i love

...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

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

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

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

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.

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"

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)

i'm a whore for grace.

don't forget.

your haggard saints

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?

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.

someone got raptured?

A little advice

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