"The dark corners emptying out"

I haven't stopped listening to B"P"B. "I know that missing you/ Has just begun." Love that one. Still loving "plenty of what's missing." You know. Rhythm. But in particular. The one I'm thinking I should write about here. I wish it didn't start with the way he found his hands on "mountain girl." Though I suppose I can accept it as a little bit of straight kitsch. The woman singing still has enough magic left in her to "make a one like you swoon." I know how she feels. But I've never had a song in my head sing sex so well. Maybe Missy Eliot of a certain period. But I'm loving. "Oh take it Oh take me Oh take it so easy Oh make it Oh make me Oh kneel down and please me Oh lady oh boy Show how you want me And do it so everyone sees me. We have a new leaf to show the world..." I love it how the "me" that he sings everyone should see comes in as a kind of graceful supplement. I'm a whore for grace. I haven't forgotten. I mean the song's called "So Everyone." It just so happens that all of that yearning and moaning is for giving visibility to a certain "me." A me who is the product of all that yearning and moaning. I've been waiting around for someone to see me like that for a while. In writing about Berlin I quit waiting for it to just happen. Started yearning and moaning in a different light.

That title is a citation. I've been rereading me in that different light. Different yet again rereading it. But finding irreparable things. We tend these days to be so afraid. Of irreparable things. Indelible. Written down. Things like. Some nodal points. A ritual for T and me. To have him realize how much I need him. We took our pill and clanked our beers together to staying together. For that night. And for longer, too. Maybe, though, being with us made him want to go find his someone else. How long can I keep on waking? They were there and so were we and then the next day I was there and they were, too. Something about how we were there. That renewed how we're going to be elsewhere. Like here. And here I am having written. Seeing stars. A kinda constellation. Turns out the New World's in the Old. Or it's in both. It's a new relation to old codes. Already as mourning.

So there's a rhythm I was consecrating. Like I said like a week ago now. And then there's T and me. Consecrating ourselves as us thanks to the gazes, various body parts and words of a whole bunch of others next to whom we just end up. We don't need a piece of paper from the city hall. We do need each other. And we do need for a whole lot of others to see that need. Like you. Like anyone else as incomparable as you are. As we are. To see us as we are. Here and there. Around. Beside each other. Beside ourselves. A description of the situation could go on forever.

I seem to have a little more patience than you do for the whole marriage thing. I mean. For real. Fuck the cake. But there might be something to do with all this extravagant and misspent desire for consecration. Because the problem is that so many of us persist in thinking that the consecration we need comes from the State. I've been meaning to quote this thing I read. I read it, I think, while I was writing on Berlin. A little thing Jean-Luc Nancy wrote about "The Sacred." Today, in addition to blogging, I'm trying to reorganize the piles of books and papers and things that have been accumulating for six months. I've just found this thing by Nancy again as a result. It's funny. Because T and I went out for lunch. Just after not sleeping so much after hearing that Dad had passed away. Descended one last time down those stairs at the place that is now my mother's big house. She said that to me while I was there. "Somebody should write something about all those stairs have seen." Maybe I will. Maybe I already am. So T and I were eating. I hadn't cried yet. And then at some point over the course of the meal. I realized that we had made love. The night before. Working out the aftermath of Berlin. Celebrating the departure of the thing that had been weighing on us for so long. And while coming. We'd looked each other in the eyes. I think I was on top. And I think we were watching each other meet our need for each other. Eating lunch with him. I remembered that. Because sitting next to us were two people I'm convinced run the journal that ran the little piece by Jean-Luc Nancy. And in that piece, if I give a rough translation, Nancy says that "in essence, the sacred or the saint encounters us... Each time, through whatever precise form (a gaze, a tonality, a rhythm or a contact, something confused or clear), it has the force of an encounter: that which cannot be avoided. Someone in the street, or else one of those people I see every day, can force the encounter on me. Or else a tree, or the movement and pace of a phrase... We call "art" -- but the word leaves a lot to be desired -- a gesture that, par excellence, consecrates. The art of pleasing, or of living, the art of delighting or of growing old, the art of singing or drawing. It's not only a question of knowing how to do it: it's a question of knowing how to make do with something that doesn't let itself be done. With what doesn't allow itself to happen... Knowing how to make do with a letting be: letting oneself be faced with truth, letting it shine on its own. Whether with truth or sanctity. Knowing how to allow the coming not of its shine, which comes from it alone, but the opening that allows you to discern it. Knowing how to make an opening for it, and knowing just how much this knowledge is out of our control." Seeing those people beside me. Remembering something I'd understood from Nancy's phrases. Having written about Berlin. Coming while looking into T's eyes. Surviving the death of my father. The tears started coming. Lol. The ipod gods have put Janis Joplin on right now. "If you want me. Cry baby."