Tangents and Conditions

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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