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. 

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 compañero 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. 

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)

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. 

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 bolaños', 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.

and then it gets a little weirder...

diwali lights make sharp the things that have grown dull in a dark season, relentless heat turning to relentless cool, and at the end of the day i have nothing left to fight, and no reason to fight.  all the battles of the day are resolved with breath and a return to seeing.  it's all so simple, but it's even simpler than that even.  i'm wrong about everything, and i don't even know what this is, and i'm not ready to let it come to light, because i have to keep one step ahead of these things, or i might just fall into the river of time.  what if we became like those rare things that know there is more to know, and let the seasons decide these things?  it would be like giving in to a demanding lover, or falling in to the gravity that wants us to fall.  in these spaces in between spaces, the top of the mountain kisses my head and the river loves me like no human ever could, knows me better than anyone in a body could ever know, and on those kinds of days, words stop making sense, and stop meaning to matter.  but i have things hidden under my tongue, notes written on river water and kisses trapped in plastic water bottles.  i can never remember a last kiss as much as i remember thinking about the next one.  i can't close things properly, i leave them sealed shut in places where i know i open them in the middle of the night, and i always leave them right where i can find them when i start to panic.  they shine like lights you can see from space, lights that never go out, and after all these lost things i hide in my closet, i think i know how to tell when a light goes out forever.  i'm not trying to confuse you, i'm just trying to tell a story that i can use to help me remember this right, but language is a fracture, and my hands are aching, and neither hand nor tongue can capture the things that i know that i can't put into words.  these are the best songs.  my favorite is the one about the boy who tries to capture it all in a plastic bottle, but it keeps spilling out.  when he finally gets it all inside, and secures the lid, he carries them to his bed, and while he sleeps the best parts come out, the ones he could never expect or complete or describe, and they fill his room with light.  in the morning, there is a rainbow of colored lights coming from his tongue, and in the morning, he feels like he might actually be living in the world. 

at night, sea, monsters and telegraphs

I've been soaking in the dirt from under the surface of the earth for more than a season, and the only sounds that make sense are the music of the worms, and the rhythms of distant footsteps.  They sound like tires on a grid from under a bridge, the place where I lost my sense of direction for the last time.  And I've been rocked to sleep by the waves under my back for so many nights now that their sounds, the ones we always dream about, the sirens, are the only sounds that can wake me up.  Human voices don't make sense when they've been playing in traffic for too long, and the only ones I can trust are the ones who have been buried like me.  We're not alone then, and not apart, not from the rest of this other music, and not from each other, but we can't see each other in the dark, and it might take a radical act of faith to assume that you are really there.

I want radical actions tonight, in vestigial situations that remind me of my dozen uncertain homes, the ones that move away from me when I'm making saints close to the ocean, the ones that fall to pieces after disintegrating from the inside, and the childhood places that get transformed by cancers that are anything but metaphorical (and tonight, metaphor is the only thing that can rock me to sleep, no body will soothe me and no words can touch the spaces outside of the careful demarcations of where I have to be).  These illnesses threw me far off course, and none of them were mine, and every time I woke up, I had to make up a new course, always different, always guided by some memory of fire, and they always guided me back to you.  And I don't know who you are.  And I don't know who I am.  And this landscape is so much like a dream, and my heart beats like a dream, and my blood burns like a dream, and waking up is no longer possible, or even necessary.

These words that fly past my ears when I'm trying to hear the mermaid songs, I can't tell if they're happening now or if they happened before, beats of the drum to mark the space between then and now, and the thousand miles of sentences that sentenced us to life or death or maybe just love.  And the stars play like telegraphs, until their colors are words, like the beats of a drum, and their revelations play out in double vision, where five cups become ten, and coins are divided, and even the sea monsters seem to have nothing good to say except to complain about not having enough money.  No one has any more money these days, or else we would all be indoors.  And all I want is to let my breath become fires that fly far above my head, so that you can see the signals that say that I remember you.  And there were nights, not very long ago, where you recognized me, and it came as a shock every time.

And tonight, when I pass by the places that caught us, the whirlpools where faeries and morbid sorcerers were singing our names, I have to remember that the people that I have been between then and now add up to something I don't wish to define, and find myself incapable of divining.  But I see things in between the shadows of the heat of the days, and I see things that tell me I'm waking up in the right place, and I see things that remember every breath, every kiss, and every cry.  It's a constant craving, built from caves of desire still inhabited by bodies that want, and bodies that are terrified of any ultimate definitions.  I always fall in love when I meet someone who doesn't know their own destiny, who has performed all the rites that allow us to see the future, and understand that theirs is one that cannot be found except by travel.  When the night is still refusing to turn into day and my eyes can't be more tired, and the vision more doubled, I think of you.  When I approach the part of the day where all the angry ghosts come out to play and I discover they don't possess me any more, I remember you.  When I am too tired to go any further, but find myself moving faster to catch up with the version of myself who knows and understands things like longing, I become like you.  And I don't know how to ask if you're ever coming home, because I have no home.

I keep falling in love with people who can live in tents on a sidewalk, and I keep creating imaginary kitchens in my mind.  They're always decorated with temporary designs, and there's always the smell of garlic and hot pepper on your hands.  I'm making you something from roots, from yam and potato and ginger, something to keep something in place, because it isn't true that we are rootless.  Our roots are cut, and the memory of the cuts are still too contemporary for any of yesterday's theories to heal, and today's songs are too indiscreet (the things of the sea don't respect any rhythms that can speak only to the living).  It could be another time of revolution, or it could be another time of dying, but there's an ecstasy hidden just beneath your bones, and a thousand revolutions to be won with tongues.  They think we can be tamed like foxes, because they don't know how to recognize a horse when they see one.

from under the sea,
i am c

Horses

She says she sees horses whenever her eyes go soft.  No soft horse ever won a race without imagining it ahead of time.  This is not the first dada revolution.  Not the last, either.  We need more trumpet players in our bedrooms, and jugglers in the hallways, and there are never enough sea cucumbers in the bath (for guests).  The next lover to insult everyone's mother, and propose an alternative to capitalism gets a prize.  It's this short text about horses.  It's the only poem I could write you, on a night like this, when the daughters of the next revolution call, worried about the ghosts, interrupting all the shaman parties and electronic sound shows.  We will live to fight and love each other another day.

toward a muse

(Calypso missed)

It's been more than a year now since Odysseus left the island, and forgot about Calypso entirely.  Except it wouldn't be wrong to say that the last statement is wrong, he didn't forget her (would you?).  The next island he gets to, he is buried under the ground while a little goth girl takes care of him.  Like Isis, she is left with the job of putting him back together, after he'd been taken apart (by himself, the self a taoist reflection that took the apparitions of sea monsters, mermaids, storms, and relentless waves).  The girl wasn't entirely stuck, like Isis, in other patriarchal stories that make the goddess the one who is there to help him come together; in fact, even Isis had terrible problems of her own, and we don't have to spend a lot of time on the girl's problems, they are entirely her own, and have their own right to secrecy.  Her first problem was not being a goddess herself, so there was no gift of immortality there to curse or bless her at the end of the day, but it's hard not to imagine that she was getting something out of the deal.

In all the wakes he'd been sleeping through, his head was soaked through with a strange gift of prophecy, and he learned how to see things in the bones of the dead, and developed a strong attraction for anything related to the sea.  It wasn't because the sea reminded him of Calypso, but because Calypso reminded him of the sea.  So he had things that could help the goth girl, and it had to be that way, because he was altogether terribly ungrateful to her for all the time she spent putting him together. 

While Odysseus was sleeping in his temporary grave, he marked the nights he dreamed about Calypso, so that he could show them to her when he became immortal, because he wanted to tell her, "Look, these are all the nights that passed between then and now, and these marks are the ones that I spent thinking about you."

But it was never really about her, and perhaps never even really about him, but about the energy that had erupted on the earth's surface when their bodies came together, and this energy brought up the bones of the dead and the watery spirits of the oceans of the world.  To the ones who are always already immortal, when these energies enact themselves in the human body, it is like watching jello trying to conduct electricity with neon lights, entirely beautiful, and it does not matter so much how the jello feels.  For the jello that calls itself Odysseus, the feeling was simply uncomfortably haunting, waking up into something just so fucking right, and when the electricity was cut, there was a lack that took the spectral form of haunting.  He missed her body, he missed her looks, he missed her hunger, and at the end of the day, he entirely missed the human being that these things were connected to.  It's terribly sad to see him like this, when there is so much that he should be paying attention to, but probably all for the best that, up to now, he does not realize that he has had his body transformed into a very delicate instrument, one that knows intuitively how to be a vessel for electricity without destroying itself.

So when he wakes and draws images of her in the sand, it takes months and months before he forgets what she looks like, because the images have started to look like someone else.  It's probably better that he doesn't know that the someone else will always be someone else, that Calypso was never attainable by him, and he was never attainable by her, because even lovers (or especially lovers) never attain each other, and only mark spaces where something else can enter.

His mouth marked like a fish that had been caught (by a mermaid, no less), he leaves the island and the goth girl has nothing more to say to him, and he's still too asleep in his mind to wonder why that might be.  At some point, all the heroes have to learn how to be better houseguests, and this is not his time for that. 

He goes back home.  (Because "Odysseus must return!" -- Tadeusz Kantor)

Home is never like we expect it to be, everyone we knew has gotten older and more tired, and there are always more kids interested in vampires than before.  He is surrounded, then, by bored grey people, and vampires, and nothing is in color for awhile.  It's no one's fault but his, and maybe not even his, his eyes are older, and still haven't learned how to see in the mortal world.  They're too full of visions of otherworlds, and futures that are clearer to him than the present, which seems so terribly murky, covered with the heat of the day and the illusions of the night.  One of the last things Calypso said to him was about his vision, he tried to remember it differently, because it is much better if she said things like, "You and I, we will see this clearly one day," instead of, "I can see very far, because I am not old like you, I don't get old like you're doing right now." 

She was almost unsentimental as a defense against falling in love, and he loves that about her, and loves so many things about her that he carries her double on his back.  Everyone knows, then, about what's on Odysseus' mind, because it is on his back.  He doesn't cut her double loose until he's found the right river, he tells everyone, but he is always looking for the right river, but can't find the one that would surely flow back to her (and if he did, he would be on it).  It's another terrible moment, where we are all embarrassed for him, and wish he would learn to focus on the feet in front of him.  The feet are getting terribly interesting, after all.  After all, there's a revolution in the city he left, and the home he came back to is so much less settled than he expected.

But he won't ever really find her until he realizes he is not looking for her, and that would take a hundred consecutive leaps of faith, the kind of obstacle course for the soul that turns us into things that we are not, things we never thought we could actually be.  That could, in fact, be the very thing that marks the kind of story that is simultaneously tragedy and comedy, where the main characters are changed utterly, and don't even realize it.  The trip around the sun in human skin is one that can feel so painfully slow that we aren't able to see the points when things shift, and if we were able to experience the moments that are months, fully, without any fear or desire, then we would be entitled to enter into eternity with a light heart. 

And he isn't able to see how the months with the goth girl trained him to carry a heavy heart and still live, entering into the eternity only occasionally, through the subtle fluctuations of a mouth locked in a kiss, or the view of the city from the top of a mountain, when everything else seems so closed.  That is how he feels, after all, that the city is like a series of stores that have all been closed, and he can't enter any of the doorways as a guest any more. 

If he were to wake up, which he will, he might start to see the enormous debt he owes to all the lifelines that crossed with his on his passages between the theres and the here.  If he were to wake up, he would see his place inside a torrent, and learn to embrace all its ambiguities.  If he were to wake up, he would see that the longing that haunts his sleep is not for a past, but for a future, one that he is walking in at this very moment, one whose chords are as complex as a tango, as ripe as a pomegranate, and as shy as a small white bird, like the one that is getting born inside his chest while he longs, while he longs, while he longs.

TC proposals

For immediate release (Call for proposals in Spanish and English here):

¡Teatro Caliente! ANNUAL FESTIVAL OF TRANSCULTURAL, EXPERIMENTAL PERFORMANCE

 NOW IN ITS NINTH YEAR...

¡Teatro Caliente! a three-day festival of transcultural, experimental performance, features local work by performers pushing the barriers of their forms (interdisciplinary, visual art, dance, music, performance), and reflecting and re-representing the cultural make-up of the southwest in general and Phoenix in particular. This brings local and international artists together to share ideas, with an eye toward opening the barriers and quality of experimental performance work, fostering creative relationships among local and regional performing artists and organizations who might not otherwise connect,

and creating spaces of artistic dialogue in multiple languages,styles, and points of view, bringing international awareness to the vibrant Phoenix arts scene.

En espanol y despues In English:

ESPANOL

El comité curador de Theater In My Basement estará aceptando proposiciones para el festival “Teatro Caliente” de 2012. Este año el festival sera realizado en Downtown Phoenix del 26 al 28 de Enero. Nosotros estamos en la busqueda de trabajos bastante experimentales, transculturales y transgenero los cuales pueden ser basados en cualquier tipo de estilo (incluyendo, pero sin limitarse a: Arte de Performance, Danza, Multi-Media (incluye presentaciones de PowerPoint), Solo Performance, Teatro, Música, y cualquier trabajo interdisciplinario que caiga afuera de las categorias de las corrientes principales, cualquiera que estas sean). Buscamos piezas de diferentes duraciones, pero entre 10 y 55 minutos es una buena pauta. Manteniendo la misión del festival, se le dara prioridiad a trabajos que representen las diferentes poblaciones de Phoenix en cualquier lengua. Entrada al festival sera basada en innovación, experimentación, y transculturalidad.

Para aplicar, por favor mandar lo siguiente:

1 página con la descripción del proyecto. (100-200 palabras)

1 página con la descripción del grupo o del individuo. (100 palabras)

Un link (su sitio del web, dropbox, o algo como asi) para una muestra en audio/video del trabajo propuesto (o si el trabajo es nuevo, una muestra de trabajos anteriores). En cualquier caso, haremos todo lo posible para mandar un miembro de nuestro comité

a ver el trabajo en persona.

El plazo para consideraciones de trabajos es hasta el 8 de Deciembre del 2011. Por favor mandar los proposiciones (o cualquier pregunta) por correo electronico a:

teatrocaliente@gmail.com

Gracias, cambio y fuego,

TIMB

ENGLISH

The curatorial committee of Theater In My Basement is accepting proposals for the 2012 ¡Teatro Caliente! festival. This year’s festival will be held in downtown Phoenix, January 26-28.  Like usual, We are looking for highly experimental, transcultural (and transgender) work in all fields of performance (including, but not limited to: Performance Art, Dance, Multi-media, Solo Performance, Theater, Music and any Interdisciplinary work that falls outside of  mainstream categories, whatever those might be). We’re looking for pieces of various lengths, but between 10 minutes and 55 minutes is a good

guideline. In keeping with the mission statement of the festival, work that represents the diverse populations of Phoenix, in any language, will be given priority. Entry into the festival is based on Innovation, Experimentation, and Transculturality.

 To Apply, please send:

 - 1-page description of the project

 - 1-page description of the group or performer

 -  A link (to your website, dropbox, or something along those lines) to video/audio samples of the proposed work (or, if the work is brand new, samples of prior work). In any case, we will make every effort to send a member of the committee to see the

work in person. The deadline for consideration is December 8, 2011. Please e-mail proposals, and any inquiries, to:

teatrocaliente@gmail.com

Thanks for your interest.

This is not a test.

 

toward a muse manifesto

This is especially special for those who are not so amused...oh, you will be, you certainly will be.

Part one:
Preface (the face before the face, the face before the fist of the manifesto)
((or possibly manifishto, mishto with the fish))
(((it's already too surrealistic, too dadaistic)))
but oh, we need dada now more than ever, dada, where did you go? and dada replies, kaboom kaboom jajaja boomboom baby i never left, i held u while u were walking on that beach, poking the dead fish with the stick, like all the little boys do when they're learning about life by studying death...

theorum #1: it is stupid to use one clear, well-constructed phrase when twenty-seven will serve much better.
(this is not a good theorum, because there is no proof, except for the blood of all the wars of the 21st century, lining up to make rooms to count the dead, but the rooms are not cleanly demarcated, because the wars were never clearly marked, because they were impossible to end)
I apologize that the manifesto took such a sudden and dramatic and even tragic turn, one filled with the melancholy of the times, that melancholy we all wish to throw off our backs like a sack filled with dead fish.  We all know that feeling of inevitable gravity, and even I am having a little trouble staying awake, and I am more manic than most of my dear compatriots, the one who hold these things dear and so self-evident, but we sold the evidence, and it still didn't help us to get our houses back, but at least we had good sandwiches, on many different kinds of bread, four more kinds than our parents could ever have dreamed of, and if that's not cartesian success, than I don't know what is.  (and three different kinds of pickled peppers). 

Pre-fish (cont'd, from above, never really started): It is obvious that there are those who do seem to really believe that socialized medicine is the same thing as terrorism, and because of that very face of the fact, we have to assume that the entire world is turning completely stupid (which is impossible, or at least too hopeless to engage with), or else language has lost its sense and meaning.
I do realize that this lacanian lack is not so absolutely modern to make any waves, but we should only note that at some point language was being used as a tool, then it became a virus, and now the signs and signifiers are lost to something altogether other (and not the good kind, not the kind that makes for the poetic erotics that makes the world spin on the woman's hips)  ((why does it have to be a woman? oh...it's a song, look it up, it's fun and bouncy))...the world has lost its voice, and the only acceptable form of communication from this point forward is the art of the moan...not a lost art, at all, but not very loud until recently, but recently...

Part One: La Verdadera Parte Por Fin:

But first, a personal anecdote:
I was certainly pre-occupied.  There were these golden threads left on the sage bushes on the side of the freeways of the world that came from the silk underwear of so many lost loves, and I was busy making plans with Oshun to enchant and bring these threads back to their owners, but Oshun is always slight of hand, and my Oshun's path is the one without hands, so who knows what the hell she is up to, she is the goddess of Love, and because she is Love, she is crazy.  And I was crazy, wondering why I couldn't leave this city, losing so many things that I didn't need, the naive part of my heart, the end of my thumb, a house somewhere in there, and other gracious spaces where my friends let me hide for awhile...and I was wondering about my daughter, how she would get by, how she would grow up in this world of gender situations that are always under re-construction, in a place particularly unhospitable to any other others (the proof was in the blood on the chins, arms, and legs of lovers who were only looking for a place to rest, like any of us, or rather, like me)  ((since the proof was sold to buy oranges, I had to replace whatever anger was there with forgiveness, but that's another story that makes so much less sense than this entirely personal and revealing anecdote))...the meat, then, in this vegetarian story is the moment that I saw the image of the man in the Vendetta mask (how do I know it was a man? I don't, really, but he sounded like a man when he shouted at me, but I know full well that men are not the owners of the shout, this goes back to the moan, the shout is the cousin of the moan, and we all can get along in this noisy house)...I saw this mask and realized that I was pre-occupied, but woke up inside of a very sexy kind of revolution.
This takes us to:

Part Seven (por fin)...
acabamos de llegar a nuestra tercera punto de vista...no es simplemente k todos somos marcos, por k siempre esta asi, pero mas, y masa, por cada revolucion sin masa, no hay corazones de lata, and if we admitted that this is about corn, or bread, or cornbread, then it would be easier to argue, but I am suddenly over 40, and this is disconcerting, because when I turn blue in the face, it means I have to exfoliate, and that has not happened yet, and that might be the real tragedy of our time, that time moves forward, and we get older all the time, unless we learn how to breathe...breath connects to the drumbeat, the originary boom boom in illus tempore, eternally returning to love, it always comes back to that...and arguing might be useful, but it requires so much discourse, and I don't even believe myself when it gets into that, and discourse is blue, and it wrinkles, and this is about aging backwards.
(please allow me a slight tangent here: I age backwards, like Merlin, it's true, but it's a secret, and that's why I would never say it in public, and write it in a blog, which this is not)...in the course of our recent revolutions, the 60s counterculture, and the 80s movements for fighting hunger and stopping the United Fruit company from uniting what they wanted to unite, the best tool of the oppressor was found in discourse, to ask the participants to name their cause, their griefs, and their goals, and while we thought this was a good idea, they were finding ways of breaking us into groups, separating us each according to hisher own goals, and the game was suddenly not a game, but lost all the same. 

So (suddenly this is so personal) I am walking toward the protest, with my daughter, carrying a sign that says, "This is my favorite revolution so far :D" and we pass by two women in a truck who are selling clothes and american flags, and they start shouting at us, "What are you protesting, what are you protesting, HUH?" and we don't answer, because this might be the first tactic, before the seventh:
A clear cut rule of non-engagement. 
And now the seventh:
Stay vague. 
This last is the advice of my father (anti-oedipus to his bones even though he may not know it yet), who, after having been through a military regime that punished him for his intelligence, and unwillingness to sell it to the highest bidder, civil rights marches and a life of watching the world come unspun like a rubber band on a freshly-opened baseball, has learned some things about how this might work.
Dad, you are Dada, and they never gave you credit.  Until now, that is.

There is nothing naive about a generation that grew up watching eyes traded for eyes, and all the dead fish of the world lie on the beach, so far from the sea, we all just wanted to get to the beach for the afternoon, in this revolution, what we want is to go to the beach.  Hell yes.
There is nothing naive about a generation who sees that there is a terrible dividing line, the executioners and those who refuse that, born in a very real sense on the last breath of Troy Davis.  Those who feel responsible for his death, and those who do not.  A terrible dividing line, and it should give us a headache, but we can't sleep, and we shouldn't sleep any more.  We'll trade catnaps and keep the world from burning, Vendetta masks slung on our backs, and wondering how the pot heads feel when the cows walk by.

The Real Point (El Ombligo del Angel de la Historia): 
This is the time of the year when the dead start to walk the earth, confusing the twilight with the sunrise, and entering into all the backrooms when no one is looking.  They look a little bit like lost Goddesses and Gods, and they might as well be, and we might as well start lighting the halloween candles and praying to them, because the dead know things, and when our prayers take forms like song, we are enchanted, so very enchanted, perdido en el canto, and the boomboom of a revolution in progress might start to match meter with the rhythm of the beating of the hearts of the dead, and that's a dance of death.  Enough to make the world spin on its axis again, enough to wake the living, enough to wake up a muse, and from where I sit, incense cigar burning and lightning in my missing thumbtip, it looks very clear to me here that she clearly wants to play. 
Preoccupation becomes occupation, and the post is written on the soles of the living, dancing with the dead.