Wednesday, November 30, 2011

under the line (afterthought)

She, of course, was not who she thought he was.  For that matter, he was not even close to who he thought he was, and everyone is always wrong about all of these things in spectacularly misguided ways.  While he was meeting her in other forms, she was meeting him in other forms, and there were moments when he thought he had gone back in time to her, and times when he thought he had moved forward, and this is what sparked the idea that maybe we don't have to live in the fixed points of the present, but that these things happen simultaneously, and concurrently, and repeat (sometimes for the lessons, but more often than not for the force of the repetition that makes life resemble the drum, the drum of the tongue, the drum of the heart, the drum of the heart on the tongue).  And the trick was to learn how to stay in the present while traveling through time.  As if a life were an act of time-travel, based on repeated patterns and the moments of their recognition.  Like recognizing a matching scar on a lover's body.  This has happened before, and this will happen again, and the meanings of the rhythms will only become clear when the lovers go back to the beach and begin with a conversation about the cold night and the moon waiting underneath the clouds for someone to follow the clues.

the part beneath the line

And another season starts to wind itself into the ground, like it were returning to the center of the world, like the dwarves who are preparing, making careful gnawings on the walls of the world, because that time of reversals is very close, and they do tend to increase in chaotic occasional sporadic bursts on the way from here to there.  However.  It’s not for us to know why we are stuttering and the milk and the blood of another time keep running down the sides of our faces whenever we meet the new and perfect lover.  It’s not for us to know why there are more forces working toward nailing the chains into the wall by the wrists of the living, and why there are fewer and fewer with each passing generation who are willing to speak on behalf of the living.  Fucking phantoms all of them, living a life already in the grave, as if these things were already decided.  Not for me to understand why the living are acting out their version of what they think is death, perhaps capturing something to make it still, a cat playing with a mouse on the edges of the waves of history, and history is always at the center of things.  It’s not for us to know why she can’t wake up, or why she can’t go back to sleep.

This is the exact kind of morning, though, where it’s apparent that there is something about to begin, and if I were in my right mind I would do what I can to warn the living that it can’t be for the best, not in the way that anyone can conceive it, and for those who understand that the underside of things is where the diseases start to grow, and where things begin to decay, and where things are cut away down to the bone, to that point where we are all on the verge of death or birth, that’s when and where the dividing line between the best and the worst makes itself terribly clear, and the dice falls always to one side and not another, but it falls because it is pulled, that is to say, gravity has everything to do with it, and we have moved through time and space to make things fall the way they fall, not that we control gravity, but we affect it. 

Enough so that. 

The verge between this kind of birth and this kind of death is always approached at the same speed as any other verge, and I don’t know if I can speak so clearly about approaching verges, not here, not like this, not with all these people watching. 

Enough so. 

That the things we do in the morning have threads that repeat in the evening.  It’s reaping and sowing, and the lesson is not necessarily one of karma, but more like: you just fucking watch yourself all right.

On this verge between seasons, between creeping and stowing, the insides of all of our jackets are lined with needles, and the blood on our chins is not appropriate for public places.  And it’s at this verge that history herself does become visible, that gray cat made of dust that you see out of the corner of your eye whenever you are in a particular shade of grieving, history is visible, and this is that time of year.

I would give more than these teeth and this marrow to love her again for the space of an afternoon, but here is where I have to remember something entirely important, that is, history is that kind of lover who always has a razor inside her mouth, and stands at the edges of the playground with large eyes that shine like a baby animal, and she shakes like a baby animal, the kind of cold that only the oldest bones know, and she makes you want to hold her and make her feel safe, but before you get there, there is other work to be done.  And the worst of it for her is that every time something starts to turn the insides of her locks upside down, that shining point of slipperiness where one decides to slide down into the world of the senses and surrender to the falling, that’s the very same point when the blood comes trickling down the sides of her mouth.  At that point everyone in the room understands that it is much too late to apologize.  And that this last earthquake has only just started, and the waves that are lining up for the shore are doing so in successively darker shades of red. 

So while on the one hand I understand that it is  kind of comfort and assurance to the living to say kindly things like, “The small things, they don’t really matter,” in truth, they really fucking do matter, and it’s much heavier than that, and entirely worse than anyone could imagine.  At the end of the day, when those men who lived their lives in suits and are now dying so all alone because they behaved like total bastards every day of their existences, when they look upon the one or two people who can still stand to be in the same room with them, and say, with one of their wasted and dying breaths, “I didn’t sweat the small stuff,” that is the very moment when the dead ones come laughing.

For two reasons:  one because their concerns were terribly petty and two because they even missed out on the details there.

It’s not necessarily necessary then to point out that most of the time spent living is an engagement with missed opportunities.  God is in the details, and the small stuff is worth sweating over.

That’s entirely neither there nor here nor anywhere, so beware, while I am entirely morose and loose enough to speak a little too freely this morning, there are entirely important developments, and it’s entirely essential to pay close attention to how and why things are starting to unfold in unfortunate directions. 

Because the story is always a love story, and there’s never any way out of that (hold on for just a moment, because that needs a qualifier, but not an excessive one, any story that is told from the other side of the grass is romantic at its roots)  ((keep in mind, further, that because of my unique position, I can eat the roots whenever I want, so I may not entirely respect the genre, and no one should unless they are trained to be that fucking stupid)  (((I am not unique, only as unique as you, but there will never be another one like you until the end of the world when the dwarf who is your double takes your place, so you just fucking watch yourself))).

All right.

The heart is a drum and the tongue is a drum, and this is a perfect morning for playing on her heart with his tongue, but it’s much too far from that kind of season.  He didn’t expect it nearly so keenly that he would wake up again so very unserenely, where that copper witch seemed as if she were kissing him from the other side of his eyes, from inside his head, like she had worked her way inside his head, and the very terrible thing is that he knew he invited her, and he prayed that she would come.  He always prays and she always comes but neither of them are awake enough to recognize that this is the way things are happening.  It’s often enough that when he thinks of her and she thinks of him there are riptides that make the waves flutter in ways that no one could have ever suspected, and the world turns on an entirely different kind of axis.  Nothing as bold as love, but another kind of lover altogether, this being the dividing line where anything might pop through the surface.  It’s never wrong to hold the tongue (except for when it is absolutely time to play it like a drum, and that time should be clear to anyone with a notion for the motion beneath the belt) and let the moment come and settle, and this is what he’s done, for so long now that his small apartment is entirely flooded over with still water that’s much too cold to live in.

He has been taking to sleeping on a rubber mattress, then, like all people might do when they are living after a flood, and even though he is convinced he slept through it, he can remember very specific things about every scar that came from it.  It’s one of the peculiar things about this generation, having been trained to consider their narrative authority questionable at best.  Their experience denies their perceived unreliability, and very much like the generation they are nipping heels with before and after, it seems to be a part of a very elaborate plot to cheat them out of something valuable. 

Knowing that you’re right about something is a curse to every righteous generation, and wondering if you might be wrong about everything is the curse that’s given to their counterparts, and it does go back and forth every time, in the same, studied measure.  The generations bounce back and forth like a metronome, and although there are some who might think it is modulating, moving faster and faster each time until there is no difference between right and left and life and death, that is not the case at all, it is always the same exact speed and frequency each time, because we are living according to energetic forces that are very very old, and nothing humans can do can change the velocity of the waves.

Except.  Except except except.  The way he thinks about her, and the way she thinks about him.

The truest love the world has ever known has been that one between half-mortals, who do not recognize the forces in each other, and assume only half about the other.  That’s why this story works so well, because of the tension.  Or perhaps it’s better to say that this is why this story is about to work, because we are about to see the tension at play, and it will be so goddam beautiful that your heart will have broken long before your eyes have taken in the words such is the power of the story-telling at work here.  So.  This morning.  He wakes up and she is scraping the insides of his eyes with her imaginary tongue, she, the kind of witch who works long distances (though not always accurately), and she, she is wanting to make his windows clear so that he can see her, and when he wakes up she is the only thing he can think about, it’s his tongue on her heart, his breath on her sternum, he wakes up smelling the smells of her skin and his breath, something unique and impossible to replicate.

So he wakes up in love, and she is gone, and the elders in the land of the living are advising him not to be caught up in any kind of longing, but the youngsters who died before their time are advising him to just love the heart and the chest and the body and the soul of that woman already, even if she is far away, because that’s all there is, and it won’t kill you, necessarily, but it very well could do the opposite, and bring you to life, as if for the very first time in this waking shaking trembling world. 

Thursday, November 24, 2011

thanks for jumping

So this is the scene.  I'm being strapped into this harness thing and there is this teenage boy doing the strapping, and he's looking a little distracted, because, because for one thing I am a little taller than the last person he strapped into this.  I am also a little heavier, but not altogether too much heavier, because children eat a lot more these days in this part of the world, but that brings up the other because, and this is because I am not a kid.  My daughter is on the other side of the room, being strapped into a harness by another teenage boy, and we are about to go flying into the air.  I tell myself that I am doing this for her, so that we could be seeing each other jumping, and although that's nice, certainly nice, I know that I would be doing this anyway, because I cannot resist.

This isn't the first time I've been strapped in to something with my daughter recently.  It was less than a month ago when we were flying across a lot of space on these harnesses that are meant to keep you from falling to the ground because that's what gravity would like to do to you.  This time we're not flying across, though, we're jumping up and down, except jumping very high, as if we were out of reach of the usual laws of physics.  But just like last time, it's something that makes me very happy, as if this were something that I were missing.  On some days, it does feel like flying, but there's not enough real flight in it.  And on some days, there is this wish that I could be escaping from things.

They're not the usual things.  It's not because I need to claw my way out of a circumstance that's unbearable because of the distance that happens between lovers, and it's not because I am growing bored with doing the same things every day.  In truth, my days are all very different, and I am rarely wishing that I could be something else than in this body.  But there are so many things that I would like to change, just a small amount.

Like, the way we can't jump twenty feet in the air when we try.  Like, we can't cross through the rules of geography and time, and visit the ones that we miss the most, and bring back a souvenir from the journey (like a hotel napkin, or a flag from their country, or their smell on the inside of a shirt collar).  Like, we are not entirely immune to this decay thing that happens to everyone, it seems, and for some it moves faster than for others. 

I don't think this is where I see my daughter yet, entering into that river of time where the body decays, but it must be true in some small way.  Very recently I realized that I stopped thinking of her as a likely subject for a sequestration, where spies from the government come to take innocent children into their custody and try to barter for abstract concepts.  She is tall, tall enough to be visible from distances, and loud, loud enough to scream someone's ear to that point where it starts to ring a little bit, and wise, wise enough to know that there are always people around to help if things get uncomfortable.  So even though she is out of that, she must be into that phase that ends in something like adulthood, and there's a decay that comes with every stage, and more decay at the end, but this is still close to the beginning of the chapters that will make up the stories that make her life. 

There's an uneasy feeling I get, though, when she is flying in the air, and I see something on her face that looks like the same relief I feel, so it must be true, then, that sometimes she gets a little bit tired of all of this, in the same way we all do, but I didn't notice it on her before, so she must be changing.  I must be changing somehow too. 

I haven't wanted to freeze anything lately, not the way I used to.  Making this moment last or linger, they're just happening, and I'm participating, and there are things that I can do and things that I cannot do, and the days are rolling into each other like wolves fighting.  I see signs of things getting worse for some people I love, and some of the things I had hopes for, and I see things getting better for other things, and other people, and I would like to say that I'm just letting things happen, but it feels more like I am participating in the world while riding a motorcycle that is taking turns a little too fast.  My teeth are tight and my stomach is stretched back against the bones in my back, and the air tastes like metal, smoke, and blood.  Despite that, watching her jumping into the air is something like a perfect beautiful moment, and something about these moments with her are entirely perfect, and something about that tells me that I can pay attention to the blood in my veins and the wind in my lungs, because there are people aware of my movements, people who depend on what I do, and how I react to things.  And this moment is more important than any other, because this is the place where the dead speak to the living, and when we speak back, it starts to sound like those particular kinds of songs that can stop time.  Tonight, it's the perfect time for the living to stay on their side of the grass and the dead to occupy theirs, and wish that no one enters into the others' realm before it's time, and I'm holding my breath, because time rolls forward, and time comes to visit like gravity or death or the kind of friend who can hold you in the middle of the air with just a thought.  For just long enough to take a few deeper breaths, and let the magic that will be necessary sooner than later start to gather force between the heart and the rib, poised on the edge between falling and weightlessness.

Sunday, November 20, 2011

the operator of my pocket calculator

This is the third time this month that I've decided to start looking like an old man.  It never lasts long, as long as any teenage phase, but always as ridiculous.  For some moments, I am aware that I'm at least seven weeks shy of looking like the hermit in the cartoons, and that gives me a drive that I never felt before.  It always ends the same way, though.  I am at my parents' house visiting, and they're watching television, and we"re not sure whether we should talk or watch tv quietly, so we do both, only halfway, and as a result, we never really get to hear what they're saying on tv, and we never really make out what we might be telling each other.  Someone with an important voice says something about someone important, and one of them takes this as good news, and says, "Things are changing."

"Then why are the police spraying students in the face with pepper spray?" I say.

And it doesn't matter what happens next, because I feel like a dick in a beard, like an old and angry version of Mike from All in the Family, and I have to go home and shave.

So it's inside a head like that where I find myself excavating the bottom of the ocean.  That's where I go when the mystery of the other world seems to be hiding, because usually it's hiding somewhere here, and I can at the very least hide out with the mermaids until the world above gets their magic together. 

Tonight, everyone leaves me alone.  I'm not unfriendly to the things on the bottom of the sea, but I just don't feel like talking. 

"Why don't you feel like talking," she says.

"It's been kind of a dark time," I say, before I even see it's her. If I'd known it was her, I would have tried saying it with a little more grit to my melancholy, because to me that's a little more flirty, although no one else ever sees it that way.  "I didn't think, or I expected I would run into you here,"  I say.

"Which one?" she says.

"Whichever one is more interesting," I say, because I'm not in the mood to make any of these decisions. 

"I'm just looking for a poem," she says. "I didn't mean to interrupt anything.  You look very busy.  And, by the way, you don't look as old as you're trying to look, you need at least seven more weeks."

She always knows how to read me, and that's why I like it when she's in my world somewhere.  I can't hide, and down here, it's not much time before I can decide that I don't really want to hide, but I need more time to think about all these things.

"What poem are you looking for?" I say.  Not that I'd know.

"That one you wrote for me," she says.  "The one you always talk about."

This needs a little explanation.  On the bottom of the sea, there are places where all the things that we write to each other and never send are waiting.  The poem she is talking about, however, is lost as far as I know.  I see places around us where there are many, many unspoken things, and places where there are only short notes with a few words, or maybe a drawing of something good that we wanted to happen.  I try not to spend too much time here, but on some nights, that's all there is.  Tonight, I came down here because there was a sinking sadness that pulled me here, and I didn't want to think it had anything to do with her.  I haven't seen her in a long time.  I came here because I was noticing for the first time that this life is very short, and there are important and beautiful things that happen that have a way of slipping away too soon, so I was looking for something like an anchor I could use later, when I was awake again, and the world was green and blue again, and the magicians were back to work after the holiday.

But she caught me.  Because this is also the place I go to write new poems, and they're not always about her, but she's always somewhere in them, because since I met her I can't put anything into the mouths of sirens that don't have some piece that reflects her.  I'm still not convinced that I came down here to think about her, but she appeared, so I have to take this as something that someone had planned.

"I didn't come down here to see you," she says.  "Don't get any ideas."

"I'm not here to see you, either," I say, because it sounds like it might sound good, even if it's petty, and especially even if by now it's no longer really true.

"You did something new to your tongue," I say.  Because it's only polite to make conversation with people around you.

"You noticed," she says, and when she opens her mouth, there are a thousand worlds that come spilling out.  They all have sounds from a thousand inner voyages, and I can see figures in there that I don't recognize, and a thousand signs of things that I don't understand. 

"It's a very pretty tongue," I say, and that's a little too much, especially considering how much time has passed, and so I start to look for the poem, because it's easier than doing anything else at the moment.  There's a space close by, the spot where we first met each other down here, and it has some of the colors and sounds of falling in love, but I don't want to step there, because if I step there with her, then she might see all my footprints, and she might know that I've spent more nights than I want to admit visiting that spot.  So we're looking. We're both looking, and it's almost nice, because it almost feels like something is happening, and when I turn over a stone, I find a stash of papers with my name written on some of them.

"I don't know who wrote this," I say.

"I wrote those," she says, "and I keep writing those.  I don't know what I'm supposed to do with them."

Tonight, the mermaids know something we don't, and have better ways of dealing with things than we can ever know, and I'm tired of the world up there, and just want to spend more time sleeping, so I can be here, where so many shadows come and go, where there is always a rumbling in the veins, and I don't know if it comes from something that happened a long time ago, or if it's something that's going to happen, and here it's just impossible to know, because the usual rules of time don't apply.  But for some reason, this is the night where I stopped missing the home I never had.  


recuerdas algo de aquel cafe

No importa que her lips are starting to snow all over me when she speaks, she wants to say something, pero ni modo, el tiempo nos escapo, and we turn back to the snow falling from our fingertips.  This is the moment when the thing starts to turn, the bull that lives in the center begins to turn in his sleep, and the entire puzzle becomes rattled.  It's never easier when it's rattled, and it's never more difficult, the puzzle is always exactly what it is.

She tells me about how she likes to spend time looking at her fingertips, and wondering about how this impossible puzzle has solutions, simple solutions that are only difficult because they take time to play out.  We can twist the pieces all we like, but we have to wait and watch how they play out, and, she says, neither of us is born for that kind of waiting, and so we keep twisting and twisting them.  Her greatest fear, then, and it should be mine, is that we may occasionally fall upon the perfect solution, but we twist again before it has a chance to work itself out, and that we might be always missing it.

"Why don't you make a move, then, and let the pieces fall for awhile, make a single simple move and let them lay where they lay?" is what I say, and it sounds like someone else talking through my mouth.  My lips don't snow, but her face is starting to be covered by flakes.  There's something about the weather between us that's agreeable, even though it's a little cold, and there's a threat that if we stayed too long we would die, forgetting to come back inside.

I'm starting to wonder why it always has to be like this for me, something threatened, something dark and looming, and if I could become some dark erotic angel for a time, without laughing myself to death, I would put on that mask and let it work itself out until it went away or until it molded to my face because it always fit perfectly.  When she puts on masks I had always assumed it was just something particular to an age, that this is what we all do for awhile, but the longer I know her, the more I can see it's something particular to our age.  As if we were born in a time when a stable identity was the first thing on our minds, but the last thing we want, because we've seen what happens to the ones who find masks that fit too early in their lives, and by the time they are ready to move in a new direction, they are already old, and looking terrified because they can't remember how to get out of the image they embraced.

So this proposal, then, to make some kind of movement that might suggest a decision, is already too much, and I know exactly why, but it still puts me somewhere that I don't understand.  It's as if it's all on her now, as if she might have the key to get us out of this, to find the trick that made everything turn, when things started to go wrong.  It's as if she were a kind of a last hope, and if she took the chance, she could unleash all of this, and I was already angry with her for not being brave enough.  And it was worse because I understood that what was happening to her was what always happened to me, and I never found the way to make the secrets fall into place. 

We live under a microscope, and everything we do is being observed, and we've taught ourselves how to use these tools against our observers.  It gives us a keen double consciousness, something in us that splits off to observe our being observed, and on some days it makes us powerful, and on some days it just makes us crazy.

So I try to turn the rivers of time back just a bit, back to where all I could think of was the time when her lips were snowing, it's not far away, but it's already too far, and I miss it, miss it terribly, because in the time that I was thinking, she was talking, and I didn't hear a word, and now she's angry with me.

"You always get like this," she says.

"Remember that time we were that couple that never got heavy with the weight of snow on our backs?" I say.

"We've never been a couple," she says.  "We don't do those things."

She's right, of course, but I still say, "If we're not a couple, then we are we always spending so much time together?"

Tonight no one is wrong, and everything is snow, and the only unexpected thing that might happen would be sleeping. 

Friday, November 18, 2011

la parte entre cafes

There are always series of cafe scenes, and it would be better to gather them all together at once, because the nature of time is such that it does work more like memory and less like a train wreck.  The train wreck of history is unbearable because it reminds us of our own lives, but it's also incomplete.  The successions of losses and disillusionments that make up a life are only one side of the dice, and it has more than six sides, 256 in fact, but that's too much to give away right now, before the ceremony that teaches us who we really are.  There are more sides, always.

It would be easy, then, to go in a kind of train wreck order, that is to say, chronological, but that would be incomplete, and never as much of a train wreck as we like to think.  It would be much harder to gather all the loose threads together, gathering them together by color, colors to represent the 256 themes, and there are enough colors, certainly, but no easy way of spilling it out so that the patterns are all visible.

However, this is perhaps more an aesthetic consideration than anything, this is a succession of scenes.  There will be more.  There are always more on the way.  And even though sometimes we like to think there is nothing happening in our lives, the scenes taken out of context start to add up to pictures that are much larger, and we always find that there was more going on beneath the surface.

It would be better to start at the bottom of the sea, because this is where he always goes when he dreams, because this is where he always goes when he is about to get born.  Every rebirth is a quotation of the first one, and the first one goes back much much further than our birth certificates say.  Every document is written by a liar who doesn't realize the weight of what they are documenting.

In the first cafe, at the bottom of the sea, he is talking to his friend, a compaƱero in the revolution that started in 1848, or much further back, and for them at the moment, it started when Che got on the back of the motorcycle, and it started when Cesar decided to try talking with the farmers in California, and it started when certificates and the laws they proclaimed stopped making sense to so many people who were trying to stay alive.

It's ten o'clock at night, and I'm parking my motorcycle.  The cafe chairs and tables are spilling out in the street.  I am already a half an hour early, and I decide that I might smoke and write something short that I can use for an introduction next weekend.

He is already there, so I abandon those plans and take up the original plan, to meet with Michel and talk about art and love. 

"I got here early," he says, "and so did you.  This is important."

"I was going to write my introduction," I say, because it sounds important and almost French, the way French people are always writing introductions to important things.  We have important things, too, Michel reminded me, and this is important.

"Your cap is pointed at the top like an elf," he says.  "You'll need to adjust that, so we are like revolutionaries, and not subjects for mockery."

Oh, Marcel, you make me adjust my cap in the middle of the revolution, because you know, somehow you know, how do you know? you always know. 

When we talk, it is as fluid as the coffee that pours, and as rich as the cream, and as hot as the French woman who brings the coffee.  Except she is not that at all, but more like a man, because there are always men with important beards in this cafe, doing important things with their beards and their caps.  It is always easier to imagine there are French women here, because of the nature of our meetings, and our lives, and I don't want to talk, but he corners me, like a cat, or a bull, or perhaps somewhat like both, a cat dressed up as a bull, ready to fight, knowing it will always land on its feet.

"What is it, Odysseus?" he asks, cornering me, like a cat in a bull suit.

My name is Odysseus, or something just as important and heavy as cream.

I can't answer.

"You are pausing, and it's going on endlessly, and it needn't be so entirely painful."  He pours sugar into his coffee, and lights a cigarette, even though one is already burning, but it's for effect, and a good one, too.  "You can't hide your heart from me, because we know each other too well."

And it's true, so true, so very very so true.  We do.  Indeed we do.  And we laugh like men at a bullfight, even though we are the cat we have come to harness.

My confession spills out like coffee beans from the mouth of a bull, a bull with its mouth filled with coffee beans.  "That woman," I tell him.  "She is only half-French."  And I cry, because that's what we goddam do.

"The one you're seeing now?" he asks.

"There is no one I'm seeing right now," I say.  Which isn't entirely true.  There is one, one or three, who has my heart in her mouth, like a cat, only I haven't told her that, yet, because I can't decide between the one or the three, but they each play out in my imagination, so vividly, and it's so very tender and furious with each of them, and so filled with exasperating complications.  But, because these scenes of such beauty and terror have only happened in my mind, I should not count them as real, because my therapist advises me not to, because I get into trouble that way.

"Oh," he says.  "Then the one from this summer?"

"No, before that.  The one before that," I say.  "The second one before that, I mean.  She was only half.  Half."

He cries and I cry, because that's what we goddam do, and then he tells me that this isn't important.  Because her other half was also interesting, so terribly interesting that half was, and he is right, and we are right, and we are full of coffee, and there is no more fear.

He then goes on to brag, endlessly endlessly, about his latest conquests, and they are so filled with desire it makes my heart choke, but there is nothing French about these conquests, and I think they shouldn't count, but I would never tell him that.

"Women keep us young," I say.

"Agreed," he says, "except that I am young, and you are kind of old."

It's all true, more true than I could ever admit, but I don't feel the least bit tired, but there has been so much coffee that I will not sleep this night.  During the moment when he was distracted by a string of text messages, I had time to think about mortality, and lost love, and the way cats have of pretending to be something they are not.  I also had time to think that these moments with Michel reminded me that we were involved in a complex performance of living, an experiment where memory and experience could interlock and form connections that made sense.  We both knew that we were living in a strange time, and in a place that did not nurture its generations, and we understood that we had to nurture ourselves, and each other, and find the threads that might make sense, and keep us from taking ourselves too seriously.

By the time the third espressos came, we were ready to talk about art, while shadowy figures were running through the streets, looking for something they could call home.  We are not as alone here as we think. 




Wednesday, November 16, 2011

la parte baja de la espalda

Just because there were too many banshees running through the neighborhood, because it was that time of year, and that kind of neighborhood, it had to begin next to a grave.  The entire story had to start somewhere close to a grave, one that had been closed for a good many years, and one that had opened very recently.  There also had to be dogs, wild dogs that live in the forest, and only a few will know why entirely, and the ones who guess will be half-right.  There also had to be a series of three, three somethings, and because he was so afraid of not getting the ritual right, he made the rite by knocking three times on the ground.  When, in fact, the three had already been knocked for him, in other ways entirely.

The first was the father, sick with sickness in the father parts, the parts that make any father feel part of something larger and deeper.  The second was the brother, sick in the mind parts, the parts that make it easy not to mind when the inside is bleeding a little more than it should, because that always seems just right when the mind is just not right.  The third, something less urgent and more selfish, was his own work, not the essential work but the rent-paying work, being examined as a living body for art students and medical students, selling his body in essence (but not the essence).  He was joking with his friend the night before about how they never had the courage to sell their bodies on the streets, and he was making ends meet by selling it in rooms with better climate control than hotels.  It was interesting how things change over time, and how things always stay like they were at the beginning of time, when we can learn how to slow the breath.

So that was the three, and none of the three was enough to drive him to hide his head by a grave on the night the story began.  It would have to be something related to lost impossible love, and it would be even better if there was a revolution involved, and that was entirely possible, but at the root, in the roots that fill up everyone's grave over time, it was something else.  The story began in the grave because he wanted another story to begin, and that seemed like the best place to begin, so that's how it began.

There are always more threes.  Three treatments for three weeks in a row for cancer (not him, this is his father again), and three times that his brother tried to find him somewhere in the dark in the last three days, and three times that the dead called his name before he fell asleep, three times in one night.  There are always more threes.  We miss them like we think we miss the dead, so they have to keep recurring until we start paying attention. 

So it begins then in present tense, in a tense series of threes, by an open grave, one that he opened, and when it opens he is covered in the dirt that covered up the body of a baby boy.  So the present tense is preparing for a release that it can't possibly do on its own, it needs a lover, and the lover is the future, because that's how the present spins to look at the past, for the kinds of webs of connections that happen in series of threes, and the past is like the dirt of our own grave pushing us forward into the present.  So it begins with a threesome, then, with the past and present and future all looking for each other in the dark, hoping they will be the center of attention for at least a little while (and they will each get a turn, this is something that I'm saying only as an assurance, because assurance is the best way to get through those impossibly long nights, when no one wants to admit they are too tired).  And so it begins with him, who we have not described, and me, who has not been properly introduced.

I can't introduce myself the way that anyone would really like, because there is too much of these pieces of bone and dried blood on my hands to be accepted into just any room, so I have to keep those stains secret because I need access to all the rooms.  I will say, though, that I was once him, but had to give that up in order to become something else, something that could see a little further.  He, on the other hand, is easy to define, at least easy for me, though not always very readable to the ones he loves or the ones who love him (and they are always the same, even though he likes to pretend that they're not, in order to make his own life much deeper than he thinks it is; we all do that, though, at the end of the day we like to tell ourselves that this lover never really knew us, and the next one will likely be the same, even if they are the same person with the same basic skeletal and cellular structures; why we do this isn't entirely a mystery; it's related to the romance of these dark times, where nothing is resolved, and nothing can be counted on, especially love, or because of love).  ((Love, on the other hand, is a complex word that needs a definition before we go any further.  I feel that we've already reached the point in our relationship where we can talk about these kinds of things.  Love is a foolish choice of words whenever we might be talking to a theorist who has no sense of humor.  But I have never met a theorist who is worth their salt who does not have a sense of humor, and never ever without a capacity to be touched in the center of the part of the self that responds to words like love, even when they are not just whispered in the dark to make things go a little faster.  Love is, for the purposes of who we might be to each other in this story, love is the only thing that's left after everything else has already happened.  Love is what comes after jealousy or suspicion or greed, love is what comes after infatuation and obsession plays out long enough to reveal the beloved object as entirely without perfections, love is what comes after everything and everyone else has already come and no one wants to go to sleep.))

He, then, now that we know that I'm me and I can't tell you any more (because of the blood and bone on my hands), he is exactly like you, only a little heightened, because we all like to see ourselves represented in ways that are shades more exaggerated than we really are.  The "really are" is of course entirely problematic for a number of reasons that any reasonable gender theorist can tell you, and there will be a bibliography offered later for further reading on that.  But before that, this, this story begins by a grave, the one that held the bones of his brother, the one who died before he was born.

"I have seen too many wars from this side of the dirt, and every war reminds us of where we were when we walked on the surface.  We are the dwarves that haunt your dreams and enter your room when the door is locked and everyone else has gone to sleep.  Wars characterize every age, and every generation likes to think they are going through something extraordinary.  In truth, you really are, because every generation is exceptional, because of the repetitions and not despite them.  But I've had the chance to learn some secrets since I've been away, and I learned how to stroke the bones you will one day leave in place of the thing you know as you, and I know the sweet taste of the meat you leave behind, and I look forward to meeting you again one day.  But for now, I can only know you as a ghost, and for me it is an unbearable distance.  The distance between the living and the dead is unbearable for all of us, but it is no different than the distance between lovers while they are living together and trying to learn what it means to love each other.  The sense of separation is the same, and always there, and it lies underneath everything that we do, on either side of this uneasy equation.  I died before my time, and this means we have the same tragedy, because everything that you ever loved or will love has to die before its time, in order that you learn how to do this.  Those that understand these rules make the best dancers.  I don't have to tell you why."

(to continue)


Wednesday, November 9, 2011

relentless

tucson dance of the dead
He never walks home, unless home is very far away, and then he walks as far as he can, to that point where the legs start to make sounds that can't be heard until three days later, when that particular search is resolved.  There's nothing that has very much resolution lately, it all seems to be a part of a strong and straying stream of becoming.  This particular becoming, however, is anything but light and full of flight, it's one where the bone is hitting the hard gravel of the endless road.
His body is prone in an office where people are learning how to be doctors, and there are hands on every secret place, and hands in every opening except for the mouth.  Because the mouth is safe, he knows that he is safe.  As they move through his flesh with nerves that are starting to come apart at the seams, he is trying not to be distracted, but it's impossible.  A tall, black bird is in the corner of the office, disguising herself as a chaperone, because so many things are happening behind closed doors and there need to be some witnesses.  She is not particularly sympathetic, because the same things have already happened to her three thousand years ago or more, and she knows that he's finding out that the repetitions are bearable, but the first time is always the one that rips you in half.
He's been ripped in half before, by other medical professionals, and the worst times were when the professionals were using older tools and older traditions, and these are the ones that left the best scars.  This won't be a scar.
Earlier in the day he was in another office, where his father's body was prone before a team of professionals, and the oldest one was holding a jar that had a sticker on the side that said, "chemotherapy."  The oldest one asks his father for his last four digits, and it all begins again.  This is the middle of things, he was thinking, this is just the middle, and no one can say how long a middle will last.  But this definitely has the makings of scars.
He is thinking about his father's body, and thinking about the bird, and wondering why this can't be more like a dream.  Some people say he likes to live in metaphors, but here all he can see are patterns, and they have the makings of scars that might read like metaphors, but for now, he just wants something like theory.  Something like a vocabulary that could talk about the male body and desire, and medicine and anatomy, the way things seem to bounce back and forth between the clinical and the erotic, with absolutely no smooth transitions. 
This is the body and all its cellular workings, sometimes lilting and sometimes galloping and sometimes being galloped toward a place where the heart stops and everything starts to become something other.  This is the body that wants, the body that hungers, with all of its flesh that responds to smell and touch and memory, being pulled into a space where gravity is something to be overturned in order to find something that's true in the presence of another human being.  Perhaps the only thing that crosses back and forth is that same bird, here she's black and in candle light she is blue, and at sunrise she hides inside the mouths of sleeping lovers. 
Every fissure is a contingency, a space that's waiting to write and be written upon.  Some lovers insist on using their fingernails to write the last four digits, and some ask permission to make more lines that might demarcate a future incision, and everyone wants to be remembered because everyone wants to mark the body.
This is the end of the 20th century, and the 21st century has been insisting on its birth for a long time now, only it doesn't have very much to introduce itself, because so far it has been nothing more (and nothing less) than a series of quotations written on the bodies of the ones who live here.  His warrior marks are buried under three months of hair, so these strangers can't see who he is, or where he's from, and none of them will think to try to guess his sacred name.  The warrior marks of the father had been placed on the father's body, but that was so long ago now that they have reached the corners of his eyes. and everyone who has been there in that field can recognize him.
He only knows his father's secret smiles, the ones that have always put him above and apart from this world of the living.  This father has lived on margins for more than half his life, and he keeps the secrets he learned here in those same eyes. 
There is also a mark on that boy's back, where they placed steel in his spine to keep his lungs from collapsing, and it connects somewhere to these other lines, new technologies for the old rites of the pains that haunt the living. 
His daughter remembers something, and reminds him with her remembering, about the two of them dancing together, on one afternoon when he was in his new space.  The song was something Irish or something Gypsy, recorded on the latest technologies, and when they danced together it was something modern, but something very, very old, and something in the blood.  Death and dying might be one of the rites we live through, and one that we have to walk our children through one day, but they're connected to the heart of a black bird, who calls the drum with her tongue and wakes up the oldest parts of the blood.  These are rites for the living, dances of death and dances of rebirth, tying the eyes of the father to the smile of the lover, because they all signify the same thing.
If anyone can give birth to the 21st century, he thinks, it's that black bird.  Because she understands how these things work, and every generation is blinded by its own technologies, hardly still enough to see that the typos on a smart phone work as charmingly as any old charm, connecting bodies to a chord that we are all born with in the back of our throats.  Everyone sleeps, but very few have the patience or the stamina to wake up. 

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

dont bother me while im still raining

i'm still raining from europe and starting to rain all over latin america, from the edges to the centers of everyplace that knows itself as america, this place that we call home, where we speak too many languages that are not from here, and our tongues get colonized in a thousand directions, but our hearts stay young...i have a murmur from the last time i fell in love, and it flutters whenever it starts to wonder what the next movie will look like...because i love movies here, the ones from here are the ones that invade the borders of our dreams and reconfigure our alliances, and every film that's not about the father who learns how to stop working so much and love his kids is a movie about a revolution...this is the kind of thing that is familiar here, and we hear the stories about plazas and september 11s and wear the masks of english bandits, trying hard to stare into the sun so we don't have to make the connections about the peculiar repetitions we are living through...it all begins when the young people decide they need to eat and are suddenly aware that it's not necessarily in anyone's best interests to keep the people fed...and the old people are all starting to compliment this generation for realizing what's happening, and doing things about it...an old couple in a coffee shop are staring at me and my daughter, and i'm sure it's about liprings and punk boots, but i'm wrong.  she admires us, and tells us that she was the music director at the high school across the street, and in '68 she created an anti-war play where the kids wore the uniforms their parents and grandparents wore in other wars...and she tells me she stays young by eating onion rings for breakfast and traveling with her partner...my father is not yet moving in my mind into the generation of old people, but he has the same sparks in his eyes when we talk about revolutions in the streets in the country that he loves so very much, and i always forget that he planted the seeds for falling in love with the possibility of a revolution here...and earlier that morning i was sitting in the veteran's hospital with him while they poured bacteria into his body to eat cancer...the old men in the hospital all smell like republicans, and i want to fight them because i'm irish and i want to argue for lost causes because i'm polish but my eyes can't fight eye contact, and i decide to use all the trappings of old world courtesy and say "have a good day, sir," and when they hear "sir," their eyes go watery every time every single one every time, as if no one shows them respect anymore...and my heart starts to murmur and i find myself wanting so many things when i'm in the presence of so many ghosts, ghosts about to cross over and ghosts who are lingering near their heads to bring them home, and i start to miss her more than anyone could ever know, more than anyone could ever have loved a woman while living in a mortal body...i don't know what it's for, and i don't know how it connects to learning how to heal, and i don't know what role this love plays in a revolution, but maybe all revolutions are about a longing for something that was too young and tender to live on its own...and my daughter is too old for those tragic childhood diseases, so she's safe tonight from my crazy melancholy, and the dogs don't understand as much as i'd like them to...the boy gets soup, he's afraid of choking lately, and i have to be careful and be there with my hands and my eyes, because his hands don't work as well as they once did, so i'm focusing on his mouth and my tired and scratched up hands, i tell him that last night i was a calavera, and we're all phantoms, and he wants more soup, and in my inability to focus on anything but a daydream (i'm meeting with the suicide girls over coffee in a room full of bean bags, they've been reading my blog and they have so many questions...and it's a musing) i am looking at my daughter's hands, hands that are starting to make drawings of mermaids and goddesses, and we're cursed with the family enchantments...bridget drugan, the gael who knew secrets in oak trees is always calling this time of year, it's time for the heart to murmur and time for me to listen...and these lost warriors, the fallen heroes of unsustainable myths, i want to sing something for them...so i find myself looking at the tough guy writers, shepards and hemingways and bolaƱos', bodies broken by alcohol, fighting a battle between beauty and darkness, and darkness always won...but i know how dark beauty can be, and i was taught by my mother that when she came that i could never say no to her, and i know something about the goddesses that haunt the genitals of warriors of all the gender wars, and the goddesses that learn their secrets through centuries of eating flesh, these spirits are cellular and in these days the ether is so very far away...real love is written in fire on the flesh and burns through to the bones and leaves us all a little less than we once were, so we know what it means to long, and why we have no choice but to go further into that beautiful darkness, until the darkness becomes light, until things like darkness and light no longer even matter, and we learn how to become as relentless as the rain.

MANIFESTO OF CROSSED ONTOLOGIES Everybody (and by everybody I don ’ t mean everybody I think I mean one person, and I mean you, in par...