don’t give it too much credence.
Don’t lend it too much support. Don’t encourage it.
What about joy accruing? You’d think that
after all this love, we’d have a surplus.
Why do I feel like that has been
so discounted. Why do I feel like now
that means nothing to you?
Not all beauty is convulsive. I agree.
Nor is all joy simply a mask over something darker,
nor is love just a blanket that hides you from the world.
It all depends where you put your focus, I guess.
If you want to look for pain,
there is plenty there to see.
The same is true of joy and beauty and love.
I’m sorry if this is mean.
I’m sorry if this isn’t fair.
I’m sorry for mentioning a guillotine and
I’m sorry for everything, absolutely everything,
except loving you.
Embrace beauty.
Embrace happy beauty.
Embrace sad beauty.
Embrace meaningful beauty.
Embrace inane beauty.
Embrace pedantic beauty.
Embrace shallow beauty.
Embrace wise beauty.
Embrace foolish beauty.
Embrace old beauty.
Embrace young beauty.
Embrace past beauty.
Embrace present beauty.
Embrace future beauty.
Embrace known beauty.
Embrace mysterious beauty.
Embrace frightening beauty.
Embrace comfortable beauty.
Embrace calm beauty.
Embrace tempestuous beauty.
Embrace ugly beauty.
Embrace written beauty.
Embrace spoken beauty.
Embrace physical beauty.
Embrace spiritual beauty.
Embrace inner beauty.
Embrace worldly beauty.
Embrace naive beauty.
Embrace embracing beauty.
Embrace solitary beauty.
Embrace quiet beauty.
Embrace loud beauty.
Embrace overbearing beauty.
Embrace crying beauty.
Embrace laughing beauty.
Embrace heartbroken beauty.
Embrace strong beauty.
Embrace frail beauty.
Embrace angry beauty.
Embrace wounded beauty.
Embrace incredible beauty.
Embrace commonplace beauty.
Embrace distant beauty.
Embrace the beauty at hand.
Embrace Gogol’s beauty, and that of Dostoevsky and Camus and Franz Wright and Voltaire and de Sade and Lautreamont and Gaiman and Tolkien and Kerouac and Vonnegut and Bradbury and Salinger and Mallarme and Voltaire and Jarry and Satie and Diesel and Johansson and Aurelius and Jesus and Buddha and Muhammad and elephants and monkeys and buttons for eyes and crooks for tails and thunderstorms and calms and sighs and laughter and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on …
“by the way thank You for
keeping Your face hidden, I
can hardly bear the beauty of this world.”
-Franz Wright
I got home from work and searched the house for you,
as is my habit.
I wasn’t surprised to not find you, but sad all the same.
I looked for a scribbled note, on the blackboard, my desk, the bed, the table, the floor and in the cat’s eyes. I thought about you, brow furrowed in concentration writing furiously, passionately your thoughts. And when you were done, looking over your words to me, frowning, sighing, burning whatever innocent paper you used as a receptacle to give your feelings to me.
I thought that, but I know you didn’t, wouldn’t. Can’t right now.
The storm rattled my weathervane, an augur of my mood. It struck out, brooded, roiled and rolled and swept across the sky like an angry inkblot smearing a perfect canopy, unstoppable. Now that too has passed, and I’m left to feel like a child angry with the sky for not holding my weight when I lept from the window and tried to fly. I just want to feel like Superman ….
My skin crinkles krik-krak from UV and dehydration, like a papyrus with years of story hidden in my pores. I crinkle and krik my way about, the only noise in this world the sound of my skin and my pants against the wood floor, swish-swish-swish-crinkle-swish-krak-swish. Cats make for good company until you desire conversation, and then it’s like talking to a mirror. Even though you know it is just a reflection of you, it seems to mock you and to be built specifically to show you what a foolish creature you are. Even though it is just a reflection of you.
I went for a jog this morning into a seventy degree sunrise, baked from the inside, heard geese laugh and passed by aged strangers who could spare me a smile. Perhaps they save them up over time, and find that they have extra as their days are running out, so spend them freely.
If you whispered my name in the night I would hear it.
My ears are sensitive to your voice and my soul is fragile to your words and I would likely weep. I remember the seperation, before. The real, distant seperation from Washington to Ohio and how I could not stop sobbing – SOBBING – for hours after watching you drive away. Was that the same then as this is now? Was that the same then as this is now? I don’t know. I don’t know.
For those who read this and care, my parking tickets (that weren’t mine) have been taken care of.
Okay then.
Another skipped day. My apologies.
Emily got back from Vegas. All is once again right and good in the world. Well, in Oberlin, anyway. Ideas escape me tonight. I’ll post something cute I wrote a couple weeks ago. A month ago? Time escapes me.
From the Kas journal: a rhyming thingie –
Curse Neitzsche for being so witty,
Liberace for being so gay.
Curse Mozart for writing a ditty,
and Shakespeare for penning a play.Curse Flaubert for his eloquent diction,
and Germans, I curse all of them!
I doubt I could write science fiction
much better than Stanislaw Lem.Curse Chopin for every sonata,
Rachmaninoff for each cantata,
for goodness curse Saint Liberata,
be better at something, I gotta!At writing I’m just mediocre,
when singing I sound like a toad.
When painting I like to use ochre,
I curse all who’re talent “Van Gogh’ed”.My rhymes are always an earsore,
my meter is half a beat late.
Originality, I need a size more,
my normalcy’s all that is great.Yes, my mundanity’s simply fantastic,
and though it may make me seem spastic,
I’d rather be better than plastic
at being more normal than you.
Okay, so there’s that. Yeah….
Where in the world are you, Kas?
No frost today, but a wet layer of snow – sticky, cold, more like a mixture of ice and water than actual snow. We are now less than a week away from March, and then only a month away from April, and then only a year away from me, 25 and counting. The nearby community college has begun to offer the MLS (Masters in Library Science). At two nights a week, they say you can get your MLS in two years. Not bad … something to consider.
Emily is still abroad in a foreign land they call “Nevada”. My dad’s mom lives in “Nevada”. I might say my grandmother, but considering the fact that I haven’t communicated with her in about four years, I think she may have disowned me. Which may all be for the best. I’m not sure, really.
Last night was a fest of new, bad movies. Charlies Angels: Full Throttle and Radio. When I say bad movies, what I really mean to say is completely mediocre. I can deal with a bad movie, it’s mediocrity that’s painful. It really makes me want to make a movie, and god knows I have the ideas in my brain … I simply have to conquer my hatred of egoism. This blog may be a good start towards that. I haven’t decided yet, especially since, having put a hits counter at the bottom the other night, I can now see that no one actually reads this. Oh well, I’ll just tell myself it’s the best things that no-one has ever read.
Now, a vocab quiz.
Prolificity: a word meant to enrage artists who believe in quality over quantity.
Usage: “Prolificity? Fuck off.”
See also Prolifi-city: a populated area near L.A. known for producing 99 brain-numbing lumps of slag metal for every brick of gold.
I feel smote down by the duldrums of $8.50 an hour and having to work on a Sunday. My revenge is to sit here and blog about it, which is some small recompense.
Emily and I have a new boarder in our home, whose heart thrums like an engine when she’s happy, and who only speaks at night. She’s very shy, but she hasn’t gotten used to us yet.
As for the perfection of language, I think that language is perfect. It is those who try and use it that are flawed. Our expression, as well as our understanding of language are both intrinsically flawed, because we don’t think and we don’t see in words. In any case, I like language for its ambiguity. I like that two people can read a book and get different things out of it, because so much depends on our perception of language, as well as how it is used.
Entire novels are written simply to express one idea. That’s 500 pages devoted to trying to express one thing, in the end, and even then they aren’t always understood. As for my writing, even I don’t understand it sometimes.
Today my brain is tired, and my heart feels like lead.
My fingers are typing independently, willfully … I can’t keep track of them. My eyes simply gaze, straight ahead, listless. I blame it all on the duldrums of $8.50 an hour and having to work on a Sunday. I blame it on the extraordinary distance between two points, and the law of half-lives. I’m walking towards my future, closing half the distance each step, knowing that at this rate, I’ll never reach it.
The white man is coming! The cannon!
We must put on clothes, submit to baptism, work…
With my apologies to Rimbaud for what is probably a mild mis-quote.
Carpe diem. That’s the short, latin version. I like the american version by Bill Watterson, too.
Calvin: ‘My elbows are grass-stained, I’ve got sticks in my hair, I’m
covered with bug bites and cuts and scratches…
I’ve got sand in my socks and leaves in my shirt. My hands are
sticky with sap, and my shoes are soaked! I’m hot, dirty, sweaty,
itchy and tired.’
Hobbes: ‘I say consider this day seized!’
Calvin: ‘Tomorrow we’ll seize the day and throttle it!’
Well, my day was not precisely throttled. I’m sorry to say I spend it feeling unwell, physically, and very reflective, mentally (not so sorry about that part). Reading back on old writing, some dating back to 1995, always reminds me of how foolish a creature the human is … or if nothing of so broad a scope, how foolish I am, particularly. On the bad days, this gets me down. On the good days, I revel in it. After all, the implication of looking back on your life and not feeling foolish is that you have not grown, not changed, and can’t blush at your own naivety because you have not yet realized and overcome it. This victory, of course, only heralds in new battles, more naivety … of a heightened kind, maybe so and maybe not, but new. Every day IS a new day, and we awaken as new people not only every morning, but every hour and every minute. What I am now is not what I was even 30 seconds ago, where I was only beginning to formulate a thought that the present me has already had and the future me will one day have long since forgotten.
Today, I work in a library, and it is, in many ways, a standard 9-5 type of job. Tomorrow I may be in my car driving to New York to make my living as a street poet. That there is only a tiny fraction of a percent of a whisper of a chance that that might in fact come to pass does not really lessen the idea as a possibility.
And the point is, we have choices. Not just little choices like: “What tie shall I wear today?”, or “What shall I have for dinner this evening?”. And not only big choices like, “What will I do for a living?” or “Should I ask her to marry me?” In every second of every day there are a million (literally) and more choices waiting to be made, turned down, ignored, hesitated upon, and overlooked. Every positive choice I make is a million negative choices at the same time. That I choose to type this also means I’m choosing not to get a drink of water, not to write something else, not to watch TV or read a book, get more firewood, build a swimming pool, go for a walk, move to New York, call a friend, learn to speak Polish, buy a gun, kill someone, overthrow the political system, streak the town or go out dancing. If you think about it, the amount of “no” you say everytime you say “yes” is staggering.
The point of all this is that maybe some of the “no” should become “yes”. I think a lot of people make decisions because they don’t realize that there are other, valid choices out there. I feel secure in my choices because I am willing to recognize the other possibilities. I am happy doing what I do because I choose to do it, out of a million other things I could be doing. Most of the time, saying “no” to a choice is subconscious, an automatic response that accompanies saying “yes” to another choice you may have grown so accustomed to making that you have, in your own mind, raised it from beyond being a choice to now just being “how things are”.
“How things are” is a lie. It’s a comfort we want to use because we are afraid, as Mandela says, not of our weakness but of our great strength. It’s not scary to have no choices. What’s frightening is having countless choices. Each of us is nothing less than a god, with complete dominion over the most essential: ourselves.
You are responsible for every minute detail of your life. You can change, and you can stay the same, and either involves making one or numerous choices. There is ABSOLUTELY no such thing as being powerless, especially not concerning who you are.
In twenty years, I’ll look back on writing this, and I’ll surely feel foolish for sounding like a damned fortune cookie. But I chose to write this, instead of a million other things I could have done, and I’ll not regret that.
“Action is choice; choice is free commitment to this or that way of behaving, living, and so on; the possibilities are never fewer than two: to do or not to do; be or not be.” -Isaiah Berlin, From Hope and Fear Set Free
In the end, all it is: carpe diem.
I’m looking for the time when it won’t be a struggle to write here every day. To say I don’t have time to write makes me feel weak. I do!
And then there are days like today, when nothing in my head comes forward for me to write. I’m no good at reaching back in there and grabbing things. So I submit something previously written, in hope that the simple act of writing, anything, each day will urge my bring to bring its inane thoughts to the forefront.
Dawn’s disgrace is ending.
I would give anything for a Sun that would rise and not stop,
for proof that everthing is not over,
for the last leaf to fall.
What’s unwritten is that beauty relies on ending, as much as on beginnings. It relies on sorrow as much as joy, pain as much as health – and this is true of all things. There is no blue without red, and rainbows are not beautiful because of their uniformity. And yet, each day our society tries to remove another color, to make us uniform, to fight against that which they are not, because they are good and so everything else must be bad, because they are right and so everything else must be wrong.
Maybe the biggest problem is that, in large part, we live in a world where we can’t agree to disagree.
Thinking about France again and the long journey over the sea.
Thinking about that cafe in Paris’ Red Light, drawing in my journal while the rain thrum-thrum-thrummed the rooftops. I never was an artist ’til Paris.
Even though the goats gruff thought they would be happier on the other side of the bridge, they too had their fears. The troll is their anxiety, their doubts trying to keep them from moving past the wall of the “city”. Marianne spoke often of the outsiders, the rebels. She spoke of the rebel in each of us, and of transformations, and journeys. That’s what those goats went to become, rebels on the other side of the fence. They defeated their troll as if it were the only troll in the world, and the story goes that the grass really WAS greener over there, and it would lead you to believe that that’s where they stayed the rest of their days, content to chew the verdage.
But once you’ve defeated a troll, conquered your fears and gone past your limits, just once! Once you’ve become an outsider, you can never go back. Stepping outside the walls, they begin to expand. If you don’t keep moving “out”, soon you’ll find the walls have enclosed you in their warm embrace again … warm like a stagnant pool in the summer, like a fake smile, like the tourist season.
Paris was way beyond my boundaries. It was the island around which walls could not be built. It was a continuous call for “la revolution!” and a conflagration demanding the candle be burned from both ends.
After France, even the US was strange, outside comfort. And so, one of the best summers I ever spent, an outsider in a world I knew well, an observer distant from my surroundings. Myself, surrounded by France, still lingering on a balcony over La Place de la Baleine watching the american tourists below that had brought their comfort with them.
Being an outsider is not just where you go, it’s how you go and what you take with you for the journey. Those tourists were never outsiders … their normalcy never became an object for their own rebellious contempt. And then, maybe I wasn’t, either. But I learned one thing. One thing at least. Being an outsider doesn’t make you happy. Those who have been outsiders, and have since gone back to ways of comfort, their memories of being outsiders may bring them happiness. Those who stay outside, those terminal rebels … I think they rarely find happiness.
I guess that in this story, there is no moral.
Another busy and weary Sunday.
I’m never sure if working with people makes me more positively or negatively disposed towards humanity. I certainly see both the best and the worst, even in a library.
Why do people give in so easily to despair? Is it simply a desire for poetry, and for us, is poetry so bleak? Happiness is not a place, nor a job, nor your daily habits nor your monitary worth nor your religion nor your popularity nor your “strangeness” or “ordinariness”. Happiness is nothing but a choice to be happy, in any condition. We trick ourselves into thinking that forces play upon our joy, suppress it or deny it. But we’re all just swinging in our own cages.
I think that maybe, in a world like today, being happy almost makes us feel foolish. As if we know there’s a black cloud hanging over our heads, a hole larger than Europe in the ozone layer, a crazy dictator in power, starvation and disease running rampant the world round, nuclear destruction seems impossible to avoid at some juncture, melting icecaps … WHAT RIGHT HAVE WE TO BE HAPPY!?!
Sisyphus didn’t think on these things. He rolled a boulder up a mountain. When it reached the top, it rolled down the other side … his work to begin again. Must we imagine him happy, too? I’ve felt his happiness, and my failure is that I can’t explain it. If asked, I’ll say “Read Camus”… and that too’s a failure. Read “The Little Prince” and read “The Alchemist” and read Russian literature and French literature and American literature …. they’ve all felt like Sisyphus at times.
And to the illiterate — I guess that to them, I have nothing to say.