Thursday, March 29, 2007

Someone Almost, But Not Entirely, Another.


I set out through the streets in search of an answer. I wandered through the bitter cold; my gloved hands still shivering, shoved in the pockets of my coat. The buildings rose tall and gray around me, looming above like a displeased surgeon looking on a patient. Their square windows were like a thousand gaping eyes, reaching out a far and wide gaze, the patios outstretched palms- waiting to pull me toward something. My pace quickened. I longed to escape the confines of this city and I knew that if I kept walking I would eventually reach the bridge. I longed to glance at the water, imagining my limbs reaching out beside me, pushing through it, beyond it, away from everything I knew and into the arms of mystery.

I felt my legs brush up against each other as I settled into a jog. "At this rate I'll reach the bridge in no time," I said to myself. My thoughts were quick like arrows and my eyes squinted to block out the people in my periphery. There was always someone watching, a lone eye positioned at the top of a tower. Only a myth- I know. But, I couldn't help feeling caught between myself and my fantasies. I had to be back at the office the next morning. The stacks of paper would surely be built up on my desk, a cluttered cave of the beaurocractic dundgeon. And I knew that come morning, I would look that lovely lady in the eye. And she would bow and her smooth skin would brush against the sides of her skirt. I could hear the sound echoing in my ears, the fabric sliding carefully against her, her heels clanking on the hard-tile floor, my eyes searing into the back of her, my lips quivering with unspoken promises. She barely even knew me but still I shivered.

The buildings became fewer- they were now only small houses peeking out from the sides of the street. An old man left his home. He had shut the door tightly, it closed quickly clattering behind him. He clammered down the front steps and I stopped to stare. Rude, I know. He looked familiar- his age-worn and washed out eyes which glimmered only faintly, heavily set into a gaunt face- just two tiny green twinkles. Barely noticible if it hadn't been for the streetlamps which lined his walkway. He looked at me, blinked, checked his watch. "Somewhere to be?" I wondered. He continued on his way, head down as he headed ahead of me. I'd shout a warning but I doubt he'd heed it.

I continued on my walk, my feet shuffling slightly, my eyes trained forward and my arms dangling uselessly beside me. I wished there was something to be done with them. I fumbled through my jacket pocket and pulled out a few crumbled notes, recipets. I fiddled with a small flask and took a sip. The whiskey warmed me but I was wary not to drink too much. The houses soon seemed more scattered. Only one every few blocks. Things were quiet and I saw no people on the street which had changed to a gravel road. I knew that just over the hill the bridge poked out; I could see the very tip of it along the horizon. I knew I would get there soon. It was so close I could taste it.

Sunday, March 25, 2007

The Epitaph for My Heart.

The pages build up behind me. There are two notebooks now, nearly full. Today I rode through the city, no destination necessary, snapping photographs of buildings standing still, some half-built- the sun leaping off of their raw interiors. I looked up through cherry blossoms and took a few shots of the birds landing on the newly budding branches. I sat on a rather muddy hill in Robert E. Lee park and watched two dogs attack each other rather viciously. The water ran steadily over the concrete and flowed past, by my feet. I have watched that water move from many different places in the park. Unfortunately, it is not terribly interesting, only a bit of frothy whiteness flowing freely. I wished that I had gone to the mountains or to the beach. I wished that I was not looking at the same streets, the same sky, the same buildings that I've been looking at since I was a very young girl.

My fingers are gnawed raw; they hurt a bit. I am silly to chew them so neurotically. I am silly to chew them because I am thinking things which aren't being written, because the time is passing and I am making nothing of it. This happens almost half of my days off from work and usually, eventually, at some point I get something accomplished. I spent the morning reading a girl's long and ridiculous blog about a specific interaction she had with her ex-boyfriends new wife. It was an obsessive, absurd, violent, manipulative internet relationship they had but her blog (written after all of it happened) was so serious and so emotional that it was hard to stop reading, even if only to find out the end. It was like a soap opera but it was mostly strange because I ended up there from someone else's blog who had nothing to do with the situation. I don't understand why someone would make an entire blog dedicated to proving oneself in a certain situation or to hurting another person. It got me thinking about the internet and about the way that people communicate through these glowing machines, how they have totally alternate lives, often anonymous ones, through blogging. And I thought of all the people whose blogs make me feel good about humanity, people who I don't know but who have fascinating things to say and who say them in an intelligent manner.

It is hard to find bloggers who you relate to, as it is hard to find friends who you relate to. Sometimes they write something inane, something annoying. But, they always make up for it in the next post. I think about Wide Lawns often, about Forksplit, about Lagal and The Great Hall. They are all a part of my life just like Kafka was when I read his diaries for months, like Camus was when I was absorbed in his notebooks. I suppose that is what makes words so beautiful to me, that they let me know people in the most intense and personal ways. And I think that everyone has it in them to write an interesting blog which is what makes it a much more universal medium than literature. You can know an author by what he writes, by what he says about himself but an author has to have a universal medium. He has to write a story, a poem, a novel. Bloggers have only to describe vividly, entertainingly and frequently of the motions of their lives and the way they fit within those motions, the way they make them. Perhaps this is why I don't do it so frequently. My life is not full, though I'd like it to be, with interesting quips, with entertaining snippets, with things I would rather write than literature. So, I spend my time trying to make real lives out of made up people instead of writing out each interaction of my own day.

I keep meaning to start fictional blogs but it somehow feels lazy. I suppose it would just have to be brief outlines of things which would eventually become something lengthier. But, already, I feel as if Fernando is a never ending character, a constantly communicating but often stagnant individual, stuck inside himself and perhaps this is because I see no veritable end and I don't wish for their to be one. A very close friend of mine who is also a brilliant writer began to correspond with Fernando via a character he invented named Catherine. Catherine only wrote one letter but hopefully there are more to come. I had come to believe, rather whole-heartedly, that she would be the one to change Fernando. He may not write her anymore; most likely it would be out of unfounded feelings of inadequacy. But, I suppose she can exist without him to write her, though I don't want him to. "The half-moon sat on a field of bright pinholes; the milky-way like queen anne's lace strewn carelessly across the sky. All of it reflected in the deep darkness of the Atlantic, the churning mirror that stretched the entire horizon. I walked out to where the waves were lapping at the shore, a strong breeze whipping my hair around my face. It was bright and the sound of the waves breaking in rhythm stirred the blood in my cheeks. And I wished you had walked out with me, to behold the perfect night in our world which was like a dream for that short time."

The spring is slowly approaching. Today I smelled it strongly and clearly in the air. There are many important decisions sitting on my doorstep and I am hearing the buzzer but paying it no regard. I am stalling an offer of increased responsibility. I am going to have to answer the door soon and sit down to speak with the offerer of said responsibility. Too bad he is such a chesire cat. Grinning and disappearing but always aware of all the goings-on in Wonderland. And it is such a tempting (though as yet unspecified) offer- a challenge almost. A challenge to mold my behavior, my personality to a specific type of professionalism, a specific type of classiness, a diplomacy that I am not quite sure I am capable of. And it is also a question of how much I would be giving up, how many hours of my life I would be worried about the thousand and one responsibilites of a new restaurant. And how many words would I lose to a year without time to experience enough to have anything to say. There is much speak of my "resume" and I don't know how much I really care about any "resume".

Still, there are a thousand and one things to filter through, to analyze. I suppose I ought to get started. But, I think I'll go eat Thai food and watch The Host instead.

Saturday, March 03, 2007

The Sooty Sponge of the Sky.



Four or more times I woke this morning and rushed to the screen of this glowing machine, searching for the glistening letters I knew would be stacked next to each other, word by word. My dreams followed my steps across the room, hazy and startled by such sudden movement. Usually, they have time to settle, to set themselves to the pace of my mind. But, this morning, full of energy and excitement I let them ride the tail of my desires and they were shaken. It was not until the fourth time I checked that I found the words, full of breath and perfectly moving through my muddled morning mind. I read them over and over again; I inadvertently whispered them aloud- so beautiful were they built. They rolled off the edge of my slightly moving lips and I felt the form of them and their measure.

My dreams are just now popping up in small and flatly colored bits. I was chased through a large building full of doors. I knew each person who slept behind each door; I could see the layout of each one of their rooms, but I could think of no where to hide. I almost jumped out the window but I wasn't entirely sure that I was who they were after. I had an accomplice and he had vanished somewhere into the whitewashed walls.

I am awake now and listening to Mozart's Requiem. It tastes like Death, an odd thing to have for breakfast. I am also inhaling the rhythm of written words; they echo inside me and jostle the memories of so many mornings past when I woke to know the depth of someone else's words, when they shook inside me and I breathed my own words back where there used to be only empty air. There is a whole world of words, and they are stacked atop each other, to be continually built and never to fall. Yet, it is so different to stand here, to speak the words that usually take so much care to make. They spill, carelessly, half-thought, from my lips and they fill the room around me with hurried sound. And yet they are happy sounds that break the silence.

The front door just blew open from the wind and when I rose to close it I knocked over a bottle of wine. It spilled and shone red and bloody against the wooden floor, a sudden flash of color quickly mopped up and absorbed into the perfect whiteness of a paper towel. Across the street a bag is caught in a tree and is shivering in the wind, caught just by it's edge. And despite yesterday's perfect weather the trees are still bare but spring is just beyond the horizon, a mere 19 days away. Already, I have felt the great relief of prolonged sun, of arriving to work with the sun still blazing through the windows. And, also, I have felt the great relief that these words lend. Already, I am teeming with aplomb, lost in the comforting sound of the clicking of keys and awestruck by the ease with which these words can flow. But, also, I am grieving for all of the days I have lost to long sleep and too much drink, days where words were intimidations, where they stood to scare me, to show me all the things I couldn't do, I hadn't done.

And perhaps it was the winter. Perhaps it was the lack of sun, that things sat in darkness and covered by layers of dirty ice and slush. I feel as though I am rising out of that slush and into the arms of the trees, thick with leaves and life. I long to swim in lakes and let my limbs carry me across the many miles. In A Happy Death Patrice Mersault is always swimming and I have been reading these intense descriptions of his lengthy limbs outstretched and lapping away beneath the laborious sun. He swims beyond himself, his body only a machine, moving in perfect rhythm, a rhythm which encompasses him, which is entirely himself. And Mersault feels all the world around him with a melancholy depth that I too often feel. Yet, Camus' existentialist leanings separate me from fully believing in the morals of his story. Mersault feels great emotion but does not attribute it to anything but to a vague, general idea of life. Still, Mersault lives inside me like so many other people made of words and I shall once again gather the strength to make myself of words. And this strength lives alongside others.

"As far as the eye could see and at regular intervals, huge black birds with glistening wings flew in flocks a few yards above the ground, incapable of flying any higher under a rainswollen sky heavy as a tombstone. They circled in a slow, ponderous flight, and sometimes one of them would leave the flock, skim the ground, almost inseparable from it, and flap in the same lethargic flight , until it was far enough away to be silhouetted on the horizon, a black dot. Mersault wiped the steam off the glass and stared greedily through the long streaks his fingers left on the pane. Between the desolate earth and the colorless sky appeared an image of the ungrateful world in which, for the first time, he came to himself at last. On this earth, restored to the despair of innocence, a traveler lost in a primitive world, he regained contact, and with his fist pressed to his chest, his face flattened against the glass, he calculated his hunger for himself and for the certainty of the splendors dormant within him. He wanted to crush himself into that mud, to re-enter the earth by immersing himself into that clay, to stand on the limitless plain covered with dirt, stretching his arms to the sooty sponge of the sky, as though confronting the superb and despairing symbol of life itself, to affirm his solidarity to the world at its worst, to declare himself life's accomplice even in its thanklessness and its filth. Then the great impulse that had sustained him collapsed for the first time since he had left Prague. Mersault pressed his tears and his lips against the cold pane. Again the glass blurred; the landscape disappeared."