Wednesday, July 12, 2017

don't know where this is going



if you had told me years ago that I would be this age and still not know how things will go, and still not have a set routine, I would have been very excited to get here. And I am. My biggest fear is that the philosopher’s stone will give me all its secrets before I am old, and that will leave me doddering through the last years. I don’t mind knowing secrets, but I do not want to go through this world being correct. My heart is a plant when I am wrong, thirsty for water and sun and warm hands. 

I have moments of irritation, but I've learned that only the most tiresome people find everyone tiresome. 

Everyone is looking for a chance to form a more sustained narrative, and I found myself living in the margins of one obligation or another for so long, that I thought I was comfortable in the fragmentation, the fragments of story and impulse that might tell a larger story. But I couldn’t find my way into the larger story. This is not just about me, it happens to lots of us. The trouble is that one narrative thread cannot contain anyone. Like painters looking at light, there are a thousand ways to see it, and they all offer something that is not necessarily true, but a way of perceiving. The neuroscience says that we don’t see the way we think we do, we look and we fill in and this is not like a movie at all, and we haven’t captured how we see, but in multiple angles and from multiple narrative threads, there might be something that we recognize. “This happened to me, too, this kind of seeing is what happened to me too.”

I am wearing that suit, the one I wear most, the one where I look like an eccentric artist of Eastern European descent, and it is getting very hot in here. When she moves to the hall to take a phone call, I slip outside, zipper off the suit and I smoke on the back porch, shaking like a nervous bird, feathers wet with sweat. It’s not that I am unlovable, or that I don’t know who to be at the proper moment, but that I think too much about the suit and the zipper and if it’s showing and if it’s the right time or not to take things off or put them on, because I think too much about myself. So when I come back, it is a surprise to catch her zipping up right before she comes back into the room. 

I unzip my suit, the one that is all bravery and enlightenment and “I am detached from the things of the world”, and slip out back to smoke. Out here, I am like I am when I sleep, covered with wet feathers, wet with longing and memories, wet with the weight of all I want to do tomorrow, wet like my tongue is wet. I don’t know if it’s a mirage, but it’s definitely written in water, when she walks out and doesn’t notice me until she starts to unzip herself, cigarette dangling, feathers starting to unfurl. We don’t know what to do, not because we are suddenly revealed to each other, but because we both know at the same moment that we are just like everybody else. 

This is bigger than I had thought it would be. My daughter is going off to college soon, in a few weeks. I just finished a doctorate. I have a car that works and can carry things. All of these things that were leading somewhere are now really leading somewhere, I don’t know quite where, though I have some thoughts for sure. I’ll go somewhere and make art somewhere and work somewhere, and I am starting off on a ground that is more solid than anything I had before, this was all years in the making. Some of it was my design and so much of it was based on the elements shifting, adapting to changes of wind and tides and stuff like that.

There is a terrible weight, one I don’t talk about very much, because I don’t know how to carry it and I don’t know how to put it down. There is a love of my life that got pushed aside by family dramas, death, madness, but more by the title I had as a father, to see this one move into her life as herself. She has a conscience, and she knows some spells (but not enough: conversation in car, “What are some ingredients for a good love spell?”), and she sees with different eyes than the ones this culture gives you. All these things will work for her, but it will be hard, just like it is for everyone else (but if I had my druthers, if I were Prospero…). My sponsor once told me, “That little one, your daughter, is the only relationship that matters, and the only one that you can be sure you’ll still have years from now.” I didn’t take it to heart then, I was all interested in being a Leonard Cohen song, tied up in sweet obsessive love, but by the time this love of my life came around, I took his advice seriously, so that no matter what happened, I wouldn’t break a promise to my daughter. 

Love doesn’t always win out over everything, sometimes it lays its head on your chest and whispers goodbye.


Meanwhile, she is getting ready to leave, and I am sure I will feel guilty about all the thousand things that I did wrong, all the times when I could have been able to see the space we were in, but I don’t think anything would change that, it’s a guilt that every parent carries, at least the ones who are honest with themselves. It doesn’t feel like that right now. Right now it feels like a brilliant movie is ending, and there are reels that are being prepared for the next feature, except there are more than one. At least one is hers, and at least one is mine. But before those start, I want to enjoy how this one closes, because it’s extraordinary, this is an extraordinary story, I got to play a part in raising a most extraordinary human being.

Monday, June 12, 2017

This is very nice.
https://www.artandeducation.net/announcements/141190/first-creative-practice-phd-graduate-christopher-danowski

Monday, May 22, 2017

social media is sort of like barthes "i'm wearing the sunglasses" except instead of anxiety about love, it's anxiety about how we are seen, about our political/social selves, it's the practice of indicating what we are thinking about except within a context of publicly pretending that we've already thought it through. and calling each other out for not having thought something through enough, or not giving proof of one's allegiance to this blabla or that balboa. this sounds obvious or pretentious. haha. just working something out in public. wearing sunglasses. haha. oh that's even more obvious or pretentious. never mind here's a picture of my dog. no sunglasses. we should be so lucky.

Wednesday, February 1, 2017

evita bailaba con freud

Dream 1: I'm at an incense shop with Allen Ferguson and we are looking at cigars. He asks about a sampler kind of thing and the guy behind the counter pulls out some little boxes that look just perfect. I am looking at these, and meanwhile thinking about incense, and I turn around to see that the shelves are all moved to make room for a yoga workshop. There are all these groovy looking people on the floor. They have the incense in their laps and the instructor is teaching them about the scents as part of the workshop, so it's hard to shop. Eventually, Allen is talking to someone in a corner, and I am sitting on the floor and chatting to a young woman. She might be from eastern Europe somewhere and is very interesting, and after a few words we start to make out. A little later I am texting another woman from the yoga workshop, and trying to keep the texting from this possibly eastern European woman, who is starting to get jealous, even though (I can tell) she feels being jealous is inappropriate in most circumstances, but especially now since we're just flirting to see where it goes. The one I am texting writes that 'metaforos son mejor en espanol', and this seems very very hot to me, so I am trying to text back 'y entre cites de Borges Evita bailaba con Freud' before I wake up (on texting Freud's name, it keeps autocorrecting)

Dream 2: I have to put apples on my feet before I go out. My friend (?) says, that's why we call it "hunky dory." I say, "Haha, I'm not falling for that again," and I wake up. 

Friday, January 27, 2017

Another Lost Book of Love

*****

There are those who are born into forgetting, they have to learn everything through the skin, over and over and over again, and they never do learn in a way that gets them past themselves. There are those who are given access to the pages written in the Book of Love, who can see the story and its lessons before it plays itself out, they see their destinies and they can decide to fall in love even though it is doomed, or do something else, and they almost always do something else. And there are those who have left the Book of Love entirely, who escape, erasing their traces and disappearing like rabbits into a tree trunk, their footprints barely visible, almost already eroded. Of the three groups, the first one, the ones who learn through the skin and forget and have to learn over and over again, caught in an endless cycle, are the most delightful people I have ever met and I have always wanted to be one, and on most days I feel like a rabbit, heart beating and missing someone I haven't met.

*****

We wanted to be ascended masters, but we kept getting caught in our own reflections.

*****

She's covered with napkins and listening to damien rice, she says it's important that he let her have the first breath in the song, this is important, she sings first, everyone was waiting for this album and when it begins we don't hear his voice, we hear hers, this is important. We telegraph ourselves to each other, we tell each other everything we need to know, we like to hear our stories and we like to signal through the flames, this is what my heart is like, and most of the time, the one we are telegraphing to doesn't get it, and that's part of why we do it.


*****

I'm looking at her blue jacket, how it matches her eyes, and that beauty mark, and then I'm looking at her button shirt under the jacket, and I'm thinking about my hand under her jacket, imagining how she will look at me when my hand is on her heart, and I get so hot in my head that I cannot think straight any more. This is me at 17. This is me at 21. This is me at 49. Nothing is really changed, except there are a million stories between then and now.

*****

We progress in 7s, new skin for every 7 years, everything is new, and I knew that 7 x 7 would be important, but I didn't know it would be the year I spent pretending you leaving didn't hurt.

*****

And then I felt so bad and awful and beat up by the world and my heart was flat and there was only dusty bones in there and you could shake it and they would all fall out through the cracks, and I lay down on the road in the middle of the road and I said I'm done, that's it, I am done, I cannot love anything or anyone, this is all lost this is all fake, and just then an old flame driving by stopped and said this letter I just found this letter you wrote me do you remember this letter? and I don't remember this letter, but I remember what she wrote back, it was the sweetest thing anyone ever said to anyone ever anywhere.

*****

It is dark and she is talking and she is learning secret signs and they have to do with bodywork and she is thinking of a secret sign, and I see it in the air above us and I tell her and she says, "Draw it on my back," and I draw it on her back, and she says, "Yes, that's it." It was easy because it was right there in the air above her head and I think it must be like that, that is how it is, it is always like that, but we don't see it when we don't know how to see it.

So I put my head into the fireplace, the lap of the goddess, and I say please lull me to sleep, please lull me into that place where I am not fighting where I am not willing to argue over every little thing, please make my head stop talking so I can hear you and know things. I want you to teach me things, and today I don't even care if they hurt. They probably will hurt. And the goddess is standing over me when I wake up and she is eating a bowl of captain crunch and she is dripping sweet milk on my head and it feels nice and she says, "The fireplace is not the lap of the goddess, idiot."

*****

I really really really don't mean for it to get this strange. It always works out like that though, and the worst of it is, I know that it's really not very strange at all. My edge is not as far away as I like to think. I've never been hurt, not deliberately, and I've never been able to hurt someone, not deliberately, not like that, I would be the one with the whip who looks like an idiot, standing there in some leather something and wishing I were somewhere else, that even being on break from a job at a corporation would be less awkward than pretending I like this.

*****

There is a gentle stream and it's a warm day and I dip my feet in, and my friend says, "Haha, you are so stupid."
And I'm like, "Oh, what?"
And she's all, "You are going to get sucked into the current and get bashed to pieces."
And I'm all, "How do you know?"
She's like, "Because it happened a year ago, and three years ago, and 14 years ago, and 30 years ago."
And there is a dog who is watching and the dog says, "That is what it's like to get born again and again and again. Jump into the river."

*****

I'm driving through the mountains at night, and up ahead there is a figure and her name is Isabel and she is looking like a queen, and I get closer and realize this is the same Isabel who killed me in 2010 and who tried to kill me last year, and I shouldn't stop, but I do, I am pulling over and we are so surprised to see that we're still alive after all this time, we have so much to catch up on.

We're inside a cafe within minutes and before I know it she is telling me about how they use the dates from the date palms to make the date shakes, and for some reason, I am back in some whirlpool of childhood. I might mean tide pool not whirlpool. And someone is telling me about dates and date palms and I don't understand that dates are those little brown round pod things, like big raisins, no one explains that to me, and I don't know what dates are and I guess it has something to do with the palm itself, like they must hammer out the leaf itself and extract something from it. I don't know how it works. So when Isabel (who I assume, like you must, is a ghost) tells me about date shakes, I am back there, a child who is trying to understand something everyone seems to know, because there is an important detail (what exactly is a date) that everyone knows and I don't know how to ask. And this is what love has always felt like to me. Everyone knows and there's a secret but I don't know the right question. What is a date?

******




(these are fragments I will continue)












Tuesday, January 10, 2017

that dream

I am in a revival of Don't Drink the Water, and we opened last night. It went fabulously. I had my opening scene tonight, and now I'm backstage waiting for the next one. We're all smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee and it's really fun. We are in a new country and this is an exciting city in this new country and we are all excited about being here. My next scene is about 10 minutes away so there is time to talk.

It suddenly occurs to me that I remember the order of events in the next scene, but I can't remember any of the lines I have. This can't be that hard. The nest scene is short so I just have to get through that, and the rest will come back to me. I ask around for someone to go over lines with me. I can't find anyone to help me and it's getting closer.

The entrance is a flight up, but I go up two flights of stairs instead of one. Up here, there is a guy who visited me and my ex last night, he is a grad student in performance studies and wants to talk about his residency next summer. I tell him I'd love to, but right now I have to be Walter Hollander and I can't remember my lines. He finds people sitting at a table with scripts, and they share them with me. They are all the wrong script.

Now there is a woman with a headset, and she's trying to get me downstairs, because it's going to start. She notices I'm not in the right costume. "We'll have to get this straightened out," she says. Then, she notices that I am panicking right now, and she says, "I have been watching you for years and I always wondered how you did it, and I can see that you're always working, that makes sense."

Meanwhile, the grad student tells me that everyone worries too much. This is just a play. "Just listen to what the other person is saying when you're out there," he says. "And when it's your turn, say things."

I'm downstairs and in the wings and I am in front of a costume person. I need a suit and a wig and glasses, and she's undressing and redressing me and now I can't see anything. "Who did your costume?" she asks. "I think it was Jake and Jamie," I say, and she shakes her head.

"You'll be fine," she says. Then she gestures to Danny McNeill (a childhood friend, I haven't seen since second grade), he's got a script and he's going to go over it with me, and everything will be ok. I see myself in the mirror. I like the wig and the glasses. "This is what Walter Hollander looks like now," I say and then I wake up. 

Monday, January 9, 2017

this is so long away

There has been no news because there is no book of longing on the table by the bed and there is not a single signal that has been crossed.



Except now, there is this. This is me when I was thinking about you (I wasn't thinking about you).
This is me between two mermaids, I have not been there for awhile, I stopped listening to the songs, because they did confuse me.

There is also this.

This is me when I decided to enter into the world of men who are giving up and going out to sea because there is only sadness on the land. I cannot tell you what we found because it is secret.

That's not true. What's true is that the mermaids know, they know us better than we know ourselves, and I could say this is a photograph of me when I was not thinking about you,
but it is better to say that it is me trying not to think about you.

Now there is also this. 


This is something I wrote about you. Before it disappears, have a look.
None of this is true, this is not about you, this is about her.

I have been away for a long time. I have had things to take care of for a long time.
This might be about you. 
It's not like I haven't not been thinking about someone.

There will be more for 2017, this has just started and look at the footprints by our doorsteps already, just look, we have been dreaming and there are footprints between the doorstep and the edge of the sea, and there are songs that have our names, you can almost hear them already.  








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