search for delicious

Tangents and Conditions

2010-02-19T11:52:00.002-05:00

So Wednesday on the couch where I still spend a consquential amount of time, my shrink, as her ilk are wont, picked up on something I had said about my hesitations about plunging into writing and said, "follow those traces." I think what I'd just said was something about how I didn't know where the traces of Berlin were going to end up settling this time around, where they were going to be déposées. That's one of those charged words in my analysis, déposé. It has to do with traces and remains. Caroline has been described several times in analysis as déposée in me. Now she, or at least her remains, are a little more firmly installed in the name I’m signing with. It also happens to be a name I have now actually published under. In French!

Part of the charge of that particular word déposé comes from Genet, because it’s close to the word disposition. In one of his late interviews, after he got throat cancer and somehow survived for years hanging out with Palestinians, he talks about the "disposition" that brought him to writing. I can almost cite him word for word. "I understood that certain things in my life were blocked for me." And so he was disposed to writing. And to hanging out with Black Panthers and Palestinians. Lucky fucker. With that hard cross he bore after writing his way out of prison and into the theater, he basically haunted hotels waiting to die. And along came Angela Davis and the others. Towards the end of his life, all he had to do was to show the world how he bore the traces of those others in him. It's bonkers, that late book, "Prisoner of Love." And often very very beautiful.

Maybe I run into trouble when I ask for too much. Genet didn't seek out the Panthers or the Palestinians. They just came to him. There’s a sort of famous quote from him where he talks about how wrong it would be to say that he had done anything to advance the causes of those groups. Quelle sottise, he says, refering to the fact that people often ask him why he is helping the Palestinians. "Bullshit. They helped me live." I love the extravagance of that gesture.

They're not Palestinians, and not (yet?) in anything like the impossible position Palestinians are in, but I have been hanging out with some boys that are helping me live, some but not all of whom I met in Berlin. They all, though, end up having some relation to that beautiful Babylon. And I think one way of saying lots of the many things my mind has been up to is to say that I’m translating Berlin. First of all, all that writing about Berlin from April 2008 that's archived here on this site ended up being something like the contact sheets for a publication that meant rethinking what those pieces were doing and figuring out how the pictures in prose were supposed to be arranged on the page. To do that, I had to translate them into French and hear several people tell me how maybe the things seemed weird, no doubt because they were written in English. Quelle sottise. I'm pretty fucking weird in English, too. The whole thing was not entirely unsuccessful. I learned I knew a little bit about how to fight, and I don't even think anyone was killed in the battle. There's actually another party for the journal, Monstre, this coming weekend. I went to the first one for the release of the thing in November and was entirely too cranky and exhausted to have much fun. This Friday, though, I'm supposed to be meeting an on-line friend who likes to expand assholes and is some kind of a tangential element to this Monstre-world. That should be fun. Tangents are essential, as I've always known, but now I'm in a position where I can follow through on a few of them. Translating Berlin is a lot about that, about being careful about where certain tangents are leading me. Walter Benjamin: "Just as a tangent touches a circle lightly and at but one point, with this touch rather than with the point setting the law according to which it is to continue on its straight path to infinity, a translation touches the original lightly and only at the infinitely small point of the sense, thereupon pursuing its own course according to the laws of fidelity in the freedom of linguistic flux."

Last weekend there were several tangents touching and shooting off into their linguistic flux. And they are more good evidence that translating Berlin goes beyond just translating whatever words I can put together in whichever languages about the time I spend there. At the moment, as you can tell, I’m as interested in the surplus to Berlin as in Berlin while I was there. This is because I, like you and like, I think, a lot of us, need a little bit of structure in my life and in my writing. And I think that a blog is a place where we work on the conditions for that structure. Maybe it’s a place where we can plot out the trajectories of some of those tangents Benjamin would have us thinking about and get some kind of a working map of the crazy force field working its way through us as we work our way through it.

So last weekend started last Thursday, a week ago today. I’ve been trying to write my way into it and into Berlin and trying to figure out how those two fields of writing are working on one another and how exactly I can say how they work, and if they can afford, too, other kinds of writing. (Jesus—look at that sentence. No wonder it takes a little while for us to work our way back here when we’ve been off on a hiatus for a while.)

So last Thursday my weekend started, after attempts at translating a great little book—my first real contract for a book translation, difficult, critical, philosophical, fun—by making my way to the theater. Since I’ve been on hiatus, I haven’t been blogging up my theatrical ventures, but one of the more remarkable ones this past fall was a big-ass mother-fucking piece by an old Greek fag named Dimitris Dimitriadis. He rocks. By which I mean that I discovered in his writing some kind of a kindred spirit, a brother. I have such a profound inutition for what his writing was up to over the course of his life. The first play by him that we saw was called Dying as a Country and it involved something like a hundred and fifty extras. (In French, “extras” are called “figurants.” I like the play between those two terms.) It takes place during a civil war. People are dying by the wayside. There are soldiers and sterile women and mass open graves. I quote, translating from the French, “And there were more than a few of them,” (ie, the soldiers caught up in this devastating war), “who waited in horror for night to fall, because a mute flow would rise up under the bones of their skulls and they would feel the while sky compress within them, and in their heads galaxies and infinite expanses would pulse with a piercing silence that would unleash their inarticulate cries, and would make them coil up in their beds as if they had been struck by the worst pain...” I remember crying to that line. The play is actually a kind of monologue, but it had been staged to be carried by a core of about ten or fifteen Greek actors who would come to a microphone, most of the time, to say their spell. That particular moment was enuniciated by a woman wearing the cutest little red leather jacket. Somehow, I can remember with a certain amount of precision the way she articulated those particular lines, even though they were in Greek and I was reading the supertitles in French. Her voice went slightly into her head as she talked about those imploding galaxies in the soldiers’ heads. Standing up, her arms were stretched out behind her head as if she were laying down, like the soldiers whose torturous existence she was narrating. As she said that line about the galaxies imploding, her hands clenched up into fists that then opened up behind her head. The extras, the figurants, were all lined up in a circle that went in one of the doors to the theater and out the other. Some of what was going on outside—at some point, for example, they all start to sing, and, at another, snow begins to fall—was transmitted by video onto the screen at the back of the theater. As I hope that little excerpt shows, the prose being spoken was so amazingly beautiful, but what was most amazing was that most of it was spoken in Greek, with French supertitles, and you could hear maybe not every little aspect of its beautiful density, but really? A whole damn lot.

So, with our faithful theater-going friend Andreas, Thierry and I had made a date to go see another play by him in the same theater: The Vertigo of Animals Before the Slaughter. This one was performed in French. Beforehand, we were all more than a little nervous. We hadn’t realized that we had signed up for three hours and twenty minutes of modern Greek tragedy, and we were all a little afraid. I even moreso than the others, because I had watched about a minute of video of the production on-line, and it had looked scarily stultifying and very French. We were also joined by Andreas’s Pierre and Pierre’s colleague Katja, and we all agreed that we could leave at the intermission, if we wanted to.

The end of the play allows you to understand exactly what has been going on throughout the play up until then. It reenacts the beginning of the play, where the audience saw two older men awkwardly acting the roles of two younger men. One of them tells the other that he has exciting news, and that he is getting ready to get married. This sends the other literally into a prophetic spew that is really very funny. He says that the other will have a lovely family of some incredible amount of children and that they will be happy up until the point when the children reach a certain age. Then the prophetic spew really begins, which has to do with his friend’s success and all of the havoc it will wreack on his family, involving, of course, lots of incest and horror. At the end of the spew, the dude sort of steps back, like, what the fuck was that all about and where did it come from? I think I was already giggling, because it was either at that moment or at one slightly further on that the lady in front of us, who apparently really didn’t get what was going on, turned around to stare at me, wondering what in the hell I was chortling at. Soon, though, there were enough people tuned in to what was going on on stage and, in particular, to the words the actors were saying that I wasn’t the only chortler.

The prophesy was, of course, entirely accurate, and the vast majority of the play brings the characters to full, stunned articulation of the horror. The daughter goes crazy because her father falls in love with her, the two sons fall in love with each other, one of them assassinates the prime minister and shacks up with the father’s friend who had prophesied all of these events, while the other starts sleeping with the mother who bears and smothers his child at the end of the play within the play. All, it is implied, because the father denied his love for his friend and got married. All because of what that brought to be born of the pen of the poet. All the beautiful, luscious indulgent speech of these crazy people that you can so easily identify with until you freak out and realize what horror you are watching. The actress playing the mother is named Claude Perron, and I recognized her from this film made by Godard’s partner Anne-Marie Miéville called After the reconciliation. I didn’t love that movie, but I did love the way she at one point growls in this gutteral snarl, “Rrrrroooberrrrt,” which is the name of the character played by Godard. I recognized her right away. Her first big monologue—which is actually probably the moment I chortled and got looked askance at by the lady in front of me—is addressed to God the night before she fucks her husband for the first time and evokes all of the elaborate pleasures she expects from it. Luscious stuff. At the turning point of the play, the house expands into a palace, and all of a sudden the family is sitting on more excess than they know what to do with. And then they have to figure out how to deal with it, which they don’t. It drives them mad, in beautiful ways that really did make me think that this play was doing what a tragedy is supposed to: giving you that chill of identification with monsters trapped in situations far beyond their control. It also made me think that I never really thought that particular shudder could involve often hardy laughter.

At the end of the play, we see something like its obverse potential, the way the play and its tragedy might not have been. The father’s friend has invited the family to come and see the spot where he and his father used to meet. This happens just to the other side of this kind of screen that has been used throughout the play, and it’s an obvious kind of nod to realist or naturalist theater. You watch all of the characters we’ve been seeing doing crazy things file on stage, disappear behind the screen that obscurse their forms, and you hear the father’s friend say what the importance of the place was to him and to their father. The friend sends them on their way, wishing them the best before emerging from behind the screen to face the audience wielding a pair of scissors. He sticks out his tongue and cuts it off while we gasp.

Goodness me, what good a smart and funny tragedy can do for you. I knew I was pushing things a little bit, but I’d heard that a new club night called Bordello was happening for the first time that night in central Paris. The idea behind it was to make a sex-club fun again, to put some sexy alternative pop on so the cuties could dance around and to try and do something that Berlin does ever so much better than Paris seems to be able to swing. It’s still definitely the case that Berlin swings things that way much better than Paris does, even if Bordello happens again, but I was all for the initiative. Plus, Vincent had invited me to come on Facebook. Remember him? He’s the one who’s with Julien. They’re that lovely couple we met this past summer. I remember naming the time spent with them in their lovely little house in northeast Paris “a promising parenthesis.” It turns out it was indeed just a parentheses. We went to their country house in August, and that’s a whole other story, but after that we hadn’t heard much from them. It turns out that we didn’t see so much of them, because when they got back from vacation, Vincent found out that he had been let go at his job. We had run into them the weekend before, it had been nice, and Vincent had invited me to come to Bordello, this fun sex party, on Facebook. Even after three and a half hours of luscious contemporary Greek tragedy, I felt like I couldn’t quite just go home without giving it a go. So Thierry and I decided he would go just for a quick drink before the last metro, and I would either go back home with him or else stay and shake my tooshie if I found it in motion.

Julien and Vincent were there, and so were some other boys that I recognized from around. Thierry ended up running into this guy that he met at the Lab in Berlin. I wonder how many European boys’ lives turn out that place? More than a few. Mine does. It’s part of the Berghain, which is where the big Easter party happens. It’s the space that has the happy dance floor where so much goes on. I’ll tell you what went on there in January at some point, but for now its importance is that it was where Thierry met Christophe without ever knowing his name. The night we went there in January, we had noticed him because he’s beautiful and also because he was smoking pot. This was the weekend I had rented out a playroom for Thierry and me to celebrate his birthday in. We did celebrate, and that was a lot of fun. But on Friday, all of the drugs I’d been working so hard to assemble for our fucking pleasures were not yet assembled. They were for Saturday, which was a good if somewhat schizophrenic thing. But that Friday night, we went to the Lab sans drugs and Thierry ended up fucking around with Christophe without ever really finding out his name. Apparently, Christophe told Vincent that he picked Thierry up off of the floor at the Lab, which is, I think, a bit of an exaggeration, but which also seemed entirely imaginable to me. Vincent told me this while I was making my way to the coat-check (which, hello, cost 5 euros!), saying that it was a little strange because he was almost sure that Thierry was making out just to the side of the dancefloor with one of the two guys they’d come to Bordello with. “There’s something a little incestuous about this whole thing,” he laughed. I countered with, “I just spent three and a half hours watching a contemporary Greek tragedy where the mother and the son have a baby, so I really don’t think this is going to be a problem.”

Christophe was there with his German boyfriend Frank who lives in Berlin. I think I’ve met, seriously, like, (I’m counting), five Frank’s since I went to Berlin in January. So that when this particularly sexy Frank said “I’m Frank,” I think my answer was something like, “Right, of course you are.” Frank had my name on his t-shirt, which through its safety pins said “Anarchy Will” in a punk slant down the front of it. He felt dumb when, after we’d been making out and dancing around for a good hour or two, he asked me my name again. Ever patient and understanding, I said something like, “Oh, don’t feel bad,” and he said, “Yeah, but look,” and fingered over the letters of my name on his t-shirt. I smiled and got back to dancing with him.

I talked and danced and kissed a lot, with Frank and with Christophe, with Julien and with Vincent. It was fun. I was expending myself almost as if I were in Berlin, with the idea of Berlin the background and even in the fore, since Christophe was something like an import even though he’s French. The most beautiful moment of the evening was undoubtedly when, in between kisses and massages, Christophe asked me how long I’d been living in Paris. “Ten years,” I answered. At which point this incredibly sexy man—whose pectorals are so beautiful that some obscure part of me is still absolutely certain that if I sucked them long and hard enough, I would end up drinking milk—plunged down to the floor and kneeled before me, staggered by the force it must have demanded of me. I’ve said to a few people since then, including my shrink, that this was so exactly what I’ve needed for so long: just an ounce of recognition for the feat of my survival in and around Paris represents. I haven’t yet totally given up on the idea that that survival of mine might, if I follow through on some of the tangents that work their way through my conditions, morph into some kind of life.

A preface to what is to come

2010-02-04T17:08:00.004-05:00

OK. So I've just been in Berlin for the longest time ever, up until now. That means I have a lot to write about and figure out.

I have a hat now, a little skater's cap, that hardly leaves my head. Today I went to buy a cigar for some sex tomorrow night and to get loops put into my ears that are a couple of milimeters wider than the one I have been wearing for the last, jesus, decade or so at least. That involved reopening a hole. In about a month, I can go get the next step up with the loops. I'm aiming for some thick posts. I'm thinking colors, like maybe green on one side and blue on the other. You know, like the ground and the sky. Things like this happen because I was on vacation in Berlin for a month, working a little bit for me. They're like wonderful unavoidable surplus from my time there. I'm ready to go back in a heartbeat, even into the heart of the worst winter Berlin has had in seventeen years. Even in those conditions, I find myself differently there, and with others, confident in the difference I'm discovering and the difference I'm making with those few with whom something like a relation begins. There are a few people like that I want to tell you about, and they're just as incomparable as you and me. I'd be happy if my paths crossed with any of theirs again. I look forward to it.

I went to Berlin thinking that even in winter I might find a prairie or two: somewhere wide and welcoming, where the wind can tickle your hair and might stir your pen to write. I think I found one or two, but it took some effort and of the hardest kind: the effort to let go. It's amazing what you get when you quit looking for what you thought you wanted. Just so long as there's more, whatever you get is good.

You know how it goes: I've somehow come back with a life that was already here to be lived, it's just that I hadn't figured out how to do it yet. I'm careful all of a sudden with what I'm doing with my time. I'm aware of efforts I spend, and can feel pleased when they sometimes bear some fruit. Let's keep it up.

2009-03-15T20:49:00.003-04:00

sara and steve once spent a whole morning rescuing horseshoe crabs. they did the exact same thing. and some queen sailed over and said "they are hatching their eggs. they just crawled the equivalent of however the fuck many miles to a hatching ground."

and steve and sara had placed them back in the water.

irrevocable climate change. did you read that report. it's done.

that's where i'm at and why i've been quiet.

xo j

The Rest of Us

2009-03-14T10:47:00.002-04:00

Hey there. Troubled times, so I'm really just reading around trying to make sense of what I can. Just finished another novel. It's just come out in French. It's by Stéphane Audeguy, and I'm liking it much much more than his first one which I read when it came out. It's called Nous Autres in French, and I think it should be titled The Rest of Us in English. A "we" narrates the novel, and we readers are given to understand that the narrator is basically all of the attentive dead of Africa. Here's a translation of its last paragraph, which has me on the verge of tears.

"One morning, Pierre discovers an extremely bizarre trace of something all the way at the end of the beach. It’s a kind of ribbon made up of little twists. It’s impossible for him to imagine what had left such a wake in the sand. He slowly follows it, trying to understand, trembling at the idea that this mysterious mark might just stop somewhere, thereby forever keeping its secret. At the moment the hesitant writing of this unknown life seems to him to be the most moving sign of the world’s grace. It goes on for another twenty yards. Finally, he sees a little shellfish quietly making its way with uncertain steps. Pierre calculates the fact that, in proportion to its size, this hermit-crab has just covered the equivalent of two thousand kilometers in this sandy desert. But he’s done so walking parallel to the ocean: the animal is moving surely towards a hideous and slow death. Pierre watches it for a long time. And then he can’t take it anymore, he picks up the animal, it quickly folds itself up into the bottom of its shell, he goes down to the sea and places it carefully into shallow water. He waits. Soon it goes about its business, incomprehensible, indifferent to the miraculous rescue of which it has just been the object. Pierre goes back towards the bungalows. His joy is as pure as the ungrateful crustacean’s joy, now entirely absorbed by the delicate pleasures of life in a lagoon, and the craziest wind won’t be able to shut us up, and our words on the earth one vast tomb."

Dancing Barefoot: A Triptych

2009-02-25T13:24:00.003-05:00

Sunday afternoon

When I came across the drum corps, I didn’t realize it was carnival time. There were probably about thirty of them, with their different drums, dressed more or less the same. Coming upon it from our place, once enough of the people standing in front of you had filtered away, you had a great view of the drum corps leader who raised his hands to signal the upcoming shifts in rhythm. He would lift up his chin, often several times over in sync with the rhythm he was getting ready to modulate. He would lift up his eyes, too, and seemed almost as happily surprised as the rest of us listeners were once the crew got where he had been telling them to go. Then he would turn around, dancing with his own drum, making a grimace of pleasure. People watching them couldn’t help but be moved, often physically, letting it go into their hips or their heads. All of that rhythm illuminating all of our faces.

As we were walking away from it, T said exactly what was on my mind. I said, Qu’est-ce que j’adore ça, a drum corps, rhythm you can’t escape and that makes people giving themselves up to it so beautiful. T responded, Ca me donne envie de pleurer. The tears T named and that I felt welling up, too, come from being ravished at the sight of people's implication in that beauty, but also from the realization of all that we’re missing out on when we’re isolated in front of our various screens. And from finding what we were missing, by surprise, in the street.

“What’s rhythm is/ what’s rhythm is/ what’s rhythm is/ plenty of things missing…”

Thursday night at the movies: 35 Rhums

They’re on the way to a concert when her much beloved taxi breaks down. It’s pouring down rain as the four of them get out of the car to push it with a chorus of entirely understandable yet jovial screaming. They find a bar that’s open and go in for a drink. The bar owner’s son waits on them, telling them that it’s closing time and he can only serve them one drink. They leave, and the taxi-driver calls her colleague Pierre, speaking to him so loudly that the other three keep telling her not to scream. Pierre won’t be able to come and get them until much later. The concert will already be over. Still drenched, they go to knock on the door of a café that we soon realize is the one they’ve just left. One of them insists that the owner let them in, and he is so beautiful that the owner eventually concedes. While the taxi-driver calls Pierre back to tell him they won’t be needing him to come pick them up, “Nightshift” (“Marvin/ sang of the joy and pain…”) comes on and they start dancing.

The film’s story is about a love between a father and his daughter, and that is the pair we watch start the dance. Much of the beauty of the dancing, though, comes from the way who ends up dancing with whom, who breaks in on whose dance when, how the one lets go of the other is a choreography not only of their rhythm, but of the forms of their relations to one another. None of these relations are simple, but as they dance, everything becomes clear. They are stranded in the rain without transportation, and, instead of panicking, they allow themselves to be who they are, essentially in relation to one another. They make me want to be a part of us.

Saturday night: MoNA

Friday, our sex-buddy O came over with a big fat joint and we had a lot of fun, except for the unfortunate moment when the tilting world threw T for a curve and he scampered off for loud retching in the bathroom. So Saturday, we took it easy all day long. Our traditional morning-market forewent the traditional Saturday chicken, and we headed out for an Indian lunch. We followed it up with a stroll in the neighborhood, a coffee and some pinball, and an exhibit up the hill at this nifty little place called Le Plateau. N, of Romy Schneider fame from the last entry, had invited us to come for drinks at his studio on Friday, and saw right through T’s stutters when T explained we had other plans. N got to make fun of us for that on Saturday night. It so happened that we’d bought a big enough roast beef at market and I was raring to make a gratin. We had fresh green beans, too, so N and his beloved G came over for a meal. We invited Babar, who’d been on our mind and was on the other end of G’s cell as they walked in the door, at even more of the last minute. N’s cell phone had run out of batteries, so he hadn’t received our text message saying that we wanted to check out MoNA, a club night just down the street. As a result, they were all a little taken aback at the idea of going out. We’d also been talking about MoNA with S, who’s happily still around, and he came over after dinner and after thinking he was going to be able to see the YSL collection that’s been making headline news since then for showing that in spite the apparent dearth of it, there are some people in the world who have lots and lots of money to spend on famous people’s art. He and a friend had gone to the Grand Palais where the collection was on display for all to see before the auction started, had looked at the line, and S apparently decided it was time to join us and go dancing. In other words, we were porous and wanted to go out.

I haven’t danced that much in a long time. The porous we I was a part of is I think largely to thank for how easy it was for me to get going. Probably, too, the fact that for some reason I found myself at the threshold of the dance floor giving an archaeology of the term “queer” to G. French people of a certain ilk use the term, and fairly often these days, in English. Queerly enough, it ends up sounding like the French word for leather, cuir, especially when I use it because I like both so much. Translation takes time and effort, and I found myself explaining to G how “queer” got mobilized in the late 80’s and early 90’s, that it means weird, but has always had the undercurrent of sexual ambiguity. I explained how modernists like Woolf and James used the term in ways that we started to pay attention to back then, and that it’s sad to lose that genealogy when we use the term without translating it, really, in French. At some magical point, our conversation dwindled down and the rhythm picked us up. G and Babar left around 2, but T and S and I kept shaking our booty until 4. T invited S up, but S politely declined, saying he was a little pompette, which is a cute way of saying tipsy. So T and I stumbled upstairs, went at it until about 5 and slept late until the next day.

There's more than one way to show myself letting myself go.

the plot of our life sweats in the dark like a face
the mystery of childbirth, of childhood itself
grave visitations
what is it that calls to us?
why must we pray screaming?
why must not death be redefined?
we shut our eyes we stretch out our arms
and whirl on a pane of glass
an afixiation a fix on anything the line of life the limb of a tree
the hands of he and the promise that s/he is blessed among women

2009-02-17T20:46:00.007-05:00

showing myself letting myself go.

that was careless of me, and i apologize. when that song came on i was thrown back to toledo. spain. it was mid-summer and we'd endured an almost unendurable train ride from madrid. in the dead heat of the day, i forgot to watch the clouds and the sun; those incredible formations in el greco. storms came in, without even coalescing, just a wall of mist and electricity and streamed through and left as soon as they came. i'd fallen asleep, drooling. i know this sounds almost too much, but someone had a guitar. so i fell asleep to the guitar, privacy falling around us, and the heat was so dry. it would suddenly start raining and disturb the earth and the rolling fields, the grasses that had two sides, shining and dull with dust so that it came in through the windows. and we were going to read st. theresa's hot manuscripts, with god's heat and his burning landscape. but just then i was sleeping and uncomfortable. maybe i was afraid the guitar string would snap.

so there was like, this church of privacy around us. out of my mind, disoriented and groggy, in my dream, and a man came around selling cokes. so david got me a coke and i sat up, grumpy, and then was really easily charmed. blinked like a baby owl. i love you, coke! the guitar player still wasn't very good, a german student with a backpack and lots of little braids, colors and strings in his hair. pretty sure he was square-jawed and solid. i leaned against the window and watched his forearms. they had the golden fur i love so much. the corded muscles from rock climbing. it's a small mystery of arms that just kills me.

anyway, tomorrow and the next day i'm also pretty sure work is going to be a fucking jerk so it's nice to remember those very strong, very furry and masculine forearms and really how very bad his rendition was of "wild world' or whatever cat stevens it was and how cold my drink going down. my dear, be bright. remember this.

that secret that we know, that we don't know how to tell.... is that christmas morning? 19a. Jesus said: Blessed is the one who existed before coming into being.

showing myself letting myself go. so i'm just saying don't stress the lengths of your sentences. it reads better to me in everyday language, colloquial (the way we breathe, have sex, meander, star-gaze on a cold winter night)... but i also have this kind of joyous quirk when you veer off into exhaustion, when your "self" blurs. like that nice moment with you and t. after your debut. that's all. also... grief and missing someone that much. what's left but to turn to someone you love and take them in. i'll represent you in this wilderness as best i can. because i love you and i'm starting to love myself, and you will change, or (please, no. not again. do not leave yourself) leave. but stay if you can and love me. thank you for loving something in what i'm sending your way.

and how did all those books start? in the kitchen of the murray house, and then somehow charles wallace and meg always goes for a walk to the star-watching rock. thats how they start. one foot in front of the other. and you know, like 3 immortal beings and a unicorn or a seraphim thrown in there. (and someone in the murray family is always making someone else hot cocoa. swear to god). they become about love and time travel and getting back to something like trust and grace with things that are familiar, and so readily problematic to the larger society. like fucking, for example. that the relativity of connection has no underlying foundation, there's no relative ethics to breathing, i mean truth.

i re-read a swiftly tilting planet last summer. happily crashed out on the daybed on my mother's porch with the morning sun, my little sherpa hat, wool sweater and coffee; and realized, startled, that you could change time. (also, i'm wearing the exact same things tonight. i used to wear this hat after i got out of the pool, during winter practices. it was dead cold outside and this awesome hat, brought back from macchu piccu in peru kept me warm. i was warm and my muscles hummed and there was a sweet ache thru my body all day. i could shrug and feel the last sprint, the last careening 100 yards all the way through my back. the stretch of it, and black ice-hot concentration). 52. His disciples said to him: Twenty-four prophets spoke to israel, and they spoke of you. He responded to them: You have deserted the living one who is with you, and you spoke about the dead.

like, what do you actually go through waiting on line to get into the club. you text, you talk, smoke... and then all that convolution stops with a smile, or eye contact and another contractual agreement starts.

and then you wait for the bus, exhausted.

your grief wants to sing for you. let it appear scattered and corralled by shadows, there's a cascading hill behind you, thoughts dripping with honey. because the loss is there. and you need to take it thru it's paces.

i feel like the commitment, however small, to constellations is fine as far as it goes. but this really is about you. your ability to understand that you're dealing with something that is both utterly material, with material consequences, and utterly immaterial at the same time. no contradictions need to be resolved. "but that this act requires fundamentally transforming the dominant logic models of Western science. It requires moving beyond the mutually exclusive, non-paradoxical model in which all contradictions must be resolved."

i think it's slightly hysterical that science is catching up with being. "your blood like so many ribbons in a tornado" frank o'hara. he says somewhere else "What an oak!"

i was born to adore you
as a baby in the blind
i was born to represent you
to carry in the sun
to carve your face into the back of the sun

antony, the crying light

so let me finish with frank o'hara, again:

We dust the walls.
And of course we are weeping larks
falling all over the heavens with our shoulders clasped
in someone's armpits, so tightly! and our throats are full.
Haven't you ever fallen down at Christmas
and didn't it move everyone who saw you?
isn't that what the tree means? the pure pleasure
of making weep those whom you cannot move by your flights!
It's enough to drive one to suicide.
And the rooftops are falling apart like the applause

of rough, long-nailed, intimate, roughened-by-kisses, hands.
Fingers more breathless than a tongue laid upon the lips
in the hour of sunlight, early morning, before the mist rolls
in from the sea; and out there everything is turbulent and green.

2009-02-15T16:49:00.002-05:00

a song just came on:

Let I
I was born to adore you
As a baby in the blind
I was born to represent you
To carry your head into the sun
To carve you face into the back of the sun

Caroline's First Turn

2009-01-27T04:15:00.019-05:00

So, last week, on Tuesday we inaugurated Obama and on Friday Caroline took her first turn on stage. Obama declaimed a sober and sobering speech, which didn’t stop any of us from getting giddy about, for example, Aretha’s hat, weepy at what it means when Aretha sings “Land where my fathers died,” cranky about how over-determined – my word, like you say, although it is borrowed – is this handsome and potentially great man’s load and how little margin for maneuver it would seem he’s going to claim for him- and ourselves, and happy at the reality of people dancing in the streets, singing with each other to praise him. Caroline – you know this, as no doubt do many of any people who read this site – is me in a dress. Her turn on stage was a brazen attempt at “La Javanaise,” one of the most well loved songs in the popular French repertoire, at a little self-labeled “boite des frissons” in the capital for a night in honor of the quintessential dirty old man with incredibly chiseled lyrics, Serge Gainsbourg. The audience knew the chorus, and they are the kind of audience who can’t help themselves from singing along. This might have been a good thing, because apparently, they were having trouble hearing the incredibly chiseled lyrics of which I miraculously did not flub a one. (It may be one of the most well loved songs in the repertoire, but nobody I’ve run across yet knows the lyrics to the stanzas, just the chorus.) Which is a good thing that’s also too bad considering nobody could hear them. This is a technical problem that may find solutions. The other queens have been known to complain about the insufficiency of the microphone set-up at said “boite des frissons.” But I think it was, as Mistress of the house Madame Hervé said right after the show, “that you didn’t sing loud enough! Nobody could hear you!”

Madame Hervé is a notoriously hard nut. My girlfriend Julie Guirlande told me afterwards as we were jiggling in our boy drag on the dancefloor that you just have to let whatever she says flow over you like water, but certainly not to let on that she might be getting to you. It took all Saturday for it to become water. Before she told me I hadn’t sung loud enough, Madame Hervé had already called me to order because I’d been out of the dressing room before the show. This is in large part because the dressing room measures all of about 15 square feet and involves no more than a curtain that sections off a sliver of dancefloor space right next to the stage. Iow, you want to get out of there. But apparently, staying in the dressing room before the show is a house rule that nobody had told me about. My girlfriend Melissa sheepishly apologized for not having said something. The other girls who’ve had a little more experience know that you can go out of the dressing room without incurring Madame Hervé’s wrath, but only if you’ve brought another dress to wear. Preferably with another wig. That’s what Jacqueline Genoux did. And then she had to come back to the tiny dressing room to put the elaborate feather-construction down the back of her second dress. Melissa had the same elaborate feather-construction to put on because they were doing a really funny duo together. The elaborate feather-construction involved a stick from which sprouted three feathered prongs. Which meant that wherever you were in the tiny dressing-room space, there were feathers under your nose. So there I was sitting in my dress waiting my turn on stage fighting with the feathers, trying to remember the terribly chiseled lyrics that I sometimes forget, vaguely hearing Taillefine do “Elisa,” Julie Guirlande do “La Madrague,” Lady Zoa do an incredibly vigorous “Pull Marine;” before it was my turn.

In her boy drag after the show, Julie Guirlande also underlined how nice Madame Hervé’s introduction of the “petite nouvelle” who would be me was. She asked everybody to give the “petite nouvelle” who would be me a warm round of applause. Which they did. And I haven’t mentioned it yet, but, in case you can't tell in the above picture, I was really pretty. And, like a big girl, I had done almost all of my makeup myself. But the whole thing really felt like a catastrophe. Madame Hervé did get to me. People couldn’t hear what I was saying. I had a whole bevy of supporters, like, among the most important, B, who had canceled a night out elsewhere to come be adorable and supportive with his adorable new “petit” P and with E, B’s office mate and fellow Thursday afternoon cake-partaker. While I was out working the crowd in restricted pre-show territory, B saw me and put up his fingers like I was a vampire. I think he has issues with the whole gender trouble thing. Or at least with my whole gender trouble. After all, he did fall for me as a topping boy in leather with a beard. And that is actually one of the things I’m having trouble getting my head around. I mean, myself in make-up really tends to fuck with people’s minds, and there is a whole elaborate distance that settles in between me in makeup and, for example, the people with whom I had just a couple of hours earlier been drinking wine while trying to find a bimbo’s song that I could sing for the next Folle Académie night at the Tango. There is a whole choreography of how to negotiate that distance and make it work for me and for them that I’m only just now becoming aware of. And apparently people really don’t recognize me. Which seems very strange to me, because, strangely enough, I do. I mean, when I look in the mirror while I’m doing the make-up, it’s just as strange as when I look at myself in the mirror without make-up. It’s all strange when you’re staring at yourself in a mirror.

My friend N was there. Once I’d taken off my makeup and dress, I went out for a cigarette with Lady Zoa and N came out, too. N has this idea that I don’t give enough of myself away, and he saw what felt to me like Caroline’s catastrophe as yet another incidence of that. And he said I had something of Romy Schneider about me. Which is a useful reference. N rattles on a lot. And as he was rattling on, Lady Zoa turned to me and said, “If this is a friend, you need to get some new ones.” She was wrong. Because N was more or less right, even if it didn’t sound exactly like he was being supportive. Because like I said to my shrink yesterday on the couch, I felt like it was a catastophe because it wasn’t. Because Caroline doesn’t yet know how to let the catastophe that is her mother and father rolled into one show through her yet. (The height of my outrageous ambition here is Antony singing through his fear of the middle place.) I thought it would be enough to put on a dress for that catastophe to be obvious. It’s not. I have to learn how to spend myself in a dress so that people can hear the catastophe that is breaking me up and giving my body (its hands, its legs, its voice) its rhythm.

We had long, raucous, rhythmic, sex the night after that. In our leather drag. At some point, I told T that his was the name of my expenditure. Which is a little differently intense than being married. It calls up other things to be named.

2009-01-08T06:27:00.002-05:00

no i meant like nina simone's 8:46 fantastic "west wind" that her friend miriam makeba asked her to sing. i mean, whoa. holy fuck. so don't be worried.
the sun is coming up right now.

Breathing in the New Year

2009-01-06T11:59:00.003-05:00

So you said I need to breathe a little bit more. Or at least to try to a little bit. To see what happens. So that’s what I’m going to do today. While I get some of my shit together, vaccum the apartment, figure out where my work is for the next several weeks, months. Some things just are not going to take the whole year. Which is nice to have. Some projects to make good on right at the start of the year of the ox. Ox. You.

You said, I think, that my stacatto was a little too intense. Or hard to take. I forget your exact wording because I was on my way to the Boileroom bar for water. Like I told my shrink, it was nice to have the distraction of the need for water because I had trouble taking the comment head on. It’s funny because way back when I was just starting to get set up writing you, I worried about the stacatto. That it was too much. Too hard to read. At some point I quit worrying about it and called it “my style.” Your comment made me start worrying again. Which, so long as I can keep writing to you, is no doubt just as well. If it crippled me into silence it would be a problem. But let’s not let that worry cripple us. It can just make us aware. Because, really, here I am writing you again. And I’ll keep coming back. I think we’ve established that by now. Let’s keep coming back.

It’s a question of pace. And also of walking around with someone. Which is one way of saying what we do here. Where there is no path except the one we make by walking. On your side of the ocean, the Animal Collective’s new album is out. There’s a song on it I’ve quoted here before. They’re not calling it “Bearhug” anymore. If I’m not mistaken it must be called “Brother Sport.” Pitchfork says it’s one of the centerpieces of their new album, but that those “obvious peaks would have less resonance if not for the more subtle moments.” Can’t wait to hear those more subtle moments. The album supposedly drops at the beginning of next week here in Euroland. And then T and I are going to go hear them that Friday. In “Brother Sport” they scream out about how “I want to walk around with you.” It’s funny because there was a series of three of four sessions of analysis where I kept citing songs. And that was one of them that came up. Most of them were Antony. But “Brother Sport,” too. And I said I guessed it moved me because there were so many people around in my life that I wanted to walk around with. Which is so much better than what I imagine the opposite would be like. Not wanting to walk around with anyone. But which brings its own amount of pain with it. People you know you want to walk around with but can’t. I was working too much when it came up. So there was that problem. And then so many of you are so far away. So there was that pain of wanting what I couldn’t have. “Jesus,” I said during that session, or another. “All this music that keeps coming up.”

Your entry helps, but can we get a playlist for the Patti show? So much of it is a happy blur to me. I spent most of the concert bobbing along ever so happily with my arms over T’s shoulders pinching his tits and singing the words to the songs I knew. Happy to be there alongside you and the others hearing Patti sing and say what we needed to hear. That is at least a little bit of her undoubtable magic. She says what you need to hear.

Like, I really needed to hear her say, and to hear you repeat in my ear, do not be afraid. Especially when, as my mother has repeated to me several times when we talk about financial news, “This is just the kind of thing that your father was so afraid of.”

I think that for the new year and now that I’m back in Paris and was around people who helped me think, I have two questions that I’m not going to be afraid of asking here and now. The first is: What child? Which I like in particular today because, as I was getting around to letting it formulate into a question, trying to figure out which question exactly it would be, the effort had me singing that Christmas song, “What Child Is This.” Hearing its distorted syntax that would play with my mind as a child. Hearing some of that childhood come back. Asking about the child. I like it, too, because if you insert a comma, it becomes a different and perhaps even more apropos question: “What, Child?” And of course because Kiki’s covered it, caught on that album that was playing on Huron street this last time around.

The second question has to do with the pacing I started off with for this entry. I told you I’m translating some Berlin bits to be published sometime soon here. And there are a couple of translating projects in the wings. The question is related to translation. But it’s also related to what I need to figure out how to say to the world. What bears repeating? By which I mean, what to I need to say again, with more breaths? What haven’t you and lots of others incomparably like you and me heard? What do we need to hear?

And this by way of B. A little gentleness in a world of brutes indeed. Savage and tender. You know the score. Now let’s make sure everyone does. We've got work to do. Remember.

the lady in the bumblebee suit

2008-11-27T10:15:00.007-05:00

we stopped in at the bodega to get some beers for dinner.

"hey," a dude, mid-thirties, husky, looked like a longshoreman with his black watch cap, was saying to the owner, who was holding court behind his little glass partition. "HEY." rap rap rap on the thick plastic, "you know those diapers you sold me last week? 1999, man." Dude paused incredulously. "nineteeeeeen-ninety....niiine.." He shook his head, wide-eyed. Way in the back, deep and busy in the liquor freezer case, I almost dropped the beer. S. had dissolved into silent, helpless giggles. Both men laughed, and we paid for our drinks.

***

Finally we made an attempt, "What are you really talking about? What do you mean by 'eradicating craving'?" Aachan Chaa looked down and smiled faintly. He picked up the glass of drinking water to his left. Holding it up to us.

***

Later, after dinner, (fried chicken! beer! fries! side salad. The waitress was really proud of me. She said, "perfect cold rainy night, warm booth, cold beer and fried chicken," she said with an air of approval.) We'd been talking about a wide range of things.

The Iranian executions some months ago "International controversy erupted after Iranian officials executed two gay teenagers who were originally reported to be convicted of homosexuality, however later reports released by the Iranian government after international furor claimed the conviction was for the rape of a 13-year-old boy. The two were hanged July 19."

The photos of the hangings were fucking medieval, devastating, had been viscerally awful and terrifying. you just wanted to throw up. i had to get up and go for a walk and have 8 cigarettes. i wanted to scream. the photos of the two released read as if they were lovers, but later official reports stated they had actually raped another, younger boy, and weren't themselves lovers, and again it's not clear. so the charge wasn't homosexuality, per se.

And the photos, the two teenagers standing on the scaffold crying, were read as lovers, and the heartbroken response was yes. that could happen here, to us. to people i love. However the gay press and blog discussions (which were not about the overwhelming unreliability of what the actual charges were or if they were trumped up or not after the international uproar), and how the whole mess might be initially reported irresponsibly by the gay press here, somehow became for a moment, again, a grand over-reaching irreconcilable clash of civilizations war between cultures and religions (one barbaric, the other vaguely tolerant, east versus west. discussions devolved into incoherent rage against Muslims, Iran, the war in Iraq, god bless America, and fuck ALL of the middle east and there was the very real, awful stench of this could happen to us.

Both teens were convicted by Court No. 19 under sharia law. The teens are identified only as "M.A." and "A.M." Those found having homosexual sex in Iran may face death by either hanging, stoning, cutting in half by a sword, or dropping from a tall building or cliff.

An ISNA report said the couple acknowledged having sexual relations with each other but said they were unaware of laws against homosexuality. wiki

(s. added: "also, there is no anti-gay and lesbian sharia law, at least not exactly. male homosexual sex is illegal according to a hadith or supposed saying of the prophet, but not to my knowledge according to the qur'an, which would be a much stronger law. and i've never heard of anyone in Iran being cut in half with a sword or dropped from a building.")

S mentioned Matthew Limon. in terms of the non-coverage, or muted and sporadic outrage by Gay Rights Groups, no one wanted to go anywhere near the whiff of pedophilia. consensual or otherwise, even though the facts of the case were textbook in terms of how homosexuals are treated as opposed to heterosexuals, and examples that need to be set and so on. maybe i'm wrong about this, but the coverage an attention prior and after the overturn was next to nothing. from the ACLU

***

As an aside, because somehow we ranged into transexuality... (full disclosure: i'm vaguely discomfited by it. i have ishes, based on the one or two FTM's i know, on almost a purely aesthetic level. i.e. unbelievably hot, androgynous girls who transformed themselves into lumpy football players with male pattern baldness. also, it costs a hell of a lot of money to transition. whatever, i'm a judgey asshole. S., however, is completely not. her feeling is wow, i kind of applaud and am fascinated by the total faith in identity... i'll check back with her but i think that's her general feeling. much more expansive and well thought out then mine, certainly.)

Anyway! the point is, "In 1963, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini wrote a book in which he stated that there is no religious restriction on corrective surgery....The new religious government that came to be established after the 1979 Iranian Revolution classed transsexuals and transvestites with gays and lesbians, who were condemned by Islam and faced the punishment of lashing and death under Iran's penal code." Right before Khomeini died his original fatwa, that no one had initially paid attention to, was re-established. In other words, there is nothing in the Qur'an specifically against transexuality, so they are tolerated, or more than just tolerated by the government, since the government pays for the surgery.

(s. went on to say: "and i certainly don't think they're persecuted by the government. (wiki says they are stigmatized by society, but duh. where are they not? the different, and therefore interesting, thing is that the government supports transexuality and pays for the surgery.)
also, as i understand it there is some disagreement/ambiguity, at least in some areas of Iran, about whether you need to get the surgery or can just get the official gender change certificate without the operation. which of course would make all the difference to homosexuals, since you could then marry your lover, if you're into that kind of thing."

"hey did you watch the footage of the "gay on mormon violence" in the castro? what did you think?"

"uhm. pointless."

"well, that's the thing, right? they (mormons) come right out of high school and go straight into 2 years of missionary work. and then they go home and they are RM's. Returning Missionaries. And then they can get married."

"baby, the last time The Lord asked me to do something specifically He wanted me to go out naked in the street and experience aura exchanging hugs and lulz with everyone lucky enough to run in to me. and what do you think i did? true story. He and I had to renegotiate a couple of things after that."

Jennie,
From the heartland comes an interesting take on marriage. The Register has run several editorials more recently along these lines. At a minimum this would help to separate the church from the state and increase momentum for a variety of kinship options - some more elaborate than others. Those options which have been created in the last two decades are now going down the drain as marriage is installed, in Massachusetts large employers told workers to either get married or lose their domestic partner benefits. That's the beauty of equality uber alles - it really means 'more of the same' and cuts off larger vision.
-B.

read Des Moines Register, July 16, 2006, EDITORIAL "Recognize equality through civil unions"

***

Then, because everything is really about me, and The Lord and I still have congress, we were walking home with a little doggie bag for malcolm and i started babbling about coming off meds. i am in total shock how ridiculously hard it's been. Not only has the physical ramp-down been awful, time consuming and violent, but the simultaneous re-acquaintance with the full, rich and really stunning canvas of all emotions all the time, coupled with (plus! bonus) this incredible almost comically kaleidoscope reemergence of my "life-force", overlayed (le sigh) with a kind of uneasy and toddler like confusion and utter personality ego-globalizing of "who am i? what is real about me? what is pervasive? who is i? blah blah blah" i mean, really, it would be hilarious if it weren't so fascinating and scary, i learned a lot on the medication and i wouldn't describe my feelings about it as negative or alienating, it's just been a little difficult. it's like being on a dive in open water and looking up and not seeing the boat for a second. pure panic. and S. said, "oh it's like the broken bowl. all is gone. gone, gone, gone beyond."

WHAT.

“You see this goblet? For me this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on the shelf and the wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’ When I understand that the glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.”

Aachan Chaa was not just talking about the glass, of course, nor was he speaking merely of the phenomenal world, the forest monastery, the body, or the inevitability of death. He was also speaking to each of us about the self. This self that you take to be so real, he was saying, is already broken.

- Mark Epstein
Thoughts Without a Thinker

oh, that just calmed my shit right down.

2008-11-25T10:48:00.000-05:00

“I hate incorrect syntax as if it were a person to beat, incorrect spelling as if it were phlegm spit at me, independently of the person who spit it.

Yes, because spelling is people. Words are complete when both seen and heard. And the splendor of Greco-Roman transliteration dresses language in its severe, regal mantle, through which it becomes a lady, a queen.”

Fernando Pessoa, “The Book Of Disquiet,” translated by Alfred MacAdam, pages 9 and 10 (Exact Change, Boston, 1998).

(via sasha

Bumblebees

2008-11-24T13:03:00.004-05:00

So. A while ago on the couch. I was complaining. Sorta. Saying I didn’t know what it was I was looking for in backrooms these days. That I wanted more affect. More relations. Thinking of Foucault. Which I do every once in a while. “Perhaps it would be better to ask oneself, ‘What relations, through homosexuality, can be established, invented, multiplied, and modulated?’ The problem is not to discover in oneself the truth of one’s sex, but, rather, to use one’s sexuality henceforth to arrive at a multiplicity of relationships.” My complaints must have been. Oh. Say. A year and a half. Two years ago. Something like that. Definitely before Berlin. Which was a turning point. As you’re all too aware. And as I think you’re aware. It was a turning point because of B. Or at least one way of naming the turning point is to call it B. It’s his fault. Which is also his grace. I’m so happy he’s still around. We have cakes now. On Thursdays. It’s become a little ritual between his office mate E, B and me. Late Thursday afternoon/ early evening. One of us buys cakes. We’re in Paris. So they’re yummy. It’s kinda the end of the week. Definitely the end from my end of things. We eat cake. Drink coffee or tea. At their office close by mine. And chat. About what we’ve seen. At the movies. On stage. In bed. On a screen. In our childhood. And at some point I tap my hands on my legs. And from his swivel chair across the room. B’s head rolls a little bit. And he takes a head-lolling step or two to collapse on the sofa into my lap. And I give him a head massage. Which in general makes him purr. And moan when it’s over. Once he said. “Wow. Can’t wait for next Thursday.” At the end of the massage. Which made me happy. That he was happy. That we ache a little bit. Because the happy moment is over. Until next week. I love B. And I love that I can love and care for B. A little bit. Given the situation. It’s some of the affect I was looking for and not finding in brothels. He still wants somebody to put a foot to his ass to get things done. Someone at night time. Someone he calls a husband when he imagines him. I hope he finds him. If that’s what he wants and needs. And if he figures out how to need and want his husband all at once. Well. I’ll be happy for him. Even if I'll probably have a fit or two getting to that happiness. I’m lucky enough to have a husband. Of a kind. That’s not on a marriage certificate. That’s at least partly why I can see B. And give him a head massage. Purr.

So since that moment complaining on the couch. About the lack of affect in backrooms. I kinda quit going to them. Not on principle. Mind you. Just because. There was a lot going on in bed at home. Actually? T and I never fuck in bed. Or hardly ever. Only when we have guests and the desire arises. Otherwise we fuck on the couch. We spread out this huge white towel that has my father’s initials on it. It was a gift to him from a Saudi prince. Don’t ask. He handed it over to me at some point because it was just too big for him and my mother to know what to do with it. And it sure is handy. Because it covers the couch. Mostly. From wet things that do nonetheless soak through from time to time. Because good sex does that. Makes you. And your sofa. If that’s where you're having it. Wet. Lately we’ve also been fucking on my desk chair. Access to pictures. And? I think it eroticizes writing in kinda cool ways. Though you wouldn’t know it here. Sorry about that. Hopefully this one will be a doozy and we can make up and get on with all this.

Jesus. B is everywhere I try and tell a narrative. Because at the beginning of the month. November 1 to be precise. We went back to a brothel. The Full Metal. Our local standard. Though not the one that’s so practical on a Sunday afternoon because it’s a ten-minute walk away. That one’s called The Bunker. And it’s great for boys who went out for it on a Saturday and didn’t get enough and want to wile away Sunday hours looking for more. That reminds me. Of my main internets sex profile. The headline on it reads. “Ready for more.” I’m serious about that. Though nobody much has noticed yet. B has. In his own way. A week or two before we headed back to the Full Metal. We’d gone shopping with B. After lunch. And somewhere in the margins of a trip to see Wolfgang Tillmans’s recent exhibit in Paris. It was a lovely day. Made B fluctuate in his categorical statement about not fucking with us. That Saturday. He came over for our weekly rotisserie chicken. And then the exhibit. And then shopping. I think it was in that order. And when we went shopping. We went to the local leather store. Because they sell Fred Perry. And B wanted to get a Fred Perry shirt for P’s birthday present. Which he did. And we flirted with the shopkeepers. And various other sundry there for their Saturday shopping. And one of the shopkeepers gave us each passes for a night they sponsor at the Full Metal. Like something like twice a year. And we held onto them. The passes. Saying to our various tricks that we were going.

Like to S. Yes, same S we saw walking down the street with T² and W². A while back now. We like to have S over for dinner. This time around. On November 1. He wanted to have us over for dinner. But we have our market on Saturday mornings. If there’s anything sacred for us. Saturday morning market might really be it. So we had food. A really yummy big fish. And we’re closer to the club than S is. So we conceded that he could make desert. Which he did. Yummy apple cake. Which we ate after our dinner. We still have his cake mould. And I just this second left a message in the chatroom saying we still have it and that it would be a good excuse for us to see each other again. If we do just more of the same. That’s just fine with me. More of the same would be dinner. And then sex. This was the first time the three of us went out for it. Usually we just do it at home. T and S and me. Actually. I’ll anticipate my narrative a little bit. The Monday just after this November 1 dinner and outing. I went to hear S sing. He’s a singer. In an a capella choir. That’s sorta hot shit. Like Orange developed special technology for them to be able to hit the right notes. That kinda hot shit. They were singing a program of contemporary music by a composer named Gérard Pesson. And some of his students. And Ravel. It was pretty great. Even though I had been a bit in a state. All day long. Until I stretched out on the couch again. But I’ll get to that in a minute. Before I do. I wanted to finish off this strand. After the concert. My friend M and I went out for dinner with S. (T was in Denmark for work, so he had to miss out. On the Monday cultural activities at least). M is a music person. Much more so than I am. So he and S had a lot of lovely things to talk about. Which I listened to and learned from. And at some point. I forget exactly how it came up. I think we were complaining about how so much of the sex we’ve been having was disconnected from affect. Or some such. And S said. To the literary people M and I pretend to be. “Isn’t there any literature about innovative ways of linking sexuality and emotion?” And I said. “Yeah, Foucault. And the novel I’m going to write someday.” Which made all three of us smile.

And I cited our little trip to the Full Metal that November 1 as an example. Because as we were heading out. I got an SMS from B. Saying he was still at dinner. But were we already there? I said. No. But we’re on our way with S. Who B finds sexy. T would say it’s because B finds anyone we find sexy sexy. And he’s probably right. To a certain extent. I’d also chatted with G, of G and J-M. Their letters have come up before. In Berlin. T and I chatted with them at the bar. So I had been chatting on-line with G and told him I was going to the Full Metal. And he let me know that he and J-M were going to be there, too. So when S, T and I walked into the Full Metal, I knew that G and J-M were going to be there, that B was coming. Which means. Jesus. That bar was stuffed full of people I have tons of affection for. Different world. Not paradise. Far from it. Not hell either. Probably a kind of purgatory. If we had to get theological about it. Or a labyrinth. If we wanted to follow your suggestion and think it through Greek myth. I mean the space of the backroom is already its own other world. And that night at the Full Metal that other world was itself being othered by the configuration of all these singularities. Like I said on the couch. If a while back I was complaining about the lack of affect in my backroom encounters. Jesus. Given this configuration I was served.

Because of course there were other people around, too. Like V. And N. And then this new fixture on the scene named F. Which also happens to be B’s name. T had been chatting with him on line. And cruising him the one other time we’d seen him out. He’s intimidatingly beautiful. Tattoos all over his body. And tending to prove T’s hypothesis. That B finds whoever we find sexy sexy. They ended up fooling around. Which. As the French say. Put me into all of my states. M’a mis dans tous mes états. For lots of very complicated reasons. As a matter of fact. When I was recounting all this on the couch. I said. Something to the effect of. “Jesus. All of this is so complicated.” Which. A week later? Became. “Jesus. This is so rich.”

I pined all day long the next day. For the fact that B had no doubt found in this F his husband. T found me overwrought. And this is all mixed up, too. As it has been on this site. With grieving for my father. Which makes things really complicated. So all Sunday. I was pining. For lots of things. We went to the movies. And saw a really good but very difficult film. A kind of allegory about a boss who runs a construction site where they make platforms for shipping things and who gives his workers a mosque apparently to allow them to pray on site but also to harness religion for the purposes of his capital. The boss is sexy. And ends up dead. It was a doozy. Turns out. At the movie theater just across the canal. B and F were seeing a murder mystery. I left a message. Saying we could have drinks afterwards if they wanted. They didn’t want. Because they were tired from fucking all night the night before. Which was fine. But didn’t settle the butterflies in my stomach. Do you know Joanna Newsome’s music? She has this song. That I love. Called “Clams, Crabs, Cockles, Cowries.” And there’s an image in it. That I love. Where she sings. “And some bellies ache with many bumblebees./ (and they sting so terribly).” That’s the state my stomach was in. This was actually the night I wrote you about recently. The night when T and I had a conversation that went like this:

T: I just feel like there's so much you feel like you can't tell me.
I:: But right now, there's so much I just can't quite tell myself.
T approaches me and holds me.

So to bring this all back into some kind of full circle. I went with all these bumblebees in my stomach to my shrink that week. And let out a little bit of anger that I hadn’t allowed myself to feel. Because really? The ecstasy I’ve been occasionally writing you about? A lot of it. I’ve learned on the couch. Has to do with the fact that before my father died. I was able to remind him of the child I was for him. The child he had forgotten I was for him. The anger was about his having forgotten. Which means I’ve spent a lot of time looking for that child elsewhere. “That child” gets mixed up. In confusing ways. With the child I will not have. Because I’m too busy doing other things. In a world. And in a country. Where it ain’t easy for a faggot like me to adopt a child. And really that’s just fine. But it demands a lot of tears. And it’s complicated.

I started crying some of those tears that day on the couch. Tears over the course of which it was suddenly clear to me. That the only tears worth their salt are ones shed when sadness is mixed with joy.

BTW. We're going over to S's for dinner on Saturday night. Plans were made in the margins of writing this entry.

Historic Day

2008-11-04T12:26:00.003-05:00

OK. I know it's a historic day. But I, too, am tired of seeing me listening to Antony on (my birthday) here. Maybe the aphorism I'm about to emit will apply.

The only tears worth their salt are ones shed when sadness is mixed with joy.

Listening to Antony (My Birthday)

2008-10-06T12:23:00.001-04:00

Today’s my birthday. I’m 37. Antony’s brand new one is on its first loop of many through my ears. Shhh. I’m listening.

It’s been kinda one of those days. Even though it’s my birthday. Because it’s my birthday? I’m getting ready to go lie down on the couch. Maybe I’ll figure that one out.

If I had to speculate already though. I’d say. It might have something to do with the fact that two dogs have recently made me want to burst out into tears. The first one looked like Camilla. My parents’ last (and aborted) project. I mean she’s still alive. And I hope well somewhere. But the project got abandoned. The other one worked by ricochet. Just a dog. With its head on the ground. Making all that effort to look up at the world walking by him. You know. The way they have their heads down on the ground. And their eyeballs. Rolling up. All that effort. To see things going by.

Then there was the series. Haha. It’s funny. Because in French. Your sets on a muscle machine are a series. So I was in the middle of a series. Triceps. If I’m not mistaken. And there was an article in the paper. About a movie. Called “About War.” And apparently the last half of the movie. Could be resumed in two sentences. By Hélène Cixous. “When I lose my father, I also lose his child. The child I was for him, the one I am for me.” I had to make a big effort to be able to finish the series. Maybe I should have just let it break me down. But I made the effort to hold it together. At a moment when. One could understand. And I could, too. That things might fall apart a bit.

There’s also B. And T. T’s idea. To invite him over for traditional Saturday market roasted chicken lunch. Which was super nice. Then the three of us went to see a little show Tillmans has up here in Paris. B bought me the catalogue for the recent Hamburger Banhof show in Berlin. For my birthday. “Lighter.” It’s called. (Writing that up now, I read that as an injunction. “Make it lighter.”) It’s the one that is full of pictures of his pictures up on the wall at different exhibits. It’s beautiful. It has the smeared-up “photocopy (Barnaby)” on the front hardcover. And the back hardcover is more smeared-up photocopy. Of one of the pictures of an exhibition. I have some major thinking to do about constellations. Because I have to write about these things. For serious real. And. Because the B T W constellation. (By The Way???) After such a lovely Saturday. Entered into static on Sunday. When I had to work translating. Heavy buzzing. B’s still coming over for dinner with M tonight though. I’ll be in good company. And that’s already a lot. “I need another world…”

waiting for antony (part deux)

2008-10-05T12:31:00.000-04:00

ooh it just gets better and better

2008-10-01T11:45:00.001-04:00

"...The sensation of my body changed, and I finally understood what it was to feel like a mountain. There was no more space or time. The voice of the first awakener resounded unceasingly: "Never pretend anything that is not certain. There is no substantial ego, no object that is not impermanent. Perceptions, feelings, and visions are processes empty of real substance. Life is suffering. Birth, illness, old age, and death are suffering. To be separated from those we love is suffering. To be forced to be with those we do not love is suffering. To be unable to satisfy our desires is suffering."

Yet Ejo's kesa seemed to be saying to me: "Do not dwell at the surface of things. Beyond the Buddha's words, in the deepest depths, in the highest heights, lives an exalted passion. Listen to cosmic consciousness, the phoenix surging forth from the mind in flames, for it is telling you: Life is pure happiness. Birth, illness, old age, and death are four gifts as marvelous as the cycle of the four seasons. You can never be separated from those you love, for they live in you forever. You cannot be forced to be with those you do not love, for you have let go of aversion. Your light, like that of the sun, is for everyone, and you love even those who appear odious. To be unable to satisfy your desires is not suffering-the important thing is the prodigious gift of desire itself, satisfied or not, which gives you your sense of being alive.

"Go beyond this litany of The cause of suffering is attachment to desires and things, because when attachment to desires and things is free from all possessiveness, it is sublime goodness. All that appears to be impermanent is engraved in the memory of God. Every second is eternity.

"Go beyond the litany of Put an end to all attachments and end all suffering. No-we cannot end these attachments. If all is one, then how can one detach itself from itself? Attachment through love is the way of realization. Eternal being is attached to you with an infinite tenderness.

"Go beyond even the litany of the Buddha's Eightfold Path of ending suffering by right seeing, right thinking, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right attention, and right concentration. Free yourself from all conceptual chains; trust in the wisdom of Creation. You are not merely a part of Creation, you are Creation. To live in full happiness, walk in the infinite, pathless land. Let your eyes see what they invite you to see; do not put blinders on them. Let your thought wander in all dimensions, let your every word be rooted in your heart, act like a beloved child of beloved parents, see a thousand lives in one life. Make no effort; instead, allow things to happen through you, for every natural act is a gift. Right attention and right concentration are the offspring of a passionate love. Think, feel, desire, and live with pleasure. A cat makes no effort to concentrate when it sees a mouse."

Transmitting the Shrouds of the Dead, Alejandro Jodorowsky

Waiting for Antony

2008-09-30T10:11:00.004-04:00

While we're singing. Or loving people singing. Such sad songs. OMG. Like, what? Antony seems to be singing that we need to huddle together and weep for everything we're getting ready to lose. The lady's on slow fire. It sure is beautiful. And it sure bores a hole into my belly. Especially with the middle images. Sheer attention. To what the singer's getting ready to leave. Did I say this little EP is coming out for my birthday? I like that. Coincidence.

concerts

2008-09-24T18:46:00.017-04:00

yes, i like beer again.

i'm sort of pissed right now, too. a few days ago i sat down to write a story. first, i curled up on the couch and cried. just because. you know, writing. and second, thomas edison decided to come by. besides not thinking that's fair, and that i've just about had enough of bullshit energies having their way with me, (okay now i'm giggling, but it is fucking rude) it's my story after all, like, basically i get it. the gears have shifted again. we're in the midpoint of hell and chaos. no one needs tom edison to shout that shit at them. so there's this thing of awakening. maybe. that's how i feel about that. i don't feel about it. go back to the search for a domestic source of natural rubber...

so i like beer again, but specifically, i like beer with a cigarette on a certain sun-warmed rock in the late afternoon after i'd danced in the cold water, my eyes as empty and green as outer space, heel to toe like a hindu god. scarred and shiny. there's nothing more deliberate than a river.

none of this is "ideas". someone once yelled that at me. that love to me was a sheer filament of ideas, only. what do you say to that? what the fuck are you talking about? is about all i could manage. i thought that was pretty good. there's something sweet in there, i absolutely guarantee you, something real sweet. a thrill of gratitude actually flooded my chest.
a feeling had me. big silence, big firs, ferns patterned in sunlight beneath.

malcolm came over and snuffled my ear. i think all this is possible. this peak instability; the entire system takes on an avalanche of emergent properties. i think that's what i could pore over, again and again, in all these ideas made flesh. all these words. it happens. several acres of old growth. let me tell you why. the temperature during the course of the day was tremendous. no humidity, but deep fire. i broke into a sweat only about 20 feet out from the porch. i'm sure this can happen anywhere, it does in fact. danger, magic, and happy endings. both malcolm and i got hurt that day. he stumbled over some barbed wire, just a nick, and i scrambled on a rock and skinned myself. the half-bright way a puppy feel pain. so we sat by the river, instead. the air smelled of crushed sage and cold water. it's not a mistake of the imagination. and i don't feel one way or another about it. and this heat. it wasn't a drought heat, that crazy dry, almost lifeless temperature. this was the burning ocean of life, of woods, and earth.

and it was my mind that interested me. it had edged into glory. and it was quiet there. s. and i did shrooms up there a couple of years ago. whoa now i'm coming with you and i'm coming with you. oh feel me i'm coming. Patti Smith has started to sing that song again. we were at one concert where she finished and said, "oh i haven't done that one in a long time. i really like it again." it's a great song. anyways, we had fantastic sex, hypnagogic fucking is kind of awesome, patterns and auras and whatnot, edging into other kingdoms, principalities, i'm absolutely sure that linguistic and intervening ages were invented right then. and then we sort of rolled over and watched malcolm. his fur was gorgeous, you know that amber color he is? oh my god. his being-ness was all concerts and autumn breezes and sun, his color was himself, initiatory life pulsed in him, in total fidelity to him. so beautiful, i mean it was so good. i just cried. we lay on the bed with him and watched the light turn from mid-afternoon to dusk. we filled that day so sweetly.

if awakening is anything it might be close to apocalypse. i mean, closer to what the root word is, which is revelation, to reveal. and i guess, i can't find the definition, but people have used awakening. to illuminate. maybe disclosure, not sure. certainly prophecy.

and there are moments when that doesn't apply at all. it means fidelity to reality, the real. and sometimes the mind and heart comply, and sometimes not. that's up to you. a mercenary, a soldier. either way, stay in the light. living proof. i am your answer i am living.

And while we're singing...

2008-09-24T13:22:00.003-04:00

"Laugh. In the face of death under masthead.
Hold your breath through late breaking disasters.
Next to news of the trite.
And the codes. And the feelings that mean to be global.
Like c**e in the nose of the nobles. Keeps it alight.
And the wrath. And the riots. And the races on fire.
And the music for tanks with no red lights in sight.

Got you cryin'. Cryin'. Oh whyin'. Oh my my my.

Gold. Is another word for culture.
Leads to fattening. Of the vultures.
Till this bird can barely fly.
And Mary and David smoke dung in the trenches.
While Zion’s behavior never gets mentioned.
The writings. On your wall. And the blood on the cradle.
And the ashes you wade through. Got you callin' God's name in vain.
Leave the damned to damn it all!
's got you cryin'. Cryin'. Oh whyin'. Oh my my my.

Broken rose. Coloured glasses. Can't see for the thorns.
And you just can't stand no more!
What a clumsy kind of low. Time to take the wheel and the road.
From the masters. Take this car. Drive it straight into the wall.
Build it back up from the floor.

And stop our cryin'. Cryin'. Oh whyin'. Oh my my my.
Our cryin'. Our cryin'. Our cryin'. Still you try, try, try."

--TV on the Radio (enjambments mine)

And then there's this one, which somehow seems apropos here:

"Faceless fall. From this. Life and ah.
If you can't. See the stars.
You've probably gone too far.
Like the voice that cried.
On the lonesome tide.
Like the wave was the only love it ever saw.

"What's this dying for"?
Asks the Stork that soars. With the Owl.
High above. Canyons mighty walls.
Owl said "Death's a door, That love walks through.
In and out. In and out. Back and forth. Back and forth".

Turn from the fear. Of the storms that might be.
Oh let it free. That caged on fire thing.
Oh hold its hands. It'll feel like lightening.
Oh in your arms safe from the storms.

Sky bends. The moon's dress's slung low, slung low.
Dogstar taught a dance. It goes, it goes, it goes, it goes, it goes, it goes, it goes.
Arms out. Knees bend. The motion flows.
Like the soft. Open petals. Of a Jessica Rose.

So Sirius. So it falls apart? Just reveals the perfect nothing.
Of everything you are. Of everything we are!
Candle of life. Lights the blights and bruises.
Oh lay it down. In the night. Let it soothe this.
Oh hold its hands. And we'll know what truth is.
Oh in its arms safe from the storms."

Still TV on the Radio. Enjambments still mine. I was liking this just hearing it. I'm loving it reading and listening to it.

Better

2008-09-24T08:15:00.003-04:00

I'm better. I don't think it's mono. I hope not. Had lunch with B again today. I say again. Because I had lunch with him yesterday, too. He's still yellow. His facebook status yesterday read "B is a Simpson." Today it says he's "Greuh." Which I think is a growling noise. B's good at noises. It's part of what makes our skype conversations so fun. At first glance yesterday I thought he was exaggerating. About the yellow thing. Then I looked into the whites of his eyes. And they were yellow. Apparently mono gets at your liver. B's is in overdrive. We like each other a lot.

This weekend. T had lots of soothing words. To help calm me down about B. And T. And I had a really good session of analysis Monday. At some point, the session ended up being about having good addresses. You say that in French if you know a cute store. Or a nice restaurant. "J'ai une bonne adresse." So it's sorta trite that way. (Is it trite in English, too? One of the weirdest things about this extended living and now more and more settling abroad is that I forget what it is we say in English. But we do say that, don't we? I have a great address. For shoes. Or bagels. Or whatevers. Weird how language's second nature can become obviously second and not at all natural once you're straddling two languages at once. Of course, this is one of the major motors for writing about translation.)

But when I was turning around my good addresses in analysis. Of course I was talking about you. And my shrink. And my friend K who just said in an email last week: "YES I WANT YOUR PIECE ON TILLMANS." I was telling my shrink that these were all good addresses. And that I have quite a number of them. Like any of us do. Many of us. At any rate. People I say you to. Who allow me to discover myself differently. Preparing for another world. So many I's amongst us who need it. Yay indeed. Know what? The EP comes out in Europe right on my birthday! Something cosmic about that. Sidereal and all. I'm already all weepy over the minute and a half excerpt that I found on your friend Choire's website before it popped out so serendipitously here.

There's a vague plan in the air for New Year's in New York. I assume you're hanging with your friend Patti.

Keep thinking. I was having vague fits of paranoia because I littered my blog entry with kleenex and you didn't write back. Also because I'm teaching Balzac. Which is enough to make you paranoid. I gave a kick-ass lecture/discussion today to wrap up on Lost Illusions. There are reasons behind why I do what I do. But my paranoia was really only in vague fits. Even reading Balzac. Who has a soft-spot for all the strange things his characters because of how they're "built-in." (Henry James on Balzac cited by Michael Lucey: "Nothing appealed to [Balzac] more than to show how we all are, and how we are placed and built-in for being so.") It's just such a rough world in France in the 1820's. How we're built-in made us do the darndest things. Not like it's looking like it's going to be much less rough wherever we are over the next decade or two. But at least you and I. We're good now. It also helped my paranoia about my kleenexes. That you had burped in your first entry back from your vacation. I love it that you like beer now.

xxoo s

The Winter King

2008-09-23T08:24:00.004-04:00

look! yay.

hi sweetheart. i'm here. are you feeling better? did you sleep? i'm here, and thinking...

xo

ps. not sure about joyce, either. never have been. but that one below was a stunner.

2008-09-21T12:49:00.003-04:00

At the moment, it's mostly sleep I'm worried about. Getting by. Which I used to think of as an art. Or as something that could leave precipitates worth keeping. At the moment, the main precipitate getting by is leaving are piles of kleenex around the house. I felt something coming on over the course of my Friday -- the one day I don't go in to work, of course. And then Saturday it came head on. Knocked me out all day yesterday. What really worries me is that B has been diagnosed with mono. Which I don't think I've ever had. And the most hilarious part of it is that it wouldn't even have been because we had great kinky sex with each other. Nope. But at point of highest contagion, no doubt, we had had lunch and he had stuck his tongue down my throat for all of half a second. That might be enough. I was pooped anyways. But if I have to deal with EBV? Sheez. I'm not out of the barnyard yet. As they say 'round these parts. Meaning. We've got a lot of road to travel. Before we get to awakening.

Thought I should tell you. Our Search for Delicious just became even more clearly important to me than it already is. I mean our correspondence. I've declared a hiatus from my writing group for a while. Because of headcold, but also because of the fact that every time I tried to write for it I got filled with dread. I was supposed to go today. Couldn't have. Because of the cold. But as T said last night when I was making the decision and he was helping me articulate its consequences. The writing group was always about dread. Which I might have needed. To get where I. And Caroline along with me. Inside me. Need to get. But what with all the concentration on getting by. Too much pressure to perform. For them. Nice people. But so far. Nothing quite enticing Caroline out into the world. Helping her awaken. It's actually felt a little more like. There she is. Lying on the ground. Passed out. And once a month I come up and give her a little kick on the shoulder. She sorta moans. And rolls over. And says she's tired. Does she really have to come out? I mean. I don't wanna be mean. Drag her out into the light if she's not ready. She's got a good beginning. She's just not quite ready to take stage yet.

Plus? I dunno about you. But this whole Wall Street thang? I just don't get it. So I've been reading smart people on the economy. And remembering a moment that I can't quite chronologically situate. When I was visiting my parents. It may have been around the time Bush and Cheney and Haliburton started bombing Iraq. I remember being adamant. Without feeling self-righteous. Self-righteous I would sometimes feel as a kid when I'd go on diatribes for Michael Dukakis. For example. But about the bombings. It was just so clear to me. That it was not a question of right or wrong. That this was all going to be a mess. Dismayed at their inability to consider the consequences. To wonder about the side-effects. I guess it was around that moment that I lost the feeling that however much I reasoned about things. They might actually be right. At that moment. I realized. They were so wrong. And had no idea. And coming back to their house one night. (I have lots of memories of being on the threshold of my parents' home. It's a charged site). I remember turning the key in the lock and thinking. Jesus. They have no idea how fragile this all is. Do they. And it does seem now like we're at a brief moment where that fragility seems obvious to everyone. And fragility, vulnerability. It makes some of us crazy. And then there are others amongst us. Like you and me. We're not alone. And we're ready to do something else with that fragility and vulnerability. Like wake up.

2008-09-14T19:45:00.001-04:00

ELIJAH: No yapping, if you please, in this booth. Jake Crane, Creole Sue, Dove Campbell, Abe Kirschner, do your coughing with your mouths shut. Say, I am operating all this trunk line. Boys, do it now. God's time is 12.25. Tell mother you'll be there. Rush your order and you play a slick ace. Join on right here. Book through to eternity junction, the nonstop run. Just one word more. Are you a god or a doggone clod? If the second advent came to Coney Island are we ready? Florry Christ, Stephen Christ, Zoe Christ, Bloom Christ, Kitty Christ, Lynch Christ, it's up to you to sense that cosmic force. Have we cold feet about the cosmos? No. Be on the side of the angels. Be a prism. You have that something within, the higher self. You can rub shoulders with a Jesus, a Gautama, an Ingersoll. Are you all in this vibration? I say you are. You once nobble that, congregation, and a buck joyride to heaven becomes a back number. You got me? It's a lifebrightener, sure. The hottest stuff ever was. It's the whole pie with jam in. It's just the cutest snappiest line out. It is immense, supersumptuous. It restores. It vibrates. I know and I am some vibrator. Joking apart and, getting down to bedrock, A. J. Christ Dowie and the harmonial philosophy, have you got that? O. K. Seventyseven west sixtyninth street. Got me? That's it. You call me up by sunphone any old time. Bumboosers, save your stamps. (HE SHOUTS) Now then our glory song. All join heartily in the singing. Encore! (HE SINGS) Jeru ...

James Joyce, Ulysses

did i ever tell you my story about Elias? (and yeah, this does have to do with what you just posted, no loops tonight)

;)

2008-09-13T06:03:00.002-04:00

Came across this this morning. Damn do I regret not having bought those Antony tickets for the concert in London.

There is the urge to weep. There is the force of creative vision. This pain? This isn't a heart breaking; it's a heart waking. The waking world is this one, where our senses clear and we feel the power of transformation, we see that the doors along the corridor of possibility are not, after all, closed to us, though they may be far away and heavy and frightening. We can face them and walk through them nonetheless.

All These Deep Impulses Roaming Around

2008-09-09T14:59:00.001-04:00

Ok ok. Sorry to leave so many deep impulses wandering around our space without any anchoring for days on end. Suzanne is a little voiceless while WB lives out some narratives he doesn't yet know how to tell and waits. Not for an Austinian Pride and Prejudice set-up. (Those typos'll getcha and you're bound to make them writing incidentally on a blog). But for an Augustinian conversion. Oh yeah. He's working. Way too much. Too. Is it too late to have loved you?

Meanwhile, the leash was maybe the best part. It was hanging from my belt out of use Friday night just after I got in. T had come in the day before for a work meeting. And a night out. I got in. We made a run for the goods. Like last time around. Same place same guy. Unfortunately different goods. The connection gave us an extra hit. Which he told us was because it was crumbly. Turns out it was crummy too. We don’t do this often enough to have a tester. B had told us his friend R had said that the e in Berlin was bad. We shoulda listened and cancelled the run. ‘Cos it was terrible. Fine coming on. Then clenched jaws and angry. We had words in the subway on the way to Perverts. Where we will not go again. The echte Berliner boycotted. All the big parties. Except for A. Who we saw out on Saturday. I still remember the way he looked at me. On Saturday. How he looked at me six months ago. I remember that too. I like remembering being seen by him. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Because we were having at each other. In the difficult way. In the train on the way to Perverts. Because while it was coming on I had been saying to T. That I was possessed. B again. That B. Like some others. Was in me. Still. Telling T how it was. How he maybe could be. T. Given B. In me. We’re working it out. Desire is not fair. Ways of dealing with it can be. So far so fair. Basically. With some beautiful mistakes. (Barthes again! I’m reading the recently published seminar that made for the Fragments. Barthes saying there. “Destiny is to be struck by Error. (Error is a god: the goddess Error. Why can’t we build a true Pantheon? The Pantheon of our desire.” Me moaning with pleasure recently reading that in bed.) T and I both separately and independently wished B happy birthday today. And here I am doing it again. Sorta. Happy B-day B!

So Friday we weren’t actually in bed too late. Not much to tell about Perverts. One nice moment. Maybe I need to let T go more. Let him go out on his own. I let him go at some point. Sat with my jaws clenched on a sofa. Drinking beer or water. T went for a walk. A while later on, I got up. Found him in a dark corner. Going to town. I joined in. We went to town. For a good while. Thank goodness. Because other than that? It was a bunch of foreigners wandering around a party looking for where the party was. “Maybe.” The drama queen I also am said at some point to T. “Maybe this is just the dystopia.” Like after the utopia of last time around. But that’s a load of drama-queen shit. Because last time took place. Took place and took time and took words and made me cry lots once it was gone. And I don’t really believe life works in flip-flops between good and bad. There’s always more.

Also? We hadn’t really eaten very well. A hot-dog chopped up drowned in ketchup and curry powder that you eat with a little fork. You eat the pommes frites with the same fork. Pomm-es. The Germans say like it has two syllables. All organic. For real. The hot dog stand says so. We always stop at the same one. Just not usually for our main dinner. This meant that when we got up on Saturday we were starved for Fruhstück. Still at C and L’s. Which is really turning lovely. Comfortable. Campy. Multi-lingual. Lots of laughter around the breakfast table. And? A really sweet Tillmans montage on the wall across from where T and I were sitting. Like Tillmans pictures. In a collage with pictures of them. And a couple of Tillmans’s beautiful after-eating shots. Or after-breakfast. And C and L seem in a good place. I know absolutely nothing. Or very very little. Of their history. But that was nice to see. And be a kind of part of.

Saturday after Fruhstück was Folsom Europe Fair. I’m sure you know how this goes. Mostly lots and lots of men. Some women, too. And? Because we were in Berlin. Even a family or two parading by with a stroller. And wearing the little sticker that says you contributed. But mostly men. Dressed up. Parading around. Drinking beer. Eating sausage. Or? Sucking pig. Quote unquote. It was on a spit. And the stand said. Sucking pig. Quote unquote. It’s funny. Because while we were in Croatia. We had sucking pig, too. Quote unquote. The waitress even said so. “I recommend the sucking pig.” We recommend it, too. Particularly at this one grilled goods place on this island in Croatia where it was actually delicious. I’m not sure there was anything particularly suck(l)ing about the pig on a spit of which we partook in Berlin. Because it was actually a little dry. But yummy. Lots of beer. Well, not tons. Probs 4? Over the course of the day. And lots of conversation. Because you know what? We’re sorta becoming part of a scene. If not a gang. Which is nice. To wander around and bump into people you find things to say to. And they to you. We’re still not great at meeting people. Is anybody? I mean. Really good at meeting people? Sure. I know some networkers. But actually meeting people? When you meet them they interrupt things. And at the moment. I think T and I have a lot going on. Like we’ve got enough interruptions. Or enough occasions for them. All these deep impulses roaming around. You said that very well. Actually though. Now that I think about it. There are F and P. Who were staying in a studio together. Who I’ve seen around on the scene. T met F in the plane on the way there the day before I came. We didn’t fuck. And might well not. But we kept running into them. And chatting. Really pleasantly every time. I think we may have met them. We’ll see how it pans out.

I did get chatted up by an H. Which could have been useful for our alphabet. Hence for my real writing. Whatever that is. Augustine. Proust. Corked-wall. Etc. This is one of my operative fantasies. That I’m not really writing yet. Even here. Probably should work on that. Am actually. Working on that fantasy. Writing here. So anyway. H. He smelled like he had already been at it for hours. Stinky hot leathers. Sexy face. Like the other echte Berliner he was boycotting the big parties. When I told him I’d been to Perverts on Friday. And was going to Pig on Saturday. In other words. The two big parties. Must have been that that made him say he had to pee. And he walked away. Even though I made it clear. Against my best interest. That I fully supported the echte Berliner’s move to boycott the parties on the grounds that they were too expensive. And made for tourists. Like me.

At some point. Around 5 in the afternoon. T said. “We’ve seen everybody but B.” I cracked out my cell phone. Texted B. Quoted T. “‘We’ve seen everybody but B.’ Dixit T. Where are you?” B wrote back. “B is waking up, getting ready and on his way.” I think I went to the bathroom. That’s funny. I almost wrote birthroom. Instead of bathroom. I’ll have to tell my shrink. Anyway. I came back from the bathroom. Or getting more beer. No ! Actually I’d been sidetracked by G. Who’s not (yet ?) a lover common to T and me. So he doesn’t qualify for the alphabet. Which is too bad. Or actually great. Because we need a G. G and J-M have been together for a long time. I think their letters appear in my last Berlin Chronicle. They would have W in their alphabet because I’m a lover common to them. I like them. They’re older. Not usually T’s thing. But. Now that I’ve written this. Which is of course not real writing. Haha. I’ll ask him. G and I had been talking about the American presidential election. And how nice Americans are. And how scary they can be. Because G and J-M had been to the States for vacation. Grand Canyon and all. A stop in Portland for leathers whose fame stretches all the way here. Lovely leathers. So anyway. Chatting about that with G. Then more beer or birthroom (ha!) and then back to find T. Standing with B and R. Who had traveled together. R. Who B often introduces. Or mentions. As the beautiful muscleman who used to scowl at him. Instead of talking to him. And now all of a sudden is his big buddy. And who is a delight. Though intimidating. Just because of his beauty and muscle. They had a swarm of Parisians. And a few Berliners. Swarming around. Some we know. Some we don’t. B took a few pictures. Only a few. But I was in one of them. B’s friend T. (Not “my” T). Says I look like a bus-driver for tourists. Which was not the look I was going for. But funny nonetheless.

After the fair. T and I went to eat. Yummy German food. Which doesn’t come along everyday. Decided we’d go back to the e we bought at Easter. For the big party. Far away. In East Berlin. New space. Beautiful space. But, Jesus. You had to get there first. There was a shuttle from a S-Bahn stop. But you had to find the bus station once you crossed Berlin to that S-Bahn station. Outside the S-Bahn station. On the other side of the station from the main entrance. Where we and a bunch of other guys in leather and other sundry were standing. We chased a bus. City bus. That read “PIG 2008.” I think that it’s only in Berlin that a city bus would ever say “PIG 2008.” I like Berlin a lot. We piled onto the bus. There was a sweet looking guy. Who chased the shuttle back to the bus station with us. When one of us said “Maybe it’s this one.” He started singing show tunes. “Could it be this one. Could it be that one.” I liked him immediately. We ran into him early on inside, too. Or saw him in action. I was sitting down. T had gone to pee. Some beautiful body sat right down next to me. Which already indicated interest. Because there were plenty of places to sit. We were early. For the party. A trickle of people like us wandering around the new space. Exploring. First time used for a party. Still some walls full of peeling paint. An old electricity factory. So the beautiful body next to me got and gave a smile. But it was early. Not too early for him though. Up came the show tunes singer with a friend. They must have known the beautiful body next to me. Because they kissed. And slid onto the horizontal cushiony space just behind us. And immediately. The beautiful body pulled out his huge penis and stuck it right into the show-tune singer. Without a condom. I hesitate to add “of course.” So I’ll keep it away from the phrase “without a condom” and say I hesitated to add it. Because there’s a lot of that understandably going on in a place like this. T and I looked at each other and sighed. And probably felt happy to have each other. And a whole mix of other things that I should probably explore here or elsewhere sometime soon. The dance-floor was beautifully set in place. A big screen playing porn above the DJ. Who spun for the dance-floor that was at the front end of a huge hallway with a glass roof. That had leaks. We know. Because it started raining outside. Out where the coat-check was. Bathrooms, too. Which meant that those porta-potties didn’t get used that much that night. The door to the outside was open all night. You walked into the hallway. Big bar on your left. Dance-floor to your right. The dance-floor was. Let me count. Maybe 6 steps up from the floor beside where you entered. So you could hear the music while you were milling about ordering your beer. But you weren’t drowning in it. And you could step up to drown in the music all the more effectively. And from the dance-floor you could take the stairs up to all the little nooks where circuits and circuit-workers used to work. Where we had come to play. And then you could take those stairs back down to the dance-floor.

The dance-floor is where the leash comes in. Maybe the best part. Besides the space itself. T had been sent on a mission. For his day without me in Berlin. To buy a leash. And try on a pair of pants with a zip down the butt. I forgot to mention that. Before we went to the fair. On Saturday afternoon. We went to Mr B. Where T had tried on the pants. But could barely fit into them. And was told that after a little wear and tear he would. But he wanted me to double-check. I did. With the help of the vendor who spent a good 15 minutes moaning and groaning with T so that they could get the front snaps snapped. They didn’t quite. But with a belt it works. And with a little time. They’ll snap. I love the pants. I love the leash. And I love T.

The leash was the best part. In part because T also had clamps on his tits. And when we’d go up the 6 steps or down the stairway from the nooks to dance. I would slide the leash under the chain between the clamps. And we’d dance. And I would wiggle the leash. Which T had to love. At some point I started telling T to invent gestures. Gestures for dancing. He’s started. But is a little resistant. Last night. We had trouble going to sleep. And at some point he said he didn’t get why his gestures weren’t good enough. They are. But it would be fun. If we could bring some newness into the world. Some more newness. Because here we are. Still. And that’s already new. While it keeps going on. So the leash was fun. For inciting gestures. It was also fun. Funny, even. Because there were several times. Where a big muscleman would try and plow through us. And he’d get caught up in the leash. And look a little silly. Meanwhile. T and I would smile. Because the leash made sense. A further translation of Berlin last time around. When T finally understood I needed him. It’s a translation of that attachment that literalizes it. A little cheaply, granted. But given these tough times. We’ll take what we get. And if we’re lucky. We’ll run with it.

The way back was the hardest part. Though even that. Shuttle jampacked full of men to get back to the station. Because there was ne’er a taxi in sight. And a long subway ride back. But we ran into people we knew. J. A sex buddy of mine. And his lover. And a couple of their friends. So we could at least chat. Which was nice. Even at 6:30 in the morning. After a hard night out. T and I fucked once we got back to the pad. And slept. Well. Until we woke up starving. And went to eat breakfast with C and L, and another visitor from near Leibzig. Back to Paris on a plane. We fucked some more. Since we hadn’t actually done that much fucking. And since then. I’ve been working like a maniac. Way too much work. Did I say that already?

Something else I said already. In Skype to B. Who wants to radicalize. I asked him what that meant for him. It had something to do with a tattoo. And other things, too. But it inspired this from me. In French of course. But if I put it in English. I think it applies here. “I think going radical maybe means seeing, recognizing what we are already. Because what we are already is not necessarily nice to look at. And it takes courage to see it. And then to show it. It takes even more courage. And making for the interruption needed so that – what we are already – is seen and shown. Well. That’s being radical.”

“Amen.” Said B.

2008-08-28T22:51:00.003-04:00

Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you. And see, you were within and I was in the external world and sought you there, and in my unlovely state I plunged into those lovely created things which you made. You were with me, and I was not with you. The lovely things kept me far from you, though if they did not have their existence in you, they had no existence at all. You called and cried aloud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours

Confessions (X, 27, 38), Augustine

we, the just

2008-08-26T21:17:00.007-04:00

So he became a dancer to God.
Because his flesh was in love with the burning arrows
He danced on the hot sand until the arrows came.
As he embraced them this white skin surrendered itself to
the redness of blood, and satisfied him.
Now he is green, dry and stained
With the shadow in his mouth.
from "The Death of Saint Narcissus" by T.S. Eliot

forgive my poor communication for the last few days i am absolutely disoriented, i have the whole production of the world in my body. fear, oh my dear, i wish it was that. it's more like surrender, we can't help ourselves. we don't want to. the forces are in play. terribly (that word chosen carefully) attuned. like that essay. uhmmmmmmm. berger! ooh where is that? please hold la la la need cig and more beer.... oh ps we saw patti smith? did i tell you. very good patti on the night of the 24th (if you see her on the street with her shoe untied please tell her to tie her shoe because she is clumsy.... k, wait a second.... brb. i learned to like beer at the cabin. i never did, did you know that? i like scotch, whiskey but not beer. now i do. it tastes really good after a swim in a glacial river, in the hot sun, watching malcolm and sean fishing. nearly a full moon later. & a smoke. firesmoke & my eyes watering from the bone chill. shivering on the heat of the rock, blue sky already specked with stars and that moon rising. malcolm has his belly up to the water. please don't bring him down. please don't let him go. he's on the same side as you. there are some people who believe in love. a man named john

a man named john wrote a song for me to sing
and the most beautiful flowers i have ever seen
he is a very good man
and he has been an even very good man to me
i hope one day his song i will sing
another love i still love
familiar face to me
a standing arch above my heart

willie was shot once in his mind
and his cry out saved his own life
the second time was through the heart
the doctors pulled the bullet from inside
he had a job to do he said
that's his way of life

i had this weird moment in the pass through to seattle on i90. we stopped at a rest stop and i almost literally collapsed, because the smell of the air, the soft wind and the forests cedar, pine, something. on the mountains sweeping up from the highway, the rain, the fog, the warmth from the ground—all a pouring forth of vast power.

tell us our names, show us how we smell, name us, what skins we wear, the wolves who find each other, the qualities of our mouths and our hands claiming someone, cumming for them. it was overwhelming. and i had the distinct feeling that self-pity was impossible anymore. all things were made through it. What is the famous Beckett line? “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.” it was kind of funny, this litany pounding in my ears, my blood had drained into my feet, because it was physically exhausting. i was left gasping. how fucking ridiculous to feel coherent and continuous, extraordinary complications and interruptions come from the earth. or the rain, my actual being under the dome of heaven, the bridge between the two, the axis. or this familiar, heart-rending sky of the pacific northwest. knowing isn't cleaner than the world, it's made of the stuff. “It was like so, but wasn’t.” How traditional Persian tales begin.

He said: O Adam, tell them their names,
and when he had told them their names
he said: did i not tell you that i know
what is hidden in the heavens and earth,
and know what you disclose and know what you hide?

so. anyways! i found the essay. here you go.

when he painted a small pear tree in flower, the act of the sap rising, of the bud forming, the bud breaking, the flower forming, the styles thrusting out, the stigmas becoming sticky, these acts were present for him in the act of painting. when he painted a road, the roadmakers where there in his imagination. when he painted the turned earth of a ploughed field, the gesture of the blade turning the earth was included in his own act. wherever he looked he saw the labour of existence; and this labour, recognized as such, for him constituted reality.

if he painted his own face, he painted the construction of his destiny, past and future, rather as palmists believe they can read this construction in the hand. his contemporaries who considered him abnormal were not all as stupid as assumed. he painted compulsively—no other painter was ever compelled in a comparable way.

his compulsion? it was to bring the two acts of production, that of the canvas and that of the reality depicted, ever closer and closer. this compulsion derived not from an idea about art—this is why it never occurred to him to profit from reality— but from an overwhelming feeling of empathy.

"i admire the bull, the eagle, and man with such an intense adoration, that it will certainly prevent me from becoming an ambitious person"

he was compelled to go ever closer, to approach and approach and approach. In extremis he approaches so close that the stars in the night sky became maelstroms of light, the cypress trees ganglions of living wood responding to the energy of wind and sun. there are canvases where reality dissolves him, the painter. but in hundreds of others he takes us as close as any man can, while remaining intact, to that permanent process by which reality is being produced.

once, long ago, paintings were compared to mirrors. van gogh's might be compared with lasers. they do not wait to receive, they go out to meet, and what they traverse is, not so much empty space, as the act of production. the 'entire world' that van Gogh offers as a reply to the vertigo of nothingness is the production of the world. painting after painting is a way of saying, with awe but little comfort: it works.

John Berger, "The Production of the World"

2008-08-26T09:07:00.002-04:00

I recall in this context two thoughts. A man in Anaktuvuk Pass, in response to a question about what he did when he visited a new place, said to me, "I listen." That's all. I listen, he meant, to what the land is saying. I walk around in it and strain my senses in appreciation of it for a long time before I, myself, ever speak a word. Entered in such a respectful manner, he believed, the land would open to him. The other thought draws, again, on the experience of American painters. As they sought an identity apart from their European counterparts in the nineteenth century, they came to conceive of the land as intrinsically powerful: beguiling and frightening, endlessly arresting and incomprehensibly rich, unknowable and wild. "The face of God," they said.

In a simple bow from the waist before the nest of the horned lark, you are able to stake your life, again, in what you dream.

Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams

I Miss You!

2008-08-21T17:20:00.004-04:00

Here à Paris, the other night, I decided I'd write down an alphabet. For every letter, T and I had to find the name of a lover we'd had in common. Know what? We're only missing GHILNQUXZ. And some letters are doubled up. I got this idea thinking it could be a writing constraint. Like, I can start really writing once I get all the letters attached to a name. Or, I could start writing with only the letters for which I have a name. But it's also a nice memory game. Like tonight over dinner, T said, "of course, we're forgetting Matt." Who was the sweetest skinhead ever that we took home one night ages ago in 2000 in London. *Sigh*

All this as a way of saying, we're not ovulating, but we're cooking something up.

Postcard from Croatia

2008-08-13T04:37:00.003-04:00

Hey you -

You must be on horseback somewhere right about now. Me? I'm on an island in Croatia with T. Vacation!

We took a plane to Venise and were greeted by huge, beautiful thunderstorms in the sky. While I was excitedly contemplating the storms on the horizon, the ipod gods put Antony's "My Lady Story" on. I praised them.

The shading in a Bellini Madonna in a church we hurriedly strolled through made me feel like we'd arrived in Venice. We had a long morning running up and down bridges without really getting lost. Lovely.

I reread James's "Aspern Papers." I love James.

Before leaving, I said I was ready to be horizontal. Totally exhausted from work. Everybody around me said it would take time to settle down. They were wrong. The only problem our first morning was that we didn't have toilet paper in the apartment we're renting. That provoked, somehow, a huge storm between T and me. You know how it goes. Since then we've basically been horizontal. The tricky thing here is actually to go from horizontal to vertical and vice versa. The beaches are all on rocks, some more slantwise than others. Standing up, I sometimes get dizzy and feel like I might just bounce down the rock out into the Adriatic. Which sea is delightfully warm and refreshing.

We didn't know it, but our little one bedroom up on the hill has a mezzanine. So B could have come after all.

We found the nudist beaches. They're lined with pine forests so you can go give your skin a break in the cool cool shade. The Adriatic was actually in turmoil yesterday. No sliding into the sea unless you were ready to be spit back out and raked across the rocks. Until we found the sandy beach that T's colleague's daughter told us about. Placid. Small. Like, maybe 15 of us on it. Enough in a cove for the sea to be quiet. While we were drying off in the late afternoon sun, we heard bleating behind us. Billy goats! Just saying hi to us all before going off to graze.

A little like me to you. Baahaahaaa. And lots of love.

xxoo s

Just a thought...

2008-08-07T18:11:00.001-04:00

We are afraid of what we are already. We, the just. This is just a thought for us.

Some cut-ups and some comments

2008-08-02T06:32:00.002-04:00

“A true grammar,” I read Roland Barthes saying yesterday, “would not have an infinitive for the verb ‘to love.’” Before they were a book, Fragments of a Lovers’ Discourse were a heavily psychoanalytically inflected seminar. That seminar has now just come out as a book in French, which is why I say I was reading him say so yesterday. It’s a beautiful idea. Love is only ever relational. I love you. She loves him. We love her. Barthes seems to be saying that in a real grammar loving could only ever be conjugated with the grammatical persons doing and being done by love.

“You have to live stories before you can tell them.” That sentence gets repeated a lot in what I’ve thought of for a long time as one of my favorite movies: Godard’s Passion. Right now, I’m taken up by living a few of my own. So I’ve been a little out of touch.

Living a few of my own and reading a few of a few others. Guillaume Dustan, looking back at his books: “The book stops in 1995, when I meet Marcelo. I was coming home. It wasn’t the end of my story with sex, but it was the end of my journey alone. So it was another story. Posing other narrative problems. The story not of one but of two transformations: my slow sobering up; and his. But I think those transformations are already there in the book’s background, which is why the book was possible with its tonality, bearing life, or at least I hope so. I really want to talk about it, but I have to wait. I’m waiting for it to be obvious. You have to wait because I’m trying to do things that are less and less easy. As soon as it becomes easy, you have to do something else. Or else it’s no use. It’s thanks to all of this that I know myself better and better.”

Dustan, for a book with photos of DJ’s: “An ideal arrangement of places exists. There have to be mirrors or shadows. For enchantment. Space. For not bumping into each other. Darkness. For not getting tired. Heat. For being comfortable. Usually I get up on the podium. It’s the right place to do what I want to do. Anything at all. Anything at all doesn’t come easy. It’s easier if there’s a prop.”

The lion will roar soon. Or? He’ll just walk out of the room. And come back.

"The Lion For Real"

2008-07-25T22:00:00.004-04:00

can we go back to allen ginsberg for a minute? check this out.

The Lion For Real by Allen Ginsberg

"Soyez muette pour moi, Idole contemplative..."

I came home and found a lion in my living room
Rushed out on the fire escape screaming Lion! Lion!
Two stenographers pulled their brunette hair and banged the window shut
I hurried home to Patterson and stayed two days

Called up old Reichian analyst
who'd kicked me out of therapy for smoking marijuana
'It's happened' I panted 'There's a Lion in my living room'
'I'm afraid any discussion would have no value' he hung up

I went to my old boyfriend we got drunk with his girlfriend
I kissed him and announced I had a lion with a mad gleam in my eye
We wound up fighting on the floor I bit his eyebrow he kicked me out
I ended up masturbating in his jeep parked in the street moaning 'Lion.'

Found Joey my novelist friend and roared at him 'Lion!'
He looked at me interested and read me his spontaneous ignu high poetries
I listened for lions all I heard was Elephant Tiglon Hippogriff Unicorn
Ants
But figured he really understood me when we made it in Ignaz Wisdom's
bathroom.

But next day he sent me a leaf from his Smoky Mountain retreat
'I love you little Bo-Bo with your delicate golden lions
But there being no Self and No Bars therefore the Zoo of your dear Father
hath no lion
You said your mother was mad don't expect me to produce the Monster for
your Bridegroom.'

Confused dazed and exalted bethought me of real lion starved in his stink
in Harlem
Opened the door the room was filled with the bomb blast of his anger
He roaring hungrily at the plaster walls but nobody could hear outside
thru the window
My eye caught the edge of the red neighbor apartment building standing in
deafening stillness
We gazed at each other his implacable yellow eye in the red halo of fur
Waxed rheumy on my own but he stopped roaring and bared a fang
greeting.
I turned my back and cooked broccoli for supper on an iron gas stove
boilt water and took a hot bath in the old tup under the sink board.

He didn't eat me, tho I regretted him starving in my presence.
Next week he wasted away a sick rug full of bones wheaten hair falling out
enraged and reddening eye as he lay aching huge hairy head on his paws
by the egg-crate bookcase filled up with thin volumes of Plato, & Buddha.

Sat by his side every night averting my eyes from his hungry motheaten
face
stopped eating myself he got weaker and roared at night while I had
nightmares
Eaten by lion in bookstore on Cosmic Campus, a lion myself starved by
Professor Kandisky, dying in a lion's flophouse circus,
I woke up mornings the lion still added dying on the floor--'Terrible
Presence!'I cried 'Eat me or die!'

It got up that afternoon--walked to the door with its paw on the south wall to
steady its trembling body
Let out a soul-rending creak from the bottomless roof of his mouth
thundering from my floor to heaven heavier than a volcano at night in
Mexico
Pushed the door open and said in a gravelly voice "Not this time Baby--
but I will be back again."

Lion that eats my mind now for a decade knowing only your hunger
Not the bliss of your satisfaction O roar of the universe how am I chosen
In this life I have heard your promise I am ready to die I have served
Your starved and ancient Presence O Lord I wait in my room at your
Mercy.

Paris, March 1958

****

ok, i am going west. we're going to madison, and then vancouver and then san juan islands and then spokane and then sandpoint and then boise and then up into the sawtooths and we are leaving tomorrow in a sporty red car (i hope my window works, it wasn't working tonight. that might be not so awesome) and we're packing lots of snacks for the car and treats for our handsome dog and waking up at the crack of ridiculous tomorrow morning. and i will not be back until august 24th. so that means, i will have sketchy internet access and you will probably get a random email or text message about wolves and fishing, the gorgeousness of it all and of course, trees. the text message will be like this: "T-R-E-E-S A-R-E B-A-N-A-N-A-S"

i stood out in the thunderstorms the other night, starting the lathe of heaven and i wanted to say to my friend, like ginsberg said to dylan: "You're the king, but you haven't found your kingdom... i'm presenting you. It's about time. This country has been asleep. It's time it woke up."

what else. i was at rite aid today getting my 'scripts refilled and i was two day too early and almost had a meltdown. all the pharmicist said really was you're too early. the insurance won't pay for it. me: oh my god are you for real and was about to get all wound up with my voice squeaky and then she was all, well you can still get it it's only $40 instead of whatever, but not covered. i was like, oh ok, wow that's kind of reasonable. i cannot imagine what these people have to deal with, they are so good at being impassive. absolutely nothing phases them. not even an eyebrow shot up. and their voices are mild and relaxing. i bet i could fill scripts for prozac, clonoprin which is a benzo, maybe throw in some xanax and some epilepsy medication just for the hell of it and maybe some viagra and they would be all, "whatever". they must get training. she dealt with my slight and growing hysteria and capitulation to their jedi mind trick very well. she did say after i paid, "well now you'll have a good trip." no inflection. none. like, yes, we are the only rite aid in the entire united states. they don't exist anywhere else and we just averted a severe crisis. i still get giggly when i pass the condom section or i see someone buying them on line. "you're going to have sex!" i say to myself.

i'm really excited because malcolm loves it more than we do out there, the last time we were there with him for a long period of time in the summer, on the last day, we were all packed and ready to get into the car and malcolm was just sitting on the porch. he wouldn't come. "je refuse" said malcolm, "i said, good day".

i was just talking to c. on the phone and she has this thing where she has to ask about the geophysical location all the time "where am i?" so she can feel safe. she was really cute in the car to fire island that one weekend. "where are we?" "that's the world fairgrounds" and she wouldn't ask for awhile. then she would ask again. "now we're past kennedy". she still had no idea, but she felt better. i can relate to that so completely. it makes no sense, actually, compulsively situating oneself, i have to have this narrative in my head, and there's water over there and i can't get lost.

i love the poem up above, there. the last two stanzas make me shiver with pleasure. it wouldn't have two or three days ago. but now it does.

i'm going to leave you with some advice, and i will take it too. it's good advice.

"if anyone goes batshit in the car play "mountains" by prince and everyone will dance and calm down"

talk soon.

xo

Friday night I loved.

2008-07-21T09:29:00.002-04:00

Friday night I loved. And either that’s an antiquated way of saying Friday night was the object of my love. Or else you can take it as the setting for some objectless love. Loving as an intransitive verb. Like being. Night was its setting.

No fucking! Or at least not until later. And only amongst ourselves. The two of us I mean. Friday at least. (Saturday’s a different story. But not quite yet a story. Fragile spot. Undefined.). Lots of boys around. At our gay neighborhood bar. The Cox. It’s the place you go because you don’t know where else to and because everybody who thinks they are someone to the gay Parisian scene’ll be there anyway. Although. T and I. Have a history of going there. And our coupleness takes over. We talk to each other and feel silly. For not “having” a gang. But recently. Since I’ve decided I live here. That’s having its effects. Like St. said to me the other day. “You’re part of the galaxy now.” He reads us here, so he knew what he was talking about. So we hesitated before going. Because I wanted to see Kung Fu Panda. Like I said to B while we were skyping that afternoon. “I need culture.” “Right,” he replied. “The panda.” But we went. B was there. Other people milling around. At least when they go to the bar. Because otherwise milling around is not possible. At the Cox, there’s an outside section. But also arguments with the neighbors over whether or not they have the right to have people drinking there. So now they’ve roped off bits of the sidewalk to stand on. Which involves keeping us drinkers packed behind the ropes like sardines. In some ways this is good. It forces proximity on you and whomever you’re standing beside. You just have to know how to have your tongue in the right gear. To say something clever and keep the conversation rolling. And things can happen. So Friday night. We started out up against the wall. B and part of one of his gangs not far. But several sardine packs away. So glances and smiles from not so afar. Until there was a clearing. T led the way and we filled in.

J is a designer. He was chatting with B. So was E. Sexy guy. Who didn’t use to talk to B until B started taking pictures of the bearded among us. And now finds lots of things to say to B. J has a beautiful smile. And designs things. Like he has a project for candles. In the shapes of bottles. And penises. We did a little market research. Because at some point a very weary looking P climbed over the ropes and joined us. Somehow I knew. His grandmother’s been sick. And she isn’t any more. Before he even told me I knew his tired eyes had seen things he’d hated seeing. Plus? She died the day of his 40^th birthday. Hard week. But he was there in his chaps and ready to work it out. And willing to be part of the test market for penis candles. He didn’t think it was such a good idea. Because. Like, what. You can’t stick it up your butt because it’ll melt. We decided maybe it would be fun for radical feminists who want to watch penises burn. But that for those of us who like them. Maybe not so much. Beer flowing. Conversation about Berlin. E saying he not liking all the men in their major uniform gear. Like we’re in ’39 or something. I saying later to B. Just wait ‘til he sees me. B giggling. Because in a lot of ways. It is like we’re in ’39. It’s just so different we don’t quite know how to get our heads around what exactly is going on. At borders. In retention centers. In Gitmo. We all know and we all have no idea.

Hunger. Desire for culture. Panda. B peddling “the best pizza in Paris.” A bike ride away. On the way up the hill to our house. J, T and I jumping on bikes. B on his scooter. Zooming up the hill. To the best pizza in Paris. Great conversation. Easiness. Being us. Just easiness. Something clicking. Settling into place. And shifting. Both at the same time. Stories. Friends. At the table and elsewhere, too. Great food. The easiness of a we that’s several I’s. Not looking for and just finding one another The other side of the destruction of me I was recounting the other day. Where any I I am is only itself with others. Friday night I loved. I finding myself thanks to others. In less melodramatic terms. I had a nice dinner in Paris with new friends.

directed by desire/happy birthday

2008-07-14T22:25:00.008-04:00

the heat here, my lovely friend, is missed slightly. Just off to the edge of the street, there's wind and sun, flowers. the shock of the still slightly cold ocean after a day in nice shoes and a bright cardinal to wake me up on the day of her birthday. says Baby. And within the story of the earth outside my red curtains, a thunderstorm. early morning. it's too windy to fly, easy to grab a cup of coffee. Make little marks in the bedpost above my head, watch the light filter through clouds. changing the species i am for the day, a code-owner. a light in my own kitchen before my eyes are in "i don't have what you said. I don't feel what you said"

I can smell the rain, that's all I am.

someone today, asked me if i could find a specific poem. on the web. What the shit? many things were annoying as fuck right then, but this one seemed out of the blue. we are in the damn age of google, work it out. i don't want to go into it, but really. the request happened at the wrong time, in the middle of a thousand things and i was like, "nope". and then went back to writing an extremely low key email full of subtext and hate to a vendor or whatever.

ok, actually i did do a search myself and i couldn't find it. so i had more of an issue with the failure of the goddamn internet then anything else. because, word. who doesn't like to find a poem on the internet for someone who asks politely? i would love to, but the internet is failing today. FAIL.

ok, so because i'm me, i toodled home and got the collection off the shelf and flipped through it like a good little doggie, because who am i really to deny such an obvious request to pay attention to the Mountain and Sea and Singers and Just Stop Gods that rule my soul haha. uhm so it's a good poem, and i sat and read it to myself, and i read it with her voice and laugh, and she was there with me, and it was nice. she's dead. but you can still hear her giggle at the end of the stanza, the last breath before she comes home, and looks up. she read it to me over the phone once, in the first or second edit of the book it eventually ended up in. it turns out, the poem really was for someone else, at the asking. an allowance of someone's consciousness, the impulse behind asking. not my business. i am not, sufficient unto myself. i've always taken her words as scripture. who would want to be alone without them?

ok, so i found this:

WHAT IS THIS thing called love, in the poems of June Jordan, artist, teacher, social critic, visionary of human solidarity? First of all, it's a motive; the power Che Guevara was trying to invoke in his much-quoted assertion: "At the risk of appearing ridiculous . . . the true revolutionary is moved by great feelings of love." I think also of Paul Nizan: "You think you are innocent if you say, 'I love this woman and I want to act in accordance with my love,'but you are beginning the revolution. . . . You will be driven back: to claim the right to a human act is to attack the forces responsible for all the misery in the world." Neither of them, admittedly, was claiming the love of a woman for women, the love of a man for men, as revolutionary, as a human act.

Adrienne Rich, forward for Haruko/Love Poems by June Jordan

she said, who wants to write love poems? Not me. Neruda is the only one i can stand. Speaking for your highest good, I will say more to you, who have listened with joy.

I don't know why I sent you Neruda a couple of days ago after reading your post, but now I know. (via Patti Smith, of course. She's on Frida Kahlo today, but not for long.)

Unnecessary, seeing myself in mirrors,
With a fondness for weeks, biographers, papers,
I tear from my heart the captain of hell,
I establish clauses indefinitely sad.

Now I know. Discern me first in the Manifested Many.

xoxo

Torpor

2008-07-11T09:23:00.003-04:00

It's like not even all that hot here. In Paris. Heavy. Like my mother used to say. It's actually gray a lot. Like there's going to be a storm. Which never comes. But lots of wind. Blowing something somebody's way. Last week. On the couch. I told my shrink that I had a lot to learn from torpor. So this kind of weather's workin' for me.

T and I started this experiment up recently. Under my impetus. And coming by way of a mutual realization inspired by Shortbus. I really like Shortbus. I don't love it. But I really like it a whole lot. And one of the things I like about it. That T and I agreed was one of its greatest contributions to society. For all that it concentrates on sex. For all that sex is the thing pushing all of the characters around. What it really shows the best. Is that sex itself is boring. If sex itself can be said to exist. What's interesting is what happens beside sex. What sex makes you see. What fucking brings to light. What is there thanks to sexual relation. Not a narrative. Just a different light.

Given that that's the case. That's what's interesting is what happens while you're fucking. What you see in a different light thanks to the fucking. T and I have made it a policy of ignoring our minimal collection of porn. And putting other images on the screen. Kiarostami's Ten has actually been great. Tarnation was a little bit too much, though some of the 80's singing sequences were great to see. Shortbus itself we haven't actually tried. I'm not sure it would work. But the thing that's been really getting me going? Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line.

OK. So it helps that it's a movie filled with sexy hunks often half naked and covered in mud. But there are two moments -- so far, because I think there are actually others that have the potential for the same effect -- that destroy me. Especially if the sound is on. But even if I'm just reading along with the English subtitles we put on. There's actually one moment in particular. Bell is one of the character's names. (Funny -- I'm tempted to turn him into an initial, too). Bell is in love. Bell is the only one we see in love. Off of the battlefield. In flashbacks to his babe. The camera looking at her as if it were the character paying attention to her beauty in his mind. They're really beautiful scenes. That don't destroy me. Except that I know they're setting up the moment that does. Bell and some of the rest of the troops have made it over a hill filled with Japanese soldiers. Sowing and reaping destruction on their path. Bell makes it and performs semi-heroic actions (though interestingly for a "war movie," none of the characters are really heroes). He can be semi-heroic because he's able to pay attention in his mind to the woman he loves. The one he calls "you" in the voice-over. The one who calls him "you" over some of the same images. Never in conversation.

But to get to the moment that destroys me. And when I say it destroys me. I mean of course I start sobbing. This last time it was really weird. Because usually when you sob. Your nose gets all runny and gross and shit. But this time it was just my eyes secreting big tears. And chopping my throat into sobs. No snot.

Bell gets over the hill with the rest of the boys. And they finally get letters from home. And the letter Bell gets from home. Begins by saying she's met someone else. The camera is showing us Bell reading the letter. And pans out to the opposite of the close-ups. Or mid-range close-ups. That are the general rule of the film. He looks like he's been hit in the stomach. He gets all small. Smiling. Troubled. Self-conscious. Looking around to see who might be seeing him. As he reads her voice telling him she's met an Air Force captain. And that she's fallen in love. Because it's just gotten too lonely. And we see him being lonely. Being hit by the solitude that overtakes him. In the scene just before that. We've seen him saying. To Fife. Another private. "I just don't wanna feel the desire." Which might be true. But doesn't stop him from feeling the desire. Because we've seen him with that desire many times up until then. And just after he says this. We see her. At a windowsill in twilight. Fiddling with the curtain. Turning her head away. Cut to a bird in the sky. We see the bird because she does. Standing outside something like military housing. In daylight. Like the bird is the desire they each feel in their solitude whether or not they want to. She looks like she's got a chill. She holds the top of her dress up to her neck, and then she sees someone walking in the shadow that runs along the side of the housing. She turns back, obliquely in relation to the camera, holds her elbows, as if she's trying to warm herself up. He's actually shot in very much the same position. Reading her words. Same distance between their separate bodies and the camera. She knows he can say no. "But I'm asking you anyway. Out of the memory of what's we've had together." This gets us close to my destruction when I watch this scene. The inordinate, immeasurable extent of her request. The fact that it is the memory of what they had together that gives her the authorization she needs for her request that he grant her their separation. "We'll meet again someday." And the camera shows her room again. You can vaguely make her out in the mirror which is decorated with a drawing of a plane. As we hear her saying that people who have been as close as they've been always meet again. The image then switches back to Bell. Who's flustered as he holds the folded letter in his hands. Before switching back to an unmade bed. In the half-light of a door cracked open. We hear her saying. "I have no right to speak to you this way." Before we cut back to him. Reading the letter unfolded again. Paying attention to it in a way his traumatized reaction didn't allow for in the previous sequences. To read her saying. "A habit so strong." He knows the strength of that habit. And allows himself to feel it. Reading her inordinately difficult request. And this is the moment that really gets me. She says. With all of his attention. "Oh my friend of all those shining years. Help me leave you." It's in the tone of her voice. It's in the fact she calls him her friend. "Of all those shining years." In a film that's full of a world that shines out from the midst of all the violence that also destroys it. It's probably also the impossibility of his fulfilling her request. And the fact that he might be able to do it anyway. All the things we say to people that we have no right to. And that we say anyway. Attention to that destroys me. Makes me fade into a populated solitude where any I I am is only itself with others. Where I becomes we.

Maybe. I'm speculating widely here. But I also thought this was a good way to start thematizing something we're interested in. Being beside narrative. I love the way you do that in your egret entry. The way you say "i would sometimes say that everything in the past few years has been just a whopping good story. and then. so. me personally, i'd never seen an egret on fire island." The way you tell yourself telling the story. You put your telling on display. And show yourself beside the story. In the event. Malick's films seem interesting that way. The broad strokes of the voice overs, pushed to the point of cliché, often go against the grain of what it is the images are showing. Put words in tension with what we're seeing. Show language to be inadequate to the stellar world. Another element of the world shining.

about that egret....

2008-07-06T22:11:00.003-04:00

In Egypt the Heron is honored as the creator of light. A double headed Heron in Egypt is symbolic of prosperity.

As a Chinese symbol the Heron represents strength, purity, patience and long life.

In Africa, the Heron was thought to communicate with the Gods.

Most Native American tribes took note of the heron’s inquisitiveness, curiosity and determination. As such this set the heron as a symbol of wisdom in that this creature seemed to have good judgement skills.

Specifically, the Iroquois tribe held the blue heron as a very good omen, a very lucky sign. They recongnized the heron as an expert fisher/hunter. As such, they believed that sighting a heron before a hunt was a sign that the hunt would be a good one.

As a water creature the heron is also a symbol of acceptance, and working with the elements of Mother nature rather than struggling against her.

i wouldn't have paid much attention except, a) oh hello there you are, and i'd just been in a pretty spectacular meditation. plus kane went into complete shock mid-gallop. you know, i would sometimes say that everything in the past few years has been just a whopping good story. and then. so. me personally, i'd never seen an egret on fire island.

oh interesting! look:

aigrette
456; 721; 748; 813; Aigrette (from the French for egret, or lesser white heron), the tufted crest, or head-plumes of the egret, used for adorning a woman's head-dress, the term being also given to any similar ornament, in gems, &c. An aigrette is also worn by certain ranks of officers in the French army. By analogy the word is used in various sciences for feathery excrescences of like appearance, as for the tufts on the heads of insects, the feathery down of the dandelion, the luminous rays at the end of electrified bodies, or the luminous rays seen in solar eclipses, diverging from, the moon's edge.

Paris Pride report

2008-06-29T06:25:00.006-04:00

Yea Gay Pride! Here in Paris, we were safe from all the wedding dresses. Because we're living under a regime that's something like Thatcher or Reagan twenty years too late. And weddings seem out of the question. But people needed a party. We were at the Bastille, where the march ended up, when Act-Up Paris (yes, they're having trouble, but they still exist) tried to stop the government party's homo delegation from entering onto the square. They sat down and started screaming at them, booing them. That was refreshing. Even though S, our companion for the day, and for a fair portion of the night, thought there had to be a question of tolerance. I scoffed. Yeah, but tolerance for the UMP?

I was in my leather. Even tho it was darn hot whenever the sun came out. Magnet for cameras. I mean. It could have also been the fact that there were three of us. People seem to like to look at that. Four actually. Because S has a friend from Quebec. That he met up with, too. Who kept taking pictures of us. We would march. Throw an arm around whomever of us happened to be beside us at that moment. S's friend broke away to go to the movies at some point. And then we were three. And every once in a while we'd stop. And stroke each other's nipples. Chatting all the while. One nice little three-way kiss. On the bridge on the way to the Bastille. S is really very handsome. You remember him. He's the one who emerged with T² and W² when we were waiting for them at the Cox. He and T had chatted that morning and decided we should meet up to march. Good idea. Because I'm really very proud of that. Of the sex we've already had. The chats we've had since then. The sex we ended up having last night. The fact that it emerges from everyday sexual rhythms that are syncopated by drinks. And conversation. And art. The fact that S knows T² and W². And a couple of other friends and acquaintances. We don't have a refined political stance to be affirmed. Just living. Just living and showing that we are. I'll be happy to throw myself behind whatever worthwhile political push/agenda comes along. But while waiting for that. I'm going to work on just living and showing that we are.

Which last night ended up involving the police. After the march. We were pooped. Went to a café. Sat with S. Chatting. More than we had before. Then. At ten to eight. T's phone rings. A neighbor had noticed someone suspicious in our apartment. Had called the police. Who had stopped the burglar with two of our computers, our two ipods, and a pair of Adidas. So went to the police station. To file a complaint. Poor guy. Junky. Must have really needed a fix to climb into our 6th floor window like he did. Apparently from the outside. The neighbor was witness. Very straightforward process. Three hour or so interlude at the police station. S had said to call him. That we'd get a bite to eat. If things didn't take too long at the police station. At 11 pm. We emerge from the métro. S waiting for us. Homemade pesto at home. Wanna come? S came. More chatting. Longing for San Francisco. S. He has an A. Long-term. Getting to know A through S. All S says about their time together. A should have gone to San Francisco. 17 years ago. But met S. Canceled San Francisco. They went there together a few years ago. Loved it. The spaces. The weather. Some sighing. Talking about it all. Before T went to the bathroom. And S jumped on me. And we loved and fucked into the night. Lovely gay pride, really. Just living.

2008-06-26T04:50:00.002-04:00

Years ago, I used to hike at a city park that I did not know what a gay cruising spot. I found out the Saturday afternoon that this guy parked his van directly behind my car, preventing me from backing out, forcing me to leave my car and walk to his driver's side window. Luckily for me, I packed a knife - worried more about being mugged than sexually accosted. I asked him to move his vehicle. He asked me what my hurry was and I was 'awful cute.'

He moved his van.

Well, it's a good thing he packs his knife. 'Cos that's obviously what you need to pull out when someone tells you you're "awful cute." Lol. Poor guy didn't know how 'awful' was the 'cute' he was looking to play with.

snapdragon

2008-06-18T20:29:00.005-04:00

the snap dragon was a very simple thing. we came back from a walk and were passing thru the back gate into the garden behind the pool. there was a beautiful red flower in the midst of all the sprays of green and breathless purple. oh, isn't that beautiful, look at that.

do you know why they are called snapdragons?

the demonstration of what they can do made me laugh. you put your fingers to either side of it and press gently, and it looks like a dragon's mouth opening and closing.

i laughed with delight and, i think, squealed. did you know that? i giggled at C. NO! and we were both like, ooooh...!

C. said something a minute later when we explained to S. after she asked what we were yelping about like, it doesn't take much to make us happy.

i was really happy. increased sensitivity to the mug in my hand, my skin and the sheen of sweat drying in the breeze on the small of my back the music starting in my head, the red of the flower, the quality of the air, the way the sun was on the deck, malcolm winding his way thru our legs. flexibility and constitution. a will. the saving grace of an unenviable position, that we move forward and backwards in time. the last time i'd seen a snapdragon was in san francisco, about to go into a diner for breakfast. i noticed them in such a way that it's a defining moment in my life, they covered the street and a mythical, paradigmatic history (of place, and who i was there) ended. so in a sense, something that had sort of a psychopompic function, between the bright, foggy western morning and a early june day in the east, i kind of learned the techniques of living. of noticing. my artistic and poetic capacities. but this had a heart. eschatological time. this ended time—into presence.

do you see how this relates to what we've been going back and forth about? if you do that's great because it alludes me. like, my mother sent me a picture of a butterfly, and i thought of you. you were watching a butterfly one day in Paris.

The last night S. was here, before she left for Beirut (and omg i was seriously considering just telling Dad that she was going to ireland. tsuris! also, i might be a bad jew and using that incorrectly.) I've kind of been a very technical, fascinating, marvelous and weird person since that night. She leaned her body into me and brought her mouth to my ear. all the fantasies and hard play and she just said i was in you. i was fucking you.

hours later we curled up on the couch, it was a hot night and the windows were open. we sat in the dark. the humidity made me calm and it felt like you were breathing water. our voices were quiet and rusty. heat like that, you feel sedated and predatory. you've hunted. and prayed.

I found everything inside the room soaked, as if were, in Bliss - the Bliss of Satchidananda. I saw a wicked man in front of the Kali temple, but in him also I saw the Power of the Divine Mother vibrating.

That was why I fed a cat with the food that was to be offered to the Divine Mother. I clearly perceived that the Divine Mother Herself had become everything - even the cat. The manager of the temple garden wrote to Mathur Babu saying that I was feeding the cat with the offering intended for the Divine Mother. But Mathur Babu had insight into the state of my mind. He wrote back to the manager: "Let him do whatever he likes. You must not say anything to him. (p. 345)

To my Divine Mother I prayed only for pure love. I offered flowers at Her Lotus Feet and prayed to Her: "Mother, here is Thy virtue, here it Thy vice. Take them both and grant me only pure love for Thee. Here is Thy knowledge, here is Thy ignorance, take them both and grant me only pure love for Thee. Here is Thy purity, here is Thy impurity. Take them both, Mother, and grant me only pure love for Thee. Here is Thy dharma, here is Thy adharma. Take them both, Mother, and grant me only pure love for Thee." (pp.138-139) Sri Ramakrishna

the re-reading of genet right now is hilarious. you can imagine. ;)

Floating

2008-06-11T10:43:00.002-04:00

So. You know some of this. Because I have trouble not talking about it. I can't not not talk about it. That's a step away from the irreperable. Says Agamben. If I'm remembering correctly, you enter the irreperable when you can not not do something. And so you do it in a certain way. The ethically, politically right way. Agamben is a little full of himself. But I think he might be right.

T and I have had this thing with B. I think it will have been irreperable. And I think it will be a major friendship. For all of us. For each of us. And precisely in that fluctuation between the all and the each. Will lie whatever greatness it will have. We're currently working through a snag. That has to do with the desire for possession. B, I think, kept his in check. Because. For him. I am T's. And he might have wanted. Me to be his. For all intents and purposes. I am T's. Because of the force of history. Because of what just happened in Berlin. Because I wrote about it. Because we have and will continue to meet our need for each other. But. There is this thing. About triangulation. That unmoors possession. That can also exacerbate the desire for it. Even when it is what is impossible. Possession. Which isn't to say that it doesn't happen all the time. Like you said. "what i didn't say was she was inside me." That'll happen quite unbeknownst to us. And then all of a sudden you find someone there.

Sunday night we were unmoored. Hercules and Love Affair was in town. B was on the cusp of a love affair with M. Who was there. And is really very very sexy. B fretted about it with us. Put his head on my shoulder. We still had the crazy and beautiful idea. That we were going to go on vacation in Croatia. Loll in the sun. Read cook and talk. Swim. It's not going to happen. Now that the desire for possession has reared its monstrous head. The desire for possession. For something we will never entirely have. Someone else. That desire is monstrous. It shows us up for what we are. Weak beautiful humans who want nothing more than to be more than what our weakness, beauty and humanity make of us. Maybe I'm going over the top. Saying all this. But. Something about that triangular situation. Shows us up for the monsters we are. And. If you're like me and a little worked over by it. Which you are even if you don't admit it to yourself. And if you're lucky enough to come across the right wonderful people to explore it with. Triangulation demands that we do something else with our monstrosity. Besides just letting it overtake us. Something like showing it for what it is. And loving it.

We were on our way on Sunday night. Dancing!! Nomi was twirling around in a dress lined with fringes. B, the next day: "I want a dress with fringes. To turn around and around and around in." It all felt fragile. And collective. Full of rhythm. New. And nice. There was something floating in between us. Putting us just beyond ourselves. Right beside ourselves and each other. And then. The next day. I wanted details about B and M's night. I asked for it. And said so when it made my stomach churn. It was my desire for possession rearing its head. Just after its having become unmoored. And that's what was strange about it. We'd just gotten to this wonderful floating, undetermined, unmoored stage. And nothing seemed scary. Or wrong. It all just felt real. As real as was the bile that started rolling in my tummy when I realized I was jealous. Me! And I told him to have fun. To take advantage of it. And I told him that it hurt me to say so. And I had to let go of what had only just barely begun to start floating between the three of us just the night before. That was hard. Monday was a shitty night. Plus? T was in Milan. At least I had Joan as Police Woman for company.

Tuesday was rough. B and I cried. Or reported tears. In skype. We find this amazing rhythm in our skype conversations every once in a while. Tuesday was one of those times. He gave me just what I needed to hear. At that moment. Which was his desire to possess me. At the very moment he was relinquishing acting on it. He hadn't said so before. It's been said. It is consecrated. It is impossible. And it is going to be the basis for whatever is destined to come between us in the future. That's ambiguous and I think it's right. Things like this come between us. They're the stumbling blocks that make us who we are. That feed desires, pains and joys. That become who we are as we become what our existence makes of us. And what we make of our existence.

I fretted over the fact that this entry didn't have a conclusion. Duh. Things are just getting started. I'm a whore for grace. And? I'm a whore for beginnings, too. Especially ones strong enough to become something else. Something else. You know. Out of this world. And keeping us in it here and now.

(edit) yes because he never did a thing like that before

2008-06-06T12:21:00.011-04:00

and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas 2 glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Molly Bloom's Soliloquy

Ulysses by James Joyce

you live through your heart's desire. i can't own the power and magic of this world, and yes it is always available. it's taken me approximately 3 years of conscious necessary thresholds to reach a deep unconsciousness that really isn't so vast and untenable—for example, i used to watch a fire burn, and glowing red coals, those riders that came out of the trees, a medicine show and dream. i sparked in and out of satori sitting on docks overlooking the ocean, a string on a maze that really was just a path; and i don't really know anyone. no one does, and that's kind of great. what a relief. i don't know anything not even my own mind. and i keep saying yes. it turns out my own true nature is tenderness. i told you about that session, briefly in an email, i think. what really just happened was the full force of the wave of anxiety and fear and memories just broke finally, and i was verbalizing the shit out of it as it was happening. it's like a fever breaking and then practical things need to happen. i need to bathe and get some clothes and some soap. and my skull happens to be gone and my brain is exposed. but s. was sitting next to me and the way it happened was gentle, nothing by proxy. just that it is real, and you can't argue with reality.

and i had a moment with s. like that. you say it so well "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."

i can't say it was the first, there have been so many, and this was a benediction. and there will be others, moments. a life.

turns out, i blundered onto the right path anyways,

to find the origin,
trace back to the manifestations.
when you recognize the children
and find the mother.
you will be free of sorrow
tao te ching

isn't it nice to know that no matter who's singing what song, you can hear.

i called my shrink to ask her for a refill. she asked me how i was doing on the meds. i was like, fine! you know? it's good! except i'm having a little trouble with short-term memory. like, i will take a pill and then a half a minute later seriously not remember if i did. she was intrigued. let's google that because that's a new one. i waited while she typed it in. oh here we go. "med x and med y attenuated the cognitive deficits observed in depressive rats." we giggled. "that's not you. that has nothing to do with the medicine." you're not depressive, a little sociopathic. "barking mad". we both started laughing uncontrollably. i can't believe you said that in the first session, that was uncalled for. who said that to you and who made you believe that? i knew i shouldn't have told her about how i can move the world with the very power of my mind. some things are best left to fiction. i still would like some help with the wrack lines of the sea that blow up during a storm, and signs of resourcefullness. i think that's where sex comes in, as if it needed any opening to begin with, the ecology of it's sounds and eddies. flowers that fringe the shore, colors not seen from the beach. true madness might be thinking you know how to read the wild liquid coursing through someone else's body at the first.

"i loved your story about the snapdragons" she said, when she was getting off the phone.
i never told you the story about the snapdragons.

"no, but you will."

and you know what she was talking about? peace, unlooked for. i just spellchecked this and james joyce can't spell.

"The dark corners emptying out"

2008-06-06T08:21:00.003-04:00

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."

2008-06-05T09:06:00.002-04:00

miss lady. i've been loving your head for, like, a week now.

i love

2008-05-29T19:19:00.007-04:00

...your head, it's beautiful.

i have uninterrupted pulses, purposefully enduring, i suppose. i've always watched faces, my own, others. it can be quite disconcerting for people. i'm not looking for anything. a more remote level, maybe. a quiet one. i did realize early on that i'm not an observer. i may be vigilant, but i don't gainsay the order of my passions, i like sensual elements in others. but in other words, i like the care around your eyes, the brow in precise arrangement paused, a direct carving, in the streets of paris. (or probably in the studio above). like, i manage perplexed indignation rather then repose, but i hardly ever retreat into confusion anymore. i think i might manage dim-witted, more often than not. hahaha. the sexual corruption of beauty, of having lay down in light. over and over and over. until these dumbass fucking laws are revoked, i think i'll stay there out of pity for anyone who needs it. so if it's rhythm, meat and meat. okay.

like, how you avail yourself (unsaid or not overdetermined) the metaphor of the labyrinth, in describing berlin and the spaces you wander. i was wondering if any divey bar could be described so. of course. and before, with smoking, yes. yes of course. heard indistinctly, above the music, above the dancers. whatever the source. this might be visionary. or prophetic, if prophecy is the ages old setting down of rhythms. from before... this will be. these four corners will trace the discipline of a collective work, and the machinery of creation will run, and you do know yes that the angel announced the unsayable into Mary's ear? right. the horn was blown into the ear. well, clearly, there are priorities. i am listening to bert jansch, he's doing the american traditional "katie cruel". atemporal.

When I first came to town
They call me the roving jewel
Now they've change their tune
Call me Katie Cruel

Through the woods I'm going
through the boggy mire
Straight way down the road back home
to my heart's desire

yay. or like when i was in Toledo, with el greco. The stacked composition, the rows of packed figures, and the weird, accordion-pleated space of an uncanny masterpiece

i can only sustain anne carson for so long, for example. and i always go back. no one seems to be giving anyone another option. like, are you fucking kidding me?

xo

ps. i was thinking about what you said there was a moment in ephraim where i thought of you. a moment when merrill's voice says something about using a language that's just above everyone's head, including his. yes. and no. mythologies (there it is again), hierarchies (according to?), consciousness (the ground...? of what?), stories by proxy (this is a resplendant "yes". why not. this is how i tell stories. about feelings. heh). sitting, for one minute even, in being. gratitude, for being talked to, danced with, at all. from wiki:

"It depends not on consciousness, but on being; not on thought, but on life; it depends on the individual's empirical development and manifestation of life, which in turn depends on the conditions existing in the world." karl marx

tell that to the woods. i think that sapling over there might have a thing, or two.

What's Missing Is

2008-05-28T12:52:00.003-04:00

Was weeping again last night. In between bouts of baisers and baiser. That’s kissing and fucking. T and I have been going at it. Ever since I got back from New York. Much more than at other points of our common life. Looks like that thing I was talking about. ‘Member? I had to do some searching. But I basically had it right. “Heavy heavy shit we carry around with us all the time forgetting it's even burdening us.” We’re over that. We’re celebrating its being gone. Remembering its burden. And so we’re fucking around a lot.

Mostly one on one. But we did go to the movies with B this weekend. No fucking around. But, as you know, it’s related to previous fucking around. In nice ways. We had a drink on a rooftop café overlooking a canal afterwards. That was nice. Though we were all ambivalent about the movie. That everybody’s liking. “Conte de Noël.” Everybody French is in it. Deneuve. Amalric. Devos. Great actors. Doing very good acting. But so bourgeois. Fantasy of French people. Working-class but fluent in German philosophy. Nice fantasy. Big house. Complicated psychoanalytic situations. Several really great scenes. Anyway. Still no tinkle-dinkles to be seen when B’s around. Tonight he’s taking a picture of my face. He’s done other faces. Boys. He calls them. “Les garcons.” Amongst whom we. T and me. Some of whose faces he’s taking. In a picture. When he first mentioned it to me. He told me it was about forgetting of self. Getting that moment. When the self is forgotten. I like the idea. And some of the pictures are great.

So no sex with B. But several times over with T² and W². Over the weekend. Ending with a funny story. Perhaps indicative of things beyond itself. So. Sunday. Movies early with B. 1:00 screening. Phone-call from B at 12:50. “Au secours!” Him saying. Meaning. “Help me!” Because he was late. Afters. Drink and chatty chat chat. After that. Tea and North African pastry with R and M. Bemoaning socialists. Americanizing rampantly. At a moment when. What does that mean? What risks does it involve? R and M sorting books. Because moving. R to US. Sad for us. M staying a year longer. Meaning. My pecs can continue blooming. Because M and I chatting. Talking, even, sometimes, too. While working out.

Afters. Complicated text exchanges with T². Because one likes to think technology works. But. They at Cox. Local trendy pretty boy bar. We late. Aiming for 9. But sitting down for sardines and salad and rice at home only at 9:10. Having to call mothers. 10:30 before taking risk of going to Cox. Because no message received from T² confirming presence at Cox. Me wanting to see them. Again. Because we’d seen them Thursday. At Cox and then at their place not far off. And then Friday. I made stuffed calamari. And afterwards we rolled around and did lots of other things, too, until W² started getting worried they’d miss their last metro at 2. Saturday was Animal Collective. (Yea! Already covered in blog). So no T² and W². But me wanting. To see them again. So. Sunday 10:30. At Cox. No T² and W². Lots of other garcons. In various states of post-weekend disarray. Couples squabbling. Boys drinking and drunk. T and I. Waiting. Me calling. T²’s German cell-phone. Expensive. Getting T². T² saying. Auf deutsch. “Where are you? How long have you been there? We’re coming! Don’t move.” T and I. Not moving. Standing. Sitting. Waiting. Wondering. What in the hell they were doing. Thinking knowing. Exactly what they were doing. Half an hour. Maybe more. Them arriving. With? S! Met in sex club 10 days previously and seen and heard in opera chorus since then. And now. Walking down street behind T² and W². Not knowing any more than we, T and me. That he was why we were waiting. Sit down for drinks and chatting and civilized patter and caresses and smiles. Planning. Maybe a visit to Stuttgart in the Fall. That’s the funny story.

But I started by talking about weeping. You know. That sometimes happens in between bouts of baiser. Getting there where that or laughing can happen indifferently is no doubt one of the reasons I keep fucking. Because the world exists. Again. Differently. Once you let yourself go through that. “The Letting Go.” That was B“P”B’s previous thing. “Strange Form of Life” and all that. This one. Same thing. Just more of it. And more reassured. No need for fancy madrigals. Just “Lie Down in the Light.” Just what he does. Liking it all. But now especially. “What’s Missing Is.” Has to be sung. Has to be heard sung. To hear that what’s missing is. It is. And it’s “some kind of pillow, some loving willow, some care once denied, now dissolved inside.” That’s already fucking good. To hear what’s missing is. But then there’s also. “What’s plenty is.” And what it is is “One God, six tongues, five breaths, four lungs.” Don’t know how I feel about one god. But you also have to hear the bridge. He and his band just playing it. Playing what’s missing and what’s plenty. All of that swelling. Ebbing and flowing. Before taking us to “What’s rhythm is.” And what’s rhythm is “plenty of things missing.” It’ll get you if it catches you in the right light. With a chord change in relation to the other verses on the “missing.” And a shift of B“P”B’s voice into its graver, less heady tones. “Plenty of things missing.” Are in turn. “Steps taken, lips kissing, new harmony on an awesome scale.” And, just as you think he might have gone way too far out of the world with his harmony, he adds “meat against meat.” Finishing up with its being “under sail.” And no tidy final chord to tie it all up. Just letting the song float off “under sail.”

Me thinking. Today in the metro. After some time on the couch. What was I consecrating? Realizing. What I was consecrating. What keeps me dancing. What gives these phrases. Their rock and roll. Their punctuation. Their eventually annoying pat-a-tat-tat.

Rhythm. Plenty of what’s missing.

Musical Notes

2008-05-27T14:38:00.000-04:00

Does this happen to you. That you think, "I need to blog about that." And you don't for various complicated reasons. And then you think, "Oh yeah, I need to blog about that." And ditto on the complicated reasons. And then all of a sudden, a couple more of those loops. And you've got a back blog that keeps you from getting anything up on the screen.

Enough already! I'm thinking. Largely thanks to our friend Bonnie "Prince" Billy. He has a new thing. "Lie Down in the Light." Wow. It was sounding eternal the first time I listened to it. Having it playing on a loop hasn't convinced me otherwise. He sings things like. "You remind me of something/ A song that I am and you sing me back into myself/ When I wake, When I'm sleeping/ The song is a man and a woman and everything else." It's a good thing he adds everything else. Otherwise I might not be able to love him. Weird, isn't it. When you accept music you're hearing as your own. When it enters your ear and nestles there. And you know you can just push the button and find it again. Antony's been that way for me. Our friend Mr. C., too. Joanna Newsome I had to keep trying. Kate Bush. Kiki. Not necessarily anything terribly original about that roster of originals. Just love them. Some others, too.

Like Animal Collective. And lovely Panda Bear. I can't decently write on a blog called "Search for Delicious" and not mention that I spent a brief evening watching him stare out at me and the rest of the crowd. He actually made me weep. I'd never heard the band allow a slip of Panda Bear solo into one of their sets. This time around they did. "Comfy in Nautica." The chords that open the song. All they promise and get going on already. The surprise of hearing the group let him have his say on his own with them. The risk that must represent for them.

And then I luv this song. Like a lot. They played it when we heard them here à Paris this past fall. And I think I looked it up then, too. Googling "I want to walk around with you." And finding out they're calling the thing "Bearhug." Apparently it doesn't have a proper release yet. Though I'm waiting for it. I kinda imagine it as the centerpiece of their next album. Since they're apparently playing it to death in their live shows. There are lots of people I want to walk around with. And I love the rhythm and the urgency of they way they just scream it out.

'Member how I said that the first time we saw them it was the joy of discovery. And that the second time it was like they'd found the rhythms they'd been kneading and therefore didn't need to knead them anymore? Well, this time it was like they still didn't need to knead, and it was also like they, too, were a little tired. The show didn't even go on for two hours. But as tired as they were (and they have been touring an awful lot). It was like they had spaces to show us. Patches of woods. A little stream. Things they'd come upon while they were walking around. And that they're happy to show off.

Part of my backblog is of course my own damn fault. I mean. I set myself up for a fall bein' all like "I was consecrating something and it's not marriage." I'm going to blather on about it off-screen for a little while. Because if Berlin and my writing about it was some kind of consecrated non-marriage. Or some kind of entirely other ceremonial. You know. I wanna be careful about how exactly I say what exactly it was. Or, maybe not careful. I just wanna get it right. Right enough to keep me dancing.

she was home

2008-05-22T20:44:00.005-04:00

oh, the detours. when i got out of the water (actually had to be peeled out of the wetsuit. i was shouting with laughter. everything s. said or did was hilarious. and m. was chatting away and s. started giggling too and i was screaming. i was so completely thrilled to have been in the water. so cold. so protected in the wetsuit. wow.) but at any rate i was also completely raked of any physical energy and needed to be helped not so gently out of the warm, very tight suit. you try it. ridiculous. i mean, i was crying with laughter.

we'd had guacamole and chips and s. made a really good tuna fish salad and we just stood around the kitchen counter and talked and drank and ate. i'd walked by their house to see if he was home. the sky was so blue and there were rip tides.

the tiredness took me by surprise afterwards. i'm sure horses feel it after a gallop, i certainly do after riding them. it's just an intense physical burst, and then when it stops there's nothing to do except: sand thru my toes, a man and a dog near the edge of the ocean, a bird there. the fact that i was in the sea being tossed around was the most immediate and hard thing to think about. and then you just become a body, with slow thoughts, if any. and you want, really nothing. except to sit in the sun and let your clothes dry on your skin. blue-lipped, shivering. another walk to sailor's cove later. thru budding groves and high grass. the temperature dropped. nice. i think i wanted a warm roast beef sandwich with some horseradish mayo. and cheese. and thick, black bread. just wearing a tee shirt and some shot old pants.

and of course i thought about energy, but not really. i just felt it. this was the same exhaustion i felt on that hill, when i was young. different. there was no fear, no self that got in the way of anything or any thing. and no effort to get there. you can walk for an hour like that, more. it's like nodding off into the world, and the size and integrity of being. it was good. it was solid. warm. and all of this came later because right then the light was beautiful off the bay.

What I was doing writing about Berlin

2008-05-20T06:13:00.003-04:00

So. One thing I was doing. Amongst all those other initials. Incidentally. Do you have to have at least two letters to call them initials? I don't really care if you do. Because that's what those lucky letters are. Initials. The beginnings of names. Dancing letters. Dancing and fucking. We like that mix.

So. Like I was saying. One thing I was doing amongst those initials. T. Especially him. But I'll get to that in an entry or two. But also T² and W². Especially them, too. They're coming to Paris this weekend. Yea! Din din at the house in leather and German and who knows what else. B, too. And especially him, too. We had Thai food with him last week. No tinkle-dinkles to be seen. That's the way he wanted it. Just sticky rice and conversation. And his smile and his gaze and his humor. Those are the ones that were there especially. Even if, once I was writing, their bodies weren't. There. They were. T and T² and W² and B. D and V, too, but we didn't make it to Sleazy Madrid so they've receded a bit onto the horizon. J-F. Him, too. But he comes with a sigh. There we all were. Dancing and fucking. Loving witnessing loving. Not over it yet. Neither the loving nor the witnessing loving. Going at it. And then written down.

Who knew? Who could ever know? Before writing. There I was with all those initials. Initiating. Fucking and dancing. Dancing and fucking. And who knew? I was waiting for writing.

So. That's one thing I was doing. Dancing and fucking with those bodies that will have left those initials. Waiting for writing. Without knowing. That I was expecting. Though suspecting. Obscurely, as the French sometimes say. I'd have something to say to you.

But another thing. I was doing. Dancing and fucking. Was forgetting that my father was dying. I know this for a fact. That I was forgetting. Because my last night in Berlin. Though I was trying. I was having trouble falling to sleep. Lying down. Couldn't get myself to fall. To sleep. Getting up. Tossing. Turning. Smoking. Thinking. About all those bodies. What they'd initiated. Though they had no intials. Not yet. All the dancing and fucking I'd been doing. A! Grosse Schlange. Incapable of forgetting. All I'd been doing. And sleeping. Sleep-deprived I. It was that last night all I was needing. Sleep. Sleep. Focus on sleep. Unable to fall. Until. Smoking. On the balcony in the cold cold air of early-Spring Berlin. All of a sudden I remembered. My father is dying. Sleeping. Thanks to that memory. Became a verb. I fell to sleep. Remembering. My father was falling.

But another thing I was doing. Fucking and dancing and waiting for writing and forgetting and remembering and finally falling asleep. As if that weren't enough. Enough to be doing all at once. Was something I couldn't quite do until it came down to writing it down. For you. Writing it down. Pursuing my sidération with words addressed to you. Considering me with all those initials for you. I was consecrating something. And? Honey! It wasn't exactly a marriage. More, I hope, soon.

2008-05-14T09:58:00.004-04:00

Long before I knew who Walter Benjamin was, I knew about the angel of history he had up on his wall that made him write. More or less. "History is an angel being blown. Backwards. Into the future. History is a pile of debris. The angel wants to go back. And fix things. To repair the things that have been broken. But there's a storm brewing in paradise. And the storm keeps blowing the angel backwards. Into the future. And this storm, this storm. Is called. Progress." I'm writing that under dictation. From the traces of “Strange Angels” that I find without too much trouble in my head. When I was young, I loved that song. That album. One summer, at a summer program for the gifted and otherwise engaged, several among us would sit out on the lawn. Or the soccer field. Or whatever sizable plane of grass it was after sunset. Look up at the stars. And, really, with this bunch, there was no effort to be profound. Just pleasure at being together. I wonder where they are now. We’d giggle and chat and discuss. A couple among us were some kinda lovers. I was the only gay. So no lover. Just longing. And friends. We’d listen to music. And tell surrealist jokes without a punch-line and laugh. Laurie Anderson. Mainly. Oh! And Cat Stevens. Bob Marley. Funny fragments of mix tapes coming to my mind. I think Laurie was my favourite. Before I knew that at a not all so long ago Antony concert she apologized for Lou’s stepping on your foot.

I guess Merrill’s supernatural entities are described as something a bit more sophisticated than angels. If I’ve understood correctly, it all has to do with the atom. God is God B in Mirabell. B for biology. Which is pretty cool. I mean as long as you’re going to place all of your doubt and love and poetic security on the line and open yourself and a few chosen living and dead friends up to a cosmos that you gain access to by, as far as I can tell, sheer aesthetic gall. Might as well call your deity biology. Study of life. Seems to me these days that it’s the aesthetic part of that gall I have trouble mustering up. Not that aesthetics aren’t my concern. Au contraire. The moments I find myself loving are the ones like the one you cite. Where he articulates the fact that it’s beyond him. And that that’s the most important thing. To articulate. Its being beyond articulation. Or where God B’s minions, Ephraim et al, give JM new access to where he is and who he’s with. Like, p. 253 of Mirabell, the consecration they get from an entity numbered 741. Where what they're up to is recognized as THE FIELD...FORMED BY LONGSTANDING EXPERIENCE. To which JM and DJ, flustered by the complement, reply: "DJ's and mine?" 741 answers:

YES/ A FIELD OF STILLD COMPLAINTS EARTH-RICH IN TRUST & EAGERNESS

JM replies:

"Listen--how in his words the furrowed sea/Contracts to a hillside plot the sailor plows."

I mean if the Ouija board gives you access to that, I’m all for it. And I mostly love the remarkable insouciance. The way he and DJ poke the angels. And the way they poke back.

Speaking of angels. Like I said. I'm off to see some tonight. In Polish! Mustn't be late. Who knows what 80's America looks like in the hands of 2000's post-communist Polish. Promising splice. Will let you know what it offers.

"running thru matt and lucy's land"

2008-05-11T13:05:00.007-04:00

What i think i feel now, by it's own nature
Remains beyond my poor power to say outright,
Short of grasping the naked current where it
Flows through field and book, dog howling, the firelit
Glances, the caresses, whatever draws us
To, and insulates us from, the absolute—
The absolute which wonderfully, this slow
December noon of clear blue time zones flown through
Towards relatives and friends, more and more sounds like
The kind of pear-bellied early instrument
Skills all but lost are wanted, or the phoenix
Quill of passion, to pluck a minor scale from
And to let the silence after each note sing.

James Merrill The Book of Ephraim

and with that little bit of nuance, whereupon both reach for cigarettes, (really? there's so much in the opening pages, but not much that really gets me like that stanza does), i'm going to go run in the park. because it's gorgeous here. and i'm alive! "There are degrees of radicality at borders; some you can cross, some you can't. The uncertainty is what makes them interesting. Is what makes them borders. A page has a size. A self has flesh. Defy this; if language goes beyond reality, go there too. Of course there is danger. Anyone who slipped would find themself impaled. Foucault talks about a flash of lightning that harrows the night, a violence that leaps at its own core. You kiss my eye. You cross me. Here is the speechless place. Beget what we are." Anne Carson.

better than emerson's apple, this one. and familiar.

the world was BANANAS with color, flowers, puppies and blue skies this weekend, and i'm going to catch the rest of the sun. xoxo

Thick As a Brick (Edit No. 1)

2008-05-09T16:57:00.000-04:00

i'm a whore for grace.

don't forget.

your haggard saints

2008-05-08T08:02:00.011-04:00

i'm sitting here after a crazy night of melatonin dreams. (may i be evangelical for a minute? LOVE. always kind of awesome when the linguistic, giggling sapir-whorf manufacturing has visual codes.) and thinking of all our shared experience and language, whatever modernist cut-ups of thought, sex, voice, emotion (adios?) and consciousness that has been going on between us, what we know and what we come to, the relief of laughter is paramount. maybe that dry, sun-blasted smell of sage so prevalent in the galilean foothills. so this—if you have gone public, i have been watching, and that's my strange little attractor. like this, we have two different experiences of butterflies. of poetry. of reading. there is no more a character named "jennie". or "po" or whatever weird and useless name i've given myself in public. can you imagine that? so let me re-introduce myself. you know when mirabel changes irrevocably into something else (first, bat/ephraim. then, peacock) and suddenly, gloriously offers himself to the couple on the other side of the mirror. a living, breathing courtesan rather than a board and alphabet and symbols. to lend his young beauty. and later, "light falling sideways from a half dark mind". the next to last thing is "touch me not". i began in the garden and i will return there. i should re-read but i think the last transformation is michael. and kind of awesome: Merrill makes relentless fun of Yeats.

waking up into a muted, rainy morning and ladies and gentleman, bodies fall. there are falling bodies and fathers, people die. fuck that. saying good bye to you on 14th and then walking down into the subway. i miss you, too.

what are we going to do? i really liked this post yesterday morning?

Did someone mention a rapture?

2008-05-07T13:12:00.004-04:00

Oh, was I supposed to answer that question? Looks like the answer might be yes.

Though it looks like I'm starting to get my wits about me and be here. It's been a rough week. That new job, likes we were sayin' over a lovely beer and no doubt before or after bursting into one of the many lovely laughs we had together in your city, might ultimately end up facilitating writing. And may ultimately have already facilitated those bursts of Berlin. But this week? It's been all about catching up on things and trying to get things in place and sending emails and making phone calls and figuring out where to get lunch and finding a morning caca rhythm and when am I going to squeeze in the gym session and you certainly get the picture by now.

But? Here I am in my hideout writing to see if I can get my voice back. You know. That voice I write you with. Because there are always the bigger questions.

It was over another one of those beers that I mentioned to you. Like, I don't know how much to mourn here in public. Which is funny. Because I didn't know how much to say about my sex in public in public. I'm not being redundant. That second public means "on this blog." And with that very sentence I understand why. My sex in public was already public. In a way. But what I ended up saying here. The weeks before my father died. What was that anyway? Not exactly private. It was something that had been waiting to happen. Something I'd been waiting to live. Again. I'd been there before. But I'd never been there again before. That sounds too prettily paradoxical. But I think it's right. I'd never been there again before. That again you get when you write shit like that down. That again that you're probably already getting again in another way. When you find yourself fucking. Or looking to fuck. Writing. You know what I'm talking about.

I think, though, really, that my rapture of the moment is really due to what I mentioned to you over yet another one of our beers. (Yes, we did drink a lot). I'm still caught in the strangeness of the fact that all that got written down, with so much thanks to you, so soon before Dad died. I haven't found a way to give that strangeness shelter yet. Which means I'm not quite home. And that's sad. Or really frustrating. Because I'd just found a way to give a lot of other strangeness home. To allow it to define my home. Be its own shelter. And then he had to up and die. We do, you know. Kiki tells us ladies and gentleman that that's all we need to know. Or she used to say so before she survived her and Herb's death at Carnegie Hall. Since then, I haven't seen her harp on that too much. Which actually makes total sense. People die. And then they live on. Otherwise.

Just starting to make out how Dad lives on otherwise. It's still pretty faint. And it's complicated. Of course all the talk on the couch is pretty much about that. Or starts and ends with that. Thank goodness for that couch. There's a lot going on there. Probably why there's a little less going on here on this blog. Don't think I told you. That day I wrote through what I know of the moment of my father's death. And you told me I took your breath away. And I told you I'd already taken my own away. That caesura. That publicity I allowed myself to lend my mourning. Well. That exists because I missed my session of analysis that day. Paid for it anyway. And that all made sense. I needed to be sitting down. Up off of the couch. Writing that down. There's a lot more I need to write down. Soon. Today. Yesterday, too.

Funny story. My other web incarnation just got linked the other day. From a Frenchie sociologist's blog. He cites me on my former webworld in his bibliography. He's that kind of blogging sociologist. And you know what? That was some good shit I wrote down. It made me happy to have written it.

It hurts now how happy it was to have seen you and yours. I miss you. You're here, too. Otherwise. And that's strangeness. It needs shelter.

2008-05-02T17:58:00.001-04:00

someone got raptured?

A little advice

2008-05-02T15:21:00.002-04:00

So next time you take a place from the international terminal at JFK, I don't know, like if you come see me, I have a little advice. Do NOT. I repeat. Do NOT eat at the Wok and whatever it is next to the McDonald's which actually might be a better choice. Because you might eat something that makes you almost faint in the plane. Literally. My blood pressure went kaput and I collapsed onto the guy sitting across from my row. That's never happened before. And of course there's lots of other things contributing here. Leaving my father's country again after his death. Refusing, maybe, on some bodily level, incorporating the idea of him into me. But also having been so well surrounded by yous guys. A couple of months that, as I was recounting them no later than before the theater on Wednesday, were already making me a little dizzy. You know, there's a lot going on that could make you wanna faint.

Hope your last day or two since we said goodbye on 14th street have been a little less uneventful.

xxoo suzanne

A Proximate Hello

2008-04-18T09:07:00.004-04:00

So I just slept in S's bed where you sometimes sleep. Like before waking up to talk with me about Grief Lessons. As if that moment could ever be repeated. On the couch next to the one I'm sitting on now. The dogs and cats you so often caress are around. It's nice to be so proximate and say hello. You must be at work and our rhythms are differently in sync. And tonight? We get to eat dinner together.

from this broken hill

2008-04-16T23:27:00.003-04:00

All your children here
In their rags of light
In our rags of light
All dressed to kill
And end this night
If it be your will

i read that as rage of light. of course i did. skipped over this one because i was so excited about rufus' chelsea hotel #2. I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel, you were talking so brave and so sweet, giving me head on the unmade bed, while the limousines wait in the street. Those were the reasons and that was New York...

I will sing to you
From this broken hill
All your praises they shall ring

for from joy all beings have come, by joy they all live, and unto joy they all return. sit quietly behind your wooden door; spring will come again.

My honey, my little baby, my honey, my star. wanna build a chamber around the moon?

"Just One Star"

2008-04-15T12:05:00.006-04:00

So another funny thing is that song you've just posted. It comes up a lot on my ipod. Because if you click on "Antony And The Johnsons" and not "Antony & the Johnsons," which is obviously a different group for my silly ipod, and also not just "Antony" all alone, which gives you special access to two songs by Antony, one by our friend Mr. C that sometimes makes me think of you because it's called "If It Be Your Will" and another that's footage of Antony singing "Rapture" on a film set that I had a very indirect nudge or two in orchestrating. So if you do click on "Antony And The Johnsons" and then click on "All Tracks" (or whatever it is in English b/c my pod speaks French to me) and then go to the album version of "Rapture," after that you get to fall "Deeper than Love," and then you get to hear tribute to "Divine" ("and I'll swallow their shit laughing on my bed of hay/ And I hold your big fat heart in my hand!..."), before "burning... I'm on fire" in "Blue Angel," followed by a brief and very sweet sojourn with a wicked witch whose loneliness is too lovely to leave beside the "Lake" that I found on a compilation. And then you get to that song. Which comes up again three songs later. Because I have both the EP and album version of it. Which is lucky. You'll understand once you get to the end of this entry.

I am scared of that middle place, too. And these days I've even been scared of that interlude he does, well, right smack dab in the middle of that song. When he lets his moans be song. Look at his mouth in that video! It's as crazy as the crying he does at the beginning. Which crying is disastrous, of course, and shows just how attuned he is to the disaster we're living through. That's the big "we" there. Not just you and me. Because the tears stop him, he wipes his eyes, and then he allows that break to modulate his infinitely porous voice through the rest of his line. And all the way to the end where he smiles big and talks about the crystal formations he's putting in the air through his piano keys and thanks everybody for the great time he's had. Fuck me, I love him.

But I've been particularly scared of that middle place he seems to sing his way through with his wide open mouth and pounding piano before I even saw him singing it on our blog. One can't help but imagine it must sound something like that. That middle place. Or at least be as terribly strange. Here, I do, though, come across something that consoles me. Which hurts, too, weirdly. Consolation, I mean. My mother was beside my father when he died. She helped him down the stairs as he was having his stroke. She laid him down at the foot of the stairs. Asked him if he wanted a pillow. Got him one and called the neighbor. Who put a cold compress on his burning forehead. So I've been told. Mom told me she was beside herself.With my father lying on the rug. Not knowing what to do. That was between 2:15 and 2:30 Paris time on the afternoon of Friday April 4. That she was telling me this story. And when she got to the part about being beside herself. I had to speak through tears and remind her. "Mom! You might have been beside yourself but you were beside him, too!" It was important to me to insist. I was rediscovering a moment I'd written and published about. If I say too much, I become immediately googlable. But suffice it to say that it'll be something like my academic Antony moment. Won't go there again, I don't think, in academic writing. Who knows though. One of the things I'm proudest of is a silly hyphen. That's not as easy to google. "She does—live on," I wrote about a character in a novel who finds herself consoled by somebody beside her who's also beside himself. That's consideration for you. I think a fairly precise definition of it. And the hyphen, to my mind, puts that sentence beside itself. With a catastrophic break in the middle that is the condition of "her" survival.

If you're listening to Antony And The Johnsons on my ipod. And if he hasn't already put you so far beside yourself that you have to push the pause key at the bottom of the wheel. You get a really beautiful song called "Frankenstein" that seems to be all about falling into the monster's arms and getting confused about whose arms are holding whom. And just after that. If you're me last Friday. The day after returning to Paris after leaving your father's casket at his grave. You got a song that I hadn't noticed. Hadn't really heard. Until last Friday. Sitting in the Luxembourg Gardens waiting for T who was bringing pastry and coming to sit beside me by the Marie de Medici fountain. Because it was a gorgeous, chilly, early-Spring day out. And I was in the neighborhood. And T works not far. And because I wanted to sit beside someone who's been so amazing about allowing himself to be beside himself beside me so many times. It's not always easy. Consideration doesn't happen every day. Especially if you're a couple. So waiting for T. And enjoying the weather. And the pause I was allowing myself. The luxury that can also come with mourning. A little beside myself because of the circumstances. And listening to Antony sing. Which so clearly puts him beside himself. Literally, too, since it's a recording. "Just One Star."

"I am just one star caught in the shine
My friends, my mama loves me, but it's not enough
I wanted to be more, more than I could bear
I am just one star born of grace and soon to die
But if I can just learn how to love then I could live
My honey, my little baby, my honey"

“oh i’m scared of the middle place, between light and nowhere,”

2008-04-14T22:40:00.002-04:00

when antony gets halfway through the line “oh i’m scared of the middle place, between light and nowhere,” he stops to cry.

it’s the most upsetting thing ever filmed—worse than if tom waits started weeping while singing the opening of train song: “well I broke down in east st. louis, on the kansas city line…i fell down at the derby, and now the night’s black as a crow. it was a train that took me away from here, but a train can’t bring me home.”
max abelson

p.s.

2008-04-13T23:51:00.000-04:00

t. is okay but he looks like a crack baby.

here we are

2008-04-13T22:26:00.011-04:00

things get really sharp in the days after. you know who came for you and who didn't. you know who was scared and who wasn't. you know love and you know what the trees look like after years of distortion. and all of it matters and some of it doesn't. there's nothing like it, the few weeks, months after a death. it just is. there's some high comedy in there too (you find out exactly how everyone hopes for what comes after, what god will do or not do, how safe they will be, and some of those flower arrangements, i mean wow. and now is not the time for ecclesiastes or maybe you're giving me that new age book, why? how helpless we are to insist we know what we're talking about, no matter what the pleiadians transmit) and this is consideration and we do have a word like your french one in english: sidereal, as in sidereal time.

people appear to be under the impression that a person writes about death or whatever in order to set it right, or make it make sense thru what means you have at hand. that's human. more often then not, it's a song that comes to you like antony, or the way the pear trees look in the light at dusk, when ashes are committed to the river. i'm speaking from experience. we walked thru the hospital to a morgue room and identified his body. there is nothing like that. there is nothing to describe it. he was gone, and his features had assumed the death mask. and the howl that came out of me was primitive and silent. my mother who had gone so far in the hour before, who was not there except as grief, came back and witnessed me. watched me with inexorable pity and love. we were looking at each other as i collapsed. and that's all there was to it. it was just a moment, probably no more than a few minutes. i think it was the clearest, truest moment of my life. and you know, it's not. it won't be, it wasn't. there was nothing to make anything radically better. and that is consideration.

i found out about j's death on NPR. no that's not right. k. called me because she had heard, and i turned on the radio, walked to the bathroom, stepped in the shower and experienced the worst headache of my life. it was blinding. i think i passed out. and then crawled into bed, still wet and shivered. i remember thinking, i thought i had this down. i wasn't thinking about d. i was thinking about all the funerals i stopped going to in san francisco, there were too many, and i didn't want death like that even if it cemented a community, even if it was paying your respects, it was too much and i turned to writing and my life. and then it dawned on me that i had heard it on the radio and i was raging. the mid-morning light cut thru my eyes like a razor and i did throw up. and then i slept. and i think i woke up, i'm sure of it, feeling like i didn't have anything to live for. what's the point. it's exhausting. love doesn't stop death.

i recovered from that very quickly and got angry again. she died 3000 miles away with only 4 people who'd known about her choice to go off chemo and who knew enough to honor her wishes and not tell people. it didn't really happen until a few years later. when her voice started coming back. her letters, notes, encouragement, her laugh, even the brand of cigarettes she smoked. d. i saw in lucid dreams all the time for awhile, until i performed what prayers i could, and then he went away and didn't disturb me in that strangely impotent and invasive way, i really felt like i was impeding his passage, and did what i could to release him. but who knows, i probably needed to feel important to him, like i could help. but here were concrete things happening, that i needed to listen to. i mean really? look at what's in front of you, look around, everyone you love cares and loves as deeply as she did, they don't fuck around with truth, they hold to their humanity and hearts and they fail and they fight and circle themselves like the rock of mecca no matter what obstacles there are, and total doubt and despair isn't helpful on any level, unless it is, maybe in those moments after coming so hard and being so close to inconsciousness, to un-self, no selfishness. even for a moment. here are all your fantasies, they are true. here's all the music, here's all the care. here are assurances of her and of god. and fuck if i wasn't honoring that and making her death into a small thing. everything you have written down, the creatures and the kids and the trees, that was all there to begin with inthe days after, all those awesome and bright and horrifying moments. those really sad places and feelings, keep writing it down, go as far out as you want, i wish i had. i wish i had. she kind of kicked my ass, which was nice of her. start doing your work, the real work with real people and relax, she said. and then she lit a cigarette. she said, now you aight, lady? because i have others to tend to.

you and i had this talk when we were sitting on the couch having morning coffee. i asked you what book you had, and you handed me "grief lessons". well, you know what happened after that. and what we have and have not talked about. and i guess i'm telling you all of this because that conversation does not end, whatever form it takes, whoever it's with. your father, your tenderness, and your savagery, the lighter that didn't work on your walk. you don't learn anything from this, but i think you do fight for passions and some laughter. even with all the falling things, there's the song. there's no alternative, and no consolation. and here we are, and here love is.

it's an interesting thing too, that someone saying "i'm sorry." is actually the best thing anyone can say. it's perfect. i was on the fence about it before d's death. because i'd never experienced a death and i thought it was lame, i mean people saying that. but that's not so.

"The year of grace 1654.
Monday, 23 November, feast of Saint Clement. . .
From about half-past ten in the evening
until about half-past midnight.

FIRE

The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.
Not of the philosophers and wise.
Certitude, joy, certainty, feeling, joy, peace."
Pascal

i'm sorry.

Creatures and Cherry Blossoms

2008-04-13T05:44:00.006-04:00

So one funny thing about all this which is not at all funny. I mean besides your style in telling it. And I also mean funny as in weird, not funny haha. So one funny thing is that Mom and Dad (two names that work something like letters do according to Roland Barthes, "treasures of the symbol" and magical fairies and all that), well, they got a little dog a little over a month ago now. She's a year old, and it looks like she's going to stay little. I'm terrible when it comes to breeds, so I'm not going to be able to tell you exactly what breed she is. But she's damn cute. Even T, who's not a big dog person, couldn't help but be into her. I mean she's like one of my parents' last projects together, and she runs around the kitchen and den because she's not allowed into the rest of the house yet. And she leaps up onto the sofa and nestles right behind your neck. There's a picture of her doing just that over Dad's shoulder. If she's feeling frisky she licks your ear and makes you go aqmdlkqflkmdfj when she does that. Which was a nice unavoidable kind of thing to have happen in between bouts of tears. Turns out that the day of my father's funeral she was scheduled to be spayed. Which was weird timing, but also good timing since that was the day the house was really filled with people. And my brother-in-law took her in early and went and picked her up at the end of the day when the house had mostly emptied out. Just close friends of my Mom's and of the family who it was nice to see around. Not so much because I like them in particular, but because it seemed to indicate that Mom would have people around when she's going to need them. And among those people there was my aunt. My Mom's sister. T and I call her my ex-lesbian aunt. Because she used to live with a woman when she lived in California. And now she's married. But she never really came out. Even once there was also me. And now she's married to this real jerk that nobody likes. I don't even think she does. Like him, I mean. When I once mentioned her in analysis, the voice behind my head protested. "EX-lesbienne !!!" my shrink, who's a lesbienne, said. As if that were not possible. She's also probably got an alcohol problem. Like her father. Which tends to make Mom crazy. Anyway, at the moment, and it's a moment that's lasted for a little while now, there's a woman that's living with her and her husband. Which is a weird scene. Because everybody knows that she's living with her but she has no named function and in spite of that my aunt brought her over the night after the funeral and after the dog got spayed. My aunt's friend works in a vet's office. Which is how she met my aunt. Long story. Weird southern Gothic. Because my aunt's husband that nobody likes ended up killing their two dogs. Left them in a hot car. And my aunt ended up bonding with this woman at the vet clinic. When she brought them in. Maybe a year or so ago. But this friend of my aunt's made my Mom mad the day of my father's funeral because she overrode the vet's orders and fed the dog a little bit even though we'd been told she wasn't supposed to eat. And she went back to her place to get a cone for her head. This is the funny not haha but weird part. Because it, too, involves a cone around a creature's head. She said the dog was nibbling on her stitches and that she wasn't supposed to. And so she put a cone around her head. My youngest sister took it off fairly promptly. And watched her to make sure she wasn't licking her stitches too much. Even though she also had her two five-month-old twins to be looking after. When I wasn't. Looking after them, I mean. Because I went whole-hog on the whole Uncle routine. Throwing them into the air. Tickling their necks. Making them smile. Singing them songs. Letting the boy suck my thumb while he made nonsense sounds that no doubt made a lot of sense to him. Thank goodness for all of these creatures. And a big get well soon to you and yours.

Oh, and the cherry blossoms. On the way to the cemetery. Everything in bloom on a beautiful warm spring day. Warm enough for the blossoms already ready to make their way down. Blowing in the wind and falling to the ground. I in the car. With lots of my family. Humming in my corner of the car. Watching blossoms fall to the ground. "Eyes are falling/ Lips are falling/ Hair is falling to the ground/ Slowly softly/ Falling falling/ Down in silence to the ground/ All the world is falling, falling/ All the blue/ From me and you/ Teardrops falling to the ground/ Teardrops/ I'm talking 'bout your teardrops // For instance/ Oh, my momma/ She's been falling/ falling down for quite some time/ And oh my poppa/ He's been falling/ Falling down for quite some time..." I don't know how I'd have survived up to now without Antony.

Later that day. After singing the song all day long in my head. And not getting the lyrics quite right. I took a walk with the ipod. Down to the football stadium that's like a 10 minute walk away. Site of adolescent angst. And wandering from home. Had to ask a scary looking group of three for a light. Because mine, of course, ran out of juice right there that very moment that I had left the foyer to smoke and think and walk and be alone. Settling into Suzanne. Looking at houses that were the backdrop for so much alienation. And then the football stadium. Walking all the way around it. With Antony on repeat. "Is this the rapture?... Oh my father/ Who art in heaven... " If it is. The rapture I mean. It might just be what it is. And I might just need to breathe in deeply and watch and write falling things down. You know, like stars that have fallen to earth. Needing consideration. Because you can say that in English. Consideration. It's the sideration I was looking to be able to say in English. With the "with" of the "con-." The tenderness of consideration and the savagery of the stars nestled in the word. "Is this the rapture?..."

kitty valium

2008-04-12T09:59:00.008-04:00

plan awesome worked. i enjoyed that bottle of wine very much. o. and i snuggled on the couch with a blanket and some crackers and cheese and drinks. he was more flipped out then i was, initially, if that's possible. before i took him from an ex. he'd had very bizarrely hectic and horrific things happen to him so he's incredibly sensitive to any changes. he's kind of more like a shepherd dog, he wrangles and vocalizes and needs a job and safety. i was worried about him, because it's been like, 9 years of being with t, and this is the first time they were separated. when i came home, he jumped in the cat carrier, and then he wandered around looking for t in all the places that t usually is. then he settled on my chest and fell asleep, exhausted. the kind of sleep that's quite as normal in it's trust as he was in his confusion. i stroked his nose, and between his eyes, up into the top of his head, behind his ears. he moved softly and sighed. trust and pleasure is kind of amazing.

that was a few hours. and there was a storm last night, an incredible one. gorgeous. the lights were low in the apartment and the music was lovely. i thought about t in the lab, probably in a cage, like he'd been when i met him as a kitten. i hope he wasn't scared. more likely drugged out of his mind so the thunder sounded like a mama cat's heart.

a weird phenomenon of my building, lightning hits the top of the roof and crackles down the side, so that happened a couple of times. the surge was sort of incredible.

anyways, the AMC just called. i'm gonna go see my beautiful friend.

update!: in the cab over we were listening to NPR. i don't know what show it was but my pity and stress and drama queen explosion was interrupted by "are you there god? it's me margaret." srsly. the host was reading from that book. BWAaHAHAH hAHHAHhHAhasdfghjkl;'

then, at the emergency room:
ooh! a ferret!
dogs are awesome. even if they are sick they have to play with each other.
ooh! kitty valium!

they brought him out and he had one of those cones around his neck and like catheter bags all over and i just bawled. the tech was, what the hell? and said, he's uncomfortable. and i was all WELL, CLEARLY CAPTAIN OBVIOUS. so we went back to the west side and i was singing to him, and he was knocking his head against my leg trying to rub it with his head. there are at least 4 cab drivers in this city who think that they had a lunatic in their car, and they are right.

so now he's at my vet and he has to keep the thing in him for 36 hours counting from yesterday when i brought him in initially, and probs won't be home until tomorrow night. o. is chilling and i'm going to go for a run in the park. i hate running but i feel like it would be good. all the plum and cherry blossoms are out!

i told my brother what happened and about the catheter in t's penis for 36 hours and i was like kitty valium is the least of what i hope they gave him he could have all my percoset for fuck's sake jesus and g. was like omg it's good they have him, probably the longer the better so you don't have to see what he's going through. you can imagine he's in a little meadow with flowers. and i said, chasing butterflies! and he said. look at that butterfly! it's blue.

in the landscape of spring there is neither better or worse

2008-04-11T21:09:00.010-04:00

hi w. i just spent the last week in hospitals for one love and another. s. is fine after really a couple of years of worry and stress. but god. those first few seconds of consultation after and right before the physician starts speaking. you read a face. anyways, we know what it is now and it can be handled. i think she liked the morphine (i sure did!). she was cute. i almost grabbed the cab driver by the collar and said make sure she gets home, but she insisted i go back to work. i think i shouldn't have either tuesday or the last two days.

tonight i was forced to leave my cat, t, at the animal medical center/emergency room over on 62nd and FDR overnight. he almost died: that's what the vet said and then she said something about potassium levels and i said IS HE ALRIGHT and that startled her out of whatever clinical coma and she said OH YES and became human. horrible. over 2 days he just deteriorated so fast, i was in at one vet one morning and he was bouncing around and charming everyone then it turned the next day and he was deadweight and growling, in a lot of pain. apparently blockages happen like that, really fast. so i threw us both in a cab. the cab driver had a pet goat back in bangladesh so we talked about that and what goat's milk taste like and he let me have a cig. i do not like emergency rooms, who does. then, i hated the vet on principle in the emergency room when she said i had to leave him there for the night after she grabbed him away from me, but you have to be nice because they are taking care of your baby, and there's nothing that you can do otherwise because, clearly, you are not a fucking vet. they want to keep him all catheterised and blood work and whatnot for 3 days but i am going to transfer him back to my vet who i called on the pager. you're supposed to only do that in dire circumstances so i did it. i had a slice of pizza on my walk home, and almost threw up. low fog so far east. everybody is alright after this long few days.

there was one night at dick's when we first met, now closed and a wine bar (jesus god i hope not?), we had some such conversation about writing, death and love. and i think, exposure. we always do in one way or another. none of this, all this goddamn care, i guess, is reducible to body chemistry. how about that? we will see each other next week xoxo ps. j. sent this poem back. now i'm going to get shit drunk and drink the rest of this wine.

Afterthoughts.

2008-04-11T12:10:00.004-04:00

I mean that title literally. Like when did it get the connotation of "regret." Because, really, I don't have many. Just thoughts after things. Like I'm writing after my father's funeral. And am now back in Paris. Sun's out, though we just had a proverbial April shower. I've survived the trip back to the place where my strangeness was first sheltered, and even apparently somehow encouraged, and we have buried my father. At least I think so. As T noted shortly after the graveside part of services, it's a little weird to leave with the casket propped up on its strange metallic scaffolding kinda thing. That must have struck him because within the last year I was beside him for the cremation of his grandmother's body. One had the option of watching the cremation happen on a video screen. We didn't take it. But there were reliable witnesses who told us it had happened.

Everything was of course super intense. Intensified, too, by the fact that my father had left each of us, his three children, a letter, sometimes two. Apparently one for my Mom as well. She said the letters to us were better, though. But she might just need to reread hers. Mine left me a little cold when I read it the night after the funeral. I mean it was nice then, too, but didn't do anything like what it did when I read it over T's shoulder the next day on the plane to Paris. When it made me cry, and left me wondering why he couldn't say some of the things in the letter while he was alive. Because I was waiting for him to say something like what he wrote to be read after he'd gone. Maybe it's to keep me hurting. In a good way.

He'd also left a letter to be read at his services. By one of his law partners. Who did so and somehow only choked up at the end. Though he did say, as part of his preface, that he hadn't been able to read it without crying up until then. It's funny to think of my Dad as a drama queen. But he had that side to him. A side my mother referred to as "maudlin" over the course of the days leading up to the funeral. There was that. And lots of other things, too.

One of the things I might be working out here over the next entries won't come as a surprise to you. How can I make my name match up with the kinds of things I've just written? My name, it turns out, when it's not Suzanne or some other avatar, is his. And kindness was something that his "Farewell Address" insisted on several times. With Biblical citations and everything. And kindness, I think, marks some of the tone I found to strike in the entries about Berlin. So there's that link. I'll be working on others. And, who knows, maybe I'll figure out a way to be able to sign the things. Or some interesting way around it that makes sense for me. And for my memories of him. And all he's left me with. Which is a lot. And heavy and interesting and light and spacious. Tender. And a little savage, too.

until the day is done

2008-04-10T18:58:00.006-04:00

autoerotic is this great project my friend j started. i just clicked through it again. pretty. The definiton of erotica is not limited to striking a pose in front of the lens and pushing a button. An elbow, a wrist, the way clothes can hang on the hips, all of these examples – and many more – are entirely valid definitons of erotica. Don’t be afraid to explore and, more importantly, enjoy the process. ooh. i was just wandering around my bookshelf and found this, and callas is on. just opened up the book, perfect for what we've been talking about. guess why it's wonderful. What's really funny is i almost took "the grail legend" off the shelf. i'm so glad i didn't. it was that or "kissing god goodbye".

It's About You: On the Beach

You have
two hands absolutely lean and clean
to let go the gold
the silver flat or plain rock
sand
but hold the purple pieces
atom articles
that glorify a color
yours is orange
oranges are like you love
a promising
a calm skin and a juice
inside
a juice
a running from the desert
Lord
see how you run
YOUR BODY IS A LONG BLACK WING
YOUR BODY IS A LONG BLACK WING

june jordan

2008-04-09T17:20:00.001-04:00

Barkis was willing. I love you. Nancy.

2008-04-06T15:58:00.006-04:00

"Bach had a habit of imbedding mystic numbers in his compositions; these ones happen to correspond to the ones nature imbeds in its own. But this coincidence was the least of the qualities that made this music Ressler's best metaphor for the living gene... Superimposed over those first four triplet rungs, a diversionary tune that, with grace notes, contains twenty tones. Two halves of the aria, each sixteen, bars, both scored to repeat, totalling sixty-four measures.... two copies twist around one another with helical precision... I listened to these miniatures for a year, pulled out of them the most marvelous genetic analogies. But at the end, the music refused to reduce, and it hurt worse than before."
(cut and paste from whatever i could find on the web from "the gold-bug variations")

i'm not sure about the muse's potentially violence producing endurance to say or unsay (did it hurt? where are you going, without me?). but you're right, in the song suzanne just makes you understand what the river is saying, and jesus' less conflicted place as a sailor. and oranges. that's enough. that and mr. c could sit there and smile. and then end up in the chelsea hotel with janis joplin and produce that whole other song. i'm thinking that was his thing. and some people write about angels descending firescapes dressed in workman's overalls, because that's what they saw and it flows in that transcendant american lineage, and life, in some way, is fought for.

weirdly, a little later, we're having dinner right around the corner from the old loft. we moved from the townhouse on 11th to this place on jane street. that was where i'd come back to for approximately 8 years starting in the early 90's and through my stepfather's death. i go to a very specific place in that area now, mostly florent, but i just realized that i avoid the entire place if i can. and i say weird or uncanny because the night before he died we had a not too often dinner with all of us. i mean, i usually saw them once or twice a week, at least but not all of us together like that. me, my brother, my stepfather and my mother, his kids at the big chinese place that's right on hudson (i'm wondering right now if it's still there. i'll check.) My stepfather came rushing in excited to say that he had figured it out and it came down to this, a dialectic between intellectualism and anti intellectualism. sounds stupid! he exclaimed. ridiculous! but 40 years of piecing it together and that's it! it covers everything! it's only apparently contradictory. the realists against the nominalists, like philosophy: the idealists against the materialists and so forth, but we have no grasp on relationship, or our language doesn't... are you mediocre or are you a fanatic, are you a mystic or a sensualist? degradation is only associated with subjective shame. not everything is allegory and symbolism. and there is limitations on human energy. i think at that point i ordered some orange beef with chestnuts and it had come and other things had come, and someone got a diet coke and the dumplings were good. i do remember we also talked about the klee show that was up at MOMA. and time. and paradox. free will vs. determined. to be honest, in my more crystal visions and totem animal moments i believe that he had entered the way. or at least he was in that almost incredible place of total acceptance.

he did another thing that was uncharacteristic at the end of the night. he gave us all hugs, slapped us on the back. he always gave his son a great big hug. P. has autism, so my stepfather bypassed the social constructs he maintained to give his son a huge beautiful hug everytime they saw each other, and that night he extended that to all of us. okay! he said we're okay! and he laughed his great laugh. the next morning he died of a heart aneurysm within 20 minutes. he was young, just 66. i think he travelled and thought a little like wittgenstein, who he loved and admired, and he wanted a less conflicted relationship with the world and especially his mother, who committed suicide and caused his sister to kill herself before she did. he was an insomniac and a wanderer. i think i told you? but i would go into florent all cracked out from a night of dancing or sex or whatever at 4 or 5 in the morning and there he would be, reading. i'd come over and sit with him and he'd order me a chocolate milkshake, or an egg cream. and we'd talk. he got a big kick out of my tranny friends. no one wants to be different, no one wants to really be a coherent self. he could be really mean too, it must be said. he told me that i was alienated. isn't that mean? but i kind of agreed. he was probably after a nondestructive jouissance and he loved the radical shattering, like anyone else. wow, i love him.

so. he's gone. and that's my whole rambling point. you have this long conversation with someone, all parties are right and wrong, a significant conversation (itself in the language of natural love, just and unjust), they show you things, rivers, consciousness, fear (i'm thinking of the yeats poem) faith, questions. and he did not want to die. where did you go, david. without us.

Talking Muse

2008-04-04T10:57:00.005-04:00

OK. Suzanne here. Maybe. Because the thing is. Can a muse talk? And if so, what happens to the song? Does the song need a mute muse to get sung in the first place? Are there possibilities for counterpoint? I'm sure there's loads of great lit crit to read on all that. Maybe I will. In the song, Suzanne just makes you understand what the river's saying. Only Jesus talks in that song. I mean besides the one telling "you" what it's like spending the night with her. I regret referring to her as a bag-lady. That's Wikipedia's fault, but I replicated it. So now it's my bad, too.

Suzanne doesn't talk in the song. But I did just find this 1998 interview. Apparently there were chats. "I felt his presence really being with me." And. "I would always light a candle and serve tea and it would be quiet for several minutes, then we would speak." And. "He became a big star after the song was launched." And, when the interviewer says that it's sad that that made them move apart, Suzanne says, "I agree and I believe it’s material forces at hand that do this to many the greatest of lovers." After that line, at least, she apparently "(laughs)." This one's harder to swallow. If you're superstitious. And if you have limited tolerance for human interest stories. She talks about sculptor Armand Vaillancourt. "We accomplished many things while we were together. Traveling, having fun." You know, "the bohemian life" of the 60's that Suzanne is, in this storyline, pursuing against all odds, idealistic soul that she is, from the car she lives in at Venice Beach. Because she broke her back, she had to give up dancing. Professionally. She still participates in a drum circle every week, though. And according to one of her friends, "Suzanne is one of these rare souls who is actually sincere and cares about life and people and sees the world in terms of beauty." Seems, to CBC news at least, that she bears as little a grudge as is humanly possible. Though I'm sure "les rousseurs amères de l'amour" scorch her gullet every once in a while. Like any one still loving. Meaning, to my slant of mind, anyone still living. It'd be interesting to know more about how she deals with it. Apparently she's writing a memoir. It's a private thing she said she was living with Mr. C. "It was," she says, "kind of strange to have it blossom into this famous song that everyone was singing." Her shelter by the water giving many listening shelter in a song. Strange.

There's always a risk. With these kinds of things. Of taking things personally. It's come up in analysis. I'm still a student of Bersani's. Apparently. Because I keep talking about him. Not obsessively. But he comes up. Like when he says that sex is great. Even though nobody likes it. Until the persons are posed. That's when the war starts. ("Is the Rectum a Grave?") Stretched out on the couch. Found myself dreaming. Fantasizing. Of persons posed alongside arms. Weapons laid down. With mountains and music and hatred and nation and all of the other things you had me reading Allen laying down. Persons siderated, as we should be able to say in English, into earthly stars. Talking muses. Being there with tea and oranges. Or beer and leather. Or carbonara and wine. Or, really, whatever. So long as it's on offer. With consideration.

All of this because it's been working me over. It's not the only thing. My father died during my night. Early early morning phone call. So I. Stateside sooner than expected. But? Will be coming back. Back to the States. As expected. Unless something else unexpected. Comes up between now and then. Strange. Been thinking about this starry explosion. Already as mourning. Here I am with more mourning. But when I get to New York. I said so to my shrink. I know I'll be bien entouré. Meaning. Literally. Well surrounded. Some kind of home.

Laughing my way to bed...

2008-04-02T17:50:00.004-04:00

Yee haw. I don't know how you do it. Writing with that much sustained energy that makes me start smiling at the beginning of a sentence, quickly breaks me into giggles, and rolls me into a many a chortle by the end of the entry. Thank you very much for the recognition of the huge donut I just spun in our here parking lot calling myself Suzanne. I mean really. Jesus IS in that song. He was a sailor. And? Suzanne is a crazy bag-lady, wife of sculptor friend. Saw Mr C once or twice in concert. Maybe this is all common knowledge, but I had to look it up on Wikipedia. I might not be able to handle it. But it was the best I could find and I was desperate for sumthin'. Some name to be to you. Po! Hang in there. I'm just holding out the mirror. "Cause this is thriller..."

STILL BUSY

2008-04-02T17:32:00.008-04:00

just one thing, suzanne (and by the way VERY IMPRESSIVE. as one who has multiple personalities and many disorders and whole swaths of her life mapped out by various lyrics, that was flat out the best namecall i can ever remember. awesome. i'm serious. that was like a triple 580 back ollie off the pitch, brosef. or whatever. i'm totally jealous. JESUS IS IN THAT SONG.) ok, you know how when you are making an awesome mixtape # 6 for a friend and you totally have a great mellow (Jeff Tweedy, that one Blind Faith song, all thru Callas and then that unbelievably dark and strangely life affirming portishead because you know we are all roaming blackly and hilariously thru this world together) but not a bum trip train (not a uhm i think sigur ros actually fucks up my mood in ways i can't articulate even though it's calling me home WHEREVER THAT IS vibe), more like a rainy day and wine and creativity is awesome and ooh art projects! coalescing going on and you're flipping thru your library and all of a sudden you're all zOMG FUCK MICHAEL JACKSON I LOVE MICHAEL JACKSON THRILLER?

Mutschmann's

2008-04-01T16:11:00.006-04:00

There's only one more night to Berlin. Just over a week ago now. Then I promise I'll shut up about it. As a chronicle. A map of constellations. Just one more night. A night that began with the day T made his way back to Paris. Got a text from him on the plane. Saying he'd almost started crying. While waiting for the bus. Before even getting to the airport. Something about how we were there. That renewed how we're going to be elsewhere. Like here. He went back early to go on another trip. For work. No pleasure. Even though he got some even there. At the risk of pleasure. Gets hard to circumscribe. Even now, I experience slight hesitation. Writing before. I might hesitate getting started. And then I'd be in. Siderated. It should be a word in English. Sidéré. Greatly surprised. Except the stars are in there in French. In the word. In the 16th century, it meant influenced by the stars. In the 18th, you know, the Enlightenment, they invented a noun, sidération, to mean the sudden annihilation of vital capacities, in a state of apparent death, under the effect of an intense emotional shock. Now it basically means struck dumb. Which is how any I gets when it gets writing. "Mine" included. And here I am having written. Seeing stars.

So T sends the text message from the plane. I text back. "Don't be sad. I found the guy with the grosse Schlange on line." That seemed to reassure him a bit. Meanwhile. I alone in Berlin. Also found T² and W² on line. They had the same program for the night. Prinzknecht, a neighborhood bar, kinda like the Pilsner in San Francisco, big enough to become a general HQ for festive events. They do a lot of turn over. Must make their year, and make it pretty good, out of several different weekends of big German parties. One of the bartenders: he's also the poster boy for the leather store down the street. So Prinzknecht. And then Mutschmann's. We've been to Berlin Easter three times now. Always Sunday at the Mutschmann's. Last year I had big irretrievable philosophico-political thoughts about why we'd had so much pleasure. Surplus value. World economy. Fetish. Something about our moment in world history. Berlin's newly anchored market economy. All of us there knowing it's not real, but still. Feeling like it is. See? Irretrievable. Before T did me good in a booth downstairs.

This year. Lots of beers at the Prinzknecht flying solo. But chatting with the Frenchies. Or toasting one or two from afar. Waiting to see when T² and W² would walk in. They'd said around 10. I got there, as I said I would, earlier. Ended up standing towards the front of the bar. Chatting with a leather dude I see around Paris a lot. Met him in Berlin. At Snaxx. Could it have been just last year? Nope. Actually the year before. T has just now confirmed it. While he's reading about Snaxx on-line. No on-line access during his work trip. Lol. That's funny. That we're still hovering so concretely around Snaxx. Actually, this guy I was standing next to inaugurated the all-the-way-up-over-my-hiney zipper there. And we were chatting with another leather dude. From Antwerp. Who works in London. Chatting. But watching the door. For when T² and W² would walk in. They did. And I shortly followed. To the other side of the bar. Right up against the bar. Which meant several heave-ho's from time to time when some of the bigger bears would have to push past us to get to the potty. Or to another beer. Or to another bear. Chatty chatty. Auf Deutsch! Grosse Schlange! I said 11. To the guy with the grosse Schlange. Or 11:30. Which it shortly was. So off again, solo, into the night.

Not far. Just down the street. Handy. Early enough so there wasn't a line. Space of the Mutschmann's? Easy for once. Walk in. Big big bar in middle of space to right. With pool table to the other side of it. Much smaller bar straight on through. With stairwell leading to basement. With landing for chilling. One step down into darkness. Line of4 or 5 slings along right wall of darkspace. Big platform in middle of darkspace. As big as the bar upstairs, probably. Booths behind that. And a couple of dark corners round about back to the landing. So. Walk in. Walk around. Surprise! No grosse Schlange. But J. California J from Friday night. Well-past his goal of 20-30 German cocks by that point. No doubt. By the pool table. Chatty chatty. How's it going. How often do you get back to the states. More often now, I say. That my father's sick. I get his empathy. Know he heard me. Even if he's forgotten. Didn't stop him being excited. "Do you have a condom?" He asks me. While unzipping my zipper. We know where that goes. Did me good right there at the brightly lit pool table. I rattled the empty bottles and everything. Nice. No need for German Schlange. When I got done right by T's California thing. Friend of my good sex-buddy R. A kinda constellation. That helps you make out the other stars.

More beer. Cruising around. Running into a couple of Frenchies. Another J. Recent sex-buddy. Responsible for the shaved state of my torso and elsewhere. Nice encounter. See you soon in Paris. Still, at this point, citing the German Schlange. Then standing at bar. Cruising. Sorta. Waiting again. T²'s T-shirt. Pinch his butt. Poor thing. Too many beers. Beeline for the bathroom. W² in line checking coat. Then the three of us again at the bar. Then the two of us. T² likes to watch. Even in the dark. So the W's stand at the bar. T² coming and going. Kissing W². Lots and lots. Spilling beer at some point, reeling. Paying for beer spilled. T²'s had his fill of watching. Your place or mine chat. Theirs.

Out into the world. Cold world. Taxi-cab. Immediate. Whisking us to their hotel. Up the stairs into their room. Smoking something on the balcony. How can it already be 4:30? Hazy. Lots of beers. Lots of tenderness. Lots of doing good. Attention. To their longevity. Doing my best. To help it continue. Witness. To lots of love. Doing what I can. To show them what I get from it. That is to say. Not much sleep. But tender sleep what there was. In between them. Before waking. Check-out day. Rendez-vous for brunch. Café More. Like they named it for me. Reservation for 12:30. Confusion. Where am I? How to get back "home?" Maps. We're right at the fold of the map. So map not much help. Right and right again straight to train. No need for a map. Just a couple of words. Confusion. Bright sun. Me in all my leathers. Exhaustion, too, no doubt. Wrong platform. Switch platforms. On the way. Poster for Tillmans. "Lighter." Knowing. Suddenly. Exactly what I'd be doing with my extra day in Berlin.

10:45. "Home." Shower. Breakfast. With C and L. Chatty. German. Evaluation of parties. Snaxx too much for C. Understanding. But I like too much. On my way to the shower. L says, Time for bed? Nein, I answer. I can sleep in Paris. Shower. Comfy clothes. Fetishes by the wayside for brunch. Café More. I like too much. And I like More, too. My on-line profile. For a while now. Reads "Ready for more." Didn't mean the café until Easter Monday. Now means that, too. Long brunch. Nibbling at theirs. Drinking coffee. Looking at the boys. Thinking I might have ended up with others. But enjoying comfort of the click of parallel lines. On the banquette with T². W² across from us. What do you do. How long have you lived there. Where will you go on vacation. Paris. When? And that one's cute. And, oh, him, too. I think he's from Paris. Quiet. Tired quiet. Easy quiet.

Some kind of home. Out on the streets. For a walk. Stop at a building. Just look at that staircase. The streets of Berlin. On Easter Monday. So quiet and empty. Not like Paris. Wondering how. Knowing so little of each other. We could have so little need for talk. To keep us this comfortable. They pick up their bags. At their hotel. Call a cab. Kisses goodbye. See you in Paris in May.

Back home. Stretch out to rest. No sleep coming. Watch a little of the "New World." Terrence Mallick. DVD. I brought with me. Love that movie. Turns out the New World's in the Old. Or it's in both. It's a new relation to old codes. Too much for my state of exhaustion. Back out for dinner. And one or two last beers. Cross paths with P. Friend from Paris. Signing for an apartment in Berlin. The next morning. If all goes well. Apparently all did. Chatting. Evaluating space at Snaxx. Him telling me of other nights at the Berghain. Other than Snaxx. Me wondering. "Fucking the Remains" party at the Scheune. He's not going anywhere. But here or back to bed. Me saying, what the hell. Walking out the door. To the Scheune. Just can't quite get my head around it. Walking away from it. Thinking I have other things. Besides fucking. Like writing. Beside fucking. To do with the remains. Just missing bus. To take me back to the apartment. Waiting, therefore. 10 more minutes. On a cold stone pedestal. In the cold Berlin night. Relieved. At the idea and then the reality. Of a good night's sleep.

Good night's sleep. Next day writing you. "Quick Missive from Berlin." Going to Wolfgang Tillmans. Hail. Sun. Snow. Constellations. In the sky. On the earth. In the world. Fucked-up cosmos. There I am sidéré among them. Looking at pictures at an exhibit. Reflected in them. Literally. Incidentally. Barthes! Posthumous publication. Sad sad journal. Of tricks met and missed and desired. Incidents. Like me. And different.

Our Lady of the Harbour

2008-04-01T10:24:00.003-04:00

And the sun pours down like honey
On our lady of the harbour
And she shows you where to look
Among the garbage and the flowers
There are heroes in the seaweed
There are children in the morning
They are leaning out for love
And they will lean that way forever
While Suzanne holds the mirror

Hi. Nice to meet you. My name for now, for here, and at the risk of grandiosity, is Suzanne. There are other reasons, too. Like home is the place where strangeness finds itself shelter. And: "you know that she's half crazy /But that's why you want to be there." And: "just when you mean to tell her / That you have no love to give her / Then she gets you on her wavelength / And she lets the river answer." And: "And you want to travel with her /And you want to travel blind /And you know that you can trust her /For she's touched your perfect body with her mind."

But you know the song. XXOO.

servicey

2008-03-31T18:48:00.006-04:00

friday, pretty day out. people watched at diner. drank too much and passed out early, slept 11 hours so didn't go to the beach. puttered around. melatonin, certraline and drinks. such a mess. went to the gym on saturday and played with the cats. loved it. then met everyone at alta. went to nowhere and met some new people. academics. ran into kenny. sunday was gorgeous. gym, park and then dinner on riverside drive. we all walked back along the park. that walk is gorgeous at night. lots of doggies you could see boats on the water.

Spaghetti alla Carbonara on saturday night, the yummy kind too. how awesome is the synergy going on. what?

Heat 3 tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat.
Add 4 cloves crushed garlic; cook until golden, about 1 minute. Remove and discard garlic.
Add one 2/3-lb. chunk pancetta cut into 1/2"-long strips; cook until edges are crisp, 5–6 minutes.
Add 2/3 cup white wine; simmer until thickened, 2–3 minutes. Remove from heat.
Bring a pot of salted water to a boil.
Add 1 lb. dried spaghetti and cook until al dente. Drain, reserving 1/4 cup pasta water.
In a large bowl, whisk together 2/3 cup finely grated parmigiano-reggiano, 1/4 cup finely grated pecorino-romano, 2 tbsp. finely chopped flat-leaf parsley, and 2 eggs.
Slowly drizzle in reserved pasta water while whisking constantly. Add spaghetti along with reserved pancetta mixture. Season with salt and a generous amount of pepper. Toss to combine. Serves 4

so good. plus, add two major drinks of sangria. i was dizzy and chatty.

things are still stupid busy here. gr. when are you coming?

"I just show up"

2008-03-30T08:36:00.004-04:00

The boys I had over for dinner and Kiki liked Kiki. Said she had a real aesthetic. Which means that there were still comprehension problems. R had read the blog that day. Was touched by the way T figured into "Savage and Tender." Even playfully complained to M that he'd never talk about him that way. M has become my gym-buddy. We have fun chatting chatting chatting in between sets. Also went with me to listen to Judith Butler struggle with her French. I made a fan of him. We ate linguine alla carbonara. With chicken broth instead of cream. It's a weeknight standby T and I often make. And it's yummy. We usually do more exciting things for our guests. But since T is in Vancouver, I knew I was going to be alone slaving over the kitchen. And I allowed myself to take it easy. Plus we were going to watch Kiki and Herb. That was the main thing, really. I did some pausing, commenting, and translating for some of my favorite spots. Like? I told them I used to sing "Jesus loves me this I know" in Bible school. R said, "But not like that." For sure. Or how amazingly touching her monstrosity can be. Like when she sings "Boulder to Birmingham" just after missing Jesus and stopping her cat fight with Mary Magdalen. "But she's not grotesque," replied R, when I mistakenly referred to her beautiful monstrosity as grotesque. What did I translate? The moment when she says how worrisome it is that the fates of 12 million immigrants are being decided by 8 white men. Or when she talks about how Lilian Hellman stole her line. "I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashion." I didn't have to translate the moment where she says, "I'm a socialist. I socialize." Because they got that and laughed. And I just had to repeat "If I could love, I would love you all" for them to get it. I did have to translate the moment where her sister Candy's station wagon did an about-face in the driveway. "Best Christmas I ever had." And the moment after she sings the bit from "Horses" when Herb says she wasn't there for him because there's only one set of footprints in the snow. And Kiki says "Those aren't your footprints, Herb. They're my footprints. I carried you, Herb." Jesus. I've got them singing "Boulder to Birmingham" on the tube right now. It still makes me cry. "The hardest thing is knowing I'll survive."

Can I indulge a little fantasy? Maybe, like, I dunno, five years back I remember saying to our Brooklyn friend R, not to be confused with the R I invited over for dinner and Kiki with M, that Kiki should do an Emmylou Harris song. How long has she been singing that song? Could it be that this somehow filtered back to her? It's a funny fantasy. I don't really care too much if it's true or not.

Happy Birthday, Po. I love it that you have a mother who can find the New Yorker cover card that'll make you weep. And, as if you couldn't tell given all I'm finding to say thanks to the fact that I'm saying it to you, I'm so happy we started up this gig. I can quote Kiki for its title. "I just show up." It says a lot to this crazy long-distance long-term friendship we've got going on. I had forgotten the bees in the deli! So much I forget. Fucking Atlantic ocean. Keeping us so far apart. Beautiful big traversable ocean still somehow full of all kinds of life. There's a quote from a fag who wrote about Glenway Wescott, who was a fag who lived a sustained three-way with Monroe Wheeler and George Platt Lynes that I was really interested in for a while. That whole scene. The art it allowed for. I discovered it during a New York visit. I probably even talked to you about them. I had this idea I'd write a play about them. And that I'd call it "The Distance Between the Stars." So gay! Anyways. Thinking about this whole project I came across a quote that I ended up writing in a card to my father and mother, telling them why they should come to my graduation as a doctor from that great school in California. Because at first they didn't think it was important enough that they should go out of their way to come. Anyways. There's this gay who wrote a book called The First Time I Met Frank O'Hara. And he says that "The thrill of The Pilgrim Hawk [the most beautiful thing Wescott ever wrote] is the knowledge, slowly and skeptically gained, that there is always a completely different way of living from that of the struggling and occasionally beautiful but foolish people that underestimate the value of the straightforward expression, the self-exposing gesture, and the humbling aspects of being in love and, especially, of being loved."

Jesus. Here I am typing that and it so happens that Kiki's on the tube singing "Moments of Pleasure." In other words? I'm a puddle of happy tears.

Snaxx

2008-03-29T17:30:00.013-04:00

I'm eventually going to discern a constellation or two out of more than just my first day in Berlin. But there is one further detail from that day that might help me make them out. In the bus on the way from the airport to the apartment where T and I have rented a room enough times at this point to know the route by heart, I felt that heart of mine drop out of its cage into my belly. Something about the open sky. And the architecture and its wide streets. The different colors of the buildings. And my anticipation. And the fact that we've been watching episodes of Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz. And the different typefaces you see everywhere and only there. "Oh my God, I love this city." I said to T. Or something just as banal and inarticulate. Things get a little more complicated once we move into the next days. I think it might have something to do with that little ache I felt on my way in. Or the fact that the days between now and then are accumulating. And I've been great about gaping wide-eyed at the constellations as they emerge when I write them down for you. But. I started all this by talking about "Moments of Pleasure." "Just being alive/ It can really hurt." Sing it, Kate. Or Kiki. Or you or me. "They're in the same framework," you say Allen said Dylan had said to him. We do know these things. But I, at least, sometimes forget them. It's nice when you're able to wake up to them again. How long can I keep on waking?

So after Perverts. And D and T and V and I on the couch. And the cab. After sleeping in. Big German breakfast. With C and L. Our hosts. Cold-cuts, croissants, ham, weird sausage meat wrapped in plastic that's yummy when you mix it with spicy mustard on a piece of bread covered with grains and seeds and things. Quartz. You know that? Sorta like a cream cheese, but not so thick. Yummy. Jam. And chatty chatty chat. L is very chatty. In German! Lot to deal with early in the morning after a party. But nice. More resting. Going out. Walking around the leather shops looking for a hood. No hood. Too expensive. Or not right on my nose. And you don't want a hood that doesn't show off your nose. A coffee. Cruising. There's some good pictures of me and my haircut. A really good one of me reflected in a Tillmans violet at the exhibit on Tuesday. But I'm getting distracted. Bus back to the pad to rest a little bit before gussying up to go cruise some more. Chatting with the Frenchies. Like J-M and G. Members of BLUF club. Very nice men. Playpals of mine. On recent occasion. G starting new job. Independent. Free-lance. But French. And therefore nervous. Sweet nervousness in the midst of all his get-up. Cap and breeches and jacket all shined high. And J-M. Happy about his visit to a Schloss to see Watteau. Well worth the trip. Also lovely tense coexistence. Loving Watteau in a Muir-cap. Crazier things have been seen. Crazier people, too. Like the sexy skinhead whose dick I've sucked before and who, I didn't know, is a sous-chef and a disappointed Sarko-dolâtre and admirer of Mitterrand. T talked to him for a long time. The question on everyone's lips was: so what are you doing tonight? And, in general, the answer was: Snaxx. It was ours for sure.

We went early again. There were lots of stories about waiting hours in line. Previous years. And it was cold! out. So we didn't want to do that. So we took the U-bahn. And then the S-bahn for one stop. With lots of other men. Without advanced tickets. And we started standing in line at 10:40p.m. Doors supposedly opening at 11, but they were already open. Watched some little boys get turned away for looking too pretty. Not trashy enough. Without an identifiable fetish. It was cold. But it felt like every time the wind would blow, we'd move a couple of steps forward. Which says something about German efficiency. Big crowd in front of a former East Berlin factory. Waiting in line. Moving forward efficiently. "Maybe this is like the other side of the camps," I mumbled to T at some point. He didn't hear me. And I did repeat it. Made you feel weird. Also? Like you're getting ready to go into an Egyptian temple. Or Ancient place of worship of some sort. It's intense. The cold and the masses of men and the expectation and the memory of the space from our other visit. Some people leave saying it's too much. Like the couple we met while we were there. Later on in the night. More about them soon. "We thought the party in the Berghain was almost too big," one of them wrote me once I was back in Paris. "But I like it big!" I wrote back. With a ;.)-

But it sure is big. You should have seen the mass of recently closer to or further from naked people at the coat check. I stood in line first. While off to one side T changed into the chaps J had sold him. Somehow T found me in the mass of muscle and flesh. So I stepped off to one side to take off everything that wasn't my leather vest and leather pants with the zipper that opens all the way up to over my hiney and leather boots. Took T another half hour to maneuver his way to the counter. I ran off to go pee. And when I came back I made out his little bald spot amongst all the other little bald spots and occasional heads of hair. But it took him forever to check our bag and coats. "Some jerk who cut in front of me and proceeded to check the things of nine or ten of his friends," he said.

Meanwhile I'd bought two really big glass bottles of water. We'd already had some beer. I'm not sure I can describe the space of the Berghain to you. Did I mention it's huge? Walk in. Bar immediately on left. Behind that bar, lots of dark hallways. Straight ahead past the bar, a big double door, another little bar surrounded by playspace, and one of the two dancefloors with a big bar on the other side of it. Happy music. Not the dark electronic stuff on the main dancefloor upstairs. And there's lots of circuitous routes through the dark hallways to get from any one of these places to another downstairs. Including, this year, a whole lot of much wider open space that they hadn't opened last year. Which made things less crowded. If still big. And maybe a little dangerous. A skinhead I shared an airplane and metro ride with on the way back said he'd seen somebody giving a blowjob who ended up with a brick falling on his head. He said he saw him lift his hand up to his head. Saw the blood. And kept sucking. That is too much. One is often led to use that expression about this place. Upstairs--big, wide, regal feeling stairs that make you feel small, with a landing you round that brings you to emerge immediately onto the dancefloor. Great lights. Really high ceiling. This year they'd added bleachers so you could get a better view of the crowd. And a view from the dancefloor onto the men in the bleachers. Bars on either side of the dance floor. One sorta intimate way on the other side in relation to the stairs. The other stretches all along the dancefloor, is separated from it by high windows, and the ceiling stretches up just as high. Factory windows. Beautifully lit.

That's the short of the space. Not the long of it. Because there'd be a lot to say about any nook and cranny you end up in. I'll spare you all but the most important. The happy dancefloor was of course always crowded. But so was the big one for that matter. The DJ was perched on a landing under which you could stand. Like the guy with the really huge Schlange that T and I ended up with later. He had hair. Impeccably slicked back. And was wearing motorcycle pants. And was really beautiful. With beautiful tattoos all over his shoulders and arms. He became a little legendary amongst the people I ended up chatting with the next night. I'm getting ahead of myself again. But I found him on line the next day after T left. "Unbelievable. I've found you again," I wrote auf Deutsch. And proceeded to say to him that it was too bad that only my boyfriend got a go at his grosse Schlange. I sure hope I didn't just make up that word, which literally means "chain," as slang for what I want it to be. He sent me back a pic of his grosse Schlange, which would tend to make you believe that if I did make it up, it was perfectly understandable, and said that he'd had fun and was staying in for the night after Snaxx. Before doing an about-face and saying we could meet up at the Mutschmann's. So a good portion of Sunday night, anyone I'd end up talking to or playing with would be treated to my "I'm supposed to be meeting up with a German with a grosse Schlange" line. Turns out he was too tired to go out. And didn't show up. But it was fun looking for him now that I was alone and in memory of the moment T and I spent with him. I'd first spotted him at Snaxx under the landing on top of which the DJ was spinning. And then later T and I passed by him in the dark extra space that was not too much for me since a brick didn't fall on my head and since we ended up playing around with him there. There was a Frenchie we finally met after having seen him around a lot in Paris and on line. I ran into him at the Mutschmann's where he giggled and smiled and said something like "He sure was delicious that guy you were with at the Snaxx." "Which one?" I asked him. He laughed. But I knew who he was talking about. The sexy guy with the tattoos and motorcycle pants and the grosse Schlange that I watched with amazement as T knew just what to do with it. Meanwhile I just kissed him every once in a while.

T did a lot of his thing taking care of mine. As a matter of fact, that was pretty much the rhythm of our evening. Dark corner for T to do his thing taking care of mine. Which is sorta new for us. At least that it be so clearly defined. In that particular configuration. Then dancing together. Enjoying looking at each other. Looking elsewhere. Looking at each other again. Pointing every once in a while. A little identifying. Some friends that B has done photos of that I recognized who were there. It was while we were in one of the dark corners, though, that I saw the couple from Stuttgart. The ones who later said they thought the Berghain was almost too big. We'd actually seen them earlier in the day when we were having our coffee. I'd pointed them out to T because I'd seen them on line before. And they're marked as being friends with this couple I tricked with once. And they're sexy. And a couple on the prowl. There are some of those around but not tons. And I guess T and I are becoming one of them. And starting to know how to manage it a little better. Guess what? The letters for the couple's names are T and W. Funny, huh? So I guess we have to go all kind of elemental and call them T² and W². Since I is W. T pointed it out immediately. That we were the same letters. They've been together 19 years. And are a little older than T and me. Which means they must have met at around the same age. Like we're on parallel lines or something. Except that we met them. Like parallel lines never would. W² told me in one of our chats since then that he felt like we'd known each other for a long time. I told him that I might be an American, but that I felt like I had an old soul, or something like that. I mean that's exactly what I told him. "I feel like I have an old soul, oder so. Or something like that." Because it is true that something clicked. Parallel lines coming together is geometrically impossible, I think. So they're bound to make a click when it happens. They were there and so were we and then the next day I was there and they were, too. It turned into some kind of a settled configuration.

We had lots of long sex with them. In a couple of places. As it all was winding down around 5 or 5:30, I think, my zipper got unzipped all the way around. Not even in a very dark corner. I'm pretty sure it was all lit up. T² did me good. While T and W² watched. I was leaning into W² for this whole thing. And then we all went to the bar for water. And chatted. Found out then, I think, that they'd been together for 19 years. It was comfy. Part of the reason T was so sad to leave the next day. They left Snaxx at around 6. T and I stayed some more. The dark corners emptying out. It was hard because I wasn't totally, hard I mean, but T stretched out on one of the bazillion slings and I did him good. And we left around 8. But not before T got cruised by another Frenchie we'd had yet to see. At the coatcheck on the way out. Outside, snow had fallen. The sky was white. It was cold. And there was an apparently endless line of taxis waiting to take loonies like us home, lordy was it muddy. We went home. Caressing each other's knees and smiling. Evaluating. Kindly. Shower and ins Bett.

roar (hercules and the love affair)

2008-03-28T15:23:00.020-04:00

i don't think you have any idea how much i scream like a little girl at your entries.

tillmans is my favorite photographer. i have his book with the little mousey poking his face out of the airmail package. my other favorites are jack pierson (i saw his sculpture in the late 80's for the first time, just simple recreations of his little flat in the east village. completely amazing). and ryan mcGinley so now you have a very clear idea of my major aesthetic. ok very busy over here. but i am working on responding. btw, i think this is the last time i'll trip out for awhile on allen ginsberg for a bit (i go through whirlwinds)—i have absolutely outdone myself on allen. he's amazing on prosody, though. he's sort of like rumi for me. a little too much and you get extremely uhm —they both just dive right into desire and go into something i imagine autism to be like, that happens to me too, i mean my descriptive qualities get very anvil-like. or like bam-bam. that's why i'm loving what you are/how you are describing right now. space and desire and smiles. tillmans has those wonderful snapshots of airplanes coming in for a landing or taking off.

i thought i'd leave you with this from an interview he did (as placeholder) it's a political thing for him (desire and love), the strangeness nesting in home, an uninteresting "i'm so high!" here and there rather than tenderness, there's exuberance, weirdly. lots of other facets of yourself we should be able to count on as lovely and as home. and that a tender heart demands vast amounts of tenderness, too. and consideration. not a life in death, but a death in life. remember when we were talking about transitional moments in language? rNA or little worker bees busy in areas of translation (observer, translator, subject/sensation of motion in time or language), or just getting blown and noticing and smiling. and of course i'm remembering one halloween when we were in a deli buying cigs and there were some ladies dressed as bees. YOUNG LADIES IN BEE SUITS IN THIS DELI. RIGHT NOW.:

AG: I think the text of the "Gospel of Noble Truths" hasn't been printed anywhere. It's a gospel style song, for blues chord changes one/four/one/five/ and next stanza return to one. There's another reflection of that theme in a poem I wrote along on the Rolling Thunder Review.

Lay down Lay down yr Mountain Lay down God
Lay down Lay down yr music Love Lay down
Lay down Lay down yr hatred Lay yrself down
Lay down Lay down yr Nation Lay yr foot on the Rock
Lay down yr whole Creation Lay yr Mind down
Lay down Lay down yr Magic Hey Alchemist Lay it down Clear
Lay down yr Practice precisely Lay down yr Wisdom dear
Lay down Lay down yr Camera Lay down yr Image right
Yea Lay down yr Image Lay down Light.

Nov. 1, 1975

PBC: Is Dylan the "Alchemist" in those lines?

{...}

AG: Yeah. He's said some very beautiful, Buddha-like things. One thing, very important, was I asked him whether he was having pleasure on the tour, and he said, "Pleasure, Pleasure, what's that? I never touch the stuff." And then he went on to explain that at one time he had had a lot of pain and sought a lot of pleasure, but found that there was a subtle relationship between pleasure and pain. His words were, "They're in the same framework." So now, as in the Bhagavad Gita, he does what it is necessary to do without consideration of "pleasure,"

OK ALLEN WE GOT IT! it's actually got a lot to do with what you've told me and what i'm thinking over. keep going pls. the word "highest" is used, as straightforward and we can't hope that "I" is a description of the person next to us, or even ourselves. i like to think that we dream together, and the hope goes so far into an idealised home. jack pierson's work did that at one point: "joe, French Guy". "Mark D. Model in Penthouse". "Guy who stole 6 bucks". "Jimmy M. Butch..." and then we can look at our own lives and constellations and know that the ideal is ridiculous, our idea of the ideal is less interesting then our true home, and those who take your hand and trust your heart.

what are you cooking for the friends you're taking to kiki and herb at the knitting factory afters? we're having drinks and stuff at diner. and tomorrow is my post birthday dinner at alta. because i've had a birthday dinner almost every night this week. because i am the birthday girl. even if, as you say, they don't quite know what to make of kiki, often because they have comprehension problems, i'm super glad that it will be pleasurable for them to see you writhing with pleasure on the couch next to them. and also, that's what we're here for. raw shards of everyday illumination, a place for friends. we might go the beach with the puppy, too. mom gave me card, an old new yorker cover, of a big red heart seen floating in the sky thru an open window. made me cry.

the other thing i'm newly fascinated by is "the spatiality of time". hello world worlding. seriously was i passed out my first few months in california? this should not be new to me. oh, that's right. i was in the WOODS. did you know i was a conservation & resources policy studies nerd? and then, not. i got fed up with gary snyder's son on a council of all beings retreat. he was sort of a fascist shit about poetry, obvs.

anyways, working on something for you. xoxo

Perverts

2008-03-28T13:29:00.007-04:00

OK. How about a second effort at constellation in the wake of Berlin. Because really, I've only talked about the end of the first night out. And I have lots more to say. The stars were out and I really should remember how exactly they were arranged from the particular perspective of last weekend.

So we had our pills in hand as we walked into the "Perverts" party. We almost didn't go. Because last year, we were a little disappointed. But we were so filled with expectation, and I was so excited about being able to dance and fuck and fuck some more and then dance again that we decided we might as well leap right in. We had a little warm-up. Drink at Mario's. Where BLUF (Breeches and Leather Uniform Fanclub) has an annual get together. For Muir caps and cruising and beers and breeches ("a pair of trousers worn inside tall boots and with balloons on the side" dixit the BLUF website). And some sex in the backroom. This is not T's thing. Sex in backrooms yes. But not in aforementioned attire. It is mine. I was wearing my first pair. Of trousers that fit that definition. In high boots. T not into it. I knowing there to be with T. So a few beers. Marginal cruising. A couple of possibilities. Perverts? U-Bahn to Perverts.

Berlin has more space than it knows what to do with. Sometimes they get a little over ambitious. Like at Perverts, you walked in, coat check on your left, dance floor through a small door on your right. Dancey dancey dancey bounce across the dance floor and then there was a chill-out space before you got to a really long bar that was across from an even longer couch along the wall facing it. That's where T and D and V and I ended up sitting alongside one another at the end of the night. But we had to get through the night first. Which involved, first of all, negotiating the rest of the space. We got there early, so that's just what we did . Just before the beginning of the bar, there was a door that led to a stairway that led into a darkish basement playspace. Cold! at the beginning of the night. Just after the bar there was an ersatz wall that bound a little room with a cross in the middle of it, and just beyond that little room there was a kind of big platform where you could sit in or stand around one of, ummm, five or so slings. Just across from the little room, there was another bar, fairly spacious, that led to the space that was too much. Because it was really fucking freezing. There was a little heater in it. And there was a fairly constant cluster of people around that heater. Because, like I said, it was fucking freezing. And after your pit-stop at the heater you could go all the way to the space that really was too much and jiggle your butt with all of a maximum, at any time of the night, of maybe 8 people on a dance floor that had some great video going on on the walls around it. And the music was actually better, I thought, than the music on the main dance floor where there were actually quite a few people. So, like I said, those Berliners sometimes have more space than they knew what to do with.

The start of the night involved several chats. I think the first was with a guy we see around a lot in Paris and sometimes play with. His boyfriend lives in Geneva. And they were both there. I think they're the ones we evaluated the space with first. It also involved a chat with a very high and cute California sex-buddy of T's. It was funny, because before we left, I had written an email to T saying, "Is J going to be there? Maybe you should write him?" I think I actually blogged about or wrote you about sitting across the bar from T and J last year while they made out. And smiling. J's the one who sold T his chaps. And then invited him over to his place for fucking. And they've kept in touch. I've never really hung out much with J. He'd always been T's thing. Though related to me because a good friend of my sex-buddy R in SF. With whom T actually has quite a bit of static. Anyway, J was there with his crew. (And that's actually an issue: all these boys who have crews. T and I have each other and several sets of dispersed and very strong friendships. No crew. That's not all bad. But sometimes it feels like it'd be nice to have a crew. Or a kind of family). We chatted with J and his crew. Ran into them a little later on. At the bar on the way to the too cold space. Probably evaluated space with them, too. And then at some point we ran into J all alone sans his crew. And the three of us made out a little bit. J stroked T's hairy chest. "I love this chest!" he said. Before breaking away saying he had 30 or 40 German cocks to suck. I have every confidence he found them.

There was also a moment worth setting on the map of the constellation in the cold dark basement playspace. Darkness and moaning and a vaguely perceived mass of flesh. You sorta make your way around the periphery waiting to see if something snags you. Something did. And then that something became someone. Someone French. I mean I recognized certain features. And T seemed to be into it. And so was I. For awhile. I remember breaking away at some point to go stand at a little grid that was stretched out over a little window that looked out onto the water. Sorta like gallows. Meditating pleasure and smoking. T emerged. Later on, we saw the something that had became someone sitting on the couch with his someone else. Outrageously sexy someone else. They apparently met in Brussels. So we introduced ourselves. I forget the name of the outrageously sexy someone else. But the something become someone who was our entry into that someone else's periphery was named E. At the party the next night, just outside the bathrooms (apparently quite a space for meeting, since that's where we bumped into D and V, too) we ran into E again. I guess T had told him we'd been together 15 years, because I found myself being congratulated. I'm getting ahead of myself, but we chatted a bit with him. I was between them. I like being between things. And people, too. And at some point, I ended up propping my right leg over E's left, my left leg over T's right, looking at that arrangement of diagonals and saying. "Wow. That looks nice." E must have thought I was a little bit of a freak. Because at that point he wished us a great party and walked away. Maybe, though, being with us made him want to go find his someone else. That would be flattering. If T and I really had that kind of effect on people. Seems possible.

You know it's not all pleasure. There was a moment where I was standing on this sort of weird grid that was in between the back wall of the small space with the cross in the middle of it and the circle of slings. It was weird because the slings were on firm ground, and then you'd get to this weird grid thing and find yourself at risk of losing your balance. T was kneeling down in front of me doing his thing giving pleasure to mine. Which was nice. And apparently attractive to this guy standing not far away. Who I looked at invitingly. And who approached. And who every time I'd touch his tit would lift his eyes to the sky and emit a little moan. So I'd let go of his tit. And then I'd do it again because he wasn't going away. And he'd do the same thing. This went on for a little while. I think we're the ones who ended up going somewhere else. "Whatever" was our mutual comment about him.

And then there's also JF. I think I mentioned him in a blog or email to you last year, too. A conscious sero-converter. Which I can get my head around. Now. Sorta. It's taken a little while. But he seems to think we all should follow in his footsteps. Or at least that I should. T, too. *Sigh.* That's a little annoying. And can be a damper. In general he rushes up to you with a big smile to say how high he is. Or something else basically uninteresting.

Oh, yeah. One last shooting star. I was chilling out while T was in the bathroom. Appropriately enough in the chill-out space. I recognized a couple of Frenchies walking by. One of them had a big 'ol mohawk. Much more rad than my little one. He walked through the chill-space on his way to the bar but did a U-turn to prop his elbow on a little window between the two spaces and smile at me. I smiled back. So he came back and we made out a bit. Moaned about how many Frenchies were there and how happy they were to be there compared to their usual French gueules. Which can be awkwardly but accurately translated somewhere in between a grimace and a pout. I saw him later on in the weekend, but he remains a shooting star because, Frenchie that he is, he likes to complain about the gueules everybody makes but that doesn't stop him from making his own. For the moment, I'm primed to crack those Parisian gueules with a smile.

Home

2008-03-27T14:08:00.001-04:00

I'm not sure I know just quite where "home" is yet. Although it is looking like it might be here for a while. But I think I'm pretty sure what it is. It's where strangeness finds itself shelter.

Savage and Tender

2008-03-26T19:40:00.005-04:00

That title's the way I described the way Kiki sings "Moments of Pleasure" in analysis today. I know you like that one. And I think I know you like it like that, too. My shrink wanted to know about the "and." As I write you this, I should be asleep. Because I'm exhausted. But I'm not. Because I had a lot of fun this weekend. And I have a lot to think about. Like: Should we go to Madrid for Sleazy Madrid? One of the nicer moments of pleasure of this weekend happened on the couch toward the end of our first night out. T was sitting on the sofa next to D. And they started chatting. D was waiting for his (boy?)friend, V, to get done with his business in the backroom and was pooped. So he wasn't up for the action T was offering him. D lives in Madrid. V lives in Alicante. I was on the couch next to T, telling him D was pretty sexy. And then V emerged beautifully all of a sudden. V stretched out on the couch and put his head in my lap. I started massaging his head. Caring for the aftereffects of the pleasures he'd just had. And enjoying the contour of his skull. And the shape of the lids over his eyes. And the fact that we were in a place where you could just emerge from a backroom and stretch out in a total stranger's lap and take a nap. We shared a cab home. D and T texted each other messages for the rest of the weekend. And we ran into them briefly in the bathroom at the huge party the next night. Just tonight, I found out that Wolfgang Tillmans was there at that big party fisting someone. I found that out because in a chatroom I told B (you remember him from the other day) that I'd seen Wolfgang Tillmans's big retrospective at the Hamburger Bahnhof on my last day in Berlin. I think it might have been major. All his care for the world. And his care for the constellations of his moments of pleasure. The ones he's photographed. And real stars, too. It made me dream of a practice like photography that you could later fool around with and make make different kinds of sense. I don't know if writing can do it. Quite like that, I mean. I mean, look at that moment up there. There I was in this former train station with white walls staring at a picture I'd never seen that was part of Tillmans's Turner Prize winning installation. Lots of others I recognized from around. Books. Probably some exhibits. But there I was all alone after T had left me, after all my and our moments of pleasure, looking at someone who had the same haircut I'd had T give me before we went. Rolling around on the beach. Like he was happy he was born. Like he was being born. Like he was just rolling around in the sand having fun. And in front of that picture? Two lesbians in some kind of intense moment: because they knew him? Because they were involved in understanding their constellation thanks to all this? Because they'd remembered something they'd forgotten?

This is all only a first constellation of last weekend. It was a good one. The weekend, I mean. Berlin Easter seems to be becoming some kind of a ritual for T and me. Haircut and sacred substances and all. Up until now, I've been really bad about access to the substances. This time around, I contacted someone who contacted someone and we met up with someone at a train station in ex-East Berlin. I even understood all his directions in German. Good substances, I think. Did us good, at least. But they don't seem as essential as they sometimes have. For example the week before, when I didn't have any. And realized that what I really wanted T to understand was that the need for substances that I was forcing him to do something about, like ask around, was actually because I wanted to hear him speak. To have him realize how much I need him. All that was what fed the crazy sex from the other week I was talking about a couple entries back. There were obviously a few more steps. Like the way it hooked into my inability to allow him to seduce me like thirteen years ago now. That's what I meant when I said it was crazy the shit you carry around without even knowing it. Forgetting to remember that you'd forgotten. Last Easter, there was a moment at the same huge party we went back to this year, where apparently Wolfgang Tillmans was off fisting somebody somewhere, when T wandered away, as one does, and I had a little freak-out. I wasn't going to let him go alone this time around. So I didn't. We took our pill and clanked our beers together to staying together. For that night. And for longer, too.

And you know what? There's good people out there. I think that was my favorite moment of your radio interview, when you said something like that. The fact that one of them happened to be "me" was a merely incidental narcissism, I think. It's true that there's good people out there. When you catch them at the right moment. With the right amount of darkness and light. Letting go of their fierceness. Letting savagery be tender. I was able to say that that's what the "and"'s about to my shrink. I think I was maybe getting somewhere. Who knows where. I do know, though, that it's in this world. You just have to draw the right lines between the right stars and end up with the right constellation. It helps you remember what you've forgotten. And maybe? Helps you find your way home.

Guston

2008-03-25T10:41:00.015-04:00

i mentioned Coolidge before so i might as well bring up Philip Guston. (and thank you for reminding me about the weather, everywhere. we can talk about responsibility, we could talk about Cervantes? Goya? "This I have seen." I went to the prado for a week or so, every day, and looked at the black paintings. everyday we would get up, have coffee and some fried bread and then head off to look at them. I looked at a tree recently, in it's complete and late fall glory, i came back the next day and the leaves had blown away. i was immensely grateful that i'd had the chance to see it at all.

so here's some thoughts from Guston himself. if i fail at explaining myself, he absolutely doesn't.

"I remember days of doing "pure" drawings immediately followed by days of doing the other—drawings of objects. It wasn't a transition in the way it was in 1948, when one feeling was fading away and a new one had not yet been born. It was two equally powerful impulses at loggerheads. I would one day tack up in the house a bunch of pure drawings, feel good about them, think that I could live with them. And that night go out to the studio to the drawings of objects—books, shoes, buildings, hands, feeling relief and a strong need to cope with tangible things. I would denounce the pure drawings as too thin and exposed, too much "art," not enough nourishment, and as an impossible direction with no future. The next day, or day after, back to doing the pure constructions and to attacking the other. And so it went, this tug-of-war, for about two years."

"I hope I don't sound sentimental but it is so that much of the time what I am painting seems like a mirage to me—a vast detour I am making and I am left with a sense only of my perversity. I must trust this perversity... and yet, who knows I may again be forced to penetrate that state of reduction and essence. But now, the vast complications and uncontrollability of imagery keeps me in the studio most of the time."

i was lying in the attic bedroom up in vermont this last month around 2 am in the morning and the wind was howling (it felt like the beginning of every meg and charles murray adventure, it was really exciting.) The moon was full and the light in the room ! wow. i'm pretty sure wild storms trump thought.) and i’m always watching unless i’m fucking, and then i'm not really watching or absolutely not experiencing any physicality of separation but rather breath, sweat, taste. power, ground, and playing. (also, i should mention the transcendent experience is not what we've been talking about. i believe you and i both agreed and established our hatred of the transcendent) so, fucking, dancing, too little sleep, the pills. There's a little space put aside, for the social, contemplative pleasure, (also? thought. because damn if you can think anything at all with the music inside, which is a practical thing, an awesome thing.) lately the unlawful pleasure of smoking at the club I've most often been to. The big guy at the door softly asks me to maneuver around the ropes, i smile and thank him, situate myself in the outdoors where if hazy memory serves it’s fucking freezing, the sweat on my body almost instantaneously icy and chill. There’s a pleasure in that, as much as the warmth, strobes and tongue, mouth that I kiss. Men are fun to watch. Kind of sloppy, kind of out of their minds, some have a tremendously awkward way of dancing, but it doesn’t matter, body types have changed rapidly in the last decade. i'm really happy when r. comes out to stand with me, did i tell you that. we just kind of stand together, it's comforting.

one time, mom and i were in the middle of the lake, giddy. i sniffed the air like a dog, "there's something coming."

She raised her paddle, "that's thunder."

the storm came in feet first, sideways, skidded all the way down the lake and literally pounded away the humidity in front of it. 4" inches of rain in 2 hours. (mother nature does not fuck around). we saw it come on like a wall of mist behind the wind with lightning bringing up the rear... I was like, "fuck. we're in the middle of the lake, at dusk. in stupid little kayaks."

then, the general vamoose.

mom laughed really hard all the way home. yes, i did have my trusty pasternak russian bear hat on. glad to know i get it from somewhere.

There was body & soul for one period of time, you could arrive at 2 on sunday and work it out with the most amazingly eclectic group of people, all colors, all types, men and women, really good music and then toodle off down for a walk on the piers, completely elated and exhausted before heading home to sleep and work the next morning, either hop a subway or get a egg sandwich at a deli and watch and listen to the city wake up. But that little area for smoking, just off 11th avenue well there’s usually someone out there who has very little hold on how killing the weather is, could be. Soaked, babbling, a baseball cap pushed low over haunted eyes. He just got off a bus from Los Angeles.

i'm currently listening to a kind of amazing cover of "The Boy With A Thorn In His Side" by Scott Matthews, btw. also, "The Longest Road (Morgan Page Radio Edit)" not by Scott Matthews.

Kerouac in Old Angel Midnight:

The wush of trees on yonder eastern nabathaque Latin Walden axe- haiku of hill where woodsman Mahomet perceives will soon adown the morning drear to pail the bringup well suspender farmer trap moon so's cock go Bloody yurgle in the distance where Timmy hides, flat, looking with his eyes for purr me-O Angel, now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party, & ah Angel dont paper-party me, but make me horrified in silken Honen honey-rubbed Oxen tongue of Cow Kiss, Ant Mat, silk girl ran, all the monkey-better-than secondary women of Sam Sarah the Song of Blood this earth, this tool, this fool, look with your eyes. I'm tried of fooling O Angel bring it to me THE MAGIC SOUND OF SILENCE broken by first-bird's teepaleep--

like clark coolidge says, "I guess you either hear the music of that or you don't." what kind of monstrosity meant that i ever thought i was something i'm not? and really, who the fuck cares? done. (oh, i'm kidding. we're not done with that term of being are we?) and certainly we've experienced so much tenderness and immanence. it's neat exploring how others did it. too.

meanwhile! this made me laugh.
"I can't believe you have done this to me! You have me using the word 'ridonkulous' four times! What the hell? I'll be saying fo-shizzle next!"

coolidge goes on in that talk or essay (whatever it was):
Then Kerouac says, in Old Angel Midnight: "The total turning about & deep revival of world robe-flowing literature till it shd be something a man'd put his eyes on & continually read for the sake of reading & for the sake of the Tongue & not just these inspidid stories writ in insipid aridities & paranoias bloomin & why yet the image-let's hear the Sound of the Universe, son."

update add-in: the redundant ‘it’ of ‘it is raining’

Quick Missive From Berlin

2008-03-25T06:03:00.003-04:00

Ok. You can count on Jesus to rise. But you can never know what the weather's going to be like in Berlin for us to celebrate it. In the minute or two I've been contemplating this brief "hey," I've seen sun, snow, and hail. I have already seen several crocuses, and tulips, too, in some of the midways around the city. Poor things. They must be cold.

So Power is vulnerable. Way back when I actually kept up a blog, I had the vague idea that maybe what we needed were new slogans, May '68 style, mysterious and provocative. "What we need is ritual spontaneity." I probably did have sex in mind. Or at least sex as one of our overdetermined ways of getting to ritual spontaneity. But I think writing, and perhaps even especially writing a correspondence, is about ritual spontaneity, too. For me it is. You give yourself time to get to where you might generate something. I'm a fiend for generation. To the point that I sometimes repeat myself wildly just to get there. That's no doubt one of the reasons I'm stretched out on the couch three times a week now. That, and the fact that I had never really described my childhood in French, at least in any kind of sustained way.

It's hailing in Berlin again.

It's weird that feeling that something's over. Especially if it's some version of yourself. It's a good time for correspondence, I'd imagine. So long as the person playing "you" to you has at least a vague sense of responsibility.

The sun's out in Berlin.

I do have more than a vague sense of responsibility. Though it's sometimes hard to answer you because I get my head around a missive, only to return to our page and find that it's actually either not there, or is, but radically modified. No worries, though: I think it will become part of my skill set, the way I need to return to read you and the ways those returns inform the rhythms of my response. Everyone does indeed need that. I find myself often, these days, dreaming of structures for that rhythm. Our friend Barthes, with his appreciation for the "gracious and incorruptible," should be able to help out a bit. One of his last seminars, just recently published a year or two ago, was all about what he calls idiorhythmics. He, too, was dreaming of structures: structures that would allow each member of a group to go at his or her own rhythm. Structures that would encourage those idiorhythmics. He looks at lots of early-Christian experiments with ways of regulating them: eating, thinking, talking, walking, seeing... This virtual world, I think, has interesting potential for that kind of thing. But the structures need work. Themselves need to be created. I think for the last long while I'd assumed that the structures were just there and that I just had to work myself into them. They're not, though, just there. They are there to be created. Which has a tendency to create vast amounts of anxiety, I think. We just need to breathe in and get some work done.

I really like the citation from Lewis Hyde. Maybe what I'm calling rhythm is"the thing in motion" he's talking about. And maybe he's saying we should just keep in good faith that its movement will give us, and the other ones, what we need. I guess the structures I'm dreaming of would seek to regulate the capacity for fulfilling certain needs. Because these days it's just hard to imagine that in letting things go in their motion, those needs are getting fulfilled.

I've finally slept a good night's sleep after two nights of parties. I can't yet guarantee that I'm all there for the rhythms of the response you need. But I'll run the risk and publish this now. Knowing there'll be more soon.

"I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen."

2008-03-23T15:02:00.005-04:00

i think this conversation sums up everything i just wrote to you on friday. like, without me stressing the fuck out about it.

me: do you guys have any suggestions for where you want to eat? happy easter!
him: i love jesus.
me: isn't it cool? he dies. he comes back. so reliable.
her: as reliable as a crocus. did i mention i can't meet earlier than 8:30? but y'all can start without me.
me: that's beautiful baby.
her: ha

gracious and incorruptible/anyone she's ever played "stone whore" to

2008-03-21T09:06:00.047-04:00

ha ha ha ha wouldn't it be awesome if the stars and their alignments had horoscopes related to individual consciousness' down here. "Riga's a hot tranny mess. nothing goes faster than light; there is a hard-coded limitation on the transfer of information in the universe. any given event in space and time, its possible effects on the world can be seen as a 4D cone in space-time; as time moves forward, the sphere of influence of the event explodes at the speed of light. xoxo z. Look at him go trailing spacedust."

we're amazingly directed and put together animals, it turns out. just ask your (not "your" but everyone should feel free to ask that of those lucky people who you picked out of the dark, or who picked you) last trick. like, "hey i just had my fingers in your ass/pussy/my cock in all sorts of places. it was crazy! what's your overall gestalt of the aura going on, in the world, in general?"

someone, a long time ago, during a reading, came up to me later and said, "it's like the ecstatic cloud of unknowing, except not so sure what you said?" so maybe i should read some clark coolidge. HE knew a crystal.

Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit! - Allen Ginsberg

When you've understood this scripture, throw it away. If you cant understand this scripture, throw it away. I insist on your freedom. - Jack Kerouac

we know that, we're not sure about it, leaves you with a graciously annoyed, resplendent fuck you. as soon as one feels astonishment at one's own broad, generous experience there's an immediate move back to utter nonsense, and by utter nonsense i mean, ridiculously, love. no matter how relevant the unveiling has been, there's that moment of no idea again. and we tell a whopping good, true story about tenderness, and we believe ourselves.

(ritual spontaneity)= what sex is? it's def. between wandering and already home. one thing i do know about myself is that if i say "i love you", i am damn sure i am. i'm really stubborn on that point. i work so fast that any facet of that question has been answered by my soul. quickly, methodically, finally. what that means in the quotidian is to be determined.

in other news, on march 19th, 2008. all of my stories ended. the end. you get a sense of meter and music from it, a sexuality, a way to make yourself invulnerable and broken at the same time. wounded, reckless and demanding, infinite, unending desire. i don't really lock in to anything that came before. there are hurts, and beauty. what do the letters i'm pointing to have in common? affinity.

consciousness is a living thing, there is a language, a tentative set of building blocks that are alike and not. the habit is to keep to images and word-images that block the sun, or birds?, rhythms really, of what you think you are and meanwhile you're holding close a willed death of being, stopping the flow at all costs, can you hold anything otherwise, one little dribble at a time if you can stand it? of course you can. it means both cosmic and grounded awe instead of pushing all that violently back into the self (how will you hold your eyes, these cigarettes, look someone in the eyes, out of mortification, anger) total feeling, total being, everyone knows about it. mark and claim yourself there. the possibility that this joy might be wiped out. it's got so much sweetness to it, that choice: fix your inner mind to the truth of what is, very human to human, at any moment, as it is. who i am and who someone else is. there are different reverberations of the same vision, awareness: kind of blissful in an awesomely practical universe of love.

no real disjunction in the variation of the length and accentuation of a series of sounds or other events. or great angels smacking you around in the night and all the stories i've had (all the things that have happened to me, in their grandiosity and helplessness) about it dissolves away. bankrupt, realizing all that creative energy misdirected. and of course i am sobbing, happy, having a great time feeling all of this, as it comes down. i manage to be all very complicated about it, idiotic. this deep, passionate adoration. maybe i could get a little love. or help. (on good friday i chirped, as if just remembering "oh, it's good friday!" and r. nodded his head and said, "yes. jesus is dead.")

i, and everyone, merit it. nothing can take it away from me, except my own authentic will. and even then it doesn't really take away from itself. that felt separation is false. no one really knows anyone else, but we can ask, beg and plead everything of each other. that's amazing. i love you. i'm sorry. please forgive me. thank you. "in the ruins of thought"

"The gift moves toward the empty place. As it turns in its circle it turns toward him who has been empty-handed the longest, and if someone appears elsewhere whose need is greater it leaves its old channel and moves toward him. Our generosity may leave us empty, but our emptiness then pulls gently at the whole until the thing in motion returns to replenish us."
Lewis Hyde: The Gift

i'm totally just going to pronounce things at you now. we should make a list of things i could pronounce at you.

honestly, i have no idea what you mean by ritual spontaneity. did i say that once? did you? wot dat? what did we mean?

i'm being pedantic. also, did you know that most domestic disturbances happen in threshold spaces? like, doorways. again, you can thank my shrink because she told me that. and she's totally aware of the crashing metaphor too. and i used the word quotidian and she blurted out that it was her favorite word. "i love that word". she said something a little more complex than that which i can't remember because we were both being adorable.

i've used that word twice already in my posts. next time i think i'll use "binding agent".

Can you believe this shit?

2008-03-21T05:31:00.002-04:00

Look at my horoscope for the next couple of days!

Daily Overview for March 21, 2008
Provided by Astrology.com	Daily Extended Forecast

Quickie:
Have you been flirting with someone a lot lately? That sassy situation will heat up.

Overview:
You wake up feeling great and need to share that good energy with just about everyone you meet. Flirt with the barista, smile at that one grumpy coworker or just let your aura brighten someone's day.

Daily Overview for March 22, 2008
Provided by Astrology.com	Daily Extended Forecast

Quickie:
You're going to have the high energy that you've been hoping for today -- have fun!

Overview:
You may get caught looking once or twice, even if you're out with your mate. You can't help it -- your appreciation of beauty in all its forms in pretty much out of control right now!

2008-03-20T19:39:00.003-04:00

ah no. no. the full quote is from dune. c. wrote about the same weekend. i loved that weekend. one of the echos that reverberates from an awakening world. i'd forgot i'd responded to him. he read that to me at some point on the porch of the beach house. that's amazing to be reminded. i guess that we were listening quietly then, too. thanks for that.

Loose Ends

2008-03-20T18:10:00.004-04:00

Btw. There may come a time where calling me a piece of shit is just what I'll be asking for. But I probably won't do it directly. Feel free, though, if things come to that. I think I can take it, and I'm up for a challenge.

"Desire ends in satisfaction." I love that. Is that you, or somebody I should know?

And it does seem strange if your shrink is talking about the fall of the Roman empire. But who knows? Maybe she's right.